[Brothers In Arms developer Gearbox Software has announced a new partnership with in-game ad/branding firm Double Fusion - but what does this actually mean in terms of integrated content and authenticity for the developer's games? Gearbox co-founder and CEO Randy Pitchford (pictured) explains why he thinks in-game brands can be good from multiple perspectives - including authenticity, notice, and increased budgets - in this opinion piece.]

I'd like to take the time to shed more light on the announcement that Gearbox and Double Fusion are partnering to consider connecting advertising with our games.  Some gamers have voiced their concern, and I want to set the record straight about this announcement.

We respect any contempt for exploitive advertising that negatively effects the integrity or the quality of the game because we, as hardcore gamers, share that same contempt.  If anything, that's a big understatement.  I'll say it again:  We hate exploitive advertising that doesn't offer value to the gamer.

We partnered with Double Fusion because we believe they approach this kind of thing with the right attitude and because we wanted to be in control of these kinds of decisions for some of our games.  It is important for us to ensure that we're able to keep our artistic interests in mind and that our gamer customers' interests are cared for.

As of this post we haven't committed to any particular in-game advertising for any of our upcoming titles (including Hell's Highway, Aliens: Colonial Marines, and Borderlands).  What we've done is to enable Double Fusion to connect us with opportunities.  If this leads to anything, we intend for the results to bring you advantages that can increase the quality of our games, including improved authenticity, increased budgets, or out-of-game promotion that helps attract more gamers.

I'll speak a bit about each of those advantages:

Improved Authenticity: Brothers in Arms Hell's Highway takes place in the historical Operation Market Garden.   In the town of Eindhoven, in the center of the 101st Airborne Division's operational area, there was a factory for a company called Philips.   You've probably heard about Philips – they invented the CD and some other neat technology over the years.  One of our missions happens to take place in that factory.  Philips was eager for us to use their physical logo in the factory as it was then, and we placed an old version of their mark.  Without that agreement, we would've had to leave that authentic detail out. I'd like to share some photos to go along with this example from Hell's Highway - the blog does continue after these, but I felt it was important to illustrate this case:  

 

[This opinion piece was originally made available on Gearboxity, the official community site of Gearbox, and is reproduced with permission here. If you'd like to comment directly in the Gearbox forums on this matter, a special thread has been set up for gamer and even developer feedback.]

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

[Future Publishing puts out Edge, sure, and the official Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft magazines in the States and the UK. But their flagship U.S. website is GamesRadar, and I'd just like to reprint the media alert I just got from them without much further comment.]

Last week's "Week of Hate" on GamesRadar.com gave the videogame destination its best March traffic numbers ever.

GamesRadar.com's first ever "Week of Hate" had new programming every day, exploring just what ticks gamers off on every major platform, plus gamer stereotypes, why Japanese RPG's suck, game innovation flops, etc.

As expected, the contents got everybody taking sides, driving traffic to new heights.

1) Tuesday March 25th was the biggest day ever on GamesRadar (340,000 uniques & 3.2MM page views). That was the day GamesRadar.com posted "100 Reasons Fanboys Hate Playstation."

2) Year over year page view growth for the week was +57% (uniques and visits were up +33%).

3) March 08 page views will exceed March 07 by approximately 30%.

In case you missed any of The Week of Hate, here are a few highlights --

http://www.gamesradar.com/f/100-reasons-fanboys-hate-nintendo/a-20080326101446794055

http://www.gamesradar.com/f/100-reasons-fanboys-hate-playstation/a-20080325115556490021

http://www.gamesradar.com/f/why-japanese-rpgs-suck/a-20080325134138142047."

[Oh yes - the release didn't mention GamesRadar vs. Shirley Phelps-Roper, something they were trailing enthusiastically last week, and which is possibly even more trolltastic than this particular set of links. Someone hand me a shoesaw...]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

[Writer and developer Ian Bogost got a chance to try Spore's Creature Editor in-depth, and view members of the public using it, at the ICE Conference in Canada - and he has some intriguing conclusions on Will Wright's game and the question of its universality.]

In the game industry, Will Wright's Spore is surely the most highly anticipated game in recent memory. Everyone knows about it -- we've been seeing previews and demos and hearing news and talk for years now. The same goes for hard-core game consumers. Games magazines and websites have covered Spore extensively, tracking every announcement and rumor obsessively.

I spent a considerable amount of time with the Spore Creature Editor at the ICE 2008 conference last week in Toronto. I'd seen it many times, and touched it a few, before now, but this was the first time I really got to dig in deep. The demo was shown by TransGaming Technologies, the Toronto company that's doing the Mac port of Spore, which will release simultaneously with the PC version.

Impressions of the Creature Editor

The Creature Editor is slick and easy to use. It makes smart decisions when the player drags and moves parts around. The procedural animations are compelling and credible, although they do start to break down if parts are pushed to their extremes, joints placed too closely or limbs stretched to incongruous positions. Gravity doesn't seem to exist for Spore creatures, which means that one need not worry about a creature's ability to balance; they'll do so automatically.

In test mode, the player can choose animation presets like Scared, Laugh, Punch, Ta-Da and so forth. These seem to be taken straight out of Ken Perlin's many procedural animation experiments, although they also resemble expressions in multiplayer games. They are fun to watch and very motivating because they are so credible; it's hard not to want to go back and tweak a critter to see how he cowers differently with new arms, or dances differently with shorter feet. The editor encourages tweaking and experimentation.

For a long while now, both Wright and EA have been talking about Spore as a "franchise." With the announcement of PC, Mac, Nintendo DS, and iPhone versions of the game, it's easy to misconstrue "franchise" as "released on all platforms." But exploring the game more extensively made me realize how much more Maxis and EA hope to get out of Spore.

When you test a creature, it is possible to take photos or capture a performance in video and upload it directly to YouTube, making Spore a general puppetry machinima tool. The use of this feature is incredibly seamless: press the record button, puppet your creature, press record again. A window pops up with the local disk location of a saved AVI movie and an Upload button to send it straight to YouTube. I'd expect the same of photos for other services like Flickr and Facebook.

There is also a "Spore Store" built into the game, iTunes Store style. In addition to the asynchronously downloaded assets from other players, the store allows players to purchase external merchandise.

Interestingly, the coupling between the editor and the broader simulation is somewhat understated. The player has limited resources to spend on creature parts, and the choices he makes affect the creature's performance -- how it moves, how effectively it attacks, and so forth.

Interestingly, the interface display that provides feedback on the relative merits and weaknesses of the creature's current state is among the smallest on the screen, squished into the top right corner of the display. Whether or not this will change before release is uncertain, but it struck me that the editor privileged construction, creativity, and sharing more than the critter's role in the broader "SimEverything" universe.

Spore for Ordinary Creatures

ICE is a games-friendly conference, featuring panels on virtual worlds, mobile games, games and mass media, and games and marketing. But it is also a more general event, catering to new media professionals across media -- broadcst, web, mobile. In their words, the event focuses on "the business of content on interactive platforms." These are still technically- and media-minded people, but they are less dialed-in to the details and idiosyncracies of the games industry.

EA is banking on widespread popularity of the game, and this event offers a unique opportunity to see how a somewhat more general, yet still media savvy, audience might respond to Spore. Familiarity with the game was mixed. When a panelist polled the audience in the virtual worlds session, asking how many had heard of Spore, less than a quarter of the room raised their hands in affirmation.

As a dedicated videogame player, developer, and critic, one who has been following the development of Spore for five years now, my own experience with the Creature Editor must differ from that of the average person, especially players new to games or who haven't been following the project. I tried very hard to put myself in a position of ignorance, and I also watched some people try it who were totally green, ones who had never before heard of Spore.

The results fascinated me. For example, the editor emphasizes symmetry. When you drag legs or eyes to the body, a wide distance between them doubles the object, but you can get a single leg or eye or horn or whatever by moving the two together into one. This was pretty intuitive, but it's not the sort of thing one would know before making a few mistakes.

The same goes for the various handles and modification tools in the editor. It's possible to grab any vertebra, joint, or part and to use mouse controls to rotate and adjust them. The mouse wheel scales the size of the part. These mappings aren't completely clear, and some people I saw had trouble using them. All that said, the beauty of the editor is that it's so playful. It reveals more of its secrets as the player fools around with the knobs and handles, so "intuition" isn't really a fair measure for judging its approachability.

That said, The Sims only required pointing and clicking objects and menus. Spore demands a more sophisticated use of and comfort with mouse handles and interfaces that, despite their incredible power given their relative simplicity, are usually found only in higher-end software like modeling programs.

What Is Spore's Market?

I also noted confusion among green Sporeists regarding who the game is for. A lot of passers-by were fooled by Spore's cartoon-monsteriness. They seemed sort of incredulous when the TransGaming rep explained why it was "for everyone."

After Will Wright's first public demo of Spore at GDC 2005, everyone was impressed, but some also wondered: would a game about designed evolution, the Gaia spore, and ruling the universe win the broad appeal that had made The Sims such a success? Reactions like the one just mentioned might suggest that the concern is justified.

It's likely that the forthcoming EA marketing barrage will combat this preconception, but it's impossible to conclude that the preconception does not exist. People of all sorts wanted to play The Sims because they could immediately recognize it as a game about real people's lives and relationships. I'd be curious to know how newcomers would describe their first impressions of Spore.

But the observation that surprised me the most was how people totally unfamiliar with Spore reacted to the very idea of a creature editor. From my perspective, it's a brilliantly engineered, elegantly constructed content authoring tool. But from theirs, it's an unfamiliar interface to an almost deviant act.

I'm used to living in a world drunk on Spore anticipation -- at any other conference, I would have had to battle my way to the screen. But among the newbies, there was a significant amount of uncertainty and performance anxiety. People weren't sure they would be able to build something, even with encouragement and example. One even said, over my shoulder, "I'm not sure I'm creative in that way." I found this reaction fascinating.

Conclusion

One of the premises of Spore is that it allows the player to co-create with the game very easily and with extremely high quality results. I bet the self-doubt would melt away after a few minutes trying it out, but It was interesting to see people resist digging in due to this cognitive dissonance.

I have no doubt that the game will be a success, but I wonder if new players will pick up the box and think, "I'm not sure I'll be able to create anything good," or "I'm not the kind of person who toys with life." And I wonder what marketing strategies and play styles might combat this.

My observations are anecdotal and unscientific, but they point to an important fact: like it or not, Spore will have a profound impact far beyond Maxis and EA. Its success or failure will likely have an impact on how funders, investors, will perceive risk-taking in the games industry, how game developers and publishers will perceive the role of difficult technology R&D in new properties, and how the general public will imagine what experiences and sensations are possible in games.

These are issues in which we are all invested, and reason why concerns like the ones I relate here must be embraced, addressed, and even exaggerated by us all.

[UPDATE: Although Ian Bogost checked with TransGaming representatives regarding the Spore Store and microtransactions, it appears he was given incorrect information on the nature of the store. An official statement given to Gamasutra by EA on the matter reads as follows:

"Sharing or “downloading” player created content is a core feature of Spore, not at all something that is part of the Spore Store or even under consideration for additional charge. The entire game is based on players making creatures, buildings, and vehicles which can be accessed from what we call our Sporepedia – a web based collection of all player created assets.

The Spore Store simply gives players the ability to purchase out-of-game merchandise such as t-shirts and posters or any additional game products we might make down the road such as expansion packs. For example, we are working with a company to provide the option for 3D versions of a player’s creature to be made and the Spore Store is where that purchase would originate.

We have also mentioned that we will be providing the Creature Creator tool as a stand alone product in the month or two before the game launches so that players can begin to design their creatures, but we do not have plans to sell individual parts via micro-transactions."]

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

[One of the most intriguing game add-ons of the last few years is the extremely unconventional - but extremely interesting Novint Falcon, a haptics-based PC controller that pulls against and responds to your touch. In this article, originally printed at his Nonpolynomial Labs research site, Kyle Machulis explains, analyzes and deconstructs the add-on, which perhaps deserves better game support (and overall interactive possibilities - not just for games) than it's thus far received.]

After my article on the Novint Falcon box got linked by GameSetWatch and Ars Technica, it seems like it might be time to do a nice, technical throwdown about what's going on, inside and out of the novint falcon, since everyone else seems hung up on games usage (I guess it's a game controller, but that's not the fun part!). I've been working with the Falcon since early August, and am actually getting fairly far with it.

If you didn't understand my box article, read on anyways. I'm gonna try to make this as understandable to everyone as possible, so you'll all learn C and inverse kinematics and algebraic geometry and come romp with me down the happy streets of writing a driver for a badly marketed piece of hardware no one is buying.

Come on, what other relaxing hobbies do you have that involve Jacobian Matrices, hmmmmm?

Please note: I have not used Novint's SDK. I do not plan on using Novint's SDK (That would be cheating). I don't know what their developer support is like (though Tom seems nice enough on the forums. Hi Tom!). What you see here is what I've gained from lots of web searching, talking to people that know what they're doing (I'm not a haptics engineer, in fact, this is my project to learn haptics engineering and programming), and randomly trying things while hoping I don't break the falcon. I'll wikify all of this information in time, but it's honestly much faster for me to brain dump in conversational blog mode than it is into a wiki.

So what the God Damn Hell is the Falcon anyways?!?!

It's everyone's favorite time of class, video time! *wheels in the TV with bad color and hissing, blinking 12:00 VCR*

Seriously. I can't figure out how to explain it. Novint can't figure out how to explain it. So, watch this video, which tries to explain it.

If you don't understand what it is yet, well, I can't help you anymore. But enjoy this randomly technical description that follows anyways. I worked hard on it, and I did it JUST FOR YOU. Yes, you.

A Little Background on Parallel Robots and Haptic Controllers

Before we dig into the guts, let's start with what you can find out before you take the case off the thing. For reference, here's a picture of the Falcon:

A bit of background (this will contain much glossing as I'd like to focus on the falcon, but it's good to have a knowledge of what's out there otherwise). In the world of haptics, there are two major types of controllers. Serial (pen type controllers), and parallel. An overview of a bunch of the different hardware types is available in an article on bracina.com.

The NovInt Falcon is a parallel robot. Parallel robots are called such because they have multiple chains of joints working together to create the final position of the controller (or end effector, if you want to be technical about it). Not to mention, the math uses parallelograms to line up the positions.

If you watch a lot of How It Works (which, if you have cable with the Discovery Channel, you invariably end up doing no matter what. That show is video heroin.), you've seen these before.

They're real popular in pick and place operations. That's exactly what it sounds like. Pick something up, put it somewhere else. Repeat ad inifinitum. Puttin' things in or on other things. They're good at that.

Here's one in action.

So, you're probably like "But it's all pointing down"

Ok, look more familiar now? The NovInt Falcon is a parallel robot turned on its side. It's actually a Delta variant of the parallel manipulator (Here's a nice overview of the Delta Haptic Device, which is quite similar to the Falcon/Omega setup). If you want all sorts of interesting history about where it came from, check out this article on parallemics.org. But for now, we'll just say: France. It came from France.

There's lots of reasons why using parallel robots in haptics is important. However, I don't quite understand the math behind it all yet, so I'll just repeat what all the webpages say. "Good stiffness and accuracy in a small workspace". Having used some serial controllers before, I can see what they mean. Hard definitely feels... hard. I'm sure I'll be talking more about this in later articles on the development of libnifalcon.

To show a bit of what else is out there, here's the ForceDimension and their Omega series of controllers.

Once again, looks familiar, no?

Well, one major difference.

The Falcon is $249US.

The Omega starts at around $20,000US (the more degrees of freedom, the more expensive. The Omega 7 is around $50k.)

Ok, and the Omega comes with a PCI interface and all sorts of APIs and what not and FD is actually an offshoot of the subset of France that we mentioned above that created this whole thing in the first place, but still. That's some significant 0's worth of difference there.

There's rumors that ForceDimension helped out on the Falcon design. There's also rumors that it came from Sandia with Tom. Only Art Bell truly knows.

So why all this about parallel robots? Well, many future posts will be talking about research in this field, so I figured I'd at least introduce the term. There's also lots of reference and searchable material in here if you're interested in going your own direction with this information. Anyways, back to hackyness.

Internal Circuitry

Now that we've got that out of the way, what's inside it?

Click the image below to go to an annotated flickr picture of the insides.

Connectors:

• USB B Connector
• Power Connector - goes to 30V 1A wall wart of DOOM

Yes, the falcon is quite possibly cranking 30W through the motors when you max the torque on all the axes.

Chips (Links to Datasheets or Product Websites):

• FTDI FT232R USB to Serial Chip
• PIC 16F688 Microcontroller
• TI TMS320 R2811 DSP Processor

I don't have specific parts on the 3 motor blocks in the circuit (they're all exactly the same), but what you've basically got going on there is three really large old style mouse encoders. Each of the 3 large wheels attached to the motors have a disc attached to them, alternating little clear slots with opaque slots. There's a photoresistor that shines light through those slots. Whenever the light goes through (clear), you get a 1. Whenever the light is blocked (opaque), you get a zero. And that's how we know how far the motor has gone.

Whether direction is measured using some sort of quadrature encoding or Back-EMF polarity is something I forgot to check (but will do so at the point where I can figure out how to write my own firmware for this thing).

Communications and Initialization/Bootloading Sequence

Now, for the part I kinda sorta know more about than the other parts.

The Falcon uses the FTDI chip as it's main communications link to the computer. Everything is filtered back and forth through the FTDI chip, converting from USB on the computer side to RS232 on the circuit side. This is because it's orders of magnitude easier to program your microcontrollers to talk RS232 than it is to talk USB.

Novint distributes and uses the stock FTDI driver with their software. The only change they've made is to the VID and PID. They've chosen to use FTDI's free "have a PID" program, which has them listed under FTDI (0x0403) as a vendor, but with their own special product ID (0xcb48, as opposed to the default PID for FTDI chips, 0x6001).

NOTE: I have not actually proven this next paragraph, it's more what I think is going on than anything. You might've noticed in the Internal Circuitry section that there are two microcontrollers on the board: the PIC and the TI. This is where the bootloader sequence comes in. The TI DSP uC is actually reconfigurable on connection to a PC. The PIC acts as a bootloader, maintaining the logic needed to run the FTDI communications to pick up firmware and program the TI with it. This allows a developer (currently just Novint, since I've had no luck analyzing the pins. Stupid tiny LQFP pins and my shaky hand.) to possibly speed up the control loop on the internal processor depending on application specific needs. Damn fine idea, even if it did crank the price of the hardware quite a bit, I'm sure.

When a program wants to connect to the falcon, the following sequence occurs (if you want to follow along, check out nifalcon_libftdi.c). Note that the bauds get funky, because baud rate actually turns into a clock subdivision on the board, so I just converted the rate to the lowest clock subdivision possible that would still make them work. See the How I Mapped The Test Firmware Protocol section for more info.

• Open connection to FTDI chip
• The "Are we at least connected" Step:
• Set to 9600 8N1, No Flow Control, DTR High
• Write a 3 byte check message, {0x0a, 0x43, 0x0d}
• Read, expect 5 bytes back
• The "Send the firmware over" Step:
• Set 140000 baud, DTR Low
• Write a single byte (Usually 0x41 "A")
• Read, expect same byte back
• Send firmware file in 128 byte chunks
• Read, expect exact chunk we sent back from the falcon as error check
• The "Ready To Go" Step:
• Set baud to 1456213 (Maximum for the chip?)

After we've gotten this far, we're ready to run an I/O loop to the falcon.

The Test Firmware

So far, the only firmware that's usable with code I've written is what I call the "test" firmware. This is the NOVINT.BIN file included with the drivers, that the utilities in "c:\Program Files\Novint\Falcon\TestUtilities\" in a normal windows nVent (I HATE NVENT but that's an article for another day) install will use.

Rather than repeat the info here, if you're interested in the packet layout of the test firmware, check out my wiki page on it.

Note, however, that there are a few things you might not be aware of. First off, when you set a motor torque, it's only for a very short period of time (Haven't scoped out the exact value). Basically, you're expected to be polling the falcon constantly and setting the torques as needed. The controlling program is closing the control loop to the falcon, as just keeping torques on until next update can cause lots of badness (motor wear, crunched fingers, etc...)

Goals of the libnifalcon Project

So, that's pretty much all I know about this thing right now. I'm working on learning the math behind the haptics and placement algorithms, and while I learn, you'll get to learn along with me, in the form of reading my ridiculously long blog posts!

All of this is going into code form in the libnifalcon project on Sourceforge. As of this writing, v0.2 is sitting in the repository waiting for me to finish a few cleanup things.

Here's a few applications I have planned for libnifalcon:

• Max/MSP and PureData Patch (already done, just needs to be cleaned, threaded, and released. It's in the repository if you absolutely can't wait)
• Mouse movement/simulation
• Basic open source haptics library integration
• Mapping the TMS320 pins and possibly starting on my own firmware

As you can see, right now I'm more interested in getting a code platform built and teaching myself haptics programming from the ground up than I am in implementing any specific application. However, I do spend a lot of time in Pd playing with the falcon at the moment, and will most likely be posting interesting projects out of that in between code geekouts.

Aside 1: How I Mapped the Test Firmware Protocol

Mapping the test firmware protocol was fairly easy. I used SniffUSB to record the packets going to/from the Falcon in the test programs, then compared the data in those with the protocol mapping for the FTDI available in the libftdi source code. The bootloader code is basically a handwritten replay of this sequence, except translated back into FTDI driver calls instead of pure USB comms, hence some of the weirdness in the explanation (the "send 3 get back 5" seqeuence, the odd baud rates, etc...).

This was, quite literally, all it took. No amazingness or code breaking or whatever. Figuring out the packet setup was just a matter of mapping the numbers from the test GUI to the changing bytes of the packets.

Aside 2: FTD2XX versus libftdi, Operating Systems, and You

libnifalcon comes in two flavors right now.

• FTD2XX
• This is the driver that FTDI distributes, and the one that the default Windows Falcon drivers use. It seems fine on windows, outside of the fact that I personally have issues connecting the Falcon through a hub. This may or may not be due to my machine. However, this drivers seem wildly unstable on Mac and Linux. Also, they have no versions available for 64-bit Linux
• libftdi
• This is the free, reverse engineered version of FTDI's drivers, that use libusb. They seem to be stable across all platforms, though I only recommend using them for anything non-windows (or non-publically distributed on windows. Don't make people switch drivers if you don't have to.). It's GPL'd, too, so if you want to use libnifalcon under libftdi, you're stuck with the GPL too. Meh.

[Kyle Machulis is an engineer/artist with interests in immersive environment and alternative input research. Going by his favorite mantra, "As free as possible", he works to create immersion in video games and virtual worlds through the absolute cheapest, easiest means possible. Not only does he not have a research budget, but he also enjoys proving the fact that simple user interface additions to a very complex computer-generated world can create new kinds of emergent play and interaction. In his spare time, he keeps a full time job as a developer at Linden Lab.]

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

[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.]

By now, just about everybody's heard of Miss Bimbo, the browser-based "game for girls" that's ruffling feathers with its anti-feminist gameplay. Girls adopt a glam-o-rama avatar and, spending virtual "bimbo dollars" on chocolate, fashion and some unspecified "medicines," complete various simplistic challenges with the stated goal of becoming "the finest, coolest bimbo that ever existed."

This is, of course, the perfect recipe for auto-cringe: it embraces superficial and arguably destructive ideals, is ostensibly aimed at "'tweens" (itself a cringe-inducingly trendy marketing buzzword), and the website itself is a car accident of cartoonish pink featuring some kind of skank with bunny ears. Aberrant Gamer is arriving fashionably late to this party, actually, with too many outlets to link already providing analysis and experiences with the dreaded Miss Bimbo (just Google it). As for me, the servers were so stressed I couldn't even play to any significant extent. The universal verdict? Disgusting.

Games like Miss Bimbo (created by a man, by the way) just can't win. Women find them disgusting and offensive, and gamers worry about the bad PR. But aren't we being a bit hypocritical?

Ew, Girl Games

Numerous studies seem to show that females like casual games, and that casual portals and certain Wii games are broadening the traditionally majority-male audience. But gaming in general is still majority male, and video games, be it console or online, enjoy a far more favorable reputation among males than females. Most women who are into games -- your columnist included -- have now learned that mentioning their hobby is a great icebreaker among men at parties. Among fellow females and potential galpals, however, being a gamer is a warning sign, a red flag, an oddity to be overcome on the rocky road to female bonding. This large-scale failure of females to enjoy gaming on a level playing field with males continues to perplex both game companies and audiences, who wonder when the girls are ever going to come and play with us.

Maybe when we start welcoming them young? And yet gamers are usually perplexed and annoyed by the pink, pony-populous "games for girls" section at the store, many of us wondering if the target audience even likes being pandered to to such an extent. Take Ubisoft's Imagine series on DS. The company says titles like Imagine Fashion Designer, Imagine Animal Doctor and, of course, Imagine Babyz, are designed to enable girls to explore their favorite hobbies and interests.The audience has largely approached them with an eyeroll and a snicker. Even females generally find pink things insulting. The Imagine franchise, however, is one of Ubisoft's cash cows -- it's sold 3 million of them.

Why do games like these bother us? Is it because they specify an audience that is not us? Do we have a knee-jerk, PC-feminist response to pink things that refuses to accept that some girls like that stuff? The women of today are very interested in telling the young girls of today what they may and may not be interested in -- President, CEO, News Anchor (yes), Housewife, Supermodel, Princess (no). But really, why does every girl need to be Gloria Steinem?

This Barbie Will Self-Destruct

Teenagers and 'tweens are particularly vulnerable. When people are babies, it's almost expected to differentiate the bald, unremarkable little creatures with pink and blue blankets -- if you're the mom of a baby girl and you put her in a blue nursery, for example, you can bet nosy family members are going to be perplexed at your color scheme. And when kids are still single-digit in age, it's perfectly acceptable to throw them gender-themed birthday parties; a little girl will quite normally have a Disney Princess party, while a little boy might have Ninja Turtles party decor on his special day. No one cries gender discrimination then, but when Disney Princess Gal hits puberty just a couple years later, it's suddenly of concern or "dangerous" if she still prefers things that are pink and sweet? Doesn't she have a right to?

Being A Bimbo

The issue with Miss Bimbo, of course, is not just that it's pink and targeted at girls. It's that it seems destructive, espousing weight maintenance, consumerism and the superficial fashion-driven lifestyle. It presents your Miss Bimbo avatar with an "ideal height and weight" which part of gameplay revolves around maintaining, though Fox News.com found that later levels ask you to gain weight so that you can earn Bimbo Dollars at plus-sized modeling, and that while the game says being thin is important, keeping healthy and eating is key to the gameplay. It also features some budgetary resource management, and a marketplace where savvy girls can re-sell old accessories to new players.

It's a lifestyle game, and this lifestyle is mostly negative and rooted in female stereotypes. Had I a daughter, I certainly wouldn't want her taking her cues on how to prioritize her dreams from Miss Bimbo. But it'd also be unfair to prohibit her from playing it -- after all, this lifestyle is glamorized in an American society obsessed with the latest mad exploits of pop stars or the outrageous behavior of socialites. It may not be a value set we'd like to see today's young women emulate. But in addition to doing them an emotional disservice by quashing their curiosity about it, it's completely unrealistic to try and prevent their interest in it.

Girls want to play games where they can make women act like what they see on TV. And, news flash -- the average girl will at some point try out hilariously offensive, sexual and destructive scenes with her Barbie Dolls at some point in her youth. We all do it; sorry. I'd be willing to bet today's young Miss Bimbo players find the game just as hilarious.

Girls receive certain messages on a regular basis from society. Like it or not, today's women and girls are obsessed with their weight, the adequacy of their wardrobe and their social power, in alarming majorities. Given that, Miss Bimbo was almost doomed to emerge as a social practice game for the reality of our world. If we're repulsed by what Miss Bimbo asks girls to do, the game is nothing but the tiniest microcosm of a social epidemic that needs addressing on a much broader scale than shutting down a website could ever accomplish.

The Good Old Blame Game

It's easier to blame the game, of course -- it's challenging to find one article on Miss Bimbo that doesn't correlate it to problems with eating disorders, female self-esteem, gender equality or anything else. Finally, a point of relationship between Miss Bimbo and the everyday gamer. If you're going to be disgusted at Miss Bimbo, you should probably avert your eyes from GTA IV, too.

GTA casts you as a male gangster type, gaming his way up the ladder to wealth, power and gorgeous women by capping bitches and slapping hoes. It's all about hot cars, nice houses and warm guns, and it encourages men to eat junk food and work out to increase their strength. It's a negative male fantasy -- perhaps by many definitions an offensive one -- and it's become the whipping post for an entire legion of detractors who want to blame the game for social problems in young people.

And yet we as gamers will largely never capitulate in our defense of GTA, nor ever surrender our right to play it if we so choose. Because it's a game, a closed emotional experiment for its players. It'll always be attractive to young teens, and so we ask parents to read rating labels and prohibit their kids from playing it, or at the very least instill values adequate enough for the kid to determine that GTA doesn't warrant emulating in reality.

While Miss Bimbo, unlike GTA, is meant for kids, it's non-violent, and contains no pornography or overtly offensive language. It's distasteful and hard to agree with, but we can no more take issue with the game itself than we can blame the interesting social microcosm of Bully for -- well, bullying. Like GTA, Miss Bimbo is somewhat of a satire of these archetypes, and that can rob them of their venom. In fact, it's a safe way for girls to explore ideas about social pressures. What they do from there is a parental responsibility primarily, and an issue for our culture at large.

[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 (10)

Yay, some good ol' GameSetLinks for you, this time round - and probably the highlight is sister site IndieGames.com posting up a link to the (pictured) Noitu Love 2, for which a demo is now available.

In other fun linkage, we see the Video Gaiden award trails, the art of Braid continues, some ideas for Rock Band hardware upgrades, and a whole cornucopia of other neatness. And here goes:

IndieGames.com - The Weblog - Indie Game Pick: Noitu Love 2 (Konjak)
Demo of the super-duper hand-drawn 2D sidescrolling IGF finalist now released!

Kotaku: 'Masahiro Kanagawa: Team Ninja Reacts to Kanagawa Rampage'
Japanese media attention on a game/violence connection.

anothercastle.com » I Attack the Darkness Lead Story » I Attack The Darkness: The God Complex, Part 1: J.C. and the Fun Time Band
'In a special three-part “Fun With Blasphemy” series, I will go one step further and compare different styles of Dungeon Mastering with the facets of the Christian Trinity.' More goth DM rantings plz!

Still Alive « Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction
Short takes on Portal, critique-wise.

Commercial Breaks - A documentary about the Imagine and Ocean Software
Wow, seminal UK game development from 1983/1984 - via Boyer.

David Hellman » Blog Archive » The Art of Braid, Part IV: Developer Mode
Yep, still linking these!

Game-ism: 'Peripheral Sequels'
Suggesting analog fret buttons for Rock Band 2 hardware would be a neat idea. Which it would!

GameSpot News: PressSpotting talks to Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw
Good to see Charlie Brooker namechecked in here - CASH PRIZE to anyone who can dig out the Brooker vs. Edge prank phone call.

Call of Jihadi Interview // PC /// Eurogamer
Games for political reasons, interpreting them, things getting banned, etc.

ScottishGames.biz: videoGaiden Game Awards 2008
The Consolevania folks have good taste, make interesting award categories.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Can you solve the Mystery of the Video Game Scores? I know I can't. It's kind of a mystery to me why magazines care so much about their review score systems and score this and score that. Though, of course, the public's kind of at fault, too. Who remembers how many stars Roger Ebert gave Movie X?

You probably don't; if you remember anything, it's that he either said it's good or bad, along with maybe a couple zingers here and there. If game writing has produced text as memorable as Ebert's, then that's collectively our problem, isn't it?

And now that I've written enough text to (hopefully) clear this opening image, let's move right on to all the game magazines released within the past fortnight. This update may be a mite on the short side because I'm rapidly preparing for a trip to Japan, where I will be this time next week.

Hopefully I can visit all the secret places I know I can find old game mags for sale. (No, I won't tell you where they are. I can't have you go buying them all up before I get there!)

Edge April 2008

Cover: Grand Theft Auto IV

Like this month's EGM, the main focus is on a long interview with Sam Houser as he discusses his soon-to-be-born baby. This piece is a bit different -- where EGM's had a lot of pictures and sidebars and other doohickeys, Edge's is virtually a 16-page wall of text. You will get a load of Houser as he goes over the entire GTA series, particularly GTAIII and later, performing a barrage of postmortem discussions years after the fact on all of 'em. There isn't much new on GTAIV if that's all you care about, but still you get Houser's opinion on virtually everything else under the sun in gamedom. Edge is willing to let him talk on for as long as he likes, and the magazine is a better thing for it.

Other highlights: Edge's late-as-'ell GDC coverage ("A large number of game design lectures related to narrative, and most mentioned BioShock or Portal in the first two minutes"), retro bits on SCE's Siren and Spectrum classic (I suppose) Pyjamarama, and a couple of rah-rah pieces on UK developer projects Race Driver: Grid and Lostwinds, a WiiWare title. Also, this issue marks Mister Biffo's last column for real -- yahoo!

Play April 2008

   

Cover: Death Jr. Root of Evil / Okami Wii

Dave Halverson is leaving his editor-in-chief role at Play -- "promoting myself," as he puts it, to Publisher/Creative Director of Fusion Publishing. In his editorial, Halverson states that this'll allow him more time to write features instead of just gush all over platform games in his reviews, as well as work on some of his manga projects (heavens be!). Brady Fiechter is the new EIC, although it seems like it's pretty much been that way the past few issues anyway. I hope he has great luck in his future endeavors, 'cos like him or not, he's done a lot to define US game mags.

However, as if to prove that the more things change the more they stay the same, this issue kicks off with a massive Halverson-written preview of the Wii Death Jr., a title I'm really not sure a lot of gamers care about. Okami is the chief review, and it's filled with lovely art, which is the important thing with a game like this.

PC Gamer May 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Action-shooter preview blowout

I'm not sure what brought this about, but EIC Kristen Salvatore takes her editorial this month to re-explain PC Gamer's review and advertising -- we review only finished game code, edit and advertising are wholly separate departments, and so forth. If PCG's integrity was brought into question, I musta missed it.

Otherwise, pretty typical issue -- a nicely-put-together preview roundup on shooting things (all 13 pages of it), then a small handful of previews, reviews, and tech stuff. Cellplay is back, but thankfully only four pages of it.

GamePro May 2008

Cover: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Huge bits on GTA4 multiplayer and The Force Unleashed, the latter of which is quite nice and extensively introduces the nuts and bolts of the game the way old Nintendo Power liked doing. It's a nice change of pace. A spread containing a world map with the locations of developers contains a few odd typos -- Dhruva Interactive is listed as being in "Bangaluru, India," which is what Bangalore is called in the local language.

Hardcore Gamer Spring 2008

Cover: Super Smash Bros. Brawl

This magazine is the most crappity of crappy crap I ever did see. 68 pages for $6.99 is bad enough, but when you open it and realize that it's a bunch of reviews of ancient stuff, you start to feel doubly ripped off. A feature on how much money you can feasibly make as a professional gamer is kinda neat, but the cover review of Brawl is a mess -- far too little text for the eight pages it covers, with the amusing result that literally half the review's real estate is spent bitching about Subspace Emissary mode, despite the game getting a perfect 5 out of 5 score in the end. What the heck?

Future specials

   

For the spring, Future's prepared two "How To" one-offs, one for PC owners and the other for Xbox 360 maniacs. Both are primarily republished content, although the PC one has a bit more "original" stuff (original assuming you've never read PC Gamer UK before).

Neither are probably worth buying if you already read OXM and PC Gamer, but if not, they're pretty interesting reads to strum through. Although the copy editor must've been asleep when these mags were created -- one how-to in the PC mag references a sidebar that doesn't exist, while another kicks off with the sentence "Start by designing the terrain that'll be accommodate [sic] your new town."

And the rest

   

Veteran readers will know by now how little enthusiasm I have for Tips & Tricks Video Game Codebook and Beckett Massive Online Gamer. And yet I renewed my subscription to both just the other day. What is wrong with me? I should probably see a shrink about this.

