Name: Moshi Monsters

Company: Mind Candy

Established: April 2008

How it Works: Flash; it runs directly in the browser window with no installation required. All navigation and gameplay is performed through use of a mouse.

Overview: In Moshi Monsters, users "adopt" one monster from a range of six species to care for. Users are placed in charge of ensuring the monster remains happy and fed by purchasing goods from the local town (either food or furniture and items to decorate their monster's home) and raises money to purchase these items by taking part in daily Brain Age style puzzles. Players can also play some games in town for fun, plus interact with other users by visiting their monsters' homes and leaving messages on their pinboards -- specifically those that have been designated as "friends" by players who know each other's usernames.

Payment Method: Moshi Monsters is currently free-to-play, however the game is monetized in some small way with Mosh Monster Mopods -- phone charms which can be purchased and include secret codes for special items. There is no cash value attributed to any in-world items, however.

Key Features:
-A cute monster to look after
-Daily educational puzzles
-Safe interaction between users (only friends can post on friends' pinboards)
-Monsters can gain levels and popularity by having a nice room and doing well at puzzles

Moshi Monsters: In-Depth Tour

The Moshi Monsters experience begins by "adopting" your monster from a selection of six species on the website. Players have a limited number of color schemes with which to personalize their monster (one of eight main colors and one of eight secondary colors) and apart from that (and choosing the monster's name) there are no other options to personalize the "base" monster that you create. But with six monsters on offer there is a nice range to suit different tastes -- from the "ninja kitty" Katsuma to the Yeti-esque Furi -- and Mind Candy have hinted that clothes will soon be available for monsters to purchase.

Each created monster has his own room visible on the web by anyone, though visitors this way have no way of contacting the user (or even interacting with the monster or room) in any way unless they sign in. The pages clearly indicate the user's age and location. You can view Worlds in Motion's Moshi Monster, Shibito (a "Zommer") here!

Shibito already has a personalized room, but when you begin playing Moshi Monsters your room is empty and basic -- plain wallpaper and carpet plus ordinary windows and door.

With your monster you have only two real forms of interaction directly -- you can either click on it (to "pet" it), which usually results in your monster saying something (generally mildly amusing), or you can tickle it by dragging your mouse across it holding down the mouse button.

After I adopted Shibito (and after briefly tickling and petting him) I began what is arguably the main point of the world -- playing the educational puzzles. These puzzles are selected by pressing the puzzle button in the monster's room, and can be played once a day to receive Rox, which are Moshi Monster's currency, and to raise the monster's level (which has no immediately obvious meaning.)

Players must raise Rox in order to pay for food (to keep up their monster's health) and decorations for the monster's room (to keep up the monster's happiness) which both maintain the monster's mood.

The puzzles take the format of simple Brain Age tests, such as counting the number of blocks in a cube or finding the missing letter. Though they're initially very easy, they automatically calibrate their difficultly to how well the player is doing, and after only a week of maintain Shibito and playing puzzles each day they're already a real test of my arithmetic and ability to search for letters and numbers.

After my first set of puzzles I instantly set off down the shops, easily reachable just by clicking on the monster's door. There is a selection of three -- the gross-ery store (food), Yukea (furniture) and Bizarre Bazaar (decorations) and I quickly purchased some new wallpaper, a new floor, a dartboard and a cabinet for my monster, before placing them in his room -- much to his approval.

When it comes to the "single-player" game, there's not much more to it than that. In town, there are two games which can be played (Flutterby Field and En-gen) both of which are fun mini-games, but there isn't as much impetus to play them as there could be, as you can't gain Rox from successful play -- though Mind Candy promise that this will soon change.

Yet Moshi Monsters is intended as a social game, and it's here that it's different take on things is obvious. Moshi Monsters has been built as a sort of equivalent, or companion to, social networks such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. You can, for example, embed a Moshi Monsters widget into your MySpace page, which doesn't offer full functionality but is an easy way for your MySpace friends to find your monster.

This kind of thing is particularly important as within Moshi Monsters there is no way to interact with other players without already knowing their username. You may notice that poor old Shibito has no friends! Well, if he did, he'd be able to receive messages on his pinboard (from friends) and in turn, leave messages on his friend's pinboards. Any logged in player can view another player's pinboard or room (as long as they know their username) but the only initial interaction with another player is to ask them to be friends.

This limited social interaction is part of Moshi Monster's core philosophy to allow the worlds to be safe and enjoyable for the intended audience of children, and the website has a good deal of information for parents who may worry about the possibilities.

After taking care of Shibito for only a week, I'm already quite attached to him. I'm able to stop by for mere minutes each day to make sure he's happy and play through my daily puzzles, and can't help myself from eyeing the more expensive items for sale in the shops with the aim of decorating his home as well as possible.

Moshi Monsters: Conclusion

When you first look at Moshi Monsters there should be something that stands out to you above and beyond almost all other youth-orientated social worlds -- the consistently excellent art. Reminiscent of the work of Pete Fowler or designer vinyl toys, it's instantly pleasing and attractive, with clear crossover potential outside of its intended market. After all, I don't think I'd have spent so much time looking after my monster if I wasn't simply captivated by the way he looks.

If you'll have an initial reservation, it's got to be the limited customization of your monster. With only 64 color combinations per monster there isn't a lot of space to be completely unique in the world, but with luck that will be expanded on greatly for the future official launch.

As cute as the monsters and world are, when you get down to it, Moshi Monsters is a very simple experience. It seems entirely geared towards quick daily visits rather than attempting to snare the user into spending a lot of time in the world -- ten minutes or so a day is easily enough to play your daily puzzles, check on your monster and your friends, and purchase any new goods if you're feeling flush.

As a result, as a tool to get me to do daily arithmetic (something I'd never usually bother with!) Moshi Monsters is a great foil. That's not to say I haven't struggled with some aspects of the beta. After 10 days of taking care of my monster, I've run into errors causing my puzzles to stop working mid-way 4 times, and with only one chance each day, it's been frustrating to say the least. The world has been stable otherwise.

It's also unfortunate that the items that you purchase for your monster's home (such as a dartboard) have no use other than as decoration. Your monster, although he'll wander about his room, will never interact with anything, and spends most of his time standing about staring into space – though they'll occasionally emit a random pithy comment.

Another slight problem is the complete inability to get rid of items that you've purchased but don't want -- I foolishly purchased two sets of the same window, and now I'm running out of Rox to pay for food, I bitterly regret it!

Though the world is geared towards a short play time, I have to admit that currently, that decision just isn't satisfying. Even when I've managed to get my puzzles to work I've noticed that they repeat quickly, and other than posting messages on other player's boards, there just isn't much to do! This kind of complaint would lead me to dismiss the world out of hand usually, but the art style is so interesting (and the monsters so fun) that it's hard not to just wish for more to keep you in the world on each visit, and for more ways to connect with your monster.

For example, Flutterby Field and En-gen are both fun little mini-games (particularly En-gen, which is a nice twist on the usual "match 3" games) but there isn't much impetus to play them, as your monster doesn't take part. It seems like a missed opportunity.

Of course, a lot of these complaints come from the perspective of an adult player. Looking at the world from the viewpoint of a parent or child, there is a lot to like. The interface is intuitive. The community is as closed as can be -- I expect children will mostly only interact with others that they already know -- and it's easy for parents to keep an eye on, especially if they keep a monster themselves.

Although it's currently in beta, Moshi Monsters is a world which is artistically fully realized, and is therefore very attractive to new players. Sadly, many players will find themselves waiting for the designers to catch up with the artists to gain full enjoyment from it, but as a daily timewaster I can think of few worlds which can compare.

Useful Links:
Moshi Monsters Community Blog
Moshi Monsters Mopods.

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

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days, as well as any notable features on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.]

This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top titles released earlier this week - two browser games, a competition entry, and a little something from the thriving doujin community. Also, a summary of notable commercial indie games released in the past few days.

Game Pick: 'Everyday Shooter' (Queasy Games, commercial indie)
"This multiple award-winning arena shooter has finally arrived on the Windows platform, distributed by the indie-friendly folks at Steam for a very affordable price."

Game Pick: 'Dino Run' (Pixeljam Games, browser)
"In Pixeljam's latest game, players are transported back in time just moments before a giant asteroid crash lands and wipe out the entire dinosaur population on Earth. As a velociraptor seeking sanctuary from the impending doom, your objective is to run towards the end of each level as fast as you can, preferably before the wall of doom envelops you."

Game Pick: 'Mubbly Tower' (Jesse Venbrux and Ferry Spaans, freeware)
"A tower defense game built around the concept of making your structure as tall as you possibly can to please the king's increasing demands. Mubbly Tower also comes with an online high score table, four unlockable modes and a bonus platformer game."

Game Pick: 'Bowja the Ninja on Factory Island' (Robin Vencel, browser)
"Bowja the Ninja (on Factory Island) is a point and click adventure game in the style of The Visitor and Hapland. Your mission involves infiltrating the enemy's island and destroy their secret weapon, achieved by solving one or two simple puzzles in each screen to progress. A sequel is currently in the works."

Game Pick: 'Bootfighter Windom XP SP-2' (Y. Kamada, freeware)
"Common sights in Bootfighter Windom XP SP-2: wanton destruction, giant armed mechs and powerful weapons demolishing city buildings with one shot."

