[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 independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The goodies in this latest version include a platformer inspired by a certain classic, an arena shooter, a commercial RPG, plus games from IGF finalists cactus and the guys at Three Rings Design.

Game Pick: 'Boondog' (Matthew Hart, freeware)
"A puzzle-oriented platformer largely inspired by Mechner's Prince of Persia series, where you progress from stage to stage by jumping and grabbing ledges, moving blocks or barrels, avoiding hazards and activating all manners of switches."

Game Pick: 'G:plus' (maw, freeware)
"An arena shooter in which your ship continuously moves in a perpetual orbit around the center of the screen, and time on the clock can only be replenished by collecting power-ups left behind by the enemies you've destroyed. Available for both Windows and Mac platforms."

Game Pick: 'The Spirit Engine 2' (Mark Pay, commercial indie - demo available)
"Gorgeous pixel art, engrossing gameplay, captivating soundtrack and engaging storyline - this sequel to the similarly-titled freeware RPG released by Mark Pay several years ago has pretty much everything going for it."

Game Pick: 'Stallions in America' (cactus, freeware)
"A new action game from cactus where players will get to choose one of the four available characters to take on a cross-country journey, filled with massive explosions and wanton destruction. Seeming inspired by a certain television series..."

Game Pick: 'Corpse Craft' (Three Rings Design, browser)
"A Collapse-like browser game by the developers of Puzzle Pirates made as an example game for their Whirled site. Take charge of a mobile workshop as you attempt to destroy your opponents' work sheds by unleashing hordes after hordes of undead."

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

[Another of the complex lectures from last week's GameFest in Seattle that's well worth recapping on GSW - thanks to Christian Nutt (notes) and Michael Zenke (write-up) for encapsulating some really interesting concepts on just how art direction and gameplay imperatives blend.]

Microsoft's recent Gamefest featured a number of discussions talking about both gameplay and art, but none entwined the two disciplines as closely as a talk from two Valve employees.

Team Fortress 2 art director Moby Francke and Randy Lundeen of the Left 4 Dead team offered attendees a peak behind the scenes at Valve's unique design philosophy.

Team Fortress 2

Moby Francke kicked things off with an extensive discussion of Team Fortress 2, prefacing the new with an examination of the old. Francke explained that Valve hired the team behind the original TeamFortress Quake mod.

When development of the sequel to the eventual Half-Life mod version commenced, it was being created with a realistic military style, both in visual and gameplay terms.

Of course, it didn't end up launching as that realistic game. Instead, "TF is over-the-top from a gameplay perspective - you can rocket jump, you can magically heal people. They started to run into problems during play testing."

For example, there was a tiny medic patch on the sleeve of the medic, but it was nearly impossible to tell medics apart from other players.

After the fact, the Valve designers came to the conclusion that they should aim to match the game's look to the gameplay. This ties very closely into previous comments the artist has made about the current state of game art direction.

"Due to this high-paced, very stylized gameplay, we thought of going for something more unique, something that's more shape driven, color-driven," Francke noted.

He continued, "Readability was a very important thing - we wanted the characters to stand out in the world, and the ability to tell who is who. From a branding perspective, TF2 differentiates itself from other games quite easily."

Making the characters stand out required the artists and designers to develop multiple ways for players to "read" the world. They ended up with three different levels of readability.

The first was through simple colors: "Starting off with teams, we wanted to differentiate the characters through the colors alone inside the world. This is really the best way we could describe it." They used a color swatch that has a general set of colors per teams, not a simple red and blue distinction for clothes.

The second part of readability was grossly distinct physical shape. Color differentiates teams, but what class is your opponent? "We did it through silhouettes," said Francke. "We wanted very unique shapes; you can tell they have very different shoes and hats and clothing folds."

Francke concluded with the third level of readability, fine details for players to remember: "We wanted to put all the detailing up towards the chest area of characters, so you could easily see the weaponry - the patches, vests, bandoliers, neckties, caps, pants. They all contribute to this readability factor. We then also gradated the character from the dark bottoms to the contrasting upper torso for better readability."

The artists looked to three specific illustrators for the game's general look, each from the early 20th century, including Dean Cornwell and Norman Rockwell.

The third, and possibly the most important, was JC Leyendecker. From Leyendecker, artists pulled a sense of color, folds, shapes, and edge lighting.

Noted Francke, "A lot of his lighting was rendered from warm to cool - cool in the shadows, but never going black. He really rendered his silhouettes with function, like clothing folds. This will be read in the silhouette and the interior shapes of the characters when hit by the light."

The artist continued, "He used rim highlighting to pop the character from the world but at the same time to give the character more information. We used the same idea. We didn't want to go the cel-shaded route, we wanted to go more true to the way that lighting occurs."

To demonstrate, Francke showed a hand-painted rim lighting test on a screenshot which pops out the character: "At the same time you can see that without it, it just seems a little bit boring. You can see that the shadowed side gets lost into the background [without it]."

He offers up some comparisons of silhouettes, another Leyendecker signature: "It's a building block of character design - it's identifiable at first read. We work out the character in a three-quarter pose. The reason we do that is so you can get a little more information into the character, and it can be used as information for going into the modeling aspect."

This thought process even extended to black and gray models: "We solve the interior shadow shapes off of the interior design. There are some discrepancies but overall the character still obeys the model sheet."

This "readability" extends even to the world around the characters, he noted: "To contrast the two teams, for the red team we used predominantly warm colors - some grays, but they're warm as well. We used natural materials such as woods and red brick, and angled geometry."

"Then for the blue team we used cooler colors, and industrial materials such as concrete and steel, and orthogonal forms. Our world is hand-painted, lovingly," Francke continued. "We're actually analyzing the photo reference and then translating. Sometimes we look at other art for inspiration, like Miyazaki and some Disney as well."

He noted, particularly, that the brick and wood work even as hand-painted artistry: "It doesn't have to be a photo to show what the material is in some cases."

Left 4 Dead

Randy Lundeen, of the Left 4 Dead team, opened by his portion of the talk with some broad context. Left 4 Dead is an as-yet-unreleased Source engine title from Valve - originally developed by Turtle Rock studios, now known as Valve South. It's a cooperative zombie horror game that pits a group of players against an almost-unstoppable horde of onrushing undead.

Art is important to the game, but there are a lot of unique technological decisions going on as well. The game's "dynamic narrative" is entirely down to what the team calls the "AI Director." Explained Lundeen, "It's a presence in the game that is keeping track of all of your health, your ammo, and how you're playing, and it's controlling the pacing of the experience you're having in the game."

Showing imagery from the still in-development title, he continued: "As you can see, it's a very different game from TF2. It's dark and gritty, a cinematic experience. At the same time we want to take all of the lessons [learned by the TF2 team], particularly [regarding] the silhouettes."

The result is a game that relies on a number of filmic tricks to get across elements of tone and mood. These effects include color correction, artificial grain, and vignettes. Of course, the AI Director affords game-specific effects one could never see in a movie, such as local contrast enhancement, and a dynamically-communicated game state.

To begin with, Lundeen showed the audience an effects-free screenshot of the game. Minor visual changes are the first things added to this simplistic image. "First, we color correct," he said. "It simplifies the palette, but we still wanted health packs, blood, exit points to pop. We did that with a saturation threshold. Anything below that moves towards gray."

From there, the team added grain to the imagery: "We had a lot of dark spaces and a grain does a good job of implying detail in darkness. What we found from playtesting we found that if we apply grain uniformly, people would get tired. In the darker places, like a shadow, there's more grain, but in the brighter areas there's no grain."

"Another film effect is vignetting," he went on. "This is a lens artifact where you get dark edges around the edge of the screen. We decided we wanted to do vignetting just in the top corners. This is a really great looking effect."

Even still, he noted, there is such a thing as too much processing of the image. He elaborated on that point: "We didn't want to do it all around because we didn't want you to feel like you're looking through binoculars or a scope. Once we got it in the game, people didn't feel like it was obtrusive and it did a really good job of softening the top edge, focusing the gameplay down towards the center of the screen where you want your players to look."

With these elements in place to set the tone of the overall experience, the team explored options to enhance gameplay through visuals. They accomplished this by having visual cues related information to the player.

They accomplish this in a few ways, said the Valve staffer: "One is the notion of third strike. If a player goes down or gets killed in this state it's bad news." The third strike appears to the player as if the entire world were a black and white negative, with high contrast at the edges. "If the player is in this state, the player knows they need to get health right away."

The AI Director's omniscient knowledge of the game state allows the game's visual tone to change even before events take place. Said Lundeen, "We take the local contrast and crank it up. Everything gets sharper, like there's an adrenaline rush, and things start to feel more clear, like people get in near-death experiences. What the Director is subtly saying to you is, 'I am going to spawn 100 zombies around the corner.'"

Lighting is also used to dramatic effect in the horror title, as might be expected. In some cases, the drama and gameplay can be enhanced just by having a source of light. Offered Lundeen, "There's a warm point down the end of the street where maybe the player feels like it's a safe place to go." This lets the designers plan the action around players staying in the light.

"For navigation, it gives us the opportunity to use these very liberally. In our playtests, especially in a very dark game we've discovered that players will go wherever there's lights, so we just set these up and our players will go like a moth to a bug zapper," Lundeen chortled.

The game's narrative is affected by this simple lighting as well, he noted: "Another source of lights we decided to use are car headlights. They tell a good story, a sense of abandonment. When you see a car with its headlights on and nobody around, you know something's wrong."

"Another common film technique that we looked at it to help enhance silhouettes is smoking the set. You use this to separate background and foreground elements," Lundeen continued.

The problem there, he admitted, is that gameplay and visual design can sometimes interact with each other negatively: "If we just went with a more accurate, darker fog, we found it's really hard to get that silhouette read that's so important to the players. Without the silhouette read players would be too surprised. When we'd get feedback people would be really frustrated."

By lightening the fog, "people can see things much better and it's much more dramatic," he explained. "When you can see the zombies climbing over the rubble you have a much better chance to coordinate with your team. The players have a much better time and can anticipate the attacks."

Player-controlled light sources are just as important to take into consideration, according to Lundeen. "The flashlight, for a dark game, is a very important tool. What we found by just moving [the flashlight] onto the weapon is that it's a little off center and it's much more dramatic and you get more interesting shadows. When you reload your gun, the flashlight disappears now. When you shove an infected, it goes out of the way, and also the muzzle flash is creating all these great shadows as well."

The visual design here even helped to enhance the team's intended multiplayer design: "By putting the light source on the gun it helped encourage that co-op with teammates," Lundeen said. It also required some technical considerations as well: "Normal maps were an important thing to have on as many surface as possible," because it's a dark game generally lit with flashlights.

Self-shadowing normal maps added greater surface richness at no code cost, he pointed out. They also decided to make the environments as lush as possible, as a nod to dark films.

"Another film technique that we noticed is that whenever you watch a dark setting mysteriously it's always wet. It creates highlights, it creates parallax, it creates moodiness. It makes it feel more miserable, so that was perfect for our product," he concluded.

Responding to an audience inquiry, Lundeen addressed the team's decision to change the game's character models, a move that has garnered some criticism from fans.

"What we found in a lot of our playtesting was that for the original main characters, players would have a really hard time separating them from the zombie hordes," the artist explained. "It was pretty tricky to pick out who was who - people were just going in spraying bullets everywhere."

"What we wanted to do specifically was take those lessons we learned from TF2. The survivors now have different silhouette reads, different colors. There's a dynamic light on the flashlight that's kicking back a little bit of light to illuminate their faces. The character redesign was to alleviate issues we saw while playtesting," he concluded.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The return of GameSetLinks at midnight, then, with a delightful semi-obsession with The Prisoner being one of the main - possibly non-game related - parts of today's post. Although maybe somebody would like to do a game version of The Prisoner remake? Yes plz!

Also in here somewhere - calculations on the PS3 and Xbox 720's total Gigafloppage, fanboys everywhere startled by the sound of ripping shrinkwrap, Eegra's indie game winners, morality in games, and much more.

Un deux trois:

Seven Degrees Of Freedom: A Parallel Future
'Looking at previous releases dates and performance I've put the next Xbox being released in 2010 with approximately 2 Teraflops (2,000 GFLOPS) and the PS4 at 2012 with 10 Teraflops.'

Introducing the Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection Blog | How They Got Game
Classic games, '...many still in shrinkwrap (which I remove)' - cue collectorgeek collapse, heh.

Eegra: 'First Annual Game Makin' Shindig WINNERS ANNOUNCED HOORAY'
Conor O'Kane, of 'Harpooned' fame, wins out. Sorry, spoiler!

About Microsoft Research: Faculty Summit 2008
With mentions of gaming research, featuring a... Wiimote! (Scroll down the age).

Morality in Murder: Giving weight to player actions « High Dynamic Range Lying
'It was not until I returned to Osaka that I really started to think about murder, violence and aggression in games, and the moral implications therein.'

Killing real people becomes a video game. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine
'Raytheon looked at this mess and realized that civilian gamers had better equipment. So, it hired game developers to redesign drone operation.' Via Eating Bees.

IO9: 'The Prisoner: Seek The Six Viral Marketing Revealed'
ARG-ish teaser goings-on for a TV remake I'm looking forward to.

I review Virgin America's in-flight video games | Remowned
'Alternatively, the text to all reviews could read, “The framerate is unbearable.”' Remo on the case!

Obo's comment on GameSetWatch - GameSetLinks: Atlus Brings Us... Ice Cream?
'Byron's piece has had a paragraph excised.' Indeed it did.

Derek Powazek - 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments
Also very true for more formal game sites - #1 happens to be more or less exactly how we do it on Gamasutra, anonymity-wise. (Via Waxy)

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

['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 Tales of Game's homage to JRPGS, Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, an independent freeware release.]

Narrative and story are the backbone of many games, like BioShock, Gears of War, and Crysis. These games use their back-story as a way to immerse the player into their world. Every element of these games, from their voice-overs to their level design, all tell a story that helps support the rest of the game.

Often what occurs in these games are little flaws that momentarily draw a player out of the game world. A character in a sci-fi game could say a line that is considered an anachronism from the 21st century; a game full of realistic enemies could suddenly introduce monsters that don't fit the rest of the world.

This is usually due to player expectations that are set by the production values, the story, and often a serious tone that games take of themselves. The indie production Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, however, manages to avoid all of these issues through a number of design decisions and constraints.

Design Lesson: Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden's irreverent universe and style create a world where literally anything can happen, allowing the player to believe in even the most unbelievable of events and drawing the player into the world more than many of its commercial counterparts

To understand what I mean by irreverent, let's quickly recap the story of the game. The year is 2053 and you are Charles Barkley, former NBA star and citizen of Neo-New York. Twelve years previously, you performed a Chaos Dunk, a slam dunk so devastating that it killed many and led to basketball being outlawed and many of the great players killed in “The Great B-Ball Purge of 2041”. Now, 15 million have died in Manhattan due to a Chaos Dunk and you are being blamed.

If that sounds utterly ridiculous to you, it's because it is. That's just the intro to the story, the actual game itself plays out even more ludicrously. You meet a dwarf from outer space that has skin made out of basketballs, fight the dreaded Ghost Dad, who looks just like Bill Cosby, and even come across Harriet Tubman in the Underground Railroad. Nothing is off-bounds in this game - and that's what makes it work.

The best part is it all makes sense from a narrative perspective when you play the game. It's random, sure, but as a player I bought it. After the mood of the game was set with the opening cinematic, I was prepared for everything. Tales of Game's gave me even more.

Instead of trying to tell a serious story, it seems as if the developers just did whatever seemed funny to them. As a result, nothing in the game that could ever happen would feel out of place. If Jesus came from the sky during a battle, and fought against Charles Barkley, you would say to yourself “I should have seen that one coming!”.

On top of the game being over-the-top from a story perspective, Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden is a parody of gaming as a whole. References are made to Super Mario Bros. 3, Gears of War, and countless JRPGs. Combat plays out like many JRPGs, with Barkley having special “verboten jams” to damage enemies, instead of magic spells. There's an entire section of the game that plays out like an old graphic adventure game. You even get the equivalent of a warp whistle at one point.

This parody of game styles meant when part of the game did something different than the rest of the game, it didn't feel completely out of place. There were quick-time events (timed button pressed) like in Shenmue and God of War, but the felt more like mocking these games rather than embracing the mechanic. The same with the adventure game section.

Also, since the game is made by amateur developers using Game Maker, it has very low production values. The sprites are blocky and often taken from other sources. Music is often inspired thematically from other mediums as well, such as the opening theme referring to Space Jam, the Michael Jordon/Looney Tunes cross-over film.

This stopped me from over-analyzing each scene. Instead, I took the low-resolution graphics at face value, because the game didn't aspire to do anything more (also, it didn't cost $60). Nothing was too weird for the game and nothing looked out of place in it. I accepted everything.

In the end, all of these decisions and constraints made me end up liking and caring more about the story and characters than I do in most mainstream games. With many modern, commercial games, I end up nitpicking and finding flaws. I wasn't able to do that with Barkley Shut up and Jam: Gaiden. I didn't want to.

Instead, I only ended up ceaselessly entertained by the insane plot that kept turning in ways no one would expect. I was enthralled by half-cyborg, half-robot characters and how Michael Jordon was a traitor in the game world. I was giddy when I found the end boss, in what can only be described as one of the biggest non-sequitur's in gaming history.

More commercial games should try ideas and concepts this crazy. Games like this probably serve a niche market, which is why they don't get made, but they feel like what gaming is truly all about. Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden is the game that The Joker would make if he were a game developer.

[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 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

[Just a note on early deadline for Austin GDC, which is put on by my colleagues here at Think Services, and is a very agreeable blend of practical game-related knowhow - particularly in online/social gaming, but also in writing, audio, getting into the biz, actually.]

The organizers of 2008 Austin Game Developers Conference (Austin GDC) are reminding possible attendees that early registration for the September 15th-17th event - which includes keynotes from Bruce Sterling and Club Penguin co-creator Lane Merrifield - ends tomorrow, July 31st.

Austin GDC 2008 is presented by Think Services, organizers of the industry-leading Game Developers Conference (GDC) and the parent of Gamasutra.com and related websites, including this one.

The event is a three-day, multi-track game conference taking place at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas September 15-17, 2008, and continues a multi-year tradition of an Austin-based game event appealing to a nationwide and worldwide game community.

The Austin GDC this year consists of the following elements:

- Austin GDC Online Summit - Austin's signature summit, with four parallel tracks on business and marketing, technology and services, design, and social networking and community for online games. Major speakers from Bioware, Cartoon Network, Disney, EA, NCSoft, and Sony Online Entertainment are participating, with Club Penguin's Lane Merrifield keynoting.

- Worlds In Motion Summit - specifically concentrating on virtual worlds, and expanding from the successful GDC Summit, this business-focused two-day event includes sessions on Facebook gaming, user-created virtual world content and the future of the metaverse - with speakers from IBM, NBC.com, IAC, and more.

- Austin GDC Writing Summit, featuring a keynote from futurist and science fiction writer Bruce Sterling on 'Computer Entertainment 35 Years From Today', plus notable lectures from leading writers from id Software, Carbine Studios, Red Storm Entertainment and Ubisoft.

- Austin GDC Audio Summit, with a keynote from Sony's Jason Page on next-gen audio, and other speakers including Austin Wintory, composer of fl0w, Slipgate Ironworks' Kurt Larson on adaptive music for MMOs, and a special 'Iron Composer Texas' to be fought out on site.

- Game Career Seminar, including notable lectures and panels for those wanting to get into the game biz, such as 'The Game Job Interview RPG', the ever-popular 'Pitch Your Game Idea' panel, and 'You're Hired! How to Get HR to Notice You' - featuring speakers from Vicarious Visions, Nexon, Ghostfire Games, and more.

In addition to an Expo show floor with many game technology companies in attendance, Austin GDC will also showcase the recently announced winners of the 2008 IGF Showcase for Austin GDC, picking the very best examples of 'local flavor' in terms of indie games from Austin and the Southern U.S.

Those interested in registering for the event can visit the official Austin GDC website to purchase their pass - early registration ends on July 31st, though passes will still be available after that date.

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

[So, you may have noticed that Gamasutra folks including Chris Remo attended San Diego's Comic-Con last week, and as a result got some good new info such as Jordan Mechner's resurrection of Karateka. Anyhow, he sent in these notes from the Halo Universe panel he attended.

While it was perhaps entertaining for some in attendance - they do give an indication of why these kind of dog and pony shows can be problematic. We didn't run anything from this panel on Gama. But I enjoyed Remo's primal scream so much that I thought we'd reprint his unedited notes here.]

On stage: Corinne Robinson/Jon Goff (McFarlane, action figure brand manager or something); Tobias Buckell (Tor Books, Halo novels author); Eric Nylund (Microsoft Game Studios, Halo novels author); Joe Staten (Bungie); Frank O'Connor (Microsoft, ex-Bungie); Graeme Devine (Ensemble).

Devine, lead writer on Halo Wars: his development history began porting Pole Position to PC, then working on 7th Guest, 11th Hour, and Quake III Arena. Now at Ensemble Studios

"How do you expand upon the Halo universe when Bungie's done the first three?"

"We talked long and hard with Bungie" to determine how to take the story to a strategy game. Ended up with a story set before main Halo games.

(showed cinematic from game)

Moderator: "Since E3 doesn't invite you anymore, I'm glad you guys could get in here to see this trailer." (boos from audience)

O'Connor, Halo universe supervisor at MGS (On his job at MGS) "I'm bean counting, doing powerpoint presentations."

Staten, Halo universe writer, novel author, directed series cutscenes: "I'm actually not the director of cinematics anymore, that's C.J. Cowan's new job. I can't tell you what I'm doing right now, but it's super fun."

[GREAT THANKS FOR COMING THEN]

Moderator: Do you have any announcements to make today?
Staten: "No I don't."

[AWESOME GOOD JOB]

Nylund, author of three Halo novels. "I work at Microsoft Games, I do a lot of work on a lot of secret stuff."

[HOORAY]

Also working on non-Halo book

Buckell, author of a forthcoming Halo book
Moderator: "Are you done with the book yet?
Buckell: "I don't know, am I allowed to talk about that yet?"

[THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE]

"I jumped over from the PlayStation [hardware] franchise for Halo, so when they asked if they could send my books over to Bungie, I was like, 'Oh yeah.' My wife said, 'Now you can justify all those hours spent on the game.'"

Robinson/Goff talk about action figure stuff and show pictures. They made a "Hell Spartan" which is "like a cross between Spawn and a Spartan."

[Thanks McFarlane. Clearly there was absolutely zero planning for what anyone was going to be talking about during this thing.]

Question regarding cliffhanger-ish ending of Halo 3 if you beat it on Legendary difficulty:

Staten: "Bungie has a grand tradition of coming up with stuff in the heat of battle, and not really thinking it through, and it takes us years and years to think of what it means. The Legendary ending [of Halo 3] was one of those things."

[People are asking the most insanely detailed story questions about the most ridiculous minutiae, this is crazy. Now some fan is seriously giving like a prepared speech as his "question."]

"When the first Halo was released, I could hardly believe it would blossom into a successful franchise of books, comics, toys, movies blah blah blah"

[Are you serious?]

[At this point, Mr. Remo snapped and had to be restrained from plunging a ballpoint pen through his eye socket. No, seriously - there were elements of good information to be had in here, but overall, it's probably an abject lesson in why people need to be prepared for panels, beyond show and tell of who you are and what your job is. Oh, and the fans are just the fans - that's fine.]

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

[Regular GSW column 'The Game Anthropologist' is all about gaming communities. Recently, Michael Walbridge interviewed a number of game writers and summarized their thoughts on why so many game writers spend their spare time writing even more on their personal spaces. In the coming weeks, Walbridge will be detailing some of the key points from the individual interviews conducted for the piece. This week describes his third interview with former GSW columnist and current Kotaku writer Leigh Alexander.]

My wife and I went on a disaster of a vacation for over a week after I had talked to Kieron Gillen. My wife had a work party thing at the worst theme park of all time on the day of our return. I originally had thought I could interview Leigh inside of this park, but decided that no, I really couldn't, even if background noise was minimized. We went home and I rushed inside and called Leigh immediately because a car wreck on I-15 had made late (five minutes) to calling her.

Just as with the other New Yorker I interviewed, I talked to Leigh on Friday as the weekend dawned. I think I looked forward to talking to her more than anyone else because her blog was the first or second one I discovered and I had really based my own doctrine, if you will, on the content and style of what is written there and at the Aberrant Gamer.

Instead of immediately asking about the whole label or community thing, I simply asked why she had her personal weblog SVGL. Kotaku must take a heavy toll--that's a lot of writing and a lot of work and yet she still writes on her personal, non-ad-supplemented blog.

Why did she start it?

"I wasn't really sure what I wanted to say yet, so it was simply a repository for my thoughts and a place to practice my voice," she told me.

"Well, don't you get a hell of a lot of practice now without it? There must be another reason, a reason you still keep it."

"It's still important for me to be able to say things I want when there is nowhere to publish them," she told me. "I mean, it'd be a misconception to say that we are getting paid for our opinions all day and write thoughtful stuff--that's not what our jobs are." She did stress that thoughtfulness and opinions are still part of journalism as a whole; it's just that "think-pieces and editorials" are not the bulk of what she is getting paid to do.

Then I shifted, and asked if there's a commonality, a common, unacknowledged sort of creed all those blogs kept. "Game journalists are constantly having an identity crisis," she told me. "Fans have so few places to go," she told me. "Lots of people don't know about this kind of discussion, and many still don't. If more people knew this discussion was taking place I think we'd have more people who are interested."

"I didn't even know about this kind of discussion myself," I said. "I'd have gotten into a long time ago had I known about it. Gamasutra and GameSetWatch introduced me to it and from there I found the Aberrant Gamer and from there I found your blog and eventually decided to write this piece. Would you say there is a name for this? What do you all do?"

Unlike the last two people I talked to, there was no caution or hesitance with Leigh, at least not on this question. I'd never seen it written anywhere, but she'd obviously been thinking about it longer than I had. "Oh, I'd call it game criticism," she said.

Game criticism? Well then! "It's kind of like the difference between simply being a film review or a critical commentary on film. We have both of those in film, we see people being reviewers or truly being critics. We have plenty of game reviews--now we have critical game commentary."

"Only there isn't very much of it," I complained. "Why does it have to mostly be in little corners, blogs, all these writers' side-projects that provide no money?"

"Well, I don't think there's any game that's really justified it yet," she explained. What about Metal Gear Solid 4? Or others? Plenty of talk about that on SVGL "Well, I mean, to the world, to everyone else. I think we kind of consider ourselves ambassadors, really." I had felt that way before even meeting her. Fans of games, she told me, are "very insular" and "not open to change."

"We only discuss games in context of other games, not other life experiences. I recently wrote about a friend of mine who had a friend that died in Iraq. He played Call of Duty 4 to learn about it and deal with it. That's how someone is really playing it and viewing it. But we don't see much room for that kind of conversation."

"It's not going to get bigger until there's a mainstream need," she said.

"At least it's changing," I said. "SVGL has been around a while."

She laughed. "You think so? Do you know how long it's been around?"

"Uh..about a year, isn't it?"

"Well yeah. But why is it considered a veteran blog? It's only a year! And we're not ending up satisfied, are we?"

How long will it take, I asked? What's going to happen?

"Perhaps in 5-10 years it will change as people see that video games have cultural relevance."

"Really?" I said, thinking of N'gai's "young fogeys."

"I keep [doing SVGL] because I have hope. I have to. And anyway, the responses I get on it mean a lot to me."

She then launched into rapid fire comments--she just got done telling me she's not a veteran, but for all the opinion, experience, and stress in her voice, I certainly wasn't feeling like I was talking to someone who isn't a veteran. She started talking about burnout and how in all parts of the game industry, including games journalism, one is exhausted quickly.

"One frustrating thing is games journalists have to play a lot of crap for their jobs, and so they write about crap, and the game-makers never wanted to make crap in the first place and are now stressed to learn that their games are crap in our eyes; crap begets crap and misery begets misery." Sometimes, I thought, crap begets crappy writing. I thought she thought so too.

"I think part of it, too, is that people don't realize games are still stuck in the 'toy' mindset," I said. "They're still toys in the eye of the public, and we can safely always think that--there are entire companies who make games as toys. I have a friend who develops mostly Disney IP. I hadn't seen him in a while and asked him 'So, what have you been making?' 'Well, we just finished out last project,' he said, and started tensing up. I didn't feel he needed to tense because I really liked him, so I pushed. 'Well, what was it'? 'Don't laugh,' he said--"

"Oh, what was it, Hannah Montana?" Leigh interrupted.

"Haha! Yes! Exactly!"

"SHUT UP!" She's having more fun and learning that we see things similarly; she's starting to sound more like herself and less like someone who is forcing herself (out of necessary habit, I'm sure) to sound androgynous. Oh! That reminds me...

"Yeah, it was crazy," I explained. "He just got so defensive before he even told me, but I explained I understood. He then let himself get excited and proud about what he'd done."

I continued, "Oh! Before I forget, speaking of toys...I have a question that I'm going to ask you and I know you hate being asked questions because of this--"

"Is it about being a woman?" she said.

"Ah...yeah. But wait! It's really a question that you are best qualified to answer, because the question is about women in general. Um, okay. So N'Gai and you and I'm sure many others think the age factor is part of why gaming has the status it does. However, I was thinking that the gender gap is part of it, too. You can't deny there is a gender gap, especially in the industry's workers..."

"Nope, I never have denied that or said anything to that effect," she said.

"Right. Well, I was thinking part of it is because women just consider them toys. Only like, scary ones. Women may groan when they learn that someone who is dating them really loves sports, but at least they know what that entails. But guys who love games, not so much. So I have a theory, but I'd really like to talk to someone qualified, as no one cares what a man thinks."

"Makes sense," she said.

"Okay, so...why do women hate games? I've even seen them denounce them in public and in journals and newspapers and...well, everywhere."

"Well, I'm not entirely sure, since I don't agree with them."

"Oh."

"But you know, I've certainly had girl friends, and I've heard lots of them talk about them. They don't seem to bother to learn more about games because they consider them unfeminine and they worry about it because it's messing up their men."

"Messing up their men?"

"Yup. Definitely. And when I meet new women, the majority are put off by what I do for work. It makes many people, especially women, uncomfortable; they don't find it interesting. Kills conversations. I mean, once people get to know me, it doesn't bother them so much, but all the time when I'm meeting new people...I have hard time even finding people who accept that what I do is a career."

"They don't even accept your job?" I say.

"Nope."

"Wow."

"Yeah."

So the story goes. I talked to her for a while and found her to be one of the most interesting people I'd met online or off, games journo or no. A charismatic woman who can carry her charisma online and off, is interested in games and sex in games, and has strong opinions while remaining civil and (here's the hard part) able to keep the conversation interesting if anyone disagrees.

Yet, all that by itself won't net Leigh a legion of adoring male fans (the only kind available), and she knows it. Game enthusiasts are harsh critics and demanding of the other parts of life, too. No, she has to write well, too, and write she does, in spades. Thank goodness for that, because, perhaps unlike most other writers, she's aware that as a woman, she is a needed voice when the discourse between "gamer" and "fogey" emerges.

Because of the vacation, my wife and I take out my dad for Father's day that evening. "Dad," I say to him, because he's long been interested in technology and the Internet, "what would it take for women to be interested in video games, or a specific video game?"

Posted by Mike Walbridge at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As timeless as a Stereo MCs video, it's time for GameSetLinks to return, this time headed up by a look at that ever-popular cult lust object, LucasArts' Grim Fandago, thanks to a group of concerned Internet citizens.

Also in here - ridiculous Virt game music noises, Alice Taylor on a not safe for work (from an audio perspective) Wiimote multiplayer folly, Keith Boesky going off on one valiantly again, and plenty more.

You knows it:

Cruise Elroy » Grim Fandango, Year 1
Expanding on group play of the title: 'I don’t think my incompetence is completely to blame, because to my mind some of the puzzles were pretty illogical.'

The Small Details - The Quixotic Engineer
'Unless you’re experienced with a genre, it’s very difficult to notice the small details that separate a decent game from a great one.'

Shoot The Core: Ultimate Shooting Collection for Wii
Interesting niche upcoming import: 'Priced at only $30, this disc will include Chaos Field, Radilgy, and Karous.'

Wonderland: Dark Room Sex Game (PNSFW)
'You won't want to play this at work due to the sounds, although on silent it's entirely harmless.'