T&T has feature previews on Link's Crossbow Training and Assassin's Creed, the latter of which is old and the former of which is pretty superfluous. After that, it's all codes. Beckett MOG has, surprise surprise, a bunch of inscrutable strategy features and inane interviews, although this issue introduces a terrifying, badly-drawn webcomic reprint for good measure. Arrrgh!

[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 at PiQ magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Even though you'll see a fair amount of cross-posting between GameSetWatch and big sister site Gamasutra nowadays - at least on the non-link 'opinion' and quirkier stuff - there's still plenty of original content on Gamasutra and sister sites like Game Career Guide of interest to you good folks.

This time around - interviews with the Valve folks behind Portal, a fun look at Super Mario Galaxy's gravity system, Tom Buscaglia on the symbiotic relationship between game developer and his trusty lawyer, and lots more - as follows:

- Still Alive: Kim Swift And Erik Wolpaw Talk Portal
"Kim Swift and Erik Wolpaw are the lead designer and lead writer of Valve's Portal, a game you may have heard of - and in this Gamasutra interview, they go into detail on the game's creation, director's commentary, and, uh, 'time to crate'."

- Game Law: Man's Best Friend Sometimes Bites
"Buscaglia's latest 'Game Law' column sees him suggesting that "just like a kid and a dog, every game studio should have its pet lawyer to keep it safe and secure" - contributing key training tips for both canine and human sides."

- Q&A: Taito's Fujita On Mobile Consolidation, iPod Hopes
"Following up on a recent interview, Gamasutra catches up with Taito U.S. rep Keiji Fujita to discuss the consolidating cellphone game market, Taito games on Apple's iPod hardware, and Square Enix publishing Taito DS games in the West."

- Games Demystified: Super Mario Galaxy
"Want to see how Mario Galaxy created its unique gravity-based physics effects for the in-game planets? Developer Alessi analyzes and reproduces the same concepts with a playable game prototype and source code."

- Student Postmortem: The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom
"An Edward Gorey-like, silent film-inspired art style and the looping of recorded game play mark the USC student game The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and, in the latest feature for GameCareerGuide, the team exposes how the distinctive title blossomed in a university setting."

- Resolve Your Resolves
"In this in-depth technical article, Gruen & Story examine anti-aliasing in games, explaining how you can reduce 'jaggies' in your PC title, and save frame-rate, by using many less post-processing passes."

- China Angle: 'China Games And The Troubles'
"In Gamasutra's latest China Angle column, Frank Yu says that while China's online population is booming, the games industry is growing increasingly nervous about government crackdowns following the shuttering of online video sites, and looks at recent controversy over the Beijing Olympics website's co-option of some casual games."

- Y Control: Joe Ybarra On Cheyenne Mountain's Massive Plans
"Cheyenne Mountain exec Joe Ybarra's career has evolved from The Bard's Tale to the Stargate Worlds MMO, and Gamasutra talks to him about the Arizona developer's surprising four teams and multiple MMOs in development."

- Educational Feature: The Fun Instinct
"Game designers need to have an intuitive sense of what is fun, and Spin Master lead designer Tim Lang says you don't have to be born with that trait -- it can be learned. In the latest feature for GameCareerGuide.com, Lang formulates a system for acquiring a fun instinct -- or nurturing ones that already exist."

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

['Quiz Me Quik' is a new weekly GameSetWatch column by journalist Alistair Wallis, in which he picks offbeat subject in the game business and interviews them about their business, their perspective, and their unique view of life. This time - the wonderfully odd Web-based net.culture pastiche Forumwarz.]

Browser based game Forumwarz has done a pretty good job of drawing the attention of those who spend their time wallowing in Net culture. Small wonder, really: t's a sharp parody of the many negatives and positives out there, from furries to Boing Boing and 4chan, all wrapped up in a slick self-contained imitation of the web.

There's Sentrillion, the Google-alike search engine, sTalk and Tubmail, the Gmail and Gmail Chat equivalents. Kind of like a more sophisticated version of the front-end to PS2 RPG .hack, except that it's actually fun to play. Oh, and it's all rather funny too.

Then there's the gameplay, a sort of turn-based RPG style that sees players using various methods of annoyance to take down forums, depending on their class. It's bra shots and descriptions of sexual experiences for Camwhores, whining about parents and self-mutilation for Emo Kids and spoilers and “yo momma” jokes for Trolls. Maybe it's just an instilled obsession with level grinding, but it really is quite addictive.

GameSetWatch posted an interview with Robin “Evil Trout” Ward – developer Zombie Crotch Productions' only full time employee – a few weeks after the game's release.

With a little water under the bridge, and the second episode of story content on the way, we figured that now would be a good time to catch up with him and see what the reaction to the game has been like, and how it's affected the way the game's development is continuing:

GSW: What kinds of figures are you collecting about the site's use?

Robin Ward: For game balancing reasons we collect all sorts of information, like what attacks are the most popular for a given class, what the average level of a particular class for beating a forum is and pretty much anything we can think of under the sun.

We also record how long it takes people to finish our introduction sequence so we can tune it accordingly, and we do A/B testing on our homepage. The idea is by collecting lots of statistics, we can tune things in such a way that we create a larger and better user base.

GSW: Anything surprising?

RW: In terms of figures that surprised me, there are tons of those! I was quite surprised to see early on that the Camwhore class was the least popular. I somehow assumed that one would be much more popular. Those numbers have changed now, but it was interesting.

GSW: What are the user numbers at the moment?

RW: We've got 33,000 user accounts, and we get over 10,000 visits a day.

GSW: What kinds of numbers were you expecting at this point? Did you have projections?

RW: I looked around for data on the Internet about how many users games sites get at various times and I found it very difficult to find. So we really had no idea what to expect.

I'm pretty happy with the results do far.

GSW: What kind of feedback are you getting from users about the daily forum limit?

RW: It's what I call "noob complaint”. People come to the site, play for a couple of hours on their first day - which is how long it typically takes to go through all the fun stuff until you've been limited on day one - and bitch because they can't play more.

After a few days, people tend to get why it works that way. The game was designed to be played over several days, and we've timed certain events to happen on certain days.

By the time you reach the Domination end game, the forum visits become strategic moves against other players. Having a limit guarantees that your opponents can't just grind all day to beat you; they have to use the same amount of moves but in a smarter way.

Finally, for the players who don't care about competition, they can throw us a few of bucks and cheat their way right through that limit. Since the cheating has been in place, I've heard very few complaints about the visits.

GSW: Are many people taking advantage of that?

RW: Absolutely. The cheats are very popular as far as our "products" go!

GSW: Are you getting a lot of negative feedback from users regarding the content of Forumwarz? Does any of it surprise you, given the fact that you make it clear that the game is offensive from the outset?

RW: Almost none. One blogger started to review the game, then decided to stop because we spelled “Clans” with a K, as “Klans”. I frankly expected more, even with the whole typing in "I am not
offended easily" thing.

Creating a game on the Internet on our own gave us the liberty to make lots of low brow jokes and we definitely exercised it.

We did squeeze in a couple of very offensive things. The junk item "Mary Magdalene" is one such example. After Drach and I wrote that, I told him it was the most offensive thing we'd ever written. I did some litmus testing with friends as to whether they thought it was too much for us with mixed results, so we just published it in the game to see what would happen.

We've received nothing but praise for it! There's our surprise: our users want more offensive content.

GSW: So that's what you'll be giving them in Episode 2?

RW: I don't think it's our mission statement for Episode 2, but we certainly won't hold back if we come up with something hilarious. It's more important to us to be funny than it is offensive.

GSW: What is the positive feedback generally commenting on?

RW: The things people seem to point out often are: our clever writing, our slick AJAX interface and our dedication to improving it over time.

GSW: Are you surprised by the level of attention you're getting from blogs and other media outlets?

RW: Yes, but not in the way you might think. I actually thought it would be much easier to get the word out about Forumwarz than it was. We created a spreadsheet of 70-odd blogs, news sites, reviewers that we thought would be interested in the game, and painstakingly went through the entire list emailing every single one.

I hate to admit it, but we receive maybe two responses from that effort, none very high profile. We were basically ignored by everyone.

We continued to hustle though, and with the help of our users we managed to get picked up by a high profile blogger, and then things spiralled from there.

You know the thing is, I don't blame the bloggers. They must receive so much spam from people saying "Look at my awesome product!”. I'm not surprised the majority of those emails are worth deleting.

And I know it wasn't our content, because we were in a situation where one of the high profile sites that featured us previously ignored two emails from us, and then posted it the second another blogger did.

GSW: There's probably a whole other discussion there about the issues raised by the blogging scene. How stable is the back-end proving? Have you had many issues on the technical side of things?

RW: Yes we've had many issues. I think every day we get slightly better at dealing with them. Our game was very stable in development and even during our beta phase, but once we started dealing with 50+ concurrent requests all sorts of new problems popped up related to that. It was also very hard to test for that given the small size of our team and resources.

Less than 1% of all requests to Forumwarz fail, so the majority of players can play through it without any problems. But we're still committed to making things better.

GSW: Is the option for users to generate their own content proving popular?

RW: Very much. Our biggest problem with ForumBuildr v2.0 Beta is that people were creating too MUCH content, to the point where it was overwhelming for others to go through it all. We've just started a new system where each player is scored based on the quality of the content they provide, so good players are encouraged to submit more and players with many bad submissions are encouraged to submit less.

We're only on our second week of this new system so it will be interesting to see how it works in the long term. I imagine further tweaks will always be necessary.

GSW: Do you think the user generated content is going to prove an important factor in the longevity of the game?

RW: Absolutely. Unfortunately it takes us a really long time to create content. Our users will always be able to play through it faster than we can create it. So we need to have ways for them to have fun even while we're not adding much to the Forumwarz universe.

GSW: How is the development of Episode 2 coming along? Have you had to speed it up at all, given the response from users?

RW: It's coming along. We've definitely created some great content for it and I think people will really like it if we can deliver everything we want to. Having said that, if anything it's been slowed down due to our huge response from our users.

GSW: You mean you feel pressure to take on board everything you're hearing?

RW: Well, actually I disregard the majority of what I hear. I get hundreds of emails a day, and there's no way I could get to everything. In terms of supporting Episode 1, I try to address the areas that are causing users the most pain. Also, I try to add the features that I think will bolster the community.

It's very important that the current Forumwarz build runs smoothly and that people continue to have fun. As the only full time developer I've been spending a lot of time enhancing that aspect of things and so far I think people really appreciate it.

GSW: Is there a date that you're working at hitting?

RW: No comment!

GSW: Have you had commercial interest in the game?

RW: In what respect?

GSW: Well, I guess in terms of people showing an interest in the workings of the game, and in terms of using the model for something commercial. I think the game model would work pretty well on something like the DS or PSP - especially in terms of the way the story progresses.

RW: I think that there is a lot of room for big publishers to create web games. If we can create a game on a shoestring budget with a tiny team and get 30k users, imagine what a publisher could do with a decent sized team and their marketing resources.

There's a reason why downloadable games like Xbox Live, PSN and WiiWare are so popular with developers: the games don't cost $10M+ to develop. The barrier of entry for commercial games these days is so huge, it's no wonder that big publishers are looking for some way to alleviate that risk.

Also consider this: there is no certification process for web games, and a huge installed user base - think about how many web browsers there are in the world. Patches can be deployed within minutes. Sure, your interface is a lot more primitive, but there's a lot that can be done.

I wouldn't be surprised if some major companies started looking at web games seriously. Then again, predicting the future is a dangerous thing to do...

GSW: Could you see yourself licensing the technology to other companies or developers?

RW: I feel that the Forumwarz game engine is very specific to the game we've built in it. Having said that, if someone had a good idea for how to implement a different sort of game using it I'd love to hear it.

We do have at least one upcoming feature for Episode 2 that will be purposely more "licensable." So it's something we're considering on the side, but not actively.

GSW: I'm guessing that's something you're not going to expand upon, huh?

RW: It's not our goal to be a licensing company, but we'll certainly think about it as we go on!

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

Now, let's start the weekend with some delightful GameSetLink-age, pwning the Internet and making esoteric links your friend since 2005, ish.

This time, Harvey Smith says nice things about Tale Of Tales' latest indie title, James Kochalka advocates for games and kids going well together, and all kinds of other awesomeness occurs. Like this:

witchboy.net » Blog Archive » stones flowers
Harvey Smith critiques Tale Of Tales' 'The Graveyard' (pictured), intriguingly.

Business Week: 'Gaming Trends: 2008'
With quotes from Leigh, even!

Subatomic Brainfreeze: KINGS OF POWER 4 BILLION %
'So yeah, you guys may or may not know about Paul Robertson, but either way, it is clear to me that you should.'

Manifesto Games seeks venture round for indie games » VentureBeat
I love Manifesto, but I think indie is still selective, and venture funding isn't well suited to that.

Oxygen Games - 'Powershot Pinball Constructor'
Nice, Pinball Construction Kit new-style for DS, though I wonder if it has true global sharing - via Packratshow.

Gamasutra - Post-GDC: Aonuma's Reflections On Zelda
Check out the comments for the super DUPER bizarre... fan fiction?

American Elf: 'Level Up!'
The awesome GSW-reading cartoonist/artist/musician James Kochalka on why games and kids mix in good, fantastical ways.

Conserve Our Ocean Legacy: Ocean Survivor Game
A pointed anti-overfishing message via a Flash game - bravo.

Feature Article: The Long Road To High-Def Gaming | High-Def Digest
The history of enhanced resolutions in games!

Yahoo Auctions Japan - a special Pokemon GB auction
Gotta catch em all!

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

GameSetWatch recently visited with Pleo, a robotic dinosaur that its developers, Ugobe, call a "life form." We found it quite complex – sensors under the rubbery skin respond to touch, and Pleo is sensitive to light, sound, obstacles and a variety of interaction.

Out of the box, it "knows" a variety of different behaviors, and Ugobe has been releasing more Pleo behaviors accessible with an SD card.

A lot of interaction with the little creature, then, is surprisingly game-like; Pleo’s manual is minimized, prioritizing interaction and discovery rather than specific instructions on how to get it to do various things.

The developer intends to expose the Pawn-based SDK to developers, to allow them to create, share and elaborate on Pleo behaviors. When GameSetWatch's Leigh Alexander spoke to Ugobe chief technical officer John Sosoka, he said he sees Pleo as… a new development platform for gaming?

A Real-World NPC

"We draw from game design," Sosoka said enthusiastically, recalling his experience seeing Davidson and Co. (Math Blaster) through the CD-ROM multimedia revolution, and supporting some contract designers as they formed Silicon & Synapse – the company that would become Blizzard Entertainment. "We’re used to that world," added Sosoka, "So there is a piece of that. This is the first time I got to combine my robotics experience with my game design experience."

He likens developing Pleo to "building this really cool NPC that exists in the real world." Non-player character AI is getting more and more sophisticated with time, he notes, and part of the appeal for players is discovering just how deep that sophistication runs, and figuring out the rules – and the absence thereof – of interaction with those NPCs through experimentation. Like Pleo, says Sosoka, they do things you expect, and then you gradually come to understand what special, unexpected things they can do, too.

"Pleo is those things wrapped together," Sosoka explains. "It’s kind of like an animal and kind of like an NPC. And so, the design issues are along those lines. Being able to have as many of the things that you can expect if it were an actual animal… and then you want to have the way that you interact change depending on what’s going on so, you can build more depth of experience."

Developing The Presence

We told Sosoka some of the highlights of our experience with Pleo: At times we were pleasantly surprised at Pleo’s unexpected responsiveness, like when he seemed to approach the TV to sing and dance during a game of Guitar Hero. At other times, we weren’t sure whether he was reacting to us or not.

Sosoka admitted Pleo is still a work in progress, comparing developing it to the gradual learning curve that occurs in the game industry when new engines and platforms are introduced; the initial efforts are exploratory, and later efforts reflect refinement born of familiarity. "Pleo is a little of a cartoon sketch of what we expect the experience to be," he said.

Beyond the NPC concept, Sosoka has an interesting view of the Pleo experience in the context of video games. "One of the things that really strikes me is that there is something incredibly powerful about being in your physical world, and being tactile, that is just different from games," he says. "Much as I love games, there’s something different about it being in your physical space."

Continues Sosoka, "One example I use lately is… that you play the same game with a Wii controller that you played on the computer, and it’s a different experience. Just that little tiny experience makes it fundamentally different because you’re engaging other senses… kinesthetics and all those other things. So with Pleo, we’re going down that path of creating this new technology… this is a big space to explore and we’ve all kinds of opportunity to explore it."

A New Platform For Game Experiences?

In that vein, Sosoka hopes to share Pleo’s technology platform openly with other developers. "We designed things in order to allow you to control it through its USB cord, you can control every motor. And then we built a little virtual machine and a little scripting in, like you would in a game, but instead of using Lua and Python – we didn’t have space – we used one called Pawn. We built this virtual machine in from scratch, and built the high-level behaviors on top of that to make sure that it really worked, instead of just building it in for other people to use. We actually use that for the high-level stuff."

Then, the team set it up so that users can write their own scripts in Pawn and create their own sound, animation and other behaviors. Sosoka also worked with universities to get some units into human-robot interaction study programs. "We’re working now in going out to art schools and animation schools for people to experiment with," he adds.

Sosoka hopes that providing the tools will help other people to "use Pleo for something wildly different from what we’re doing." Ultimately, he hopes they will explore what it means to create a game experience with a component of interaction in the physical world "I think that this is a really cool thing that you can do using a lot of the same skills you’ve already developed for game design," Sosoka says excitedly. "Pleos can talk to each other through infrared. You could do kind of interesting, coordinated things… performances, cool stuff like that, and just make it up… and on an SD card, you have room for lots of content."

"This could be a new kind of game platform," Sosoka states. "Normally the way we think about games is you build the whole world. It’s really interesting… to think about taking all your skills from building a NPC or a hero character, and create one that can see things and can hear things and can detect things and can feel things. And you have this chance to build a character in the game -- except you don’t really build the game. The ‘game’ is your world."

"Ultimately," he concludes, "I’d love it if people could develop their own personalities for these life forms… but if they could develop their own content, we could provide a mechanism for people who didn’t want to share it, but wanted to develop commercial content – we’d love to develop an avenue for making that happen. We could potentially have developers that could use this as a small game platform. That would be fun for us."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[Wanted to mention this HP/Intel-sponsored webcast Q&A sister site Gamasutra is running next week - with our own Brandon Sheffield quizzing Introversion's Chris Delay on procedural content - should be interesting, we hope, and there will be an archive after the fact if you can't make it to ask questions in real-time, boo.]

Gamasutra is reminding readers of its first-ever live webcast Q&A for Wednesday, April 2nd at 11am PST, with Introversion Software (Darwinia) co-founder Chris Delay being quizzed on procedural content in the company's upcoming titles such as Subversion.

Interested parties can now register for the event, which is sponsored by major technology companies HP and Intel, and also includes a second presentation from Paul Campbell, founder of HP Gaming Business, discussing the company's 'create, power, play' motto.

In addition, those Gamasutra users attending the event on April 2nd who fill out a post-event survey will be entered into a drawing for an HP L3065 30” Flat Panel Monitor.

In the starting in-depth technical Q&A, Introversion Software co-founder and lead architect Chris Delay (Darwinia, Defcon) will discuss the use of procedural algorithms and techniques to create assets in the company's thus-far mysterious Subversion.

Introversion has previously discussed procedural content as part of an exclusive GameCareerGuide.com article on the subject, explaining of its use of it at the time:

"With each new generation of console, the costs of creating game content, in terms of both time and money, are increasing at a tremendous rate, and it is just unfeasible for a small developer to be able to keep up with such escalation. This is where Procedural Content Generation comes in handy. Procedural content is content that has been created by a computer algorithm rather than custom made by an artist. This content can be created completely dynamically, or can be generated based on some external input, from a user, or a text file, for example.

You might argue that a city created in this way would be far less detailed than one created by hand, but that all depends on how much effort you wanted to put into your dynamic content. Your dynamic buildings could be simple boxes, with textured windows and doors, or you could have the buildings include real, dynamically generated windows based on the size and architecture of your building, which could then be textured depending on the neighbourhood that it is placed in."

The included pictures show that, for Introversion, "after a week's work, we now have a way of generating fairly convincing city layouts with dynamic buildings, whose size is dependent on the population density of that area of the city."

These and other discussions will be on show at the event, during which users will be able to use chat capabilities to answer polls and ask questions in real-time. The event will also be archived for later viewing, and interested viewers can register now for the webcast.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

['@ Play' is a kinda-sorta bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

(Note: screenshots from the Super Famicom fan-translated version.)

In recognition of the U.S. release, after more than ten years since its Super Famicom origin, of the DS version Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer, our column again focuses on that game.

It's very long this time, and divided into three parts:
Part 1 is an introduction to the game for people who have never played roguelikes before. There have been so many negative reviews of this game, written by people who should really know better, that I think a little consciousness-raising is called for. That's what Part 1 is about.

Part 2 is a guide to first-timers to help ease their first trip through Kobami Vally and Table Mountain.

If this seems like rather a lot, well, it is. I was encouraged to see that it's finally available in local department stores! I hope this means that it's selling better than expected. It seems that there's already a Wii update of Shiren in Japan. That could very well be the coolest cool thing of all... just maybe, if the DS version does well, they might consider localizing that game too?

Well, let's not get our hopes up, shall we?

(This column is focused mostly on new players. If you're an old-hand with the Super Famicom game, here's a list of some of the differences between it and the DS version: Download file. Thanks to Teasel from the NeoGAF forums and Gabikun of GameFAQs for some of the items. Further thanks to Lord Gek for pointing me to Gabikun's list.)

Part 1: Why You Should Play This Game

What is it that reviewers have against Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer?

"Everything about this game is excruciatingly painful to anyone who associates the words “video game” with fun and exciting."
(Britishgaming.co.uk)

I take serious issue with dismissing the game as "painful." Getting killed in ludicrous ways is part of the fun.

"However, due to the turn-based nature of the game, the entire experience feels stop-and-go. Attacking enemies is a quick, no frills affair with only the minimal amount of animations. Granted, this is a port of a Super Nintendo game, but even other SNES RPGs managed to have a little more pizzazz. When we bust out a Lightning Staff or breathe fire thanks to Dragon Herb, we certainly wouldn't mind a smidge more style. We just lit some undead soldier on fire after all, give us something to "ooh and ah" over!"
(IGN DS)

If this guy played an ASCII roguelike it'd probably burn his eyes. And I can't believe he is criticizing a game for being "stop-and-go." I can recognize that he's trying to say something unique, but what does that even mean?

"On the downside, the dungeon generation can be moronic and if Shiren dies, he loses everything - all the items, money, and powers he attained through hours of questing are gone. Games, in general, have gotten easier since this title was originally released on the SNES and this unforgiving style simply won't fly with players raised on newer games."
(GamesRadar)

Re: moronic, realism is less important than being fun, and the layout of the dungeon levels is less important than what they contain. The fact that games have gotten easier is not seen, universally, as a good thing, even among people who only recently started playing. There must be some reason torture games like I Wanna Be The Guy have gained in popularity, and the main quest of Shiren, while hard, is far from torturous.

"All told, there’s not much special to Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. The game is boring in the early going, and then it becomes scary. Who wants to explore so badly that they’ll die and go back to zero? This could be yet another example of a product that makes much more sense in the region in which it was initially created. And so, I’d suggest Shiren go back to Japan."
(Geek.com)

The boring early levels are there for fortify the player character for the later levels. Players need to use the treasure found in the first half of the game to survive the second half. This is all by design.

"Imagine if Satan were to create a video game. If he did, he’d probably join forces with Chunsoft to create Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer.
[...]
The game is a roguelike dungeon crawler that spews Japanese gaming out of every orifice imaginable.[...]"
(Sega Nerds)

The reviewer misspeaks: roguelikes are really more Cthulhu's bag. "Spewing Japanese gaming" sounds like something I did when I watched a roommate play through Kingdom Hearts. I won't touch upon the "every orifice imaginable" phrasing, except to say that my nightmares feature some pretty funky orifices, and only a few of them show up in Shiren.

With all these reviewers lining up to take shots at the game, you'd almost think it was already out for the Wii....

I can't fault them to some extent, as roguelikes are still kind of obscure. (I hope that @Play will eventually help to alleviate this condition.) But to hear people whose job it is to recommend games for people to play rag on one of my favorites of all time, and I've played a great many, is kind of infuriating. And it looks like I'm not the only one who really likes it, either. So the best thing I can do, as I see it, is present my own view. Here it is.

The first thing you should know about Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer, and something that I wish each of the above reviewers had been told before they wrote their pieces, is that it is a game.

That may seem like an obvious statement, but it's not as simple a declaration as it may first appear. While the G in RPG stands for Game, many are not games in the strictest sense: they care more about storytelling than play, and there is no real way to lose. The definition of game has been only recently expanded to cover the kinds of things most CRPGs are. Some still hold that opinion even now: the kinds of person who turn their nose up at RPGs are probably influenced by those old definitions.

In a Final Fantasy or a Dragon Quest, if your party is wiped out it is not a real failure, for you can always return to your last save. So long as the player doesn't do something grossly stupid, like selling all his equipment and wandering the wilds naked, he's not going to fail at the quest. Meanwhile, Shiren the Wanderer is a game in a more fundamental sense, the sense that you can actually lose at it, and probably will many times before you earn your first win. While it is not real-time, it is still much like a classic arcade game, where games nearly always end by losing. As Dwarf Fortress reminds us, losing can be fun.

But it is still a role-playing game. It and other roguelikes arguably have better claim to that title than other CRPGs. There are games that got inspiration from the earliest incarnations of Dungeons & Dragons, but even now roguelike games, with their "no do-overs" policy, their dependence on player preparation, strategy and volition, and their opportunities for creative play more profound than just hitting the X button repeatedly, feels more like a pen-and-paper RPG session than many Western RPGs, and nearly all other Japanese ones.

The word volition up there isn't used casually, and it gets to the core of what makes roguelikes and traditional CRPGs, which both spring from the same ideas and ancestor games, so different from each other. In traditional games, the player is told, pretty much, exactly what to do and where to go. There may be some subquests, but the focus is on the main story, and there's not a lot the player can do to affect the route he will have to take. Roguelikes require that the player, instead, perceive what his needs are himself, take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves, and make his own way through the dungeon. You cannot play a roguelike passively, letting a story wash over you. You must drive yourself forward and accomplish the game.

Of all roguelike RPGs, Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer may be the best first-time introduction that has yet been created. It is challenging, but not overwhelmingly so once you learn the rules and how to escape from trouble. While new players still tend to die a lot, they can still make some progress in each game that makes later attempts easier, the artwork, animation and writing are entertaining enough that players can have fun even if they die, the controls are much simpler than the every-key-does-something norm of the genre, and there are few "instadeaths" compared to a game like Nethack.

Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer is a DS game, but it is based on a Super Famicom game released over ten years ago that was never released outside of Japan. The dungeons are random, but there is a logic to what happens in them. This logic means it is a game in which amazing things can happen: a monster that attacks the player with an explosion might accidentally kill another monster, thus gaining a level, and becoming a far deadlier monster in the process.

Back in 1996, a guy named Alan Kwan wrote up a couple of stories about the game, based on his own playing, and posted them to Usenet. These stories are how I first learned about the game, and they are still excellent introductions. If you really want to know what playing it feels like I cannot recommend them more highly:
Story 1: Dark Owls, Super Tanks and Menbells
Story 2: Theft, Master Chickens, and Staves of Misfortune

I also devoted three columns to the SNES Shiren some months ago, that used lots of screenshots and explanatory captions to describe the game. Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

Some things Shiren the Wanderer is not:

• It is not impossible. People do win this game. You'll win too if you stick with it, at least the main Table Mountain quest, I guarantee it.
  
• It is not mindless. Far from it, it requires far more strategy than nearly any other non-roguelike RPG.
  
• It is not badly made. Shiren the Wanderer is really very well-designed. It has the tightest core game system of any top-tier roguelike other than Rogue itself. Nearly every item, even supposedly bad ones, has a purpose. Every monster, even those with tricky attacks and abilities, have strategic ways to make them less dangerous, even harmless.
  
• It is not unfair. The great majority of situations have ways out of them. Sometimes, it is true, you may have to make a sacrifice, or the way out is not to have gotten into it to begin with, but there are usually ways to have seen them coming. With good planning and economical use of resources, you can do a lot to ensure you'll have the tools to survive the later half of the game.
  
• It is likely not the same as other random dungeon games you may have played. Although nearly all random dungeon games are inspired by roguelikes, many of them neglect important features. Even among roguelikes, Shiren's a bit special. In the taxonomy of the genre, it's closer to being a Hack-like game than a 'Band, but it's really closest to Rogue itself.
  

Part 2: For New Players

Some tips for players going through Table Mountain for the first time:

The beginning of roguelike wisdom is in recognizing critical moments. A critical moment is a turn in which, if you don't do something important, you may die before you get your next turn. For example, if you're next to an enemy who has just hit you for 20 damage, and you have less than 20 HP left, that is a critical moment because you may die if it gets another attack. If you swing and try to kill the monster, you might either not do enough to finish it or miss, in which case if he doesn't miss you may take 20 HP of damage. Even if you know you could kill the enemy with one blow nine times out of ten, you should not take that chance unless you can certainly kill it or have no alternative. There are lots of monsters but only one Shiren, so over the course of the adventure luck tends to favor the enemy.

That is a simple example, but there are so many special monster abilities that it can sometimes be difficult to recognize danger. Most critical moments in this game are caused by damage done by monsters. One of the most reliable responses to a critical moment caused by damage is to push a Chiropractic Jar, which fills up your hit points. These jars are common and can be used multiple times each, make healing easy if you have a spare turn, and you can't heal yourself if you're dead. If in doubt, heal.

If you often find yourself running out of food, consider trying these things:

• There is a free Big Riceball available from talking to a guy across the counter in the tavern in Canyon Village. After adventuring some and finishing some subquests, you can eventually get free free fill-ups in Mountaintop Town.
  
• Sometimes completing one of Fay's Puzzles is worth a free riceball.
  
• There are ways to get a little extra fullness without eating a riceball. Herbs and meat give you 5% and 10% fullness, respectively.
  
• The longer you wait before eating a Big Riceball, the more use you get out of it. In a sense, every percentage point a source of fullness will take you over maximum is wasted food. It's usually best to wait until you're actually starving before eating it.
  
• Riceballs are harmed by Rotten Traps unless they're in some container. With a little searching, quite suitable containers are not hard to come across and identify.
  
• While finding riceballs in the dungeon is random, there are monsters in the game that make food, and monsters are less random than items. Making effective use of them is tricky, but not hard with a little thought.
  
• There are two guaranteed shops in the game that often have riceballs in them.
  
• Staying at an inn fills up your hunger meter. If you're approaching a town with an inn in it, you should probably not eat a riceball, but wait until town. New to the DS game, you can leave these towns and return to them to regenerate their stock.
  
• Don't wander around too much. You get hungry as turns pass, and walking around is how most turns are wasted. Don't take the long way around a dungeon level if you can help it, don't waste too much time healing up, don't run from fights more than you have to, and don't spend a lot of time leveling up.
  
• Some monsters make you hungrier as a special attack. Deal with them quickly to save your stomach.
  
• Finally, if you're really out of food, you can still make do for a few turns. Running out of fullness doesn't mean you die instantly, you just are unable to heal naturally and lose one HP a turn until you eat. If you have reliable means of healing, you can keep going for a short while. If you're getting near the end but your food stores are depleted, a sprint to the stairs can be effective. I've won a game while in starvation mode.
  

If you've got an extra stuff, use excess resources first. Dragon Herbs are one of the more useful items, able to destroy most single monsters in one turn, but if you have several of them they should be an early recourse in a tricky situation.

If your inventory is full and you really want to pick up another item you might have to make a hard decision as to what to take with you and what to leave behind. One option is, instead of just dropping something, think if something you're carrying can be usefully used up first. Of special note is when you're carrying Medicinal Herbs, Restoration Herbs and Chiropractic Jars. Chiropractic Jars are the best healing items in the game: they fill all your hitpoints instead of 100 at most, and they can each be used multiple times. If you have several Chiropractic Jars you're probably set as far as healing goes. In this case, if you're suffering from full pockets, consider eating the Medicinal Herbs and Restoration Herbs when you're at full hitpoints. This both frees up inventory space and increases your maximum hit points by a small amount. Of courfse, if you haven't found any Chiropractic Jars you'll need those herbs for healing.

One of the hint-providing characters in the game offers a tip that makes it sound like all shields make you hungrier but the Armor Ward shield makes you more hungry than usual, and Hide Shields make you less. This is not exactly true. Most Shields don't affect your hunger rate at all. Only the Armor Ward shield makes you more hungry, and the Hide Shield makes you less hungry than even if you had no shield. Without a shield, you lose one fullness point every 10 turns, but with a Hide Shield you lose one every 20.

The walls in dungeons are interesting because, unlike with water, trees or pits, you cannot cut across their corners by moving diagonally, either to move or attack with a weapon. This means, if you're standing in a doorway, usually only one monster can attack you. But a few monsters have attacks that can hit through corners, particularly any monster with a flame attack. While most swords cannot attack across wall corners, the Razor Wind sword can, as well as arrows, staff blasts and thrown items.

In a tight spot, one-use items should be used before wands. Shiren has very limited inventory space, and a wand is potentially several escapes in one slot while a Dragon Herb is only one. There are plenty of exceptions to this though: Dragon Herbs are the most powerful instant damage item, and some scrolls, such as Blastwave, Confusion and Sleep, can affect a whole room.

Blastwave Scrolls become less useful for clearing our Monster Houses later on. In Table Mountain, even reading two such scrolls will probably not clear a Monster House, although it'll probably make it much easier to kill the monsters in melee. A FAQ for the SNES version on GameFAQs claims that reading a Powerup Scroll before reading a Blastwave increases its power. I have yet to confirm this, however. (It also says that reading multiple Powerup Scrolls have a cumulative effect.)

Keep food in Jars of Holding to protect them from Rotten traps.

Most item-destroying enemies cannot destroy your currently-used equipment.
Curse Girls & family can now curse any item. Non-equipment cursed items cannot be used, but can still be thrown.

Don't keep all your food in one jar, so you don't lose access to all your food because of one inopportune curse.

If you really need the contents of a cursed Jar of Holding, you can get your stuff back by throwing it at a wall. The jar will break and your stuff will be released onto the floor. But if you can wait, it's best to use a Scroll of Blessing so you can keep the jar.

The Fowl family of enemies can electrify items. Charged items cannot be used, dropped or thrown, and vanish once off the floor. It's unknown, currently, if there is a way to rescue a charged item before it evaporates. Fowl-class enemies don't seem to be able to affect jars, but this may be inaccurate.

Rice Changers CAN affect jars. Make an effort to kill them before they get into melee range. If you're trapped, you can protect important items by dropping them, for Rice Changers can only transform stuff you're carrying. (Note, however, that Field Raiders also appear on the Rice Changer floors, and they can turn items on the ground into weeds.)

Here's a table of which monsters can affect which items, based on personal observation. I do not claim that it's perfectly accurate, especially for Fowl, but it seems to hold up for me:

               Effect  Equipment?  Jars?

        Fowl:  Destroy     N         N

Rice Changer: Transform    N         Y

  Curse Girl:   Curse      Y         Y

      Walrus:   Steal      N         Y

       Slime:  Corrode  Y, only      N

When you hit a normal-speed enemy with a Wand of Sloth, slowing it down, you have one turn before it gets its next move. If you slowed it because it can kill you in one turn and it's adjacent, the best move to make is to step away from it, so it'll use its next move to catch up. Then you can kill it easily using hit-and-run tactics.