Game Pick: 'Frayed Knights' (Rampant Games, commercial indie - demo available)
"A preview of Jay Barnson's upcoming Dungeon Master-style indie RPG. Other notable commercial indie releases this week include Grubby Games' The Amazing Brain Train, Puppygames' Droid Assault and a new game from the developers of Jets'n'Guns."

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

['Quiz Me Quik' is a new weekly GameSetWatch column by journalist Alistair Wallis, in which he picks offbeat subjects in the game business and interviews them about their business, their perspective, and their unique view of life. This time, we have a look at the history and state of gaming on the world's most famous free operating system.]

It would be interesting to find out exactly how many people have switched to Linux since the release of Windows Vista. Not a big percentage of PC users, sure, but it’s probably a number worth taking notice of.

Personally, I loaded Ubuntu onto my laptop just a month after buying it – Vista’s sluggish operation got to be a little too irritating. And boy is the difference noticeable, too; Ubuntu might actually be the fastest OS I’ve ever experienced in terms of basic operation.

There are drawbacks, of course. Open Office is a fine counterpoint to Microsoft Office, and The GIMP is a great Photoshop alternative, but the gaming side is predictably lacking. I can play all the fantastic Kenta Cho freeware shooters, but…no Warning Forever? Tragic.

Of course, I’m not putting down the whole scene - I’m far from a Linux gaming authority. That’s why I thought now might be a good time to have a chat with Bob Zimbinksi, who has run the Linux Gaming Tome for around nine years now. He denies being an authority either, unfortunately, as he’s stepped back from the day-to-day workings of the site a little over the past few years. “Answering your questions has made me realize just how removed from Linux gaming I am these days,” he smiles. “Don't mistake me for an authority on modern Linux gaming. I'm a guy with a Macbook Pro and an Xbox 360. Sorry!”

Err, so…maybe that says something about Linux gaming, eh? Not that Zimbinski doesn’t still have some interesting things to say about the history of the site, and where Linux gaming has been in the past, of course. More importantly, he’s got an explanation as to why he’s moved away from Linux, and whether or not commercial gaming has a home on an operating system that thrives on a base of free software.

GSW: When did you first start using Linux, and what attracted you to it?

Bob Zimbinski: I started using Linux in the mid-90's, maybe 1994 or 1995. At the time, the notion of a Unix system on my desktop seemed pretty radical to me. I'd used Unix at work and school, and it was exciting to have free reign over an entire system, especially considering what a hands-on project administering a Linux system was in those days.

Upon getting my first Slackware system up and running, I resolved to use Linux exclusively for my computing environment.

GSW: What were your first experiences with Linux gaming?

BZ: I've always been a video game nerd, so it was important to me to see how much gaming I could do on this new system. I remember how exciting it was to get Doom running fullscreen - [graphics library] svgalib was a monster that I'm sure nobody misses today. I was also quite taken by Maelstrom, a Linux port of a slick Asteroids clone for the Mac.

GSW: What would you say your milestones for Linux gaming are? I assume Doom makes the list.

BZ: Doom, yes. That Linux could run such an - at the time - demanding piece of software was a validation of sorts. And Doom was the greatest game that humans had produced to that point, so that helped.

3Dfx released Linux drivers for their Voodoo 3D cards, allowing us to enjoy the goodness of hardware-accelerated OpenGL games like Quake, and virtually every game released after 1999. Also, the release of Loki Entertainment Software's first port, Civilization: Call To Power.

GSW: When did you first encounter the Linux Game Tome?

BZ: I don't remember my first actual encounter with the site. There was a project called the Linux Software Map which attempted to be a catalog of software for Linux. It had a games category, but I remember it was incomplete and sometimes out of date.

I suppose I found the Game Tome when I went looking for alternatives to the LSM. I liked that the Linux Game Tome was updated regularly, and that it included ratings and feedback from users.

GSW: At what point did you decide to step in and resume the updating of the
site?

BZ: At some point, the regular Game Tome updates stopped, and I missed the resource. At the same time, I'd been looking around for an appropriate way to contribute to the Linux community, so it occurred to me that maybe I could help continue what the Game Tome had been doing.

I contacted Tessa, who ran the site, and she agreed to hand it off to me. I wrote a bunch of Perl scripts, imported her data, and launched the second version of the Linux Game Tome.

GSW: How much had Linux gaming grown by the time you took over, and how steady was its rate of growth to the time you brought other people in?

BZ: When I took over the site, I didn't have the sense that Linux gaming was growing at all. I don't think there really was such a thing as "Linux gaming" at that point. There was still very much a hobbyist feeling to the entire community at this time, pre-internet boom. The world really hadn't discovered the Internet yet, so "Linux gaming", like most everything else on the net, was still a bunch of nerds sharing their stuff.

I've just had a look at the database. Here's the number of games added each year since I took over:

1998: 133
1999: 203
2000: 191
2001: 168
2002: 284
2003: 268
2004: 237
2005: 273
2006: 215
2007: 207
2008: 127

GSW: Did you ever feel like the project was overwhelming?

BZ: I've felt overwhelmed when other stuff in my life has kept me from keeping up the site, and there's nobody else around to help. There was a period where I think the site went completely unmanned for a number of months in the early 2000s. Since then, a number of people have stepped up to help.

GSW: At what point did you feel like the scene was really coming into its
own? Do you feel like the site had a part in that?

BZ: I think it's important to recognize that there are really two Linux gaming "scenes": a free software one and a commercial software one. The free software scene is a part of the larger open source movement, and it's been active and self-sustaining as long as Linux has been around.

Commercial games for Linux effectively got their start when Loki Entertainment Software started porting commercial Windows games. Maybe that's when the commercial gaming scene came into its own. Since Loki, Linux Game Publishing has continued to produce native ports for Linux, as have a handful of brave companies - id, Epic, Bioware.

GSW: What is your level of involvement with the site these days?

BZ: My current involvement is pretty minimal. I step in for the occasional technical issue, but daily maintenance of the site is in the extremely capable hands of Niels Weber, Pasi Kalinen, Ingo Ruhnke and Jacek Poplawski. Pasi has also been working heroically on some much-needed updates to the site code that I hope we can roll out soon.

GSW: What kinds of games are you playing these days?

BZ: I just – finally – finished Zelda on the Wii. Before that, Lost Odyssey, Mass Effect, and Blue Dragon on the 360.

GSW: Do you think [Windows emulator] WINE is still a necessity for gamers using Linux?

BZ: I don't think there's any way around some kind of Windows emulation layer if one wants to play modern commercial games on Linux. Heroes like Linux Game Publishing continue to produce native ports of a handful of games, but the vast majority of commercial PC games on the market are out of reach to Linux users until they run something like WINE or VMWare. I hate this but, it's true. Of course, there's an awful lot of free stuff out there to have fun with too.

GSW: Do you think commercial games are less likely to succeed on Linux?

BZ: If success equals lots of copies sold, then yes - I think commercial games are less likely to succeed on Linux simply because the market is probably tiny.

How many people run Linux on their desktop? How many of those want to play commercial games and will pay 50 bucks for the privilege of doing so?

GSW: Finally, what motivated your own move away from Linux, to Mac and Xbox 360?

BZ: Just time, I guess. After using Linux as my primary computing platform for nearly ten years, I got restless. MacOS X had arrived, and with its BSD base, it brought many of the technical things I found attractive about Linux, but wrapped in a delicious candy shell. And the laptops are dead sexy! So an iBook became my primary computer, then a Powerbook, and
now a MacBook Pro. I still rely on Linux for moistmaster - my file/web/mail server - but it's not on my desktop any more.

As for the 360, I'm a game nerd. I've always owned consoles. I've got a Wii and PS3 too, but of course the Wii only comes on when friends are over, and the PS3 just sits and cries quietly to itself.

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

Time to round up some of the top posts on big sister site Gamasutra (with a smattering of others from sites we run such as Game Career Guide), and there's actually some interesting stuff hanging out today - headed by Chris Dahlen's interview with Jordan Weisman.

Weisman is probably one of the people slightly adjacent to the game industry who has had the most influence on it, thanks to his pen&paper RPG history (ahem, Shadowrun) and his pioneering of ARGs, so it was excellent to get his views down.

Elsewhere, there's a neat Jenova Chen piece, Ian Bogost on how games can be tactile, a cute Intellivision history, and a host of other smaller pieces.

Anyhow, feel free to peruse at your leisure:

Interview: Jordan Weisman
"Weisman's legendary resume spans FASA (Battletech), 42 Entertainment (I Love Bees) and now Smith & Tinker (game rights to Crimson Skies and Shadowrun) - Gamasutra presents a rare interview with him on design and inspiration." [NOTE: the Gamasutra news story highlighting one particular part of this feature is 'Weisman: Practice 'Planned Parenthood' With Your Game Franchises', an interesting concept!]

A History of Gaming Platforms: Mattel Intellivision
"Following up on their profiles of the Commodore 64, Vectrex, Apple II, and Atari 2600, game historians Loguidice and Barton examine the lifespan of Mattel's cult '80s console the Intellivision, from Astrosmash to AD&D and beyond."