Google Lively, yet another pointless virtual world. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine
'In retrospect, I was a fool to mention Barack Obama in a place where I could get body-slammed.'

Kotaku: 'Indiecade 2008: Winterbottom! Gravitation! And More!'
Nice to see more coverage of this at places like the Kotak.

Jake 'virt' Kaufman's first Kwakfest YouTube video
The insane(ly good) game musician video narrates his goof-off 60-minute game competition MIDI jam.

List of Major Game Releases - giantbomb.com
I'm very impressed indeed with the Web 2.0-ness of Giant Bomb, which I thought was going to be YET another editorial site, but is something v. different.

YouTube - GameMaker-TV Interview
Indie game maker Cactus makes my mind melt - via IndieGames.

A Tree Falling in the Forest: Raising Games: Charles Dickens Edition
A little ranty, but good stuff from Keith Boesky.

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

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Explaining why something like Let's Compute! exists is going to take a few sentences. Bear with me here.

In the UK, one of the major 8-bit computer formats in the realm of education was the BBC Microcomputer System, made by Acorn Computers Ltd. for the British Broadcasting Corporation as part of a computer-literacy campaign in the early '80s.

For a generation of British kids, the BBC is the equivalent to the Apple II -- every school computer lab had tons of them, and despite its high price (about £375) compared to the C64 and Spectrum, it was popular enough in the home market to support a decent-sized games scene. The Acorn Electron, then, is sort of to the BBC what the Apple IIc was to the full-sized IIe -- somewhat cheaper (£175), a fair bit cut down in capability, and geared more exclusively toward private use in advertising.

Database Publications' The Micro User (later BBC Micro User) was the predominant BBC mag in the UK. Electron User, a spinoff mag devoted exclusively to the home machine, launched in October 1983 as a Micro User pull-out and became its own publication soon after.

The Electron was never a success on the scale of the Spectrum or C64, but retained enough of a userbase to support a burgeoning games marketplace all the way to the early '90s. It was never a very mature audience, though, and by the time 1990 rolled around, the editors of Electron User realized that most of its readership was very young. So it compensated.

Let's Compute! is the rebranded version of Electron User, with program/game listings suited for all the BASIC-speaking computers of the day but Acorn's assorted systems still getting top billing. It is unabashedly a magazine for children -- almost exactly like CTW's Enter or Scholastic's extremely short-lived K-Power in America.

You have very simple programs, very simple tutorials, a bunch of game reviews and hints, and even some puzzle and comic pages. The cover feature is also not exactly the sort of thing you'd see in PC Magazine, either -- if you can't guess it from the art, it's a piece with tips on earning computing badges if you're a member of the Cub Scouts.

I think in 1991 I was mainly interested in NES games and having Kayla from English class be my girlfriend, so even if I happened to be British and reading this mag when it came out, it wouldn't have been of much use to me.

By all indications online, Let's Compute! stopped publishing after issue 12, one after the issue pictured above. Not too hard to see why -- I have the feeling the editors' hearts were in the right place, but their idea of a kid-oriented computer mag was about five years too late considering the state of the 8-bit marketplace in 1991.

There...did all that make sense to you?

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['Quiz Me Quik' is a 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 - a look at sculptor Sid Garrard and Gears Of War replica company Project Triforce.]

I'm going to take a stab in the dark here, and suggest that maybe – just maybe – GameSetWatch readers aren't exactly the kind of people to require the pictured Locust bust in their respective lounge rooms. Now, that's possibly a generalization, but I'm going to run with it.

Don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against the kind of people who horde this kind of thing. I just tend to go more for the subtle approach – a couple of signed Sam and Max posters and the odd Master System box is all I've ever really gone for. And I'm thinking that maybe GameSetWatch readers have that air of refinement that would suggest they do the same.

So, I don't totally understand that side of what Sid Garrand and his company TriForce are doing with their new range of Gears of War replica equipment. 'Do I really want a whopping great lancer propped right in the middle of my coffee table?' I pondered while conducting the following interview. 'No,' I thought. 'No I do not.'

But, somewhere in the dingy depths of my CV exists a little bit of prop making. Yes, readers, that field of heather at the start of the Honda Jazz advertisement voiced by Tony Robinson? The tremendous trees? That was me. Well, some of it was me. Admittedly, that's all the experience I've got in that field, but it's a fine field none the less, and so it's the actual sculpting side of things that I really dig. It's pretty amazing work, in that regard. I don't want it anywhere near my house, but I respect the huge amount of work that has clearly gone into it.

And so, with pre-orders on offer right now – oh go on, readers, indulge yourselves! - it seemed like a great chance to talk with master sculptor Sid Garrand to find out more about the line of products available, as well as querying how easy it is not to laugh while dressing up as Marcus Fenix.

GSW: What is it about Gears of War that you find so interesting? Is it the design aesthetic?

Sid Garrand: Actually - and this will make you laugh - I just loved the game so much that it inspired me to make the weapons and armor to show my appreciation for the amazing job that Epic did in creating the game.

GSW: When did you start working on making replicas of the equipment from the game?

SG: As soon as I completed the last mission back in November 2006.

GSW: What made you want to do it?

SG: Seriously, it was my love of the game, the character design, the level design and the gameplay. Corny but totally true.

GSW: Have you had experience in making replica equipment or sculpting before this?

SG: I own my own company, Nightmare Armor Studios, where I did all private commission work for the last 10 years.

GSW: Any formal training?

SG: No schooling, just an incalculable amount of hours spent sculpting.

GSW: How did you get the chance to show the equipment to Epic in the first place?

SG: I just showed up at their offices in Raleigh, NC fully outfitted and they welcomed us in with open arms. As a thank you for their hospitality to us I gave Cliff Bleszinski a Lancer replica which I am proud to say he displays on his office wall for everyone to see.

He has actually been photographed with the Lancer replica I made for him a bunch of times, at the Microsoft press conference where the announcement for Gears of War 2 was made and in numerous magazines publications as well. Needless to say, that really made me smile.

GSW: Did you discuss obtaining the license with Epic at the time?

SG: The discussions for the license evolved from that day when I showed up at their door.

GSW: How long after that was it that you heard about gaining the license?

SG: We didn’t officially obtain the license until last April.

GSW: What has been the reaction to the replicas at conventions and things like that?

SG: The reaction has been tremendous. We take 1,000s of pictures with fans whenever we attend a convention. Everyone asks, 'Can I hold the Lancer or try on your helmet?' It is so great to talk to all of them because as I explained this all started because I am a huge fan of the game.

GSW: Is it hard to take something like this seriously? Does the posing come pretty naturally once you've got the equipment on?

SG: The sculpting work we take very seriously. Because we do everything by hand it takes a great deal of time to make sure each piece comes out perfect. I mean the people who will be making purchases from us are some of the most hardcore fans in the world and they won’t settle for anything less. As far as posing in the suits that is pretty easy because you definitely feel like Marcus when you strap it all on.

GSW: What level of interest are you expecting in regards to sales of the equipment?

SG: Whenever we attend shows the main question we get is, 'Wow, how can I get a set?' When we put up our site thousands of people registered for updates and information about the products. That being said. it is a high-end item that many guys will have to sneak past their girlfriends when it gets delivered.

GSW: What's the process for making it? Has this changed much since the first replicas?

SG: The process has become much more refined. When I made my first set I did it based on screenshots from the game. Now I am working of hi-res photos and must get everything approved by Epic. They are really great to work with and are always willing to help me out whenever I have questions.

GSW: How quickly are you able to produce them?

SG: I really can’t say because I am my own harshest critic and have been known to get stuck on a screw or bolt for hours because it just doesn’t look or feel right. I want fans to get the best product they can from us because in the end if they aren’t happy then I wont be happy.

GSW: Have there been many requests from the Epic team for replicas?

SG: They are all very interested to own a replica of something they designed. Over the last two years I have given them a bunch of products as a thank you for all they have done for us.

GSW: Have you received any hint of what to expect from Gears 2? Any plans to include that into the TriForce line-up?

SG: They have been pretty tight lipped about details but on a recent trip to the Epic offices we did get a chance to play Gears 2 for about an hour with Cliffy and the design team but their aren’t enough Locust in the world to get me to talk about what we saw in the game. I will say this, I will definitely be online to get my copy in full suit of COG armor the minute it comes out - it looks and plays phenomenally. And yes we plan to include new items from Gears of War 2 in our upcoming product lines.

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

[We sent regular GSW columnist Mister Raroo and his family to Comic-Con to report on the event from their usual unique perspective. While the Raroos spent a lot of time investigating the games on display, they also found time to meet up with friends, ride long escalators, and even overhear the difference between Ronald McDonald toys.]

In The Beginning

It all started with Maurice. He used to be a delivery driver for the library system I work for. In his spare time, he volunteered for San Diego Comic-Con International. Almost a decade ago, Maurice was kind enough to use his influence as a volunteer to get Missus Raroo and I into our first Comic-Con. We’ve been hooked ever since.

Maurice was always a humble and unassuming guy, spending his days driving heavy totes of books from library to library. However, as we were about to find out, at Comic-Con he was almost like a rock star. We set up a place and time to meet and before long, we saw Maurice walking toward us.

Dressed in a full suit, Maurice escorted us past the massive lines of hopeful attendees. Along the way, security guards and other Comic-Con staffed greeted him, calling him “sir.” At the front of the line Maurice introduced us as his personal guests and the staff treated us like we were royalty. It was rather surreal.

I haven’t talked to Maurice too much in recent years because he transferred to another department, but every now and then we bump into him at Comic-Con. He’s often leading panels with big name celebrities or generally walking around looking busy but happy. It’s pretty neat to think that Maurice’s simple kindness of hooking Missus Raroo and I up with free Comic-Con passes that one Summer led to us becoming regular attendees, anxiously looking forward to each year’s convention.

Over time, our interest in Comic-Con has waned a little, mainly because it has become increasingly crowded, making the simple act of walking very difficult a great deal of the time. In addition, as we’ve gotten older we’ve had less energy and patience—not to mention spending money—to handle the demands of such a massive event. Nevertheless, we always end up having a good time and each year has been a memorable event.

Preview Night Line Time

Preview Night takes place the evening before Comic-Con officially begins. Until a few years ago, it used to be something truly special. Just as it is now, Preview Night was only open to members of the press and people who had pre-registered as four-day attendees. Because four-day registration was much rarer and the event didn’t attract nearly as much media attention in the past, the floor was free from heavy traffic and attendees had a good chance of actually speaking to their favorite artists or scoring special deals and rare finds.

It’s not like that any longer. Now Preview Night feels just as busy as the other days. In fact, since there are no events and panels going on, the floor actually seems even more crowded on Preview Night than any other time during the convention. We were shocked at just how packed the convention center was on Preview Night, and our time to visit booths was limited due to the line being so slow to check in.

There has been a lot of talk in recent years that Comic-Con has outgrown the San Diego Convention Center, and if the lunacy that was pre-registration check-in is any indication, it definitely has. With disorganized lines snaking every which way, it was a big mess of people trying to figure out just what the hell they were doing. Even the line for press—which I had assumed would be quick and orderly—took an absurd amount of time to get through. I overheard a number of people in the press line saying that in years past it only took a few minutes and everyone seemed befuddled as to why it was taking such an excessive amount of time.

While we were standing in line, I realized a crew from IGN was behind us. I turned and tried to strike up conversation with them a couple times, but they didn’t seem interested in talking to anyone outside of their huddle. Eventually they were permitted to cut to the front of the line. From what we could gather from their conversation, famous PSP-licker Jessica Chobot had somehow finagled a way for them to have priority registration ahead of everyone else. As they walked past the rest of us in the press line, I saw more than a few jealous and angry looks cast their way.

Overhearing what the guys from IGN were talking about made me realize that I’m definitely in a different camp of games journalism. They were focused on what would be the best place to head out and get drunk later in the evening, whereas Missus Raroo and I were worrying because we forgot to bring our son Kazuo’s snacks. I think we were the only press in the line with a toddler. It’s actually pretty cool that there are so many different angles to games journalism.

Game Time at Comic-Con

As one might expect, I spent a great deal of my time exploring what video games were on display. Years back, there weren’t nearly as many game companies with booths at Comic-Con, but recently it’s become almost like a mini-E3 of sorts, with demos, previews, and even unveilings of games happening at the event annually.

Without a doubt, Street Fighter IV was the most popular game on the convention floor. Extremely long lines coiled all around Capcom's booth, and those who tried their hand at the game were proudly showing off the red headbands that were being passed out to players. I attempted to get into the booth to check out Mega Man 9 but it was impenetrable, with security telling me to back off and get in line. I tried to explain that I wasn’t trying to see Street Fighter IV but they didn’t care. So, I didn’t bother after that!

I did, however, check out the Street Fighter IV presentation, along with hundreds of other attendees. Really, it was a pretty ho-hum affair, with the focus being on anime created for the game. There was one man sitting in front of me, however, who obviously felt the opposite of how I did, and was excitedly on the edge of his seat the entire time. At one point a couple of people walked in front him, obscuring his view and he angrily signaled “Out of the way!” with his arms.

Beyond Capcom’s offerings, most of the other games on display were much easier to check out. In particular, I enjoyed taking a look at what Telltale Games had to offer. Sam & Max: Episode 1 and Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People, both for the Wii, seemed like delightful games that should definitely appeal to Wii owners. Pointing and clicking to objects on screen is a breeze in both games, and they really seem like titles the whole family can sit down and play together. Telltale also announced that they are working on a Wallace and Gromit game, which sounds like a winning license for them.

Speaking of Telltale, I attended a panel with members of Telltale and Hothead Games about episodic gaming. I’d never really considered the benefits of episodic games, but there are some unique positive values intrinsic in the medium. For instance, episodic games allow developers to implement changes based on feedback received between episodes, and they also permit a strong relationship that can be formed between developers and consumers—a special type of relationship that is perhaps not possible with larger-scale game releases. I’m definitely curious to check out what the future of episodic gaming has in store.

Sony's booth was very popular, with LittleBigPlanet and its attractive swag drawing a lot of interested people. Everywhere you looked, people were walking around with sturdy and adorable LittleBigPlanet bags in hand, which no doubt contributed to the popularity of the title. While I thought LittleBigPlanet looked pretty amazing, my heart was captured by PixelJunk Eden and it was fun to have an opportunity to get some play time in with a member of the development team. I sort of felt sorry for him at times, though, because trying to explain the premise and gameplay of Eden to clueless Comic-Con attendees seemed like a bit of a challenge!

The saddest booth was probably Konami's. Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia looked particularly nice, and Silent Hill: Homecoming and New International Track & Field both seemed pretty decent, but everything else failed to impress.

Comic-Con attendees literally looked bored as they played Rock Revolution (and the game mysteriously disappeared from the booth by Sunday) and Castlevania: Judgement wasn’t playable to the public. Instead, two Konami representatives demoed the game, all the while acting like it was the most fun game ever created. It looks a bit like Powerstone and I while hold out a smidgen of hope since Castlevania is perhaps my favorite game series ever, I have a bad feeling about that poor game.

I really loved developer The Behemoth's Castle Crashers, which is now my most anticipated Xbox Live Arcade game. It was refreshing to speak to a member of the development team and hear firsthand how passionate they are about the game. Judging from the reaction people had when playing Castle Crashers, The Behemoth definitely have a potential knockout on their hands. I loved the super bright, hand-drawn graphics and awesome four-player gameplay. Castle Crashers might be reason enough to purchase a Gold Xbox Live membership!

The most charming game booth was probably NIS America's , which was located at the other end of the convention center, away from most of the other game companies. Fittingly, NIS America were situated next to many booths selling anime DVDs, toys, and the like. Dressed in Prinny costumes, the NIS staff members wore cute face paint and were energetic and happy to talk to attendees. It was a busy booth and in the short time I was visiting it I saw more than a few people buy games and other goodies.

Perhaps most interesting for me was talking to Peter Payne from J-List about the adult software they offered for sale. I’ve never played any bishōjo games, but Peter was more than happy to fill me in on what the genre was all about and the types of games available to interested parties. On the surface it’s pretty funny to think someone would buy a game that allows them to live out their fantasy of having sex with bunny girls, but is that really so much weirder than some of the other things people are into?

I was surprised to find that many bishōjo games featured higher production values and deeper storylines than I would have otherwise expected. When all is said and done, most humans are pretty kinky in one way or another, and it’s actually kind of nifty to think that there’s a place people can get the adult software they want without fear of being judged or criticized.

Family and Friend Time With The Raroos

I was so happy that Missus Raroo and I were able to take our son with us to Comic-Con. Though some of the people manning the various booths seemed taken aback when I’d ask them questions with a sixteen month old strapped to my chest, for the most part everyone acted really accepting about babies and toddlers being in attendance.

In fact, we saw a lot of babies everywhere we looked. Back before parenthood, Missus Raroo and I used to wonder why people would bother bringing their babies to Comic-Con, but now that we are in that situation, we understand. Family is important to us and we like to do things together. If we weren’t with Kaz, things wouldn’t feel complete. I imagine that other parents who bring their kids to Comic-Con feel the same way. It’s an experience we all want to share with our children.

We brought our nine-year-old nephew Mario with us on one of the days and he absolutely loved it. Seeing how excited he was to scope out the wide breadth of Naruto toys, give THQ's enticing de Blob a whirl, and learn the ins and outs of the Pokémon trading card game from a Nintendo volunteer was really cute. Mario’s presence was a good reminder that no matter how crowded the convention center became, there was something magical available to anyone willing to take the time to look.

Comic-Con also served as an opportunity to get together with some people I’ve been in touch with but never had the opportunity to meet in person. On Thursday I got to spend some time with Joel Hamilton, Ian Ferguson, and Brandon Sheffield, all of whom I know through a shared affinity for the Neo Geo Pocket Color.

We went out to lunch at a local pizza place and had a swell time kicking back and talking. Kaz even fell asleep in “Uncle” Brandon’s lap, which was cute! Joel and Ian came back to our home in the evening to enjoy some video game discussion and frozen yogurt from our favorite local establishment, The Yogurt Mill (though Brandon informed us that it’s most likely actually soft serve, not yogurt!).

Our pals Raina Lee and John Pham spent Friday night at our place, and it was great fun. We had a wonderful evening filled with good conversation, import Dreamcast games, and the consumption of my famous baked-from-scratch chocolate chip cookies. We also discovered that John was mortified by our pet chinchilla, especially when Raina kept trying to make him hold it! After sleeping in the next morning, Missus Raroo and I cooked a hearty breakfast to give us all energy for another day at Comic-Con.

Until Next Year…

San Diego Comic-Con is not for people without patience. You’ll end up getting stuck in large crowds of people, your feet will get tired, and you may even end up questioning your sanity for attending in the first place. But there are little moments that make it all worthwhile. For me, these moments came while doing unexpected things such as riding the long lobby escalators because it made Kaz smile and laugh. As we went up and down the escalators, the security personnel had a confused look but we didn’t care—we were just having fun as a family.

Other small moments of happiness came from overhearing the enthusiasm people held for things we didn’t necessarily appreciate. Missus Raroo witnessed someone explaining to his friend the difference between two different Ronald McDonald toys that were on display. “This is Ronald 1971, while that is Ronald 1974.” Meanwhile, a lady sat down nearby with bags of free goodies, playfully panting while happily muttering “Too much swag! Too much swag!” Even though we might not able to value the difference between Ronald 1971 and Ronald 1974 and we do our best to avoid accumulating swag, we can’t help but smile at other people for being so excited about such things.

In a lot of ways, this year’s Comic-Con was my favorite yet. Even a very negative experience we had—namely Kaz and Missus Raroo’s passes being stolen (don't worry, we got them replaced!)—couldn’t hamper the fun we had. I didn’t necessarily enjoy navigating the crowds, but it was fun to share the experience with Kaz and we had a great time meeting friends and hanging out together. At the end of Comic-Con my legs felt like jelly and I was happy it was finally over, but I can’t deny that overall I had a blast.

Comic-Con provides so many things to so many people and while it’s certainly overwhelming—especially to outsiders that just don’t understand it—for most attendees it’s a safe haven where they can act the way they want and pursue the interests they love without fear of ridicule. Dressing up as your favorite anime character might go underappreciated in most social situations, but at Comic-Con strangers will ask to have their picture taken with you. Whether someone is into vintage comics, collecting movie stars’ autographs, Japanese animation, rare toys, or even sexy cat girl adult software, Comic-Con offers so much that just about anyone can find something to their fancy. I’m already looking forward to next year!

[Mister Raroo is a happy husband, proud father, full-time public library employee, and active gamer. He currently lives in El Cajon, CA with his family and many pets. You may reach Mister Raroo at mister.raroo@gmail.com.]

Posted by Bill Sannwald at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Really enjoy wandering around the Internet and finding GSW-worthy information for you good readers.

This weekend is no exception, starting out with a fun post from a Splash Damage game designer on Far Cry 2's 'possibility spaces', or something.

Also hanging out in here - some neat pics of California Extreme, Harvey Smith on having his faith in games revitalized, PARC on avatar gender choices in MMOs, Mystery Science Theater messing with PlayStation, and lots more.

Go go go:

It's Bezness Time: Far Crying and Far Wanking
Best name for a blog post on Far Cry 2's narrative structure evah.

MST3K Playstation Underground 2CD set + VHS tape - eBay
Aha, it's on YouTube, too, inevitably.

Interview: Codeglue Talks Rockets and Rotterdam | XBLArcade.com
Another neat XBLA indie title to watch for.

witchboy.net » Blog Archive » 5 moments
Harvey Smith (wonder what he's cooking at Arkane Austin?) rhapsodizes: 'I think 2007 reinvigorated my faith in games, which had (perhaps understandably) flagged.'

Tokyo Exhibition Turns Game Carts Into Pop Art | Game | Life from Wired.com
'Held in May at Tokyo retro game specialist store Meteor, the show invited artists to contribute their own cartridge art using the carts themselves as the medium.'

PlayOn: Avatar Survey: Gender Demographics
The infamous Palo Alto Research Center looking at how people play in MMOs.

Heartless Doll - Top 10 Most Ridiculous Undergarments Worn by Women in Video Games
All of these look painful to some degree.

More Captain Rainbow details « Lovedelic Life
'Some extremely nice person on YouTube has taken the time to upload and subtitle the first two Captain Rainbow trailers that are currently available on the Japanese Nintendo Channel.'

Techcrunch: AOL Makes Big Budget Cuts Across Blogs
Oh dear - commiserations to any game-related blogs affected, there's some nice people over there.

California Extreme 2008 at Lepus Lepidus
Good write-up of a show I forgot to plug closer to the time - especially neat that The Act was there.

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

[Held in conjunction with our upcoming Austin GDC show, this IGF line-up that we've just put together comprises a regional-centric indie game showcase, for a change - and an enduringly eclectic bunch of titles there indeed are in this bunch! Thanks to all who submitted.]

The organizers of the Independent Games Festival have announced the nine winners of the Austin GDC IGF Showcase, picking the very best examples of 'local flavor' in terms of indie games from Austin and the Southern U.S. to be exhibited at the Austin Game Developers Conference from September 15th to 17th.

Some of the top local titles span the gamut from one-man teams through tightly focused console indies, including Texas-honed games such as physics-heavy iPhone puzzler Enigmo, CosMind's evocative art-game Glum Buster, Red Fly Studios' Wii/DS quirky Mushroom Men duo, knockabout Guildhall @ SMU student title ToyBox Heroes, and user-generated game website Mockingbird.

The Showcase winners receive complimentary passes and get to showcase their titles in a special IGF Pavilion at the Austin event, which this year features learning tracks including Online, Audio, Writing, Worlds In Motion and Game Career Seminar, and is hosting a local Independent Games Festival Showcase for the first time.

More information about the 2008 Austin Game Developers Conference - for which the early registration deadline is July 31st - is available at the official event website.

The full list of the honored Austin GDC IGF Showcase winners is as follows:

Enigmo (Puzzle, iPhone/iPod Touch)
Developer: Pangea Software, Inc.
Description: "A 3D physics based puzzle game where the goal is to get the falling water droplets into their containers by using various bumpers, slides, sponges, etc. There are 50 levels that get increasingly challenging."

Fireteam Reloaded (Multiplayer Action, PC)
Developer: Pixel Mine Games
Description: "Fireteam Reloaded is a team based multiplayer game that will get your blood pumping and your heart pounding! Play as one of three character classes across a variety of post-apocalyptic urban settings in a struggle to dominate your opponents. Go solo or team up with up to three other friends."

Glum Buster (Action/Adventure, PC)
Developer: CosMind
Description: "A collection of my daydreams, for your daydreams."

Mockingbird: The Game Making Game (User-Generated Game Site, Web)
Developer: Mockingbird Games
Description: "Mockingbird invites everyone to make their own games! Using a simple, intuitive set of tools, Mockingbird takes the pain out of game making and helps people tell stories using casual arcade games. Change anyone's game you play, share them with friends, put them on your blog!"

Mushroom Men: Rise of the Fungi, Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars (Action Platformer, DS/Wii)
Developer: Red Fly Studio
Description: "Mushroom Men shows gamers the mundane world from the surreal perspective of a three inch high Mushroom Man. As a brave Bolete Mushroom, players can wreak havoc on their enemies by transforming common household trinkets and trash into weapons and tools."

Ashen Empires (Fantasy MMO, PC)
Developer: Iron Will Games
Description: "Ashen Empires is a classic fantasy MMORPG and one of the few games that gives its players the freedom to role play with complete control over the character creation process. At any point you may begin training any skill of your choice to aid you in your journeys."

ToyBox Heroes (Action/Adventure, PC)
Developer: Team Shirt @ The Guildhall at SMU (Jacquiline "Kim" Acuff, Arturo Caballero, Christopher Cotton, David Demaree, James Farmer, Mark Flieg, Ryan Jenkins, Jonathan Long, Dane Munkholm, Jonathan Pittman, Adam Reynolds, Brandon Souders, Daniel Talaber, Benjamin Wagley, Eric Young)
Description: "Toybox Heroes is a console-style physics-based fighting game for two to four players. Players select one of four action figures, each available in four colors, and duke it out in a variety of household environments. Weapons range from crayons to cherry bombs to Rubik's Cubes. As players receive and inflict damage, their rage meters build; once full, each character may unleash a unique special move."

Goo! (Action/Strategy, PC/TBA)
Developer: PillowFort
Description: "Goo! is an action strategy game where the player controls a giant glob of amorphous liquid. The players’ Goo is constantly decaying as they fight against a constantly growing and very aggressive Paint Goo. When different color Paint Goo mixes, A.I.s mix and the Paint Goo becomes very aggressive."

Pirates vs Ninjas Dodgeball (Arcade Sports, Xbox 360 Live Arcade)
Developer: Blazing Lizard
Description: "Mortal enemies collide in the ultimate playground sport of Dodgeball. Choose from 4 teams featuring Pirates, Ninjas, Robots, and Zombies and compete across 4 levels in 3 different variations of the sport. Characters come equipped with special moves and melee attacks to make our rendition of the sport a much more action packed experience!"

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Aha, the rest of the week have brought some pretty notable original features, interviews, and other articles from big sister site Gamasutra and other Think Services sites - particularly because we had people simultaneously at GameFest, Comic-Con, and Casual Connect.

It was probably Brandon Sheffield's interview with David Cage about storytelling and censorship in games, as it pertains to (the pictured) Heavy Rain that got a lot of the notice. But there's a lot of other neat stuff in here - here's the full line-up:

Gamasutra Features

Dreaming of a New Day: Heavy Rain's David Cage
"Quantic Dream founder David Cage created the emotional storytelling in the acclaimed Indigo Prophecy, and, with Heavy Rain intending to take things further, Gamasutra talks to him about maturity and censorship in gaming."

Working Remotely: Yes, It Sounds Good, But How Do You Actually Do It?
"Can the game industry make telecommuting work for its employees? Midway and Maxis veteran Simpson looks in detail at how game developers can set up a remote working-friendly ethos - and make better games along the way."

Gamasutra News Originals

Prince of Persia Creator Jordan Mecher To Helm New Karateka Game
"Karateka, the 1984 debut effort from Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, will see its first true followup since the original game, Mechner has revealed during a San Diego Comic-Con panel. Brief details inside - along with an amusing tale of a particularly unique Karateka Easter egg."

Comic-Con: Street Fighter IV's Ono On Continuing The '2D Series'
"As part of his Comic-Con presentation attended by Gamasutra, Street Fighter IV producer Yoshinori Ono has been discussing the upcoming Capcom franchise rebirth, suggesting: "Street Fighter is not a 3D game. It's a 2D series, and we're keeping with that tradition.""

Gamefest: Capitalizing On Middleware
"Speaking at a group panel at Seattle’s Gamefest, Epic’s Michael Capps and a trio of Unreal Engine 3 licensees presented their company’s experiences on how to best make an out-of-the-box engine fit a project’s specific requirements."

Casual Connect: Hawkins Defines The Omni Media Gamer
"Delivering a keynote at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle, Digital Chocolate CEO and Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins described the iPhone as "better than Star Trek" and predicted the rise of the Online Media Gamer (OMG), consumers attracted to online games because of accessibility and social features."

Gamefest: How GTA IV's Niko Bellic Got Animated
"How did capture/animation studio Image Metrics help bring Grand Theft Auto IV's characters to life? Head of production David Barton and technical director Vladimir Mastilovic explained how Niko Bellic was brought from actor to game in this detailed Gamefest presentation."

Comic-Con: Will Wright On 'Your Fans Entertaining You More Than You're Entertaining Them'
"Talking at a special Comic-Con presentation of Spore attended by Gamasutra, Maxis' Will Wright has been discussing the success of the Creature Creator for the game, quipping: "At some point, your fans are entertaining you more than you're entertaining them.""

Big Fish CSO: 'Casual' And 'Hardcore' Insufficient To Define Market
"During the Casual Connect conference in Seattle, web-oriented game developer and distributor Big Fish Games presented its research into gamer buying and playing habits - and determined that the labels "casual" and "hardcore" are far from sufficient in an ever-diversifying market."

GameFest: How Halo 3's 'Lots And Lots Of Sparks' Got Made
"Is the effect artist one of the unsung heroes of today's game biz? Bungie's Steve Scott, who created Halo 3's fire and flames, revealed the graphical secrets behind the title at Microsoft's GameFest developer conference in Seattle, and Gamasutra was there to document it."

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

After being developed under heavy secrecy with the moniker "Project White Rock" - an allusion to the game's intended addictive qualities - Nokia's flagship mobile title for its reimagined N-Gage mobile platform was unveiled in May as Reset Generation, an action/puzzle game that somehow fuses Tetris, Bomberman, and Super Mario Bros., among others.

The game is the dream project of producer Scott Foe, who has been bandying the idea around since his teen years. It is being produced in conjunction with Helsinki-based RedLynx, developer of Pathway to Glory, one of the genuinely well-received entries in the long-suffering N-Gage's prior incarnation as a fixed hardware device.

As Foe puts it, Reset Generation is "a game about video games," and that description applies not only to its schizophrenic but effective gameplay blend but also to its art and music design, which is sure to inspire waves of 8-bit nostalgia among long-time gamers.

The score was provided by chiptune band 8 Bit Weapon, and the pixel art characters are based on designs by well-known artists such as Dan Paladin, Scott Kurtz, and Feng Zhu.

The game is planned to launch this year for Nokia mobile phones - since the N-Gage platform is now built in to the company's smartphones, as opposed to being a standalone branded device - and for free on PC via the game's website. The two versions will be compatible in the game's four-player online, and will be tracked on the same leaderboards.

Nokia is even hoping gamers will become invested in Reset Generation that they make their own tributes - art assets and the game's soundtrack are being released for free.

Gamasutra sat down with Foe at Nokia's offices for an in-depth discussion about Reset Generation's formation and influences, its development, and - in notable detail - what Foe thinks about Scrum.

What was the genesis of this project? It's unusual for the mobile space in some ways.

Scott Foe: Well, the genesis really goes back to before there was even a mobile space. I mean, I've been thinking about this title since I was seventeen years old. I wasn't even in college yet when I started fantasizing about this. I cannot describe it, I recommend it to everybody, the experience of doing that thing you've been telling yourself you're going to do for so long.

So that being said, people always ask, because the term "producer" is so flexible, “What do you do? What do you do?” I'm kind of like Hannibal from The A-Team. I collect this amazing virtual network of amazingly talented people. We've got the character designers, we've got 8 Bit Weapon, and of course we have RedLynx and these fantastic people, and you know, I love it when a plan comes together.