The most common wands, in order from most useful to least, are: Bufu, Paralysis, Postpone, Sloth, Doppelganger, Knockback, Lightning, Switching, and Steadiness. But each has particular instances where they excel: Doppelganger is the only wand that can potentially save you from a whole Monster House, although at the cost of allowing foes to promote. Lightning is good if you have no arrows. Switching is best in opportunistic situations, but can sometimes instantly get you from the middle of a Monster House to the door or staircase. Steadiness is hard to identify, but in the Table Mountain adventure it's usually the wand that doesn't cause anything to happen when swung at a monster.

One of the most frustrating situations in the game is being attacked by a wall-pass monster inside a wall. Monsters that can pass through walls are unique in that, while embedded, they can attack without you being able to hit them back! One of the most deadly later monsters, Death Angel, has double speed, double attacks AND wall-pass! If you're in a corridor and don't have a pickaxe, the only effective way to fight them is to move along the corridor, offering it free attacks, until, in the process of following you, it moves into the passage. Don't skimp on the healing if this happens to you.

Room-affecting scrolls, if not used in a room, work only on the spaces immediately surrounding Shiren. A notable exception to this is the Monster Scroll, which turns a room into a Monster House, complete with loot. If it's read in a corridor, the game will teleport Shiren to a room before it takes effect.

New to the DS version is the ability to go backward through the stairs, to previous levels, up to a point, but items usually aren't generated on the ground on such levels except in shops. But monsters that drop items upon death do still appear and leave loot behind, and if you go back a floor because you fell through a pitfall (which happens on the Table Mountain levels, which go up instead of down), then you WILL find items on that level.

One of the cooler things about the game that people don't suspect at first is that some items have special effects when thrown. Dragon Scrolls, when read, blast in front of Shiren with fire breath, but they also have a similar effect when thrown, and if thrown with a Pitcher's Armband they can affect a whole line of monsters. Bottomless Jars, if thrown and broken, create pitfall traps. Break a Walrus Jar and its walruses become monsters on the current level -- useful because they leave behind loot if killed before they steal from the player. If a Monster Jar is pressed, its monsters jump out and surround the player, but if the jar is thrown and broken the monsters are confused. If you really need to kill an enemy from a distance, you can throw spare weapons and shields. Finally, while the game suggests throwing staves if they are out of charges to get one last effect, it is possible, though rare, that a thrown staff will have no effect.

Three floors in the Table Mountain quest, in particular, are unusually dangerous and should be evacuated as soon as possible. Levels 15 and 16, the marsh right before Table Mountain, are the "drain floors." They have several monsters that can lower your strength, corrode equipment, destroy items and drain levels. The experience you could earn from defeating them, and even the loot you could get, is generally not worth the resources lost in exploring them, so my advice is to head through the exit as soon as you find it.

The other super-dangerous floor is 26, the Ravine of Illusions, a somewhat-open level containing Skull Wraiths. Skull Wraiths are the third level of the Skeleton Mage monster, and have much more dangerous wand effects. They can paralyze, confuse or put you to sleep, turn you into a monster or even a riceball, temporarily seal your inventory, and drain levels, all from a distance. Just being in line with a Skull Wraith is a critical moment: a single unlucky shot can end your game. If you get paralyzed or slept, they may well get the chance to get several more shots off on you before you get another turn. Skull Wraiths are among the most dangerous monsters in the game, and should be neutralized as soon as possible. If you paralyze one, it's recommended that you do NOT wake it up to kill it unless you can finish it immediately.

From 26 on to the end, the game spikes up in difficulty. In addition to Skull Wraiths, Dragons appear on these floors. Sprinting to the stairs is often a good idea.

To handle level 30: the boss monster, Tainted Insect, looks imposing and has a bucket full of hit points, but can be affected in all the ways the other monsters can be. In practice, the Skull Wraiths on this floor are much more threatening. But when the boss is killed, all the other monsters die as well, and the boss won't appear on later runs through Table Mountain.

In roguelike news....

The 7DRL Challenge has finished another competition, and as usual, a number of fascinating ideas have come out of it. In the past it's given us such clever games as DoomRL and ChessRogue. Among the winners this year is Fatherhood, a game without monsters where the player must save his homeland from flooding while tending to his three children; Numbers, a game that drills the player's math skills as he goes; and Tribe, a turnabout roguelike where the player leads a band of goblins against the adventurers that have long persecuted them. And in the tradition of taking a pre-existing video game and making a roguelike out of this, this year has given us MegamanRL....

Uh, Mega Man? What? Why? How?

About a month ago the Nethack community suffered a grievous blow when the largest public Nethack server, alt.org, went down, it seemed for good. Public Nethack servers are particularly awesome not just because all the players contribute to a shared high score list, but because people can encounter bones levels from folk they've never met, and it's even set up so that games-in-progress can be watched, and in-game mail be sent to players via Nethack's Mail Daemon monsters. All this via telnet. This is the place that has now hosted two games with scores that came in at the highest integer the game can count to. Welcome back alt.org!

Posted by John Harris at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (22)

Be praised, the weekend is almost here, and with it a fresh batch of newly caught GameSetLinks, a wriggling and a jiggling on the Internet filament line, or summat.

Particularly fun here - the TIGSource 'Video Game Name Generator' entries are _all_ now available to play, former co-worker Frank is masterminding some potential silliness at GameTap, and Kudos creator Cliffski reveals the social meaning behind his virtual lottery tickets never paying out. And that's GameSetLinks, folks. Onward:

GameTap: 'Captain McGrandpa - Memory of the Forgotten'
Oo, 'mysterious' new April 1st debuting GameTap Original, eh?

The Independent Gaming Source: Video Game Name Generator game competition voting started
Wow, 48 entries? Tres impressive.

CNET Internal Memo: ‘Difficult Decisions’; Realignment; May Raise Capital For Foreign Ops | paidContent.org
Not sure if this affects GameSpot significantly.

Watch Castle Crashers levels made in real-time - Xbox 360 Fanboy
See Paladin draw!

MTV Multiplayer » Deciding The Fate of Dante and ‘Phoenix’ — How Capcom Predicts Game Sales
Interesting look at retail prediction methodology, pt.1.

The debate over videogame "addiction" | GameCritics.com
Academic journal discussions on the concept - intriguing stuff.

Cliffskis Mumblings...: WARNING - Do NOT attempt social commentary
Haha, the lottery ticket in indie life sim Kudos has zero chance of winning, to make a social point!

Christian Allen's Corner: Piracy Doesn't Matter? O....K....
'A certain PC title (not one I worked on) I looked at the online stats for sold around 300k in the first month after launch. Three days BEFORE the game launched…one MILLION people were playing online.'

GameVideos.com - Off-Road Velociraptor Safari '1UP Review'
A really enjoyable, slightly ranty avant-ish review of the weirdass game from the IGF co-organizers.

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

[Think the reaction to Adam Maxwell's game writing article was over? Not so - Kelly Wand, the writer on the Dirty Harry game discussed in the original opinion piece, has penned an editorial explaining Harry's (mis)conception and why game writers matter.]

“A man’s got to know his limitations.” – Clint Eastwood as “Dirty” Harry Callahan

For the record, I like Adam Maxwell. As the writer in question to whom he refers in his piece (“The Case Against etc.”), I found our work relationship on Dirty Harry consistently constructive, courteous and professional.

We got along. Ironically (perhaps mistakenly), I gathered that he liked my actual contributions, so while his solitary focus on our collaboration as the “most compelling fact behind avoiding writers [sic]” came as a bit of a surprise, I’m reasonably, maybe naively, sure that he’s speaking from the heart and not just nursing bitter memories of a grandiosely ill-starred production. He was an oasis of sanity.

Usually in this biz, it’s egos that sink projects. I never got that vibe from Adam, and I think he’d agree that I too was always about the material. So even though he’s chosen to reference the experience as proof that writing in games is irrelevant to their success or quality, I genuinely believe he’s speaking from the heart.

I’ve heard this attitude before, from designers, producers, journalists, even other writer types. And every time I find it a remarkably revealing insight as to just how derisively they view the creative process in general and the legacy of electronic entertainment in particular. It’s indifference to mediocrity, usually posed as a loaded “either-or” analogy.

We writers face this a lot; it’s a hazard of the trade. But it does get to us. Many of you are probably too young to remember, but one time there was even a nationwide “strike” over the net financial value of professionally composed sentences.

And ultimately even the richest accountants in all the land were somewhat swayed that words matter at least a little – economically, anyway. Which puts them all ahead of Adam.

Record-Straightening 101

Adam seems to imply that having “3-4 hour” story meetings every week denied him the ability to focus on his myriad loftier more technical chores, and thus the game was never finished as a direct result of my time-consuming intrusions.

First off, these sessions rarely lasted longer than an hour, unless you count lunch, which I often skipped because I was usually up all night writing. A lot. In fact, page-per-day-wise, Harry was the most grueling wringer I've ever worked on. Nevertheless, I nailed every deadline, draft after draft, all of it vetted and re-vetted by multiple production companies and the devs themselves, writing and rewriting for six months until everything fizzled out and now there is a totally different game in development that we are not working on.

Not once during that entire interval did I ever manage to see a single playable build or even a finished level, after over a year and a half of development. Granted, I’m no designer but maybe, just maybe, the technical bog was tangentially related to the Collective having a higher turnover rate than a slaughterhouse kill-floor; I rarely saw the same level designer twice.

But let’s even give Adam his four hours a week. Is that more time and effort than he’d have spent with a quote-unquote designer covering story issues? Or than he’d have ideally devoted to writing it all himself? (For the record, he is an obscenely fast typist.)

Design, Writing Not Synonymous

Maybe so, since he considers writing too inconsequential to begrudge even that much. The crux of his piece is that writing is an inferior discipline to game design (itself a far more amorphous skillset) because writing is “inherently linear” and game design “isn’t.”

But form follows function, in writing, in design, in everything. Any game story – hell, any game, is to some degree linear, and to the degree that it’s not, the writing needn’t be either. Even pseudo-free-roamers like BioShock, MMOs with level caps, every dialogue tree ever, every quest log entry – everything ends, one way or another, sooner or later.

Writing, Adam observes, is limited by having to rely on “sequences of events.” As opposed to gameplay?

Adam also appears to frequently conflate design and writing, as if the two were synonymous. Every vocation has its own elite based on excellence of performance, from writing, coding, voice acting and lighting to musical composition, unit balancing and map architecture.

Yet he states unequivocally that he’d rather hire a designer than a writer, since the designer can also write, while the writer will never be a competent designer. Isn’t the reverse then also true? And by that logic, should film studios only hire writers who are also competent cinematographers, actors, and set designers? Would Adam have passed over a talented voice actor who wasn’t also an accomplished programmer?

The Thoughtless Are Rarely Wordless

As some posters have already noted, every game is its own beast. Some are more literary by their natures than others, and to marvelous effect -- Planescape: Torment and Portal featured writing that vastly and directly enhanced the playing experience; Lumines maybe not so much. But what doesn’t appear to trouble Adam at all is that no one inside or out of the industry takes the writing in games seriously.

It’s universally considered puerile juvenilia, largely because the majority of it was dashed off by designers who consider themselves writers (based solely on their game-, blog-, or talkback-post-writing credentials). Adam, like Roger Ebert, is mistaking a quality control problem for an innate flaw of the medium.

I’ve heard (and believe) tons of depressing horror stories about arrogant and/or stupid writers for hire who make us all look bad. Writing must serve the game, as it should always serve the material for which it’s intended. Adam’s free to disallow writers from his hiring practices; for my part, the desire to improve the literary cachet of electronic entertainment, to make games more emotionally resonant and smarter, is often the loneliest feeling in the world.

What I find especially ironic about Dirty Harry forming the basis of Adam’s thesis is that that project in particular was such a stacked deck, it makes an unusually poor example for even his salient points.

Dirty Harry featured a slew of A-list actors like Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Laurence Fishburne… inked long before Adam or I came aboard as pinch-hitters - a once-in-a-lifetime cast of veteran Hollywood acting talent. And while Adam will likely agree that star power rarely makes for better games, there's ample evidence that it does help sell them. Laying blame for that whole cycle exclusively at the doorstep of the last writer to step up to the plate is kind of like blaming polar bears for global warming.

Conclusion: Where The Ideas Came From

Finally, consider the “Dirty Harry” character for just a moment. After Clint’s steely sneer and the distinctive roar of his Magnum, his most recognizable trademark? The lines. Hilariously blunt, poetic, iconic catch-phrases that have been co-opted by Presidents and remain immortalized in the public consciousness even decades later. “Go ahead, make my day.” “Feel lucky, punk?”

Writers, not game designers, came up with those. Supposedly a writer himself, Adam condemns game writing for offering little in the way of nutritive value. What he doesn’t seem to realize that it was never intended as food.

It’s the salt.

[Kelly Wand has served as writer or creative consultant on numerous games for a miscellany of companies, among them “Dirty Harry,” “300: March to Glory,” “Over The Hedge,” and “Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust.” He reviewed games for Computer Games Magazine and a truncated version of his former column Random Incoherence currently runs in Total PC Gaming Magazine.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Save the Robot is a biweekly column from Chris Dahlen crafted specially for GameSetWatch, dealing with gaming as pop culture and cult media.]

This month’s tributes to the late Gary Gygax gave many of us a chance to look back at our own days of playing Dungeons & Dragons. Some of our greatest game designers first cut their teeth on fantasy thanks to tabletop RPG sessions, with a brilliant dungeon master leading his players through a brainblowing fantasy improv jam.

Of course, for most of the kids who invested in a few books and the starter set of dice, D & D meant making one kid sit there behind a screen - usually the cover of whichever module you were following, to the letter - while everyone else waited to kill stuff and find another Ring of Protection +1.

But even those kids, who plodded through the game until their 9 PM curfew, had a leg up on the lowest caste of D & D players - the people who played by themselves. And I was one of them. How do you play Dungeons & Dragons by yourself? Well, you roll a character, give it a name, and you follow the module room by room, fighting, looting, fighting, looting, slapping on new gear, and fighting again. You don’t need a DM; you just need a long, slow night that needs killing.

The industry was well aware that they had customers who even their other customers wouldn’t be seen with. TSR published modules for solo play, such as Blizzard Pass or Midnight on Dagger Alley. Invisible ink hid all the surprises, at least for the first guy who played through.

And then there were the gamebooks.Back in the ’80s, everykid who was anykid read the Choose Your Own Adventure series. These gimmicky books were such a hit that they spawned dozens of imitators - puzzle choose-your-adventures, horror choose-your-adventures, and so on. But probably the best came from Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, with their Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks system.

Jackson and Livingstone raised the genre to a real role-playing game: you rolled a character who kept an inventory and toughed it out in combat on top of the usual “If you take the left branch, turn to page 20″ action. Of course, Jackson and Livingstone have said they weren’t cashing in on Choose Your Own Adventure: they were cashing in on Dungeons & Dragons, and meeting the needs of kids like me who needed a solo adventure.

The magnum opus of the series was Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!, a set of four books released by Puffin from 1983 - 1985. The other night, when I pulled the books out and flipped through them for the first time in decades, all the details came rushing back - like John Blanche’s wily, intricate ink drawings, which were slimy and gory, dusty and sinister. Or Jackson’s prose - not as compelling as the art, but give him credit: he constructed the greatest saga in gamebook history.

A few things put Sorcery! above the regular Fighting Fantasy books. The rules were more complex, thanks to the magic system. You memorized a few dozen spells, some that you could cast on the fly, and others that needed some kind of an object or totem, from a handful of pebbles to a green-haired wig.

Jackson was a stickler about making you memorize the spells: to play by the rules, you had to remember the three-letter codes and ingredients for each spell before you started, and stop yourself from checking again until the adventure was done. Jackson also demanded that you remember codes and page references from book to book, instead of writing them down. At a time when most computer games don’t even expect you to take notes, a game that uses your actual memory feels strangely immersive.

The four Sorcery! books formed one epic storyline – and it was a pretty standard one. In book one, you set out as a textbook hero who had to cross a strange land to recover a treasure called the Crown of Kings - or, as they would say in Hollywood, the MacGuffin. The journey took you across gentle plains in the first book, through a treacherous city in the second, across harsh badlands in the third, and finally, to the dungeon crawl of the Mampang Fortress, where you face the inevitable big boss.

Your character is a blank slate, with no name and no history. And that’s what makes the saga effective: The gamebook sticks you straight in the story, without making assumptions about why you’re here.

In a fascinating article from the official Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks site on how to write a Fighting Fantasy adventure (registration required), we read: “For the most part, don’t waste space describing what the reader’s character is thinking. Instead, write effectively about the five human senses of sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch and let the reader’s own experience fire the imagination.”

Like most gamebooks, Sorcery! effectively plays like a maze, with one or more right paths and a lot of dead ends. In each book you’re searching for the best path - the one that’ll get you all four verses of the poem to get out of Khare, or that’ll lead you to all seven of the serpents in The Seven Serpents. And most of the time, you’re depending on trial and error.

Early in the second book, you have the chance to help a bum on the street - and if you roll him over, you face a walking corpse that’s ready to eat your face. Near the end of the book, you find another bum – but this time, if you’re smart and steer clear, you miss a vital clue. Sometimes you can fight way out of a tight situation, and other times the book doesn’t even give you that: you wander into a field of black flowers, sniff poison, and drop dead. Time to start over.

But it’s worth starting over, because that’s how you get more content. And that’s the appeal of these books: there’s so much content. Something else is always around the corner. It never drops into a routine or a grind; the adventure keeps drawing you in. And when you finally hit the end? There’s no big revelation, no character growth, no reunion with your true love or party thrown by all those strangers you saved. You just have the satisfaction of knowing you finished. And you did it all by yourself.

[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)

Ah, yes, a little further GameSetLink-age for your wazoo, and this time, a fairly major cornucopia of linkage, including Second Life-rs branching out into ARGs, for starters.

Also below - a Dobbs Challenge update (reminder - the $1,000 'first month' part of the competition ends fairly soon!), as well as the mentioned/pictured neeto indie yoink-age of 'Rom Check Fail'. And onwards:

Millions of Us » Blog Archive » The Reality of Producing an Alternate Reality Game
The Second Life worldbuilders diversify further, I note.

IndieGames.com - The Weblog - News: BusinessWeek Arcade
Wow, BusinessWeek has an indie game portal now? Mind boggles.

Positivity Part 1: Royalties | metablog
'The main problem we have with retail-level royalties is that they lead directly to retail-level quality.'

Klei Entertainment Inc. » Blog Archive » “Crap” games are not the problem
More Metanet fallout: 'Really, lots of shitty games isn’t the problem. The problem is one of control and visibility.'

comics212 - never safe for work. » Blog Archive » PiQ Issue #1: Post-Mortem
Superdetailed slam of the new multi-artform (including game) mag. Unfair? Dunno. Interesting? sure.

YouTube - missFlag - Still Alive (Portal) HIGH QUALITY
Audio only, but yesh, more covers x infinity, yay.

Dobbs Challenge - And We’re Off!
The first updates in the $10,000 'mod a game with source code' competition sister site Dr. Dobb's Journal is running. Yay.

Online Game Fest | GameFest.UGOPlayer.com
Am helping to judge this - should be interesting, hopefully.

IndieGames.com - The Weblog - Freeware Game Pick: Rom Check Fail (Farbs)
Awesome mashup concept alert.

Game Studies - Who’s Who and What’s What… « Digital Worlds
Interesting diagram on the overlap between audiences for game websites.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[Completing the 'best of GDC 2008' series, this Tom Kim-penned write-up sees Steve Fawkner, president of Australia's Infinite Interactive, discusses the development Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, giving insight into the melding of both match-three puzzle and RPG gameplay elements to appeal to both casual and hardcore players.]

Steve Fawkner began by introducing Puzzle Quest as a project that Infinite Interactive had to start to get themselves out of trouble after a significant period of poor decisions and low-selling games.

The project had to fulfill several criteria: it had to be possible to execute with a small studio and it had to be possible to pull off in a short time with a reasonable number of staff. They examined trends in PC gaming and decided to look at where the industry was heading.

They concluded that games were simultaneously heading in a more casual direction as evidenced by the success of PopCap-style titles, and still held a strong beachhead with more traditional core RPG-style titles such as Elder Scrolls Oblivion IV. They decided to aim for something in the middle. This choice seemed to fit the core competency of the studio: delivery of a focused project with a core mechanic of fun, easy to learn game play.

When they looked at the staff they had at their disposal, they found that most of them were designers. No artists, no graphics programmers, just a few designers with some basic programming skills. This lead to executing a game that was pretty heavily design-focused.

They decided to apply their usual approach of iterative design, following the four word mantra: "Clear Goal, Loose Plan." So they knew where they were aiming, but weren't quite sure how they were going to get there. Their faith was that if they began development, in the process of iteration the game would become clearer and clearer as they went along.

Iterative Design

The inception of the game concept was a "happy accident" caused by the process of iterative design. Steve started his plans with the ideas that he really liked Bejeweled and he really liked RPGs. Putting the two together seemed to result in a style of game that landed in that sweet spot the studio was aiming for, and seemed to be something compelling enough to play. He made a few versions that "sucked," and fixed those up over a month-long period until he ended up with something that "was pretty cool." Even at that point, the studio knew they had a game that would work.

Infinite Interactive fleshed out Steve's early prototype to get it to a stage where they could show it to some potential publishers. Once the design was stabilized enough, they threw out most of the code and started to build it up from scratch with a reference version to keep them honest.

This is the "Design and Review" process where the studio compares where the game is to the original prototype and they examine if they are straying too far from the original plan. Of course, straying from the original plan can be healthy. But at times, they decided that it was better to keep to the simplicity of the original design.

Next, they had an honest discussion at what core skills they could bring to the game. They knew they weren't good at art, they weren't going to be able to port the game efficiently to other platforms, and they also knew that Steve couldn't negotiate a business deal to save himself.

Even at that early stage, they saw the potential appeal that art direction could add to the game, they identified that publishers would probably want to port to other platforms, and they hired an agent to represent them in their business deals.

The last piece of the puzzle was to leverage their own original IP: until the game was close to publication, they called it Warlords: Champions. Although the name was never meant as anything more than a placeholder, it got them through to a stage where a publisher was willing to pick it up and back it properly.

Selling The Game

The next part of the quest was shopping the new game around. Infinite Interactive really wanted to build more presence on the handheld platforms -- the Nintendo DS and the PSP -- as well as gain some presence on the downloadable console space such as in the Xbox 360's Live Arcade. In order to gain a foothold in these new territories, they really needed help from a publisher. So they started showing the game around.

Steve explained that having an innovative product can sometimes make the pitch process even more difficult because publishers like to be able to predict how many units they will move prior to backing a title. As an example, he noted that they tried to sell the game to an unnamed publisher who loved it, but wouldn't pick it up. As the pitch process went on, they started noticing that several names on the net play high score list always came from this particular publisher. So when they called to follow up, they were told, "Oh, we really love the game. So much so, that we decided to start a high score leader board. But we still won't pick it up." Eventually, Infinite Interactive hooked up with a like-minded publisher who saw the potential for the game -- D3 Publisher.

From the start, the project incurred a lot of risk. But the way to mitigate the risk was to outsource pieces of the project properly. From the start, Infinite Interactive handled the PC and Xbox Live SKUs. D3 partnered Infinite Interactive with Vicious Cycle who provided artwork as well as the PSP, Wii and PS2 versions, and with First Playable and Engine Software who did the DS port.

But outsourcing is only a good short term solution. Although it allows for rapid release of multiple SKUs, all of the work produces no licensable technology for the primary developer. The way to handle these shortcomings is to have an extremely polished design and front end so that the back end development is mostly porting the technology to other platforms. Meanwhile, Infinite Interactive was hard at work trying to hire a team to develop their own in-house proprietary engine technology.

It wasn't long before things started going wrong.

Project Hurdles

Code Portability
The team had not worked on very many platforms other than PC and some playing around on PSP. In the case of the Nintendo DS, as good a platform as it is, code portability between the DS and the PC isn't that transparent. For example, standard list implementation isn't very good on DS. So for these cases, the programmers had to work on their own technology to overcome those obstacles.

System Constraints
Back in the days when Infinite Interactive used to work on 640k DOS machines, the team was used to running out of memory and having limited graphics power. But on more current platforms like the PSP and the DS, they started running into custom limitations in graphics power, stack sizes, and even Read/Write limitations with UMDs on the PSP. On the DS, the team was so inefficient with their code that screen refresh used up all of the available memory. The lesson is that programming on modern PCs will make you lazy.

Cartridge Sizes
Committing to a cartridge size with a publisher isn't one of those things that you can take back later. 4K is four kilobits, not 4 kilobytes! So when the publisher asks how much storage one needs for saved games, there is a pretty substantial consequence to changing your mind down the line. On the PC, the saved games were 14K. The team had to compress the 14K into 200 bytes in order to fit their storage requirement. Eventually, they were able to squeeze two saved games into 512 bytes. But it cost the team somewhere between two and three months.

Accessibility Complexity
The team had scheduled three months to accomplish the Xbox 360 Arcade port. The implementation actually took them 6 months because of TCR accessibility implementation issues. As a word of advice, Steve recommends that developers who plan on doing multiplayer implementation on modern platforms get a hold of the TCR checks as soon as possible and read them thoroughly. If possible, talk to a QA team that deals with these issues on a daily basis and run multiplayer screens by these teams as soon as possible. If Infinite Interactive had the foresight to do that, they would've saved themselves a lot of time in the multiplayer implementation.

Localization
D3 set up the focus testing, which actually uncovered a wealth of useful information. First of all, the team found that the name of the game, Warlords: Champions was reminding people of a fighting game. So as a first response, Steve came up with Puzzle Quest. No one liked it at first, but the name soon grew on them. The second finding from the focus groups was that girls weren't happy playing the game. All of the women asked, "where are the female avatars?" This was done purposefully to save on localization expenses. But when they ran the numbers to add the female-centric content against the potential increase in sales, they decided to pull the trigger.

As a result, Puzzle Quest had too many words: over 100,000 of them! By adding dialogue for the female avatars, the team ran into gender issues in French, Italian, German and Spanish translations, and with the Japanese language, the team didn't realize that the form of the language changed if a speaker was older or younger than a listener. So now, rather than only having to worry about male and female issues, they had to translate old female to younger male, and every other permutation. The lesson learned was, if one can hire staff that speaks other languages, go ahead and do so!

Session Takeaway

Things learned

* Time spent polishing is time well-spent. The extra time spent certainly resulted in additional sales. Focus and usability testing makes a difference.
* Good design is still important: A graphically simple game can still sell quite well.
* Focus groups are awesome: the title change, the addition of female avatars, and the shifting of the style to something a little more anime in execution all turned out to be great changes.
* Good QA teams are even better than focus groups: even though a few bugs slipped through, a solid QA team really helps.

Improvements for next time

* Work more closely with marketing to maximize how many games are sold in to the stores. This can be done by identifying whether the game has an instant appeal.
* Work with marketing to deal better and smarter with the press.
* Make sure the game is nice and showy to ensure that the press doesn't have to spend hours trying to find the most appealing parts of the game.
* Improve the build pipeline to minimize production times and bugs.
* More respect for what the casual gamer really wants.
* Some of the standard RPG conventions were absolutely mystifying to casual gamers, such as matching purple gems to level up.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

['World of Warcraft Exposed' is a brand new weekly column by Michael Zenke about the culture and experience of the globe's biggest online game phenomenon, the ten million subscriber-strong World of Warcraft. This first column explores how WoW became so popular in the first place.]

Massively Multiplayer Online Games are officially mainstream. A title from the genre has had an entire cartoon episode made about it, features in an advertisement starring Mr. T, and hosts some ten million players worldwide. World of Warcraft is a fundamentally important element to the MMO landscape, but more than that it's an ecology, a society all its own. In World of Warcraft Exposed we're going to try to take you beyond the surface of this fantastically successful enterprise.

Why has this game spawned such a rich culture of podcasts, Youtube videos, bloggers, forums, and news sites? What's it like to play World of Warcraft as a new player? What's it like to work your way up through the levels, and what's the experience of playing at the endgame like? All of these topics, and more, we'll explore in future series articles.

Today, though, we're talking about success and the mainstream. We know WoW has hit it big. What we don't know - what we don't think anyone could claim to know for certain - is why exactly Blizzard's behemoth was the one to break loose from that nerd stigma. World of Warcraft's launch and subsequent popularity is a singular event in the history of gaming. Why this game? Why not titles that went before it, like the comic-esque title City of Heroes? Why not Star Wars Galaxies, a title with a huge built-in fan base? Why not WoW-launch contemporary EverQuest 2, the successor to the original MMO superpower?

There's no one answer to that question, of course. There are as many theories about WoW's popularity as there are MMO commentators. It's in between those theories that I think real insight can be found. As much as the venture capitalists might like to hear differently, there's no one reason why World of Warcraft has achieved the success it has. So with that in mind, let's approach Azeroth as a sociologist might: what drives people to inhabit this world?

[WoW Box Set photo courtesy karenchu121's photostream]

Cut the BS

If you had to pin me down, and forced out of me the #1 reason for WoW's success, it would all come down to one simple word: fun. I'm not talking about some sort of elusive concept here; not the pursuit of fun or the idea of fun, but the real deal. World of Warcraft was one of the very first MMOs that you could hop right into and have fun - right away. Ten second after entering the world you've got your first quest. A minute after that you're in combat for the first time. Combat in World of Warcraft is simple, clean, and well-explained. Every step you take in your first hour of play is right down the path towards fun. There are no barriers, to insane design decisions, no hoops you have to jump through - WoW lets you have fun, right away.

This newbie experience philosophy extends all the way up to the heights of endgame play. Certainly no one is going to explain to you how to complete an end-level raid dungeon; there's no tooltip for that. But raids, guilds, groups, they're all put on the path towards the goal of fun. Endgame play is just like the newbie experience, only moreso - low barriers, constant feedback that you're making the right choice, enjoyable rewards.

This all sounds like kindergarden-level obviousness, but I can't overstate how important this low-barrier approach is to World of Warcraft's success. In the original EverQuest, at launch, you spent long minutes waiting for your character's health to regenerate after every fight. Spellcasters had to meditate, essentially vulnerable to everything in the gameworld, for even longer minutes to get mana back.

Star Wars Galaxies ceased having any form of direction or purpose the instant you stepped out of the tutorial. Final Fantasy XI essentially forced you into a group at level 10, and punished you with level loss if your avatar died too often. Making it easy to have fun, making almost every act of play inside the gameworld an enjoyable experience, may be WoW's greatest success.

To A Mirror Finish

Fun is an elusive concept, though, right? So let's break it down a bit. The quality of World of Warcraft's design and conceptual elements - the keys that allow for that high level of fun - comes from constant clarification and refinement. The lengthy Beta testing phase that WoW went through before it released, the dedication to great design in Blizzard's corporate culture ... it all adds up to the word polish. Polish has been taken up as the banner, the rallying cry of game designers both in and out of the MMO genre. Meeting the high quality standard World of Warcraft has set requires an enormous amount of polish; so much so that WoW's success is often said to hang on the game's polish.

What's fascinating about World of Warcraft, and what makes that argument such an easy one to believe, is that Blizzard has applied so many levels of polish to the game. From the Macro- to the Micro-, everything hums and clicks together like so much clockwork. Two opposing factions, both with distinctly different races, offer players two substantially different paths to follow. Before the Burning Crusade expansion, these factions also had slightly different classes - more meaningful choices. The user interface is achingly simple and yet amazingly powerful. The yellow exclamation point above a quest-giver's head - a blindingly obvious decision, but extraordinary in 2004 - offers connectivity and continuity for the player.

You can drill all the way down through the game to reach even the smallest level, and still find polish. The mage tower in the Human starting zone of Elwynn, for example, is peppered with memorable characters and stories; there's even a magic globe that you can use to see a far-off locale you won't reach for another dozen levels or so. The game's NPCs are peppered with clever pop culture in-jokes, Easter eggs for the observant player. Lore-addicted roleplayers can comb through hundreds of in-game books to learn more about Azeroth's history.

The game is far from perfect, of course, but the sheer level of sophistication and development that World of Warcraft shows at every level is staggering. Almost intimidating. The amount of money that was spent bringing this game to market seems almost ludicrous, right up until you experience a new dawn on the docks of Southshore or witness a heated exchange between two vibrant characters in an Outland tavern.

Everybody Likes a Good Story

While most MMO players will tell you they flip past the quest text without reading it, the fact that WoW had a well-codified questing system at all was something of a minor miracle in 2004. Compared with the guessing games of previous online games, World of Warcraft's quest journal was a revolution. This system of directed experiences is another well-referenced reason for the game's success.

Even though players may be ignoring the story reasons for completing quests, the rewards of xp and in-game currency lead them down that storied road just the same. Quests act as landmarks and signposts in what would otherwise be (and was, in previous games) aimless wandering and meaningless grinding for rewards.

The trick is that even as quests attempt to tell a story, what they're really doing is leading the player around by the nose. "Kill 10 rabbits and then talk to Bob" is a fantastically simple task, but if the rabbits are halfway across a zone map and Bob is all the way over in another hamlet, that charge carries some powerful ramifications. Designers know that the player will have to travel to one specific area of the map to carry out the task, and will end up in yet another part to turn in the quest. By seeding the hunting zone and the hamlet around Bob with further quests, interesting challenges, beautiful landscapes and a sense of danger designers are assured that players will have a certain level of quality in their gaming experience.

Again, this seems deceptively obvious in retrospect. Why wouldn't designers create a world with this kind of directed experience in mind? The reason is that word "world". World of Warcraft is much less a world than it is a very elaborate game. The Blizzard designers ensured 'game' would be the take-away from their Azeroth; while it might have been interesting to see Stranglethorn Vale with a living ecosystem or provide meaningful AI life to all city NPCs it would have detracted from the reality of WoW as a game. Whatever wasn't fun was removed, whatever was boring was polished, and the story of a character's adventure through this online world is all that truly matters.

Mom's Computer

It’s tempting to see the huge number of people that play World of Warcraft as purely a function of game design and mechanics, but there are other elements at work too. For example, the fact that people can play the game at all ... Going back to the lowering of barriers to fun, WoW’s low system spec, the incredibly forgiving requirement it places on computers, is another pillar on which the game’s success rests. Despite this, many player cite the game’s pleasing presentation as a compelling reason to play.

The key is that Blizzard solved the ‘issue’ of graphics through artistic presentation instead of raw horsepower. Azeroth’s unique art style, a combination of anime-inspiration and western comics, draws the player in to the online fantasy with minimal stresses on the average PC. It’s something many design houses don’t address well, to their detriment. Vanguard: Saga of Heroes failed miserably at launch last year – it also overtaxed a brand new machine and required 20 gigs of disk space. It’s easy to assume that there was some connection there.

What's the Most Important Thing About Comedy?

Timing. Many people believe the same to be true about World of Warcraft’s success. That magical moment at the end of 2004, so goes the theory, was a pregnant point in the MMO genre. Games had been released for the past two years that tantalized the gaming public, but didn’t deliver. There was a lot of interest in the genre, but nothing accessible enough to reach a truly mass market.

Pitted against EverQuest 2, WoW went up against a recognized brand that had completely lost its way. Though modern EQ2 rivals World of Warcraft in some ways for polish and fun-ness, at launch the game was a confused mish-mash of poor design concepts. Into this special moment, hyped by months of open Beta testing and happy players, Blizzard dropped a bombshell. The rest, as they say, is history.

All Tomorrow’s Parties

As Blizzard’s game has evolved over the last three-plus years, many of these major elements have been further refined. The level of polish is still at a genre-defining level. The narrative that guides players through old Azeroth and into the Burning Crusade expansion’s Outlands area is stronger now than ever.

And – despite the kvetching you see on the official forums – the fun factor in World of Warcraft has never been higher. The few barriers between the players and fun that existed have systematically been lowered over the last three years. WoW’s current place in the Western marketplace is unparalleled as far as both numbers and cultural cachet – and, of course, another expansion is just over the horizon.

As the weeks continue to pass here on Earth and in Azeroth, we’re going to try to continue to explain the fascinating puzzle that is World of Warcraft. From basic elements like what you should know before you make a character to high level social trends, World of Warcraft Exposed is going to give you the thousand-foot view of an online phenomenon. Here’s hoping you’ll keep reading.