Microsoft's Unangst: 'PC Will Always Be At The Center Of Innovation'
"What's the state of the Games For Windows initiative in 2008? Gamasutra talks to Microsoft's senior GFW director Kevin Unangst about the reception to the program, the PC Gaming Alliance, Games For Windows Live's versus Valve's Steam Community, and why PCs aren't (or shouldn't) end up too much like consoles."

Persuasive Games: Texture
"Author/designer Ian Bogost (Fatworld) looks at 'texture' in games - the art of connecting the virtual to the real via rumble and physical simulation, from Hard Drivin' to Rez and beyond."

GFH: Neils Clark On Moving Beyond 'Game Addiction'
"Following his recent Gamasutra feature on the subject, writer and researcher Neils Clark spoke at the ongoing 2008 Games for Health conference on game addiction -- from KoToR to World Of Warcraft and beyond."

Carry Small, Game Large: Big Shared Screen Multiplayer Gaming
"This technical article presents an intriguing 'shared gaming' concept, using a Java/Flash framework to allow mobile Internet devices to control a big-screen game with participants in the same location - details, source code within."

Finding A New Way: Jenova Chen And Thatgamecompany
"In this in-depth interview, thatgamecompany co-founder and fl0w designer Jenova Chen discusses his philosophy of abstract game design - and why making traditional games is "too easy" to dwell on."

Interview: Gameforge Talks Rise Of Web-Based MMO
"German game developer Gameforge has created the buzzed-about Civilization-like title Ikiriam to run solely in a web browser, and is now expanding operations to North America - we talk to the firm's Lars Koschin about the surprising rise of the browser-based MMO."

Results from James Portnow's Game Design Challenge: Mini Racing Games (GameCareerGuide)
"Design on paper mini games for a car racing game -- that was essentially your game design challenge, though what made it truly challenging were all the additional restrictions. Three fabulous submissions are featured here, along with three honorable mentions. Read on to find out what made the winning ideas stand out to James Portnow, a professional game designer."

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

The May 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine, GameSetWatch's big sister print publication, and the leading U.S. trade publication for the video game industry, has shipped to subscribers and is available from the Game Developer Digital service in both subscription and single-issue formats, as well as a single physical issue.

The cover feature for the issue is a postmortem of Harmonix's signature new music game franchise Rock Band, penned by lead designer Rob Kay and offering much insight into the title's development. As is explained in its description:

"Witness Harmonix's transformation from a game developer to a peripheral manufacture hybrid, as the company undertakes its most ambitious game to date—one which comes close to fulfilling the studio's ultimate vision. From controller management to over-stretched leads, this postmortem chronicles the trials and tribulations of this innovative game."

Another major feature in the new issue is 'Engines of Creation,' in which Jon Jordan takes a comprehensive look at an increasingly crucial part of game development, from Epic to Crytek and beyond:

"Third-party licensed game engines are increasingly used in the development of high-profile titles. But which is right for you? Here, we lay the major entries' features side-by-side."

In another signature feature, Paul Hyman describes the ins and outs of the current state of hiring in the rapidly shifting sands of the games industry, explaining:

"The job market is hot right now, especially for developers with experience. This state of the industry report aims to discern what companies are really looking for."

In addition, new design columnist BioWare Austin's Damion Schubert reflects on his trade in 'Design Of The Times: Idea Synthesis,' described as "...ruminations on collaborative design and humility as ways to get ahead as a game designer." Finally, in a new interview, Bungie artist Mike Zak discusses designing art for curious players, Halo's unique look, and Bungie's newfound independence.

As always, the issue also contains the customary in-depth news, code, art, audio, and design columns from Game Developer's veteran correspondents, plus product reviews and editorial columns.

Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months' and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of May 2008's magazine as a single issue.

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

[This Mathew Kumar-penned interview ran on Gama yesterday, but is worth a reprint here on GSW cos, really, Planet Moon are one of the more intriguing small console developers around - heck, Aaron Loeb even writes plays about game violence - and they have a canny worldview on how to (try to) do things different.]

Developer of the just-released Battle of the Bands for Wii, published by THQ, Planet Moon - founded in 1997 by some of the ex-Shiny veterans who helped created MDK, is one of the more quirkily interesting Bay Area game creators.

In particular, a history of offbeat humor has permeated original IP Planet Moon action titles such as Giants: Citizen Kabuto and Armed And Dangerous.

More recently, the company has worked on titles including Infected and After Burner Black Falcon for PSP - as well as Smarty Pants for Electronic Arts and Battle Of The Bands for THQ - both on the Wii.

In this in-depth interview, Gamasutra talks to Chief Operating Officer Aaron Loeb about Planet Moon's recent titles, and the place it sees for original IP in the industry, which includes a call for an obvious distinction between "blockbuster" games and "art house" games.

You're working on Wii now, having moved away from PSP -- is it the platform you see as being good for original IP?

Aaron Loeb: We will work on any platform where we can explore fun, new ideas. We are currently developing for other platforms in addition to the Wii, but nothing has been announced.

As a company, we’re focusing on a portfolio approach recently. We have a really big game in development (unannounced), medium games (like Battle of the Bands) that takes 16-18 months, and smaller games (like Smarty Pants).

It’s working well for us, as we learn and change our procedures based on lessons from the different game projects. For instance, our company has moved to the SCRUM project management system based on experiments done with it by the After Burner team (a PSP game we made with Sega).

Having multiple teams on multiple platforms enables us to improve or processes, our working conditions, and our games.

What was it that you learned from the After Burner development that led to the move to SCRUM?

AL: We learned that the traditional waterfall schedule doesn't deal with problems with any of the efficiency that SCRUM does. It also doesn't empower the team.

The SCRUM system says that the team will figure out how to solve a problem (and by that, I mean that individual implementers will be responsible for problem-solving, not that it's some kind of group-think).

Rather than having a producer who comes in and says "you will have a jet, and it will have twenty moving parts, and they will look like this, this and this and you will create them in the following way," SCRUM allows for a much more creative process, in which the Project Director might say, "I want the jets to be highly customizable within the following parameters" and the team is responsible for figuring out how to get from Point A to Point B.

I like to think of the SCRUM system as the scene in Apollo 13 when the engineers get the box full of crap that's in the capsule and are told they have to figure out a way to use this stuff to keep the astronauts alive.

The team works in "sprints" in which they have a goal to achieve in a set period of time and they figure out how to achieve it, and the Project Director is responsible for quality -- so he or she can approve or reject the work.

It has a number of rules that are great -- like you can't change the goal in the middle of the sprint, which is hard sometimes to adhere to, but is essential!

At this point, I think we would be hard-pressed to go back to a rigid top-down management system.

What spurned the decision to move away from PSP?

AL: Honestly, developers don’t really get to make decisions like that. Publisher support for the platform waned for a while, so if we’d stubbornly stuck to the PSP we wouldn’t have gotten work doing much beyond ports.

Interest in the PSP is definitely coming back among the publishers, though. That little puppy just keeps on selling!

How do you feel about the titles you made on PSP in retrospect -- Afterburner, Infected?

AL: We’re very proud of them. We wish they’d found a bigger audience, but I think most people who’ve made PSP games wish that in retrospect.

Both projects had really cool, stylized ways of telling their story we hadn’t tried before. Infected was told through what were essentially radio plays, and that actually worked really well. It also had a cut-scene acted out with hand puppets, which I think was a videogame first.

After Burner had some really cool 2D animatic cutscenes, and multiple storylines. It also had a ridiculous array of jet customizations. The games are both quite fun!

If I had one regret about either of them, it’s that Infected’s infrastructure multiplayer was anemic. It was the primary complaint about the game. We had only 1-on-1 multiplayer across the Internet (16-player over ad hoc), and that just wasn’t good enough in the face of SOCOM.

We should have cut the feature entirely rather than taking a stab at something we couldn’t deliver with our budget and schedule.

You're talking about the problems PSP games had at retail. Do you think a major problem of original IP is still distribution?

AL: Original IP is far more risky than licenses or sequels. It’s also potentially more rewarding. Our industry goes through huge swings in its appetite for original IP. Early in a lifecycle, everyone wants it; later on, few will touch it.

Certainly, publishers have problems selling titles the retailers have never heard of. The giant box stores are particularly problematic in that regard; the folks at GameStop, in general, are fantastic and they really get behind stuff they think is good, original, or otherwise.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to money. How much did the game cost and how much goes into marketing it. Someone recently said to me that the biggest way our industry screws itself is by not “opening our books” as Hollywood does.

Because the press and the consumers don’t actually know whether a game cost $50 million or $1 million, games from radically different sources are held to the same standards. Hollywood has the concept of an “art house flick,” but we don’t have art house games.

This creates a problem where all games are reviewed as though they should have the highest budgets (using the Hollywood example, if you expect all movies to have giant transforming robots and explosions, then tiny, English comedies really won’t review well).

One way publishers and developers have dealt with this is to retreat to smaller platforms with original IP in hopes of being held to a less blockbustery standard. There are some highly reviewed original games on the DS, XBLA and PSP, for instance.