So, it takes a village. Everything that we have is because everybody contributed and brought their A-game. And so, seeing all of that come together, and all of that cooperation - at the end of the day, companies don't make games. Nokia doesn't make a game. RedLynx doesn't make a game. People make a game. And we've been working with some amazing people. And because of that we have this amazing game.

So that's the short genesis version. The long genesis version is, of course, we are investing money in the N-Gage platform. It's mobile, it's connected. You need something that really flexes the platform, you know, a flagship title which is going to basically show off every feature that the platform has, and even features that the platform doesn't have.

At the same time, it's going to be the lighthouse, you know, the beacon - plant the flag for other people to look at and say, “Wow, mobile gaming isn't just this 64k experience that was in my phone in 2001.” It's now come into its own right as this very special form of entertainment, at home or on the go.

That's a very first-party console publisher mentality - trying to light the way for other developers.

SF: Set the bar. Yeah, and being at a first-party console publisher, or mobile publisher, as it were - a platform - that's definitely the way we went.

How did you end up in this area, having worked on more console type of gaming in the past?

SF: Nokia acquired the Sega Network technology infrastructure in 2003, and we had started a project called Pocket Kingdom, which was the world's first global, mobile, massively multi-player on-line game with Sega at that time, and both I and Pocket Kingdom went over with that acquisition.

And it's been in development for like two and a half years now?

SF: It's been in production for two and a half years... I mean, there was preproduction, and concepting before that, so two and a half years is when we brought the studio into the equation.

That seems pretty considerable for a mobile title. That's not typical, is it?

SF: It's not typical, but then again the things we're doing here... you know, we're running, running, we're way out ahead, and there are rocks in the road, and we only find those by tripping over them.

Earlier today you were speaking about the development structure. How does that work when you have development overseas, you're here, QA is somewhere else, and so on?

SF: Yeah, I like to think, going to our pop/schlock book collection, you always hear that “The World Is Flat.” Well, our tools aren't flat yet, but they are getting flatter.

This project being so distributed all over the world, and having so many moving pieces, because you've got not just a platform and development studio to deal with, you also have operators, and operator networks, and different operator network characteristics, and outsourcing firms, et cetera. This project just wouldn't have been possible a few years back.

But when we got onto the project, you know, you look around the internet, and you see all these off the shelf project management softwares, and different processes that help ease the pains, and you're able to pull those things down and get to working with them, and you're doing things that, again, just weren't possible before. And it's pretty amazing.

You said you're using Scrum.

SF: That's the project development methodology that we've employed. You know, Scrum is - especially with the recent [Game Developer magazine] article from, I believe, last year, “Scrum Rising” - a hot topic in the games industry of late.

People have strong opinions.

SF: People have strong opinions. I definitely have my own strong opinions. It's definitely not a silver bullet, nor is any development methodology. I mean, for example, yes, Scrum leads to greater team communication and cooperation, but if one of your team members is an axe-wielding barbarian, then that might necessarily be a good thing.

But there is certainly, in publishing minds, this kind of idea that Scrum is this evil dragon that - “Oh, if we don't have a waterfall project planned with everything mapped out in detail, then this project is just going to go way overboard, and way over budget.”

I have to say that if you're doing a quality-driven title - so I'm basically separating the universe of game projects into release-date driven, and quality-driven; release-date being, “We gotta get it out by this date,” and quality driven being, “It's gotta be out when it's ready” - for a quality-driven product, using an iterative development model like Scrum is excellent for bringing that home, and for revisiting issues, and making sure that everything is just perfect.

For a release-date driven model, Scrum is excellent because, at the end of every sprint - Scrum project cycles are broken down into a number of sprints - you have something which could conceivably go to quality assurance. So if your due-date has to be - cannot miss! - this certain date, then at the end of every sprint you have something that you can conceivably ship with. Whether that's good or not, that's in debate. But you could theoretically launch it.

From the publishing side, Scrum has very few artifacts, so when you go into a Scrum product development methodology, instead of having, like, oodles of Microsoft Project files and Excel files, and this and that, what you have is the product backlog. People take product elements off the product backlog, the team puts it in the sprint backlog, they complete it, then they give you a sprint report and a playable build. The sprint report and the playable build are probably the best visibility into how the health and well-being of the development project of any of the corporate artifacts that come from the different development methodologies out there.

So, for example, if you're at a publisher, and you really want complete visibility into how is the team doing, what are they accomplishing, you have that sprint backlog and can see, at the end of each sprint, what the team did, what they failed at, and why.

You can't get more clear-cut than that. Having the actual sprint review build, that build of the game, to be able to take around internally and say, “Here, look. This is what the game is about. This is how we're doing. This is how we're going.” There's no better feel for how a project is going, instead of waiting however long for a given milestone build.

From the contractual side? I mean, it requires flex. Say you're doing a release-date driven title, and you're making a contract, and you know the team is operating on a Scrum development methodology. Well, it's easy to say, “This is the due date. These are the payments. And go. These are the number of people you have, and we'll be out on this date.”

Now when you go for a quality driven title, contractually it becomes a bit more sticky, in that you either have to, one, plan on going back to amendments to the contract to say, “Okay, we need two more sprints. We need three more sprints. We need this many more sprints.” Or actually building into the contract the possibility of approving and paying out more sprints on an as-needed basis. And of course, most business development people, and people who write the contracts in the publishing arms of organizations everywhere are probably not familiar with this, and very married to the standard way of doing things, which, of course, causes friction within the publishing organization.

Again, not a silver bullet, but I definitely couldn't see myself using any other development methodology that's in current practice today. I definitely am a huge Scrum fan.

I imagine that kind of heavily iterative method would be particularly suited to a game like this, where you've got fairly disparate gameplay styles that you're bringing together. I suspect that took a lot of trial and error.

SF: Most definitely. I mean, a piece of paper is never fun. Right? First person shooter is easy. Well, easier. You've got a point of reference, you know you're going to need some weapons, and some enemies, and maybe you're going to do an amazing narrative structure, and blow everything else out of the water. But for the most part, you know what you're aiming at.

For something where you are planting the flag, and you are running out ahead of everybody, and there are rocks, it does take time and iteration, and polish to get the jetpack to be as fun as the jetpack could be, or to make sure that the princess-rescuing is satisfying.

One other point, going back to the transparency, I don't think it's really part of the standard Scrum development methodology, although I may be incorrect about this, but one of the things we found really useful on this project is doing our burn-downs by discipline, so you have a burn-down chart which is basically, here's all the work that needs to be done on the project, and you watch it burn-down as elements are taken out of the product backlog.

When you burn-down by discipline, and you see the velocity of how the project is going, you can say, “Oh, we need more artists, or we need more designers, or we need more programmers.” And it becomes more obvious, sooner, although, again, that might already be written down somewhere. I haven't read all the Scrum books. That might be out there.

From a design standpoint, what that was like working with a studio that was overseas? You talked a little bit about the production pipelines...

SF: Oh, I mean, I can probably count on one hand the number of local studios I've ever worked with. It's been that way for me, pretty much. The only advantage is, I speak Japanese, so back in the day I could actually listen in on conversations - whereas now, I don't speak Finnish.

But again, I really have to applaud technologies like activeCollab and Basecamp. Both are fantastic, and the choice between them comes down to whether we want to host our own servers or not. So that's great for keeping coordinated, and of course there were visits out to the studio and workshops, and getting together.

But going back to Scrum, and the transparency that that offered - basically, we knew what was going on at the developer, through the sprint backlog, through the coordination tools like TestTrack or activeCollab. And like I said, the world's flat, the tools are getting flatter.

Also, it really helps to work for Nokia, where I don't pay my phone bill. So anytime I want to, at two a.m., I can give the developer a ring, and we can chat about something. And there were many, many, many phone calls in addition to everything else going on in the project.

Has this project been on schedule? That's probably not the right question since it seems like you didn't have a real date, but what was your initial projection for how long it would take?

SF: Well, I mean, our initial... This is a quality-driven project, so... when it's ready. N-Gage obviously - you know, it's no secret - took a lot longer to come. One SKU for all titles, on mobile, that's the golden egg. To get the golden egg, sometimes you forget, somebody has to fuck the goose. There are feathers flying, and there's squawking, and it's not pretty. But at the end of the day, you know, you get there, you got that golden egg. And five years from now people will be appreciating and enjoying the golden omelette.

So, I suspect when development on this game began, the target for you guys was still the N-Gage hardware platform?

SF: No.

No. You knew this was coming.

SF: From day one, we knew... or from day one of concepting, we knew that it was going to be cross-platform, multi-platform, web widget, N-Gage.

Where do you see mobile gaming going, with respect to platforms?

SF: It depends on if it's the far future, or the near future.

Pick one.

SF: All right. In the far future, there is no-compromise convergence. I mean, eventually, Moore's law catches up with the mobile handsets in the same way that it catches up with the PCs. It won't be about the platform, but the content, and where and how you're enjoying it.

So I could walk into my living room, put my device down, it starts broadcasting to my television. I pick up a wireless controller, and I play it, and it's talking to the device, which is talking to whatever display I'm using, and I play a game. Or maybe I just pick it up and go outside and do the same.

And while this sounds like the stuff of high fantasy, I mean, you can go on the internet right now and see videos of people using game controllers to control a racing game played on a device, and that device has a RCA connection to a television. So it's just like, definitely not the stuff of high fantasy. That being said, futurists and historians always tell a different tale, so I'll go on record as saying that's one possible future.

Okay. So what's the intermediary then?

SF: The intermediary is: bigger, better, grander gaming experiences, more satisfying gaming experiences on the mobile devices. You've got to remember that there are a lot of economies, a lot of places in the world, that are coming online through the mobile devices, never having had a computer. And for them this is the only form of gaming entertainment, or one of the major forms of gaming entertainment that they're going to get. And I think that will definitely shape what comes after.

On that note, it looks like one of the things you guys are trying to do - with the online community, with tapping into the very gamer-centric culture - is maybe trying to introduce more of a sense of the core gaming experience to mobile platforms. A lot of the things you're doing echo online communities people might be familiar with as hardcore gamers.

SF: Well, like any good homage that works on multiple levels, transcendentally, it's layers of the onion, but the key is not to let the love of gaming get in the way of loving the game. Right? Take Kill Bill, for example. You never need to have seen a Bruce Lee movie. You don't need to know she's wearing Bruce Lee's track suit to be able to enjoy Kill Bill. Right?

You never need to have ever played a video game to enjoy Reset Generation. For those of you who have never played a video game, maybe it's just an action/puzzle title that you can't put down. But if you do love gaming, if you are a hardcore gamer, then you're going to find more to love. You're going to see the different levels of love and homage that we have baked into the title.

But it also looks like you're trying to attract a certain type of audience - the core community who cares about things like leaderboards, releasing the art assets to people to make their own things, and so on. Those are things that are more typical for a console or PC developer to do for their games than what a mobile developer would do. Do you agree with that?

SF: Again, content is king. It's all software, man. Consoles are big games, grand experiences, things that people will love, things that will touch lives. The ability to get out there, whether it's on a console, or on a mobile device, it's still entertainment.

Sure, but it seems like you're trying to make a concerted effort to reach a certain type of gamer. Because I think there are a lot of gamers who do play games, but who would not necessarily have that inclination regarding mobile titles.

SF: Ah, yes. Yes. For a great many people, Reset Generation will be either the first indoctrination into mobile gaming, or the first indoctrination into N-Gage, and we are trying to send the message that, “Hey guys, it's not exactly what you might think. Let's clear up these misconceptions here. You can try it for yourself.” And we do, through the PC side, have a volume of users there to get that experience.

Yeah, I was going to bring up the PC. It does seem like sort of a “the first hit is free” kind of thing.

SF: Yeah, it's "Project White Rock," you know? No, I mean, it's no secret, the game is an advertisement for the N-Gage platform. If you look at the widget, it has a little Nokia phone skin around that. We're not shy about that. We want you to see that we've done something really cool, and we want to share it with you.

How did you end up getting all of those well-known concept artists?

SF: Oh, reams and reams of concept art. Oh my God. If I see another picture.

But how did you approach them all? Did you just sort of work up a list?

SF: I had my hit list. I went down the hit list. “Yeah, you like me, I like you, let's work on this.” Yeah, I'll tell you this. Seth Sternberger of 8 Bit Weapon, I hope you're reading. Horrible negotiator.

I write him an email saying, “Hey, I really dig what you guys do. I think we should work together.” Here he comes back saying, “Oh my God, this is a dream come true!” So then it's, "Okay. Let's talk money."

Tipping his hand a little too early there.

SF: Yeah. But he was fantastic to work with. And he did get taken care of, because we really appreciate him, and would like to work together again.

As someone who is, I guess, part of the generation that this game is named after, it is pretty...

It is nice to see a fully-produced, commercially developed game with pixel art and the 8-bit style music, and all that stuff. That's unusual these days.

SF: Well, we wanted to make something that was non-perishable, right? Where other people focus on graphics, we focused on artwork. Like, you look at technology, technology moves quickly. We were talking about Moore's Law earlier. You make a great looking 3D game right now, and it might look like not-so-great twelve, eighteen months from now. You make a fantastic 2D game, and a fantastic 2D game does great forever.

It's an experience that endures, and we didn't just want to do another game. We wanted to do the game for the reset generation. And this was definitely the right way to go about it.

How did you end up with what you have? There are sort of shades of a lot of different genres and games in there, but obviously at a certain point you have to congeal that into one experience.

SF: Oh, it's probably not a very interesting story. It was me with a box of Legos. And then when we brought RedLynx in, they made a couple of key contributions, which has made things incredibly even more fun, like the combos - basically, the combo system came from them. So instead of just laying down blocks, you can actually build impenetrable blocks.

At the end of the day, for me, it's all about physical modeling. And like I said, it was pretty obvious that you couldn't just do this story about games, that it had to be homage in both mechanics and story. So that, that was just kind of intuitive, but how it got to be from, “We're going to do mechanics about games,” to something that is just really fantastically fun mechanics about games. That's blood, sweat, and tears on the part of all the designers and playtesters involved in the title.

I don't know if you've played No More Heroes on the Wii. It's not as explicitly about games as your game is, but it does have a sense of being an homage to classic video gaming, incorporating some of that pixel art and music. I'm curious if you think that that will be something that, as the "reset generation" grows older, becomes an embedded part of the cultural recollection.

SF: Well, I think we'll find homage everywhere, especially as the medium matures to a point where you can actually go into a store and buy a ten-year-old game. Then, you know, how many period-pieces are there? Every major movie studio makes at least one period piece every year.

I definitely think that we'll keep riffing off each other. I mean, video games are like jazz, right? Or like Carlyle Brown once said, “If you like something, steal it.” You're playing a game. “Oh, hey, man, this motion physics, or whatever, this is really smooth. I gotta have that.” Or, “We gotta have bullet time!” I don't know if you remember, but there was a time like that.

Right, when everything had bullet time?

SF: Right! Scott Miller and the Remedy guys had started it off [with Max Payne]. Every producer in the country was going in to their developers, and saying, “Stop everything! Cut level twelve! We need bullet time!”

Yep. What's different about projects like this, though, is that this is less about specifically taking a feature, and more about taking from the cultural texture overall.

SF: This is a cultural celebration, is what it is, right? It's a summary of things that we've seen before, but it also opens the door for new things. And I think the community elements play a lot to that.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | 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 independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The delights in this latest version include a new RPG by the creator of a popular physics-based web toy, three different Game Maker projects, and a simplified real-time strategy game involving universal conquests.

Game Pick: 'Ceramic Shooter' (Theta Games, freeware)
"An abstract scrolling shooter with a unique concept - players will have to actively avoid destroying objects on screen while attempting to pilot a malfunctioning ship. And yes, it's one of a trio of Game Maker projects to be featured this week."

Game Pick: 'Galcon' (Phil Hassey, commercial indie - demo available)
"A multiplayer strategy game where participants will wage war with one another in an attempt to wrestle control over an entire planetary system. This is achieved by commanding entire fleets and propagating their influences to as many planets as they possibly can, before their adversaries do the same and overwhelm all other opposing forces."

Game Pick: 'I Was in the War' (Bisse, freeware)
"I Was in the War is a short action game which involves undertaking a dangerous mission to infiltrate the enemy territory, all the while being subjected to relentless offensive attacks from all fronts. Created in under three hours for a friendly Poppenkast competition."

Game Pick: 'Stick Ranger' (DAN-BALL, browser)
"A new Java-based application by the developer of Powder Game, where players will manage a party of adventurers by dragging them towards the enemies to engage in either ranged or melee attacks."

Game Pick: 'Destructivator' (Chris Roper, freeware)
"The new retro-style platform shooter from Chris Roper, developer of The Pyramid and Return to Sector 9. Shades of Brøderbund's Lode Runner? A definite and resounding yes."

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

['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist.]

I find the hidden object game a bit of a frustration. Here is a genre in which a great deal of effort goes into the framing story -- and, perhaps even more to the point, the games tend to advertise themselves on the basis of that story, in contrast with many sorts of casual games that advertise themselves on the basis of the mechanic.

We have hidden object games about expeditions to Mt. Everest, or assembling archaeological evidence from Egypt, or tracking killers in London. But in practice the interaction and the story usually have almost nothing to do with one another.

There's even a hidden object remake of The Count of Monte Cristo. An ambitious idea, and I couldn't resist trying it. It gets off to a fair start: there's thrilling if slightly cheesy music, a great sense of importance, and an illustrated summary of the opening portion of the book.

If you were going to pick a book to translate into an adventure game, The Count of Monte Cristo is a promising choice: it's a bit of a pot-boiler, but it has a hell of a premise, with lots of obvious, easy-to-share motivation for the protagonist. There's love, danger, money, intrigue, betrayal, imprisonment, a cameo appearance by Napoleon Bonaparte -- what's not to like?

This rendition somewhat flattens the original story (apparently the authors figured that "Chateau d'If" would be too strange to the American audience, so they translated it into the rather less evocative "Castle of Iff", which sounds neither plausible nor French). So it's not as good an opening as Dumas wrote, but even watery Dumas is rich by the standards of adventure game beginnings.

But then -- oh, then. Then we are given a screen showing an inscrutable clutter of items and told to pick "clues" out of it, the clues that will lead us to our betrayer. Clues such as a pineapple, a crumpled paper, or a wedge of cheese. Do this long enough, and the story moves forward just a little.

To some extent I'm handicapped as a critic by the fact that I fundamentally dislike this mechanic. In graphical adventure games, I'm always frustrated when the screen is visually hard to parse: I want to know what I'm looking at, and consider it a flaw if I don't. Having a game take that flaw and make it into a virtue, challenging me to detect where on the screen is a musket that has been placed just so as to blend in with the background and look like a flagpole -- well, that's just annoying.

You could argue that the effect is "realistic", since in real life it's sometimes hard to see things clearly, but that's a bit bogus -- in real life I can move my head, shift positions, get closer to objects. Some games are better about this than others: the best of them have brightly lit rooms with stylish, not-quite-photographic illustrations, which at least make it clear where one item ends and another begins.

The worst are muddled collages of edited photographs in which the scales of objects and the shadows cast never work quite right, and it is near impossible to see the boundaries between things. When that happens, I find the effect substantially more tedious and frustrating than a badly tuned time management game or a text adventure with a bad parser.

So that's my caveat: I am not a big fan of hidden object interaction. I get irritated and start to click at random, and then the game pops up a little message to tell me that I'm going to be penalized for this random clicking.

But leaving that aside, I also find The Count of Monte Cristo frustrating because the mechanic is such a bad form of interaction for the storytelling that is supposedly going on in the game. I would be a little more patient (I think) if the object searches were a little more relevant to the game's supposed narrative, but in the case of the Cristo game, we get to search for absurd things in various settings around Marseille.

(To give credit where due, the settings themselves are designed to be period French rooms -- but that doesn't quite excuse the fact that apparently one of the damning bits of evidence against the villain is, in fact, a pine cone.)

It's possible to do much better with the same basic concept. Agatha Christie - Peril at End House is a hidden object game based on Hercule Poirot. I have the sense that they took a lot of their cues from the David Suchet television series, because their Hercule looks shockingly like Suchet, and the theme music has a familiar jazzy-yet-suspenseful score.

The production values are excellent, and there's a clear sense of setting and period -- but that's not what I'm interested in here. Three things make this game much more effective than the game of The Count of Monte Cristo from a narrative-meets-interaction perspective.

First, there's a greater match between the interaction style and the content of the narrative. Dantes doesn't really spend most of his time scrutinizing furniture. His adventures are more about interpersonal manipulation. Trying to squeeze him into a hidden object game doesn't work so well. Poirot, though, is just the type to linger fastidiously over tiny details.

(Holmes even more so: it's no surprise there is also a line of Sherlock Holmes hidden object games.)

Second, the creators of Peril at End House have gone to some trouble to make the searches feel more relevant to the plot. Most of the items you find don't mean anything, but in each room there is usually one -- a letter, a footprint, a revealing receipt -- that contributes information toward the investigation. This makes a world of difference, because it makes these scenes feel more like real searches, and because it doesn't attempt to convince the player that useless side articles have any bearing on the plot.

Third, the mini-games slipped in between object searches are generally more apposite as well: fitting together jigsaw puzzles of torn-up evidence; connecting clues with the characters they relate to; solving a very simple encrypted safe combination; that sort of thing. They're not really very hard puzzles, but they have the effect of reinforcing the player's understanding of the story.

But ultimately, the reason this works as well as it does is that Agatha Christie's stories start out being very much like jigsaw puzzles, with pieces supplied one at a time and the reader invited to fit them together. Some other styles of mystery writing -- a Scott Turow thriller, say, or the psychologically dense mysteries of PD James or Elizabeth George, or even a late Sayers novel -- would not be nearly so open to translation to this format. It would seem trivializing to try.

The cynical explanation is that Christie's work is really more puzzle than story to start with, and that this is why it lends itself so well to conversion. I prefer to make a different observation: that successfully adapting existing narrative material to interactive media is sometimes about making a smart match between the reader's activity (in the original case) and the player's (in the resulting work).

Note I said "the reader's activity" there, not "the protagonist's". Lots of game versions of books try (with varying success) to give the player the starring role. But the player of Peril at End House doesn't really act like Hercule Poirot, or even like Poirot's sidekick Hastings.

He acts like the consumer of the mystery, someone who has to have all the important bits pointed out for him (as, for instance, in a list of objects to find and examine in each room), and whose main challenge is to keep track of what it all means. Some of the mini-games are essentially quizzes on whether the player understands the plot so far.

The Count of Monte Cristo game doesn't let me act like either Dantes or a reader of Dantes' story. It gives me Dumas' wonderful sweeping over-the-top premise, one that demands action of the protagonist and inspires impatient curiosity in the reader. And then it asks me to sit still and click on pine cones.

[Emily Short is an interactive fiction author and part of the team behind Inform 7, a language for IF creation. She also maintains a blog on interactive fiction and related topics. She can be reached at emshort AT mindspring DOT com.]

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

[Over at sister 'online worlds' site Worlds In Motion, Mathew Kumar has been doing a sterling job expanding the Worlds In Motion Atlas, so we're going to highlight his work profiling the more GSW-friendly games featured - such as this classic alt.MMO!]

Here's an overview of Kingdom of Loathing, from Asymmetric Publications, a popular browser-based RPGs that features a multiplayer component, with in-game chat, clans, player-stores and more community aspects.

Name: The Kingdom of Loathing

Company: Asymmetric Publications

Established: February 2003

How it Works: Kingdom of Loathing is experienced on the web through html. It requires no installation and navigation and gameplay are accomplished via mouse and keyboard input.

Overview: In Kingdom of Loathing, players choose one of six classes and begin a largely single player adventure to gain levels, earn meat (the world's currency) and eventually rescue a king. Adventures are turn-based with a limited number of turns each day. Players can engage in Player vs. Player, join clans and sell items from stores when they reach the appropriate level, and those who pass a literacy test can take part in chat with other players.

Payment Method: Kingdom of Loathing is free to play, and earns revenue through donations (which grant players special in-game items) and merchandising.

Key Features:
- Browser RPG
- Player vs. Player combat
- In-game chat
- Clans
- User owned stores/economy

Kingdom of Loathing: In-Depth Tour

There have been a lot of things said and written about Kingdom of Loathing as a purely single-player experience already, so I'm not going to dwell on that too much. The initial things that are going to strike any player is that it's graphically incredibly simple (stick figure sketches) and it tries to be funny from the instant you start creating a character (you choose between classes including "Seal Clubber" and "Disco Bandit").

As I currently live in "the frigid Northlands" (Canada) I thought I'd play as a Seal Clubber, and began my quest, rationed at 40 "adventures" a day. The first thing any community minded player of Kingdom of Loathing must do is pass the test at the Altar of Literacy, which allows them the ability to take part in in-game chat. It's an amusing requirement (expecting knowledge of the use of "their", "they're" and "there") and has led to a community that is unusually well-spoken.

Once that's done (and after working with the "Toot Oriole" on Mt. Noob to learn how to play) the next thing to do is to join a clan, where the main multiplayer experience can be found. You can't join a clan until you are level 3 (which requires a few days adventuring) and once you've reached this level there are a bewildering range to choose from. I just chose at random, selecting the "Seven Lances" clan, and have no idea if I chose wisely or not.

The game has several artificial barriers of this sort -- for example, you can't own a player store until you reach level 9 (though you can sell items in the flea market) -- all of which require you quest in the "main" game for quite a while (a period of perhaps weeks, due to the limited number of adventures per day) and while this can seem restricting, a major part of play is taking part in your clan chat, which allows you to receive advice from other players (which tends to stop short of outright spoilers) beneficial "buffs" for your character (making combat easier, or leading to more item drops) amongst other benefits.

Another aspect of the community is player vs. player combat, playable by choosing to smash the "Magical Mystical Hippy Stone" that exists at your campsite. Combat takes the form of bizarre, in-direct statistic comparisons, and winners can take rank, stats, meat (the game's currency) and items from losers. I chose not to take part for fear of crippling my still new character completely.

I've been unable to access some community features, too. I haven't been able to contribute the required amount of meat to my clan's coffers to raise enough karma in order to take part in Hobopolis, one of the game's main multiplayer areas. Hobopolis is a dungeon in which clans can go on adventures together. However, similar to the content intended for clans in games such as World of Warcraft, this is almost solely for high level characters due to the difficulty. As a lowly level 6 "Malamute Basher" it'll be a while yet before I'm able to take part.

Kingdom of Loathing is a fairly unique game, particularly when it comes to its "massively multiplayer" content. Several multiplayer aspects of it are surprising -- a great example of this was the "grey plague", an in-game event in which players became diseased, leading their font to become unreadable. Players had to work together and quest to find the cure, which had to be used on other players.

There are many examples of this sort of thing, and it's a great way to explain the unusual way that Kingdom of Loathing fits the MMO concept without fitting the template at all.

Kingdom of Loathing: Conclusions

Kingdom of Loathing has an amazing community. Sure, it could be considered small -- there tend to only be a few thousand players on at any time -- but you only have to look at the incredible depth its spoiler-filled wiki goes to to see how into the game its players are. That's not to say they're closed off -- they're welcoming to "newbies" and most clans accept any and all players, but you do have to play by their rules. Which means using proper English (they don't make you pass a literacy test for nothing!) and taking part in the community in a positive manner.

If you want the "proper" Kingdom of Loathing experience you're best to forget that wiki I just linked (as the temptation to browse it will be just too much) and play through the game using the help of other players in chat. Kingdom of Loathing is a game full of surprisingly difficult (and obscure) puzzles to solve that are often explained in a rather roundabout fashion (the developers clearly love wordplay) so you're going to need the help.

Played like this, I'd almost be willing to argue that Kingdom of Loathing is about as "multiplayer" as any other online RPG -- after all, aren't all of these games about players working together to solve puzzles (sort of)?

And that doesn't take into account the absolutely incredible player-based economy that has been created in-world. I don't know how it compares to something like Eve Online (which we might look at in future) but the idea that there are players trading individual items worth millions of meat is mind-blowing. I don't entirely understand, for example, why the spices I received for killing goblin chefs are worth thousands of meat to other players while their resale value to NPCs is low (and other players could surely kill their own goblin chefs) but I guess I'm just not an economist.

When you look at aspects like that, Kingdom of Loathing isn't just a great game, but a really unique and interesting MMO. It does have its failings -- I think the interface is absolutely terrible, I don't find the stick figures that pleasant (even if it does feel like a Purple Ronnie MMO) and like many other RPGs it's completely bewildering to beginners (though the community can help with that.)

I wish I had reached a level where I was able to discuss Hobopolis, the multiplayer clan dungeons, but unfortunately the limited amount of adventures per day mean I haven't been able to get that far yet. I don't consider that a failing -- I rather like the idea that I can only play so long each day -- and have even wondered how such a system would work in a fully fledged MMORPG.

Anyway, Kingdom of Loathing probably isn't the kind of game you'd plan to look at if you were trying to work out how to build a community in your MMO, but it only take a short time playing to realize such an assumption is dead wrong. Kingdom of Loathing might be more of a "game" than an "MMO" but as either, it easily outclasses many of the competition.

Useful Links:
Official explanation
Coldfront KOLWiki (Unofficial Kingdom of Loathing Wiki)
RadioKOL (Kingdom of Loathing Radio)

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

The hive mind must bring you GameSetLinks, and it does so this time by revealing that Persona developer Atlus has also debuted an awesome new IP - that's right, it's a refrigerated UFO machine that dispenses ice cream (pictured, left!) Take that, Megaten fans!

Also wandering around here - lots of free games listed, why user-created may not always be the best, more Harmonix analysis, comparisons of console download services, and a little journalist mugging.

Tra la la:

Historical Studies of Digital Entertainment Media | How They Got Game
Ah, neat game academia folks (Lowood, Bittanti) booting up this new academic journal for next year: 'The theme for this first issue will be "Digital Games: Historical and Preservation Studies."'

...on pampers, programming & pitching manure: Player Created Content: Industry Created Glut
'I do worry, however, that many will fall by the wayside for lack of sufficient user-base to generate the content.'

365 days of free games | GamesRadar
The PC Gamer UK guys, including some RPS-ers, excel themselves.

Bringing Gaming (and Gamers) to Your Library: 100 Tips and Resources | OEDb
'When libraries offer gaming programs, there's often a very favorable response, but how do you go about getting started?'

The Story of Sega’s Oddest Game Ever | Edge Online
Aha, was talking about Segagaga the other day - here's the full skinny.

Juvenile Journalists - www.developmag.com
'Don’t pretend you’re making some sort of Suffragette protest when you’re simply throwing your toys out of the pram.'

Trends in Japan » UFO Catcher for ice cream hits Japan’s game centers
'ATLUS has developed the “Triple Catcher Ice”, THE state-of-the-art prize machine carrying the latest freezing technology'.

Poynter Online - Romenesko: 'Magazine ad sales fall 8.2% in the second quarter'
In the U.S. - tech ad spending down almost 20%, it says - shows why most game mags are in such dire straits. (Happily, Game Developer mag, in a non-consumer market, is doing just fine.)

Harmonix Music Systems | The A.V. Club
Second part of the Dahlen analysis we've mentioned before, great attention to detail here.

Developing for PS3 PlayStation Network (PSN): newretro.org
Good series from Alex Amsel - also see XBLA, WiiWare.

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

[In this editorial, originally printed in Game Developer magazine, editor-in-chief Brandon Sheffield reflects on the ever-increasingly bloated nature of game development, and wonders if there are better ways for developers to share their learning experiences.]

Consolidation scares the crap out of me, but it’s running rampant through our industry. Some of these companies seem to be getting so bloated that I wonder how they even operate.

It’s funny how it’s often the execs at large publishers who talk the most about making games more like movies, or at least more successful than them — and yet these are the very entities that are moving further and further away from the Hollywood studio system (which is composed mostly of freelance agents, production houses, and funding groups) and moving more toward a factory-style production model.

It’s a wonder to me that original or innovative games ever get through this system — at times it seems like it must have been some sort of grievous error of judgment on the part of somebody in the upper echelons, allowing a team to get paid to make what they want. After all, that’s how Ralph Baer wound up creating the first modern video games while researching for the military.

But of course, publishers fund big-budget games, and as the medium discovers itself, it strives to tackle more — more hours of gameplay, more sandbox options, more user-generated content, more graphical flourish and physics interaction.