[Michael Zenke is a freelance games writer. He's a lead blogger at the site Massively.com, and has had the pleasure of writing for sites like Gamasutra, 1up, Joystiq, The Escapist, and Slashdot Games. You can read more of Michael's ramblings on Massive games at the MMOG Nation blog.]

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

So, I've been involved in the netlabel scene for a good few years (uh, at least 12) with my Creative Commons-licensed online electronic music label Monotonik, and before that the Amiga demo-scene, so it was neat to get a note from Jan Robbe of net.label entity on a GSW/netlabel crossover:

"Our own little netlabel/indie game scene marriage spawned [NTT040] Tetroid 2012. In short, it's a psychedelic Tetris clone (with references to Mr.Driller and Arkanoid as well), featuring 21 [music] artists. It is meant to bring experimental electronic music closer to the people. Programming was done by Toxie of the Apocalypse Inc demogroup [who also created Tsunami 2010, a 96k (!) Tempest2K clone of some repute]."

And sure enough, here's a slightly grainy YouTube video of the game, in all it's psychedelic glory. It's a shame it 'borrowed' the central Tetris mechanic so obviously, because it would have been neater just mashing up the block puzzle concept in a different way. Nonetheless, check out the Tetris => Arkanoid screen flip at about 00.35, great concept:

Ah yes, some more info: "All the info/screens/youtubes can be found at http://www.entity.be (blog) or simply by clicking on the latest Entity netlabel release @ http://www.entity.be/entity... Some direct links to the game: http://www.download.com/Tetroid-2012/3000-2111_4-10822130.html, http://www.archive.org/download/ntt040/ntt040-tetroid_2012.zip, http://www.entity.be/tetroid2012/ntt040-tetroid_2012.zip."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yeehah, all kinds of goodness in this particular caboodle of GameSetLinks, with a whole weekend of web-based exploration to lay out in the course of a week of glorious http referrals.

These include a postmortem of the intriguing but ultimately underexploited indie title Play With Fire, and some thoughts on creating emotional response as game designers. Here goes with some linkaaage:

Ian Bogost - Private Eyes / They're Blogging You
More Kotaku iconography!

Moogle.net » Blog Archive » Little Change, Big Consequences
'No matter what we do, sometimes the wants need to wait for next time.'

Multiple:Option: Game Melody Oratorio
More awesome homebrew: 'Game Melody Oratorio teaches simple game melodies via a virtual piano.'

The Independent Gaming Source: GDC-inspired 'Owl Country' game
All kinds of ridiculous in-joking, but such delightful indie zeal.

Tale of Tales» Blog Archive » We made a new game!
'The Graveyard' - from the makers of The Path.

Surfer Girl Reviews Star Wars: I am big. It's the pictures that got small.
Some interesting L.A. Noire gossip in here.

The Indie Gaming Primer « Thank You For Playing
A slick set of six.

Only a Game: Play with Fire: Post Mortem
'This post examines the many things that went wrong with this project – and also the many things that worked out nicely.'

The Plush Apocalypse » Blog Archive » The Toolbox of Affect
'At the simplest level, you need to feel what you want the player to feel - if you don’t, you’re in trouble.'

Press The Buttons: Miistery Science Theater 3000
Two of my favorite tastes!

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

[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.]

'Passing through the mouth of Venus,' says Neil McFarland.

'Passing through... the driver is riled and beguiled by a procession of gigantic beauties,' he says to me. The 34-year-old illustrator describing his contribution to what is arguably the best piece of free downloadable game content ever made.

'Gripped with paranoia and fear in the all-seeing eye tunnel,' he adds. 'Blinded by Medusa, and reborn anew at the completion of each circuit.'

His word-images, this should be the way all video games are reviewed. In narrative. In dialogue. In fan fiction. Using words soft as breasts that when caressed leak all over the screen or page in a myriad of colored pixels and ink. Purples. Oranges. Mauves. Crimsons. Cyans and blonds.

At the very least, it should be how the Omega Pack is described. A four track wonderland (YouTube videos) for the futuristic PlayStation Portable racer WipeOut Pure, made free in 2005 to everyone in Europe, Australia and New Zealand as a giant suck-up, featuring the unique work of UK artists and designers. Jon Burgerman, 123Klan, Mark James, Neil McFarland.

Jon's circuit—complete with chimpanbees, dancing sausages and sheer character design genius is the reason I download the pack; I've always been a fan. But it's Neil's Paris Hair track that gives me the Flash Gordon moment.

A sense of flinging oneself into the void, only to become trapped in an off-world sideshow recreated from drug-induced visions of hair, melancholy and Barbarella-like pleasure tortures. An uncomfortable memory of sitting in a car with a mate (who would later become a youth pastor) as he confesses to having recently cheated on his girlfriend by fingering a woman in the very seat I'm occupying.

I never had a real job says Neil, father now to 7-week-old twins, husband to Pippanella.

Neil listing his work history as 'published comics, pornography, sold paintings, design for mobile phones, animate for TV and internet'.

'I am who I am,' he says, 'because I always drew, was left alone a lot as a child and have been exposed to some amazing people, places and chemicals'. Growing up, he says, I was inspired by comic books, 2000AD and Robert Crumb. 'I then discovered the work of Jamie Hewlett. He painted Tank Girl so beautifully, and with such energy, that from then on a strand of my own work was based on this love of the powerful female figure'.

Looking at Neil's track, at his wider body of art, I have no doubt that this is why he was approached to contribute to the project. What I'm even more confident of is the fact that the developers had no idea that the Omega Pack would completely redefine the game. Re-imagine it. Re-emotion it.

'I'd like to think that [my track] is as far from the established aesthetic of WipeOut as is possible, and that it evokes the spirit of my own work,' says Neil.

'For the gamer, I hope it's a track that's fun to play, surprising, and at times distracting to fly through. I want people to feel that they have entered into a lysergic fun fair and that [my art] has added a whole new atmosphere to this terrific game.

'[I want] to convey some kind of feeling in my work,' he says. 'I always want it to communicate more than just a design aesthetic or an editorial idea. The huge psychedelic influence on my work can come across as sadness or longing, but I think this is a by-product of trying to capture that state of mind of being “out there”, disengaged from trivial matters and contemplative.'

This is not slick, futuristic FX300 anti-gravity racing anymore. This is voyaging and voyeuring. Traversing—now with 40% more eye-shadow and uncertainty. Downloadable content that doesn't just skin, but reaches inside and rummages about with the heart and soul of a game. Rummages with hands made of loss and maturity and shame and vulnerability.

Extra costumes that turn Kratos into a banana are great. That put Lara in a Think Geek-inspired bathing costume are brilliant. Content that allows Frank West to slice and dice zombies in 10 new ways is awesome; download them all. But this is an opportunity for something more. This is DLC that is able to revision the game world. Given to an artist and re-souled. Marketplace points for a new experience. A new religion.

This is Neil's dream. Post Orange Box and teleport gun. Post Elebits.

He wants in. And not just a track.

'A first-person shooter', says Neil, spasming with inspired possibility. 'How about Half-Life? I'd turn it into some kind of pie fight or paint ball extravaganza. Ludicrous costumes and character animations, insane architecture and a wigged out soundtrack.'

This is Neil, thinking about WipeOut Pure, imagining a new Halo. A new Zack and Wiki, Metroid Prime, Guitar Hero 3. Imagining a Paris Hair Mass Effect. A mascara-filled, prehensile curl-laden World of Warcraft.

Neil imagining what he'd do to a Grand Theft Auto. Red cordial-like.

'I'd trip it out!' he says, mentally crossing speed pads. 'Round off some corners. And... Wow. I have to lie down now.

'Thinking about this makes me dizzy. I could quite happily disappear in that design job for a year or two.'

[Drew Taylor works in the games industry in Australia and writes video game culture articles for various magazines. He has never been to Paris, but would like to get his hair cut more often.]

Posted by Drew Taylor at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Aha, we've announced a call for submissions for the 2008 Austin Game Developers Conference this September - if you like MMOs, audio, or writing (also pina coladas and... oh, forget it!) you might want to consider submitting a lecture, yay.]

The call for submissions is now open for the 2008 Austin Game Developers Conference (AGDC). Submissions to present lectures and roundtable sessions will be accepted for review by an advisory board until Monday, April 14th.

Presented by Think Services, a division of United Business Media, organizers of the industry-leading Game Developers Conference (GDC), the Austin GDC is a three-day event taking place at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas September 15-17, 2008.

The Austin GDC focuses on three main tracks: Game Audio, Writing for Games and the largest Online Games section of the conference. The Online Games track goes even further in depth, featuring five sub-tracks of its own, including:

- Business and Marketing
- Design
- Social Networking & Community
- Technology & Services
- Worlds in Motion (Virtual Worlds)

The Austin GDC advisory board includes two new members, Raph Koster from Areae, and Mark Terrano from Hidden Path Entertainment. The advisory board also includes 18 other industry experts, including: Midway’s Marc Schaefgen, Dolby’s Lori Solomon, Multiverse’s Corey Bridges, BioWare’s Rich Vogel and Gordon Walton, writer Susan O’Connor, and several others.

“We are excited to embark on the next chapter of the Austin GDC,” says Izora de Lillard, Event Director of Austin GDC, “Our theme this year ‘Evolve to Win’ reflects the need for developers to challenge themselves to think ahead in terms of community, online games, writing and audio for games. This year’s conference program will not only reflect new trends and technology in the immediate future of digital entertainment, but also include thought leaders with unique insight towards the long term evolution of game development and the industry.”

Submissions are also being accepted for the Game Career Seminar which will be held in conjunction with the Austin conference.

For a detailed list of topics and to submit a speaker proposal, please visit the official Call For Submissions page at the Austin GDC website.

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

[Adam Maxwell stirred up a hornet's nest with his argument against writers in the games industry - an editorial Maxwell has since commented on further on his personal weblog - but the IGDA Game Writers SIG isn't going to stand for it. In this rebuttal, Brainstem Games' Ron Toland aims to put the "well-circulated myth" that "writers are nice to have, but completely dispensable." to rest.]

In his op-ed piece, “The Case Against Writers in the Games Industry,” Adam Maxwell articulates a well-circulated myth: to make a good game, writers are nice to have, but are completely dispensable.

It is time for this myth to be laid to rest. It needs to find its place in the graveyard of outdated truths, along with the line that “you don't need artists to make good games,” or “you don't need designers to make good games.”

As we can see from Maxwell's article, he is completely in thrall to this myth:

"Had I been hired simply as a writer that would have been the end for me. You see, that studio imploded very shortly thereafter, but it’s not that implosion that would have doomed me -- as a designer I survived. No, what would have doomed me is the simple, and some would say sad, truth: There is no places for writers in our industry."

I suspect that Maxwell survived because he carried the label of designer, even though what he was doing was (technical) writing. Why would the label "writer" have hurt him? Because of the myth about writers in the games industry that he still believes.

This myth is based on a profound misunderstanding of the role of the writer in game development. Maxwell provides several examples of this misunderstanding:

“When a writer sits down to build a story, they are usually building a plot.”

There are two mistakes in that sentence. First, building a story means building characters, the relationships between those characters, the setting around the characters, and the conflicts—plots—that involve the characters. Second, game writers should never sit down alone to build a story. They should meet with the entire team so that the art, sound, game mechanics, and story all work together to craft an interactive experience.

"The work of the writer is inherently linear – the work of the designer is typically *not*."

A bold but bogus claim. Has he never played D&D? Read an RPG module that accommodates several different paths to play through? Read a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book? All of the above were created by writers. All use non-linear storytelling.

Conversely, the work of the designer is often very linear. Super Mario Brothers is an incredibly linear game. So are Portal, the Heroes of Might and Magic series, and many others. All of those games were designed to be linear, and are great games.

Games are often linear because of limitations in technology and time. Writers can help make that linear experience feel more free than it really is, by involving the player in an unfolding story.

"...a writer expresses the plot by putting together scenes"

False. Portal has no cut scenes, but plenty of plot, all expressed through dialogue, character and setting. These were crafted by the writer to provide what the designers felt was missing from the game. Rather than do it themselves, they did the right thing and called in a professional. The result was one of the year's most impressive games.

"This is why the writer’s work is linear -- the writer’s power depends on the sequence of events."

Again, false. It seems he's got movie scriptwriting confused with game writing. It has been established in the games industry that the two are different, and require different skills.

“...that’s something you can never say about a writer. No matter how well written, a story can’t make the game better."

Strange words, since this is exactly what the lead designer on Portal said at GDC during their postmortem. They had the game mechanics down, but needed a good story, and a good writer, to make the game better.

Maxwell also goes astray when he asserts that a lack of authorial control cripples game writing from the start:

"...authorial control is not something native to video games...It exists, I don’t deny it, but where it exists it does so because it has been enforced. Special effort has to be made to accommodate it; in the early history of gaming new technologies had to be created to enable it at all, in fact."

The notion of authorial control is another myth. Does the director of a film control the conditions in which I see it? Does he know how often I'll pause a DVD to go grab some popcorn, or when I might doze off and have to finish the movie later?

The idea that artists can control how audiences experience their art is a false hope. Games, with their inherently interactive nature, just make it more obvious. Good writing in a game can have just as much emotional impact as good writing in movie, so long as the writer knows how to use the medium.

Even worse than his myths about game writing, Maxwell has mistaken beliefs about the role of designers:

"A writer might create the characters, and a writer certainly architects the plot of a game’s story, but the work a player actually sees and consumes? That is the work of the designer..."

That's a pretty hefty claim. Do the designers also create the art consumed by the player? Or write the code that enables the game mechanics? Or compose the music playing in the background of the game?

No. Neither should designers be the primary person on a team concerned with story.

According to Maxwell, the designer's job isn't made any easier by the presence of a writer:

"Case in point, as a part of my job on Dirty Harry, I met with our writer once a week to discuss the story, his progress in the script, changes we had made to the game that he had to accommodate. It was a great process that really helped the game, but it was also a 3-4 hour event, once a week....During that time, I was not balancing weapons, implementing core game play systems or overseeing the work of the rest of the team, which was what my job description actually called for...I’m not saying this time was wasted, but it was time where part of the game design was suffering for the sake of the writer."

A wonderful anecdote that fails to prove his point. Is he claiming that, as a designer, he never talked to the programming team? Never once stopped to see what an artist was modeling, or talked to the art team? And I suppose he never spoke to the sound designers, either?

Didn't those meetings take time away from working on game mechanics? Or are they properly recognized as being part and parcel of developing complex software with a team of people?

Instead of showing how inconvenient writers are, Maxwell's story supports the idea of having a writer on staff and integrated with the development team. That would give the writer direct access to all departments and give the designer more time for balancing game mechanics.

His worst mistake is that he implies that designers are the only people required to make a good game:

"Designers give us puzzles to solve, worlds to explore, new ways to interact and above all, new games to play...Even in a linear single player experience where story is king -- say an old school RPG, writers alone can’t get your game done; you will need designers to implement game play."

False. Game development teams give us new games to play. You can't have a game without programmers. A game without artists is going to look terrible. A game without designers won't have good mechanics. A game without sound designers is going to sound cheesy. A game without writers (or someone acting as the writer, even if they're called a designer or narrative designer or scribbler-in-chief) will probably be full of clichés. Just like movies, games require a lot of different disciplines to come together and make something fantastic.

Writers are not game designers. Nor are they merely dialogue-generation-machines. Writers use story—character, setting, and plot—to enhance the experience of players, just as sound designers use music and sound effects to improve the player's experience.

There are many tools in the writer's toolbox for conveying a game's story. Story can be expressed through dialogue, or the graffiti on a cement wall, or the name of a character. This is the writer's unique role, their place on a team of talented people with different skills.

Can you make a game without a writer? Yes. But, like a game without sound, their absence can be felt. Development teams need writers to help them craft the best stories they can for their games.

Better stories lead to better games. And that's good for everyone.

[The IGDA Game Writers' Special Interest Group was formed in 2002 to improve game writing as a craft and combat the myths surrounding game writing. They offer an active community to support anyone involved in game writing, from dialogue scripters to narrative designers to those managing writers. They encourage anyone interested in the topics discussed to visit their website or their wiki to learn more about them and join the conversation.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Ah yes, a little more GameSetLink-age to start the week, and there's some fun stuff in here - including some of the post-fury discussion on the Metanet comments on Xbox Live Arcade, of course.

But also in there - qDot working towards an open-source driver for the Novint Falcon, which is one of the most fascinating pieces of game peripheral hardware ever offered, but has had some serious game adoption problems - with even the games it ships with being less-than-awesome demonstrations of the tech, I'm afraid. Still, haptics! Onward:

The Problem with Experience-Based Writing (Magical Wasteland)
'We still need articles like Rogers’ passionate, plausible and consequential interpretation of Mother 2, but we also need something more.'

Top 5 Botched PC Gaming Launches from 1UP.com
'Installing a new PC game can be something like a blind date.'

GameOfTheBlog.com: Is this really necessary?
'This' would be 3 different chicken-themed DS games. I blame Europe, randomly!

Dispatches: No More Heroes, Part Two; Or: A Perfect Day For Bloodfish at Game Design Advance
This game seems to be inspiring a lot of intriguing articles.

Flash Of Steel: 'Tom versus Bruce Online'
These are some of my favorite pieces of writing ever (from Games For Windows mag), great to hear they're coming online.

Rockstar slow to release in-game GTA IV screens | Xbox 360 News | GamePro.com
Racist user comments aside, this is headslammingly bad as an angle for a story.

Nonpolynomial Labs News: "That thingy that feels"
Using the Novint Falcon for hacked-up good, perhaps?

David Hellman » Blog Archive » The Art of Braid, Part III: World 2 Comes First
Gonna keep linking these, since they are great.

NeoGAF - View Single Post - N+ Developers talk XBLA: "There's like 100 games, and they're all shit." (plus more!)
A fair point, following up on Metanet, about XBLA releases being of variable quality in any given month!

In Defence of the Apparant Shitstorm | metablog
Metanet follows up on the Gamasutra interview - some amelioration, perhaps, but just a bit.

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

    >

I had the intention of writing this week about Hard Drives, the greatest magazine that Larry Flynt Publishing ever produced (I kid, I kid, but it's close), but I can't find my sole example in the bookshelves. So, how about a little Brazilian programming instead?

Collectors of obscure old video games know that Brazil was an extremely unique game marketplace during the 8 and 16-bit eras. The Odyssey2 somehow emerged as the top console of the classic era, Tec Toy produced all kinds of Brazil-exclusive Sega Master System and Genesis titles, and the marketplace until approximately the mid-90s was mainly occupied by the SMS, the MSX computer, and half a dozen NES-compatible pirate consoles.

There was no dedicated game mag in Brazil during the 80s, when arcades and pinball was where the main action was in the country. (Odyssey Aventura, the locally-produced newsletter for Philips' console, lasted eight issues.) This changed in 1990 when publishing outfit Editora Abril produced Ação Games, a special one-off edition of kids' sports magazine A Semana em Ação (The Week in Action) devoted entirely to console stuff. One more one-off was produced in 1991, and then Abril went out of business. The Ação name was bought by rival publisher Editora Azul, and beginning in October 1991, Ação Games became a monthly publication.

Ação was arguably the most influential game mag of the era in South America. It had an officially translated edition (called Action Games) in Argentina, and before a year had passed, it had no less than four monthly rivals in Brazil: Games, VideoGame, Supergame (Sega-exclusive) and Game Power (Nintendo-exclusive). The latter two combined into a single multiplatform title, Super Game Power, in 1995.

Thumbing through these mags, one gets the idea that Brazilian editors and publishers really loved GamePro. Supergame and Game Power both had official licenses to translate content from IDG's mag, and Ação's visual design was basically a clone as well -- the difference, of course, being that instead of ads for the TG16 and Super NES games, these titles had spots for pirate NES consoles and shady-looking mail order places.

What makes Brazil mags unique, though, is their art -- unlike most other countries where the game industry mostly revolved around pirates, the magazines here were pretty high-quality productions, with lots of original articles and artwork (most of which is actually good, remarkably).

Sadly, most of these mags went belly-up in the late '90s once the Internet took over as the chief source of game info. I admit to not knowing much about modern Brazilian mags; titles I'm aware of currently in existence include EGM Brasil, Official Xbox Magazine, PlayStation (a homegrown PS mag), Gamemaster (another homegrown multiplatform mag), and Nintendo World (which appears to be Nintendo Power in translation). If you know of any more publishing right now, I'd love to hear about them.

[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 at PiQ magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Ah yes, plenty of goodness in this week's links from Think Services' suite of B2B-ish game sites, including Gamasutra, Game Career Guide, Worlds In Motion, Indie Games, and more.

In particular, we have the controversy over N+ rubbing shoulders with a really fun Ian Bogost column on pranks in games, as well as some analysis of EA's marketing muscle, a neat Foundation 9 interview, and a plethora of other pieces, some obscure, some not so. All good output, I think - here we are:

N+: Beyond The Postmortem
"What's it like getting a game onto Xbox Live Arcade? N+ creators Raigan Burns and Mare Sheppard of developer Metanet - and Nick Waanders, president of XBLA N converters Slick Entertainment - don't mince words in this discussion of the service."

Sounds Of The Snow
"In one of the more unconventional Gamasutra articles we've ever published, Finnish game sound designer Tapio Liukkonen (Broken Alliance) writes passionately about the need for authentic winter sound recording in games."

Q&A: CDC's Williams Talks East Meeting West With Lunia, EVE
"CDC Games has found success operating the Korean MMO Lunia in the U.S., and also runs CCP's EVE Online in China. Given recent U.S. successes for Lunia, Gamasutra spoke to CDC's Ron Williams about the interesting particulars involved in making the East-to-West connection from both ends."

Persuasive Games: Video Game Pranks
"In his regular 'Persuasive Games' column, designer/writer Ian Bogost looks at the history of the prank in video games - from Easter Eggs through Sim Copter and Syobon Action, with particular reference to Gareth's stapler."

The Divnich Tapes: Why EA's Marketing Brawn Should Entice Take-Two
"Concluding his Gamasutra-exclusive assessment of February's hardware and software trends, simExchange analyst Jesse Divnich analyzes Army of Two's retail success through marketing, and argues Take-Two should reconsider Electronic Arts' takeover offer because of its sheer marketing muscle." Also see Divnich on hardware sales compared for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, why the video game industry is outperforming expectations despite our slowing economy, and software predictions for March.

Focus On Korea: Ntreev's Kang Talks Pangya, Westward Moves
"Continuing its examination of the Korean game biz, Gamasutra speaks to Jamie King of online game developer Ntreev about their titles, including Pangya (Super Swing Golf) and Trickster, and discusses the difficulty for Korean companies to break into the international console game market."

U. Mich's 48-Hour Development Contest: Stephen Colbert Games!
"The University of Michigan hosts an annual game development challenge, in which small teams of students have just 48 hours to develop a video game. GameCareerGuide.com is running an exclusive five-part series written by the contestants about their experience making a game in just two days." Also see - Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. Also... Stephen Colbert!

A Coalition Of Developers
"Foundation 9 (Death Jr.) is likely the biggest developer conglomerate in the world, with more than 800 employees - so how is it doing in 2008, and what on earth is its 'Total Quality Initiative'? Gamasutra finds out..."

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

[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.]

We throw around lots of insults on message boards and comment threads, but there is perhaps none so common – and so virulent as fanboy.

What does that word even mean? Dictionary.com has no idea, but UrbanDictionary.com has several definitions. “A passionate fan of various elements of geek culture… but who lets his passion override social graces.” “A person who is completely loyal to a game or company reguardless [sic] of if they suck or not… a pathetic insult.” “An arrogant person… [who takes] the console war very seriously, as if it were a real war.”

Perhaps only in games does being a passionate fan become a negative. In film, hobbyists might have loyalty to certain directors or screenwriters, and comics has its Marvel versus DC – but is this sort of aggression so prevalent on movie or comic book websites?

This column has been quick to evaluate mob psychology in gamer behavior and condemn it as one of the major elements restraining games from attaining widespread social legitimacy. But fanboyism is a much more complex issue – particularly because none of us is immune. Not even the press.

The "Friend Response"

The human brain is engineered to respond with fondness directly proportionate to how often it sees something. Faces that it sees on a regular basis are programmed into the mind’s memory as “friends” – regardless of whether or not that’s really the case. Watch the same news anchor on a nightly basis, and your subconscious will instinctively consider that person as an ally of yours, even if you never meet the newsman face to face. When the mentally unbalanced send emotional letters to newsdesks or stalk actors, convinced that the actor is “in love” with them, it’s a maladaption of this so-called “friend response” mechanism, the stalker’s brain becoming all-too-convinced that that regular visual presence is a genuine element of his or her life.

But despite how people behave in comment threads, you don’t need to be insane to have a “friend response.” Just take the case of what might be called the average lifelong gamer. Chances are, his or her first console was a Nintendo, and his first favorite game was a Mario, maybe a Zelda. Even in eight bits, those characters were preserved and personified in a chain-reaction of positive association – perhaps even more quintessential than being “real people,” Mario and Link became proxies for our positive associations with our experiences. Mascots for our pleasure, just as they were for the company they represented.

Our Secret Language

We often discuss our desire for characters we can really believe in and fall in love with. But Mario, Sonic, Samus, Snake and others have even transcended characterization; during our long relationship with them, they became more like a language – just like a word, each of them is a single-symbol shortcut that corresponds to a distinct emotional loyalty, reinforced by the fact that for most of our lives, gamers have felt part of an exclusive minority culture. That also explains the affinity for Atari T-shirts, 1Up mushroom wristbands, and game-related forum avatars and profile pictures – though to us gaming is as important as any other hobby would be to non-gamers, we are more likely to attach to symbology, and more passionate about the color of the flag we carry.

Most lifetime gamers, then, have a built-in bias engine, whether they acknowledge it or not. For some, it’s much more conscious and overt – hence the “Fanboy” network of platform-specific sites, hence forum flamewars, hence almost frighteningly irrational ire over certain reviews. Most reviewers dread having to evaluate a new flagship Nintendo title of the Mario or Zelda heritage; while the PlayStation 3 struggled to gain traction in the market early on, every new release was viewed as a flashpoint as fans were desperate for a killer app, and detractors were eager to see it fail. Those early reviews, then, might as well have been a general’s decision in a war.

For others, it’s beyond awareness – I certainly do not suggest that all gamers are conflict-craving flag-carriers who flock to message boards to vehemently defend even the slightest perceived insult against their favorite characters, developers, publishers, consoles, what have you. But the truth is, the cultural lexicon of games is still so young that it’s quite small, and therefore the repetition of certain elements or characters over time has been, and continues to be unavoidable.

None of us did not grow up with Mario, for example, and none of us is immune to the “friend response” of that repetition. And even those of us that might have managed to avoid the tide of early fandom have probably developed a counterculture – in favor of PC adventure games, in favor of the Japanese import palette, in favor of another, less-appreciated mascot, with our faith all the stronger for having been minimized in an already-small arena.

Inherently At Odds?

There’s a quintessential conflict here, however. A reviewer must weigh, for example, a Nintendo franchise title in the context of the franchise’s history. Should someone who’s never played a Mario game in their lives be reviewing Galaxy? Shouldn’t Metal Gear Solid 4, when it’s time comes, be weighed at least somewhat in the context of its prequels? Shouldn’t games intended for the core market be evaluated by someone from the core market?

In any event, game journos play a lot of games. A lot. And it shouldn’t be otherwise; how else to generate an educated opinion but from experience? Game fans deserve evaluation from writers with at least as much experience as they themselves have.

Reviews, then, demand that same kind of strong experience that also cannot prevent that cultivated, long-lived emotional response from becoming an ingrained subconscious reaction. Every reviewer, whether he or she is aware of it or not, is a fanboy.

I would like you to briefly indulge me by participating in an exercise. Remove all of the mascots and familiar faces from Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and replace them with original constructs. Notice, if you will, the somewhat clumsy user interface, the high percentage of total content that must be unlocked to be enjoyed, the complete lack of usability of the Wii controls, and the lack of significant graphical or gameplay progression over the previous generation. It's true that even then, you’d have a good game. But would you have a 10 game?

What does it mean that I’m hesitant to even state my opinion that it’d be a 7 game? And what does that crap even mean, anymore?

Hanged In The Court Of Opinion

Game reviewers are taken to task often brutally if the readership catches even a whiff of bias. Lately, discussions of game journalism have revolved around whether reviewers should be “fully objective” or not – as if such a thing were possible. Game reviewers are cut of the same cloth as their audience, and having made their career out of it, might even be more likely than the audience is to have a few hairs rise on the back of their neck at the sound of the Hyrule Overworld theme, no matter in what context they hear it. They’ll never be able to completely resist the flood of positive association they feel when they see a familiar character, hear a familiar tune – a positive flood that can, and probably often does, influence a positive impression of a game.

In this Metacritic-driven era, then, where game companies must show high scores to their investors and where those scores determine their next moves, it’s love that makes the world go round. Fanboyism rules the video game industry.

What’s the solution, then? To accept that reviewers will be inherently biased toward their cultural icons and attempt to assemble as diverse an opinion pool as possible? To demand more “outsiders” write major franchise reviews, even if they’re less knowledgeable about the context?

The idea that game reviews somehow need reform or lack integrity is as prevalent as it is because fanboys are consistently displeased with them. It’s because of people’s innate, inherent and inextricable personal passions that the game audience is so impossible – just utterly impossible – for reviewers to please, to say nothing of game developers.

This constant discontent has the potential to disillusion both game journalists and game development. Fanboyism has become the stalker’s dangerous obsession with the TV news anchor, the unbalanced person who strangles a lover to death.

No 'Objectivity'

It may not be possible to stem the tide of fanboyism. It may not be desirable, either – who wants to be told that they must love their favorite thing less? But can it be de-venomized, at least, to minimize its ripple effect on people’s careers, and by extension, the health of the industry?

It can begin with game reviews – just picture what the industry would look like if there were a commonly agreed-upon moratorium on numerical scores. Second, let’s let go of the idea that a game review is akin to a product evaluation – it is that, but let’s accept that they’ve attained a complexity that completely invalidates the way we once did things, parsing games out by their technical components and then switching, jerkily, into an evaluation of subtext and the subtleties of personal experience.

If a reviewer’s positive experience of a game is influenced by its familiar franchise elements, it’s not a disqualification – it’s safe to say that most of the fans would experience that same influence. But for the sake of the industry’s future, the stamina of the developers (and please, the sanity of the journalists), let’s relinquish this idea that there is such a thing as “unbiased” for any single one of us, no matter how hard we try. I propose we embrace our own subjectivity, neutering fanboyism by accepting it -- because it sure ain't going anywhere.

[Leigh Alexander shamelessly declares herself a Metal Gear Solid fangirl, but still is too scared of you to discuss her console preferences. She 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 (34)

Ye gods, the blogosphere is wide and long and full of slithy toves, and that's why, dear reader, you need GameSetLinks to navigate you through an extremely large amount of websites in an extremely short amount of time.

This time out - more Street Fighter HD game balancing goodness, the bootleg Titanic NES RPG, indie game goodness galore, and a terribly headlined but not unreasonable overall Daily Yomiuru game book review. All this in one short post! And go:

Capcom US - The Blog: Behind-the-Scenes: Rebalancing Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (part 8, Sagat)
This whole David Sirlin-written series is excellent, from a game-balancing perspective.

Arcade Renaissance: What is really going on with Tekken 6 and US arcades?
Looks like cabinet price may be stopping a Western release?

CinnamonPirate.com : Prepare yourself, for tonight we board IN HELL!
Gigantic, neat review of the bootleg Titanic RPG for the NES.

Akihabara Channel » Best Bishojo Game of 2007
'Getchu-ya’s online website, Getchu.com announced the result of their online poll that was conducted during the month of February, voting for the best 2007 Bishojo games' - some links NSFW, interesting subgenre peek.

Knut Müller - Interview - Adventure Classic Gaming
Another nice subgenre interview, for the Rhem creator - Myst-like artgame fun.

TheStar.com | entertainment | Pilgrim's progress for graphic novel fans as Cera touted to star
Lot of video game references in the book too, obviously. Good news all round!

The Independent Gaming Source: Video of 'Glitch Racer'
The next game by Toribash creator Hampa - freeform racing physics fun, looking v. intriguing.

insertcredit.com: 'News: Obscure fighter emulation roundup'
And sure enough, there's a lot of obscure 2D fighters here!

Video game designers not the pasty-faced geeks of old: The Daily Yomiuri
Ouch, what a terrible headline. Still, actually not a terrible review of a neat book we've extracted on Gamasutra.

IGN: RetroCity Podcast Episode 1
Blimey, Paul Norman - everyone's going retro (good page views!)

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple of interesting tidbits related to the biggest game weblog in the world which I feel GSW must compile together into a coherent, slightly cheeky Kotaku-filled whole. So we will!

Firstly, you may have seen Kotaku EIC Brian Crecente debating silly game-related child predator stories on Fox News. But it turns out that awesome new game blog Eegra has unearthed a previously unknown pilot for a Crecente video game review show.

It's a review of Super Smash Bros Brawl - and it's so amazing, so theatrical, and therefore so YouTube-d below (make sure you hang on for the 'Day Note' writing at the end!)

On another Kotaku-related tack entirely, there's an interesting Portfolio.com article about Gawker Media (via Nelson) is discussing pay for Gawker.com writers based on their pageviews. I think it might be possible, extrapolating from that discussion, to have a go for Kotaku, but it's the weekend, and that's a bit much even for stats hogs such as me.

Still, the interesting thing about the article is that it points out a somewhat uncommented on Kotaku stats page, which actually lists total page views per writer for the past 6 months - including me, from my guest stint in November, even (yes, not many page views, shh, my 'appeal is becoming more selective', to cite Spinal Tap).

Anyhow, there are some bugs resulting in duplication (and who knows, it could additionally be busted!), but getting out the calculator for a minute to smoosh them together, we can work out the following. In February, the Kotaku massif managed to scare up the following total and per-editor page view score (remember this was GDC month, so extra kerfuffle!):

TOTAL FOR SPECIFIC AUTHOR PAGES, FEB 2008 = 13,258,100 page views
Brian Ashcraft = 2,317,874 page views
Michael McWhertor = 2,270,321 page views
Luke Plunkett = 2,186,295 page views
Brian Crecente = 1,697,596 page views
Mike Fahey = 1,617,459 page views
Mark Wilson = 1,603,039 page views
Flynn DeMarco = 848,035 page views
Maggie Greene = 248,775 page views
[+ various other legacy folks under that.]

[NOTE: That isn't the overall page view total for Kotaku, of course - just for individual pages. If you take into account indexes and other things, according to Sitemeter, looks like the entire site did 33.8 million page views in February 2008. That ratio (individual author page views to whole site page views) doesn't seem right to me, but hey.]

So, obviously, page views don't necessarily denote quality of coverage and vary widely based on when people post and what kind of 'breaking' stories come their way in that time. And heck, I don't mind admitting that GSW gets but a couple of hundred thousand page views a month, which is why it's an unmonetized editor blog and not our sole source of income.

But stats are fun! And we're pretty sure Brian's page views will surge after he does more of those video reviews!

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

[This Gamasutra-originating interview, conducted by Christian Nutt, chats to Capcom's Yoshi Ono about the much-vaunted Street Fighter reboot. I think it's worth crossposting to GSW for some of the thoughtful discussion on the graphical style and how it's evolved from drawn concept art - they are self-avowedly retro, but the result seems to be oddly intriguing, at least to me.]

Creating a new iteration in the Street Fighter franchise is no simple matter, with tough decisions to be made choosing an engine and the visual look.

Thus, in this in-depth interview, we talk to Yoshi Ono, general manager of the online game development department and R&D management group of Capcom about his thoughts on the process with Street Fighter IV - which is due for a 2008 Japanese arcade release before moving to home platforms.

Questions include the gap in returning to the much-loved series, the decision not to use Capcom's MT Framework engine utilized in Dead Rising, and the inspiration behind the game's intriguing-looking shaders:

It must be very challenging to bring back a series after a long delay, even when it's really beloved by fans. How did you feel that that affected the decisions to actually make this game?