I think we would see a lot more interesting, small original IPs if we figured out a way to indicate to the consumers and the press, “this is a small game on a big platform; please don’t compare it to Grand Theft Auto IV. It’s not trying to be like that.”

How is a small developer ever going to make a well-reviewed first person shooter, for instance, if all first person shooters must have as rich a feature set as Halo 3 to be taken seriously?

The problem here is a vicious circle. The GTA IVs and the Halo 3s of the world need the least plaudits from the press and the least PR because they are established and have giant marketing budgets. It’s the small, original games that desperately need those 90% reviews to get people to try them, but they can’t get them because they don’t have level editors or join-anytime-16-player-co-op-multiplayer, etc.

The result is that the publishers make a few big, huge original IP bets (Rock Band, BioShock, Assassin’s Creed) where they invest the same kind of money as they would with a giant sequel, and fewer small bets on original IP. The aggregate effect is that our industry makes fewer and fewer original games.

Do you think some of the problem lies with the end unit pricing, then? An original IP title might be great, but if I know it's only got that limited feature set compared to Halo and Halo is the same price - how can the consumer not be expected to go for what they see as "better value"?

AL: I honestly don't think that's how the consumer is making their decisions -- or, at least, not the only way. The truth is, Halo 3 is more feature-rich than, well, just about anything. It's a freaking onslaught of features.

And yet, the consumer also bought quite a few copies of the other major FPSes last year, which were no slouches in the feature department, but if this all boiled down to "feature check list = VALUE" in the consumer's mind, Halo 3 would win.

The issue for the first-time developer in our scenario is that the big boys won't publish their original game unless they can get 85% or higher, and our industry now seems to have a kind of barrier on smaller games -- no matter how good or creative their ideas -- on the big platforms reaching those kinds of review scores unless they are also super-polished, which only comes with a lot of time and money.

So, you have to spend more money and more time to make an original game successful. And, if you're the publisher, why spend that money, when you can spend the same amount on a license or a sequel and have less risk? It's a negative feedback loop.

All that said, we had more hugely successful original IPs last year than we have in years, so it's not as bad as I'm making it sound! It's only that it is harder now to get a really big, original idea off the ground than it used to be, and it was pretty darn hard already.

So what are the state of affairs at Planet Moon right now?

AL: Well, we just shipped our first game with THQ, called Battle of the Bands, which is an original IP that was pitched by one of our staff members in a company pitchfest.

We made a game with EA last year called Smarty Pants, which did very well for us, and reflected the fastest game we’d ever made -- the concept was discussed at GDC last year, and the game was on store shelves by Black Friday.

In addition, we’re working on a huge, super-secret project with one of the industry’s largest publishers that we are looking forward to announcing.

A company pitchfest? How often do you do that sort of thing?

AL: We do them at least twice a year. Everyone in the company has an opportunity to get up and pitch an idea. Sometimes people pair up and make demos, other times they do simple one-sheets.

These games are sometimes then polished up into fuller pitches and presented to our publishing partners.

In general, we take a "good ideas can come from anywhere" approach. The job of our executive and creative staff is to be able to hear a great idea and figure out how to make it even better. We've found, over the years that the "only designers or producers have ideas worth making into games" model is terribly inefficient and, frankly, wrong.

That said, our designers and project directors (the people who oversee the game from cradle to grave) are the ultimate authorities on the ideas. We aren't big fans of designing by committee.

Battle of the Bands was originally pitched by Ian Slutz, who became senior designer on the title. The original idea was marching bands of robots fighting each other, and it eventually morphed into bands of various musical styles fighting each other musically.

One of the pillars of the game is what we call “music switching,” where the dominant band in the battle is the one whose music you hear. There are five musical styles represented in the game -- rock, latin, country, hip-hop and marching band.

The switches in the music are not authored (as they often are in dynamic music systems). The songs can literally switch on a per-note basis. The game ships with a music player which allows players to experiment with this feature. We felt that for the more casual consumer on the Wii, this was an essential idea -- Battle of the Bands is a fun (and ridiculous) party game, so we focused our attention on quick “get in and get out” features.

Moving backwards, how was the experience working with EA on Smarty Pants?

AL: Excellent - the project itself was difficult because we had 20,000 questions to manage on top of making the game. But it’s not just 20,000 questions, really.

You can’t localize trivia -– especially trivia targeted to children, as they know totally different things in different countries. So, together we had to manage 120,000 questions (20,000 per territory) and all the potential headaches of that much data.

The game itself was built in its most basic form, and playable, within 4 weeks of the project’s beginning. We knew early on it was very fun, and EA gave us the chance to see all of its focus tests. Usually, game focus tests are depressing because you watch as people show you the 5,000 different ways your game is utterly baffling.

The Smarty Pants tests were fantastic: people jumping up and down, laughing, screaming. We knew we had a really fun game early on. From there, the goal was making it as fun and accessible as possible.

It seemed like a very out of character game for Planet Moon to take. Why take it -- and what do you feel Planet Moon gave to the project?

AL: One major factor in the decision was age -- namely, that we’re not getting any younger. Most of the people at Planet Moon have kids now, and making a game for the whole family sounded really refreshing. And boy was it!

It is really rewarding to play a game you made with your 8-year-old child or with your 70-year-old parents. One of the great things about the Wii is that, as a platform, it’s an ambassador to people who don’t usually play games. With Smarty Pants, we enjoyed tapping into that potential.

I think we brought a lot of ingenuity and know-how to the title. The co-op trivia mode is unique and a great bit of design. The way the game incorporates a layered approach to its design - you can ignore many of the features if you want the most basic trivia experience, or embrace them and add complexity if you’re a more core gamer -- was clever and definitely takes the game beyond simple.

We made the game on time for the holidays despite significant data challenges of a trivia game that adjusts its questions based on your age and performance. There’s quite a complex little data model under the hood on Smarty Pants.

Do you see Planet Moon returning to the very "out there" story led games you began your existence with -- like Giants?

AL: Oh, my, yes. Very soon now, all will be revealed. (And before this starts any rumors, I’m not referring to a sequel to Giants.)

Anything else in the future for Planet Moon?

AL: Onions.

Oh, and skeletons.

Skeletons eating onions.

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

Yes, in almost-weekend land there's still time for a brace of GameSetLinks, headed by Keith Boesky taking the Boom Blox co-creator to task for some game condemnation that might (or might not) be a little hypocritical.

Further down the list - some more fun promotion of Civilization Revolution, as well as academics GONE WILD and Jenova Chen's cloud-strewn IMs - all fun stuff.

To cite Prince, let's go crazy:

A Tree Falling in the Forest: C'mon Mr. Spielberg: You Gotta Be Kidding Edition
'With regard to [Jaws], his son is exhibiting the very behavior Mr. Spielberg fears from games.'

RPS Vs. Russians: The Stalin Vs. Martians Interview | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
'Alexander: Putin personally throws funny Russian people into jail. That’s why Russians are mostly dull and their take on computer games is 100% serious like they’re creating a nuclear bomb or something.'

osu! - official homepage
Free PC rhythm game '...based on the gameplay of the popular Nintendo DS series Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! and its overseas counterpart Elite Beat Agents.' With lots of fanmade levels using odd tunes, yay. Via IC!

JENOVA'S BLOG:Chat notes about Video Game, Art and Digital Medium
Some interesting IM scribblings from the Thatgamecompany co-founder.

Play Chronotron, a free online game on Kongregate
Interesting, some Braid-like time travel/storage elements in this Flash puzzle game - via Mzenke.

The Escapist : Quibus Lusoribus Bono? Who is Game Studies Good For?
Heh, taking Douglas Wilson's GameSetWatch article as a starting-point to rag on academikwak a bit.

Ian Bogost - A Response to Roger Travis
Mr. Bogost responds to the above academic-baiting Escapist article - which I agree does seem a little scattershot.

Shirt.Woot : 2K Games and Woot Team Up For Civilization Revolution Derby, Opening May 9
Awesome idea, thumbs up, 2K - that and the Shepard Fairey poster (pictured) are top marketing bonzo.

MTV Multiplayer » ‘Tetris’ License Holders Want You To Win One Million Dollars Playing Competitive ‘Tetris’
Tetris company co-founder Henk Rogers giving away the brim of his money hat, heehee.

insertcredit.com: 'News: Food in press releases'
ION Conference has great clam chowder, heh.

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

[In this opinion piece, game researcher and designer Douglas Wilson looks at why "the most surprising gaming moment of 2007" didn't involve game mechanics, plot twists, or sales figures, but rather a Mario Galaxy storybook tale told by a princess.]

EDITOR'S NOTE: Story spoilers contained for those who have not yet completed Super Mario Galaxy.

For me, the most surprising gaming moment of 2007 did not involve a new game mechanic, unexpected sales figures, a major plot twist, or even a maniacal talkative artificial intelligence.

The biggest shocker was a simple storybook tale told by a princess named Rosalina.

See, Super Mario Galaxy deceptively begins like most other Mario games. The hopelessly helpless Princess Peach is once again kidnapped by Bowser, and it is up to Mario (of course) to save her and restore peace and order to the Mushroom Kingdom.

For us serious Mario devotees, this hackneyed opening presents little problem. After all, Mario games aren’t about the “story.” Indeed, an elaborate back story might even detract from the more open-ended 3D platformer experience, right?