These are certainly good things to an extent, but at this stage they are incredibly reliant on the money of large corporate entities, the largest of which are absorbing creative studios left and right (though on enlightened occasions, leaving the studios themselves alone, just taking a bit of the money and risk).

There are talented people in these publishers, but as we all know, being talented and being in charge don’t always go hand in hand. And when these structures get larger and more labyrinthine, it makes me wonder how long before we’re submitting game concepts to representative committees, like government entities.

They will then relay this information, complete with riders, to persons who consult with the people who have the money, who in turn speak with the people that “push the button,” as we represent our "constituents" whose tastes we barely even know. Or are we there already? Or alternately, am I being too pessimistic?

The fact is, you can make a good movie for $100,000 that can be shown in theaters — it's rare, but it's possible. Could you make a game for the same price that would make it onto store shelves?

You might be able to consider downloadable games as a corollary to direct-to-DVD movies. With movies of lower-budget, it's the luck of the draw and who you know that gets you in theatres or simply on a disc.

But in games, if you've got a small budget it's pretty unlikely that you're going to get any kind of traditional marketing or retail treatment. But DVD sales have overtaken box office sales, and so too will downloadable sales overtake retail. So perhaps the era of the indie is at hand?

Postmortems: The Best Policy

Part of the key to making great games - whether large or small - is to understand what you did wrong compared to your last game. So I've also been thinking — can there ever be such a thing as a truly honest public postmortem? I had a conversation with a designer friend recently, and we came to the conclusion that unless the game was made entirely by one person, probably not.

While you can say, “We changed scope too quickly,” you can’t say, “So-and-so screwed everything up and lost us lots of time because he’s a terrible manager.” The latter is likely a truer statement, but you’d never hear anyone say it outside of the office. And in the case where the people giving you the money are the problem, well what can you do?

At a certain point, one has to wonder — are we continually repeating the same mistakes, or are we just keeping it close to the vest? (And I use “we” for the sake of convenience — I’ve never written a postmortem myself.)

Certainly there can be interesting elements in these articles, such as information about genre or platform shifts, or innovative ways to deal with budgetary or time constraints. But in general, it seems these articles frequently tread over old ground, as the skeletons of the past come back to haunt us.

There’s still plenty to glean if you’re a fan of reading between the lines — most authors, like poker players, have a "tell," which at the very least informs you of when they clearly have a lot more they could say on a certain subject.

I don’t mean to say postmortems are useless — after all, we feature them on the cover of almost every issue of Game Developer magazine. But there might be better ways to structure this information, might there not?

If we can get to the stage where postmortems enable everyone to better understand the game development process, then perhaps some more autonomy will be given - even at higher levels - to game creators to break out of the rigidity discussed in the first part of this editorial.

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

[Vox Populi, a somewhat unexpected new development for GameSetWatch, is a new bi-weekly column discussing things we've heard - and things you've told us - about video games today, and video games in the future.]

Well, there was a first Vox Populi column, and shortly thereafter - there was a second. Which is this. As per usual, feel free to contribute - or if you don't care for that, just read and appreciate.

- You may know that Metal Gear Solid supremo Hideo Kojima is a bit of a fan of the Ubisoft Montreal-created Assassin's Creed. After all, there's an Altair costume in Metal Gear Solid 4, for starters. And now, Vox Populi has learned that Kojima has been visiting Ubisoft Montreal's offices this week. Friendly chat, or something more substantial? Make up your own mind.

- The edgy renaissance of EA Redwood Shores, currently in process with the distinctly adult Dead Space, seems to be continuing, according to job postings seen by Vox Populi. They discuss "a new M-rated action-adventure" in the early stages of production for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 - with "an Oscar-nominated writer" on board with plans to expand to turn the IP into a massive multi-media franchise. Maybe M is the new E for the EA Games label?

- Do you like Tinker-ing around? Apparently, our favorite Xbox 360 creators do, too, since Vox Populi has discovered a mysterious trademark registration for 'Tinker' by Microsoft - citing intention for use in relation with "game software for use on computers." And nope, Vox Populi has no idea what this is - anyone? Bueller?

- So far, you might know Electronic Arts' Montreal studio for cute Wii games like Boogie or distinctly grungier action games such as Army Of Two. But would you be surprised to know that the developer is also working on a new racing game for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360? That's what Vox Populi has heard - expect more details on it soon.

- So, about all this Halo MMO farrago. Vox Populi may have seen some glimpses of the much-hyped title, and has worked out the following. Firstly, the title was not in development at Bungie. Secondly, it - or at least, the version Vox Populi has seen - is no longer in development. And thirdly, you may be hearing more about the aforementioned defunct version soon.

[DISCLAIMER: Vox Populi is the voice of the people. Literally. So it lives on what it hears. Please send it information. It endeavors to ensure that the information in this entertaining missive is correct, but, citing an excellent, similar column in another medium: "All stories are sourced from well-connected individuals. But I urge you to use your judgment and remember, context is everything."]

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

['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.]

Returning to a previously explored subject (Ash from Pokemon's awkward social situations) has brought fruit once more for a colorful Mr. Persona, we see, as he explores the post-watershed years for the master of monsters:

[Jonathan "Persona" Kim is a character animation student at the California Institute of the Arts. When not continuing Pokeoffice stories, he continues the Mecha Fetus revolution on the Mecha Fetus Visublog.]

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

Good Lord, I _still_ have GameSetLinks left over from last weekend? What a terrible embarrassment. Fortunately, most of them are obscure enough that you won't mind, dear GSW reader - starting with a Chinese documentary criticizing World Of Warcraft.

Also in here - (the pictured) Mike Patton interviewed on his video game voice work, the return of The Yes Men, the epidemic of 'bloom' in the game biz, how much the FragDolls actually get paid, and lots more.

Eu reek ah:

EastSouthWestNorth: Daily Brief Comments July 11-20, 2008
With vids/translations - [Chinese TV station 'CCTV showed a series of programs titled 'Battling Internet Demons' that targeted the online game 'World of Warcraft' for its addictiveness and the required treatments by experts.' - Via Kaiju Shakedown.

Invading copyright is just a game for The Times - currybetdotnet
Space Invaders clone on the newspaper's website with a really silly disclaimer - via ExtCir.

Mike Patton Interview | The A.V. Club
Great Gus Mastrapa piece talking about Patton's video game voiceover work.

Water Cooler Games - Yes Men Exhibition
'While the group's work is not necessarily game-related, some may remember their spoofing of a serious games conference in the UK two years ago.' Indeed, compete awesome. We'll see what they do this time.

Versus CluClu Land: Jazz and American Game Design
'These two differing approaches to game design point to a creative tension in many of the best recent games that is like the conflict described in Gioia's assessment of Jazz history.'

Player statistics return with a vengeance - The Steam Review
'Steam’s player statistics were taken down the other week, to a small amount of wailing and teeth gnashing in the forums. Now they’re back, and better than ever.'

Bloom Disasters - The Quixotic Engineer
'To properly illustrate my concern about the proliferation of bloom, I’d like to show you some examples of bloom gone wrong.'

King of Diamonds | OXM ONLINE
Hey, Krispy Kreme knows the Xbox Live Diamond card!

ProPublica Announces More Staff Additions; Newsroom Will Include Seven Pulitzer Winners
The concept of 'a non-profit newsroom producing journalism in the public interest' is a wonderful one - esp. when investigation-oriented.

Wanted: Female gamer, must take no prisoners | Technology | Los Angeles Times
The FragDolls get paid $15,000 to $30,000 a year for the part-time gig? Interesting. $300 a day for E3.

Why Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" theory might be all wrong. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine
'It's true that we're now buying more obscure movies and music than ever before. But we're merely nibbling on these niches.' V. important for games, too - via Bittanti. Also notable for mentioning Twelve, which is high-concept/needed in games.

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

[The Game Anthopologist is about gaming communities. This week, Michael Walbridge explores the Culdcept Saga community and its struggles to survive and grow.]

If a game is beloved by its players, but doesn’t have the desired support from the developer or those who control the only networks you can play it on, what happens to the community? If it’s a game on Xbox LIVE, it dies, and you can only play by scouring the Internet for a partner and scheduling a match or co-op.

Most games on LIVE manage to find a replacement: another sports, FPS, or LIVE Arcade game to migrate to. But a few games are so unique that there is no PC equivalent and no foreseeable replacement for the nomadic community designate as the next oasis.

But there is an exception, a species we could put on the endangered list: Culdcept Saga, a game so unique and intensely loved by its few supporters that the community is going to extra effort to prevent its death.

A history: Culdcept Saga was released in February of this year and is a sequel to the cult classic Culcept, released in December of 2003 for the PS2. It combines strategy, cards, and dice rolls on a board and has puzzling game design choices, such as the revealing of each player’s hand when his turn comes.

The game is not built with the Xbox 360’s abilities in mind: it is fairly limited graphic-wise - or at least, not that different from what you see on a PlayStation 2 - and this is the main reason that at release, it only cost 40 dollars. It still has an “Only on Xbox 360” logo on the top, despite not being the system’s proudest game (unless, of course, you play it).

Reviews were highly mixed. Most games have a general consensus, but not here: Metacritic scores have a wide range, and in the February 2008 Game Informer, where the reviews come with a “second opinion” mini-review, the two scores were 7 and 8.5 (they usually come within half a point of each other).

Unlike most other games on LIVE, Culdcept Saga has no option to just look at all the available matches; you must set lots of criteria before looking. Matches usually last more than an hour, and often more than two.

Because of this, most players who play are in game; anyone who is new won’t know what the commonly accepted settings for a match are, will see no one in the lobby and assume no one plays and most will likely leave before it starts.

And if you disconnect…well, that's a major problem in waiting. Any other game would tolerate this, but 90 minutes can be ruined by a disconnection.

I did mention commonly accepted settings though; where they come from is a small community that has managed to keep the game afloat. Thinking of how competitive the game is and how deck builds were commonly discussed in game, I did a search and found a community fansite named….CuldceptSaga.com. The domain of the game's name wasn’t even reserved by Namco Bandai!

I was late to the scene, but I discovered it had enough of a presence that a couple of Namco Bandai representatives actually answered some questions for this site. I discovered many people visit and read it, and that it’s really the only forum with much of a presence or following.

An alternate GamerTag had been made just to get people access to a list of players who play (you can see friends of your friend), but alas, software limitations struck again: a person can only have 100 friends, and it was quickly maxed out. A second one was made. There was even a small league, all of which was contained in a single thread.

I found out that the host of the site is AWOL, to the most literal use of the term. He doesn’t respond to emails. The forum has no way to message other members. No changes or posts occurred in months and no one else has access. I sensed panic amongst the readers and quickly realized what they already knew: if CuldceptSaga.com goes down, so might the community and so might the opportunity for new players to discover a place to find people to play with.

I saw that one of the posters, Andym4n, was foremost in voicing these concerns. He also is the only person I could find who had one of the most impossible Xbox LIVE achievements: win 100 matches against online (there is also one to win 200, which no one has). I sent him a message on LIVE giving him my email address and asking if we could talk.

True to my suspicion, all the activity is at CuldceptSaga.com. He also said lots of people are still playing. “There’s usually a match or two available,” he told me. He manages to play five matches a week. Sometimes he has to wait, but he doesn’t mind, as he’ll edit books during the wait.

“A few of us at CuldceptSaga.com offered our services as co-admins/moderators; the admin chose three of us, but it's been a month since he last e-mailed and we have no admin access as yet,” he said. “I have a feeling CuldceptSaga.com might just vanish someday.”

“That's the feeling I got too, and I've barely been there,” I told him. “What would happen if it were to just disappear?”

“I'd have to speed up my plan! I'm in the process of creating the go-to Culdcept site.
CuldceptCentral.com if you're curious.”

“Looks like I picked the right guy to talk to,” I said.

He must have nodded. “I just hope CuldceptSaga.com lives long enough to get my site fairly well known, or people will scatter if it goes down.”

According to Andym4n, Culdcept Saga still has an intact community. He says the second season of the league has more than doubled the participants of the first, and that the community is growing more tight-knit, which has advantages and disadvantages.

The scene here is different: it’s almost a PC type of crowd who happens to be using a console. “I will say this: it has by far the friendliest online community of any game I've ever played. It's intelligent, fun conversation. You know why, right? In CS, if you talk smack, your opponents stop focusing on beating each other and gang up on you.”

And so it is that the people, not just the game and Xbox Live, make Culdcept Saga the closest digital version of what it’s like to get people to play a complex board game at your dinner table: difficult, but worth the effort.

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

Time to catch up on what's been happening on Gamasutra and other Think Services sites so far this week - and there's some notably diverse features up there, from Mick West on fluid dynamics through an interview with Q's Reo Yonaga that is particularly GSW-eclectic - and has Tim Rogers question-asking cameos, blimey.

Also in here - more goodness from GameFest, some choice GameCareerGuide.com tidbits, and news of Bruce Sterling keynoting our own Austin GDC event, for some futuristic fun in the Texas sun. Here's the full line-up:

Gamasutra Features

Q's Hidden Genius: Reo Yonaga Speaks
"Although Rez creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi is the public face of Q Entertainment, designer Reo Yonaga is a vital collaborator on titles such as Lumines [& Ninety-Nine Nights, pictured!] - and Gamasutra has the first major Western interview with the vibrant developer."

Practical Fluid Dynamics: Part 2
"Following up his popular recent article, Neversoft co-founder Mick West explains the technical details - including source code - of creating dynamic fluid systems such as smoke for video games."

Towards More Meaningful Games: A Multidisciplinary Approach
"In this thought-provoking design piece, writer Sande Chen (The Witcher) takes a look at how to ratchet up emotional intensity - through narrative design, visuals, and music - to create more meaningful games."

Gamasutra News Originals

EA's Beaver Talks Dead Space's M-Rated Quandary
"Talking to Gamasutra, producer Chuck Beaver has been discussing Electronic Arts' decision to go M-rated with sci-fi horror title Dead Space, explaining: "When we pitched the game, we had to figure out a way that we weren't just going to be a tiny niche market - torture porn" - also discussing the game's HUD-less, cutscene-less approach."

Microsoft's Heutchy Details Social Interaction With Xbox Live Party
"At Microsoft's ongoing GameFest, Xbox platform engineer Eric Heutchy gave more insight into the Xbox 360's forthcoming Xbox Live Party features, the newly expanded group chat/gaming initiative to be included in its next dashboard update -- full breakdown within."

NetDevil's Brown On Learning From Mistakes For Jumpgate Evolution
"Colorado's MMO specialist NetDevil has a fascinating history of late, with its canceled Auto Assault, the signing of LEGO Universe, and now the compactly developed Jumpgate Evolution, being made with a staff of just thirteen. In this Gamasutra interview, co-founder Scott Brown talks about that title and the company at large."

Other Neat Stuff

Educational Feature: Iterative Design
"Experienced game designers throw around the word ‘iterate’ like it’s an old football, but students and industry newcomers might not know what a heavily loaded word it can be, so Vicarious Visions designer Brandon Van Slyke demystifies the word in the latest GameCareerGuide.com feature."

2008 Austin GDC Reveals Bruce Sterling Keynote
"The 2008 Austin Game Developers Conference has revealed noted SF author and futurist Bruce Sterling as the keynote for the Writing Track at the September 15th-17th conference, giving a speech named: 'Computer Entertainment 35 Years from Today'."

GameCareerGuide.com's Game Design Challenge: Player Aid
"The Game Design Challenge is a weekly exercise in becoming a game developer, asking you to look at games in a new way. This week's challenge is: Design a player aid for the board game Risk."

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

Browsing recent feedback on GameSetWatch often uncovers some gems - such as a new comment from Craig Sams on a January 2007 GSW post about Namco arcade machine obscurities.

Sams specifically posted about Prop Cycle (aka PropCycle), Namco's 1995 dedicated arcade machine which had the player pedaling a bicycle to collect balloons in a vibrant fantasy world in which you must "...Master the Art of Flying and become the Savior of Solitar." No, really. He noted:

"Propcycle is an example of a brilliant concept that failed in the execution. It cost too much for a person to learn how to fly, navigate, remember the routes and the balloon locations, so most people who tried it quickly ran out of money and looked elsewhere for a game with a gentler learning curve.

Once you got good at it (as I did) then you could play a 4-level game with 3 free replays if you hit a certain target score. So the arcade operators saw the triallists disappearing and experts like me sitting there playing for 40 minutes for £1 ($2). So the machines went out.

I bought 2 - one sits in my exercise studio next to my Pilates Reformer and one's in storage if I even need a new motherboard or spare parts. My top scores are in the 19125 to 19750 range, probably the highest in the world. It's the best exercise as every second is worth 50 points, so you pedal like fury to get all the balloons in the minimum time.

I think I could fly a plane in World War 1 now, I've gotten very adept at realistic flying at lowish speeds."

But what's particularly interesting is Mr. Sams' homepage, which reveals of the businessman: "In partnership with my wife Josephine Fairley I founded Green & Black's Organic Chocolate in 1991, an award-winning organic and fair trade confectionery brand whose Maya Gold chocolate was the first product to carry the Fairtrade Mark."

So there you go - successful gourmet chocolate eco-entrepreneurs swear by awesome old Namco cycling-based arcade machines as exercise fodder. Maybe it's time for Namco to do a Wii conversion of this, complete with exercise bike add-on? That would be completely, epochally awesome.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

[In this analysis piece, designer Daniel Cook looks at Nintendo's Wii Fit to examine and break down the critera that skills - such as exercising or balancing - need to have in order to be turned into video games, suggesting a blossoming of games as we discover those opportunities.]

Recently, my amazing wife picked up a copy of Wii Fit. No, this is not a review.

For the past year, my wife has been dealing with a rather serious, debilitating illness. One side effect is considerable and undesirable weight loss. On the positive side, she has enjoyed shopping for a new wardrobe to match her more petite frame. On the less positive side, many stores no longer carry clothes that are small enough to fit.

So when the Wii Fit first booted up and cheerily prompted her to set a goal, she decided to try to get her BMI back up to the "normal level." Every day or so, she's been exercising, weighing herself and doing yoga. So far she has found the game to be convenient and highly motivational tool for helping her to track her weight.

We've had other exercise equipment around the house before, as well as gym memberships, yoga classes, etc. None of them has been as motivating as a simple set of exercises wrapped in a system of game-like rewards. My wife's experience with Wii Fit speaks volumes about games potential to turn an often mundane activity into entertainment that is delightful, exploratory and highly meaningful.

Thinking Beyond Scales

Yet, who would have ever thought that weighing yourself could be turned into a game? Miyamoto did, but then again he is widely considered to be an uber genius. The skeptical observer might imagine that successful cross-over games like Wii Fit are one-in-a-million success stories. Suppose it works for Wii Fit, but nothing else.

However, if the lessons of Wii Fit were broadly applicable, entire industries could be transformed. Games are a competitive advantage that can turn a commodity scale into one of the hottest consumer products of the year. In highly competitive markets, that is the sort of product design super power that lets innovative companies walk away with market share.

As I contemplate my wife's success with the Wii Fit, I'm struck by a multi-billion dollar question: What other activities can you turn into a game?

Almost Anything

First, though there is no doubt that Miyamoto is a genius, what he does is reproducible by mere mortals. He is able to apply his game design skill (or at least his greenlighting abilities) to non-traditional games like Wii Fit because he understands game design at a very atomic level.

Here is another way of looking at it. A craftsman builds tables the same way he was taught by his father and his grandfather can only build tables. But someone trained in mechanical engineering can use the fundamentals to build chairs, bridges, cars or even cathedrals.

Similarly, by understanding the fundamental science behind traditional games, you can apply the theoretical tools of game design to transform wildly divergent activities into games. I've written about some of this in the past with essays on skill atoms.

It turns out that most learnable skills can be turned into a game. However, there are constraints. A skill must meet the following criteria before it can be turned into a game:

1. Decomposable into simpler skills
2. Skills can be nested
3. Skills can be arranged in a smooth learning curve
4. Skills are measurable
5. Performance can be rewarded
6. Skills are locally useful.

Let's look at these one by one.

1. Decomposable into simpler skills
Complex learnable skills can be broken down into sets of easily acquired core skills. Players can only learn so much at once and overly complex skills overwhelm all but the most persistent players. By breaking skills up into digestible chunks, you are now able to apply many of the basic techniques of game design.

In Wii Fit, the complex activity of "becoming fit" is broken down into skills associated with using the board, testing balance, endurance activities and more.

2. Skills can be nested
Complex skills should build upon and reuse earlier skills. Advanced skills are best taught by the extension of existing skills, not introducing new metaphors.

Game design is built around the idea of core mechanics, skills that are exercised over and over again throughout the game experience. If you can't find a set of basic reusable skills that can be incorporated as the foundational elements of more complex skills, players will deem the activity shallow and lose interest.

In Wii Fit, the act of balancing while following rote exercises is used repeatedly throughout. It is an activity that is easy to learn, hard to master and contributes nicely to a wide range more advanced activities.

3. Skills can be arranged in a smooth learning curve
There is a smooth ramp from learning easier skills to learning more complex skills. Initial skills should take only seconds since they leverage existing skills. Afterwards, learning activities should build in complexity until they take minutes, then hours. If the initial learning ramp takes too long, players will be confused or bored and stop playing.

In Wii Fit, you can learn to use the board in seconds. Just step on it. However, more advanced games are slowly introduced until must spend hours of your time to unlock that last activity.

4. Skills are measurable
The game can detect when a skill is used correctly or incorrectly. Without this the game cannot provide timely feedback that pushes the player in the right direction.

The fact that Wii Fit is a giant sensor is perhaps to be expected. Within limits, it knows exactly what you are doing and when you doing something incorrectly. This is a dramatic difference from most exercise equipment or a workout video.

5. Performance is rewardable
The game can provide the player with a timely feedback and rewards. If the game provides feedback too late or in a manner that is disconnected from the original action, the player won’t learn.

Unlike traditional exercise equipment, Wii Fit judges your performance. It lets you know when you are doing poorly and it praises you when you are doing well. It is not a passive tool, but one that seeks to mold you. This is how games work and is an integral part of their success as a teaching tool.

6. Skills are locally useful
The skill can be exercised in a useful manner by the player in a variety of meaningful local contexts. If the skill isn’t useful, the behavior will extinguish.

Local utility is a tricky concept for many, especially those trained to think in terms of filling measurable customer needs. It basically means that the player finds an activity useful in the short term within the local context of the game. Grabbing a coin in Wii Fit may accomplish absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of the player's week. However, it does let the player unlock a new exercise. So for the moment, the player considers frantically gathering coins to be a completely utilitarian activity.

Skills that are eliminated by these constraints
What skills are eliminated by these constraints? Surprisingly few.

The biggest sticking point often ends up deciding how to measure complex skills. With Wii Fit, they needed to engineer an entirely new device. It is not uncommon to invest substantial amounts of effort just gathering the right data so that you can reward the proper skills accurately and in timely manner.

Machines alone have a limited understanding of many cultural human activities. In these situations, you need to build your games to use other human beings as measurement instruments. The rating techniques of sites like Hot or Not or Amazon.com are widely applicable.

The other constraints end up being easily worked around with a little bit of thought and prototyping to find what works.

Conclusion

When I look at our list of six constraints, it is obvious to me that there are a plethora of skills that are just waiting to be turned into games. Games like Wii Fit or Brain Training may seem exceptional strokes of genius, but in reality they are merely the tiny tip of an immense iceberg. Almost any human skill, be it physical, cultural, political or economic can be turned into a game that enlightens and enables.

As more leisure games emerge that mediate and accelerate the acquisition of skills, there is going to be a economic incentive to spread the science and craft of game design far beyond our tiny game industry. Game design is not just about games. It is a transformational new product development technique that can turn historically commoditized activities into economic blockbusters.

This morning, my wife came back from her morning Wii Fit session and proudly announced to me that she just worked her way back to her normal weight range. She is still on the light side and this odd little game was by no means the only source of her success. But it had its place as a tool that measured, encouraged and rewarded progress. As such it was worth every single penny.

When I look at Wii Fit and I hear the delight in my wife's voice, it is apparent that game design is again breaking out into the broader market. Obviously it isn't happening quite in the way many have predicted.

The harbinger of game's ascendancy to all aspects of the modern life is not some piece of evocative art or Citizen Kane-a-like. Instead, our future appears in the form of a glorified bathroom scale. Still, if we can improve people's lives with a bathroom scale, just imagine how games can transform the rest of our world.

[Daniel Cook writes regularly on design, the business of games and product development techniques at Lostgarden.com. He has previously worked with Epic Games, Anark and Microsoft.]

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

[Andrew Doull is an IT manager from New Zealand who spent the last 5 and a half years working in the United Kingdom. He's just emigrated to Sydney, Australia, and spends his free time developing Unangband, a rogue-like game, and blogging at Ascii Dreams. He writes an irregular column for GameSetWatch.]

Why as gamers do we undervalue fun? This is the flipside of the search for Citizen Kane: we associate fun with juvenilia instead of serious purpose, childhood dreams instead of adult aspirations, the clumsy, awkward-limbed gracelessness of youth that we stand apart from in later years.

Ironically, as game players and critics, we are the best position to write about how fun is important in our world. But instead we are somehow embarrassed by this, as if fun is not the highest achievement we should strive for.

Danc of LostGarden.com points out that 'Games... are all about learning skills'. That is, games can have a direct impact on who you are as a person. This is an unqualified given for this medium.

For art and literature, there's been a centuries-long debate about this exact notion: that art can improve who you are as a person was resoundingly answered in the negative, post 1945. The humanist theory of art, arising out of the Romantic movement, was that if you were exposed and uplifted by sufficiently powerful and influential works of art, you would become a more profound and moral human being - not someone capable of genocide.

This is not to say that gamers cannot be bad people. But game playing has immediate and measurable effects in a way that viewing art does not. The Brain Training-s and Cooking Mama-s promise to be gaming's path to the mainstream, resulting in a low level, incremental approach where individuals improve their daily life skills as opposed to the critically acclaimed magnum opus that game critics crave.

As far as the gaming hardcore is concerned, homemakers raising virtual pets are at the opposite spectrum of fun, but both kinds of gamers are still experiencing fun nonetheless.

Will gaming end up just being a better-thy-self opiate for the masses, a kind of Television 2.0, where Tyler Durden's declaration that self-improvement is masturbation replacing a middling amount of gamer masturbation with a middle class of gaming self-improvement?

It is a sad fact that the world cannot support 6.6 billion revolutionaries. So we will always need an opiate for some people. And as far as opiates go, gaming is a mostly inoffensive one. It contributes to bad posture and a sedentary lifestyle (if you ignore the Dance Dance Revolutions of gaming), while saving the livers, lungs and septums that other popular method of distraction put at risk.

If the occasional street robbery and thuggish Xbox-related homicide brings gaming into disrepute, these acts are only a pale shadow compared to the brutalities inflicted to bring harder stuff from Columbia's cocoa or Afghanistan's poppy fields to the American main street. (A notable exception may be the increase of misery in the Congo caused by the rise in demand for thallium for manufacture of the PS2). Even gaming addiction, while potentially pulling apart relationships, does not inflict financial misery on the scale of gambling.

But we will not win arguments about the positive influence of gaming by arguing 'games are less bad than drugs'. A historical perspective on gaming shows Dungeons & Dragons survived a similar cultural outcry in the early 80s, and there is an established tradition of fêting excellence in mankind’s longest surviving games: Chess and Go.

Game theory, while only an adjunct to game playing, helped navigate the treacherous waters of confliction resolution during the Cold War, with the balance of power and stratagem of Mutually Assured Destruction, and modern military exercises are games all but in name. South Korea on the surface is the modern gamer’s paradise, with arenas full of cheering onlookers celebrating success in Starcraft.

Fear of fun is defined in part by the view of gamer as someone living in an extended adolescence. The child-men of their 30s and 40s, living in their mother’s basement, pale skin coloured only by an PlayStation tan, are still very much part of a culture of gaming, but these kinds of men have always had their obsessions, be they beetle collections or Beatles collections.

What has changed, to an extent, is the framework around them – with online gaming levelling the playing field of the socially recluse, and casual gaming, and especially the success of Nintendo’s DS and Wii platforms, widening the pool of potential game players. Fun becomes a guilty pastime, with solitaire windows minimizing the moment the boss walks by, and the Westernized and especially Americanized view of success creating a culture of neurosis around pleasure (Those long holidaying Europeans have always had their social(ist) board games).

Why do we feel that gaming is wasting time, when no one disputes Bobby Fischer’s legacy? The Cyberathlete Professional League would disagree with the assessment that fun is frivolous – and even if you are no athlete you can always argue you are training your hand eye coordination, practising your hand brake turns, golf swing, or even ability to move your mouse around the screen (The best argument for why your IT department should never remove that Minesweeper preinstall).

And if fun is not clinical enough a description for the range of emotions you feel, you can celebrate your fiero or understand your opponent’s yomi or commiserate the fun to be had at a forfeit at your expense.

Distributed intelligence points a way forward that elevates human understanding through play. From image recognition, to Free Rice, to intuition about folding proteins, harnessing the power of fun for collective gain promises to allow gaming to help solve hard problems in science. Equally, human gaming skills have forced artificial intelligence to update the ante, showing us the deep understanding required to play the simplest seeming of games. While computers can now play at Grand Master level in chess and poker, no algorithm can yet match a middle rank Go player. We just need to be sure we don’t fall into the trap of Fermi’s Paradox – playing games instead of exploring the universe.

Gaming is the crest of the current wave of the intergenerational culture wars, and this wave will abate only when this gaming generation takes political office, heads media and business, and defines the standards our children will rebel against. This cultural battlefield is in part defined by the hypocrisy of defining 'fun being had by other (young) people is bad' - and I would hope we would carry the juvenilia of gaming, the perpetually young at heart onwards to bring an end to this cycle of young vs. old.

Humanity as a species is defined by our neotenous physiology - that is our extended period of youth and delayed onset of adulthood, and it would be a shame to miss this opportunity in a medium that encourages a flexible and adaptive mentality instead of a steady ossification into old age. The secret of longevity, of course, is staying young.

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

Still catching up on those darn GameSetLinks from the weekend, and this time, it's headed up by Daniel Cook's impassioned defense of Soul Bubbles, a title mentioned more than once on GSW that's rapidly becoming a cult hit, at least in terms of buzz.

Also in here somewhere - stories of failed game startups, PlayStation 3 Linux ports of neat indie games being mysteriously halted, Emily Short plays iPhone games, Kyle Orland on finishing games and reviewing them, and quite a few more.

To the sky:

Lost Garden: Soul Bubbles: A classic game ill treated by expert reviewers
The bigger point - game reviews don't work for some games. 'Expert reviewers' is an oxymoron - it's about experiences.

GameSpot News: 'PressSpotting: Are You Done With That Game?'
Well, we are now!

Diary of a Failed Startup: Postmortem
A game-related start-up that didn't work - honest feedback. (Via Psychochild.)

Cave Story for PS3 Linux is cancelled « Peter Mackay’s projects and development diary
Time for rumors, hmm?

E3 - brave new worlds? The three most interesting games at the show | Games | guardian.co.uk
Some good picks here, including MadWorld.

iPhone adventures - The Gameshelf
Looking at 'Adventure' for the iPhone, heh.

The videogames that will never see the light of day | Technology | The Guardian
Fergus McGovern is talking about Resident Evil for Game Boy Color.

Aqua Forest review « Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction
'The iPhone’s Aqua Forest game is another of those inventive rarities that could only exist on this platform.'

A Tree Falling in the Forest: What's the Point: E3 Wrap Up Edition
'Twenty minutes later someone opened the door. With the exception of a half full outdoor garbage can, the room was completely empty.'

HMBG Foundation's ArtSpark Festival has an Indie Games Showcase, August 11th, Austin
Also see this Facebook event - not making it that easy to track, but worth keeping a note of!

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

[My esteemed colleague Mr. Christian Nutt was kind enough to wander up to Microsoft's GameFest, where they actually seem to have made almost as many big announcements as E3, and here's some great dev-specific intel on avatars for the Xbox 360.]

Talking Microsoft's GameFest event in Seattle, the company's Cameron Egbert and Dan Kroymann have been discussing the creator of avatars for the Xbox 360, revealing lots of new details on the practicality of developers implementing avatars within their games.

Egbert, a software development engineer for XNA Developer Connection, started by showing his existing GamerCard for Xbox 360 and saying: "It doesn't say much about me".