Yoshi Ono: If we look at the history of the series, we had the four officially numbered titles: Street Fighter 1, and II, and then we did Zero, which of course is the Alpha series [in the west], and then III.

In all honesty, and I feel this way, to a degree -- we could have stopped at III and been pretty satisfied. We didn't hit a brick wall, so to speak, but we did pretty much all we could do with 2D fighters by the time we got to III. We were very satisfied with the results, and it was hard to imagine doing more than that; certainly, staying within 2D.

But, we've had ten years to think about it, had a lot of ideas being bounced back and forth. For this series, I almost think that we are better off having waited. It gave us a lot of time to settle down and throw ideas back and forth, think about how we would tackle it.

In the beginning we were not exactly sure which direction to go. Should we stick to something entirely new? Should we stick to the roots? Having the time to step back and look at the series up until now, to think about the various options that we have, I think was very helpful.

Having that time actually helped us to get the game headed in the direction that it's headed now -- which I think is a good direction -- and to get us where we are today.

Another reason I think that it's actually better that we let it sit on the back burner for ten years, is that technology has advanced so much in the last decade. There is no way that we could have envisioned arcade boards as powerful as this. The 360 and PS3, certainly, are incredibly powerful compared to what we had to work with ten years ago.

So really, in looking at how to use this power that we have now, we took a look back, and we looked at what has always been a strong point of the Street Fighter series, which is the art design, which was from Akiman, who unfortunately is not with us anymore. [Also] from Ikeno who is still here; a lot of guys who have really put their all into the art and created the awesome, iconic characters.

So, we thought, what could we do to reproduce this art, in motion, literally moving in 3D before your eyes, with modern technology? This would not have been possible ten years ago. There is just no way. So we are finally at a point where technology is aiding us, and helping us to do something that would not have been possible ago.

Is Tokyo studio newly formed?

YO: Actually, the Tokyo studio is not new. It's been around a good six or seven years. Actually, the latest Onimusha game, Dawn of Dreams, was made in the Tokyo branch. Chaos Legion was before that.

You were involved with Dawn of Dreams?

YO: I was indeed. Street Fighter IV is being produced in Osaka, it's being created in Osaka, but the producer guidance is coming from Tokyo. So that means a lot of business trips, a lot of phone calls.

So you're the only part of the team that's in Tokyo?

YO: Yeah, officially, technically, it's pretty much just me. Also the project manager. Ikeno, the art guy, is in Osaka; all the art guys are in Osaka. It's the project manager and I in Tokyo, and that's about it.

Did you guys develop your own engine for this game, or are you using the MT Framework engine that the other next generation Capcom games (such as Lost Planet and Devil May Cry 4) are using?

YO: Yes, we are looking at an original engine. We did not use the MT Framework, for a couple reasons. One is, it's versatile, but it's very well suited to games like Lost Planet, or a game like Onimusha, or something like that; for a sort of 3D perspective action game.

It's an incredible engine working with a game like that, but this time not only is the game style completely different with Street Fighter IV, but the art style itself, the shaders we're using, are extremely unique and all custom made for this title. We felt that we would be better off with a different engine than MT Framework, so we are working with original technology this time around.

And, of course, MT Framework is a great engine, and certainly we are borrowing bits and pieces of that technology for what we are doing now. There are so many good parts that we can pick and choose, and blend into the engine now, so we have most certainly been doing that, and exchanging information with that team.

Lets talk about the shaders. They're very unique looking and they really serve the graphical direction of the game. What was your goal with the shader look? What did you use as inspiration, and how did you get that technology up and running?

YO: As far as the reason we decided to go with the shader like this, we thought that a really important part of Street Fighter, and the series up until now, has been the artwork.

The paintings that Akiman used to do, the art that Ikeno has provided for us, it's really integral to the series. So we certainly didn't want to go realistic. It was a very easy decision for us, as far as that's concerned.

So as organic as the process was to determine what we wanted, making it was very difficult. Basically we had Ikeno, who is the art director for the title, working very closely with the R&D team to get this just right. And it was not an easy process.

Ikeno would give guidance, and say he wants a shader that does this, and then the R&D team would do it, but then they would also add specular maps and other things until everything was kind-of shiny, and realistic, and Virtua Fighter-like; and then we'd kind of dial it back a bit, into a kind-of anime direction, but there was too much standard cel-shading, so we'd have to dial it back to the other direction.

So, basically, what ended up happening is, Ikeno produced a series of artwork that the tech guys would literally tape to the side of their monitor, and compare them bit-by-bit to make sure that they were doing it right.

This is a lot like what we used to do with 2D games; you'd have a piece of art on the left side of your screen that you actually reproduced on the screen to your right. So it was really kind-of nostalgic for us to work that way again. It was a difficult process, but I think we're happy with the way it's turned out so far.

It's almost embarrassing to say that we had to do it that way. I'm sure Takeuchi and the guys working on Resident Evil 5, there, are very much in tune with the technical side of things.

They're very digital about the way that they do things, and we are a bit more analog, a bit more organic in the way that we did it. So it's almost embarrassing to admit it, but at the same time, the nostalgia almost makes us proud to say that that's how we did it, as well.

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

Ah, yes, damn there basically the weekend, and how about the second GameSetLinks dealing with game shirts in a row, since those slightly amazing 2D Boy/EGP/Chronic Logic shirts seem to have popped up in some Target stores?

Somewhat blown away by the esoteric links that made that happen - I was talking to the Kyles about it at the Indie Game Summit - but they look really cool, and it's probably the widest big-box store distribution of indie games so far, apart from the IGF-licensed compilations, perhaps - so go support them, and put sightings in comments, perhaps? And now, the news:

2D Boy:'Sexy Indie Game Shirts!'
World Of Goo and Gish game/T-shirt combos in... Target? Only $12? Mind officially blown.

GameSpot News: 'Introducing... Press Spotting'
Kyle Orland sorta re-does his GameDaily Media Coverage column - now written by Gus Mastrapa at GameSpot - complete with hilariously telegraphed GameSpot editor's note about spin-controlling Gerstmann-Gate. Still, Kyle can be trusted to do the right thing.

They Told You Not To Reply - Washington Post Security Fix
The owner of DoNotReply.com cited here is OldManMurray's Chet, who works at Valve on Left 4 Dead and others, hee.

VH1 Game Break: Sayonora: The Last Game Break Column
Aw, sorry to see it go, it was a tad quixotic and under-read but interesting nonetheless.

Temple of the Roguelike - » Blog Archive » 2008 7DRL results are in
7-day Rogue-creating challenge done! Lots of odd and playable variants here.

Arthouse Games critiques Rod Humble's 'Stars Over Half-Moon Bay'
My boss lives in Half-Moon Bay, coincidentally.

MTV Multiplayer » Sex, Violence And Video Games: Developing For A Worldwide Audience Is A Confusing Minefield
Good piece interviewing Randy Pitchford, others.

Infogrames - Letter Of Employment (Dave Perry, Shiny)
This was at the Shiny acquisition stage, we presume - via Perry's delicious feed, must have been Googling himself!

Experts State: Do Not Banish - Instead, Manage Violent Video Game Play — Open Education
The third in a three-part series (scroll down), with more analysis on Grand Theft Childhood.

Crayon Physics Deluxe, an ingenious video game that looks like it was designed by a third-grader. - By Chris Baker - Slate Magazine
Indie goodness alert! I was interviewed for this but sadly, Slate editors don't like me.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Microsoft's XNA Creator's Club (pictured) is just one new Western-originated platform with the potential to democratize game development. But whither Japan for an indie console renaissance? Japanese-based game developer JC Barnett argues Japan's corporate culture may not be positioned to allow such sweeping changes.]

If we allow ourselves to be swept up in the hype of Microsoft's (and to a lesser but no less real extent Sony's and Nintendo's) advances towards amateur and independent game development, it would seem we are on the verge of a new era in console gaming where any person with enough of an idea and the chutzpah to work at it can create and release a title over one of the major networks.

This is a situation not uncommon on the PC side of the gaming fence, and even the console world has had its dalliances with initiatives like Sony's NET Yaroze.

But this time, with the release of so many free tools and cheap engines, it really seems anybody can live "the dream" and give the big publishers a run for their money in all areas, from creativity and innovation to downright niche market pandering.

Though it's too early to talk of shockwaves reverberating around the globe, it has at least caused enough of a stir to be noticed in Japan too. In the wake of GDC, Nikkei reporter Shin Kiyoshi writes [in Japanese] of the "democracy of innovation" spurring on the U.S. game industry, and mentions big hitters like Crayon Physics and World of Goo.

He then goes on to paint a rather bleak picture of the Japanese indie scene, despite the inclusion of an "indie category" in the Tokyo Game Show's game awards, which usually includes a mobile phone title or two.

Japan - Missing Out On The Indie Wave?

Shin points out that the burgeoning amateur and indie development scene is helping push the creativity and competitive edge of the U.S. market to an extent that pushes Japan's own industry even further behind the curve. And Kiyoshi is certainly not the only one to have noticed this; more and more Japanese pundits and developers are, sometimes with only basic grumbling acceptance, noticing the growing gap between the two cultures.

And though there is some amateur game development in Japan, it is almost negligible: it certainly isn't allowed to encroach upon the established industry thinking that once made Japan a great nation of video gaming but is increasingly turning it towards mediocrity and obsolescence, save for a single digit number of exceptions.

Much has been written about the communal nature of Japan's national spirit, as opposed to the drive for individual excellence, and it's true that there are far fewer Japanese willing to suffer the risks of independence, favoring instead the increasingly tenuous security of a full-time job at (preferably) a large corporation.

But economic factors, too, help dampen the entrepreneurial spirit in Japan, which was recently ranked second worst of all developed countries with a staggeringly low rate of start-ups and new business ventures. With pretty much zero government support and the unwillingness of banks, still suffering the debts of the decades after the economic bubble burst, to invest in or lend to risky business ventures. The "terror" buzzword on Japanese television is "subprime", with countless hours of program time devoted to the massive negative effects the American economy can have on Japan, which is not helping create an atmosphere of positivity and hope.

A Lack Of Startup Culture?

Whereas there seem to be several new, independent start-ups for every major corporate merger in the Western game industry, in Japan we just see an increasing conglomeration of faltering businesses trying to find solace in umbrella corporations, safety in numbers, with almost no new companies to fill the gaps at the bottom.

Whenever new companies are formed it is usually instigated by industry veterans who have gone the accepted route of corporate ladder-climbing, have a proven track record and start their own businesses with either a personal fortune or heavy investment from their former masters or publishers.

It is almost unheard of for a group of young turks to start up and “give the establishment what for”, which perpetuates the cycle of complacent development practices which has caused Japan to lose the lead over the last few years.

Aside from the cultural disposition towards individual risk, there are other factors halting the progress of young talent into their own business. Language barriers are by far the most problematic, with a lot of the tools, engines and information, so readily available to all keen amateurs in the West, presented mostly, often exclusively, in English.

Is XNA Relevant For Japan?

The potential of Microsoft's XNA Creator's Club also has a more obvious problem in Japan with the console's failure to win any significant market share. That isn't to say it is enough to stop the hobbyist in Japan creating games that can be enjoyed in the West, but here again the cultural divide is an issue with localization and niche game development making crossing the gap a lot more troublesome.

Though a certain segment of American audiences may be very interested in scrolling shooting games, beat 'em ups or even amateur dating sims, Japanese bedroom developers would have to present the game in a language their audience can understand, which, without publishers' localization support just isn't going to happen.

As it stands it is up to corporations like Microsoft and their slightly baffling and expensive (though welcome) support for the ailing Japanese market to organize XNA Creator's Club events and competitions. Though the number of entrants is low, compared to the West, the quality of the projects seems high, showing that there is talent in Japan.

Yet the way corporate life is expected to unfold, people like these are slated to be hired into the machine and set to work as a junior, following the design of the established auteur until possibly 20 years of hard graft later, they might get their own shot at fame and freedom.

Young talent with enough insight would probably rather move to the U.S. where their skills will be able to be nurtured more effectively and where the rewards seem more commensurate - rather than alleviate Japan's struggling and shrinking pool of suitable applicants from which companies are having a hard time finding new recruits.

Conclusion - Some Possibilities For Growth?

Now more reports of the status of Japan's game development industry are arising, each painting a bleaker picture than the preceding one, it comes as no great surprise that the lack of independent, bedroom developers isn't doing the community as a whole any favors. Acceptance truly is the first step towards a cure, but there seems to be little indication of any support for young entrepreneurs.

As with most things, the problems are numerous and a solution will take time and a lot of effort on many different fronts. Like some Western companies possibly some Japanese developers could do their bit in fostering young talent and an aggressive economic push by government organizations could help people set up their own businesses.

From the West's point of view Japanese support for engines and tools would be an immense boon, but may be more effort than it is ultimately worth. As it is we must rely on larger corporations, for example Capcom, to change their ways to mimic western development sensibilities and hopefully stretch that initiative to include a support system for young talent in much the same way Valve let a bunch of game students create the surprise mega-hit of 2007. But don’t hold your breath.

In the end, Japan's corporate and cultural life simply doesn't sit well with the idea of democracy of innovation. The young play and enjoy themselves, the middle-aged work hard and long, the older, established talents rule with iron fist. Young arrogance is frowned upon, old wisdom is respected.

Keen youths willing to strike out on their own will find no help from government or banks and will have a hard time being taken seriously by publishers until they've personally lead a 500 man team to making a million selling console hit. Let's hope Microsoft continues to support the Japanese indie scene, with any luck forcing Sony and Nintendo to do likewise. Japan has talent, just no real systems to nurture it properly and effectively yet.

[JC Barnett is a pseudonym for a previous GameSetWatch/Gamasutra contributor and a Western developer working in Japan - his Japanmanship weblog regularly runs articles such as this.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

['Quiz Me Quik' is a new weekly GameSetWatch column by journalist Alistair Wallis, in which he picks offbeat subject in the game business and interviews them about their business, their perspective, and their unique view of life. First up - the Czech Republic's SCS on their odd success with... truck/bus driving sims?]

There's a few things that make game developer SCS Software a tiny bit different: firstly, the company's based in the Czech Republic, making it one of a relatively small band developing out of that country. But more unlikely still, there's the focus on trucking games - an odd niche genre, to be sure, but one that's proved pretty surprisingly lucrative for SCS.

The company formed back in 1997, and released Rocky Mountain Trophy Hunter III in 2000. For years before that, though – before SCS was officially formed, even – the group worked on an engine: Prism3D. 2002 saw the release of Hard Truck: 18 Wheels of Steel, the first of five Wheels of Steel games from SCS.

The company's latest title, Bus Driver was released late last year. It's fairly self explanatory kind of game, described amusingly by The Escapist as “the bus driving simulator that lets you drive a bus” - here's a demo video from YouTube, surprisingly reminiscent of Japanese regulation-heavy titles like 'Densha De Go' for trains.

So sure, there's a bit more to it than, say, Desert Bus, and while it's received criticism from some that it's watered down the, uhh, 'level of simulation' expected from SCS, reviews have generally been positive.

More recently, the game was picked up by publisher Meridian4 for retail release in the US and Australia in May, and that's how we got to speak to SCS Software CEO Pavel Sebor about the company, its history, and about the unlikely success of Bus Driver

GSW: Was there a clear idea of the kinds of games the company wanted to make when it was formed? Were you always aiming to get into the... bus driving game niche?

Pavel Sebor: Back in 1997, when the original group of programmers officially formed the SCS Software partnership, our business model was supposed to be 3D engine development and licensing, with focus on FPS genre games. With the various challenges, obstacles and hard-to-refuse opportunities along the way since then, the company has evolved and changed quite a bit.

GSW: Is there a local market for your games, or are you generally aiming for an international audience?

PS: The local market is too small. All the studios in the country are concentrating on games to be published internationally to recoup the development costs.

GSW: Is piracy an issue in the Czech Republic, even for the kind of games you make?

PS: Before and just after the fall of the so called Iron Curtain, the piracy was pretty much 100%. The situation has changed dramatically since then, and it is approaching the rates of Western Europe. Which is still far, far from ideal, especially for PC games. For a small studio like us, piracy hurts us a lot.

Judging by our server logs and the amount of traffic on our websites, we know that our truck games are played by an order of magnitude more people than there are paying customers. This of course vastly affects our ability to re-invest what we make into new game projects. Sales of our games are the only source of financing of new projects for us.

GSW: How big is the market for truck/bus simulators? Were you surprised by this?

PS: It is a niche market for sure. For a few years, this market looked pretty stable, large enough to sustain a small developer like us year after year, but the situation is changing now.

With the PC games retail market in the US shrinking fast, there is less and less shelf-room for non-triple-A games available, and there may come a point when the retailers will simply refuse to stock our games.

We need to alter our business model, and just as everybody else these days, we are experimenting with digital distribution as an alternative. It complements boxed games sales nicely, but it will take more effort to make it sustainable on its own.

GSW: What has the reaction to Bus Driver been like in the year since its initial release?

PS: Much to our own surprise, Bus Driver has been picking up pace over time. When we created it, we thought that the audience for a game about buses would be only a small fraction of the established pool of trucking sim fans. We knew the potential was there, but we doubted that a hardcore bus sim could sell in decent volume.

So the decision was made to make it more kid friendly, to hopefully expand the audience, even if we upset the hardcore sim purists a bit. So far, this bet has proved right.

GSW: What do you feel its target audience is, then?

PS: First and foremost it is anybody taking interest in buses, regardless of age. Feedback that we have received from the customers so far suggests that we have addressed this audience perfectly when it comes to 8-12 years age group, but our older customers would prefer the game to include more simulation features.

GSW: Do you think its sale on American store shelves in the coming months will greatly affect its number of sales?

We certainly hope so! From a promising start in digital distribution, we have picked European countries retail distribution one by one, and almost everywhere, sales were above expectations. The game has just been released in Spain, and France is going to follow shortly. This will pretty much cover all major European markets. Now with Northern America and Australia covered, too, we hope to repeat the same formula.

GSW: How challenging was it to develop a title based purely on rigid, regulation and schedule-based bus driving and still keep it an enjoyable experience? I notice even Meridian4 marketing director Steve Milburn admitted – in a press release, no less - he was dubious about the game prior to trying it.

PS: It certainly wasn't an easy process coming up with the gameplay that we have now. When we started working on the game, we were not sure whether to make it a game for what we assumed was a smaller but hardcore and very vocal simulation fans group, or whether to try to make the game appealing to a broader, younger audience. We thought that we could do both at the same time, but eventually we had to pick just one angle.

GSW: Here's the burning question in the world of bus sims - how do you feel about the criticism that the game should have included an "in-bus" view?

PS: We are probably losing some sales because of it. In-cabin view is a repeatedly requested feature, we have been getting several e-mails asking for it every day since the game was released. The game's ambition was never to be a really deep simulation, but many people expect it to be.

GSW: Are there plans for expansions or sequels to Bus Driver?

PS: I am not making any promises, but we may revisit the theme again. When it comes to it, we owe it to our sim-oriented fans.

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

Ah, a good collection of GameSetLink-age here, headed by Kotaku's Michael McWhertor (who gave us much moral support on the GameSetApparel project) starting up his own Meatbun.us game T-shirt store - with awesomely geeked-out game tees to the fore.

Oh, and before we get going tonight - are there any GSW readers who are based in Las Vegas and available to go to events a) next week during the week or b) next weekend and write up some notes for us? There's a couple of non-major but intriguing events going on - ping us if you're around. And onward:

Crispy Gamer: 'Backseat Driver'
This is a good piece, why call the anon developer 'GameCynic' though? Just seems prejudicial to start with.

the-inbetween.com: [ Crystal Castles vs Chiptunes]
Good piece on the state of the bleep.

YouTube - Mahalo Daily on Game Boy Music
Veronica Belmont strikes again! Bleep report.

Academic writing on video games? | Ask Metafilter
This is a pretty good rundown of interesting writing, though it's not all 'academic', as such.

CGDC5 Finalists are up!: Jay is Games
A very, very neat set of games.

Kotaku: 'Meat Bun: Steamy Hot Game Shirts + Mike'
Very fun from Mr. McWhertor - I wholeheartedly support alt.game T-shirt fun.

Water Cooler Games - Review of I Can End Deportation
Extremely interesting.

Scents and Sensibility: Books: The New Yorker
Another example of just beautiful writing that transcends all boundaries - more of this in gaming, plz.

Gism Butter » Blog Archive » Great Haul At the Flea Market
Mm, game hunting is the most delicious of sports.

MTV Multiplayer » Do These Freshly-Baked Cakes Get You Excited For EA’s ‘Dead Space’?
Yes they do, MTV News, yes they do.

No More Heroes is not punk « schlaghund’s playground
'Travis Touchdown (and No More Heroes with him) is the indictment of a culture that has lost sight of the potential for that deeper meaning behind a thick wall of decadent and indulgent entertainment.'

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

['Roboto-chan!' is a fortnightly column, sometimes by a mysterious individual who goes by the moniker of Kurokishi. And sometimes not. The column covers videogames that feature robots and the pop-cultural folklore surrounding them. This edition covers the problems with releasing games outside the cultural cocoon they were created within.]

Senko no Ronde is a game that has caused a fair amount of confusion since it’s Western release on the 360. The traditional shoot-em-up fans think it’s awful, whereas the Virtual On crowd seem to be fine with it. Ultimately, the problem with it is the absence of the pop cultural mythos that gave it context within Japanese arcades, as it’s not trying to be either a shoot-em-up nor a Virtual On clone (though it does bear similarities with the latter).

Like many mecha games it’s trying to give form to something that has never actually existed in the real world. The issue is that without the understanding or knowledge of this inspiration the game is caught partially with its mechanical pants down. This is not to say that Senko no Ronde is unplayable without knowing its functional roots but the learning curve is made far more obtuse than it was actually intended.

Believe in the Sign of Zeta

With a game like Portal, where you are placed in the first person and expected to shoot portals in walls that you can walk through, the objectives are pretty much implicit. The viewpoint and the genre of FPS as whole is probably one of the most inclusive out there, as what you see is literally what you get.

When G.rev released the first iteration of Senko no Ronde in Japanese arcades, the gaming userbase already had a handle what it was trying to pull off and so took to the game without the confusion as to what its objectives were.

So what is Senkou no Ronde riffing off then? Well, like Virtual On, the main influence for the lateral and planar movement in relation to another opponent most closely resembles the mobile suit combat in the 1987 anime TV series Zeta Gundam. This meant that in Japan there was already a visual familiarity in terms of the movement and pacing that’s present in Senko no Ronde’s combat.

Admittedly, Senko’s approach is more comprehensive in terms of its viewpoint (as in top down and covering both players) but that’s a concession to the arcade beat-em-ups of yore. Yet even with this visual shift, the functional element remains very familiar.

It’s ironic in some sense that Virtual On’s influence was the same as Senko’s but the interpretation was wholly different, as in third person and sans the whole danmaku styling. It’s why the common thread of distinct vectored dashes is prevalent in both though, as Zeta Gundam and Yoshiyuki Tomino’s influence is something that has shaped mecha gaming for close to quarter of a century.

Idealistic Name Changes

What does this mean when something Senko bridges the cultural divide and lands in the West? Well, the first thing that happens is a name change to make it more palatable to the average Western gamer.

The new moniker of “WarTech” may sound facile but it served a purpose; it insinuated the fact that this game will probably allow you to shoot things with guns (something the cover art emphasized further with a large gun taking up a sizable portion of it). Now shooting things with guns is a common thread in terms of the gaming medium in the West. Unfortunately, the name alone couldn’t explain the rest of Senko’s cultural baggage, which is where the problems started.

The name change was a naive one as it over simplified what Senko was actually offering to the player. Instead of packaging the game in a manner that was culturally palatable, it would have made more sense to have just gone with it. As one of the main problems that faces mecha games in terms of their marketing is that they are forced into cultural niches where they don't fit.

The irony is that this is done with the best intentions, as often the people trying to bring these games over to the West want them to be successful. If they just exposed the games in their natural state to the public their would be cumulative cultural boon towards the genre.

Unfettered Access

That aside, minus the mecha mythos propping Senko's functionality up it was quickly misjudged as a traditional shoot-em-up, as the bullet patterns look like a Cave-esque dodge-o-thon, right? Actually, no as the bullet patterns and large bosses were a visual throwback to G.rev's shooter background. The main meat of the game was about fixed dashes and wrong footing your opponent to that effect. Something that was spearheaded by Virtual On but originally inspired by Zeta Gundam.

The big difference between the two is that Senko's approach is more akin to Zeta's original implementation. Whereas Virtual On was very rigid and had multiple obstacles littered throughout the arena, Senko is far more tactile in terms of the dashing and the environments are completely clear of obstruction. The latter harking back to the space based combat seen in Zeta.

The problems arise when, without the familiarity and subsequent interest in a series such as Zeta Gundam (and all it's multitudinous progeny) Senko comes across as being a bit rubbish. In the same way my mother isn't interested or knowledgeable about cars, she subsequently has no time for games like Forza or Gran Turismo. Senko has a similar predicament, though amplified by the fact that outside of Japan mecha isn't really part of our everyday pop-cultural make-up.

There isn't an easy or quick fix for this, as in Japan it's taken half a century of incessant mechanical bombardment from manga to anime and now games for any of it to take hold. All that can be done, is to afford the public an unfettered access to the genre as a whole. Something this column, in its very small way admittedly, does its best to contribute towards.

[Kurokishi is a humble servant of the Drake forces and his interests include crushing inferior opponents, combing his mane of long silvery hair and dicking around with cheap voice synthesisers. When he's not raining down tyrannical firepower upon unsuspecting peasants in his Galava aura fighter he likes to take long moonlight walks and read books about cheese.]

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

[Are writers a necessary part of game development? In a striking counter to current industry thinking, game designer Adam Maxwell (Auto Assault) argues that they are not, drawing on his own experiences to state that they are always better replaced with another designer.]

There is no doubt in my mind that it was my skills as a writer that opened the door to my becoming a game designer. It was 1997 and a designer from the Warcraft II team had left Blizzard to join another ex-Blizzardite in creating a new studio.

They had a 3-game deal with Activision and an idea in mind to create a paradigm breaking RTS game, called Third World, but what they lacked was someone who could write their documents for them. I wasn’t technically hired as a writer, but rather an assistant designer. This would prove to be a decision that I am eternally grateful.

Had I been hired simply as a writer that would have been the end for me. You see, that studio imploded very shortly thereafter, but it’s not that implosion that would have doomed me -- as a designer I survived. No, what would have doomed me is the simple, and some would say sad, truth: There is no places for writers in our industry.

Writer Vs. Designer?

When we discuss of the role of the writer, we have to be clear. There is a huge amount of writing in game design -- and good writers tend to make better designers (all else being equal) -- but being a writer doesn’t automatically make one a game designer. Writers do not dictate the way players interact with the world, nor do they dictate the way the player experiences the content that they themselves may create. These are the responsibilities of the game designer.

A writer might create the characters, and a writer certainly architects the plot of a game’s story, but the work a player actually sees and consumes? That is the work of the designer, even when the writer has written the dialogue, decided the plot, created every character and conceptualized every setting. There’s a critical reason for that, a reason that is perhaps the most compelling fact behind avoiding writers:

The work of the writer is inherently linear – the work of the designer is typically not.

When a writer sits down to build a story, they are usually building a plot. Most games certainly have plots, so you might be asking yourself why a writer wouldn’t be useful. After all, an experienced and well-educated writer will know everything there is to building a plot, and games could certainly benefit from better plots, right? I couldn’t agree more, but I’m afraid that it’s something of a leap to go from there to, “the person to architect a game’s plot is a writer.”

Plotting On Games Vs. Films

Now, I’m not going to talk about methodology specifically, but a writer expresses the plot by putting together scenes. Scene A leads to scene B, which leads to the climax in scene C and finally to the resolution in scene D. By placing particular scenes in a particular sequence, the writer’s plot is fed to the reader in such a way as to evoke the emotional response desired by the writer.

This is why the writer’s work is linear -- the writer’s power depends on the sequence of events. It is why a writer’s work is so powerful, at least in static media. It’s also why Roger Ebert thinks games can never be art. In Ebert’s mind, this inherent authorial control is what makes art of other media. I mention Ebert’s opinion because there is one small grain of truth implied by it: This type of authorial control is not something native to video games.

It exists, I don’t deny it, but where it exists it does so because it has been enforced. Special effort has to be made to accommodate it; in the early history of gaming new technologies had to be created to enable it at all, in fact. Video games, abstracted beyond the specifics of any one genre or title, do not require this authorial control to be considered such, do they? Pong is certainly a game, but what about Final Fantasy VII, or Bioshock?

Both are certainly games, but there’s something else there, something that makes what are otherwise two mundane examples of gaming stand out. Their stories. Now, one could make a case for the story making those games better, but if you look at the games themselves, You see games hamstrung repeatedly to allow for storytelling mechanics.

To many, Final Fantasy VII is reviled as the game that introduced us to interminable cinematics, boring exposition dialog and pointless interruptions to the gameplay. Bioshock’s railroaded experience is such because of the story. I don’t think I’d have played Final Fantasy VII without the story, but Bioshock? Done as a sandbox game, I might still be playing it now. Of course, it would all depend on the implementation, but that’s where designers come in.

How Do Writers Help?

And that’s something you can never say about a writer. No matter how well written, a story can’t make the game better. It can make the game more memorable, perhaps, but when it comes to playing the game, to interacting with the world presented within, a writer has no real power. To have any effect in that realm of what we do, the writer would essentially have to be a designer or at least have the knowledge, skills and sensibilities of one.

So, when I wonder about the place a writer has in our industry, I have to ask myself a simple question: “What does a writer give me?”

Good characters, interesting plots and memorable worlds? Evocative emotional experiences, wouldn’t you say? I would, but when I come to that conclusion, I ask the next question: “Is any of that necessary to make a good game?”

Sadly, the answer is no. So then I start to wonder about what designers give us. Designers give us puzzles to solve, worlds to explore, new ways to interact and above all, new games to play.

Despite my love of the written word and the way I tend to identify myself as a writer, I have to admit that when it comes time to add to the team of a project I’m on, I would rather have another designer than a writer.

Writing may have gotten me my first gig in this industry, but it’s my skills as a designer that have kept me in the industry for as long as they have. That I can write certainly makes me better at what I do, but I have to admit that it is, in the parlance of my world, a bonus stat, not a primary one.

An extra designer on your team can mean the difference between 8 levels and 12 or between 10 hours of content and 15, or the difference between a 60 and an 80 on Metacritic, and this is true whether your game has a story or not. Designers bring fresh perspectives that could bring with them innovations in your game… but what about writers?

How Writers Do Help!

Writers are at their best when they can write stories. That means there are whole market segments of our industry where writers are only somewhat useful.

Even in a linear single player experience where story is king -- say an old school RPG, writers alone can’t get your game done; you will need designers to implement game play. In other words -- even on a story heavy game, a designer who can also write is more valuable than a writer alone. This is bad for the pro-writer camp because writers are expensive and often in ways that don’t show up on the books.

Case in point, as a part of my job on Dirty Harry, I met with our writer once a week to discuss the story, his progress in the script, changes we had made to the game that he had to accommodate. It was a great process that really helped the game, but it was also a 3-4 hour event, once a week.

During that time, I was not balancing weapons, implementing core game play systems or overseeing the work of the rest of the team, which was what my job description actually called for.

I’m not saying this time was wasted, but it was time where part of the game design was suffering for the sake of the writer. Games get delayed all the time, I suspect that the example I provided above is one of the reasons why.

Accommodating writers takes time and money that is often unaccounted for because people don’t realize that it takes extra work to integrate the work of a writer into the game, even at the fundamental planning stage.

Mind you, if your game has a story in it, these costs don’t go away if you hire a designer that can write. No, those costs exist either way, but here’s the final nail in the coffin for the writer: What do you do with the writer when the story is done?

Do you fire the writer? Do you pay them to sit around in case the story needs to change? Do you only hire writers on a contract basis? All of those questions have answers that can work, but I wonder why you would bother.

Conclusion: The Denouement

For the same price (sometimes cheaper, I’m sad to say), you can hire a designer who is also an unsung writing hero (they exist in far larger numbers than anyone wants to give the industry credit for) and when the story is done, that same designer can be there to throw his lot into the fire with the rest of the designers and actually make the game fun. He can be re-tasked as needed, and he can be useful at every stage of development.

For those reasons, and maybe even a few more, my money is on the designer over the writer, every time.

[Adam Maxwell is a designer (and writer!) who has worked on games including Auto Assault and Dirty Harry. This weblog post is adapted from an original posted on his personal blog Dopass.com.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (21)

Ah, yes, some more sedate and serendipitous GameSetLinks, and it's particularly notable to see an interview with Dave Gilbert about the 'indie->casual', if you will, of his Playfirst publishing deal (his 'Blackwell Legacy' pictured, left).

It's increasingly notable that the casual crowd is loving or appreciating the kind of games that are perilously close to the character-led, oldschool graphic adventure in terms of story, content, etc - look at Her Interactive's Nancy Drew, for one - and I'm surprised more amateur graphic adventure story creators aren't taking advantage of this. Anyhow, some links:

YouTube - The Legend of N
'A remake of Zelda from start to dungeon 1 end in the game N+ for the XBLA on xbox 360.' Wow. Via IndieGames.

Independent Game Developer Spotlight from 1UP.com
Lots of 1UP's awesome IGF interviews, collated.

Interview with Dave Gilbert, Wadjet Eye Games - Gamezebo.com
PlayFirst's deal with Dave is great - the sophistication of the PC casual market is increasingly being underestimated by, uhh, casual observers.

gameplaywright.net // 'LOTRO: WTS 1 [One Ring, The] 2g PST'
'I shell out money every month to play [Lord Of The Rings Online], because even when players don’t take it seriously, the game continues to admirably strive for a level of sobriety that I find compelling.'

How to Fix the Game Ratings System from 1UP.com
Ah, the full ESRB/Jerry Bonner piece from EGM is now posted.

Free Pixel » Go watch 'Afterworld'
Heard some early hype for this cross-media machinima-ish mini-show, but doesn't seem to have taken off, buzzwise - some interesting comments here though.

CALTROPS -- Article: The Top 100 Indie Games
Gigantic random fun list alert.

The Escapist : Where Things are Hollow
Wait, The Escapist wrote an article interviewing The Escapist's Yahtzee about being famous and beloved? Love you guys, but yep, all a bit self-reflexive.

Rock Band night brings out the fans -- and game's creators - The Boston Globe
"We wanted this to be: get your friends together and go nuts... then," he added, "we want you to buy an instrument and start a real band."

The HarmoNESica
Witty NES cart hack alert! Via Waxy.

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

[The Japanese role-playing game is a surprisingly important genre for developers to study - and big sister site Gamasutra presents an 'Essential 20' - by HG101 star Kurt Kalata - explaining and chronicling the top JRPGs of all-time, from Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger to Xenogears and Shadow Hearts.]

Japanese RPGs that concentrate on narrative and battle systems, favoring storytelling perhaps more than any other genre, actually have more complex roots than many realize, as Kalata explains:

"Two of the most popular games back in the day were Ultima and Wizardry. Although all had followings amongst hardcore Japanese gamers, they were a little bit too uninviting for your average console owners, whose ages skewed a bit younger. Yuji Horii, a developer at Enix, decided to take on an interesting experiment.

By combing the overhead exploration aspects of Ultima (the third and fourth games, specifically) and the first person, menu-based battle system of Wizardry, a new game was born: Dragon Quest. Released for the Nintendo Famicom in 1986, the game became a phenomenon, and went on to inspire dozens of clones. Most of these are best left forgotten, but it did inspire two more notable franchises: Square's Final Fantasy and Sega's Phantasy Star."

With this in mind, Kalata presents a thorough run-down of the top 20 JRPGs of all time and detailed information on each title, including in-depth explanations for each as to why they're worthy of note.