At least, that’s what I used to think.

Mario Tackles Tragedy

In Super Mario Galaxy, Mario ends up adrift in space, only to be rescued by the enigmatic Princess Rosalina and her comet spaceship. Joining forces with Rosalina in the fight against Bowser, we are tasked with collecting enough Power Stars to restore full power to her spaceship.

Early on in this quest, we unlock the Library, inside which we can join a gaggle of Lumas to hear Rosalina read a chapter from her colorfully illustrated storybook (presented in the same style as the game intro). Throughout the game, we gradually unlock additional chapters, one by one

In grand fairytale tradition, Rosalina’s story begins “a very, very long time ago with a young girl.” The tale, which starts unassumingly enough, slowly reveals itself as an autobiographical account of Rosalina and the construction of her spaceship.

Our heroine, who voyages into space in search of her mother, befriends a little Luma, builds a home on a turquoise blue comet, and eventually assumes a mothering role herself for a whole family of Lumas.

Then, in Chapter 7, Rosalina’s tale takes an unexpected turn for the tragic. Overcome by nostalgia for her home planet, our heroine finally faces up to the harsh reality that her search has been futile. Her mother, as she reveals in a poignant euphemism for death, is “sleeping under the tree on the hill.”

The story ultimately rebounds, as our heroine accepts this truth and embraces her new family. But this ending is, of course, bittersweet.

It is worth pausing here to reemphasize that Super Mario Galaxy – a Mario game, for chrissake! – tackles the drama of human tragedy.

In other news, Hell is now a chilly 0° C.

Super Mario Galaxy is a brilliant game, for reasons already covered in various reviews. Yet despite the largely positive coverage, I was disappointed that the gaming press so overwhelmingly ignored (or in one case, dismissed) Rosalina’s storybook.

To fill that void, I’d like to make a case that Super Mario Galaxy stands as striking proof that “traditional” stories can not only be successfully integrated into video game worlds, but can also enrich the broader gameplay experience.

All About Rosalina

Plumber be damned, I would go as far as to argue that Super Mario Galaxy is, at its core, a game about Rosalina – or at least her worldview. One only needs look at the secret ending – debatably the “true” ending – obtained by collecting all 120 stars.

This ending focuses not on Mario, but on Rosalina, as she wistfully departs for the starry beyond. Albeit a far cry from the artfulness and restraint of the storybook, the ending hints at where the developers’ true allegiances lie.

Part Little Prince and part My Neighbor Totoro, Rosalina’s tale uses the guise of a child’s perspective to explore issues of family, childhood, life, and death.

The hand-drawn aesthetic of the illustrations provides a fitting visual expression of the frolicsome gameplay and childlike exuberance of the game world. Indeed, the familiar storybook form, which plays on our own associations and nostalgia, is inseparable from the content.

As such, Super Mario Galaxy challenges conventional “ludological” wisdom that calls for video game stories to be procedurally generated, or somehow woven into gameplay.

Rosalina’s storybook may not formally alter the game system, but it certainly affects our perception of the game world, imbuing it with an additional aura of motivation and meaning. Much more than mere “bonus content,” Rosalina’s storybook anchors an emotional heart of the game world.

Of course, some players won’t care about or connect with Rosalina’s tale. Super Mario Galaxy supports these alternative play expectations by making a clean separation (at least formally) between gameplay and story. Moreover, this separation allows the storybook to maintain some subtlety.

Rather than spoonfeed the tale to us, the game requires us to take an active role in uncovering the trauma that lies within. The storybook avoids intruding, and feels all the more precious for it.

I don’t mean to minimize the importance of game mechanics. On the contrary, Rosalina’s storybook works so well precisely because it stands in juxtaposition with the otherwise unadulterated childlike “fun” of the gameplay. Taken by itself, the storybook tale would be far less poignant.

"L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux"

In making these arguments, my intention has not been to stir up old ludology versus narratology debates. Besides, that was always a false dichotomy. My goal has simply been to push back against sweeping claims about how games should or should not tell stories, and also to draw attention to a game that has spurred my own narrative imagination.

Though I’m certainly excited to see how advances in user interface and artificial intelligence technologies open up new design possibilities, I wonder whether we game researchers tend to undervalue the fundamentals.

Super Mario Galaxy serves as a reminder that – with little more than proper timing, placement, and aesthetic synergy – gameplay and story can be used to amplify each another, thereby transcending the sum of their parts.

Phrased differently, I can't help but feel like gameplay purists are much like the "grown-ups" that so bemused Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s little prince. So concerned with formal definitions and “unique” qualities of the medium, these purists overlook the more invisible links that bind story, world, and mechanics together, and ultimately make each element richer for one another.

No worries. Those of us who still have a little childhood left in them already know that we only need pick up the controller again to hear our little laughing stars. Well, if not five hundred million of them, at least 120 (and one).

[Further discussion of Rosalina's storybook is available on Wired's consumer weblog Game|Life, in an interview with Galaxy director Yoshiaki Koizumi.]

Posted by Douglas Wilson at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[“Why We Play” is a weekly column by NYC freelance writer Chris Plante that discusses how video games benefit us when we are away from them, in the real world, and what brings us back. This time he finds peace in the sandbox.]

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s we must obey the rules of the game. We can pick the game, Niko Bellic, but we cannot change the rules.
-Dimitri Rascalov, GTA IV

With college out of the way and my job search begun, I’ve had a fair amount of time to play GTA IV, and, strangely, return to Crackdown. The more time I spend in Liberty City, the more I miss the opportunity to scale buildings in a single bound. It’s not that I don’t love GTA IV’s narrative, or even that I feel it would be bettered by Crackdown’s superhero’s agilities, rather they are like beer to chips, wine to cheese, or coffee to bagels—they perfectly complement one another.

What I enjoy about these particular games, especially Crackdown, is their willingness to give the player complete freedom to the open world. But what, if anything, does this freedom cost the game’s narrative? And why do I find this freedom, unique to the sandbox genre, so damn appealing?

Applying My Diploma

To dig in, let’s take a brief pit stop in narrative theory. From Aristotle to Arthur Miller, a well-structured narrative should always progress by continually re-applying what the audience learns from previous scenes. Like in a detective story, each scene must act as a clue, a small semblance to a cohesive whole.

At the narrative’s climax, the audience should be able to step-away and feel they have all the pieces before them, but that they alone can’t perfectly put them together; yet, when the pieces congeal, when the climax occurs, the story must also feel inevitable, that these pieces were carefully crafted to fall into their particular places. As Hedda must shoot herself, as Major Kong must ride the bomb, as Brody must give the stink palm—the narrative (or fate) has led them to these decisions.

Generally, games obey this cause-effect method tooth-and-nail. Your completion of each level rewards you the next level, the next puzzle piece, more difficult than the last. On a micro-level, the game gradually increases its difficulty by adding and layering mechanics. The designers carefully pace your introduction to skill-sets, weapons, or abilities to complete the game.

While I won’t explore this concept in non-narrative games, they obey similar rules. Tetris increases speed and pieces. Guitar Hero adds another fret.

Selling Freedom

Yet, sandbox games' recent expansion across the video game landscape has made this cause-effect method difficult to maintain. Since the designer must make the world the player inhabits believable to the player, they usually hand over a few game mechanics typically divvied out over levels in more linear games.

Suddenly, players have a sense of choice never before given. How can designers plan a cause-effect narrative, when the player has unlimited choices—what if he abandons the studio created narrative for his own?

In a traditional linear game, you may learn to use an Uzi in level 1, drive a car in level 2, and lead a drive-by in level 3, but a sandbox game must make all three possibilities available immediately.

While the sandbox games often make an effort to teach these skills in a linear fashion and might make it difficult to accumulate the Uzi or the car, it also cannot prevent you from performing these action prior their instructions without contradicting the game’s open-ended structure. After all, a game that promotes free will should not say, ”No driving until we teach you to pull the right trigger, and no killing until we teach you to switch weapons with the D-Pad.”

Obviously, this isn’t entirely beneficial to the game, and may be the sandbox game’s biggest hurdle. Many casual gamers are quickly intimidated by the plethora of options a expansive environment offers, and though Sam Houser boldly says “F*ck them!” I’m sure he, along with other sandbox developers prefer all gamers (of any gamer creed) buy their studio’s product, especially when it cost $50 million dollars to produce.

So how do sandbox games overcome their own open-endedness? Or, better, how do you provide instructions to players that skip a tutorial? Or should the studios even bother?

With GTA IV and Crackdown’s recent successes, they’re two valuable though different examples. GTA IV has gotten a lot of press, and I’ll get to its particularly special feature in a moment, but first, Crackdown.

Crackdown for Dummies

Of the two, Crackdown has the most open-ended narrative. When you begin the game, you are assigned a handful of dangerous gang leaders to assassinate. These bosses have varying strengths, but while it’s difficult to kill the strongest without boosting your own attributes, the game requires no particular order to your killing spree. If you have the guts, the skills, and somehow stumble upon powerful weapons, you’re welcome to kill the final boss from the get-go. Good luck.