The he showed a 3D avatar, as being implemented on Xbox 360 later this year, and noted: "This is me. I made him earlier in the week", going onto explain: "Avatars are a new identity for gamers. Somewhat like a gamercard, these can be used to replace the gamer picture if the user chooses."

"It gives them an online presence they did not have before without Xbox Live. It is ubiquitous across the system. Also, you can use them in your games as a replacement for your characters, or in your UI, or whatnot."

Egbert further explained: "You build them from a predefined set of geometry and textures and customize them as you want... to suit your tastes."

How about edgy avatars? Egbert explained: "This is a product for everyone, so nothing in here will violate an E10 rating - no weapons, no compromising situations."

He added: "Avatars are meant to be an extension of the player - this is not a pet, this is your online presence."

Technical Specifics

According to the XNA programmer: "Provided with avatars will be two ways to actually use them. First of all is a supplied renderer and animation system. Secondly, you can get the assets and render them inside your technology as you choose."

The technology should allow game creators, using metadata, to use random avatars in games, and create specific avatars to be used in the same way every time in your game, "like a game show host".

Egbert continued: "Animation in avatars is done through two methods -- the first is skeletal animation, which takes care of all of the body animation. It uses the same skeleton through both male and female avatars. Body weight is also controlled through the skeleton system... it can vary by about 7%."

The second type is facial animation, which is "all done through textures", and looks very Mii-like, with different eye and mouth textures to be switched out.

How about integration with Xbox Live? According to Egbert: "Avatars follow your profile across live - so if you load up your profile on one box, it'll look the same on another box. All changes are propagated to Xbox.com", and "...the user has an option to use a 2D headshot of his avatar as his GamerPic."

Questions And Answers

Finally, Egbert and colleague Kroymann took questions from the audience, with Egbert answering a query about whether there would be branded clothes or hats in the game with: "That's not anything that's being handled in the first iteration."

He did indicate that there may later be achievements to unlock avatar-related items, and Microsoft may later add branded items for avatars into the Xbox Live Marketplace.

How about avatars rolling out across Games For Windows or MSN? Egbert said there's "...nothing to announce right now - this is the first stage, doing it on Xbox".

When's the rollout and SDK for avatars for Xbox 360? Egbert indicated rollout will be in "fall, no hard date" and the SDK will be available at the same time.

Can you use avatars in Xbox Live Community-developed games? Dan Kroymann noted: "not yet", but that the Community Team had been talking to them.

Finally, how many avatars can be seen on screen at once if you push things? Kroymann's opinion: "If you're rendering the full avatar maybe 100 would be a rule of thumb, for most games."

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

[How do you go from a gothic past to a teen oriented future? KingsIsle development head Todd Coleman tells big sister site Gamasutra how key team members behind traditional MMO Shadowbane ended up creating their forthcoming teen-wizard MMO Wizard101, and the differences between designing for kids and hardcore gamers.]

First announced in May, KingsIsle's forthcoming Wizard101 MMO is a fantasy-based 3D virtual world targeted at teens and 'tweens, where players take on the roles of wizard apprentices at the Ravenwood School of Magical Arts.

In it, players can customize their wizard character's outfits and accessories, play arcade-game inspired puzzles and mini-games, adopt magical pets, and learn from seven different schools of magic, with a heavy PVP focus on collectible cards used for card duels alongside and against other players.

Interestingly, the core of KingsIsle staff has roots not in traditional children's entertainment, but in the much darker 2003 Ubisoft MMO Shadowbane, something which development head Todd Coleman told Gamasutra could be explained by the team's more family-oriented mindset, so many years from their first post-college roles.

In this interview, Coleman takes us through inception of the game as a true card-game MMO, rather than an MMO with a card game attached, its Yu-Gi-Oh! and Final Fantasy inspiration, and how designing for teens differs from designing for an older, more hardcore set of gamers.

So KingsIsle has people with a lot of experience on MMOs in the past, particularly Shadowbane.

TC: Yeah, I was on Shadowbane.

Is [Id and Ion Storm co-founder] Tom Hall still there?

TC: Tom runs the other project, so we have two MMOs in development. I run one, and Tom runs the other. Mine just happens to be first, so I'm sure at some point you'll get to talk to Tom about his.

Right now, Tom is also helping me by playing Wizard. His wife and him are a little bit addicted to it. I think he might be a little mad at me right now, because I think I nerfed his character last week.

KingsIsle is a really different and unique culture, because we have the sensibilities of a startup but the resources of a much larger company. A lot of that is because our founder, Elie Akilian, had such a strong and dynamic background in the telecom software space. It's a very different startup story than you'll hear from a traditional game publisher.

Where are you guys located?

TC: Our corporate office is up in Dallas -- in Plano, actually -- and the game development team groups are located in Austin. There's also a core technology group that works on cross-platform operations tools and networking layers -- all the things that would be common across multiple MMOs.

When you say cross-platform, you mean the MMO platform?

TC: Yes, across the MMO platform. We haven't looked at or announced any plans to move to any consoles or anything like that. I was meaning across one game and another game in a web in all the ways we're building technology. We're looking for commonality. We've got a little bit more than a hundred people now, I think.

One of the most interesting things is that no one had ever heard of us before. We're just kind of in a little room in Austin and Dallas just chugging away on a couple of MMOs.

February 1st was my three-year anniversary with the company, so it's been three-and-a-half years now, and we've finally announced the company and the products and immediately followed that up within weeks with, "Hey, not actually are we doing these projects, but one of them's in beta. By the way, you should join beta." The announcements are coming fast and furious.

With MMOs, a lot of the time you have the opposite situation, where somebody announces an MMO project when all they have is concept art. This happens a lot.

TC: That's what we had on Shadowbane, right?

Right. Since an MMO takes so long to make, even if everything's going right, it can seem like they were just hanging you out to dry, because you'll go all this time without seeing anything.

TC: From my standpoint, I was in that situation with Shadowbane. We put the marketing cart so far in front of the development horse that we felt like we were playing a game of catch-up forever. We were always trying to keep our fans happy while getting the game done, and those two things are really hard to juggle.

It's been a really refreshing experience here, that we were able to just concentrate on getting the game done and making the best game that we could, before we subjected ourselves to the pressure of the market as a whole.

I'm not sure exactly what your funding situation is, but is that at all a result of having more financial security?

TC: Absolutely. With Shadowbane, we were always hungry and trying to figure out where our next meal was going to come from. In this situation, we still have the startup sensibility, but resources have not really been a huge issue for us.

If we need to get another development server, we have to justify it, of course, but they've been very, very cool about being realistic about the resources that it takes to build one or, in this case, multiple MMOs.

Do you find that it's easier to get funding for projects like this? Your target audience and this segment seems like a hot area right now.

TC: It is now, but rewind to four years ago when I was out talking about it and nobody was particularly... well, [CEO and founder] Elie [Akilian] had the foresight at the time.

Remember, this was while it was still in beta, and at the time, people were still arguing, "Well, EverQuest is as big as any MMOs is going to be, and from now on, all it's going to be is carving up that same 500,000 people and cannibalizing." That was the general feeling.

Yeah, I remember the GDC after World of Warcraft came out. It was successful, but before it had really exploded, there was a GDC panel announced that was called something like, "Will an MMO ever reach a million subscribers?"

TC: Back then, the market was a lot different. Everybody thought, "Well, we have determined in our infinite wisdom that there is a total of 500,000 MMO subscribers in North America, and there won't be any more." It was a little short-sighted, I guess.

Back then, the kids market was fairly well ignored. Everybody was looking at fantasy, and a few people were looking at sci-fi, but even that was visibly small. And, of course, there were these monster projects out there like with Marvel and DC in the superhero space where everybody thought, "I don't know if they're going to hit or not."

In the kids space, it was mostly silence. The idea when it initially came up was a conversation. It was one of those sitting at [pizza chain] Mr. Gatti's, writing up ideas on a paper napkin kind of conversations.

It usually starts with me and a couple of buddies. We always seem to be in this position together. We have one that just really resonates with us. Joseph Hall -- my director of technology -- and I were chatting on the phone about kids games, because his wife and his daughters were playing a very light kids MMO.

We were talking about how that market could potentially blossom and be huge, but there was almost nothing in it at the time. We started talking about what would be cool if we were younger, and what we came to was the realization that collectible card games are all about, by definition, collection. I mean, that's what you do with them. They're a competition and collection.

MMOs, to a large degree, are about collection and either passive or active competition. We thought, "Nobody's married those two concepts together. There's just no answer for an MMO that's wrapped around a CCG as its base component."

The other thought that we had was that all the other MMOs were following the same game model of, "Let's stand around a monster and all hack at it. There's a giant crab on a beach. Let's all smack it with our sticks," or whatever. We were thinking it would be cool to find some other mechanism to do that.

That's when we lit upon [Disney MMO] Toontown Online, which did turn-based combat. We thought, "That's a really cool idea. I wonder if you can do turn-based combat but make it more of a Final Fantasy style?"

We decided to rope that whole Final Fantasy style of turn-based combat in with a collectible card game and put it into a world that we thought was very appealing, which was the world of a wizards' academy.

Clearly, I've heard at least, that genre has blossomed into something on its own. The idea of a wizard school is evidently kind of popular.

So yeah, we took those ideas and stuffed them in a bag and kind of hit "puree" and what came out the other end was, "Wow, this is really cool. This is really compelling."

We decided initially to target the 8-to-whatever age group, but then once we actually started getting into it, we thought, "You know, I think I would actually play this game." It's been really interesting for us, watching our market kind of blossom and go well outside the bounds of what we originally expected it to.

Our design lead, James Nance, who was another friend who I've known since high school and was from Shadowbane and basically everything I've ever done - his mom is now playing our game, and she's put a couple dozen hours now into an MMO.

This is someone whose background in gaming is Solitaire and Minesweeper. She's not a game player at all, and we find her getting in and talking about damage over time and recovery rates and stuff like that. We've seen a pretty broad swath of people who have gotten into the game and found it to be really cool.

It sounds like you're growing more from your own experiences with traditional MMOs, but trying to put it in a different framework. That segment is rather heavily 2D instead of 3D, but what you're doing, at least in terms of the more technical sense, is more of what a gamer thinks of as an MMO.

TC: It totally is. We looked at the offerings that were out there, and - let me say - that's not an excuse for us to not run on an incredibly low-min spec. In terms of production value, we decided to swim upstream of the web-based offerings that had come before us, but we had set goals for ourselves that would still allow us to tap into that market.

Our initial download, in theory, for a broadband user, should be about two minutes to be up and running in the game. Then, while you're in character creation, we're downloading the tutorial. While you're in the tutorial, we're downloading the first adventure area.

Everything is more streaming, like a browser, and we set our minimum threshold to be, I believe, a 1 GHz machine with a GeForce 2. So yes, we did absolutely try to set a higher bar for production value, but we always put that secondary to keeping the game eating light as a bird on a processor or bandwidth standpoint so that it could still be very approachable.

The example I use is that, often, the kids' machine in the house, was not purchased to be a kid's machine. It's because mom got the new laptop, so dad got the desktop, and dad's old desktop is now what's in the kids' room. As a result, we needed to be able to target machines that were six or seven years old and still be running on them fine.

We still want to scale up so we can be competitive, so people who are looking at World of Warcraft or something and looking at us will think, "Well, World of Warcraft really isn't for kids, but this is still visually stunning. This is a really cool concept and a great game and I can see myself and my family investing time in this." That was basically what we went through. It's a real tough balance to strike, but I think we've done a pretty good job. Hopefully people will agree with me. (laughter)

The CCG aspect seems like something that tends to remain fairly popular among that age set.

TC: Definitely. A big chunk of this is because it's not like we made an MMO and then later said, "Hey, we should just slap a CCG in there too and try and do some CCG stuff." We actually developed that as the core of the game.

The heart of the game is that combat is based on turn-based CCG with cinematic style movies, basically, baked into it, like the old Final Fantasy games. When you start with that as your core and you build an MMO around it, it's a much different feel from, "Hey, I built this MMO. Let's slap a CCG in there."

We'll definitely see, but it certainly raises a lot of opportunities for us to look at other avenues and other ways we can try and spread the Wizard101 idea to outside the traditional MMO mobs.

There's also clearly an attempt to attract the Harry Potter group as well?

TC: It wasn't accidental of course, but there's a bunch of different influences. Harry Potter is clearly one of them. We're a wizard school, and there's definitely that similarity. You're an apprentice wizard at a wizard school, and you are the hero that they need with the potential to save the world.

Beyond that, though, the similarities aren't as deep as you might expect. We actually draw from things like Narnia, and we have a dose of [fantasy/sci-fi author] Roger Zelazny in there.

You'll also notice some pretty heavy Yu-Gi-Oh! similarities. We're fans of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TV series. It's actually really well-written and pretty cool. There's a bunch of different areas like that that we pull from.

There's no way to look at it and go, "Well, it's just like blah," because if you say, "It's just like X," somebody else is going to say, "It's got this, this, and this. That's clearly like Y." "Oh, that's true, but it also has this, this, and this. That's clearly like Z."

But the name, obviously, and the idea of collecting these spells in Wizard101 - originally, actually, we intended to do 101 spells to collect, and what happened is that we got into development and started producing this and when we all started playing it, and we were constantly hitting against that 101 wall.

We thought, "When are we going to put in this new spell that we want?" Finally, we thought, "Okay, forget it. We're going to go right past the 101 and keep going." So it clearly has the school tie with the idea of Wizard101, but it no longer is a cap for us in terms of spells and powers.

So your title now is just a single-entendre?

TC: Yes. (laughter) I guess I could pick out my 101 favorite spells, but not really.

Having worked on a more hardcore-skewed focus before, from a development standpoint, does this feel different?

TC: In some ways, it's actually more challenging. It's actually, from what I've found, harder to do a more elegant, simple interface, than it is to do a more hardcore interface, because you're constantly having to back up and think about things from a different perspective.

It's hard for me to remember a time when I didn't understand the concept of health or experience points, but when my wife got into our game and said, "What is this XP symbol?"

I said, "It's experience, of course!" and she looked at me like, "Why would I possibly know that?" I realized that, "Well...you wouldn't!" So we had to add a tutorial tip for that.

That's actually been really challenging, but to your question, part of the reason that myself, Joseph, and James were all attracted to this was because Shadowbane was such a grueling experience.

There was a lot of good that came out of it and a lot of great experiences, but it was also such a dark, gothic world, and a very heavy theme. Going from that and being like, "You know, I think I'm just going to go design some ninja pigs," was a freeing experience, and it was a very relaxing way to be creative.

There are commonalities and crossovers. We're still competitive players by nature. When we wrote the high-concept doc for Wizard, we were on the fence about how much cooperation versus competitive nature was going to have. We later added the arena just because we wanted to fight each other and stuff like that. Then, of course, it's a CCG-based game, and CCGs are PVP by their very nature.

When you get in, you'll be able to see elements of our background and our sensibilities as designers clearly carried forward, but thematically, it's very, very different. We wanted to make a very different kind of universe.

It could probably go without saying, but I'd add that we're in a different place now than we were with Shadowbane, where we were out of college and full of spit and vinegar and young and single. Now, all of us have kids.

We're all older and married, and started talking about how, because these take so long and you devote so much of your life to them, you don't have that many MMOs in you, unless you're going to jump from one project to the next. We looked at it and said, "What do we want to work on for the next four years?" And I think we've been very pleased with the choice that we made back then.

Did your company have any sort of a self-imposed charter in any way, in terms of the type or tone of games?

TC: Absolutely. KingsIsle as a whole definitely wants to make mass-appeal games for everyone, not games for the gamers. That's also been different because Shadowbane was a very hardcore experience. It was not just a game for gamers. It was for gamers that are exactly like us, and if you don't like it, you should leave.

With this one, I think we've grown, in terms of what we find fun and what we find acceptable of those games. I've got a Wii in my living room right now, and my wife and I play Zack & Wiki all the time. We've definitely all grown significantly, and I think that's reflected a lot in the kind of properties that we want to put out.

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

[In this opinion piece, game commentator Duncan Fyfe takes a look at how and when games end - citing titles from BioShock to Portal and beyond to ask how to set expectations and deliver on them for game endings.]

In video games, the ones that tell the player a long, linear story, the ending is usually an uncertain proposition. Prose and film teach an audience to expect three-act structures and considered pacing in storytelling.

Instead, games have what Warren Spector calls the second-act problem; where act one is the intro movie, act three is the outro movie, and in between is the game.

Games are structured less like a novel and more like an anthology; an arbitrary number of assembled vignettes, thematically united in post-production. A collection of missions and quests that exist because one designer had a cool idea for a boat chase sequence and another designer had an awesome idea for a stealth mission. It's a problem of pacing, and it relates directly to the presupposed need for games to have fifteen-hour narratives.

I think this issue is compounded by another: players don't know how long a game is. You can hold a novel in your hands and feel the weight of the pages. An album has its track listing printed on the back.

A television season consists of a predetermined number of episodes with those episodes at a fixed length. A movie is somewhere between 90 and 180 minutes. No such guidelines with video games. They lack an intuitive metric: it'll fall between one and one hundred hours.

If players don't know when to expect the real ending then they'll have to guess. Maybe after this mission in GTA we'll get to the endgame. Wait, no, one more thing. One more thing after that. With these interminable games that try for an engrossing narrative, players just get tired. Will it ever actually end?

Fallout is based on the premise that the player must find this water chip. It takes a long time, it's an exhausting journey, you find it and return home victorious. And then... one more thing... and you're actually only halfway through.

Objectively, there's nothing wrong with the content. But expectations frame experience, and the game had just prepared the player to say goodbye, not to enjoy another ten hours. Having to take a game at its word, players feel betrayed and jerked around. We react to a piece of content differently if we know it's the ending.

When we watch the season finale of a TV show, we know that this time the characters are really in danger. With a video game the player has no idea. Is this thing going to go on for another hour? Or five? Or ten? Where the hell am I in this story?

I'm not sure many developers are aware that this can be a problem; like how Ken Levine has said he didn't anticipate the ugly comedown from the stratospheric highs of BioShock's Andrew Ryan scene.

Expectations are everything. The movie Gone, Baby, Gone has a fake ending at about the 70-minute mark, but the audience doesn't start leaving the theater. They know how long a movie is and they're mentally prepared for the remainder of the film. I don't think Fallout players would be as bummed out if they found the water chip at the 70-minute mark.

But no one knows how long Fallout is, like how no one knows if Return of the King's running time is three hours and two minutes or three hours and four minutes. The movie continues long past the point where anyone was interested.

One more thing. One more mission, one more quest, one more rung in a ladder carved from monotony and you have only the vaguest of assurances that the ladder ever stops. I wonder why people don't finish games.

Oblivion's core story is paced terribly, which is to say it's paced like a video game. One more thing. One more lost object to find. That's at least consistent with Oblivion's general M.O. as a treasure-hunting smorgasbord, and Mass Effect doesn't handle that dichotomy nearly so well; instead redefining 'sidequest' as a repetitive grind existing at the periphery of the story.

BioWare dumps a whole lot of extra content on the player for the purposes of making Mass Effect long enough to count as a conventional video game. It dilutes the tightly focused, very linear narrative that they're trying to showcase. It's also why games like GTA that measure game completion with a percentage stat don't really work, since it can take players five times as long to get from 76% to 77% as it can from 1% to 2%.

Subquests aside, Mass Effect is able to manage player expectations of length. After act one, you get on the spaceship and you're given a certain number of planets to visit.

Those are goalposts; checkpoints by which the player can measure their progress in the second act, and theoretically the third act should be as long as the first. See? Easy. Knights of the Old Republic did that, Monkey Island 2 did that. No unpleasant surprises and the player is never unintentionally misled through poor design.

Some games telegraph their length with exceptional results. Right up front, Portal tells you: 19 rooms. Indeed there are, and so the player never thinks that room 15 might actually be a plot-critical gameplay escalation instead of a puzzle chamber.

Portal continues after 19, of course, but here it works. It capitalizes on the players' perception that the game is over; the "epilogue" comes as an intentional surprise more of the same. When you anticipate player psychology as Valve clearly does, then you can work with it.

You know how everyone in the world is able to pinpoint the exact moment that A.I. should have ended? Spielberg kept telling the viewer "one more thing", and the more times he said it, the worse the movie got.

Unless you're Portal, unless you know what you're doing, when players think a game is ending, they should be right. If a game prompts players to say goodbye, then, one way or another, they will.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Yeehaw, time for GameSetLinks, and we're still rounding up some miscellaneous E3 links (towards the bottom), but hey, nothing wrong with that if it's neat.

Some of the other highlights in there - 'massively singleplayer' as a genre, my random GameTap tips, the new skool Zombie Cow Studios, and downloadable Spore prototypes. Yay.

Out to lunch:

Orbus Gameworks: 'Character Blogging and Metrics'
On Dungeon Runner's automated in-game character blogging.

gameslol » Blog Archive » Massively singleplayer: a real genre?
Discussing the neat concept of "...singleplayer games that are played by lots of people simultaneously."

Game Tycoon » Blog Archive » Designing for Older Gamers
Expanding on the recent Gamasutra article on this very subject.

Spore.com: Downloadable Spore prototypes
Featuring 'Particleman', in which you can: '...play with physics controls to create different kinds of gravitational simulations.' Via ErrorMacro.

realtimecollisiondetection.net - the blog » Salary of a game programmer (artist, designer, or producer)
Absolutely excellent post on ways to tell what people are paid - disclaimer, includes Game Developer salary survey info, which I help compile. Not clear if H1-B info is accurate tho - see comments.

Play in Community Spotlight - Celebrity Picks - Simon Carless and other games on GameTap.com
Me and other games! My picks for my favorite GameTap titles, from Sensible Soccer through The Last Express.

Zombie Cow Studios
The folks behind indie neatness Gibbage are back with a super-quirky free adventure game and some other indie titles.

Nihilistic Software - 'New Game Teaser'
Hey, I never noticed this before - upcoming downloadable PC zombie game from Nihilistic?

Wired Gallery: 'At E3, Insiders Thrive as Booth Babes Go Extinct'
Shuttle bus bliss!

pushing buttons...: My E3, Come Back!
A paean to the classic days from an ex-God Of War designer.

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

[Finishing up the Games, Learning and Society coverage masterminded for GSW by The Brainy Gamer's Michael Abbott, this last one is an intriguing one from Mary Flanagan of the Values At Play project - thanks again to him for covering this intriguing social/educational gaming conf.]

Speaking at a Games, Learning, and Society Conference workshop entitled “Values at Play: Tools for Activist Game Design,” Dr. Mary Flanagan, an associate professor at Hunter College's Software Art and Culture department, argued that every game design decision and feature can potentially have and convey social, moral, and political content.

Flanagan directs Hunter College's Tiltfactor game research lab and is the creator of The Adventures of Josie True, the 'first internet adventure game for girls' - created in 1999. She also co-founded Rapunsel (pictured), a research project to teach girls programming. Flanagan is devoted to developing games and software that create “rewarding, compelling, and socially-responsible interactions, with a focus on inventive game design for social change.”

She believes designers must intervene in the earliest stages of game design to consider how games can embody social activist principles. “The idea is to embed human values or human principles into design processes.”

Flanagan noted that “it's not just about narrative and representation.” She and her colleagues are trying to embed positive principles into gameplay and identify design solutions that “convey these principles, yet also satisfy competitive urges and are fun to play.”

Flanagan and her team believe that every design decision “can potentially have social, moral, and political implications, and that each design feature can potentially convey social, moral, and political content.”

Can games teach equity? Can games convey values such as creative expression, negotiation, and diversity? Flanagan believes they can and should, but the traditional iterative design model may not work for this.

She advocates instead a model that prioritizes values goals at the beginning of the design process and affirms the efficacy of those goals at each step along the way. “You would be amazed at how quickly these things can disappear if you don't keep a close eye on them."

Flanagan introduced workshop participants to “Grow-A-Game” cards, developed by Tiltfactor for the Values at Play project. These cards function as a game design tool intended to facilitate analysis of the values present in video games. They can also be used to brainstorm modifications to existing games or for designing entirely new games.

Participants were divided into small groups, and each received four categories of cards:

- Actions: “Game mechanics or actions that a player performs within the game. Mechanics are geared towards socially conscious actions including trading, creating, and subverting.”

- Challenges: “Social issues and conflicts. These include: sexism, pollution, and addiction.”

- Games: “From classic board games to modern first-person shooters. These cards trigger dialogue about values by inspiring players to analyze and modify popular existing games. Sample games include Scrabble, Pac-Man, and Quake.”

- Goals: “Goals cards have ideals that might set the context for a more just and sustainable society. Goals include: generosity, peace, and autonomy.”

Each group drew one Goals card (e.g. justice) and one Action card (e.g. healing) and were then asked to collaboratively design a game (in this example) about justice whose primary mechanic is healing. Groups brainstormed and discussed their ideas, then presented them in a debriefing session.

In a separate exercise, they also combined a Games card with a Challenges card and re-conceptualized an existing game to focus on a social issue. One group redesigned Monopoly to incorporate the goal of "empathy" by having players switch places, property, and money when they roll certain die combinations, ensuring that no player take undue advantage of another. The winning condition is keeping all players in the game for as long as possible.

The workshop concluded with a demo of Hush, “a statement game built from two cards,” according to Flanagan. Through haunting sounds and images the game depicts ethnic cleansing in Rwanda as the player struggles to keep her crying baby from alerting the militia outside her door.

Hush, says Flanagan, illustrates how a powerful and evocative game experience can emerge from a design focus that combines innovative gameplay with social values.

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

Well, we've covered all of the E3 news on GSW, of course, but during the course of the week, we actually posted a bunch of neat features on Gamasutra, so would like to mention them briefly here.

[Oh, and also E3-related and worth mentioning - our 'console digital download' site GamerBytes, under editor Ryan Langley, has been doing a sterling job of rounding up the E3 announcements for XBLA, PSN, and WiiWare - here's one example, go check out the site if you haven't been.]

Anyhow, here's the Gama feature links for the week:

Redefining Game Narrative: Ubisoft's Patrick Redding On Far Cry 2
"Ubisoft Montreal's Far Cry 2 has one of the most ambitious open-ended, emergent game narratives ever - and Gamasutra talks to its guardian, Patrick Redding, about just how he can pull it off."

Surviving High School: A Mobile Survivor Story
"How do you succeed with original IP in the license-heavy cellphone game biz? Vivendi's Palley discusses the trials and tribulations of creating Surviving High School, which has sold over 10 million downloadable 'episodes' since launch."

Measuring Responsiveness in Video Games
"Neversoft co-founder Mick West follows up his previous responsiveness article with a cunning how-to about using a digital camera to track 'controller lag' - benchmarking games from GTA through Heavenly Sword along the way."

Top 10 Pitfalls Using Scrum Methodology for Video Game Development
"Industry veteran Miller looks at the leading Agile methodology for game development, suggesting the ten top pitfalls - and ways to overcome them - for those using Scrum to manage a video game project."

PlatinumGames: Shaking Up Japanese Games
"Rising from the ashes of Okami creator Clover Studio, principals from PlatinumGames talk to Gamasutra about its Sega deal, the state of the Japanese game biz, and its plans to "create games that have a worldwide appeal"."

[Want to get RSSed-up with all Think Services' game sites? Quick list goes like this: GameSetWatch's RSS (editor.blog), IndieGames' RSS (indie.games), WorldsInMotion's RSS (online.worlds), GamerBytes' RSS (console.downloads), GamesOnDeck's RSS (mobile.games), Gamasutra's RSS (main.site), and GameCareerGuide's RSS (edu.news).]

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

Busy days abound in magazine land...just not in the U.S. right now (I only have four mags to cover in this installment).

First off, I was delighted to find a store nearby that stocks UK mag PC Zone, so I bought another copy. Very nice, very funny, and (like I said the last time I mentioned it) I wish they'd drop the DVD because I can't justify $15 per issue. Total PC Gaming is still around, too (on issue 8 right now), and it's still consistently high quality.

So is Retro Gamer, which put out Volume 2 of the Retro Gamer Collection recently (I think it's Barnes & Noble exclusive around these parts). At $25 it's pricey, but it's quite a nice compilation of old RG stuff nonetheless and will look tremendously chic on your coffee table, assuming you've cleared out the Dr. Pepper cans and pizza boxes from the surface.

In America, though, not much going on right now besides Future Anime, a one-off anime/poster magazine put out by America's biggest game-mag company that came out of nowhere into stands this week. That's a little off-topic for this column, but here's coverage on the rest of the new US (ok, and one Brit) game mags...

Edge August 2008

Cover: DC Universe Online

Between the giant cover story featuring a universally-popular pop-culture icon and the eight pages of Cliff Bleszinski talking about himself (not to mention the opening piece on iPhone 3G gaming which was out of date before the date of publication), you might be excused for thinking that this month's Edge is actually a copy of Electronic Gaming Monthly in disguise -- except, you know, larger and covering lots of Brit stuff for some reason.

Not that I am complaining much, because Cliffy is a hunky dreamboat and there's a very neat and compelling story behind DCU Online -- Sony Online Entertainment's Austin studio trying to take what they learned from Star Wars Galaxies (the Edge piece says that "subscriptions are stable and the community is largely happy" with SWG, which seems to contradict all given evidence) and produce a more exciting MMO with this pop-culture license.

For ubernerds the highlight this month is undoubtedly "This is how you make successful games," a retrospective on Segagaga with Tez Okano, the producer (there seems to be some net confusion on his last name, but it's definitely Okano, not Okada). It's a great little piece that portrays the game's creation and the massive changes going on in Sega all around it. Okano is a relentlessly interesting guy, and I wish him luck on Thunder Force VI, which he's working on right now...and speaking of somewhat obscure old devs, there's a similar "reminisce" piece just a few pages later starring John Romero, in which it's revealed that he got married to a Romanian lady he met on the Internet in 2003! Woo!

Game Informer August 2008

Cover: Wolfenstein

I'd love to devote a column to this topic someday, but am I the only one who occasionally wonders of GI actually uses the same cover every month and is waiting for someone to notice? That's an exaggeration, of course (their GOW2 covers were iconic and exciting), but if I see one more grimy B&W man with a gun looking resolute on the cover of GI, then I'll... I'll... I'll whine about it some more in this column. (Then again, it could be a testament to how "samey" a lot of AAA game projects are these days on a visual basis...)

This is GI's E3 issue, and the Wolf piece inside is very colorful, nicely-designed, and substantial, a departure from previous E3 issue blowouts. Same deal with the runner-up feature on Rock Band 2 (that tiger on the corner of the cover is from that, and remarkably not from Dragon Quest). The feature on Marvel Ultimate Alliance II, on the other hand, looks plain and put together at the last minute possible, complete with that trademark Game Informer double-spacing on the main text to pad out things.

Official Xbox Magazine September 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Fable II

Thanks to some kinda renewal mix-up, I now get discs with my copies of OXM and PC Gamer even though I've only been charged for the "no-disc" edition. Not complaining, but I don't want Future to lose money on my account! This issue kicks off with all kindsa music-game coverage and has a ton of assorted previews before leading up to Kieron Gillen's Fable II piece, which both looks nice and features lots of Peter Molyneux, the only man I have more of a crush on than Cliffy. There's also a studio profile piece on 2K Marin disguised as a Bioshock II preview, and while there's no info for game nerds, there's a lot of very neat stories told within. (Speaking of which, both OXM and GI include pictures of dogs that live in dev studios this month. I went freelance precisely because none of my bosses would let me take a ferret to work -- if only I had a talent for story trees and making milestones! Those progressive Californians are so nice to work for!)

On the minus side, OXM's got another excerpt from a trashy video-game novel this issue (Mass Effect this month), which I really wish they'd knock off because if I wanted a taste of the Mass Effect novel, I'd pick up the thing off the Barnes & Noble shelf -- or, for that matter, the Half Price Books shelf two months from now.

PC Gamer September 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Fallout 3

Those fated six words ("details you will not find online") rear their head once more on PC Gamer's cover. I had a chance to play the first two Fallouts a fair bit just recently (they are pretty dated these days but I still love 'em), and now that I can understand most of the lingo getting thrown around this piece, I'm most certainly looking forward to this sucker.

The other big piece this month: a list of 365 free games for the next year (which is no-frills and mostly space-filling text) and a preview of DCU online which is nice but doesn't cover anything Edge missed. This month also feature Yahtzee's last column, which is a shame -- I guess writing the back page for America's only number-one computer games magazine isn't as glamorous as being a net superstar these days.