Kalata covers more obvious candidates, like the Final Fantasy series and Chrono Trigger, to somewhat under-exposed fan favorites like Shadow Hearts: Covenant:

"Shadow Hearts is a game of contrasts. On one hand, you have an immensely violent and brooding hero, fighting in a world filled with hellish demons. On the other hand, you have flamboyantly gay shopkeepers, even stranger cast of supporting characters and a real world setting that grossly misinterprets historical figures and events to its whims. The games consist of moments of tragedy intermingled with moments of total ludicrousness.

The first Shadow Hearts -- which was released in American within a week of Final Fantasy X and got totally demolished at retail as a result -- errs a bit too much on the serious side. The third Shadow Hearts, subtitled From the New World, takes place a warped version of 1920s America and conversely errs a bit too much on the wacky side. Sitting beautifully in the middle is Shadow Hearts: Covenant, which balances its tone perfectly."

You can now read the full Gamasutra feature, which contains Kalata's complete top 20 as a journey through the best of JRPGs (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The milieu of digital games has been significantly extended by the Alternate Reality Game, which was pioneered by titles such as Majestic and The Beast, and uses puzzles and clues hidden in webpages and even real-life to entice readers.

UK ARG startup Six To Start, founded by Dan and Adrian Hon - previously at Mind Candy, where they developed the collectible card-based Perplex City, described as "the world’s first commercially successful ARG" - is now embarking on its first projects as a new company.

The first of these is We Tell Stories, a just launched project in collaboration with UK book publisher Penguin, and as the official site explains:

"Penguin has challenged some of its top authors to create new forms of story - designed specially for the internet... Over six weeks writers including Booker-shortlisted Mohsin Hamid, popular teen fiction author Kevin Brooks, prize-winning Naomi Alderman and bestselling thriller authors Nicci French will be pushing the envelope and creating tales that take full advantage of the immediacy, connectivity and interactivity that is now possible."

As an example of this, the first available story from Charles Cumming is "an adrenaline-fuelled adventure written and designed for Google Maps", and is itself inspired by Penguin Classic 'The Thirty-Nine Steps'. In addition to this, the site explains:

"But somewhere on the internet is a secret seventh story, a mysterious tale involving a vaguely familiar girl who has a habit of getting herself lost. Readers who follow this story will discover clues that will shape her journey and help her on her way."

Therefore, I had a chance to chat both to representatives from Penguin and from Six To Start about this unique collaboration - starting with Jeremy Ettinghausen, digital publisher at Penguin:

How did this collaboration come about? Who brought you together?

Jeremy Ettinghausen: We became aware of Dan and Adrian's work at a conference and became very excited about the potential to create a really immersive and engaging storytelling experience. At Penguin we are always interested in taking our authors and ourselves in new directions and to everyone here working with Six to Start seemed like a very exciting opportunity.

How did you collectively end up picking the authors and the classics they would be riffing on?

JE: All of the authors were selected because we felt that they would be interested in trying something new and different and because we felt that they would produce something interesting. The classics were chosen in consultation with the authors.

Are these Penguin authors weirded out by some of the more abstract crossmedia elements, or does it make sense to them?

JE: It's been suprising to me how open the authors were, but I should say that they were chosen on the basis that they might be open to this idea. There were a number of authors who perhaps would have been very weirded out by the concept!

I think that there is a growing number of authors who, far from being at odds with the internet and digital culture, are fascinated by it and see it as an opportunity to do different things with their writing and write different kinds of stories for a different kind of audience. We're thrilled to be able to facilitate this with We Tell Stories and hope that it might lead to other interesting crossmedia projects.

In addition, I caught up with Six To Start co-founder Adrian Hon to discuss the specifics of this new project with him:

This collaboration is obviously quite a lot about 'storytelling'. How do you knit separate stories together to create a coherent whole?

Adrian Hon: It's not easy, especially given that all six stories are completely independent of each other - in other words, you don't need to read one to understand another.

What we're doing is using the ARG to create a meta-narrative that sits above the six stories, occasionally weaving small details into them, that brings them together. But it would be overstating it to say that the six stories form a coherent, thematic whole - other than the fact that they are all adventures into new forms of storytelling online.

Are you expecting the 'normal' ARG coverage and collaboration on sites such as Unfiction, or is this meant to be more of a personal experience than a group-solved device?

AH: We wanted most of the six stories to be personal experiences. That's partly because that's what people are generally comfortable with when it comes to written fiction, and partly because we wanted these stories to be an easy entry into online storytelling.

Having said that, there's at least one story that will be a group experience, but if all of the stories were group experiences, I think we would have raised the bar for entry too high.

There is a 'seventh story' as well, which is more of a traditional ARG with puzzles and live updates, and so I'm pretty sure that the ARG component of We Tell Stories will be covered on Unfiction. I also hope that some of the people who enjoy the six stories might be intrigued enough to investigate the seventh.

Certainly I've seen more than a few people say (approvingly!) that We Tell Stories appears to be a good introduction to ARGs.

The first story looks to use Google Maps in some way - how did you work with the author to make this happen?

What the Google Maps story does is force us to think about the reader experience. While they might not realize it, authors simply don't have to think about this when it comes to books, since they already implicitly know the 'design' of books - it's words on page, divided up into chapters, and you can flick back and forth pages to look at the 'story history', and bookmark pages to keep your place.

The design of books is so great that it hasn't changed for hundreds of years, and so we just don't think about it any more.

When we had the idea for a story based around Google Maps, we knew that it had to incorporate a lot of movement - otherwise what's the point of having a map? So one early idea was a travelogue - a little like Around The World in 80 Days. Another was a thriller, like The 39 Steps. We ended up taking the latter option, due to its frenetic pace, and we asked Charles Cumming, an acclaimed British spy thriller author, to write a story for us.

To begin with, we simply told Charles to 'bake movement in' to the story. However, from early on, it became clear that this was rather trickier than any of had thought; it wasn't enough to have the protagonist walking and driving and flying around the place, they had to do it all the time.

Early drafts of the story saw the protagonist having a very tense discussion for a couple of chapters - riveting stuff - but it was all in one room. Luckily we had a great relationship with Charles and we worked together to incorporate more movement, or references to other locations, in every chapter.

We would often give suggestions about scenes that would fit the design, and Charles was always very open to revising the story and coming up with new ideas. Ultimately, I think it was his flexibility that really made things fit together.

Something that is worth mentioning is that none of the authors we're working with are particularly tech-savvy - some of them are the completely opposite. And while it does help, it only helps up to a point. From my point of view, I can teach an author about technology and interaction, but I can't teach someone how to write.

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

Yikes, time for more calamitously collected GameSetLinks of peril, and this time we're poking at indie fave Cactus (he of Clean Asia!) and friend's new company, Lo-Fi Minds, as well as wandering around the innermost thoughts of David Jaffe.

Elsewhere in this set of oddness - Metaplace launches in mini-form on MySpace, David Hellman shows off some more Braid art, the original progenitor of Gauntlet has a related prototype unearthed, and many others. On to ze linkz:

Lo-Fi Minds - Work in progress
Cactus and Villek's new games, looking awesomely abstracty (one pictured!).

davidjaffe.biz: SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!!....or,er. don't....unless I earn it.
Making a lot of sense here, through the slightly mangled grammar, hee.

Metaplace - (A piece of) Metaplace Launches!
'Today we’ve released the very first Metaplace world on MySpace: Metachat.'

David Hellman » Blog Archive » The Art of Braid, Part II: No Shame in Tracing
Awesome series showing the visual evolution in... visual forms!

Avant Game: The Lost Ring - the alternate reality game for the 2008 Olympics
Official announcement from Ms. McGonigal.

The Brainy Gamer: The Brainy Flamer
And Future just invested in N4G, didn't they? Sigh.

AtariProtos.com - Dark Chambers (Atari 7800)
Interesting because it's an update of the original inspiration for Gauntlet, Dandy - which I didn't know about.

8bitrocket.com: Review: Pinball Hall Of Fame:Williams Collection for the Wii
Just grabbed this for PSP, worth re-iterating - this game is awesome, despite not even being stocked at GameStop.

Eegra: Feature: Kenichi Nishi and Archime-DS Interview (Part One)
The folks behind Chibi Robo and LOL (the American name!) for DS - they're pretty unconventional, in a good way.

Sex & Games: Lighting Warrior Raidy Goes Gold
English-language hentai games get more sophisticated.

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

[As you may have noticed, GameSetWatch daily posting has settled happily into 'one original GSW story, one notable Gamasutra story you might have missed, one link compilation. I like this, and I will beat you up if you do not.

This newly filed Gamasutra story - from Christian Nutt - is notable because, blimey, Intel is coming out blazing against the traditional graphics card folks, and I'm not sure many people have noticed yet - could have next-next gen console ramifications too.]

Intel recently held a key press briefing in San Francisco on its upcoming processor architecture, discussing several of its current and upcoming technologies, including its upcoming Larrabee graphics tech (due in 2009-2010), which has significant ramifications for PC gaming.

Patrick P. Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager, digital enterprise group, delivered the presentation and took questions from the media gathered there as well as over the phone.

He began by discussing the breadth of Intel's ambitions for its IA architecture and "expanding its range further and further" by taking it "much more aggressively into high end computing... to solve scientific problems that have never been addressed before".

The most relevant topics to gaming discussed at the briefing are Intel's new Nehalem microarchitecture, its Visual Computing initiative, and its Larrabee architecture, which will deliver its high-end graphics products to compete with NVIDIA and ATI's products.

Intel's Nehalem architecture, which will begin to ship this year, will eventually form a core of products that will range from notebooks to high-end servers. It's scalable from two to eight cores and compatible with Intel's integrated iGraphics. According to Gelsinger, it has been "designed so that we can produce, very rapidly, different solutions for different market segments."

At this point, Gelsinger began to talk about graphics more concretely. In his (and Intel's) opinion, "as graphics moves away from a traditional polygon model to light physics, global illumination... it needs to not be just a traditional rendering of graphics but the integration of media as well... video and media elements." This shift is answered by Intel's Visual Computing initiative.

Visual Computing

Gelsinger said that "new visual workloads which will define the architecture of tomorrow." Noting that "we've analyzed literally hundreds of workloads, hundreds of core algorithms. It's not a simple problem to design an architecture for that future... one that looks at CPU graphics and media... from mobile up to server systems... the level of performance we can do is just about enough, but we need to scale it from any process point into the future... a rich set of tools and developer support."

Visual Computing seeks to offer solutions for graphics, A.I. and other processing tasks both on the hardware and software side, though currently the company is fairly unspecific on this, noting mainly that "...a complete platform is required. This includes the multi-core CPU, chipset and graphics plus software and associated developer tools."

The Future of Intel's Graphics: Larrabee

But more importantly, the rise of Visual Computing is "the defining thesis of much of the work that's gone into Larrabee," according to Gelsinger. While the Larrabee technology has not yet been demonstrated publically just yet, it will form the core of Intel's products in the graphics market, where it intends to compete against entrenched competitors AMD/ATI and NVIDIA.

What sets Intel apart in this market? Gelsinger suggested, "traditionally caches haven't been effective for graphics... we're bringing our leadership cache technology to this visualization and Larrabee architecture."

He also noted that "when we've talked with software and game vendors... the number one question is, 'What are your tools?' We're going to bring a complete set of tools" including such products as a compiler, debugger and more "when we bring that to the marketplace."

Q&A Time - Larrabee

After discussing Larrabee, the briefing moved into a Q&A session. Gelsinger refused to answer questions about Larrabee from a technical perspective as well -- "Other specifics such as cache size, number of cores, we're not yet saying."

When asked how Larrabee will compete with NVIDIA and ATI's graphics offerings, Gelsinger appeared to suggest that familiarity with Intel's products on the part of programmers might be its advantage. "This next generation of workloads has gotten highly programmable... we have the most successful highly programmable architecture in the industry... let's be the solution of choice for next generation workloads... let's take IA and bring it forward and extend it for these new types of workloads and that's what we're doing with Larrabee."

He contrasted Larrabee against the Emotion Engine and Cell processors, saying that software vendors don't like them, thanks to the "heavy lifting" required. He also mentioned that Larrabee "will be delivered as a discrete graphics product" -- i.e. a graphics card for PCs, as NVIDIA and ATI do with their products.

Gelsinger added: "We've said we're going to have versions of Larrabee for discrete graphics... we're going to compete well in benchmarks like 3DMark and we are going to have to support [standards] like DX and OGL."

He did acknowledge that some of the ideas Intel has about techniques -- such as raytracing and physics -- for programming Larrabee are not currently standard across competitor's products (though he demurred comment on how competitors might respond to Intel's moves.) If Larrabee is a success, "[Intel] expect[s] that... these models of programmability will become standard."

Q&A Time - Integrated Graphics

Returning to the question of integrated graphics, Gelsinger echoed earlier Intel statements on performance. "What we've said, and what the Intel commitment is, is that integrated graphics will be upgraded substantially over '08, '09, '10. We'll do a 10x improvement in the integrated graphics we'll deliver to the market [over that period]."

A question came up about Intel's integrated iGraphics, and what kind of performance they might deliver for gaming -- including DirectX support.

Gelsinger responded that compared to prior Intel integrated graphics, "generally it's going to be a much more aggressive implementation. As we've described already, as we move to leading edge technology... it will be a significant boost in graphics, will be a much higher performance. It will support DX... even though we haven't given any more specifics on what [version] and features. Stripped down? No, it's a major upgrade."

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

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

He's done non-stop interviews, Q&A sessions and media press conferences, but in the three days that IT entrepreneur Allan Alcorn has been in Melbourne to take part in ACMI's Game On exhibition, this is the first time I've seen him physically withdraw from a question.

In a small, crowded Japanese restaurant, Al closes his eyes and places his thick-set hands over his face; and for a long moment he's silent.

It's evident that Al's revisiting a time in his life that has haunted him for the last five decades; a memory so personal that out of simple respect I already know I'm not going to ask him to describe it.

'Honestly,' he says, slowly opening his eyes, and pulling away his hands. 'What scares me is running out of money. I come from a poor family and actually going broke and having to go back to [that] lifestyle...

'I don't want to do that.'

Al's reply confirms something I've long suspected. By creating Pong—the 'world's first successful video game'—Al may well be relegated by media to a particular slice of gaming history and culture, but as far as he's concerned, the achievement and its significance is but a blip on a much larger screen, and neither defines nor motivates him. Al is not a video game designer, a cultural beacon for all things retro and gaming. He is a hacker, a finagler, a ring master and a businessman.

He always has been. And he always will be.

'My wife could tell you that it can be a real problem, but for some reason I see things differently to other people,' explains Al. 'I don't see the same things as them. I'll see what things aren't, and that works well, but not in a social situation. I'll make the wrong connections. I know they're wrong, but they're much more fun than the right ones.

'When I was a little kid, I was always curious about how things worked, so I'd take stuff apart and not put it back together. My neighbor was a repairman at a TV repair shop and I was fixing televisions at a very young age. But even with photography I was, "How does it work? Why does it work?" So I went to the store and bought an old Tri-Cam pack—an old, clunky camera that was almost being thrown away, with film that you couldn't even buy anymore. And I developed it. I read the instructions and figured it out. I wound up taking photographs simply to have something to do in the darkroom and not because I cared about the images. It was just the process.

'I want to know how it works,' Al re-emphasizes. 'I can't understand how some people can drive a car and not understand what's going on in it; why it doesn't go when they ease up on the gas. So that's just been a part of me...'

Al quickly smiles; the look of an uncle about to bestow a gift on a small child.

'Oh yeah,' he says, as a matter of leading. 'I also wanted to know how explosives worked, so we got into that. We got a contact with a big chemical supply company, so it wasn't a problem, and we had everything and did lots of neat stuff. Nobody got injured... Okay, so one guy got injured, but he's still got one eye that works. True!'

'I was always precocious with science,' admits Al, who got into electronics because 'it just seemed really cool'. 'When I first got started I was working with vacuum tubes, then the first transistor came out when I was in Junior High School, so I bought one just to see if I could make it work. I just loved that stuff, and it really helped when I finally did video games and TVs. When we came to [do Pong] it was all, 'Oh, that's not the right way to do it!' But our way was cheaper, so that was how I learned about hacks.

'I've always been a hacker, to that extent,' says Al. 'A hacker to me is defined as somebody who takes something that was built for something else and does something really cool with it. Like taking a computer and using it for games, instead of for something serious, like building bombs. They get mad at you for doing it,' confirms Al, 'but it's more fun.'

If Al sounds like a misbehaving teenager, it's with good reason. Breaking the rules, scamming and 'finagling' (obtaining something that's hard to get by using unfair or unusual methods) has long been a survival technique for Al.

'When I grew up, I came from a relatively poor family,' confides Al. 'My mother and my father were divorced, and I never got an allowance. So I finagled.

'At the age of 17, a friend of mine managed to buy an Aston Martin—this was when the James Bond movie came out. And I was really into photography and knew somebody and got a deal on this really cool, really hot-shot camera. So here I am and we've got this cool camera and I'm driving an Aston Martin and I'm flat broke.

'I remember going to a drive-in movie at the time. We had a Chevy motor in the damn thing and way too much power, and brakes that worked on one side, but not the other. And people would go, "Is that an Aston Martin?"

'"Yeeeup", I said. We're sitting in the lot eating hamburgers and whatever.

'And the guy said, "Is that like James Bond?" And I'd go, "Yeah."

'"Wanna race?" he asked. And I'd go, "No-no-no!"

'We managed to finagle a deal where—get this—we actually had two Aston Martins. One ran, but the other was just a chassis with a motor in it. And the guy who was the manager of the Playboy Club in San Francisco had an Aston Martin, but the motor was shot. So we made money selling him the engine which I had to swap out in his back yard in one day, and I got it to run. So I had all this money and my mother was totally frustrated because she couldn't withhold an allowance, because she wasn't giving me any money to begin with.

'I learned from that: don't tell me we can't do something, just how can I finagle to do it.'

Being resourceful is one of Al's greatest traits; almost every time he talks, it's about taking something and finding a way to make it more valuable. Even—or perhaps, more accurately, especially—Pong.

Despite being released in 1972, Pong is still a doorway, an opportunity to exploit.

'It's great having done it' admits Al, 'because people are like, 'Oh, you invented Pong' and they'll want to talk and listen to me for a minute or two. So it's given me access that I don't deserve sometimes,' says Al, modestly; 'many times.

'People will think that I know a lot about stuff that I don't know shit about and I'll get away with it for while, until they figure it out, or I pick up what they're talking about!'

'It's fun to share and bounce ideas off others' continues Al. 'The best moments for me are when I'm in a small room with a team of really, really bright engineers, that are smarter than me, and we work together to build something that none of us could create, to synthesize something new. I'm lucky I can do that. It's fun. I enjoy it.'

That joy is never more evident than when Al is talking on-stage or being interviewed; when he takes on the role of mythical story-teller, a skilled campfire narrator recounting decades of Silicon Valley history.

'I'm told that for most people, getting up in front of a big audience and talking is one of the most frightening, nerve-wracking things that can happen,' says Al. 'But for some reason I'm at ease getting up in front of a group. It's fun to have people who don't know you like you. And it's fun to tell stories that are true. I'm good at that.'

Indeed, in just the 35 minutes we have together over lunch, Al manages to discuss (among other things) his role in the invention of Firewire, how he sneaked a jug of liquid nitrogen into a fancy hotel and body-tackled an executive vice president of Apple, how financial constraints breed creativity, his disappointment with his slot machine business, his biggest mistake ('turning down founder stock in Apple that Steve Jobs offered me'), why there's no leadership in universities in Europe, how he shared his son's childhood and discovery of the world, and why Stanford University got it wrong with their artificial intelligence research.

All the while, Al name drops more frequently than a gossip mag. Not because he's trying to make himself look good, but because these are the people he associates with. Fortune 500 CEOs, Stanford and MIT professors, think-tank geniuses, revolutionaries and visionaries. Even... cartoon superheroes, such as Space Ghost.

'I was at this classic gaming convention,' explains Al, 'and this guy came up to me and said he was from Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. He said he's got a suite upstairs with a blue screen, and would I mind if he interviewed me for the show. I thought, “What the hell is that?”, but I did it, and he asked me all these weird questions. The next thing I know, my daughter's boyfriend has found it and sent it to me. And, my god, look what they've done to me! I didn't know, but apparently I'm Zorak's father. And my daughter said, “Oh, no! I'm Zorak's half-sister!”

'Honestly, though,' says Al, debunking any idea of being a retro icon, 'in Silicon Valley it's a different thing. It's what you're doing lately. This is old stuff that's interesting, but things are moving so fast. It's the shiny stuff, it's the new stuff that's coming out. It's the whole idea of what's going to be hot, what's cool, what's new, what can be done with the technology.'

For Al, this is invariably where it's at. The cutting edge. The entrepreneurial leap of faith. The place where new technology is able to realize the dreams of the past and the future.

Revisiting the topic of games, Al launches into a passionate dissertation on VR consoles.

'Think about it,' he says. 'Remember Atari in 1983 said that the video game business was over. Everybody thought it was over. But Nintendo said no. And guess what? It's not over.

'Do you know Jaron Lanier? He was the guy who popularized the first VR stuff and put two silicon graphics computers together and lashed it with a glove and goggles and a helmet. And that was a clue. It was really hard to do. But did you play with one of those VR machines?'

Another rhetorical question. One of many to come.

'It was kind of fun,' continues Al, not missing a beat. 'It had a few problems. But how long ago was that? Now here we are, 15 years later, and people aren't looking at it. But what if you could do something, like put a little something on your head, like glasses, and go back to it? When Jaron did it, it required a silicon graphics computer to just do fong shaded shit, nothing technical. Now the Xbox can do better, real world stuff.

'So, wouldn't that be cool? To be able to sit in your chair and play World of Warcraft—or whatever the hell it is—and actually interact like the goddamn holodeck from Star Trek?

'But no-one's doing it because they're too busy working on the next generation of Halo; because of the money they've got invested in Halo.'

There's too much risk for them, says Al. And to do it, 'you'd have to hi-jack the technology'.

'Have you ever tried to write a program for the PlayStation on your own, just for fun?' asks Al. 'It's not something you pull together with just a little basic program. And it's all because of this greedy mentality where they close the box and protect what they do. They limit everything that's going to happen because they think all the wisdom comes from them. Nuh-uh. That's where the Google phone comes in; read up on it. I love their approach, because they say—they actually say—we're going to make an open platform phone and we think we're really smart and we're going to write apps (applications) for it that are better than anyone else's apps. But we also know that we can't do all the best apps, We can't think of them all. So we've got a 10 million dollar prize—no strings attached--that we will pay to the person who writes the best app in the next year for it. Because they want it to be open, they want that to happen, because that's where fucking innovation comes from.

'I think there's gold over there,' says Al, his mind already analyzing the technological and financial possibilities yet again, 'but nobody is looking at it.'

[Drew Taylor works in the games industry in Australia and writes video game culture articles for various magazines and online columns. He's not ashamed to admit that Hackers (starring Jonny-Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie) is one of his favorite films of all time.]

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

Then you'll be wanting English Of The Dead, Sega's latest adorable attempt to extend the franchise beyond breaking point. And that's why it works, really!

Elsewhere in GameSetLinks, there's a little less conversation and a little more action, including an interesting conversation on graphical fidelity in games, a slightly tongue-in-cheek look at game developers popping sprogs, and Italian arcade dreams. So yay:

Seven Degrees Of Freedom: The Breeding Edge
'Yes, you heard right, game developers are not only having sex, they are actually breeding.'

Tale of Tales» Blog Archive » Audio Games for DS Homebrew
We all need a Hyena in our DS.

Ste Pickford's Blog - 'Documentation'
You just can't design a game on paper. You have to actually make the game to design it.

Big Bear Entertainment, animated music video creator, raises $550,000 » VentureBeat
The MTV2 game mod animators - odd that things like this get VC.

NCSX: Zombie Shiki - Eigo Ryoku Sosei Jutsu: English of the Dead for DS
Sega should do language learning in the West this way, too!

NCSX on Edo Culture History - Tokyo educational non-game for DS
'By plugging the Edo Culture card into an NDS, users may take virtual tours, learn about the culture, visit the Edo Museum, and view important landmarks.'

YouTube - Johan Agebjörn featuring Nintendo - Mega Man II
Neat remix video alert - via The New Gamer.

The Ludologist » Blog Archive » Better Graphics, Diminishing Returns
Interesting jumping-off point (a Game Developer article) to discuss graphical fidelity.

Insomnia | Commentary | Untold Tales of The Arcade: Mission Secret
Italian arcade reminiscences: 'It should be clear by now that I'm a bit of a Taito fanboy. I'm also a martini fanboy.'

Short and sweet game | MetaFilter
Cecropia's post-'The Act' Flash game work discussed - also via TNG.

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

[It's always worth listening to what Henry Jenkins has to say, so our correspondent Jessica Maguire was at SXSW recently to transcribe his keynote with 'Everything Bad Is Good for You' author Stephen Johnson - there's some game references but a lot of important wider issues raised here. And sorry, despite the headline, Leeroy isn't actually in here - just playing with y'all. Enjoy!]

Amidst accusations of the dumbing-down of American youth, Henry Jenkins stands as a profound defender of popular culture, and a notable commentator on media and video game-related issues.

The Co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, author of numerous books including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, shared the stage with Steven Johnson, author of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, Everything Bad Is Good for You, and other popular books about emerging technology, for the opening remarks at SXSW 2008.

The Decline Of Youth Culture?

To begin their conversation about the impact of new media and gaming culture, Johnson asked Jenkins about the emergence of books like The Dumbest Generation and the big NEA report about the decline of reading among kids today.

“Never underestimate the desire of parents to see their children dumb,” opened Jenkins. “It’s easy to imagine our children as failures. And they are going into worlds that are unknown to us, and were not a part of our play when we were their age. Kids are early adopters of all new technologies. And they do it outside the watchful eyes of their parents. So there’s a sense of fear among parents. I myself wind up saying everything to my son that I swore I never would as a parent. “

“All it takes is one instance of a Columbine or declining test scores, and we have the making of a moral panic,” Jenkins continued. “Currently we’re focused on IQ and school-based learning. There are new literacies that are not being understood by the older generation. The dominant message in the media is that something is wrong with young people. “

Johnston felt that he’d “like to see empirical measures of those new skills... There are other skills, maybe more important than your ability to read a 400 page novel,” he felt. “Have you seen anything out there?”

Jenkins opined, “The whole structure of assessment has been based on a model that is wrong for these new skills. It starts from the assumption of the individual and autonomous learning. As we move to an era of collective intelligence, the capacity of people is to process knowledge together, to communicate ideas with each other, to pool resources. Nobody knows everything, everybody knows something. It’s a very different model than how we process information in school. If we’re measuring for total mastery over an ever more complex body of knowledge, we’re going to end up with disappointing scores.”

“But what are the skills that allow us to process this information together?” he asked. “Right now, you and I are up here playing the experts. The reality is we all know different things. If you look out into the hall, there is much greater brain power out there than there is up here. And it’s the same thing in the classroom. There’s more in those 30 kids than there is in the teacher. Pooling knowledge is how we work and play today. But it’s not how we do schooling. There’s a fundamental shift in what it is to learn and what it is to know. The MacArthur Foundation is beginning to look at new models. “

Asked Johnson, “Do you ever look at a new technology and think, that is just stupid?”

“It’s a momentary flash in my mind,” admitted Jenkins. “But people don’t do things, in the end, that are meaningless. We may couch potato out sometimes, but that’s meaningful to us as well. So the challenge is to dig in and figure out what is meaningful about it to the person doing the activity. It may not be meaningful to me, but it’s clearly meaningful to the people engaging in it. People aren’t idiots. They do things for a reason. And the reason is usually very interesting. “

Lost vs. The Wire

Almost a non-sequitur, Johnson then asked, “There’s been a lot of popular focus on the success of shows like Lost and The Wire. Which is better?”

“The question is what criteria would we use to evaluate that,” Jenkins asked in return. “Television is many different things. The Wire may be the best show inside the box, and Lost may be the best show outside the box. Everything that happens on The Wire is inside the television. With Lost, most of what happens is taking place through other media – through the ARG, through fan interactions. The complexity of engagement and what the community has brought to Lost makes it a very compelling thing. The Wire may be the last gasp of old school television pushed to its limits. Whereas Lost seems to push us in a new direction in terms of what it is to engage in a television experience. “

“It’s amazing how much time people have,” Johnson added. “One person creates a map from 45 freeze frames – it must have taken 3 days – and they put it in the discussion frame, and then other people chime in with corrections and additions. But the time commitment is amazing. “

“Rather than pathologize that, and say what’s wrong with these people that they spend so much time this way, let’s ask what’s wrong with America that these incredibly intelligent people are given so few opportunities to demonstrate their intelligence in their workplace,” said Jenkins. “Right? And this is what I found looking at fans as a population. A high number of them are pink collar workers. Their jobs require a high amount of education, but their actual work uses only a small part of what they can do. And so most of their intellectually rewarding experience takes place outside of work. Why are those skills so underutilized in the workplaces we’ve constructed?”

“What can we do to harness that creativity to make a better society?” Jenkins then asked. “People are acquiring skills and competencies in their play that are almost immediately being applied to more serious undertakings. We are seeing new models emerge that push us to the next level – a culture of collective intelligence. How do we turn that back into something that enables us to transform the political culture?”

We Are Wizards

“You alluded to fan fiction, and there’s a documentary about that with Harry Potter fans called We Are Wizards,” said Johnson. “You’re in that film, right?”

Jenkins responded, “The Harry Potter phenomenon is a good example of what we’re talking about. Kids are learning to read through Harry Potter. There are also tens of thousands of stories written by young people based on the world of Harry Potter. And they’re learning to social network through Harry Potter. Songs are circulating using MySpace and Facebook – entirely outside of the commercial music sphere. It’s not always very good. But some of it’s really interesting. “

They’re learning to become political through Harry Potter,” Jenkins continued. “When Warner Brothers took action against these fan fictions, one 15 year old girl went on national television and debated studio attorneys about her right to write stories. Articulating and defending fair use. She wound up heading an organization. She said, ‘they went after kids in Poland and Thailand thinking we wouldn’t know, and within hours we knew because we know already know those kids.’ This is a global network of young people who are connecting around the world through their interest in Harry Potter. “

“Then there’s the Harry Potter Alliance informing kids about a variety of issues that affect young people,” followed Jenkins. “The premise is that Harry Potter was a young man who stood up for what he believed in and inspired others to fight for what’s right. The impact of what young people did with that book illustrated the changes in learning I’m talking about. In hunting society, kids play with bows and arrows. In information society, kids play with information. Young people, as they become adept at navigating together, are going to become a powerful force for social change in the world. “

Interactive Media And Urban Centers

“The young people who grew up with these interactive media – what are they like?” Johnson asked. “If you look at the broad demographic trends, they are incredibly good. They are the least violent since the 1950s, they are the most entrepreneurial on record, and the most politically engaged generation since the dawn of the television. Do we have a crisis here or an incredible opportunity? People seem to be more engaged generally than they’ve been since the rise of mass media. The idea that there’s some kind of reason for a moral panic at this time is very strange.”

In response, Jenkins revealed, “At the new MIT Center for Future Civic Media, we are looking at how to build an infrastructure that enables civic engagement. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone describes the way leagues used to bring people together. While waiting your turn, there would be many important conversations. Putnam blames a decline in that kind of civic engagement on the rise of media. I’m skeptical of that. Even if we do blame it on media, there’s a new kind of civic connection taking place through games. Who’s to say video games are not serving that same force that bowling leagues used to provide, where people develop a sense of social responsibility and participation.”

“The challenge is to take that civic engagement back out of those virtual worlds and bring it into our physical neighborhoods,” Jenkins argued. “What is the move from democracy as a special event, where we all feel proud because we went out and voted, to democracy as a lifestyle? Over the last 40 years, there’s been a breakdown of that – not because of the Internet, and not because of television. In part, because the average American moves once every five years.”

“Alvin Toeffler predicted that under those conditions face-to-face relationships would become increasingly disposable,” Jenkins explained. “He underestimated the degree to which we now carry our network with us, like a turtle with his shell. As we move to a society of mobile and network communications, the social connections we invest deepest in are online connections. The challenge is then what does that leave to our cities and towns? How can we enable people to engage with each other at the local level?”

Johnson took the opportunity to describe his recent project: “Our project, Outside.in, is trying to build out the infrastructure for the geographic web. The fear in the 1990s is that no one would want to live in a city again because of the digital revolution, but the opposite has been true. The Internet is actually an urban location enhancing device. At the level of neighborhood and community, people care passionately about what is happening. People have a lot of expertise, a great deal of interest, and that zone is completely uncovered by traditional media.”

“We built Outside.in as a service to help people see those conversations and use geotagging tools to tag different aspects of neighborhoods,” Johnson expanded. “We’re about to launch ‘on my radar’, which is basically the Facebook newsfeed applied to geography. We’ve been working with Yahoo and their new location technology Fire Eagle. It lets you enter your location and get back all the conversations happening within a certain radius. You can zoom out to see the whole neighborhood, the city, etc. So new tools can amplify what local experts on the ground have been doing traditionally by word of mouth. “

“The challenge is how do we harness the community to share information with each other?” asked Jenkins. “One group we’ve underestimated is high school kids. How many kids have LiveJournal accounts, and are learning to write at the same time as we see school newspapers being shut down. And kids are being punished for things they’re saying about administrators on their own private outlets. Young people can contribute to these kinds of outlets, and they want to. How do we give them the tools to do so and free them from a restrictive atmosphere?”

Audience Q&A

The audience Q&A session began with an audience member asking “Do you think the ratio of consumption to production is changing as a result of new media?”

Jenkins responded, “Three years ago the Pew Center for Internet in American Life found that 57% of teenagers online had produced media, and about a third had circulated media they produced to a larger community beyond their family. And that number is growing fast. Some of you know the story of Soulja Boy. There are incredible successes happening as a result of the new technologies. Including the way young people are inspiring each other to create media expressions.”

However, “there is a participation gap,” he warned. “40% of kids do not have access and are not feeling empowered to create. Those inequalities are not just technical. They are social and cultural inequalities. We’re also all finding our way through this digital world without guidance or support. Young people need the involvement of adults. I’m all for giving young people control over their voice. We also need to be sure they are safe. Not so much from Internet predators, but from the difficulties that arise as they explore this new terrain. “

The next question was, “How literally should we take the notion of collective intelligence? What individual skills do you see as useful for relating with others in that way?”

Jenkins offered: “There are two views of collective intelligence. The aggregate model of an average solution, and the one where people share knowledge and arrive at consensus. The latter puts emphasis on diversity. In that model, each individual must have their own expertise and knowledge. It ideally creates mechanisms where we represent all of the perspectives that are brought to the table. It’s like the difference between Wikipedia and YouTube. Wikipedia blends all of what is added. YouTube popularizes a top 100 that tends to be dominated by a white middle class male perspective. Not a lot of diversity at the top.”

“What are your thoughts on cyber-addiction?” came from the audience. “How do we battle it?”

Johnson piped up, “A friend’s sister was dating a guy heavily into Ultima, and she was losing him. One time they were supposed to be going out on a date, and she stuck her head in the door to remind him. He looked up in the dark room and said, ‘Can’t you see I’m getting stronger?!’”

“The question of addiction is a real one, but the minute we use that term we are defining something in a negative way,” felt Jenkins. "It’s more interesting to ask what it is that’s so compelling. What could we do to make other activities that compelling? Translating the mechanisms of video games into real world situations. What manifests as addiction seems to be a larger problem of depression. We also tend to cite examples from China, where the language of addiction is used to control young people’s access to information. They say young people are staying up all night playing video games, when really they are surfing the web to learn about the larger world.“

“How do we balance the tension between the democratic and the commercial?” followed from the audience.