Its simplicity makes the narrative feel so open-ended. Or, in cruder terms, the narrative’s quite empty. Beyond a brief intro, gang leader descriptions, and a bizarre final twist, the game exists as a futuristic dystopian playground. You aren’t expected to obey side-missions or live a normal life while you’re not busy cleaning the mean streets, Just run, gun, and jump like you’ve never done it before.

And while the game does offer basic control instructions, it borrows so heavily from classic games that anyone who’s played Mega Man or Mario 64 should have the necessary entrance skills. While this may not make the game playable by casual players, the protagonist’s super-strength and weak early enemies offer an introductory learning phase.

While rich narrative games like GTA IV pile on narrative and gameplay branches (Taxi for Roman, date Michelle, kill for Vlad, party with Little Jacob) that require the player to quickly understand the controls and also create a sense of guilt when you skips these missions to screw-around, Crackdown tells you to kill this dirty dozen or so bosses. Whenever you want. Just kill them.

What Crackdown lacks in narrative cause-effect, it makes up for in cause-effect exploration. To accomplish this, it uses gility orbs. The agility orbs, like PF Flyers, make you run faster and jump higher. The more you collect the more you want. They build off one another much like linear games’ scenes and acquired skills, but rather than linear, you can collect agility orbs however you prefer, and yet each one seamlessly adds and builds upon the previous orbs you collected.

Cheat Sheet

In my opinion, Crackdown encourages exploration and creating your own narrative unlike any game before it. And if you’re willing to cheat, it takes this a final step further. Shortly after its launch, Crackdown’s developer released downloadable content that employed an in-game debug. By hitting ‘select’ you’re given a small menu that allows you to spawn weapons and vehicles, upgrade your agility, alter your wanted level and the time of the day, and even become invisible. They aptly titled it “the keys to the city.”

I despise the term cheat. I believe, specifically in single player games, when a user buys a videogame they have paid for the full product, including any glitches, cheats, or debugs. If the user paid for the city, why should they not get the keys?

Yet, there’s a stipulation. In both GTA IV and Crackdown, handing complete control to the player requires them to concede they are not honestly pursuing the narrative via their own acquired skills. In Crackdown, you cannot save with this mode selected, and GTA IV penalizes the player by not rewarding the user with achievements while “cheats” are selected. But this benefits the player. It encourages, almost requires him to step away from the game’s narrative, and create their own.

But GTA IV already offers an extensive narrative that branches into many different areas for different types of players. Why encourage players to develop their own unique stories?

On Brucie Kibbutz

Earlier this week I wrote an article on my personal site Hardcasual.net that dissected the role Brucie Kibbutz plays in GTA IV’s universe. Here’s the condensed version to catch you up:

"Brucie Kibbutz is both a breath of fresh air, and, for me, the cherry-on-top of a carefully crafted narrative sundae. Brucie’s a steroid-popping, car-thieving maniac. As a cliché, a stock version of the same character would play a lot like Biff. Instead, he’s highly likable and surprisingly wise, all because of one well-chosen character trait: Brucie’s impenetrable confidence both in his existence and his role in Liberty City. He’s a dude. He’s a ‘roider. He’s a racer. And he’s definitely 'alpha.'

Brucie’s always the first to identify Brucie…He’s aware of his success, and surrounds himself with other successful people like Niko.

But while Niko only sees the first-level of his reality, Brucie pulls back the curtain and reveals the truth not only of his digital scenes, but the truth of the entire game. Niko, the protagonist, is the hero of a videogame, and he will always win (just as heroes do in films, and just as, some of us may hope, heroes do in real life.)

Brucie, too, is a natural winner, but what makes Brucie unique, truly special, is his ability to see the world’s mechanism. He sees how the clock works, and it’s so evident, so clear to him, that everyone can’t comprehend his actions. He’s a moron. A fool.

In this video, Niko completes a death-defying high-speed race and Brucie hollers with excitement. For Brucie, he saw the finish ling coming all along. While Niko, the player, will complete this race–you have to if you want to progress—both he and the player are under the illusion that success may never come.

The game pressures you to succeed in this narrative, but the truth is there’s no real failure in GTA IV. Even if you never complete the narrative, you can always get the codes. You can spawn all the helicopters, weapons, and health you want, and enjoy the city. Yet, when you play this race, you’ve chosen to become the bigger character, the victor rewarded by the game’s built-in praise. It’s the path of Niko.

The path of player receives praise only from herself or those who view her unique twist on the virtual world.

And yet, the curtain’s pulled back. Success can be had at any time. And when I met Brucie, it was suddenly evident: the city’s already mine."

They’ll Find These in Museums

After World War I, Dada was created as a form of anti-war politics, a form that rejected traditional art techniques via anti-art methods. While I do not have the time or resources to fully examine how the recent en flux of sandbox games, games that break away from the traditional videogames’ narratives and structures, may be a response to the United States and the world’s current political and economical dilemma as Dada was a response to its own time of civil unrest, I think the issues worth considering.

These particular games, especially GTA IV, give the player complete control of a world identical to their own. Sandbox games afford them the opportunity to be a hero, a God; they allow the user to create chaos, maintain peace, or just be another passerby—a participant as popularized in GTA machinima where the protagonist plays a Vice or Liberty City tourist.

For me, a young man just out of college, struggling with an enormous debt, seeing a decreasing amount of potential job openings, and living in a possible recession my world doesn’t feel like a linear narrative. I can’t see the finish line. It feels like chaos. Sandbox games let me take control, find sense, or, if I must, create madness. These games offer choice; they offer a chance to create my own life story during a time it feels like circumstance and fate have me by the throat.

Sometimes I wish I saw the world more like Brucie.

[Chris Plante is a freelance writer living the post-collegiate pauper life in New York City. By night, you can find him at HardCasual.net. By day, he produces theatre and television.]

Posted by Chris Plante at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Back with a few mote GameSetLinks - starting out with the fact that The Endless Forest community site is now up - neat for fans of wandering around wordless idyllic pastures gesturing at each other and explaining how your stag is "...much too shy to introduce himself to large groups." Inexplicably cool microniche stuff.

Also in this set of links - the new TIGSource procedural generation indie competition, plus RPS at GameCamp and Noitu Love 2 reviewed at The Onion AV Club by GSW's Chris Dahlen, yay.

Onward to insanity:

Tale of Tales - Press Release: Tale of Tales open The Endless Forest Community Website - GamersHell.com
More neat stuff from those Low Countries-bound art-game crazies.

Gleemax Games (Alpha)
The IGF Platinum sponsors this year launching their game portal, with online versions of some fun board games (RoboRally!)

The Independent Gaming Source: Procedural Generation indie game competition
Awesome idea, algorithmically generated indie games FTW!

Curmudgeon Gamer: Giving It Away (or: Why the State of North Carolina now owns a lot more videogames)
Matt Matthews: 'My alma mater, NCSU, has a videogame collection. What they have covers newer systems and mostly popular games. So when they sent out requests for more games recently, I responded.'

Dobbs Code Talk - Hackerteen: Internet Blackout, Volume 1 Review
I see some mentions of this O'Reilly young teen comic (!) demonizing video games a bit, presumably in favor of... hacking? Wacky, has anyone read?

Digital Eel: 'Goblin Slayer'
A freely downloadable digital board game from the Strange Adventures in Infinite Space folks.

Rifftrac: 'I, Tube: PORTAL Edition.'
Mystery Science Theater's Brain Guy links GameSetWatch. My day is made!

The Guardian GameCamp | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
This sounds like it went really well - more unconferences for games, plz.

More Indie AV Club: Noitu Love 2 « Save the Robot - Chris Dahlen
GSW columnist and Onion AV Club reviewer Dahlen has been waving the indie game flag over there, yay.

GamesOnDeck.com - Nom 3 : An Advanced Mobile Game Created with LOVE
Ah, update to the previous Bong Koo Shin interview we ran last year - I forgot we have the Nom 3 postmortem on Games On Deck!

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

[In this in-depth opinion piece we printed on Gamasutra yesterday, I take a look at Sony's PlayStation Network for the PS3 - and the surprising positive and negatives of how it works for independent and third-party downloadable games.]

Digital game downloads for consoles are in a fascinating position right now. We've previously discussed the state of console downloadable games - as well as a more detailed discussion of royalty rates for Xbox Live Arcade. But the state of PlayStation Network for indie games is significantly less-discussed - actually, for some potentially interesting reasons.

A starting point would be this interview with Sony's Scott Steinberg conducted at GDC, discussing Microsoft's announcement of Xbox Live Community Games. Steinberg's response to that:

"I thought it was interesting in the sense that what they were talking about we've sort of been doing for the last couple of years with PSN and giving smaller, start-up, entrepreneurial developers the chance to get in and make their games available on the PSN."

Well, yes and no. The biggest issue here - and what I find somewhat disingenuous of Sony - is that Microsoft is trying hard and genuinely to open up its platform to everyone (though they do have significant XBLA-related royalty issue and game complexity/submission headaches to work through).

And Sony is trashing them on the basis of PSN - which is actually somewhat of a closed platform right now, save some inspired and to-be-lauded cherrypicking.

The First-Party PSN Advantage

Closed platform? What on Earth am I talking about? Of course, there are some amazing 'indie' downloadable games on PSN - particularly awesome titles such as Fl0w and Everyday Shooter, among others.