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

It's the GameSetLinks o' the weekend, starting out with TIGSource's tribute to The Poppenkast, one of the neater cliques out there in indie game land.

What it represents is the tip of the iceberg regarding user-created content - in the sense that - arguably - what games really need are tools to allow artists to spontaneously create content without a lot of hard graft. And tools like Game Maker and Adventure Game Studio are starting to birth amazing pockets of creativity.

Onwards to the links:

The Independent Gaming Source: 'Poppenkast: 3 Hours to Fame'
Derek is right on the money here with The Poppenkast being dynamic, exciting, and underappreciated. Not sure about the beards, tho!

1UP: 'Little Kids, Big Business'
Even 1UP jumping on the free to play worlds express, conceptually.

Top Travel Spots For Game Fans - Forbes.com
'Gamers should make natural adventurers. So, given a $1,500 budget for a game-related vacation, where would they go?' Cute concept, at least.

Eegra: The Shindigger's Digest - THE FINAL COUNTDOWN
Interesting indie-style game competition entries over at ze Eeegra - screenshots only so far.

Contemporary Arcade Coffee Tables :: surface tension ::
Very stylish (pictured) - if $6000+ dollars and UK-only, youch - via ArcadeHeroes.

GameTrailers.com - Duke Nukem Trilogy -E3 2008: Explosive Trailer
Redefining silly.

Kotaku: 'Major Minor's Majestic March E3 Trailer'
One of the few highlights of E3 for the alternative crowd.

auntie pixelante › super chuck norris bros.
'there’s something really compelling about the way super chuck norris bros. allows you to knock enemies out of the 2d plane and destroy previously-intangible background objects; to violate rules of super mario bros.'

ARGNet: Superstruct: (Re)Building Our Future
More McGoniweirdness!

Penny Arcade! - It's Just Like Being There
In case you're not a reader - pretty damn incisive on E3.

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

[Our Editor At Large Chris Remo has returned from Los Angeles in one piece, and he posted something E3-related on his own blog that's a) informative to fans of GlaDOS and b) worth reprinting here, if you like . So I asked nicely, and here it is.]

There is much confusion over what exactly Portal: Still Alive, an upcoming Xbox Live Arcade release of Valve’s excellent platformer-thing, is. After all, it was announced amazingly vaguely during Microsoft’s E3 press conference, and there was little followup. So I asked Valve’s Doug Lombardi, and he explained it to me.

Portal: Still Alive is a standalone version of the original Portal that can be purchased through Xbox Live Marketplace. In addition to Portal itself, it will include a number of levels that are not part of the game’s story, and do not feature story-related elements such as GLaDOS voiceover.

The game is exclusive to Live Arcade, at least for a while, but PC players can get basically the same experience right now anyway. Here’s why.

You may have seen Portal: The Flash Version, a clever Flash-based tribute to Valve’s game. You are slightly less likely to have seen the Portal: The Flash Version MapPack, which recursively ports the Flash game’s levels to Portal itself.

Still Alive’s bonus content consists of 360-certified versions of the levels from that pack. So if you’re a PC Portal owner who, like me, was feeling excluded by Still Alive’s bonus content, fear not: you get to play that content first, and for free.

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

['Quiz Me Quik' is a 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, the inevitable E3 retrospective, from a distinctly different perspective.]

Growing up, I remember E3 being a pretty amazing, mystical event. I could never remember exactly when it was, but when it appeared in the game magazines I bought, it always meant big exciting things. Obviously, the whole event is now rather different to what it was, but it’s still a focal point for the industry, and still brings with it more than a fair share of announcements. This year was interesting – it might not have brought the games that people expected, but I think the word ‘interesting’ still more or less applies here.

But really, no one needs to read another twenty-something journalist with pretentions of grandeur prattling on about their view of the whole thing: “I really believe that this series of announcements represents a shift in the momentum of this generation of consoles in regards to the juxtaposition of core versus casual users blah blah blah”.

Especially now, a few days after it’s all over, and especially from one who sat at home in Adelaide and read about the whole thing hours after the press conferences were actually held. It’s not that I don’t care, but quite frankly, I’ve done the whole writing about E3 at 6am Australian Central Standard time thing. I’d rather just sleep.

I thought I’d spare you the systematic pseudo-intellectualised babble. After all, as I keep saying, this is Quiz Me Qwik, not Masturbatory Analytical Journo Hour, though that is a very good name for a column and I hope Simon is making a note of that somewhere so he can use it later.

Anyways, we’re going to take a look at E3 from a very different perspective. Like I said, it was a very spectacle when I was younger, and it occurred to me: it wasn’t just me, was it? Or just that era? So I asked my nine year-old cousin Steven to do me a little favour.

For the events of E3, Steven was to take note of the announcements, and at the end of the week, I would interview him to see what he thought of the whole thing. Originally, I asked him to try and stay up and watch the press conferences – generally on at around 2am ACST – but his mother suggested that might not be the most awesome idea ever, even though he was on school holidays this week.

Actually, what she really said was: ‘Alistair, he’s a nine year-old boy! Do you really think that’s a good idea? Really? Christ - honestly, Alistair, I fear for the day when you have children.’ But nevermind. I managed to work past those issues, and give Steven a call to get the inside word on whether or not E3 still really is the magical event I remember it being.

GSW: Hi Steven.

Steven Wallis: Hi. Are you recording?

GSW: Yes.

SW: Cool.

GSW: Yeah, I guess. So did you check out some of the stuff about E3?

SW: Yep.

GSW: Great – let’s start from the top of the week, then. Did you see any of the Microsoft conference?

SW: Sorta.

GSW: Sorta?

SW: Yeah, sorta. I read about the good bits.

GSW: Okay, so what would you consider to be the highlights of the conference?

SW: Huh?

GSW: What were the good bits?

SW: The Mii things were cool.

GSW: Well, technically they're not Miis, but yeah. What did you think of the new dashboard?

SW: What's that?

GSW: Um, that dashboard, you know? What you see when you turn the 360 on.

SW: Are they changing it?

GSW: Yeah.

SW: Why?

GSW: I'm not really sure. [Pause] So, what about the end of it?

SW: What happened at the end again?

GSW: They announced that Final Fantasy XIII is coming to Xbox 360 as well as PlayStation 3.

SW: Really? Cool. I didn't know that.

GSW: Um, yeah. Well, it is. How do you feel about that?

SW: It's pretty cool, I guess.

GSW: Yeah. Did you see much of the Nintendo press conference?

SW: I read some stuff about it.

GSW: Yeah? What did you think?

SW: Seemed pretty cool. I can't wait to play the new Animal Crossing, cause talking to people will be awesome.

GSW: Yeah, you liked the DS one a heap when you played it at my place, didn't you?

SW: Yeah, it was cool.

GSW: Yeah. What about the Grand Theft Auto for DS that was announced?

SW: Is it really coming to DS?

GSW: Yeah.

SW: Awesome!

GSW: Yeah. What about Sony?

SW: I dunno. Didn't really find anything cool about it.

GSW: God of War III? You liked God of War II, didn't you?

SW: Oh yeah! That's going to be cool.

GSW: Yeah, so anything else catch your eye?

SW: Not really.

GSW: Okay. [Pause] Well, all up, was E3 a magical experience?

SW: I dunno. Kinda. It was alright.

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

[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 independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The goodies in this latest version include a unique platformer featuring imaginative use of cadavers, a casual card game, and three different simulation games which allow the player to exercise near god-like powers over a population of dwarves, planet Earth, and the universe itself.

Game Pick: 'Deaths' (Jesse Venbrux, freeware)
"A 2D experimental platformer by the developer of Execution and Karoshi 2, where the last fifty failed attempts by players from all around the world will be loaded and displayed as cadavers in various parts of the current stage you're in."

Game Pick: 'Pandemic 2' (Dark Realm Studios, browser)
"In Pandemic 2, players are given the chance to exercise god-like powers in deciding how to mutate a certain disease while trying to annihilate mankind in the process. This is achieved by spending evolution points on disease symptoms, resistance or transmission methods to increase the chance and rate of infection."

Game Pick: 'Dwarf Fortress' (Tarn Adams, freeware)
"The latest version of this well-regarded single-player fantasy game has debuted - for those not in the know, you get to control a dwarven outpost or an adventurer, in a persistent world that is randomly generated with distinct civilizations, dozens of towns, hundreds of caves and regions with various wildlife."

Game Pick: 'Universe Sandbox' (Dan Dixon, commercial indie - demo available)
"A physics and particle simulator that simulates applied gravity to planetary bodies. This educational toy for Windows-based computers can run scale simulations of our solar system while giving you the power to control gravity, time and everything in it."

Game Pick: 'Loot' (Casey Sillito, freeware)
"A casual card game set in a dungeon, in which players are to equip themselves with a deck consisting of potions or spells procured from the rooms they've explored."

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

[Continuing Michael Abbott's excellent coverage of the recent Games, Learning, and Society Conference for GSW, academics Erica and Rich Halverson described their efforts to “reverse engineer” fantasy baseball gaming as a principle to help learning in more formal ways - essentially, how gaming concepts can transition into learning realities.]

Erica and Rich Halverson's talk at the Games, Learning, and Society Conference in Wisconsinprovided a snapshot of their research into the ways “learning, play, and engagement in fantasy sports require a combination of fan cultural practices and skills characteristic of gamers in order to be successful.”

Erica Halverson is an assistant professor of learning sciences and Rich Halverson is an associate professor in educational leadership and policy analysis, both at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The Halversons believe expert fantasy sports players “construct organizing metaphors for their gameplay and that these metaphors guide both in-game decisions and experts’ mental models used for reflecting on play.”

Understanding how expert gamers think and behave could yield great benefits to educators and game designers alike. Such an understanding “could help guide the design of learning spaces that use the competitive fandom model as a principle for design.”

Fantasy baseball emerges, according to the Halversons, via the convergence of three activities: Primary activity (Major League Baseball); Fan activity (watching games, collecting cards, etc.); and Fantasy activity (organizing or participating in a fantasy baseball league).

The fantasy activity “repurposes the primary activity content” with fan activity to create a game-based environment with its own unique set of player-created rules.

The Halversons are trying to “reverse engineer” fantasy baseball to better understand how data-rich games work. They are trying to determine “what is added to fan knowledge to produce fantasy gaming expertise.”

To find the answers, they are analyzing the discourse of in-game play (both spouses are fantasy baseball players) and conducting semi-structured interviews with expert players. Much of this has occurred within “an incredibly complex transmedia environment” of phone, voice and video chat, multiple internet resources, email, charts, graphs, databases, etc.

Expert players, say the Halversons, rely on what Aristotle called practical wisdom: “patterns of problem-setting and problem-solving; an eye for the appropriate move in navigating complex systems.”

High-level gamers rely on reasoning, data reduction techniques (“chunking large bodies of information into meaningful patterns”), and an ability to adapt knowledge to novel situations.

Stories and analogies are constructed around play and are often mapped onto other experiences, such as stock market analysis. The Halversons' research suggests that expert players routinely use their fantasy baseball acumen to succeed in other situations requiring skillful analysis of ever-changing data and information.

High-level players must develop and utilize adaptive expertise, according to the Halversons. “The primary activity is dynamic, so rules are really heuristics. Things change quickly, and players must respond nimbly by developing strategies for multiple scenarios.”

Expert fantasy players are ready for almost any situation and quickly turn unexpected events to their advantage. “It is also a social learning and adaptive situation. You must know the other players, know the league, etc.” Referring to one especially successful fantasy player, Rich Halverson described him as “the smartest man I know.”

Of particular note to educators is the Halversons' finding that fan knowledge and primary activity expertise go both ways. An expert fantasy baseball player's knowledge of the primary activity (MLB) “enables hypothesis testing that makes you an expert fantasy player.”

But perhaps more importantly, expertise in the fantasy game creates heightened expertise in the primary activity as well.

This could result in broad applications for teachers who wish to apply the competitive fandom model to teaching a wide range of other subjects. It could also impact game designers who want to better understand how and why players engage on a deep level with games.

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

Eureka for Friday afternoon - especially on E3 week - but that doesn't mean the GameSetLinks have to stop, of course, and there are flecks of E3 goodness (yay, Rhythm Heaven!) hanging out in the soup of the general link goodness.

Also in here somewhere - a Defender remake inside a favicon (!), neat Into The Pixel winners, the robotic Guitar Hero winner, and a new development blog for The Path, among a number of fun things.

Nine one one:

Hands-On: Rhythm Heaven Coming to America, Awesome | Game | Life from Wired.com
Kohler has taste, this will rock.

'DEFENDER of the favicon' game
'DEFENDER of the favicon is a JavaScript remake of Eugene Jarvis' brilliant arcade game Defender written by Mathieu 'p01' Henri and inspired by Scott Schiller's experiment with generated favicons VU meter.'

Gametrailers.com - Dead Space - E3 2008: Lullaby Trailer
Someone from EA mailed this in, and I wouldn't normally link to random game trailers - but this is ultragory and ultrascary, and very un-'big publisher' in terms of R+-rated content. Iinteresting.

Project Lore: Five dudes. Four cameras. One World of Warcraft.
More of the pro video/gaming crossover stuff - monetization still boggles me a bit for stuff like this, but maybe with enough high-end sponsors?

Into The Pixel - 2008 Contest Winners
Some great stuff in here - 'Untitled' is Kyle Gray's EA Tiburon project he showed at IGS 2008, too!

It's inevitable: soon we will all be gamers | Rob Fahey - Times Online
Fahey sneaks into The Times, a la Robertson in the BBC - Brits getting into mainstream a bit better than Yanks right now!

JeremyBlum.com » DeepNote™ Guitar Hero Bot
Chronicling the rise to power of an awesome robotic Guitar Hero player.

Meaningful Play 2008: Designing and Studying Games that Matter
Interesting serious game-related conf in October.

Telltale Games - Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People
'It has recently come to my attention that the Electronical Superface Ratings Boys (ESRB) have made us remove all the many head-offings that SBCG4AP was SUPPOSED to have in order to avoid an M for MATURE rating.' Really?

The Path —— development blog
New blog for the (pictured) IGF-nominated artgame from the ideological radicals (hee!) at Tale Of Tales.

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

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

Usually, when I talk about roguelike games here, it's in the context of being a kind of old-school Dungeons & Dragons simulator. This is an awesome thing all to itself, for reasons covered previously. Yet there are other attributes of the games that differ from D&D, or indeed any other RPG, either pen-and-paper or computer.

One of the most entertaining of these, if one has followed the evolution of the genre far enough, turns out to be a direct result of one of roguelike gaming's major limitations. While some have moved on to using simple graphics to represent the dungeon and its inhabitants, most roguelikes still at least have the option of using ASCII characters to represent the playing field. And the method of representation is one of the aspects of the genre that ties it back to Rogue: line-drawing characters for walls, an at-sign for the player, and letters for the monsters.

Letters for the monsters. Oh, the troubles that spring from this simple idea.

First problem: there are only 26 letters.

One of the many tiny, sparkling shards of awesomeness embedded in Rogue's thick hide is how it turns the limitation on monsters into a theme. The first level of rogue has a handful of monsters: Bats, Jackals, Snakes, Hobgoblins and Kobolds. Every level after the first introduces one new monster until Dragons enter the game on level 22. I submit that it is no coincidence that the Amulet of Yendor appears on level 26.

But Rogue, for its coolnesses, is still a fairly short and simple game. Most games these days want to offer more opponents than just 26. And so the great bestiary proliferation began.

Now those games that offer more than 26 monsters have to come up with some way to represent the new monsters. There are three ways this is done. The oldest, going back to the lost roguelikes, is to treat uppercase and lowercase monsters as different species. Nearly all of them do this now, but it still limits the opponent types to 52. The second was is to use different colors to distinguish between monsters, and this is also pretty common. A DOS-style terminal is capable of displaying 16 different colors, although one of them is black. 15 * 52 is 780 beasties, which sounds like a lot, although for other reasons we'll get to shortly still isn't enough.

The final idea was to allow a few symbols in there to add a few more creatures to the mix. Nethack uses @ symbols to represent humans and ampersands (&) for demons, along with a few others. In that game colons are lizards, semi-colons are sea monsters, and apostrophes are golems. We are not quite sure what system was used for assigning these; the secretive Devteam hasn't said anything about it, although there is certainly a chance that there is some pattern at work. Fiendishly, both Nethack and Angband use the same symbols as game terrain to represent hidden monsters. Nethack ghosts are represented in-game by spaces, and Angband trappers use the same character as the floor. Angband mimics use the same characters as object types lying on the floor.

There are other letter-like symbols that could be used, if one is willing to poach characters from other languages. The basic ASCII alphabet doesn't have any of those, but extended ASCII and Unicode support them. This isn't as helpful as one might suppose, however; the advantage to ASCII is its universality, and furthermore, the primary advantage of using letters if that monsters are more easily recognizable by using the first letter of their name to represent the foe. Most players speak English, and there just aren't many monsters iconic enough for inclusion that use diacritical marks on their first letters.

Yet, despite all these options, it's still not enough for some games. Nethack, in particular, has a scheme whereby monster letters (upper- and lower-case considered separately) indicate a general monster type, and color depicts species. A comment in the source code notes the pattern behind these: monsters with an elemental affinity are to use an appropriate color (red for fire, white for ice), and leader or royal monsters are purple. Yet under this system there are some monsters that appear identical on an ASCII display. The most troublesome result of this happens near the end of the game, when the player reaches the elemental plane of Earth. Upon entry, the first two monsters the player meets are always another reincarnation of the Wizard of Yendor and an elflord, both represented by a purple "@". The elflord is a middle-level foe, not dangerous to a player who has literally been to hell and back, but the Wizard could be quite a pest.

Second problem: Finding monsters for the less-common letters

Fitting all the monsters into 26 letters isn't exactly easy, but worse is finding monsters for the less-common letters of the alphabet.

ADOM is maybe the game least burdened by these considerations. While it does try to conform the monsters into families represented by particular letters, there are many letters that don't obviously match family names. Grues are 'x'es, while humans are generally '@' barbarians are 'K's, bugbears are 'g', bears are 'N', golems are 'Y', sea monsters seem to be 'A', and so on.

I've been thinking a bit about this problem myself, and started compiling a list of monsters that begin with different letters. A few letters are easy. It turns out there are an abundance of G monsters: Gnome, Griffin, Gargoyle, Gremlin, Gorgon, Golem. V, a fairly uncommon letter, has more monsters than one might expect: Vampire, Vrock and Vortex.

A few letters are troublesome, in particular: J, K, Q, X, Y and Z. It is entirely because of the letter Y that the Yeti appears in so many roguelike games. The difficulty of finding good monsters for K, Q and Y, ultimately, was responsible for the beginnings of a roguelike tradition: the inclusion of weird monsters in order to fill out the whole alphabet.

To elaborate: the first versions of Rogue borrowed much of the opposition from Dungeons & Dragons. Later revisions switched out some of those monsters for a more idiosyncratic set. The rumor is that this was done in order to foil Rog-O-Matic, the early Rogue-playing borg, but to me it seems at least possible that it was to distance the game from D&D around the time the game was being sold commercially by Epyx.

When the monsters were changed, they had to find new monsters for some of the hard-to-fill letters. This was the point that Lewis Carroll's Jabberwock became a Rogue monster, as did the Quagga, an extinct relative of the zebra, the Kestral, a type of falcon one might not expect to find underground, and my personal favorite, the Xeroc, replacing mimics. (Think about that name for a moment, in relation to copying things.)

Artist's rendering of a Yeek

Not even Angband is immune to this. One of that game's trademarks is a race of very-low-level humanoids called Yeeks, which actually originated in Moria. Yeeks are something of an unofficial mascot for the games, a race of monsters that are comically weak. According to the deleted Wikipedia page on them, they're called Yeeks because that's the sound they make when stepped on. Yeeks have a kind of popularity in Angband culture; the basic game includes the King and Prince of the Yeeks (Boldor and Orfax) as unique monsters, and variants add the Yeekish Queen and President.

Some recent variants even make Yeeks a playable race. Being so weak, they gain experience levels rapidly, but unfortunately they must live with a -5 to Luck. Why would that be? Because, if you were born a Yeek, it's not exactly like the laws of chance were on your side.

Others:

Nethack: commercial-at: Human or Elf, space: Ghost, colon: Lizard, semi-colon: Sea Monster, apostrophe: Golem, Amphersand: Demon

Angband: period: Lurker, comma: Plant Monster, dollar-sign: Creeping Coins, various symbols: Mimic

Sources:
The Rogue Vede-Mecum:
http://www.monmouth.com/~colonel/rvm.html
Wikihack:
http://nethack.wikia.com/
Angband monster spoilers:
http://www.thangorodrim.net/spoilers/monsters0.html

The ampersand demons above come from the Geoduck Tileset, a clever Nethack modification that makes monster graphics tiles into appropriately-customized ASCII versions.
Image of a quagga (R.I.P.) from the Wikipedia entry on that animal.
Image of Fobby (shamelessly pawned off as a Yeek) is from Earthbound, copyright by Nintendo. Used here because Earthbound is awesome. Pic stolen from Fobbies Are Borange.

Posted by John Harris at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

[Well, E3 is just about done, apparently, but just wanted to point to a few things that my lovely Gamasutra colleagues extracted from game developers at the show. In many cases, there are longer, neater feature-length chats coming, but this will do fine for now! Also I must highlight our own Chris Remo's saving the Internet (according to GAF) by getting Mr. Miyamoto to announce a new Pikmin. Good job that man!]

- E3: Halo Wars' Rouse: Age Of Mythology Console-Controller Prototype Informed Game's Genesis
"Speaking with Gamasutra about its upcoming Xbox 360 RTS title Halo Wars, Ensemble's Justin Rouse revealed that the firm experimented with an Xbox controller-using version of Age Of Mythology before deciding to "build this thing from the ground up" and start on Halo Wars."

- E3: Sony's Tretton Talks Sony Home Vs. Microsoft's Avatars
"At Sony's E3 roundtable, SCEA exec Jack Tretton has suggested that there was "a lot of learning... and a little naivete" in the construction of the Home online world for PlayStation 3, but that the "worst thing" Sony could do was look at Microsoft's new Xbox 360 avatars and try to react based on them."

- Square Enix: Final Fantasy XIII Going Multi-Platform Is Game Changer For Biz
"Talking to Gamasutra, Square Enix SVP Shinji Hashimoto has been discussing the fact that Final Fantasy XIII will go multi-platform in more detail, commenting that "more than a turning point... perhaps this is a change in trends for the game industry as a whole.""

- E3: Gearbox's Hurley on Borderlands Vs. RAGE
"Speaking with Gamasutra at E3 about multiplatform shooter/racing-combat hybrid Borderlands, Gearbox Software producer Simon Hurley joked about the "convergent evolution" that led to Id Software announcing RAGE, also a shooter/racing-combat hybrid, less than two weeks before Borderlands went public."

- Nintendo's Miyamoto: 'We're Making Pikmin'
"Talking during a Nintendo developer Q&A, legendary creator Shigeru Miyamoto has confirmed in response to a Gamasutra question that a new title in his unique Pikmin franchise is currently in development, simply stating: "We're making Pikmin.""

- Sony's Tretton: 'Disappointed' In Multiplatform FFXIII Through MS' 'Currying Favor'
"Speaking at a roundtable Q&A attended by Gamasutra, Sony's Jack Tretton has been discussing Final Fantasy XIII's move from a PlayStation 3 exclusive to a multiplatform title, suggesting "I guess disappointed is clearly an appropriate term", and suggesting Microsoft has spent most of their money "trying to curry favor with third parties"."

- High Voltage's Corso: Wii Deserves Better Games Than It's Getting
"Talking to Gamasutra during E3, High Voltage creative director Matt Corso has been discussing the developer's just-announced Wii FPS The Conduit, suggesting that, for the core gamer, "The Wii is a really cool game system... it's worth better games than it's getting right now.""

- Sony's Jack Tretton: The Full E3 Roundtable Report
"Gamasutra brings you a full account of Sony CEO and president Jack Tretton's wide-ranging roundtable discussion that covered everything from platform exclusivity, the state and future of Home, PSP piracy, and Sony's desire to bring a PlayStation 2 to "every last consumer on earth.""

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

[Regular GSW column 'The Game Anthropologist' is all about gaming communities. Recently, Michael Walbridge interviewed a number of game writers and summarized their thoughts on why so many game writers spend their spare time writing even more on their personal spaces. In the coming weeks, Walbridge will be detailing some of the key points from the individual interviews conducted for the piece. This week describes the second interview with Kieron Gillen of Rock Paper Shotgun.]

My second interview was with a writer from the blog Rock Paper Shotgun, a place that covers my favorite games format, the PC. Not knowing how to approach, I thought, “Well, they’re four game journalists and they’re all British.” So I tried my best to do what an intelligent British gamer would: I mailed all four of them with the subject “I request a sacrifice”. One of them replied in part with

"Hi Mr Walbridge

You have prompted a shadowy gathering of the RPS hive mind. I step forth, and give the answer. Imagine this in a voice that's very deep, and flames are spouting from my nostrils.

Anyway - pleasure to meet you. Sorry that Carless has talked you into doing work for his evil GSW. I fear and shun him."

That’s how I met Kieron Gillen. I chose to talk to him over talking to all four of the RPS writers because I'm not sure how to talk to four people at once at this point, and I'm still collecting my thoughts. It turned out to be the right choice.

Like N'Gai, his being early in line set the tone for the rest of my interviewing. His being in the UK forced me to use Skype, a thing I'm grateful for. I also had some slight difficulty understanding him. The guy talks a mile a minute and he talks with excitement, enthusiasm, and anxiety. More than once he interrupted himself with "Oh yeah, your question," then answered the question.

He seems comfortable speaking to me but also seems to be exerting a lot of effort in not jumping to conclusions about anything. The only thing he's actually conclusive about is RPS; he owns part of it, he feels he can represent it. But anything else? No. Perhaps it's a British thing, or perhaps it's because he's dealt with some harsh, unfair criticism.

“Why’d you make RockPaperShotgun when the four of you are writing at plenty of publications who pay you in English money?” I said. “It’s about the PC only. You surely aren’t writing only about consoles, are you? You’re making enough money, aren’t you?”

Yes, he tells me, they write about PCs. But some PC stuff needs more coverage. “Every few days we’ll discover something that people don’t usually see, and it’s a shame if it’s not exposed,” he explained. "I've been a games journalist for a decade at least. 13 years. RPS is an outlet for our PC stuff because we're not seeing people write about the format the way we want to."

“And how do you want it done?” I pried.

"You gotta understand—the editors I work for do give me a long leash. I just…I'd be lying if I were to say it doesn't bring me pleasure to have the cuffs off."

Unregulated? “It’s just part time. Games journalism doesn’t tend to emphasize the PC. But I do. So commercially and intellectually, making and working on RPS makes the most sense because it’s not something anyone else does. It’s especially something that American readers don’t see in approach in tone.”

And the other blogs? Do they get a label for style or purpose? And I don’t remember what he said, not only because he’s a fast talker with a foreign accent, but because he soon jerked me out of my chair: “Well, I wrote this thing called ‘The New Games Journalism’”…

I had read it a long time ago and hadn't gotten around to looking at it again. There are four writers on RPS and the one that I get just happens to be the guy I didn't know wrote "New Games Journalism." Oops. There already was a guy who loosely did what I'm doing right now in this very interview! He had made an attempt at clarifying the changes that occurred. Could I learn from it? I gently encouraged him to talk about it. I was awe-struck; here was Mr. "I've been writing for 13 years, have my own successful space and am well-read and liked by my peers" feeling frustrated; he sounded like a man who felt that fate had dealt him failure and there was nothing he could do about it.

I was digging up skeletons, picking at old wounds, resurrecting old fights, and he let me proceed. I'm not sure why he was so willing to talk about it, other than the fact we got along. He took a deep breath beforehand, knowing that anything he said about "New Games Journalism" to me was going to be added to the long-buried canon on it.

“The whole thing was not something I foresaw,” he said, exasperated. “It was more of a letter, really. I was speaking to my peers, not the readers, and so it ended up seeming condescending to some people. Most people thought it said ‘no reviews.’ People thought I was trying to change games journalism—I was simply trying to add to it.”

He also gave me an ultimate summary: “It helped precipitate the debate about what games journalism could or should be. It seems there were more pieces written about it than in the style of it. Some people got inspiration from it. I’ve had enough people tell me that to make me think it reached enough people and some of the people it was intended for.”

So no, (duh), he didn’t have a name or label for me; he was kind enough to concede hmm, yes, look at those similarities! But no more. "I didn't think it would get passed around so much. I had no idea so many people would read this thing and take it so seriously." We then calmed down--he talked to me more about games journalism as a whole and I begged him to tell me more about what I should do to succeed, and he obliges me.

I ask him if many people get to talk about games in this kind of way, or if people are feeling lonely in the land of games writing. "Actually, I've always had someone to talk to about games," he tells me. "But I know that for many others, that's not the way it is."

He's got plenty of friends and has no label for me, and I don't blame him. Combined with N'Gai, I have now had two different kinds of warnings that I'm barking up the wrong tree.

I'm grateful he still mentioned my article here on RPS. The tagline? "Michael Walbridge talks to assorted games writers trying to find a scene name. I just tell him the one he shouldn’t call it. For God’s sake, not that."

Posted by Mike Walbridge at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[The Brainy Gamer's Michael Abbott is still reporting from the Games, Learning, and Society Conference - this time, Surreal (This Is Vegas) creative director Patrick Lipo has been been talking about the "blessing and curse" of working on large games.]

In his presentation at the Games, Learning, and Society Conference, Patrick Lipo proposed a set of simple tools for game design aimed at helping teams prioritize features and focus on the player's experience.

Lipo, a 15-year veteran designer who served as project lead on X-Men: Legends and as studio creative director at Surreal Software (This Is Vegas), suggested that such tools can “provide inspiration for the design of anything from a small side project to a magnum opus.”

A Matter Of Limitations

Lipo characterized the process of working on large games as both a blessing and a curse. Big budgets provide the resources to add a nearly endless set of features and realize even the most ambitious vision - “so why do so many big games seem to have development troubles?”

Lipo believes limitations can help guide designers and a keep a project on course, noting that “a game that tries to do too much often fails at most of them.” Despite what many young designers may think, a blank sheet of paper can be a dangerous thing. “Every game needs a box to be built within.”

Big games are often driven by a fear of player expectations. This often results in what Lipo calls “resources without meaning,” big budgets and personnel devoted to over-ambitious goals. It is possible for a design team to have an excess of ideas, and without a clear set of project priorities these ideas can paralyze, rather than inspire, a team.

A Matter Of More

Part of the problem, according to Lipo, is that “we all have the same enemy: more. Everyone wants more stuff, more features, more everything. We want our games to be cool, and more stuff adds value.”

Audiences are demanding breadth in all things, which is pushing designers to create design mash-ups with shooting, driving, open world, and MMO elements that rarely all work well. “GTA has set a ridiculous precedent,” Lipo observed, noting that it is unrealistic and unwise to mimic its formula. Spider-man 2, he said, is a telling example of what can happen when a game tries to be all things to all players.

Lipo believes the ideal approach is to focus your efforts within a clearly defined set of constraints. “This is not an argument for simplicity. Depth is best targeted at carefully chosen places,” Lipo argued. Constraints enable you to prioritize features and support a game's objectives. “They assure that each feature is worth the cost of entry, and they demand that the gamer will notice your efforts.”

“The big question designers must ask is very simple: what will impact your players the most?” Lipo suggests this may be an unpopular stance to many gamers “who want to feel you're giving them everything you've got,” but most well designed and popular games adhere closely to this credo.

A Matter Of Focus

Lipo cited God of War as an example of a highly polished game focused on epic fighting with a simple combat system and light RPG elements. BioShock, according to Lipo, is a simplified version of System Shock 2, a game that may have been too complicated for its own good. “I'm sure these were tough cuts to make, but BioShock is still complex and deep...and more successful.”

Lipo outlined a set of Tools for Focus:

* Use verbs to abstract player activities, keeping them “chunky” and high-level (e.g. fight, collect, build, etc.), and letting them group features (“fight” can branch into other related sub-features)

* Identify Pillar Verbs - these are what the player does 90% of the time, used as “a razor for prioritizing features”, and to spot where you are trying to do too much. The verbs, he says, should identify the activities that will impact player the most.