“I’m an optimist, and I believe in participatory culture,” said Jenkins. “But if we take it as a given we’re going to lose it. This is not an inevitability. By holding up a notion of a more democratic culture, we say there’s a world we’re moving toward that could be better. And that gives us a measure against which to critique the real world. We have to go out and challenge the terms we’re given. The terms of participation are up for grabs. We have to hold companies accountable. I believe in the communities, but when communities are commodified and disrespected, then we have to question some of the discourse of Web 2.0. The fact that it’s commercial doesn’t mean we can’t use it, but we have to recognize that the interests of companies and the interests of users are not always the same. “

Johnson concluded, “There’s a tendency to write us off as utopians, but we’re progressives in the classical sense. Rather than look at all the flaws in the world, we want to look at the reasons for hope and the positive trends; to encourage the trends that are potentially empowering.”

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Ah, yeah - a week's worth of RSS concatenated into the latest GameSetLinks, and the colorfully titled Grand Theft Childhood book - actually expressing some sane views, we've heard - is one of the things discussed below.

Also notable is Capcom being relatively honest about Xbox Live Arcade costs and suggesting that $10 is a _big_ rough to actually make money with its 2D update of Bionic Commando. It may be too late to change the price up, but we can at least make everyone aware that it's an issue, mm? Links are here:

EngRish Games blog
A Japanese indie gamer trying to point out/translate Japanese titles for us non-native speakers - via The2Bears.

Capcom reveals price for Bionic Commando | XBLArcade.com
'The poll says $10 so that’s what it will be. Since the title will have to do quite well at that price point to break even... I guess we have to roll the dice and see where they land.'

IndieGames.com - The Weblog - Flash Game Pick: Questionaut (Amanita Design)
Amanita Design (Samorost) + BBC + education = wonderful Flash game.

Valiant Entertainment - Brett Ratner working on 'Harbinger' movie
Interesting because Valiant used to be owned by Acclaim (see: Shadowman, though not Turok), was bought out after Acclaim's bankruptcy.

Pro Wrestling Roundup: John Cena Has His Own NES Pro Wrestling Shirt
Cena is known to be a video game geek, I believe - this seals the deal.

PC World: Game Myths Debunked: Grand Theft Childhood
Discussing a new Harvard-authored book on the subtleties of video game consumption and kids.

Brand Week: Pontiac Evokes Nostalgia in New Campaign
Some of the reasoning behind that new Spy Hunter-inspired ad.

Vancouver Sun: 'Inside the EA Magic Factory'
Apparently it's a factory where they make magic!

Jim Flora :: Fine Art Print :: Manhattan
Completely random, but wouldn't it be cool to see a game using this art style?

Retro Sabotage: Dysfunctional time machine - Flash Games [ver.9.0 req.]
This is very surreal Flash game pastiche territory.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Having just got the new issue of Game Informer magazine with Alpha Protocol on the cover, I was very interested to spot an ad for O3 Entertainment's Chaos Wars, which SiliconEra has been discussing for a while.

It's coming out in April now for PS2 - there's a pre-order page on GameStop's website. This is actually a pretty obscure product - as the Wikipedia page explains:

"Chaos Wars is a crossover between several companies' console role-playing game series: Aruze's Shadow Hearts, Atlus's Growlanser, Idea Factory's Blazing Souls, Gakuen Toshi Vara Noir, Spectral Force, Spectral Souls and Hametsu no Mars, and RED Entertainment's Gungrave and Samurai Police/Shinsengumi Gunrouden."

But yet it's managed to get a U.S. release on PlayStation 2, and that's part of an interesting trend. As the PS2 hardware has matured, but continued to sell (heck, it managed 350,000 units in the U.S. in February), we seem to be seeing SCEA relax its concept approval on casual titles and Japanese niche games alike.

Time was it that standalone 2D games wouldn't make it out on PlayStation 2 - difficult to work out what was actually permitted, since there are some extravagant rumors, but it certainly seems that titles like Arcana Heart wouldn't have made it out previously. And now it has.

So here's my brief list of some neat North American PS2 titles of recent and upcoming vintages that might appeal to the hardcore GameSetWatch geek. I have almost certainly missed some, so that's what the comments are for:

- Arcana Heart (PS2, Atlus, April 2008)
"A 2D arcade fighting game developed by Examu (formerly Yuki Enterprise)... the game features an original all-female cast (each a variation of the moe Anime-Girl archetype), and after choosing a character the player chooses an "elemental alignment" which determines the character's special moves."

- Taito Legends 2 (Destineer, May 2007)
"Taito Legends 2 is a follow-up collection of... Taito arcade games for the PlayStation 2 [including Cameltry, Cleopatra Fortune, Elevator Action Returns, and a host of others]... Bonus content includes hints, cheats and tips for most games, original game flyers, and one interview with Taito."

- King Of Fighters XI (SNK, November 2007)
"The latest installment of The King of Fighters series. The game continues the story of The King of Fighters 2003." But also see a host of others, including Neo Geo Battle Coliseum, World Heroes Anthology, Fatal Fury Battle Archives, and more. SCEA sometimes allowed compilations of SNK 2D titles before, but it definitely seems like they are getting more friendly as resources shift to Wii and next-gen consoles.

- Heavenly Guardian (UFO Interactive, February 2008)
"The successor to the cult favorite Kiki KaiKai series, known more commonly as Pocky & Rocky in North America. It is not precisely the Kiki KaiKai 2 sequel that had previously been announced and canceled - however it is developed by the same company, Starfish SD, and has been described as a "spiritual successor" and is allegedly "very similar" to the cancelled game according to Kiki Kai World's publisher, UFO Entertainment."

Some alternatives might include Baroque, Mana Khemia, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core, Persona 3 FES and a host of others. Again, it's not as if these titles all wouldnt have been released before. But in a time that a lot of people are concentrating on the 'next-gen experiences', it's great to see some exquisitely niche PlayStation 2 titles - often with wonderfully crafted gameplay - flowing into the West.

Sure, these are niche games which may only sell 10,000 or 20,000 copies, but with the titles already produced for the Japanese market, and with Japanese game developers increasingly targeting the Western market - the more that hardcore gamers such as ourselves support them, the more we'll see of them. So get to buying!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Being a packrat is a dangerous thing. Don't worry -- my place is not a mess, overrun with stacks of magazines to the point where you can't navigate it anymore. Everything's still nice and neat; I can still keep a facade of normalcy as long as I don't show guests my home office/ferret habitat/magazine room.

But I've worried that I'm picking up a new hobby, one that I don't really need right now. I stop by used bookstores almost whenever I pass one, and lately I've been buying whatever $1 Choose Your Own Adventure books they have.

I do this for the same reasons I collect magazines and collected video games before that -- part nostalgia (I devoured these things as a grade-schooler), part gotta-catch-em-all psychology, part sheer nerddom. Now I'm even starting to peruse eBay and AbeBooks for deals on CYOA and other gamebook series. (I have a strict policy -- don't pay more than a buck for anything -- and so far it seems workable.)

Is this the plight of the geek? The desire to collect stuff of no vital value? Where does it end? In my case, it ends once I run out of shelf space -- which, sadly, I still have a lot of. Could be worse, I suppose -- I could have a taste for all those $60-and-up anime figurines I write about all the time for my magazine. As shelf filler, gamebooks give you far more bang for the buck. (PS: You got any extras, drop me a line at kevin@piqmag.com. Wait, don't. You'll just be encouraging me if you do!)

Anyway, click on for my views on all the new US game mags of the past fortnight. Big things are happening this month (except to book sizes, those are still small) -- nearly all the mags are livid with GTA4 coverage, but one stood out above the rest...

Electronic Gaming Monthly April 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Grand Theft Auto IV

This is the first EGM that reflects the new editorial changes around the Ziff offices. All the editors in ZD-land -- sorry, the 1UP Network -- have been consolidated into "one super-mega editorial team" that contributes stuff to every outlet. It's basically the same folks, but now the masthead has a voluminous cast of Seniors and Executives and Group whatnots, so it's a little hard to tell who's atop one another any longer, so to speak.

This is also the issue where letter grades debut, which I commented on a bit last week -- I understand the motive (to help ensure that both the writers and the readers understand where the "average" is on the scale), but I'm not sure this is the most pressing issue facing EGM's three-person review system, which -- just like the Famitsu cross-review system it copied 19 years ago -- is showing its age in the modern game marketplace.

Otherwise, things are quite lovely this issue. Every mag is doing their next-to-final GTA4 previews this month, but EGM's is the best for getting Dan Houser to talk outside of the PR-mode he's always been in for previous coverage. It also has a couple amusing sidebars, one with the Dutch hacker who found Hot Coffee first and another outlining the influences GTA3 has had in and out of the industry, complete with assorted dev quotes.

I am increasingly taking a shine to the way EGM does industry pieces, the way that pretty much no news article is throwaway any longer -- at the very least, it's either something wholly original (like the 3-page bit in this issue where an ex-ESRB game rater offers his suggestions on how to "fix the system" and ESRB head Patricia Vance rebuts him in a long, caustically-worded sidebar) or dotted with quotes from a pool of devs that I suppose are EGM's equivalent to the pundits that news channels seem to summon out of thin air whenever something requires commentary. It's interesting to read, and my only complaint is the same as always -- that print mags are too small anymore to have more than one or two of these pieces in a go.

Games for Windows: The Official Magazine April/May 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: The Sims 3

Speaking of shrinking print mags, GFW is apparently shifting frequency to ten issues a year, skipping the advertising-sparse months of May and August. I'm assuming that outstanding subscriptions will be extended accordingly. It's naturally impossible to tell how permanent this is, but it's not a very encouraging sign. PC Gamer is leaps and bounds better than it was even a couple years ago, but GFW's charms are still unique in my eyes, and I want more of it.

I'm sure the fact that PC gaming is dead... er, wait, I mean kind of slow... doesn't help much, either. The industry's loss is my gain, though, because except for the cover feature and the reviews section, this issue is almost entirely original news or features. It's all good stuff, too -- bits on the maturation of writing in games, the presence and meaning of death in games, a history of game packaging trends, and a roundtable where GFW asks 17 developers what they'd wish for if a genie allowed them to solve any game creation-related problem in an instant.

To put it another way, this issue of GFW is convincing me that the mag is turning into Computer Games in all the good ways. Hopefully it won't begin copying CGM's missteps this summer.

Game Informer April 2008

Cover: Alpha Protocol

We now know the face of next-gen role-playing games, and that face is Adam Sandler's. The feature inside is typical GI, and I know I sound like a broken record about GI's features by this point -- the text is stylistically similar to something IGN would post and it's a much better use of my time to look up all the game facts on the forum threads instead of wade through it. The sub-feature on the new Aerosmith-themed Guitar Hero is better, as is the annual Game Infarcer section (hmm, I just realized GamePro didn't do their LamePro schtick in their April issue this year... shame).

The Connect section is also a little light this month, including one spread titled "PC Customization" that is basically free advertising for Alienware. What the 'ey? Buying an Alienware PC is what you do when you can't be bothered to customize your PC! (Admittedly, the feature does have actual customization tips in the text, but many likely won't notice this because the piece is illustrated with nothing but selections from Alienware's catalog.)

Official Xbox Magazine April 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Fallout 3

The cover preview-feature is nice and thoughtful; a lovely status report on the game, if you will. The roundup on upcoming XBLA stuff ain't bad, either. Otherwise, this issue's heavy on the usual reviews and previews.

The ad situation seems kinda sparse right now in Xbox-land, too -- there's a ton of in-house ads, and the old Halo 3 advertisement has popped up out of nowhere for a return appeareance. There's a half-page spot for independent console repair outfit 360 Pros, which is the first ad I've seen of its type in a very long time within the confines of a game mag.

PlayStation: The Official Magazine April 2008

Cover: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Kind of the same old over here -- the small staff behind P:TOM have put together a mag that's mostly previews and reviews, without a heck of a lot much else (although the little community bits in the back are nice). I'm still looking forward to better things.

Game Developer March 2008

Cover: Call of Duty 4

I forgot to mention the February '08 issue here, which I apologize about. I don't know if this began last month offhand [EDITOR: It started in March, starts its 'official' run in May], but this number has a new back-page feature, a humor page called "Arrested Development" that's actually pretty funny -- this one parodies game-industry books by introducing titles like Making Money with GameCube Ports: A Fast and Easy Guide to the Wealth You've Always Wanted.

Ths issue also includes a piece on some tech stuff by Jay Koottarappallil, which is frankly the greatest name I've ever heard. He ought to be an action-movie star.

[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 at PiQ magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

More GameSetLinks then, and I was pretty astounded to read the link below which has Hardcore Gaming 101 discussing the completely surreal (and rather obscure) Pu-Li-Ru-La from Taito - talk about hidden dada art action, hm?

Anyhow, very annoying that it's left off the U.S. version of Taito Legends 2 (which I just picked up, and is a great archive of classic Taito titles) - guessing it's something to do with the bizarre 'legs akimbo' art pictured in the HG101 article, which was altered for the U.S. arcade version. Oh well. Onward with plenty of other esoterica:

chewing pixels » The Golden Compass: Blame It on the Reviewer
Interesting follow-up on the Gamasutra interview with the Golden Compass game scripter.

Hardcore Gaming 101: Pu-Li-Ru-La
Again, some awesome screenshot-heavy researching from the HG101-ers - Kurt Kalata from the site has an article or two forthcoming on Gamasutra, by the way.

EvoTab » Keeping tabs on game news
GameTab evolved, from the mercurial Reed.

Lost Levels :: View topic - K-Project (Rez Beta) Dumped
Wow, I wonder what the music tracks used are - via SiliconEra.

PiQ Entertainment Magazine Hits Newsstands - Anime News Network
Mr. Gifford's magazine, he of Mag Weasel fame.

Creator of Eliza, Joseph Weizenbaum, Dead at 85 - Boing Boing
Indeed, a v.appropriate eulogy - via Waxy.

insertcredit.com on the Tower Of Druaga MMO
Check out the last video - it's Benny Hill: The MMO!

PlayStation.Blog » thatgamecompany’s 24hr Game Jam
Cute! Now I wanna play it.

Bob Ostertag's 'w00t' experimental music album - free download.
'w00t was composed entirely from fragments of music' from games - from Balloon Fight to World Of Warcraft! Via The-Inbetween.

Kotaku: Did Konami Inspire Gibson's Patent Suit?
Meh, how about looking at the Gibson patent? Seems to be some kind of crazy VR headset silliness not inspired by Guitar Freaks.

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

Over at Carnegie Mellon University, they've announced they're doing a two-day festival called 'The Art Of Play', starring art-game neeto folks like Jason Rohrer (Passage, Gravitation), Heather Kelley (Kokoromi kru), and even former Ion Storm-er and current Spielberg co-conspirator Randy Smith.

It takes place on March 31th and April 1st, and here's the vision:

"The Art of Play brings together creators and researchers of games from multiple contexts - large AAA productions from major corporations, mid-sized developers completing work-for-hire projects, indies developed by small teams and released for free on the internet or for a small price on one of the many alternative distribution channels, and experimental games produced within an academic context."

What's more: "The aim of this Symposium and Arcade is to survey the games that brought us to this moment with their unique creative vision, and to frame the field moving forward, as game makers finally abandon the question "CAN games be art," and begin to ask ourselves in how many ways they WILL be."

Not really clear how open this event is to the public, but there's a PDF brochure, an afterparty (!), and the website art is by Cactus, so hey - the more events like this, the better.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Ah, time to run down some of the more interesting feature articles and interviews on our sister sites such as GameCareerGuide and Gamasutra this year - all of which we have never mentioned here before, in fact.

Some of the ones I enjoyed - some of the detailed talk on game design in the High Moon interview, the Nordic Game Jam piece, and Denis Dyack being positively reflective about story and mythmaking in Too Human. Anyhow, here's those stories:

- Designing Filmic Games: Paul O'Connor And The Bourne Conspiracy
"How do you design a triple-A, next-generation cinematic gaming experience based on someone else's ideas? Gamasutra talks to High Moon Studios VP Paul O'Connor about The Bourne Conspiracy and crafting smart adaptations."

- Q&A: Krome's Davis On The Pinata Franchise, Australia Dev Scene
"Australia's low dollar and strong development heritage has made it an attractive proposition for publishers, and Krome Studios (Viva Piñata: Party Animals) lead designer Cameron Davis talks to Gamasutra about working with Rare and Microsoft's Piñata IP, as well as the state of development in Australia."

- Nailing The Interview, Part 2: Recruiting: What, Why & How?
"In the second in our series of game-specific recruitment articles, HR veteran Marc Mencher discusses just how you identify developers you want to hire, with many practical tips on advertising, sorting, and scheduling interviews."

- Nordic Game Jam 2008: 134 Game Developers, 40.5 Hours and 19 Game Demos
"'Game jams' - in which developers get together to improvise and create games in a limited time - are a key source of creativity, and Gamasutra has a full report from the rapidly expanding 2008 Nordic Game Jam, including game links/downloads."

- Educational Feature: The Artistic Pursuit
"In the latest feature on sister educational site GameCareerGuide.com, Carey Chico, executive art director at Pandemic Studios (Mercenaries, Destroy All Humans), lends his expert opinion on what kinds of artists are being hired into the game industry."

- Game Culture Vultures: Parkour
"This in-depth Gamasutra article looks at how Assassin's Creed and Crackdown were inspired by free running sport Parkour - just how well did they take the authentic cultural trend and apply it to gameplay?"

- Interview: Inside The AI Of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
"Gamasutra and AIGameDev sat down with Dmitriy Iassenev, the man behind the AI of post-nuclear PC first-person title S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, for a detailed interview on its surprisingly complex NPC 'A-Life' system and resulting emergent gameplay."

- Registration Opens for Paris Game Developers Conference 08
"Think Services, the organizers of the Game Developers Conference, and Connection Events have announced that registration has opened for Paris GDC 08, the June 23-24 conference being held in Paris at the Coeur Défense Convention Center to explore the various challenges of the industry from casual to core gamers."

- A Human Work: Denis Dyack On What Games Need
"In this in-depth Gamasutra interview, the Silicon Knights founder (Too Human) talks about story mythology in gaming, the role of 'directors' in the game business, and why - ultimately - it's better for your game to be late than bad."

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

[There's some great honesty in this interview about the cultural differences, and why the Japanese game development biz still has a chance - tip of the hat to Gamasutra features editor Christian Nutt for doing the interview, and check it out.]

Capcom producer Ben Judd is a company veteran that's worked both in the company's U.S. offices and in its Japan headquarters, helping to explain Western suitability to developers while starting Capcom's internal localization team.

Now he's that rarest of things - a Western-heritage producer at Capcom's worldwide headquarters in Osaka, and is uniquely placed to explain some of the cultural differences going on in game development.

In addition, he has drawn attention for his high-profile work producing the next-gen Bionic Commando, in development at Swedish creator GRIN (Tom Clancy's G.R.A.W. for PC), and in this in-depth interview, we discuss his work at Capcom and how Japanese and Western game development still differs massively.

I want to talk to you about being the first, and maybe only American producer in a Japanese gaming company. I mean, I know there are some other guys working in Japan, but I'm not sure there's anyone else in that role.

Ben Judd: Not a full-blown, 100% producer, no. We have a few assistant producers, I think, but not 100% producers. What do you want to talk about?

Well, I want to ask, first of all: You've never worked in an American development studio, have you?

BJ: No, never have.

But you're working with the guys at GRIN in Sweden on Bionic Commando. So you have an idea of the differences and similarities between Western and Japanese development. I'd like to get some of your insight into that.

BJ: OK. First off, one of the things that has been helpful is that I've played some Western games, so I can say that I know what American gamers like and don't like, compared to the Japanese gamers.

This is because I've lived in Japan for so long, and have Japanese friends, and can hear from them. So it's nice; I've always lived a life where I'm understanding both sides. Which is great, because you have a lot of knowledge, but a lot of times you're in the middle. So a lot of times, both sides are crashing in on you.

But as far as the development side goes, it's been a learning process for me, because I've worked in a Japanese development studio before, but never in a Western one, and one of the biggest differences is that Japanese design, usually, is: you design and create two or three levels -- you put everything into it; all the AI, everything, scripting, all of the graphics -- and so, within about six months to a year, you have a beautiful level, that is something that you can PR many months before the actual game is launched.

So, there are two advantages to the Japanese design style: I would say one is, you reduce risk. You know what your game is going to be like; you've already created 100% of what a level will look like. And then the other advantage, of course, is that you can PR things earlier, because you've got something beautiful right from the start.

And with Western development -- at least, the only thing I can speak for, of course, is GRIN -- and I do believe that each studio has its own culture, so this may not be 100% what it is for the other companies -- but they build things in layers. So you'll have a game that doesn't have any scripting; you'll have a game that has some limited animation; you'll have a game that has some props: but these things can be shared universally across all the levels. So it's a lot more efficient design.

And I think they're forced to do that, because with Japan, with Japanese workers, you can sort-of pile them into a project and force them to work 18 hour days right from the start, all the way to the end. So, it's not that I don't think Western development doesn't have its own fair share of long hours, but I just think that Japanese workers, you know, you can just burn them, hard, and for a long time. And because you can do that, you don't have to be as efficient.

And I think, also, that the level of detail that they try and build a game to is also a lot higher. But that's certainly one of the big differences; that you're working with games that are not complete, and don't look that beautiful. It certainly makes you a lot more nervous, and it makes it harder to PR, because they don't look truly beautiful until toward the end of the production -- but by that time, it's not enough time to generate the steam and the hype that you need to.

Why did you want to become a producer in Japan? I'm sure it has to be much more of an uphill road than it would've been in the U.S.

BJ: I just love Japan. It's that simple. I mean, the people there are so nice, and I love Capcom. There is, of course, political nonsense, and yeah, the uphill battle -- it's never fun. Every day, Japanese developers are sometimes negative by nature. So even if there's something positive that's come in the latest build, they'll only see the negative.

So, whenever I get those comments, and I'm telling them to GRIN, I have to sort of filter some of them out, because otherwise you have a totally demotivated team. The way it is in Western culture, it's more that you compliment the people, and make them work harder rather than sort-of talk down to them. But, you know, every time I start to get depressed, I think: Hey! I'm working for Capcom! That's what keeps me up.

When you show the game to the management in Osaka, -- since, like you say, the development style of the two cultures is pretty different -- how does that work as an interface? Can you make them understand that, culturally? Or is it a real challenge?

BJ: Not initially. It's taken me probably a year and a half, just to get people -- the Japanese that are creators, that are on my team, that I always take over to Sweden, that had seen how the guys work -- it's taken me a year and a half just to get them to understand how the development is. And those are a few people that have been on the project, right? Trying to get the higher-ups to understand... people that only know Japanese design, to understand... is near-impossible.

So, the way I see this is: I'm always trying to do something new. I was the first, I think, foreigner that worked in Capcom Japan for a long time. And I was the first person to start the localization team. See, each one of these challenges, I bring home myself. It usually comes with a lot of pain, but the idea is that if I can just open this road, maybe there will be other foreign producers out of Capcom Japan.

And I think that Japanese companies need to do that. They only look at Japan a lot of the time, and the market is going more and more global; unless they start trying to internationalize themselves internally, then they're going to fall by the wayside.

Are you bringing in any of the working practices, or would you like to bring in western working practices to the Japanese studio if possible?

BJ: Hmm. Probably not. And the reason why is: I've seen a lot of different cultures, and I've seen a lot of different styles of working, and some things just are not meant to be mixed. Some things are just not meant to work out that way. Having someone, a single person like me, in the middle, to make sure that you're borrowing the good parts...

Like, for example, with Bionic Commando Rearmed, we've got the art coming from the Japan side for the in-game cutscenes -- which is great, because I love that art -- you've got the tech coming from GRIN's side; being able to pick and choose those parts, the best of both worlds from both sides, is great. But trying to force them to work together is not always easy.

Bionic Commando Rearmed is the XBLA/PSN game?

BJ: Correct, correct. The in-game cutscene art only is being created in Japan.

I mean, of course, we always have the designers; I've got several designers that were always on these projects, from Japan, that constantly get from them feedback.

It's helped out a lot with the bosses, because, traditionally, western bosses are not that good -- for a reason -- and the Japanese bosses are designed much better. They have a lot of insight. So, getting their director to talk with our directors is nice; people realize, "Oh, there's this new way I could do it!"

The other thing is the story; when we were planning out the story, one of the Japanese guys suggested this ridiculous idea, and at first, everyone is like, "Huh?" But then we sat down and thought about it, and said, "Yeah! That's a great idea!" And it feels very Capcom.

And later, Ulf Andersson -- who is the Swedish director who's directing next-gen BC -- he said to me: "If that idea had come from a Westerner, we all would've laughed him out of the room." And, I thought about it later. He's right. That idea only could have come from a Japanese person, to have been accepted the way it was.

At TGS last year, I was talking to Ryan Payton from Kojima Productions...

BJ: I know him - we did a podcast together, actually.

That's right! When we spoke, he said one thing he did to encourage people from Kojima Productions to look at western games, is he put a 360 in a high traffic area in the office, and he put in, like Gears of War, Halo, other high profile games that are popular in the West, that have a lot of ideas.

Apparently, people just, you know, walking by, they'd screw around a little bit; he'd leave them on the attract mode, and maybe people would play them, maybe they wouldn't, but it seeped out. Have you tried anything like that?

BJ: We've already got something like that. We've got a gigantic 60" TV, and constantly, teams are playing software. We've got a marketing team that constantly gets them new software, so... Most of the guys have already played Call of Duty 4, Assassin's Creed, Halo 3.

I mean, don't make any mistakes: The Japanese guys know that the west is starting to kick ass and take names, and they are studying those games. And from what I know of Japanese motivation and business practices is, if they ever feel that there is something that they're not staying on track with, or on target, then they study it, see what's great about it, then they learn how to do it better.

A lot of people talk about the Japanese industry being, you know, on the way out, in terms of design and stuff like that. I don't think that they're out yet. I think that they'll come back.

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

Swerving tipsily into the weekend, we have some choice GameSetLinks for you, principal among them the revelation that multiple IGF prizewinner World Of Goo is plagiarized... from nature!

So, as we wait for God to file that inevitable defensive patent, let's check out some other choice links - including CrispyGamer's comics, Clint Hocking on Bully, and something about the Internet and cats and me. But not necessarily in that order. Here goes:

2D Boy » Blog Archive » World of Goo Teams Up With Nature, Borrows Liberally
2D Boy are such ripoff merchants!

Gism Butter » Blog Archive » Sega Ephemera
Alex Handy + Bay Area recycling + old school games = fun.

WSJ.com on what attracts us to content on the Internet.
'Just like the laser and the cat, technology is playing a trick on us. We are programmed for scarcity and can't dial back when something is abundant.' This is me and the Web, oh dear.

VG Cats: '100 Kirby-s'
Oops, missed this at the time, totallyadorable.

Crispy Gamer - Comics: Ding!
One of CG's comics, from PvP's Kurtz - they also have Backward Compatible. I respect them for trying this (a la Keefer's old gig at GameSpy) - comics attached to editorial sites is kinda... cool in an oldskool way?

Click Nothing: A Teacher's Primer
Clint Hocking challenging a teacher on Bully criticism - would be choicer if he'd played it, but the offer is bold and good.

GS's Army of Two Review: Unprofessionalism at its finest? - NeoGAF
Reviews should either be wholly personal or 'attemptedly' universal (which is impossible!), here's a bad unintentional muddying.

YouTube - Far Cry 2 Dunia Engine
Out-Crytek-ing Crytek, are they?

UPDATE: GameSetWatch - Anatomy Of A Goof - Xbox '360' Sales Down!
An Australian TV network has taken Smarthouse (one of the through-sources of this false report) and stitched them up like a kipper for plagiarism. Bravo.

InstantAction Beta Blog: Game Dev Contest Winners!
Cool, some indie goodness here!

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

[This Brandon Sheffield-conducted interview ran over on Gamasutra the other day. We thought it worth reprinting here because it's part of our continuing attempt to cover the South Korean biz more than anyone ever, and it's got some really interesting and honest insights into the market and console gaming there.]

With the rise of microtransactions and the rise of titles such as MapleStory in the casual MMO business, South Korean gaming has been growing in respect and relevance in the West. There's a lot to learn from this rich, constantly evolving market, which grew up along lines so different from the U.S., Japan and Europe that it's difficult to compare -- and compete with.

To that end, Gamasutra has already spoken in-depth with a variety of members of top companies in the market, conducted principally at the recent annual Gstar trade show, to offer their perspective on the industry in 2008 and going forward.

In this previously unpublished interview, Gamasutra spoke to Henry Lee of Blueside, best known for the Kingdom Under Fire franchise (including the recently released Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom, published for Xbox 360 by Microsoft Game Studios.

One of the few purely console developers in Korea, Gamasutra talked to Lee about developing console games in Korea and the looming development threat of China:

What is the workflow like on console games here? Is there a lot of heavy pre-production on console titles like these, or do you have a lot of iteration after you've made a prototype?

Henry Lee: Actually, there is almost no console developer in Korea. We are supposed to have a pre-production for six months or a year, but for Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom, we needed to rush, so we had only two months for pre-production. It was very tough time.

In Japan I know there is huge pre-production, and they just make that game the game that they designed at the beginning. In the U.S., they make a loose design, and they make a playable demo, and they make new iterations… How much do you that kind of stuff?

HL: We are in the middle. I mean, we have a detailed design document at the beginning of the project, but it doesn't cover the full development, it has a basic idea, and basic continuity script for the players, and that kind of thing. And the feeling, or the design, that kind of thing, it depends on the designers.

So we have some basic concept art for the player and background, but the actual detail, or the actual feeling will be added by the character designer. And the animation, for some parts we use motion capture, but for some sensitive parts it's directly related with the playability, the usability of the game. So that part will be done by animator by hand.

In the west we have a lot of communication between development studios; they share technology ideas and that sort of stuff. In Japan, it's the complete opposite. Nobody talks to anybody. Even different teams in the same company can't talk to each other. Obviously there aren't that many high-end console developers in Korea, but is the Korean industry trying to work together, is everyone tackling problems separately?

HL: Other companies are trying to work together, but not us. We are just so different from the others. We are sort of… isolated. I mean, we get some support from Microsoft, but we don't have any connection -- actually no connection, zero connection with developers from the US, and Japanese developers really don't want to give anything to us. We want to contact other developers, but nobody know about us, or...

It seems like if they have better network support, and you have a better engine, you would be able to take something from each other. Because, obviously, in the US people write about, or talk about the things that they've done, and how other people can learn from it. Is that the kind of thing that would be welcome in Korea, or is it not necessary? Do you want to be more focused on the west than each other?

HL: I don't know that much about other companies. But as far as I know, there are not many game companies that successfully finish their projects here. The first priority is progress of the game development. The biggest problem is that there are not many real directors here.

It would be very helpful if technology could be used from the U.S., but I'm not sure the developers here would want to use the technology. I mean, Korean developers have a lot of know-how about network play, but, when I see World of Warcraft, even in that US developers are much better than here.

How did you fix that at Blueside?

HL: It sounds arrogant, but we set the goal of the game clearly. Usually at other companies, the game director, or game designer, plays Diablo and said "Oh hey! Let's make Diablo!" The next day he might play World of Warcraft, and then, "Hey! Let's change this to Warcraft!" It's very funny, and very stupid.

First of all we set up the design and design document very clearly, and we just -- well, actually, it's very common in Japan or the US -- we calculate the resources, make a schedule, and try to make everything predictable. And so, not for this project, but Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders, and future projects, we try to make a prototype.

How do Korean developers compare?

HL: When it comes to graphics, I think we are just as good as the U.S. or Japan. Actually, just graphic artists here, for me, are the best in the world. We, I mean, the company cannot have enough support for the graphic designers. They are really very good.

Our programmer talent is more troublesome. Actually, in Korea, these days, almost nobody wants to code, because it's very hard, it's very tiresome. It's very hard to hire. So we are trying to hire people from Russia, or Spain, or Eastern Europe. I heard that Japan has the same problem.

And game designers? In Korea, usually game designers are like, "I want to make a game! But I don't know how to code or how to draw! What should I do?" Then be a game designer! It's so funny and stupid. That's the biggest problem. I tried to hire some game designers here, but nobody can do these kind of things.

We have three designers -- two main designers, and one sub-designer -- but they’ve been here for about 7 years, 8 years. They started this job as a QA team, and they became game designers.

Do you think that universities are going to start teaching people more of this stuff? So they will be useful?

HL: We have successfully hired about three or four programmers from university. Some are very good, and some are very bad. Some are useless. But the biggest problem is, well, I think for the programmers, they need to study not only DirectX but also English that they can read the whitepapers from the US or elsewhere, physics, 3D math, basic mathematics and languages. And software engineering, programming languages, that kind of standard curriculum. They need to study that but still many universities teach only DirectX and OpenGL.

A lot of other countries are doing outsourcing, but it sounds like you are receiving outsourcing from other countries.

HL: Well, the big part of the atmosphere of a game depends on the music, and so we asked an U.S. composer to make some music for our games. And sound effects.

Actually, sound effects -- music and sound effects in Korea or Japan are … the feeling is very different from U.S. And sometimes we try to ask other companies to make some small stuff like icons, because of things like scheduling problems.

So are those other companies you ask in Eastern European countries, or within Korea?

HL: Within Korea. Actually we need to talk to them a lot, so if the company is overseas, it's very hard to control. But it’s all very small stuff.

When do you think console games will be popular in Korea?

HL: Well, I think as soon as the players can earn money through playing. I mean, in Korea, only MMORPGs are popular, because they can earn money by selling items or different things.

I don't think there are many true game players here. They need to, they have to be able to get games for free. That is the first rule here. That is the funny thing. I mean, they have no idea how to buy games here. They can download games here.

That's why all the game developers in Korea give player the game for free, and then they can earn money by selling items. So, if console wants to be popular, it has to lend itself to that kind of weird market.

So as far as the Xbox 360, it's not doing well in Korea because of the mentality of the western games. It's just not being accepted by the Korean gamers. The gamers always want free games, and they want to get online, spend a little money on specific items, and just make a living on it. Not playing the game.

Would you ever consider doing smaller stuff like Xbox Live Arcade?

HL: We are on it. We are working on a new project for new platforms. Some small, portable platforms.

Nintendo has an office in Korea now. Do you think they will do well?

HL: From a marketing point of view, they are very good. But from the development point of view, they're very bad.

For developers, they offer nothing. They’re not even a channel to the Japan office.

They don't have developer relations -- really?

They always keep saying that they want to have relationships with developers, but they have nothing. They don't support anything.

It's like, if we need some information about hardware -- that sort of thing -- they give us nothing. They just ask for us to wait for orders from the mother company in Japan. They’re absolutely not helpful to developers.

But at selling their platform here, I think they are very good. They hired the right people, right actor, right actress for the advertisements, and so they are very popular here. And the launch games for the platforms -- definitely the DS -- they chose the right ones.

Do you think that western markets are starting to take the Korean games more seriously yet?

HL: No. Korean companies have some good online games, but it's very localized. Some games like MapleStory, I've heard are very popular in the U.S., but I don't think it's a major thing. I think the game companies in the U.S. are very interested in the Korean or Chinese market, but not in Chinese games or Korean games.

Are you worried about the future of the Korean industry?

HL: Slightly, yes. Because games from the US or China will take over the market here. A good example is World of Warcraft. It's the best. I actually don't like MMORPGs that much, not since Ultima Online, but World of Warcraft is the best. Nobody will -- I don't think anybody can make that kind of game again. I mean, the scale is so big.

I mean, many Korean games are just copies of games from other countries. Kart Rider, that kind of thing, it's just a copy of Nintendo's Mario Kart. That kind of game is not that hard to make, and so it's very easy to copy, and that market will be taken over by China, because China has the technology now, and China is very good at copying stuff.

The popular casual games here are copies of Japan's games. And Korean developers copied the games easily, so it means the Chinese can copy the Korean games easily, and they are cheaper.The Chinese will make tons of games and they will take over.

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

[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.]

I never had any designs on becoming a game journalist. Actually, I went to a two-year acting conservatory, and got a very good education, too. These days, I imagine my parents peek some of my articles – a defense of breast physics or a discussion of incest sex games – and wonder why they bothered sending me there.