But these are, to all intents and purposes, first-party titles. Many of these are produced by the team headed by John Hight at Sony Santa Monica, and have the full power of Sony behind them in terms of funding help, worldwide release aid, and so on.

Though these titles are absolutely indie - and some of the best independent games released so far - they have to be hand-picked by SCEA (quite often with Sony acquiring the IP along the way) to make it onto the service.

As Everyday Shooter's Jon Mak recently noted in an interview, the Sony Santa Monica folks are doing an awesome job of A&R:

"The game maker wins because they get to follow their uncompromising vision. This keeps the game maker happy and motivates them to create the best game possible, which is what the publisher wants: a great game to sell... Anyway, I really hope that Sony Santa Monica, and the rest of Sony will continue this artist-centric approach to publishing."

Constriction Of The Pipeline

But there's a caveat. The pipeline for first-party PSN games is not large at all - even with SCEE (Elefunk) and SCEJ (Echochrome) also producing titles as a first-party which are then published via SCEA in North America. Sure, there are some rarities like the PixelJunk series - which are first-party published in the States but not in Japan, and we'll get to that later. But in general, there's not a lot out there.

The net result for indie-developed titles put out first-party in the States? Do we get one game a week? Certainly not. One a month? Probably not either. In other words, the dream of first-party PSN release will only happen to the best of the best indies - several games per year. And where does that leave everyone else?

(One could argue that this is better for the consumer in terms of quality vs. quantity, mind you, but it places constraints on who can reach the service and makes it much less open.)

Third-Party's Role In PSN

Well, the third-party publishing for PlayStation Network - for everyone else who doesn't get picked up by SCEA directly - is run through a different division of Sony, located in Foster City. I've spoken to them briefly with regard to getting PSN games entered in the Independent Games Festival, as I am IGF Chairman, and they seemed perfectly nice. But what's getting released via this method right now?

Overall, a lot of users are mystified by Sony's relatively sparse release list. Some think it's a tactic, I suspect. Here's a NeoGAF messageboard poster who explains things quite neatly from his perspective:

"That's a big problem with the PSN downloadable games right now. Every Thursday morning, I'm thinking, "Wonder what's going up on PSN this week?" but by evening I'm often disappointed. Since the new year began [up to early March], there have only been seven new games (and one of them, Jet Moto 3, has vanished from the store). That's including the PS1 classics and EyeToy games. That's not even one game a week!...

Where are the downloadable games from the big-name third party publishers? Apart from Sony, the only major third party publishers that have any representation are Capcom, Namco, and...uh...er...well, I suppose Konami might count for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PS1 classic), although as I understand it Sony "published" the PSN release of that. Oh, and Midway licensed a few classic games to Sony Online Entertainment last year. And that about wraps it up."

He's right - if you go look at a master list of PSN titles, then you'll see (though some indie-style games that aren't out yet are mislabeled as being 'published' by SCE) that really, only Capcom and Namco are getting significant amounts of releases out via the third-party method right now.

Capcom's Battle To Conquer PSN

In particular, it's interesting to track what Capcom has been saying and/or intimating about the process, even as the leaders in cross-platform releasing right now. Commenting on no Beta on PS3 for Street Fighter II HD Remix, the company's Christian Svensson notes:

"We wanted to do a beta to test the new network features but even if it were possible for Sony to do, it would require 3 submissions (US, Europe, Asia/Japan) to reach the same global audience we can with MS in a single test and global submission...

To date, we are still the only third party publisher doing cross platform, simultaneous digital releases (still working on the global simultaneous, but see the issues above on multiple submissions per territory as an issue). Believe it or not, this is not easy and to suggest we aren’t treating the PS3 as important would be ignorant of what we’re doing for it."

I think this hints at some of the issues that are buried regarding PSN. It appears - from both Capcom's evidence and speaking to developers off the record - that there are significant process issues to getting games released worldwide, or even getting games released in the U.S., with slow response times and confused procedure at times.

Apart from territory-specific slowness, having to submit games separately for each territory is potentially a major issue for smaller developers and publishers who don't have, say, an office in each territory.

While you could make a game just to release in one territory, it presumably limits your sales significantly - and there may be different standards in each territory (such as Japan using different 'Accept/Back' buttons) which might mean complex variant submissions. Microsoft has, at least, managed a single worldwide submission process for XBLA titles.

Furthermore, some of the digital download milestones Svensson listed recently for Capcom are borderline mindboggling in their 'should be simple' nature - though congratulations that he and his staff managed them:

"–First Cross-platform Simultaneous Digital Launch from Any Publisher (PSN/XBLA) - Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix

–First Cross-platform Global Simultaneous Launch Maybe* (PSN/XBLA – Europe/NA/Asia) – Rocketmen."

Let's face it, if these are things that a major publisher like Capcom has to struggle at, how is it going to be possible for the average independent developer to do them?

This is one of the reasons why PixelJunk Racers/Monsters are, slightly oddly, submitted and published by the developer itself in Japan (where the Q Games folks even took out a print ad in Famitsu!) But they are published by SCEA in North America - a slightly territory-mangling state of affairs which is only so because of Sony's territory-split structure.

Progress To Open Up PSN?

Obviously, it's not possible to wholly condemn or praise Sony on the basis of some of this anecdotal information. And having said all of this, Sony's GDC 2008 lecture on PlayStation Network seems to present a much rosier possibility for Sony and third-parties. It references the free PhyreEngine and comments of third-party possibilities - again, with a little anti-XBLA rhetoric here:

"[Chris] Eden added that what differentiates PSN from the competition was pricing, as well. "We don't set or recommend prices, or have price slots," he said. "Sony just acts as a digital reseller, you're free to set your own prices."

Unlike competing services, he continued, Sony doesn't slot releases into a schedule. Once a game has passed its final QA check, the content is uploaded to the network the following Thursday."

These and a lot of other promises in the GDC lecture made me hope for the future of the PlayStation Network for indies - and not just via the higher-end, privileged first-party releases. And it's quite possible that some of the fixes are in process.

Conclusion

So overall, I do think Scott Steinberg and the other Sony execs do have a right to say that PSN is doing a good job for independents - especially given the great work done by first-party to pick up indie games and give them the respect they deserve.

But a regular third-party worldwide PSN release schedule - and not just from major publishers who have to strain to accomplish it - would really give "entrepreneurial developers the chance to get in and make their games available on the PSN." So look at your infrastructure, and make it happen, Sony.

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

[Save the Robot is a biweekly column from Chris Dahlen crafted specially for GameSetWatch, dealing with gaming as pop culture and cult media. This time, he examines the 'everything but the kitchen sink' attitude to visual/conceptual design in games and other media.]

Just a few minutes into PC indie title Noitu Love 2: Devolution, I knew what it was. I knew by the way I'd travelled from high-tech alien shoot-downs to a 19th century music hall and gothic clock towers, and the next minute, to a Japanese mish-mash of blossoming trees and samurai bots. Later settings - a western train chase, a deadly TV set - confirmed what I'd already deduced: Noitu Love 2 was a stylistic pastiche, a conceptual collage, and in other words, a mess. And I knew I was in love.

I’ve been calling Noitu Love 2 my Jets 'N' Guns GOLD of 2008 - referring to another PC indie game with a dysfunctional attention span, another kettle into which some hackers had thrown everything they could on the basis of one principle: "It would be so awesome if ... ."

Zombies, metalheads, mice, pirates, cows, and homicidal beer: it all had a place in Jets 'N' Guns GOLD, making it not just a shoot-em-up action game but - speaking purely of style - the kind of thing you'd otherwise get if you threw your ten pulpiest comics in a shredder and, following your best instincts, taped the strips together. It's not random, but it has a fantastically random energy.

This approach to gamemaking - to throw everything plus the kitchen sink into the visual design - is not new.

Since the '80s and titles like Super Mario Bros., we've understood that you've got the desert level and the underwater level, the sky dungeon and the fire dungeon, and so on. Sometimes there's a rubric behind it – say, the four elements, or a time travel conceit - and sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason at all.

The variety complements the consistent gameplay elements, while making room for new surprises. This is such a common tactic that by now, games that look too samey - for example, first-person shooters that run you through one dark, metallic, enemy-filled corridor after another - bore us pantsless.

But there's more to this than "variety." In other forms of entertainment, chucking so many different environments at the audience would be cause for alarm. A James Bond movie has to set up some excuse for taking its hero from Africa to Latin America to the moon. In music, artists hop genres - but we're still getting used to it.

It still strikes us as odd when rockers try to rap, or rappers use acoustic guitars, or a jazz guitarist sits in with a bluegrass band, or Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood composes for orchestra. And the artists often expect the styles to collide and to surprise the audience. That's part of why they do it.

And of course, in a game like Noitu Love 2, styles don't just collide: they rush into each other at deadly speed, never staying on the same idea for more than a couple of beats, always striving to leave the player breathless. Same for Jets 'N' Guns GOLD: the designers weren't trying to find a fusion and a harmony between the disparate elements, so much as knock your head back again and again.