* Identify Secondary Verbs - these are side activities that provide breadth and variety of gameplay (e.g. a rail-shooting sequence). For instance, Half-Life 2's secondary verb is driving, Diablo 2's is crafting.

Lipo gave further examples, saying God of War's pillar verb was 'fight,' with 'upgrade' and 'explore' its secondary verbs, while Super Mario Galaxy's pillars were 'traverse' and 'collect,' while its secondary was 'fight.'

A Matter Of Values

Lipo also suggested that designers identify Pillar Values. “Beyond verbs, what abstract concepts make your game memorable? Where should your extra love go?” These function as short vision statements that define the game experience.

Examples of this were given for X-Men Legends: It's about a team of heroes, not an individual, it must contain the most destructive environments possible (this meant a trade off between dynamic and visual detail), and the player must be able to create his own team of X-Men.

With Halo, its values are cinematic set pieces, unique vehicles, and genre-defining multiplayer, while God of War's are an unapologetically brutal main character, powerful, visceral combat, and epic moments.

“Make sure your game screams your pillar values. Make them plain and easy to understand. Ask yourself 'What are people going to remember most about this game,” Lipo observed.

A Matter Of Scale

Finally, Lipo suggested designers pay attention the the scale of a game. “At what level of organization does the bulk of gameplay occur?” Different games make different choices in this regard, and Lipo cited the evolution of his own game This is Vegas, which began with “a vision of GTA meets The Sims.” While the team was excited about this idea, and the technology was up to the task, “the problem was scale.”

The player had the run of the city and could enter dozens of buildings, and the player could sway entire crowds with a single outrageous act. But the player could also affect his relationship with any individual. “This required the player to think on a 'per room' basis and a 'per person' basis.”

Suddenly one out of every 100 people wasn't just part of the crowd, which led to unpredictable behavior that hindered the player's ability to understand what was going on. “Gameplay was deeply rooted in two places. Ultimately we had to pick one.”

A good designer must be adept at creating guidelines and limitations as well as generating new ideas, noted Lipo, “because in the end it’s about deciding how to deliver the greatest game experience.”

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

Time to rip some GameSetLinks up the wazoo, headed by Jane McGonigal talking about why having fun gaming in real life with real people in London at the Hide and Seek Festival.

Also in this compendium of goodness - Cliff 'Democracy' Harris on why getting player stats is useful, USA Today on the indie game scene, John Carmack on software patent litigation, (the pictured) Civilization Revolution's outlet-specific goodies, and a host of other RSS-scraped goodness.

Yee hah hah:

Avant Game: Hide and Seek 08 Rules Me – and why real-world players are so game
Jane McGonigal on the real life game revolution.

gamedev.sessions.edu » Blog Archive » Art?
A rare game-related essay from Chris Crawford.

bit-tech.net | Game Phone Home!
Cliff Harris: 'We need to learn that sharing usage data is good.'

Civilization Revolution gets even more Wonderful | Fidgit
'People who buy from Best Buy will be more cultured. People who buy from Gamestop will be better at exploring the oceans and outer space.'

1UP: 'Welcome to the World of Videogame Law'
'[John] Carmack saves his most aggressive hatred for patent shops -- companies like Immersion and Intellectual Ventures that are in the business of licensing technology.'

The Escapist : Game Design Sketchbook: Regret
'Regrets often center on mistakes that were unavoidable at the time. Though you can learn from each mistake that you make, it's not clear that regretful thinking is valuable.'

Wadjet Eye Games: 'Wadjet Eye Games announces publishing deal with Lively Ivy Studios'
Some of the best pro/semi-pro Adventure Game Studio creators banding together.

NeoGAF on the Nintendo press conf - animated GIF stylee
Oh dear, core gamers are grumpy, hee.

Small game developers get on fast track - USATODAY.com
Hey, more indie game buzz.

Lookspring » Playing with history
Ms. Robertson on some slightly revisionist history re: Edge and its website.

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

Utah-headquartered indie developer NinjaBee has built up a major catalog of XBLA titles - from Cloning Clyde and Band of Bugs through the upcoming A Kingdom Of Keflings, and has more than broken out of the shadow of its parent developer, the more contract development-driven Wahoo Studios.

With the upcoming Keflings still shrouded in mystery, and the firm also helping out the winner of the 'Doritos Unlock Xbox' game design competition to create the amusingly unlikely Doritos Dash Of Destruction, we spoke in-depth with NinjaBee president Steve Taylor.

Some of the topics discussed during the interview include the differences between contracting and working on new IP, on working with Microsoft during the submissions process, and on the future of digital distribution for PC.

Is Ninjabee still considered a division of Wahoo Studios?

Steve Taylor: Yep! Wahoo Studios continues to do contract work and NinjaBee is the brand we use for our own creative efforts, usually from one small team within the company working on a self-funded project.

How are the differences between contracting and developing your own titles?

ST: The big differences for me mostly center around money and creative control. With work for hire, we don't have to come up with a bunch of development money ourselves and somebody else gets to deal with the marketing and release. But with indie projects we get to make the game we want!

Having experienced both ways for a while now, I've learned it's not always as black and white as it seems. For instance, if you want to sell your indie game on certain portal sites, you've got to follow a few rules about what you can do with your game, and suddenly you feel a little less indie, since you're not calling all the shots any more.

On the other side of the issue, work for hire doesn't mean unconstrained cash - it means milestones and cash flow and the risk of cancellation and balancing teams from project to project.

Each type of project has some hefty pros and cons, but we really enjoy doing both. We're making games either way, and it's the best job in the world!

What have you contracted on recently?

ST: Well, there's the Doritos Unlock Xbox project, which is public. This is technically a contract job for us, but it's a big collaborative effort between us, Microsoft, Doritos, and Mike, the contest winning designer. This is going well and has been a pretty interesting project. I'm confident people will be happy with the results.

You were one of the earliest companies to be developing new IP for Xbox Live Arcade. How did that happen?

ST: It was a bit of a strange path with Outpost Kaloki X - we designed a console game, pitched it to 30 publishers, got 30 rejections, and released an adapted version on the PC.

We continued to pitch the game around and finally showed it to Ross Erickson and Cherie Lutz who convinced us to consider Live Arcade for Xbox 360. We considered it (for about 15 seconds) and jumped at the chance to execute on the original console vision of the game and make it even better.

We had to borrow some money, and a chunk of the work was me in a dark room after hours developing a personal relationship with my dev kit. Microsoft supported us with hardware and people, and we got the game done in time for the platform launch.

Cloning Clyde was a bit different. John Nielson came to a meeting with us to pitch a completely different game, heard the Live Arcade pitch and walked away with little dancing sparklies in his eyes.

A few days later he said, "OK, there this guy named Clyde and he's involved in this cloning experiment with sheep and frogs and stuff," and at that point we couldn't have stopped him if we tried. This was also well before the launch of the platform, but we weren't done with the game until the next summer.

We followed those up with Band of Bugs (more original IP, but in a very different direction), and we're actively working on more original stuff for Live Arcade, including A Kingdom for Keflings.

Can you talk about A Kingdom for Keflings?

ST: Not a whole lot, yet. It's a crazy cool city building game, different from everything else we've done, and completely different from anything else on Live Arcade. Is it a good idea to go so far off the path of what's currently selling on Live Arcade? I guess we'll find out!

What did you think of the recent "delisting games" news?

ST: It's probably not a great idea for me to comment directly on controversial Microsoft policies. I can see some pros and cons. How's that for taking a stand?

Well, how has Microsoft been to work with?

ST: Overall, fantastic. More than anything else, it's the people that have been the best part of the experience. The producers and technical guys working on Live Arcade titles are hard-working and dedicated to the service.

I've gotten many e-mails written in the wee hours of the morning by people at Microsoft who felt that following through on promised feedback was more important than sleeping.

Have you ever felt constrained?

ST: Absolutely. I'll be honest - Microsoft has not hesitated to push us one direction or another where they felt it was critical, or to demand the addition or removal of a feature related to a particular policy. User-generated content, for instance, is still a particularly dangerous area to be in right now.

Microsoft bears the ultimate responsibility for this service and platform, and if I were in their shoes I would probably be pretty demanding as well. I might disagree with some of their policies and choices, but this is their platform and each platform has its own rules - including the PC, if you count big web portals and other distribution services.

Speaking of user-generated content, I heard that on Band of Bugs your level editor only allows users to make particularly small levels specifically to avoid people being able to spell out any swear words with their designs.

ST: Sort of - in the end, the size and complexity of the user-created levels was really up to us. We chose those limits mostly for performance reasons (an open-ended editor lets people do some crazy stuff that's expensive to process and render) but we also felt large sprawling levels didn't work well with the game mechanics.

The scale and resolution of maps in Band of Bugs was a design decision we made early on - we wanted the feel of Vandal Hearts more than the feel of Halo, for instance. Now, it is true that this seemed to help when it came time to get the level editor approved. More than one conversation was had about blocky maps making it harder to create offensive content, but nobody pretended that made it impossible.

The bigger issues were related to where the maps got stored, how users got access to them, how we could keep people from seeing content they don't want to see, etc. This stuff is still a pretty hot button, unfortunately.

It was the people we worked with that eventually made this editor happen. We got some individuals on the Live Arcade team behind the idea of the map editor, and they championed it and helped us get it approved, even though it was opening several cans of worms and raising a lot of questions.

There's been a lot of talk about how onerous their submission and testing process is otherwise, too.

ST: Yeah, the more vitriolic complaints have surprised me a bit. It's a console platform, and every console platform has a difficult certification process. It kinda sucks, but was it any less painful on previous or competing consoles? Not in my experience.

Here's another area where the people we're working with matter a lot - the producers and test people on the Live Arcade team work pretty hard to cut down on the complexity and frustration of this process.

How have you felt about the performance of your titles on Xbox Live?

ST: It's a mixed but mostly positive bag. Outpost Kaloki and Cloning Clyde have done well. Band of Bugs has been ignored by some players and very well received by others. None of our games have sold like UNO, but they've done well enough for us to continue to spend our own money on Live Arcade efforts!

And I'm extremely pleased with the work we've done with the NinjaBee name. I'm more personally proud of these titles than of anything I've done before in my professional career.

What about their performance on PC?

ST: Honestly, we're still trying to figure out how to make sales on the PC. We come from such a console-heavy background, we had to learn a whole lot of new things to release a PC game on our own, and we're still learning. But we'll keep doing it - I believe there's a lot of potential for these games and for NinjaBee in general on the PC.

Can you make a comparison between the performance on each platform? Your games are mostly strategy orientated, and I wondered if you've found the games fit the PC audience better.

ST: Because of our lack of experience (and lack of a hit so far!) on the PC, I feel sadly under-qualified to answer this. I think there's a ton of untapped potential on both systems. Maybe there's a way for us to get at more strategy players on Live. And I'm sure there are several zillion strategy players on the PC that haven't tried Band of Bugs...

What do you think of the distribution methods currently on offer for PC?

ST: I'm excited about PC distribution services offering LIVE-like features and community elements, like achievements and friends lists and things. Unfortunately, the people responsible have their own rules about what gets allowed on the service, just like their competitors. In some cases, this'll mean our more off-the-beaten-path stuff may get the cold shoulder.

Well, do you think that those kind of "destination" style storefronts, like Xbox Live, are preferable to the "everything and the kitchen sink" concept of something like, say, iTunes?

ST: A somewhat frustrating thing for us to learn from PC game portals was that some portals pop your game on their front page for one day, and you sink or swim based on that. This hasn't worked too well for us, because we're not usually making the kind of game that people visiting the popular portals want immediately just from a screenshot.

What saves us, I think, is the middle ground of a genre or category list - if somebody's looking for a tycoon game or something in the sim/strategy genre), they've got a decent chance of finding Outpost Kaloki.

Fortunately, both destination and kitchen-sink style services offer category listings. I'll take the one-day promotion if they'll give it to me, but after that I just have to hope people who are looking for my kind of game can find it, and in that case I sure hope my game stays listed somewhere for a long time...

Which other indie developers do you admire?

ST: I won't be able to hit all the teams I admire, but here's a few... I bow down to Don and Jake at Gastronaut, who are insanely nice people and who are geniuses pulling off the work of a team five times their size.

I'm a big fan of some guys who I think epitomize key facets of the "indie" approach, like 2D Boy, Flashbang Studios and Grubby Games. And I've met some shockingly open and friendly people at indie conferences and Live Arcade gatherings, including the Twisted Pixel guys, the Reflexive guys, John Baez from The Behemoth, Denis from Load Inc., and a ton of others.

Indie developers are the most passionate yet down to earth software makers I've ever met. At the GDC last year, I found myself looking forward more to the Indie Games Summit than anything else!

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

[Hope all our E3 troopers are still alive down there! Here's the latest from the Los Angeles battle zone area, where I believe the megaton has yet to drop - and may in fact be lost behind the sofa cushions.]

Still fed up with 20-post summaries of E3 press conferences? Following our handy Day 1 round-up, big sister site Gamasutra has returned with a full round-up of the major announcements, press events, and kerfuffle on Day 2 of E3 2008.

Tuesday at E3 was dominated by the press conference from hardware giants Nintendo and Sony - while Ubisoft also showed off its line of titles and announcements from publishers such as Disney also debuted.

- First up was the Nintendo press event, and Gamasutra's bulleted announcement guide explained the major reveals, from from Animal Crossing: City Folk through the WiiSpeak microphone, GTA: Chinatown Wars, the 2009 debut of Wii Sports Resort and its bundled MotionPlus accessory, and even Wii Music.

- Our own Brandon Sheffield then analyzed Nintendo's announcements, concluding of the incrementally innovative new products shown: "It’s perfectly acceptable to go with what works for some time – after all, that’s what everyone else is doing, by and large. Small innovations work well. Large disruptions can only come every once so often."

- Next was Sony's press conference, and again, we boiled down the major announcements into a simple document, from the company's new $399 80GB PS3, the launch of its video download service, new PSP titles Resistance: Retribution and Valkyria Chronicles, and Zipper's MAG (Massive Action Game) for PS3.

- Gamasutra's Christian Nutt then took a closer look at the action, suggesting, somewhat concerningly, that "While SCEA president and CEO Jack Tretton promised "a lineup that features the biggest exclusives in the industry"... his promise that "we've just begun to scratch the surface on what we intend to deliver to consumers in the years ahead" was probably the most important message at the conference."

- In addition, Ubisoft's E3 press conference revealed a new 'survival adventure' title, I Am Alive, from French studio Darkworks, as well as new ranges of casual games, from Monkeyz through the Ener-G girl-targeted DS game series.

- Elsewhere at the Summit, a number of other smaller announcements, including Disney's announcement of its line-up and - particularly interesting for developers - AiLive's debuting of its LiveMove 2 tool for the Wii's MotionPlus add-on - also debuted.

Stay tuned for a similar Gamasutra-authored summary for subsequent days of the E3 Media & Business Summit from the Los Angeles Convention Center.

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

['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 Konami's PS2 port of the original Metal Gear]

Being once a PC gaming zealot, I missed a number of console games during my youth. After the Sega Genesis, I didn't own another console until a few years after the original Xbox was launched. As a result, there have been a number of big franchises and games I've missed out on, and I've been slowly trying to catch up on them.

One such franchise is Konami's Metal Gear series. With Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots having been recently released for the PS3, I decided it was high time I checked out the Metal Gear series, starting at the beginning. The real beginning, though, with the original Metal Gear for the MSX (or at least the ported version of it, which is available on Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence as an extra).

In playing the game, I was reminded how difficult and obtuse at times older games can be. What I found most interesting, however, was how the difficulty changed over time.

Design Lesson: By employing an inverse difficulty curve, Metal Gear is able to change the style of its gameplay as the player progresses.

Modern games do a fairly good job of introducing the player to new mechanics slowly. To help them along, designers often make sure the beginning of the game is the easiest, and difficulty increases incrementally from there.

Metal Gear's difficulty is flipped. While the player is introduced to new mechanics slowly, the beginning of the game is the hardest part. Solid Snake is given no weapons or items and charged with infiltrating an enemy base.

This means punching is the only method of attack available at the beginning of the game. Stealth is of the utmost importance during the early portions of the game, as a result. Sneaking around patrols to access new areas is how the majority of the beginning of the game plays. Being spotted alerts the guards, often leading to death or at least significant injury. Rations to restore health are rare at this stage in the game.

Soon, the player comes across a pistol, rations, and some key cards that open up new areas of the game. Part of Metal Gear revolves around saving prisoners. Save enough, and Solid Snake gains in rank, which ups his ammo capacities, maximum life, and number of rations that can be carried.

This is seemingly the primary game loop of Metal Gear. Sneak around, find objects that will gain you access to the next area, save people along the way, and rise in power over time.

By the time the player gets new weapons later in the game, like the grenade launcher and missile launcher, he is rather powerful. The enemies increase in number and strength, but not enough to counteract the strength of the player.

At this point, the gameplay changed for me. No longer was I supremely worried about sneaking. Sneaking was still a way of progressing, but I often found myself just running around the rooms trying to figure out where to go next. If enemies spotted me, I dispatched them easy.

Instead of dealing with enemies being the primary obstacle to game progression, the finding of the correct items to progress to the next area became the primary obstacle. Retracing my steps and trying to open every door became the style of play, and caution was slowly thrown into the wind.

As this continued, I would get even more powerful, to the point where I always had plenty of rations and firepower to defend myself against any aggression. The game world opened up dramatically, and I had many more options. This made finding the correct place to go difficult, but getting there wasn't. Whereas before, being caught by the enemy had significant ramifications, these ramifications were lost as I progressed through the game.

By the end of the game, I was a walking tank. I killed the last handful of bosses without breaking a sweat. I escaped easily. I conquered Metal Gear.

Normally games get harder as you go, but the core mechanic of the game stays the same. When the core mechanic is no longer necessary, a new way of playing is introduced. Because the game became easy from a survival point of view as I progressed, the way I approached the game began to differ.

I'm not sure if this was Hideo Kojima's intent when designing the game; it could just be bad game balancing or even something that happened during the porting of the MSX version of the game to the PS2. My preconceived notions of how the game would play were shattered, however. That's what ultimately made me enjoy the game so much; it did what I didn't expect it to do.

[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 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Wow, even through the swirling mists of E3, we still have some GameSetLinks left over from the weekend, headed by an awesomely diverse Diana Jones award shortlist - which I hadn't heard of before, but spans board and transgaming somewhat effortlessly.

Also in this set of links - the odd and neat homebrew Game Trivia Catechism (pictured - with Gremlin/Infogrames questions to peruse, blimey!), alongside games and art, bad hair, Kongai, and Rock Band 2 rockage,

Secular linkalige:

OgreCave » 2008 Diana Jones shortlist announced
Really interesting, thoughtful cross-media list from an originally board-game centric award.

Japanmanship: Good Art Director! Have a Creme Egg!
It's a bit Twinkie-ish, isn't it?

Multiple:Option: Game Trivia Catechism
More interesting DS homebrew: 'Game Trivia Catechism is a multiple-choice trivia game, testing your knowledge of video gaming.' With a story mode!

“Nooch on Gaming” will be signing off | Nooch on Gaming
Aw, the Merc News, my local, loses both Dean Takahashi and Mike Antonucci, some of the strongest mainstream newspaper game writers.

Playing by All the Rules | Quiet Babylon
'There is a certain arrogance that comes from being a scrub. It’s the idea that you know better than the designers whether or not their game is balanced.'

Rhizome: 'Games by Mark Essen'
Delighted to see 'game artist' being easily described on net-art site Rhizome.

GI Online: 'Bad Hair Day: Some Of The Worst Hair In Video-Game History'
Game Informer Online is pretty weird, post-Berghammer.

Play Kongai, a free online game on Kongregate
The David Sirlin-designed Flash CCG game debuts, aha!

Teaching Game Design: Giving Great Game Demos
Recapping a board game pitch discussion: 'Explaining the rules of a game is no different than teaching any other course material.'

Rock Band 2: The AV Club Hands-On Preview | The A.V. Club
Ex-GSW columnist Dahlen does a great job of explaining the heart behind Harmonix's sequel - lots of little specifics, too - via InSword.

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

[Gamasutra's Christian Nutt returns from attending Sony's E3 2008 press conference to look past the announcements and analyze the trends, asking primarily - was Sony's message to consumers targeted to the now, or to the soon?]

The most important theme of Sony's press conference this year seemed to be "just wait."

That's not a good sign for a company whose next-generation platform has not yet hit its stride and which - it was revealed at the conference - will still cost $399.99 in the U.S. at year's end, albeit for an 80GB model.

While SCEA president and CEO Jack Tretton promised "a lineup that features the biggest exclusives in the industry" and reminded the audience that "as many of you have already written, 2008 is the year of the PS3," his promise that "we've just begun to scratch the surface on what we intend to deliver to consumers in the years ahead" was probably the most important message at the conference.

Recapping the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 lifespan, Tretton reminded us that big hits didn't appear on those systems until middle and later in their lives - for example, God of War II didn't hit the PS2 until nearly seven years after the system's launch. The same, it was implied, would hold true for the PlayStation 3 - but in the meantime, here's Resistance 2.

Sony does have one game it can rely on for generating goodwill in the mainstream and hardcore press like no other - and that game was used to deliver a typically staid presentation of the hard numbers to the attendees, which very much took the edge off (and served as a clever way to show the game without debuting any new features.) Yes, LittleBigPlanet was used to deliver a PowerPoint presentation in gorgeous, amusing, and clever 3D.

Tretton reminded us (with help from LBP's Sackboy) that the company has three very active platforms, with calendar 2008 sales in North America of 1.8 million for the PS3, 1.6 million for the PSP, and 1.5 million for the PS2. Tretton announced Latin American distribution for its consoles is commencing. Worldwide goals for the systems this year are 9 million PS2s, 10 million PS3s, and 15 million PSPs - showing continued confidence in the uptick the portable has seen in recent months.

Painting the PS2 as an "incubator for next-generation adoption", Tretton promised 130 titles for the system in the year and showed a video with no surprises whatsoever - relying on Madden and Tiger Woods from the perennial EA Sports lineup.

The PSP video was similar, though a Resistance game, developed by Sony's Bend Studio, was revealed later. Tretton also talked up Sony's social gaming efforts, showing Buzz titles for every Sony platform and plenty of Singstar titles for the PS2.

Earlier, Alex Evans, co-founder of LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule, expressed his happiness that his game is appreciated by a "wide range of people" and "what I find amazing is that this concept of creative gaming, people have just really got it."

Fortunately, LBP is not the only effort Sony is making to reach out to creative, networked gamers. Tretton revealed that there have been 180 million downloads on the PlayStation network since November 2006, across 10 million accounts.

Snarkily, after announcing a new download-only Ratchet & Clank game for PSN, Tretton remarked "We're not interested in filling up our store with titles nobody wants to play s owe can say we have the most games." Gran Turismo TV, a video-on-demand service for motorsports video which operates from within Gran Turismo 5 Prologue was unveiled. With licensed content from around the world, including Japanese and British programming (BBC's Top Gear), it appears to offer an almost unrealistically hardcore channel for race fans.

Basic promises for the eventual release of PlayStation Home came next - with nothing new or significant about the platform shown. Tretton said, "I absolutely guarantee that when PlayStation Home is available through our extended beta program, your patience will be more than rewarded." I'm still optimistic about Home, but waiting to find out what it will really offer is wearing somewhat thin.

Tretton next announced and demoed the PSN video download service with the help of Eric Lempel, PSN director of operations. It does look easy to use and impressive, and should help stave off the "Netflix advantage" Microsoft is enjoying, per its announcement yesterday.

Next, Sony presented a video reel of developers talking up developing on its PlayStation 3 system - to try and instill some sort of confidence in the press (and perhaps, other developers) that the platform has unique features, has matured its tech, has gained the necessary audience, and offers a future that is worth participating in.

Points touched on included that it has much untapped power, that programmers can really use the complicated SPU architecture properly now, and the system was packed with "forward-looking" features "including disk space", according to Dominic Guay, tech director at Ubisoft Montreal, who joined others from EA Tiburon and Bethesda in praise of the machine.

A CG God of War III teaser was shown, but the final unveil was Zipper Interactive's MAG: Massive Action Game (pictured), which is the owner of both one of the worst titles in the history of games and impressive technology that will allow 256 players to join together to fight massive battles - presumably, anyway, as the trailer seemed to be target footage and not show gameplay-specific action.

Andy Beaudoin, lead designer at Zipper, promised that "It's a real workout for even the PS3 architecture - it's not remotely possible anywhere else... there's nothing like it on the market today."

Tretton summed it up like this. Having earlier recalled that we are now reaching the 15 year anniversary of the fateful meeting where the original PlayStation was greenlit at Sony, "If this is what year two of the PS3 lifecycle looks like, imagine years three and beyond."

The problem, of course, is that imagination can only go so far in such a competitive market, and with important exclusives like Final Fantasy XIII falling by the wayside, the price of the unit not coming down fast, and sequelitis becoming a real potential problem, it's not clear if the PS3 will be able to pull out of its current trend of doing pretty well, but not well enough.

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

[Brandon Sheffield was at Nintendo's E3 2008 press briefing, and here looks at the major announcements made and asks - was there anything truly new on show, and if not, does that really matter?]

The Nintendo press conference at E3 2008 opened with a cheesy montage, which felt a bit like a commercial for Lifetime Television, hammering home the idea that all genders, races, and ages love the Wii. The theme for the conference was, “We promise to keep the world smiling…”

The first smiling presenter was Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo’s VP of Marketing and Sales, who recounted a tale of difficulty snowboarding, in which she took a fall. “Snowboarding is really a lot harder than it looks. But the fact is I don’t like a smile taken off my face for anything. And I really don’t like giving up. I decided that as a snowboarder, all I needed was a little help from a friend. A really talented friend. And I think I’ve found the perfect answer.”

The curtain rose to reveal a shoeless Shaun White, red-topped snowboarder extraordinaire, playing the Wii snowboarding game on the Balance Board. Shaun White then partook in the continued cavalcade of scripted banter for the fun-looking Ubisoft-published product, after which Cammie proclaimed: “Now if everyone would welcome me in joining our president... ‘Satooroo’ Iwata.”

Iwata was, as usual, and perhaps by design, the most sensible person to take the stage, claiming that “A big change, actually a big paradigm shift has taken place in the global game market.”

He mentioned that during E3 2005 everyone held a pessimistic view of Nintendo. But he understood this, because he says everyone was taking a common sense view of the game industry, saying that not even employees at Nintendo “would have imagined that we would be selling millions of bathroom scales around the world.” (referring here to the Balance Board)

Iwata made the bold statement that “A common sense view (of the game industry) doesn’t work anymore.” He continued on to highlight a few points about the current state of the industry from the Nintendo perspective, noting:

“In the past it seemed impossible to expect any software to sell for two years or three years. But titles like Nintendogs and Brain Age are doing just that - also New Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart DS. To use a western term, these titles seem to be evergreens.”

The Nintendo exec continued: “I believe it is no longer commonsense that players seek new titles only with more sophisticated graphics, and more complicated contents.” He also hinted that Nintendo’s more traditional design teams are cranking away at new products, stating that “Our internal team that creates Mario games, and our team that makes Zelda games, are both hard at work. They will bring new games to the Wii.”

Iwata admitted that people get tired of new ideas eventually - “This happens faster when others try to reproduce the initial change" - perhaps referencing both game-specific and hardware-specific Nintendo copiers?

"There is danger in standing still,” he added. “Personally I believe that we must find different ways for players to become engaged. We at Nintendo always challenge ourselves to be pioneers, seeking new paradigms.”

From here on out, it was game announcements, stats indicating Nintendo’s current and projected future dominance of the handheld space and successes in the console space. The inevitable Star Wars Clone Wars light saber game, Raving Rabbids TV Party and Call of Duty World at War all got equal time on the reel of third party Wii titles.

Perhaps the biggest announcement, which was demonstrated with no images or videos, aside from a logo, was Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for DS. It was somewhat telling that this was the ‘big announcement’ for core gamers.

Certainly, Grand Theft Auto is a huge license, and a big deal to be on a Nintendo platform. It stands to reason that this GTA will be the best selling of all of them, given the installed base of the DS combined with name recognition and media hype.

But on the other hand, it’s clear that the core gamer is not what Nintendo is targeting - not that it really matters ultimately in terms of sales, considering how small the core gamer market is when compared to the potential markets they could reach with more accessible software.

One intriguing element to me was in the upcoming Wii title Animal Crossing: City Folk. Certainly there was the WiiSpeak microphone announcement, which allows a room full of players to converse with another, but this is far from an innovation.

I was most intrigued by the almost off-hand comment that users will be able to send messages through Animal Crossing, with pictures, to friends’ cellphones and PCs, as well as other users in the game. Depending on how Nintendo creates the interface and infrastructure for that service, this could be a Trojan Horse to get some larger-scale networking capability and interactivity with the Wii.

Reggie Fils-Aime was the main numbers man, speculating that the DS would soon reach the 100 million sales mark. He also indicated that 19 different third party games on Nintendo platforms have exceeded 400k+ units – coming from 11 different publishers. And Cammie returned to say that as of 2007, 48% of DS recipients are female.

She hinted at the potential future of the DS as a personal assistant as well, posing: “What if DS and air travel came together in a different way? For example, when I land, why can’t my DS provide information on where to get my luggage? What about the nearest ATM?”

When Reggie reclaimed the stage to talk about Wii MotionPlus, he admitted, “As every game player knows, technical advances can be empty promises without software.” Nintendo’s answer is the successor to Wii Sports, Wii Sports Resort.

The Reggie/Cammie duo demonstrated the one-to-one movement ratio of the new device, which does look quite precise. Then the scripted one-liners returned. After Cammie played catch with a dog, she said, “Oh Reggie, you’ve got to admit, is that the cutest thing you’ve ever seen?”

But Reggie, ever the man, posed that guys would rather play the jetski game, which he then demonstrated. “Guys like power stuff,” he said. The third Wii Sports Resort game they demonstrated was what looked like Kendo. Reggie and Cammie faced off, for one real match with Reggie winning the first round, and taking a fake fall the second round.

The last big announcement was Wii Music. Apparently you “play” instruments by pantomiming, and the software takes care of the rest. The demonstrations that ensued were uncoordinated at best, and even somewhat dissonant at times.

It’s clearly aimed at the casual market, though with the drums, you can use the Balance Board as foot pedals, and you should be able to take lessons as well – but without the tactile response of actual drums, it seems less effective than Rock Band at teaching, perhaps.

So what did I take from this? These are all logical extensions of Nintendo’s strategy. Reggie mentioned at the end of the presentation that the goal, after successfully disrupting an industry, is to disrupt one’s own thinking. I would pose that the announcements here were not disruptive to Nintendo’s currently line, but rather follow them to the letter.

That’s not a problem, as it’s working, and these new interpretations of what the Wii Remote can do will likely succeed for the company. But it’s not anything truly new. And does that really matter?

I would say not. It’s perfectly acceptable to go with what works for some time – after all, that’s what everyone else is doing, by and large. Small innovations work well. Large disruptions can only come every once so often.

So while there weren’t any huge announcements per se, Nintendo's E3 press briefing was in line with expectations. And frankly, what can one expect from a press conference other than a lot of pomp and circumstance?

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

['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.]

EDITOR'S POSTSCRIPT: Well, we're delighted to say that Persona is a) over his Persona 3 comic fixation and b) back in full effect and full color, examining the telling differences between Slimes and Puyos. It's comitragic!

[Jonathan "Persona" Kim is a character animation student at the California Institute of the Arts. When not recovering from anime conventions, he continues the Mecha Fetus revolution on the Mecha Fetus Visublog.]

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

[Yes, yes, I know, you come over to GSW to get _away_ from the E3 shouting. Well, since we have a lot of people on the ground in LA on behalf of big sister site Gamasutra, and they're actually summing things up quite succinctly, I'll be crossposting our round-ups daily. Promise they won't get too obnoxious.]

Fed up with the 20-post summaries of single E3 press conferences? Never fear, since Gamasutra is your guide to the first day of E3, with a full round-up of the major announcements, press events, and kerfuffle in one handy, bite-sized post.

Monday at E3 provided the first of three hardware provider press events, with Microsoft showcasing its Xbox 360 strategy for the rest of the year and beyond - while other notables such as Electronic Arts and Square Enix also discussed their slate for 2008.