But given the wary dance games and films have done about one another over the years, maybe I can yet use what I’ve learned. Now, it’s a rare film knockoff video game that’s worth playing. On the contrary, actually, film and games seem to be converging by moving further apart. Games that try to sell us that drawn-out, cutscene-heavy, empty-action experience that has been called “cinematic” (though to so call them seems to insult cinema) are a dying breed. Developers are learning that what makes a good movie doesn’t make a good game, and so we can hope that the film studios aren’t too far behind when they’re at the table to talk licensing.

Acting school was very much about the emotional experience. If you haven’t any experience with actors – no, not high school “Drama Kids,” but trained actors – I can tell you that the whole thing was very much as you might imagine. Lots of skinny folk in black, odd teachers who stood on chairs to shout at you, lots of open weeping. People got naked. But somewhere amid all that, we learned about what it takes to deliver honest, emotionally-grounded entertainment.

Perhaps one way to elevate games – both in terms of how they affect their audience and in terms of how they’re treated by our culture – is to take a page not necessarily from the final product of films, but from their creation process.

Pageant Kids

When I moved to New York to go to conservatory, I met a small class of others from around the world who were here to do the same thing – all of us fresh-faced and nervous, with big dreams of Broadway lights and Hollywood screens. Each of us was the best singer in our High School musical, the star of our local community theatre, the president of our hometown Drama Club, and willing to try as hard as it took to be the best, most famous and most beloved actors we could be.

The first day of class saw us in pageant pose, with frozen grins and too-bright eyes, hoping to impress our teachers, outclass a room full of strangers. We produced fake accents and fat crocodile tears with ease; when we were assigned our very first scene work, many of us pulled out our best and heaviest-wrought impressions of the professionals we admired, wringing our hands and sighing our heavy little hearts out in front of the class.

Our teacher told each and every one of us, to the last, that we were awful.

She really said that, and yelled at us. As I said, it was very much like the Saturday Night Live satires you’ve seen – but she was right. We did learn that we were trying too hard, and that connecting with the audience wasn’t something we should force ourselves to do. We were just trying to be good actors – but we needed to stop trying. Those first weeks of our education in acting were spent not acting at all; to the incomprehension of many of us, we were simply taught to quit holding tension, to breathe “correctly,” to relax when under the gun, and to let impulses come through us naturally while we just sat still and read a script in our own voice. No passionate faces, no crocodile tears, no aggrandized stances. For my part, the idea that the subtlety that happens in a human face in response to a buried feeling is more stirring than anything you can conjure through artifice was something I didn’t really internalize until a bit after my graduation. Maybe that’s why I turned out a writer.

Crocodile Tears

What does this have to do with games? Well, how often have you played a game that you know is aiming to manipulate you? You’re in the midst of a contrived character death, poignant orchestral music is playing, and you’ve put the controller down in your lap to watch beautifully-rendered tears well in the corner of a hi-def character’s hi-def eye.

Oh, please, my teacher would interrupt, if she were directing the game. She’d stand up and yell; she’d tell the designers who crafted the scene to get the hell out. Maybe she’d even say, are you sure you’re in the right career? You’re much better at writing…

Ahem. Anyway, maybe some of those emotionally manipulative games even succeed at affecting you. The measure of a great game used to be whether you wept at the ending, right? But does that necessarily mean that you gained something from the experience? Moreover – does that mean it was a good game?

The characters and events in games are obviously not real; those poor characters can’t take the blame for their bad acting. Instead, a team of game designers obviously collaborated on the project; you can imagine that they sat around a table and discussed what they wanted their end result to look like. “Gamers today want affecting experiences,” someone must have said, “We want this project to have an emotional impact. So what can we do?”

That innocent act of goal-setting – wanting a design in which they’ve deeply invested (in every sense of the word) to have an effect on the player – might actually be the game designer’s first mistake, just like wanting to make our audience weep at our sincerity was our first mistake on that beginning day of acting school.

An Honest Performance

Am I proposing that, before setting design goals, game developers sit around and do some deep breathing?

Well, maybe I am. Game design is not all that far off from a film or a stage play in its fundamental parts – there are a number of different elements that must work in concert to convey, essentially, a single thread from beginning to end, from different scenes and settings to visual aesthetics and sound. It’s one thing for our acting teacher to have told us to “just relax and be organic,” but films, plays and video games are actually meticulously crafted, very deliberate and complex affairs.

The key to a good theatre performance is for the actors to be genuine; in other words, we had to learn to have honest, natural desires that corresponded in some way to those of the characters we were portraying; their objective must become our objective. We mustn’t tear at our hair or stride across the stage because we think it’d look stirring, or because we think it’d be affecting to watch; we do those things on natural impulses. The actor’s goal is, in other words, to develop the character into a reflection of our inner self, and an expression of our natural goals and desires.

There’s no science to it; as I and many others in my class learned, it’s damn hard to stop scrutinizing oneself, to stop worrying about how a performance will be received by the audience. It’s hard to stop thinking and to stop trying. But one thing’s clear: Most of the games that critics and fans have found most affecting and refreshing in the last few years are the ones that were not trying.

And when the developers of those titles – most of them independent – were asked what their secret is, most of them said that they simply made the game that they wanted to make, that the games they created were an expression of themselves or their enjoyment of the design process.

Perhaps that’s why some games feel honest and others don’t; some game experiences capture us on a personal level, and others are cheap entertainment, a performance with a lot of explosions placed at the exact moments the directors thought would most excite the audience. They contain a ready cultural lexicon proven to cause reaction for its own sake. There’s little room for personal interpretation.

My teachers had favorites, and they would have absolutely adored Jonathans Mak and Blow, for example. And I wish I could send those teachers into some of the big-budget studios to play preview builds, and have them march in their long scarves and tweed jackets on the board room tables and shout and wave their arms. I’m aware the investors are the ones that might need the most yelling at, as would, ironically, the Hollywood studios who want games based on their films. But it might work.

Or maybe a whole bunch of game developers would quit and go become journalists.

[Leigh Alexander is not a doctor, and neither are the guys in the prescription drug ads. She 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 (6)

Ah, yes - the shine of GameSetLinks beneath the murk of the average Webcrawling denizen, or something. Are we the pearl farmers working to unearth the gems of the mixed metaphor from Gringotts? Or are we merely swinish?

In any case, this set of links includes Eurogamer getting to grips with Barkey Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden - which is just what all major consumer sites should be doing, mixing games like these into their normal coverage - and other news spanning a fitting Gygax tribute to the televisual death of jPod. Let us receive the data:

Wired News: The Dungeon Master: The Life and Legacy of Gary Gygax
A good, detailed, and fitting tribute.

Waxy.org @ SXSW: Worst Website Ever, Redux
At least one MMO-related one, and these are all semi-plausible.

Fez Plushie | ALBOTAS - A Little Bit On The Awesome Side |
Cute indie soft toy alert.

Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden Article // PC /// Eurogamer
Good Lord, Eurogamer = epic win for genuinely covering this (pictured) maverick work of genius.

Behind the Game: Diner Dash Hometown Hero - Gamezebo.com
Stats aren't THAT hot on this yet, interestingly. But a very intriguing experiment.

XYZZY Awards 2007 - IFWiki
Winners announced - Lost Pig cleans up!

IGF Pavilion - Inside the GDC 2008
GameDev.net doing a great job, interviews and pics of all IGF Pavilion denizens - also missed 'The IGF and Game Developers Choice Awards - Inside the GDC 2008' and 'Indie Games Summit - Inside the GDC 2008' from the same site.

Japan criticized over child porn loopholes - CNN.com
Games and animated portrayals are specifically mentioned, and very true.

sardius_: reviews unfit for print vol. 1 -- lost: the shitty video game
This should be printed everywhere!

The Canadian Press: Leafs to blame for cancelled shows? Quips producer: 'One more reason to hate'
The adaption of Coupland's JPod - which is about game creators - canned, darn.

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

[So, as part of my work with Gamasutra and Game Developer, I also manage Dr. Dobb's Journal, the seminal programming website/magazine - founded in 1975! - which provides awesome hardcore coding info. We've just launched two big websites based around Dobbs - Dobbs Code Talk, which is a blog/forum destination for coders, but more pertinently to GSW, the Dobbs Challenge game competition. Here's what it's all about.]

Think Services is pleased to announce the launch of the first ever Dobbs Challenge, a special game competition brought to you in association with the world-renowned Dr. Dobb's Journal for software developers, and Microsoft.

To participate, firstly download the specially created 'Dr. Dobb's Challenge' games for either Windows and Windows Mobile. Then you can win from a prize pool of $10,000 by modifying the games using a trial version of Visual Studio 2008.

The games star the first-ever personification of Dr. Dobbs, alongside the characters from Microsoft's 'Defy All Challenges' machinima videos, as you battle to collect Visual Studio icons and complete the levels. Full source code and art for the games are freely provided for programmers and artists to 'mod' the results and win prizes. Here's all you need to know to participate.

Some notes for indie developers interested in participating. Firstly, the Windows version of the game (which is fun to play even if you don't know how to mod it, actually) was created by the folks at Grubby Games, the makers of IGF finalist Professor Fizzwizzle. The whole thing is really well commented in code, and there are also tutorials on the site.

The Grubby folks designed the fun SD-style cartoonization of Dr. Dobbs and Microsoft's 'Defy All Challenges' machinima characters - who are featured in this video, in case you wondered who they are. The game itself lets you pick from the main characters and has somewhat of a 'time attack' feeling to it - you can also use the mouse to grab icons from far away.

In addition, there's a different Windows Mobile version of the game designed by the folks from indie PocketPC developer B3Team, and there's actually a conventional Windows executable version of that game in the Windows Mobile download package, if you want to check it out. It has slightly different, more 'oldschool' gameplay and specially designed pixel art of the main characters from Adam Saltsman.

As for deadlines and other info, there's a $1,000 'First Month Challenge' that closes on April 14th, and the other $9,000 of prizes have a June 13th deadline - including Best Windows Game ($4,000), Best Windows Mobile Game ($2,000), Best One Button Game ($1,000), Best Game Starring Dr Dobbs And The Defy All Challenges Crew ($1,000, and Best Total Conversion ($1,000) - for making something that's completely different in genre/style from the original Dr. Dobbs Challenge, but still keeps 'collect Visual Studio icons' as the mechanic and starts from the same codebase.

Finally, I know independent game developers care about what they can do with games after they've made them. So we are intending to allow games that use the source code to be released elsewhere by the creator - if they desire - after the competition is finished. This will probably be by licensing the underlying code itself under a BSD license at that point, though you would obviously need to remove any Microsoft/Dobbs character assets if wanting to release it elsewhere - watch this space.

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

[“Play Evolution” is a column by James Lantz that happens sometimes and discusses the changes that games undergo after their release, from little developer patches to huge gameplay revelations, and everything in between. This week: evolution in World of Warcraft]

You can’t beat World of Warcraft – there’s no such thing. There are no victory conditions, and you’ll never see a screen that pops up and says, “You win!” You may think that getting to the highest possible level is an obvious victory, but that’s not true for everyone. Some people are satisfied with hitting the level cap, but others want to beat every raid boss.

It’s perfectly feasible to imagine hundreds of personal goals, even ones as obscure as crossing from one capital city to another at level one, or camping an important travel NPC so no one can reach his hub. Because there’s nothing as simple as beating the game, every goal in World of Warcraft is completely arbitrary and set by each player to match his or her own desires.

With this in mind, it seems less bizarre that World of Warcraft shipped without any PvP system to speak of. The scaffolding was there – you could attack other players and enemy NPCs in PvP zones – but there were no rewards of any sort for defeating opponents, and absolutely nothing to lose. In a way, though, this was a breath of fresh air in a massively multiplayer game where every menial task was rewarded and every action had an incentive.

In a game where all the goals are ultimately arbitrary, what’s the difference between the player who PvPs with no reward and the player who levels up to level sixty? At the end of the day, neither player is closer to objective victory, because there is none.

Hell, if a player sits and dances in his hometown for twelve hours, he’s just as close to beating World of Warcraft as the level sixty is. The only difference is that one of them has a “sixty” next to his portrait, while the other one has a “one” and has been dancing for half a day.

Despite the complete lack of structure for PvP, non-instanced (or open world) PvP was popular on PvP servers, especially in places where the Horde and Alliance cities were just a stone’s throw away from one another. One such place was the small area between Tarren Mill and Southshore called the Hillsbrad Foothills; on any particular day, sixty or seventy players would be engaged in the back and forth tug-of-war that bounced between the two cities, occasionally bringing one side or the other to its knees.

This perpetual battle had no lasting impact on the game – and yet it was perpetual. Even though there were no hard numbers to support claims of victory or defeat, the battle was interesting and it was genuinely difficult and entertaining to capture the other side’s town, even when one knew that the NPCs would respawn indefinitely. After all, it was still just as much a victory as anything else in World of Warcraft. However, players clamored for a system that would allow PvP to affect the game outside of these small victories, and Blizzard ultimately answered them with the Honor System.

The Honor System was patched in about five months after World of Warcraft’s release. The math behind the system was complex, but the principles were simple: if you killed an enemy player close to your level, you got points, if you killed an enemy player far below your level, you got no points.

As you got points, you ranked up, and as you ranked up you gained access to better items in the PvP shops. It got more complicated as you got higher in rank, requiring you to be #1 on the server to receive the most points, but the grind was so steep that the vast majority of players never got close.

Because there were no points for assaulting random cities or killing guard NPCs, the Honor System discouraged the ragtag half high-level half low-level groups that had fought around the Hillsbrad Foothills. Most dedicated PvP players formed hunting groups in high-level zones instead, hoping to prey on other high-level players so they could get points. Although the fighting around the Hillsbrad Foothills continued, it had lost its strongest players, and it was never really the same after the Honor System.

A patch or two later, the introduction of special instanced pvp areas called Battlegrounds created another game within the Honor System. The Battlegrounds became the most effective way to farm honor points, but every time you went to the Battlegrounds you played a series of individual rounds, each of which had two teams vying for victory. After this patch, the Honor System became an overarching game where victory was determined through a number of short games in the Battlegrounds.

Through its evolution (expressed, for the most part, through Blizzard’s numerous patches) World of Warcraft has come to embrace its status as an environment for multiple games, only some of which are acknowledged and supported. Since the release of its expansion, World of Warcraft has turned the Honor System into a more gradual grind without ranks and created the Arena for competitive PvP players, so you can pick and choose.

So, as of now, open-world and Battlegrounds PvP and competitive PvP in the Arena are two completely different games. The Arena has ranks and seasons, but in the Honor System you just gain points and spend them as if you were grinding for money. And by increasing the level cap to level seventy, Blizzard created a new level to race up to; a way of extending the finish line for that particular game.

In fact, most people play a combination of four or five games in World of Warcraft. There’s the leveling up game, which almost everyone plays. In this game, people try to optimize their ability to level up with regard to the amount of time they spend playing the game, and attempt to get to the highest level without wasting too much time due to inefficiency. Of course, most people take breaks from this game on their way to level seventy but when they’re leveling up, they’re trying to do it efficiently.

After this game, some people play the endgame game, in which they try to fill out their character with the best items, or the other endgame game, in which they try to beat all the raid bosses. Some people play the Honor System game, where they try to amass honor points, and others play the Arena game, where they get to the top rank in any given season. Then, there are the less popular games – or the one I just made up: going from one capital city to another as quickly as possible at level one.

In the end, World of Warcraft is an environment for people to create games, a web of intertwined systems that are all connected through common terrain. Some of these games rely on other games in the environment (most of them, for example, rely on leveling up) but all of them are different games. Through patches, Blizzard adapts World of Warcraft to create new games and modify old ones – so, as World of Warcraft evolves, half through Blizzard and half through the players themselves, a hundred games evolve with it.

[James Lantz is a starving writer who spends a large part of his time rebuilding regular-sized doors for exceptionally tall people. He also writes a blog, of course.]

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

Ah yes, a tad more GameSetLink-age for your caboodle, and there's some fun stuff in here - particularly Warlords Online, which I hadn't really spotted, and is an interesting move from the Puzzle Quest folks.

Elsewhere, there's a chat with Introversion, some Japanese student DS games, more info on some of the Australian goings-on around the ACMI Game On exhibition, and a host of other fun topics. Please enjoy the following:

Warlords Online Launches - Infinite Interactive Forums
From the Puzzle Quest guys, browser-based - they kept quiet about this, didn't they? Via HDRLying.

Mega64: "Brainpower" Music Video
Freezepop + Mega64 = adorable.

Game-ism: 'Creed Critique: Glitch vs. Pretty'
V.interesting discussion of how jumping works, animation and reaction wise, in Assassin's Creed.

Amusement Magazine - coming Spring 2008
Paris-based... glossy game culture mag? If it sticks around, this could be interesting, nobody's really tried an overt art-mag about games recently. Via mbf.

YouTube - Npeaen's Grateful Dead Rock Band demo videos
In case you wondered what the new 6-track Grateful Dead pack sounded/looked like - useful! He also has videos of all other Rock Band DLC, including the (sorted first!) new SXSW pack.

QBlog: 'A Little Sad'
Richard Bartle debunking (or at least rationalizing) a 'girls play across genders in MMOs a lot' scientific paper.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun: RPS Interview: Introversion’s Chris & Mark
Good read on where they are with Multiwinia, (the pictured) Subversion.

The Age (Australia's) Digital Life: 'Museum Piece'
'The race is on to preserve the cultural history of games.' Regarding ACMI and the Game On exhibition.

Siliconera » Student developed DS games downloadable at DS stations
In Japan only, of course - and lots of Japanese text in them. Shame.

The Age Blogs: 'Show And Tell'
With a full PDF of the ACMI game exhibition goodness - more institutions should do this.

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

[An industry path spanning the UK's Ocean, working as a foreigner at Sega Japan's CS2, and on to IGF 2008 nominated indie puzzler Ookibloks? We talked to Brian Flanagan on how his lifelong diet of Japanese games has influenced his current indie output.]

A clearly Japanese inspired art style and aesthetic is something that normally garners a moderate amount of eyebrow raising when executed by Westerners.

However, in the case of the IGF 2008 nominated Ookibloks, it actually turns out that there’s more to the game’s main designer than initially meets the eye - and we chatted to Brian Flanagan about his influences in creating the 2D puzzle-action title.

Growing Up Next To A Northern Ocean

Like many, Brian Flanagan grew up on a steady diet of Japanese arcade games back in the 80s, as he explains: "Living in a beach front town in Northern England meant that I had full access to the arcades on an almost daily basis. I'd play Xevious and Starforce a lot. The metallic graphics on both games were intriguing, Xevious more so, as I found it very mysterious.”

“Apart from those, probably Defender for a while simply because it was so stark and brutal," he continues, "as well as Robotron. In my younger days it was mostly shooters, I guess I'd say. Dig Dug and Mr Do! were two others I'd dabble with, once the fighting game genre became established, I was a big Street Fighter II fan”.

Following on from his arcade gaming fix, Flanagan then went the next step and tried to get his foot into the British games industry as an artist, as he says; “I got my careers officer at high school to get me an unpaid work experience placement, and after that I'd actually call Ocean up pretending to be the careers officer just to get me an unofficial placement during the school holidays.”

“I got told by one of the more established artists I should go to college before trying to get a real job there, and after a year of college I applied - the first choice they went for decided he couldn't handle it and I got the gig.”

“The environment was pretty easy going, slightly self governing and a little bit disorganized, and there were some artists people I learned a lot from - I worked on the port of Taito's Operation Wolf during my work placement, and then worked on the (disastrous) port of Operation Thunderbolt when I first started.”

However, things at Ocean at that time became somewhat unbearable, as Flanagan points out: “I think the major decision that I had to at least try and get a job elsewhere was during the development of a SNES game I was on, as the main design methodology was ‘make it up as you go along’."

"I'd pretty much taken the helm of the project as producer, designer and lead artist," he says. "I was trying to get the staff to conform to a graphical style, but everyone was just going whichever way they pleased - the backgrounds had no stylistic unity at all, and I was getting abuse, and even threats of violence, simply for trying to get the game to look right."

"At that point I'd had enough, and because the game was a license, and the movie bombed big time in the U.S., the game was canned, even though we hit the deadline and it was pretty much complete,” Flanagan explains.

“If we'd had an art director that had established a colour palette and look to adhere to, the issues wouldn't have happened," he admits, "but we had 3 other artists who wouldn't adapt their style, but it was my job as designer to at least try and get some coherence into the look - it was like herding cats.”

“I think things are better organised nowadays, I think the results of most good quality games reflect that, but there's still the problem where I feel engineers go for the most 'clever' approach as opposed to the most optimised and sensible way,” he adds.

Living The Life Of A Ninja

Seeing that life at Ocean wasn’t for him, Flanagan began looking abroad for employment. Considering his gaming tastes as a youngster, the only and natural place to work would be in the Japanese games industry but back then getting a gig there wasn’t exactly a walk in the park.

“I managed to get over to Japan in 1994 after a lot of letters, phone calls and meetings," he recalls. "Luckily, Violet Berlin, the TV game show presenter was a good friend of mine at the time, and she took me to an arcade show in London so I could hunt down some Capcom Japan staff on the show floor and show them some colour prints of some of my graphics I'd been doing in my own time - I also looked for recruitment ads in LOGIN magazine, my contact list grew, and I finally pinpointed individuals I could send letters to.”

“The short story on the Capcom interview is that after traveling to Osaka from Tokyo, I showed up at the interview to be told, 'your work is good, but we hired a Westerner (an American) before, and we don't want to repeat that mistake," Flanagan remembers.

“After the disastrous and somewhat racist interview at Capcom Osaka, I braved the Sega CS2 entrance exam and got a 'borderline' result according to the department head," he continues, "and did some R&D on the very early stages of an unnamed GameGear RPG. I believe the game finally came out as Royal Stone.”

“I produced some backgrounds for the early version of Royal Stone, but it seems that the colour palette had a hefty overhaul and ended up a lot ‘lighter looking’ than what I started working on, but that’s the way they worked on things,” he says.

The good news for Flanagan was that his fellow staff were far more inspirational than his British compatriots, as he says: “The development staff at CS2 were amazingly talented, all the art staff had amazing illustration skills. Most art staff had large sketch sheets mounted into their desks, and to just see some of the fantastic doodles that would come out was humbling, and the toolset they had for its time was pretty amazing."

"In fact," he continues, "their handheld dev setup was something I've never seen since. They had these GameGear size screens mounted to the top of your monitor so you could upload your work screen directly to the GameGear screen so you could preview your work accurately - all the Megadrive artists could dump workscreens to a TV, as that was the target display.”

“I think my favourite staff member was Motomu Hayashi - he was the writer, game designer AND character artist on Astal. His artwork was so original and dynamic, he also did most of the graphics," says Flanagan. "He's still at Sega I believe, but hasn't had a chance to be character designer on anything since, which is kind of sad. He did animation on Feel the Magic: XX YY on the DS, though it's sad how they'd give someone with such artistic talent such a basic job, but its not surprising for Sega.”

“The director of CS2, and executive producer on all products at the time was a very knowledgeable, but scary man, if you were doing something wrong, you'd certainly know about it. I heard he was even more aggressive with the Japanese staff,” he recalls.

Getting Funky With A Monkey

So it’s clear that Ookibloks isn’t just a matter of aesthetic homage to Japanese gaming but an actual grass roots implementation from someone who has worked in the Japanese games industry during its 2D heyday. However, while Flanagan does have the hard nosed experience, he is very quick to point out that the passion for gaming very much still remains.

“I love a lot of games for specific reasons, but I'll say for 2D, Super Castlevania for its incredible soundtrack and overall vibe, Gunstar Heroes for its groundbreaking technicality, Assault Suits Valken (Cybernator) for its control system and AirRade Air for its professionalism.”

When asked what were his main gaming influences for Ookibloks, Flanagan is refreshingly open, not ashamed of utilizing gaming knowledge as a useful tool for designing: “It's undeniable that the 'ice skater' maze games are the main base of the game, but the banana collection system was inspired by shoot-em-ups by Cave, the single screen play areas of Bubble Bobble, Don Doko Don and PANG! and the graphical stylings of Bomberman and Puyo Puyo.”

“If you take a look at those Taito games, you'll see that they all have the same core mechanic," Flanagan continues, "use one technique to stun, use another technique to defeat and then repeat that process to clear the stage. While Ookibloks doesn't require you to kill everything, it’s undeniable that Taito's influence is responsible for that.”

“My approach to game design is always that of the game mechanic coming first, and the characters secondary, which seems to reflect a very Nintendo way of doing things," he says. "I feel that a lot of the time, Western games are built around a scenario and then the game design is forced to adhere to that.”

“The basic idea of Ookibloks was getting an object to move according to the game mechanic," he explains, "the thought of portraying the character, or whether the view was to be considered top down or side on wasn't even thought about, it simply wasn’t important - then I realised that top down would be incredibly dull."

Concludes Flanagan of his design inspiration: "The only way to express the in game characters was side on I felt, after that I considered what kind of a creature would jump around the screen. After a few nights of listing possibilities, it boiled down to a monkey. He could perform all the moves required, has longs limbs to express poses, and could have a large expressive face to convey some humour. And, everybody likes monkeys.”

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

[A quick crosspost, but this is far too important and cool not to run on GSW, given our predilection for the beep and the bleep of computer game-related music. Don't forget AQ owns X-Seed, too - a possible U.S. publisher for this?]

AQ Interactive, Korg and Xenogears composer Yasunori Mitsuda's Procyon Studios have unveiled Korg DS-10, a full-featured music creation package for the Nintendo DS based on Korg's MS-10 synthesizer.

Musical instrument producer Korg created the sound sources for the software, which uses the DS touchscreen and also features two analog synth simulators, a drum module, and a 6-track/16-step sequencer.

Additionally, DS systems can connect and be played together wirelessly. Additional features include two patchable dual-oscillator analog synth simulators, a four-part drum machine that uses sounds created with the analog synth simulator, delay, chorus, and flanger sound effects, real-time sound control and three modes of entry: touch control, keyboard screen and matrix screen.

The software, for which an official site has been revealed, is set to be unveiled at Germany's International Musikmesse Frankfurt music trade fair, and will be officially released in July 2008 in Japan - with no information on an international release thus far.

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Music games are on the rise. The Guitar Hero series and its younger cousin, Rock Band, have paved the way for the Harmonix iPod game Phase, indie title Audiosurf - a top-seller for Valve’s Steam service in February - and the new rhythm-action game Patapon.

But broaden the net, and you can check out the playable instruments and jam session possibilities of Lord of the Rings Online, the strummable guitar tossed into BioShock, or Portal - which didn’t end with a plot-packed cutscene, but with a musical finale.

And yet, as someone who covers both music and gaming, I’m well aware of the gulf between the two communities. The games industry makes more money and sees a brighter future for itself; the music biz is tanking, and has to console itself with drugs, sex, and two living Beatles. At the same time, the music industry sees opportunities to regain some vim – and make some scratch – through games.

Personally, I love ‘em both – and I’m incredibly excited to watch these worlds come together. In fact, nothing pumps me more than the thought of games and music living up to their joint potential.

Here are a few ways they can do it.

Licensing: This is the most obvious and the most boring, and I almost didn’t include it. Artists get checks when games license original music – whether it’s the hits loaded onto EA’s sports games, or the sprawling soundtracks of sandbox gangster games like GTA or Saint’s Row. And the Guitar Hero/Rock Band series have been a goldmine for hard rockers, who see an uptick in iTunes downloads for songs that faded off the charts years before the average player was even born.

But everything I just said about licensing applies to car commercials and Grey’s Anatomy. Let’s go deeper.

Fantasy: This is strange to say, but being a rock star ain’t such a good gig anymore. Sure, a few elder statesmen enjoy the riches, knighthoods and universal devotion that their work from the ‘70s has earned them.

But for most of the working musicians in the world, the chance of achieving true rock stardom has dwindled to nil. Steve Albini warned us back in the ‘90s that signing a major label deal would likely ruin you. And as record sales keep dropping and the malaise persists, more and more talents give up the dream that they could someday quit their day jobs.

Real musicians have become so cynical about fame that the storyline to Rock Band is almost miraculous. You mean my band could win fans just by rocking? And we could play arenas? And get a jet? Musicians still get jets?

Banging the buttons on a plastic guitar is fun, but hearing the mohawked crowd roar again is what makes the game. And the music world gets it. In his must-read, may-scoff insider newsletter, music industry expert Bob Lefsetz wrote about trying Rock Band on his new PS3. He came away converted. “People want to rock out. They want to believe. … This shit is expensive. But people pay for it. Because it delivers the visceral thrills we USED to get with music. When bands made a ton of bread because they were unsullied, spoke from their hearts and never sold out.”

Innovation – in Games AND in Music: As we discovered last winter, the legendary Brian Eno has signed on to create music for Spore. Eno’s presence on the game is almost as exciting as Will Wright’s. And it proves a point that we’ve been seeing for a while: game soundtracks aren’t just a new channel for music – they open up a whole new bag of techniques.

In a world of recording studios and sampling laptops, music doesn't have to come from musicians on a stage. Eno discovered generative music thanks to Life, a “game” – some would just call it an algorithm - by John Conway. In the ‘70s, he worked on “ambient” music – music that could soundtrack a space and provide a subliminal accompaniment to your daily experiences; 1982’s On Land featured music for “imaginary landscapes.”

David Toop’s fascinating book on experimental music, Haunted Weather describes artists who turn the sound of a dog barking across a desert into music, or construct dance tracks from samples of liposuction surgery. Others evoke memories for a place through the use of “soundmarks” (landmarks made of, you guessed it, sound). Charles Ives envisioned two different marching bands colliding in the street; in a game, they could fight to the death.

A lot of what these talents are trying would be easier inside the imaginary landscapes and limitless rhythms of a game. And by the same token, games stand to benefit by inviting composers into the development process and laying their wildest ideas to code - just as Wright may have done with Eno.

Amateurs: This may be the most important thing of all: games attract a whole ton of amateurs.

Over time, we've given the job of making music to the experts. It’s true that teenagers still buy pawn shop guitars and start garage bands, and anyone can publish their shambolic first demos on a MySpace page. But a giant divider separates them from "real" musicians. All of the newcomers who are spreading their music on the ‘Net are widely dismissed as stealing the oxygen from the professionals – as if their music is an unavoidable, undifferentiated mudslide that smothers all the talent left in the biz.

This wasn’t always the case. In the old days, music – like sports, or cooking, or a million other social acts – was supposed to involve everyone. As musician and neuroscientist Dan Levitin put it recently, “The ancient Greeks said that one measure of the quality of a society or civilization is the number of its members who participate in the making of the arts. And in the last three or four hundred years, we've witnessed a kind of transformation in this society, which is that we don't all make music anymore.”

One of the greatest achievements of music games – especially multiplayer, social ones – is to help turn that around. They make a safe, fun space where anyone can take part in music and not feel ridiculous. Sure, some Rock Band vets will move on to a real drum kit; a handful could even become stars. But that’s beside the point. The player’s engagement matters more than their skill. They don't mind being amateurs. And their participation could make them love music more than ever.

[Photo credit: Adam Penney, photographing The Comuppins. "Transcendental Air Guitar" title thanks to Sandy Pearlman.]

[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 (2)

Aha, one of the most amazing art forms out there is that of the hacked 2D fighting game, and one of the latest GameSetLinks finds a Street Fighter II bootleg infinitely more crazy than the (pictured) Rainbow Edition - extremely awesome.

On this type of subject, my colleague Brandon Sheffield has been traversing the globe of recent, getting interviews (well, he was out in Texas last week at Gamecock's EIEIO, and at Capcom's press day on Monday!)

One of his chats was with Street Fighter II remixxy supremo David Sirlin, so expect to see hyper-detailed discussions about Dhalsim's hit boxes (or whatever extreme gameplay-balancing nerds talk about!) up on Gamasutra in the next few weeks. Anyhow, onward to the linkses:

Subatomic Brainfreeze: Life is too short to be little, and Kouryu is ONE BIG COUNTRY
Oh, Street Fighter II bootlegs! 'Kouryu is a game that seeks out to make Rainbow Edition look normal by lacing it with PCP, and it is an overwhelming success.'

Tale of Tales» Blog Archive » Games in Star Trek
With _lots_ of screencaps - rather charming.

Terra Nova: Human Data as a Playfield: The Passively Multiplayer Online Game
I still think this is too bonkers to work as a business, but it's conceptually awesome.

DadHacker » Blog Archive » Donkey Kong and Me
Great story on creating the Atari 800 version of DK - via Slashdot.

The Independent Gaming Source: "Blueberry Garden" Sneak Peek Trailer Looks Sweet
Another very neat-looking, mysterious 2D alt.indie title.

Games That Launched the Band - GameCareerGuide.com
EA's Steve Schnur on the Electronic Arts soundtrack experience.

tooNormal » Engines, Names and Evolution - Part 3
Read the others in the series - some really fun DIY game engine talk.

The Triforce » Blog Archives » OLL and Some Introspective Musing on Creativity
Worth mentioning that Eurogamer are helping to broadcast the rather excellent One Life Left podcast now.

Values At Play » Blog Archive » Better Game Contest Spring 2008
Cool... the results of the first competition aren't out yet tho? By the 15th, apparently.

Amazon.com: EA: Celebrating 25 Years of Interactive Entertainment: Mojo Media: Books
Just spotted this at Best Buy, an EA coffee-table book, has had absolutely NO press, looks intriguing. Very odd.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[So, the new issue of Game Developer magazine is out - you do subscribe, right? - and there's Infinity Ward recounting a neeto and pretty much entirely exclusive Call Of Duty 4 postmortem in there, alongside the Top 50 Developers piece - hence this 'highlights' news piece picking some good bits.

But since you're GSW readers, and deserve MORE PURE INFORMATION, here's another bonus factoid - the March 2008 issue of the mag is the first to debut our new humor column, 'Arrested Development', which is written by Matthew Wasteland of Magical Wasteland fame. We're excited about this - as should you be, since 'Five Short Game Industry Keynotes' is but the tip of Matthew's sarcasmatroid brain. Also, we're pretty sure that's not his real last name. Anyhow... the story!]

The new March 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine has an exclusive creator-written article on the making of Infinity Ward's Call Of Duty 4, and Gamasutra has extracts from the piece, discussing a second 'new IP' team once working at the developer and the relative successes of CoD4's PC and Xbox 360 demos.

The postmortem, written by Infinity Ward's Zeid Rieke and Michael Boon, is described by the Game Developer editors as follows:

"Call of Duty 4 is one of the most critically acclaimed games of 2007, and the authors make no secret of their pride in the product. There are many important lessons in here, from sticking to your ideals for a game (even if you aren't completely in charge of the series), to maintaining focus when alluring new IPs loom."

The Evolution Of CoD4

In this first extract, the Infinity Ward team discuss the start of the project, and some of the thought processes the team went through when creating the highly rated title, which Activision is claiming is the best-selling game of 2007 at 7 million copies:

"Call of Duty 4 was Infinity Ward's third Call of Duty game, and as such we approached it knowing we needed to do something fresh. We don't want to pigeonhole ourselves any more than we have to, and many members of the team came off Call of Duty 2 promising never to work on another WWII game.

We had a few ideas that we wanted to do and eventually settled on two. One was Modern Warfare, and the other was a new project."

Infinity Ward's Second Team Dilemma

In this second extract, the Infinity Ward duo discuss one of the items that needed to change through the development of the title, referencing a second parallel game team that was eventually folded into the CoD 4 team:

"At the start of development on Call of Duty 4 we tried to branch into two teams. We started a second project with a small prototype team, intending on shipping it a year after Call of Duty 4.

The area hit hardest was the game design. Our design leadership was distracted by the second project and put a lot of their creative energy into it. This meant that problems like ['What Went Wrong' reason referenced in the full article] "too much desert" were allowed to linger for longer than they should have."

To PC Demo, Or Not To PC Demo?

Finally as part of these extracts, the team discuss what didn't quite go right with the PC demo of Call Of Duty 4, contrasting it with the Xbox 360 beta version, which helped build anticipation in a much stronger fashion:

"Our pre-release buzz was stronger than it had ever been for any of our previous games; we were getting tons of press despite it being a very crowded holiday season for games; our trailers and other videos on the internet were getting amazing numbers of viewers.