I first discovered pastiche through the works of composer and improviser John Zorn. (Though I’m not sure he likes the term.) Zorn came up in the late-'70s/early-'80s downtown New York City scene, improvising on saxophone and writing and directing music that could change from country to funk to death metal skronk in the span of a few measures. To take the most common analogy, it sounds like spinning the dial on a radio back and forth, back and forth. (For example, dig this performance of Naked City’s “Speed Freaks”.)

There are plenty of high-brow reasons to make pastiche. In music, it’s a reaction to an era when the average teenager has thousands of mp3's on his or her hard drive, when early Brazilian music and pre-war gospel 78s can reach you as easily as the new American Idol star. History and context don't seem to matter much in our daily listening lives. In games, you could read it the same way – what does the context matter so long as the beat’s good?

Yet that also makes it a condemnation. Mashing so many styles together with so little rhyme or reason is one way to argue that the content of almost any game is just a pretty wrapper around the action – that it doesn’t matter if Mario’s swimming underwater or drifting through a haunted house, because the kids are just here to jump. So you might as well take your content and put it in hyperdrive, like a three-year-old getting sick of a book he can't read and abruptly tearing the pages out of it.

But that three-year-old is still having a blast, which I think is the real reason so many designers take this approach. When Noitu Love 2 sticks a giant eel, a blue-skinned cyborg and a runaway homicidal steam engine in the same hour-long game, it evokes the restless, immature joy of taking everything that gives us pleasure and chewing through it as quickly as possible.

Zorn had his own artistic agendas, but he's also a guy who owns a gigantor record collection. I suspect the same is true of Noitu Love 2's Joakim Sandberg, or any number of other designers, musicians, writers and filmmakers who at one time or another have had to sit on their hands to keep still. And whether their impulsiveness produces a wry satire or a critical statement or it's just hella fun, I can't get enough of it.

[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 (1)

Great Gatsby, it's the return of the GameSetLinks - headed this time by the latest GameTunnel indie games countdown (it's April's, but we're linking it a tad tardily) - complete with really silly and not necessarily good presidentially-themed fighting game.

But also in this cacophany of HTTP, there's pictures of the mocap session for the Conan MMO's horse riders, frequently asked questions about Japanese developers, and 1UP on 'when games get personal'.

Have at ye:

What's New in Indie [April Edition] by Game Tunnel
Including the presidential-themed 'Full Contact Debate', heh.

MTV Multiplayer » A Horse Covered in Ping Pong Balls — The ‘Age of Conan’ Mo-Cap Shoot
Uh, is that really cost-effective?

Japanmanship: Frequently Asked Questions
'I often get emails from hopefuls with an eye cocked at the Japanese game industry.' Some answers, then!

Tales of the Rampant Coyote: Frayed Knights Now Available!
'The pilot episode of the indie RPG Frayed Knights is now available for download.'

Siliconera » Shining Dragon brings “battle damage” brawling to the US?
More and more weeeird low-profile PS2 imports arriving - microniche stuff.

The Escapist : Inside Job: It Takes a Method
EA Spouse, on quality of life, sorta: ' Yes, there's progress, and much of it should be celebrated; there's still a long way to go.'

Microsoft’s PopFly makes it easy to create your own arcade games » VentureBeat
Good explanation with screenshots from Dean-o.

Multiple:Option: Game Melody Oratorio Volume Two
Completely awesome DS homebrew game soundtrack music game, pt.2.

Lithium Leaf: 'Freeware Game: Tile Tetri'
Download link broken - it's here - but Lithium Leaf is doing a good job of digging out doujin neatness.

Are We What We Play? Four Essays About What Happens When Games Get Personal from 1UP.com
I feel like 1UP is getting it, featurewise, recently.

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

['Welcome to the GameSetWatch Comic' is, once again, a weekly comic by Jonathan "Persona" Kim about the continuing adventures of our society, cultural postdialectic theory, and video games. He's back!]

The last of the previous run of Persona's GameSetWatch comics ran in October 2006, before it lapsed into extended and much-missed hiatus.

For those who didn't spot it - or were too miseducated to be reading GSW at that time - you neglected such delicacies as bizarre Pokemon pastiches, the misadventures of Shen Mue's Ryo Hazuki, and, of course, the totally disturbing Mario cartoon that should not be named.

In any case, we're delighted to welcome his return with a weekly comic that promises to dwell on the 'Welcome To The...' theme, with this first one taking aim at the... new world of Final Fantasy's evolving business practices in these Wii-tastic times? Bravo, Sir:

[Jonathan "Persona" Kim is a 3rd year character animation student at the California Institute of the Arts. When not working on cute low poly models, he posts stuff on the Mecha Fetus Visublog.]

Posted by persona at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

['Design Lesson 101' is a regular column by Raven game designer Manveer Heir. The challenge is to play a game from start to completion - and learn something about game design in the process. This week we take a look at Crysis, the most recent PC first-person shooter from German developer Crytek.]

I've always been an advocate of choice in games. Performing the same action over and over in a game can be monotonous and boring. This is probably why I enjoy RPG games so much; by their very nature they often offer the player a multitude of different things to choose from.

Shooters, unlike RPGs, usually offer only one thing to do during the entire game: shoot. Yet, even in this genre there is a growing amount in variety of actions that the player can perform. Halo showed how integrating vehicles into portions of the game could make for even more frantic feeling to the game. Duke Nukem 3D showed how various different, unconventional weapons in a game could radically change the feeling of combat during the game.

Whether choosing what weapons you are using or what strategies you will use to fight the enemies, shooters do offer small amounts of choice. As technology advances, we are seeing more and more meaningful choices being offered in games. It's not enough to just give the player a choice, however.

Design Lesson: Once you give the player the power to choose, you must not take that ability away from the player.

Crysis is the spiritual successor to Far Cry, a game that was heralded for its wide open nature. Crysis continues that tradition, putting the player on an island in the Philippines and allowing him to go almost anywhere.

This is what sets the game apart from other shooters. Players are truly free to approach each combat situation from their own perspective. You can charge into the base from the well-guarded front. You can swim down the river and enter the base from the exposed rear. You can even jump over the high wall that surrounds the base and drop in the middle. The choice is yours.

The choices are vast and this is a large part of why Crysis is so successful as a shooter. It gives options that most shooters are unable to offer. As a result, the game plays out in a very unique fashion.

The game starts out with you fighting against a group of Korean soldiers that have taken a group of archaeologists hostage. As the game progresses, you learn that the Koreans are not the real threat, but rather something more sinister (It shouldn't be hard to figure out what that is if you have watched any of the trailers for the game).

When you start meeting the other enemies in the game, a little after the halfway point of the game, the style of the game shifts. It becomes much more linear and constrained, like a traditional shooter.

There are a couple of levels, including the final level, that are pure linear corridor levels. One would expect levels such as these out of a game such as Quake, but not this game. These become the weakest parts of the game, by far, because they go against all the strengths of Crysis.

The strength of Crysis lies in choice. The choice to enter the situation on your own terms and from your own perspective. The game gives you powers, such as cloaking, speed, and strength, that can be used to turn the tide of battle. This adds more choice to how you handle a given combat situation.

The linear, corridor levels go against that sense of choice that the rest of the game has set up. The problem is that this other style of level does not compliment the more open style the rest of the game has set up. It feels far more restricting, in fact. You have less places to move around, less ways to approach a situation, and less opportunities to use your nanosuit powers.

Another thing that changes towards the latter part of the game is the enemy types. You stop fighting humans and start fighting mysterious creatures. This, in an of itself, is actually a good thing.

To me, this is a great way to add variety to a game, especially a shooter where your options are limited. Give the player new enemies to fight that are radically different from all of the other enemies that have been fought against the rest of the game.

Where Crysis fails with respect to the new enemies, however, is the fact that powers the player has becomes nearly useless. I spent the first half of the game using my cloaking capabilities a lot.

It would get me out of dangerous combat situations, let me get the jump on the AI, and allow me to change my style of play from run-and-gun to stealthy, depending on what situation I was in.

This choice virtually went away with the new enemies. They could often see through my cloaking and it became almost useless. I played the rest of the game barely using my special abilities, which changed the way the game felt and played. Couple that in with the more linear levels, and it becomes evident that the end of the game offers far less choice than the beginning.

CryTek would have been better off making the last third of the game more like the first two-thirds, in my opinion. They proved they can do the wide open combat game well, and they had enough variety in enemies and weapons to keep the game interesting.

By removing a lot of the choice towards the end of the game, Crysis loses part of its uniqueness that sets it apart from other shooters. The linear levels minimize the elements of strategic choice available to the player, which is the major strength of the game. The new enemies make the cloaking ability almost useless, which is another choice that then goes away.

Changing the style of the game part-way through isn't inherently a bad idea. I think it's important to understand why changing that style is detrimental to this game, however. By removing the choice that the player is given the rest of the game, the player feels less empowered. Had the game never introduced these choices, it wouldn't be a problem.

It did, however, so it should have allowed the player to continue to make those choices until the credits. If you are going to remove a choice from the game, at least offer the player a different, equally valuable choice to make in its place.

[Manveer Heir is currently a game designer at Raven Software. He updates his design blog, Design Rampage, regularly. He is interested in thoughtful critique and commentary on the gaming industry.]

Posted by Manveer Heir at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)