- First for the day, Microsoft's E3 press event had a host of new announcements, from avatars through karaoke game Lips to its biggest surprise - Final Fantasy XIII coming to the Xbox 360 in the West day and date with the PS3 version.

- Gamasutra's Chris Remo followed up with an analysis of the Microsoft event, adding color and noting overall: "Seemingly satisfied it has already demonstrated a broad, inclusive library for its Xbox 360, Microsoft mainly focused on value added propositions such as online offerings, video services, and exclusive downloadable content for high-profile titles."

- Square Enix conducted a press conference immediately following the Microsoft one. Justification for FFXIII coming to Xbox? Simply enough: "We considered the situation of the hardware, and that we would like to provide FFXIII to as many fans as possible in the world."

- The final major event of the day was the Electronic Arts press conference, which revealed the SimAnimals franchise, had Napster founder Shawn Fanning onstage talking about his Rupture gaming social network site, and demonstrated a lot of upcoming EA titles.

- The big reveal for EA, however, was the deal with id Software for RAGE, which Gamasutra has followed up with a chat to id's John Carmack about just how it happened.

Stay tuned for a similar Gamasutra-authored summary for subsequent days of the E3 Media & Business Summit from the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Quiz Me Quik' is a 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 - a look into the art game world with Tale Of Tales.]

Possibly one of the more interesting things that came up during this interview with Belgium based indie development duo Tale of Tales was the idea that they are, effectively, experimental outsiders in the games industry simply because of their focus on story based, artistically motivated work.

Isn't that weird? Can you imagine what the film industry would be like if narrative works were substantially less popular than action based films?

Well, okay, maybe that's a bad example, given the films that tend to come out on top at the box office these days, but you get the point.

The studio, comprised of Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, admit that this isn't even something that's occurred to them before now. In fact, they consider what they do an “extremely traditional approach”, at least from the perspective of other medium, like cinema and music.

Then again, you get the idea from talking to them that maybe they're pretty used to being the outsiders at this point. Their favourite games are all at least five years old, proof that “a certain consolidation is happening where the big game companies are happy producing braindead toys for the masses”. Indie companies, for the most part are “creating braindead toys for the cliques”. Yeah, they're probably not exactly gunning for the Christmas card list, at this point.

But what would you expect from a group whose most commercial – for lack of better word – work is The Endless Forest, an MMO where the description is “You are a deer. So are the other players. You meet each other in an endless forest on the Internet. The setting is idyllic, the atmosphere peaceful. You communicate with one another through sounds and body language”? It's a bit bonkers, but gloriously so: wonderfully, artistically so.

They've also just started writing up a blog detailing the development of their next game, The Path, due in early 2009. So, we decided to chat with Harvey and Samyn about their beginnings, their somewhat provocative views on the industry, and why teenage boys find it a complete affront to their delicate sexuality to be asked to jump around as deer.

GSW: When did you start working together? Did you immediately start working under the name Tales of Tales?

Tale of Tales: We started working together in 1999 under the name of "Entropy8Zuper!" which was the merger of entrop8.com and zuper.com into entropy8zuper.org. We created Internet art and web-design. We were fairly well known in media art circles. A lot of our work was inspired by games. And we even made a few real-time 3D web-projects - one commissioned by the San Francisco MOMA. But it wasn't until 2002 that we started thinking about actually making games. A year later we founded Tale of Tales.

GSW: What got you thinking about games as an expressive medium?

ToT: It's important to make a distinction between games as such and video or computer games, when answering this. Because, even though we had used game-like elements in our web-based work, when switching to real-time 3D we had no interest at all in making actual games. For us computer games have always been something different.

Playing computer games has always been about immersion and characters and stories. The best video games were the ones that just let us enjoy these elements. But sadly, most video games, sooner or later, stopped us from enjoying ourselves - from playing - by confronting us with the rules and goals of the actual game, often by either making our character die or by blocking our progress with some inane puzzle.

So, for us, computer games have always been an expressive medium. Except for the "game" part, which destroyed the expression. Thus it was only logical for us to create video games that focused on this expression and to remove everything that did no contribute to the immersion and atmosphere.

GSW: Was your goal of embedding real-time 3D as an artistic medium one of your intentions from the beginning?

ToT: We have always been artists. We were making art with other media before. We chose real-time 3D because we thought it would be a good technology for the kind of art we wanted to make.

GSW: What was the first project you worked on?

ToT: Our relationship started by uploading Dynamic HTML love letters for each other to a common server. Later we made this "conversation" public as . It's still available from there.

But that was long before we started making games. As Tale of Tales, our first project was 8: a dreamy game that takes place in the palace of Sleeping Beauty during the 100 years of sleep. We haven't been able to finish this project because it requires a larger budget than anyone trusts us with, for now.

GSW: I assume your budgets are growing over time, though?

ToT: Actually, it's the opposite. The first arts funding we got was the largest we ever got. That was for our first game project, 8. Recently we have only been able to get much smaller budgets. This had more to do with a shift in the kind of people that are in the jury than anything else though.

But arts funding would never suffice for real video game production anyway. 8 was designed to be developed within the games industry, even if it was initiated within an media arts context. But so far, we haven't worked with any games industry funding yet. Which is odd, because it's not like our work does not benefit the games industry.

We're doing a lot of pioneering that could help everybody in the long run. So, I don't quite understand why the big players like EA and Ubisoft or even Valve or Konami don't invite independent game makers to create a project with them - for a fraction of the budgets that they are used to spending on games, we could make something that takes their entire company years ahead, conceptually.

To their credit, I must say that Sony has been talking with us - and some other developers as well - about small experimental productions for the PlayStation Network that they would fund. So somebody is doing it right.

GSW: Do you consider yourselves primarily artists?

ToT: Yes. But not necessarily in the elitist contemporary fine arts sense of the word. More in the sense that the expression, the meaning of what we make, comes first, before the technology, before the commerce, before the entertainment. But that doesn't mean that we exclude all these things. It's just a matter of priorities. Making games is only an art form when there are people who are making art with games. You know, like: on purpose.

Everybody who makes games, or at least the people in charge of the design and the story, should be an artist. We don't see much point to the whole thing otherwise. Otherwise you're just shipping products.

GSW: Product is an unavoidable part of the medium to a degree, though.

Of course. Because the high production budgets and low consumer prices require you to sell a lot of copies. We have no problem with the selling of art works to people. That's great.

It's just when the process is reversed, when people start designing these things for the purpose of selling them, that you fall into an industrial production logic. Which is hurting the entire industry because it is hampering creative progress.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, it's a matter of task division. It is absolutely vital for a marketing or sales person to think of commercial aspects first, to think of selling as much copies as required. That is their job. But a game director or artist should be focused on achieving the highest level of quality and usability. At the moment the games industry does a very poor job in allowing creative people to do what they are good at.

The industry forces everybody to think of the bottom line all the time. Even if they're not equipped to do so. It's another sign of its immaturity.

GSW: What would you say are your primary influences?

ToT: Figurative painting - renaissance, baroque, romanticist, symbolist - the Saint Bavo Cathedral in our home town of Gent, Belgium, films by Wong Kar Wai, Ingmar Bergman, Hal Hartley. And then there's a few video games: Silent Hill, Project Zero, Ico, Black and White.

GSW: It seems safe to say that you appreciate atmosphere and character, then. Particularly with the games that you've mentioned, they focus on location as a hugely important part of the overall experience. Ico's castle is arguably as vital a character as its two protagonists.

ToT: It's about situations. A character in an environment. That's where the story starts. A deer on its own is moderately interesting. But a deer in a forest is poetic and immediately triggers all sorts of associations in the mind of the player.

But don't overestimate the influence of other games on our work. Painting and architecture are far more important. Other games mostly serve the function of assuring us that we're not entirely crazy. That what we find interesting in this medium is actually feasible and enjoyable.

Also, other games than the ones we really like can be very influential. If only because frustrating with their gameplay motivates us to not incorporate that kind of stuff in our own work.

GSW: What do you find exciting in the industry, both in terms of commercial and independent product?

ToT: We're not particularly fond of any industry. Much like we weren't fond of the art world before. But at least the games industry is better organized to give the audience access to our work. There is a lot of hope in the games industry, and thus a lot of support for experimental designers like ourselves. That's nice.

GSW: Is it something that you've seen improve over the last six or so years?

ToT: Honestly: no. As you can tell from our little list of favourite games, all relatively old games, we don't think significant progress has been made lately. Five years ago, the dream seemed a lot more alive within the games industry. Now it seems a certain consolidation is happening where the big game companies are happy producing braindead toys for the masses.

So far, in turn, the independents have been mostly creating braindead toys for the cliques. But I think there is still hope there. Especially since new digital distribution channels are stimulating even big companies to have pseudo-independent side projects.

GSW: What has the reaction to your titles been like from gamers? Considering that one of your main goals is to "make art for people", is it an important factor in what you do?

ToT: Maybe we should rephrase that to "make art for people, not for gamers".

We would like to make games that can be appreciated by people who are not gamers. This is why we try to deal with the interactive medium directly, rather than going through the conventions of games. These conventions often form a barrier to entry for many people who might be interested in the story, characters, interaction and atmosphere of the game otherwise.

That being said, we have received a lot more positive feedback from gamers than we had anticipated when we started on this journey. So much so, that we are reconsidering our position somewhat. In the beginning, we thought that we were making some kind of anti-games but now we can see that there are a lot of gamers who also like things that are not games in the strict sense of the word.

Even if "normal" games continue to be successful, there's a growing desire within the gaming community for other types of games, different kinds of experiences, and a growing dissatisfaction with the state of the art. There is a shared sense that this medium has more potential than just be a vessel for pretend-shooting zombies and monsters. I think gamers appreciate that we are trying to tap into this potential.

Of course there's always going to be a small group of testosterone-troubled kids who get uncomfortable with our projects. They can be very aggressive sometimes. But most of the time this is more amusing than anything else.

GSW: They're vocal, definitely. You've had feedback from that kind of audience?

ToT: Very rarely does one of these boys venture onto our forums with an attempt to start trolling. But he is always very quickly "attacked" by a bunch of Endless Forest players - often girls, so it's a funny picture - who silence him very quickly.

Those kids usually talk about our work among themselves. On forums. So we find their comments through our web statistics where we can see which websites link to ours. The comments range from requesting guns in The Endless Forest to some strange kind of homophobia - when they discover that all the avatars in The Endless Forest are male, even though a large part of the players is female. There's something about our work that enrages young males' hormones. Probably insecurity about their own sexuality. They are very sensitive at that age.

It's funny because we never design our work explicitly for children. We try to make mature art for grown-ups. But somehow our work seems very attractive to some children, either to adore or to despise.

GSW: How do you feel about positive peer feedback like the IGF finalist position? Is that kind of thing important to you?

ToT: This is very important to us. Not so much as an expression of appreciation of our work, because we know how relative any jury can be. It's always some kind of lottery, isn't it? But because we hope that the selection of The Path by the IGF opens the door for more games like this. Games that deal with content, with story, with meaning. Games that are artistically ambitious.

So far, the indie games scene has been dominated by retro games and modest "fun" entertainment. But if this medium is going to grow, the evolution will not take place within the commercial part of the industry. The independent scene needs to be the place where this can happen.

GSW: Does it seem strange to you that your work - story based, artistically motivated games - is considered experimental in the games scene?

ToT: Now that you mention it, that seems rather upside-down, doesn't it? If anything, we're taking an extremely traditional approach to creating games. At least traditional in terms of historical artistic practice. In fact, while such a traditional approach has been abandoned by most fine arts, it is still alive and well in the previous century's most successful artistic media: cinema and music.

But we're used to being considered strange. It's the same in the art world, you know. These days, it's not "cool" in fine arts circles to want to make something beautiful, moving or meaningful. It all has to be ironic and clever and fun. Contemporary art is very boring. I guess that's why we feel more at home in games. Overall, there is a very traditionalist attitude, which we share. I think we just go a bit further. But for us, this is the only logical way.

GSW: Why have you focused primarily on PC and Mac development?

ToT: Because that's the technology we have access to. Mostly because there's affordable tools on those platforms that are suitable for artists and don't require expensive teams of engineers.

GSW: Have you considered entering the console market in any way? Do you think there's room for titles like yours on XBLA or PSN?

ToT: We would love to make console games, and we do have plans in that direction. But so far, there have been no tools for consoles that allow the artist to express themselves without the aid of programmers. This is probably because, traditionally, there has been little interest from the console companies in a mature audience. While the PC and Mac audience consists mostly of grown-ups.

GSW: How difficult is running an MMO like The Endless Forest?

ToT: Once the technology is up and running, and your server hardware is in good hands, it's actually remarkably easy. It's just a lot of work. At least the way we do it. We are very involved with the community of players. We discuss new ideas for the game with them and share experiences. That's fun to do but it also takes a lot of time.

The biggest problem for The Endless Forest is funding. It's a free game, and we'd like to keep it that way, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to find arts funding for the project, probably because all we want to do is expand the project, rather than create a new one from scratch - which is much easier to get funding for. This is something we're discussing with the players as well. And we will probably try a few things that allow players to co-fund the development.

GSW: Epic gear, I assume. Seriously though, is that something you consider a shortcoming in arts funding?

ToT: We already have epic gear! And it's free. But you can only get it on Halloween, when the Big Zombie Deer visits the forest.

Well, of course we find it lacking. But we can understand why this happens. Budget overall is very limited for new media art. And they have this weird idea that if you make art that can be distributed digitally, that it will automatically bring in money.

There's actually a lot more arts funding going to pièces uniques that only a handful of people see on some festival, than for work that gets distributed to tens of thousands of people. But we're happy enough with what we've been able to receive. We do realize that what we're doing is very very new to them, especially in Belgium.

GSW: Is there pressure to act on feedback from users? I mean, are you finding people are looking for you to add goal oriented content?

ToT: There's always people who make suggestions about adding more traditional elements to our games. But we tend to advise them to play any of the 99.9% of games that cater to this.

The Endless Forest community is very aware of the reasons why the game is special to them. So if any new player suggests something along these lines, they are quick to explain why that is not a good idea.

GSW: How far ahead do you plan for it?

ToT: Since we don't have a reliable source of funding, there's not much planing that we can do at all. Development is kind of haphazard. Lately mostly motivated by participation in media art festivals. For those occasions, we add a bit of extra content that remains in the game after the event. It's a nice way of adding unexpected things.

But we would like it to be a bit more in control. There's a lot of things we would like to add to the game. We need to find a way to fund these.

GSW: Anything you're willing to talk about?

ToT: Apart from technical improvements we would like to implement, the most obvious addition would be the life cycle of the avatars. You start the game as a fawn. And after a month you grow into a stag. We would like to add more different ages and even death. So that here's more variation in the forest's population.

Another big thing is the introduction of all sorts of NPC creatures and areas that contain potential for stories. We have created these stories already and even have concept art for some.

Something we are also considering is the addition of a way for players to purchase special items. So they can support the game if they choose to.

And there is the desire to do stage performances with the Abiogenesis tool and live musicians.
All of these things are being discussed at length in the web forums of the game. We're actually co-designing the game with the players.

GSW: Considering that stories are so important to much of your work, does narrative have a place in The Endless Forrest, or is the experience itself the narrative?

ToT: There's a lot of narrative in The Endless Forest! It's just that we don't treat stories in the same way as movies or books might. In interactive media, it's not about story-"lines" or plot. It's about narrative environments and generative poetry. It's about the story that the players can make happen in the virtual environment.

That doesn't mean that a computer game is just a neutral tool or a toy for the player to do with as they please. The virtual environment, the characters, the atmosphere, can still be heavily authored. And they should, if you have any kind of artistic ambition.

For us, it's about creating the potential for interesting stories. Not in a linear sense, as a story you listen to from beginning to end. But sort of as a mini-version of life itself: an experience you are embedded in, an environment that is filled with narrative elements, and the possibility to explore them. The story doesn't need to be a report of activity either. It can be a mental process , too. If anything, we try to stimulate the player's imagination.

GSW: In regards to developing a "punk economy", how difficult is budgeting projects for you? Is this full time work?

We still haven't achieved our ideal "punk economy". The Path will be an important step in that direction.

We do develop games full time. There is no other way, really, for the kinds of games we want to create. It's a lot of work. Finding funding for this is part of that. Not to be underestimated in terms of time, but certainly not a full time activity. It's a matter of seeking opportunities and acting on them.

We do have a longer term business plan, in a way. But, given the goals we have set for ourselves, we need to be very flexible. We're also pioneering in that aspect, I'm afraid. There's no model that we can follow.

GSW: What's different about The Path, in that regard?

What's different is that we got a loan for its production and we need to pay it back from the proceeds. Maybe we've been spoiled by the so-called "free money" we've been getting through art grants. But when we realized that our next game was going to need to sell, it did make us think twice. Not that we ever considered making something that appeals to the masses. I'm sure we couldn't even if we tried.

It was more a matter of whether we have the guts to proceed with this project, knowing that failure would probably lead to bankruptcy. Then again, that's probably how many games are made. It sure gave us a lot more respect for the business side of the industry. But that doesn't mean we're giving in. We believe that there is a considerable audience for a game like The Path. And there's only one way to test this.

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

Now, here's an interesting one. Of course, you're expecting Austin-based indie publisher Gamecock to do something 'controversial' - it's E3 time, after all, and they're renowned for extravagantly declaiming E3's death and otherwise making a 'lovable' nuisance of themselves.

Well, this time round, partly hosted on the 'Hail To The Chimp'-promotional website at CockTheVote.us, Gamecock's Mike Wilson has announced that he's running for President of the Entertainment Software Association, the folks who put on E3. Of course, he can't actually do this, because it's not an elected position, but that won't stop him from generally goofing off in some promotional campaign videos.

There are also various other videos popping up on blog sites as E3 week continues - most recently, Destructoid revealing Wilson's running mate - his offspring, apparently, after Gamecock co-founder Harry Miller stumps up support for Mike Gallagher.

So, firstly, it seems that Destructoid commenters aren't really feeling the manufactured drama - sample comment: "Can't stand Gamecock. They need to put out a good game that warrants their cockyness and until then shut up about how they're gong to change the industry. It's easy to talk, but to deliver is a whole different story."

But I have a bigger issue with the original video, around for a few weeks, still hosted on the Cock The Vote homepage, and which seems to feature Wilson faux-peeing on a gravestone (?) throughout the vid. But it's not that - it's that the Gamecock folks list a bunch of URLs at the end of the video that they've registered as part of the campaign - and they're domain squatting on notable industry figures' personal web domains!

Some examples - RobertKotick.com, ToddHollenshead.com, DougLowenstein.com (c'mon, Gamecock-ers, he's not even in the game biz any more!), JohnRiccitiello.com, StraussZelnick.com, SeamusBlackley.com, and TripHawkins.com.

I think this was meant to be part of the gag related to political ads having URLs of supporters at the end - the voiceover says 'Paid for by the Committee To Restore Fun To The Games Industry', or similar. But all of those domains redirect to the Gamecock homepage, and a number of this folks are partly or wholly unrelated to any recent ESA kerfuffle - and probably don't appreciate having their personal domain snaffled by a 'hilarious' indie.

Anyhow, some of you may potentially find this funnier than I - it's actually not a bad concept, even if one might argue that it's more publicity reflected onto Gamecock itself as a 'rebel' publishing unit, and away from its games. But seems like this random attention grabbing (seriously, what has Seamus Blackley got to do with the ESA?) is in danger of backfiring in a similar way to the Spike TV incident.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Yee hah, time for GameSetLinks once more, again, starting out with a discussion on Versus CluClu Land about how non-gamers can be enticed into gaming - with Pokemon, for example!

Also in here - a pretty crazy (pictured!) political ad mashing up political leaders and Street Fighter characters, as well as Captain Rainbow, a new book on Japanese arcades, Postal 3 and The Village People, and, y'know, more.

Float real smooth:

Versus CluClu Land: I Talk with my Ladyfriend about our Mutual Love of Pokemans
'I've seen many of my non-gamer friends get sucked into some pretty hardcore games. A prime example is my girlfriend, who really got into Pokémon Diamond last summer.'

Just as Fun to Watch < Columns | PopMatters
'L.B. Jeffries talks to "Boner", a gamer who has managed to build a following simply by allowing an internet audience to watch him play.'

Wonderland: Introversion & Channel 4: update
News from the source - also slightly convoluted commissioning structure explained!

iPhone Game Development - Indiegamer Developer Discussion Boards
'Sure there will be hits from small developers that make top coin, but where there is 1 hit there will be several hundred that are not methinks and turn over moderate to low or even no cash at all perhaps?'

Crispy Gamer - Feature: The 10 People We Hope Will Shut the F*** Up at This Year's E3
Anonymous vitriol alert!

Video: Captain Rainbow, Nintendo's Fabulous New Wii Game | Game | Life from Wired.com
What happens if you eat too many Skittles and have previously created Chibi Robo, it appears.

Stanford workshop offers perspectives on preservation issues in virtual worlds | How They Got Game
'How will businesses, government organizations, and academic institutions preserve and manage knowledge emerging from work in these spaces?'

Amazon.com: Arcade Mania: The Turbo-charged World of Japan's Game Centers: Brian Ashcraft, Jean Snow: Books
Interesting - from Kotaku and Wired News staffers - coming out from Kodansha later this year - fun topic.

Go POSTAL: 'POSTAL III to star The Village People's Original Cowboy Randy Jones'
Have. No. Words.

Avaaz.org - 'Street Fighter ad in Financial Times'
Wow, extremely wacky.

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

[Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer was kind enough to cover the fascinating Games, Learning and Society Conference for us - we'll be posting daily bonus GSW write-ups from his explorations at the conf, starting with this one!]

Professor James Gee kicked off the 4th Games, Learning, and Society Conference in Madison, Wisconsin with a talk entitled “Beyond Games & the Future of Learning”, citing titles from Portal to World Of Warcraft to explain why games are uniquely suited to create 'passion communities' where learning can thrive.

Gee is Professor of Literacy at Arizona State University and the author of 'What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy' (2003) and 'Why Video Games Are Good For Your Soul' (2005).

Gee sees the current U.S. educational system as inadequate to the task of addressing the problems of an increasingly complex world. He stated that “21st century learning must be about understanding complex systems,” and he believes many video games do a better job at this than the antiquated sender-receiver teaching model that dominates American classrooms.

“We're at the point where we must make choices. What do we want to be about?” Gee sees two separate educational systems operating today: one a traditional approach to learning; the other what Gee calls “passion communities.”

In Gee's view, the latter produce real knowledge. Video games, virtual worlds and online social networks provide environments in which these passion communities can form and thrive.

Passion communities encourage and enable people of all ages to do extraordinary things. Gee believes the 'amateur knowledge' that arises from this immersive involvement often surpasses 'expert knowledge,' and cited fantasy baseball as an example.

The boundaries between the 'fantasy' game and the 'real' game have been blurred because fantasy players' expertise in statistical analysis has had a measurable impact on how MLB teams evaluate players.

Passion communities exist, according to Gee, to “give people status and control, not always money.” He recounted the story of a young girl who began making clothes for her Sims characters. When she wanted more textures than the game provided, she taught herself to use Photoshop to create her own.

Eventually, she moved to Second Life and began selling her own original designs. When asked if she planned to pursue her interest in fashion, she said no. “I want to work with computers because they give you power.”

“This is an alternative learning system that teaches more effectively than most schools,” Gee observed. “We need to learn how to organize a learning, passion system community. Game designers know how to do this.”

Gee noted that games often require complex problem solving and cited Portal as an excellent example – noting ironically that the game can be seen as a parody of traditional schooling. He cited a description of the game from Valve's website: “The game is designed to change the way players approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment."

What, Gee wondered, if a school could do that? “Education isn't about telling people stuff, it's about giving them tools that enable them to see the world in a new and useful way.”

Gee believes games elicit empathy for a complex system. “That's what games at their best can do. The passive spectator gains insight by getting involved.” As players engage with games by creating mods, for example, they are creating tools that “theorize their play as they play.”

In fact, it's suggested, World of Warcraft mods created by expert players “eventually eat the experience,” providing a kind of emergent play that is superior to the experience built by the designers.

Gee sees broad implications for students in this regard. “Give students smart tools and let them use them and modify them to suit their purposes.” Such self-motivated learning moves students away from merely consuming knowledge and encourages them to produce knowledge and apply it in meaningful ways.

Furthermore, Gee observed, when communities form around these activities, they are linked by a common endeavor, rather than by race, class, gender, or disability.

Gee clearly situates video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy with genuine power to transform students and equip them to address complex problems.

If passion communities could be formed to solve real-world problems like hunger and environmental degradation, Gee believes we would be much better equipped to face these issues head-on. The challenge, according to Gee, isn't just about teaching our kids; it's about ensuring they have a viable world to live in.

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

[Our own Chris Remo was at this morning's Microsoft press conference, and after its conclusion he kicks back to recap and ask - what did its notable announcements and array of on-stage demonstrations do for the Xbox 360 for the rest of 2008?]

Microsoft's press conference kicked off this year's E3 Media & Business Summit (the second annual event since that more subdued rechristening), and while it had plenty of announcements to let loose, few of them regarded newly-revealed games.

Pushing Online Features

Microsoft Interactive Entertainment Business senior vice president Don Mattrick emphasized this point, opening by stating, "Big franchises are the mainstay of this industry, and the biggest sellers are on Xbox 360."

He listed four upcoming titles - Fallout 3, Fable 2, Gears of War 2, and Resident Evil 5 (all sequels, two of which are multiplatform) as being worth "over half a billion dollars in projected sales" combined.

Each game was demonstrated by its creative lead - Todd Howard of Bethesda Game Studios, Peter Molyneux of Lionhead, Cliff "Don't Call Me CliffyB" Bleszinski of Epic Games, and Jun Takeuchi of Capcom respectively. The highlight feature announcements for each? Xbox Live content or functionality.

Said Howard, "I want to say how much we love Xbox Live Marketplace. I'm happy to announce we're going to be doing substantial downloadable content for Fallout 3, and it will be exclusive for Xbox 360 and Games for Windows." Both Fable 2 and Resident Evil 5 will feature previously-unannounced online co-op modes, and Gears 2 will include a separate five-player co-op gametype.

Stealing The Social Thunder

In an attempt to drive home its own efforts in the social and casual arenas - undeniably the central battleground of this console generation - and attract attention away from Nintendo and Sony initiatives in those areas, Microsoft is drawing from both competitors.

Its new Xbox 360 interface, which launches this fall, is considerably cleaner than the existing glowing-spaceship look of the current dashboard, with a linear horizontal menu reminiscent of Sony's cross media bar.

"Today, for the first time, a consumer elecronics device will be completely reinvented through software. Everyone, welcome to the new Xbox experience," said Microsoft corporate VP John Schappert, to slightly delayed applause.

Meanwhile, the system is populated by Rare-developed Mii-like avatars - Microsoft is clearly attempting to leapfrog Nintendo's Miis, and compete with Sony's Home, when it comes to integrating those avatars into online social activity. Expect to see them show up in casual titles going forward.

In fact, casual titles made up the bulk of actual new game announcements - and Microsoft's Genevieve Waldman disco danced enthusiastically to Zoe Mode's EyeToy-like Live camera-based minigame-fest You're In the Movies.

Other titles like iNis' heavily-rumored, heavily-leaked karaoke offering Lips (pictured) and Krome's sequel to Scene-It?, drove home Microsoft's desire to control a space in which it has traditionally been the weakest of the three console manufacturer.

It remains to be seen if the system will overcome that image, but whatever the outcome, it won't be for lack of trying.

The Sound Of Music

As is often the case during first-party presentations, third parties attempted to outdo one another in their respective market segments, without being too visibly competitive. This was most obviously exemplefied by Harmonix's Alex Rigopulos, pushing Rock Band 2, and RedOctane's Kai Huang, pushing Guitar Hero: World Tour.

Both developers trumpeted the dawning of their respective titles as true music platforms, with unimaginable numbers of master tracks available. Applause was generally subdued ("I'm really excited to be here today to talk about Guitar Hero!" yelled Huang to Ridge Racer-like response), likely because most of the information was already known.

Rigopulos coaxed out the crowd's most enthusiastic reation when gave the still-already-known-but-exciting-nonetheless news that all existing Rock Band DLC, as well as most on-disc content, would be forward compatible with 2.

In the end, the Lips presentation stole the music game show when recording artist Duffy (I hadn't heard of her, but apparently others had!) took the stage to sing along to one of her own tracks.

"I don't think I've ever had such an amazing time singing that song," she said rotely, with more than a faint hint of teleprompter. "Thank you for the amazing pleasure."

...But Just One More Thing

To cap off a conference that was, until then, more about attempting to demonstrate a superior experience than to blow the doors down with megaton announcements, Square Enix's Yoichi Wada came to the stage to show a few new trailers and announce that The Last Remnant would debut on Xbox 360 and see a PC release.

The announcements were well-received, but not rapturously so, and Mattrick thanked Wada before announcing the conference ended.

But in a bit of Steve Jobs-esque showmanship, Wada returned to the stage. "Don. I do have one last important announcement to share. Please take a look at this movie," he said, and rolled a new trailer of Final Fantasy XIII.

"At long last, the day we have all been waiting for has arrived," Wada said. It gives me great pleasure to be able to unveil this to you today. An Xbox 360 version of Final Fantasy XIII is planned for release." Then gaming forums worldwide exploded.

Overall? Seemingly satisfied it has already demonstrated a broad, inclusive library for its Xbox 360, Microsoft mainly focused on value added propositions such as online offerings, video services, and exclusive downloadable content for high-profile titles. It was a well-orchestrated and impressive, if not earth-shaking result.

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

['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This latest column analyzes the story and message behind casual title Ciao Bella.]

PC casual game Ciao Bella is a time-management game, of sorts: not the kind where you race from place to place assembling hamburgers or grooming pets, but a game about scheduling events into the densely-packed life of a young woman named Elena. There are only so many hours in the day, and too many things to get done, so you have to choose for her -- what do you want to give priority, and what can you afford to let slide?

I've argued before that this is actually quite a good mechanic for interactive storytelling about relationships, because it allows the player to articulate priorities and preferences in much the same way that we in fact do in our lives. Only part of our interpersonal interaction is about what exactly we say to one another when we're actually together; the rest is about how much time and attention we mark off for the people in our lives, and which responsibilities we allow to override which others.

And Ciao Bella bases its mechanic on that.

It has some hiccups in the design, though, which undermine what it's trying to do. One of the most serious flaws, I think, is the fact that the second level -- one that the player is likely to encounter during the hour of unpaid demo play -- seems very very hard.

I found the experience so frustrating that I almost didn't come back and buy the full version. In the end I got the game mostly because I am so interested in this mechanic of scheduling that it seemed worth persisting with an apparently flawed design.

In retrospect, part of what made that second level so difficult was that I was expecting too much of myself. Like many games, Ciao Bella offers the player several missions to complete in a given level. Unlike, say, Miss Management, which clearly indicates which tasks are optional and which are mandatory, Ciao Bella has no such obvious distinction. So I was making the level hard for myself by persisting at a very challenging task -- helping out a family member who needed a host of special errands done -- at the expense of my character's other goals for herself.

I also discovered on looking at walkthroughs that I happened to be very unlucky in trying to make use of randomized benefits that could have come my way: there's a church to pray in, and sometimes beseeching God produces sums of money to help with your problems. I gather that you can also raise your chances by assisting with renovations in the church. (Analyzing this quid pro quo view of religion is beyond the scope of the present review.)

In any case, when playing through the demo version, I just happened not to luck into divine favor much. So I was stuck trying and trying to optimize a puzzle that turns out to be extremely hard -- maybe even impossible -- unless the luck breaks your way.

Now, the weird thing is that this frustrating cycle also produced the most memorable storytelling/character-development aspect of the game. It took me many playthroughs of the level (including several after I'd broken down and bought the full version of the game) to think: what happens if I don't do what I've been asked to do?

What if I put my own goals above those of my family? Can I still win the level? And, of course, I could -- a discovery that felt like a personal breakthrough, one in which I-as-Elena realized that it was possible to reject the more ludicrous pressures on her and live her own life.

I think it might have been a good design idea to postpone that cycle of frustration until a little later in the game, though, and let the player get a bit more invested before turning up the difficulty. Or, perhaps, to have some more indication within the game that goals could be optional.

Once I was past that hard discovery, the game rolled along considerably more smoothly. I didn't always accomplish everything that everyone wanted me to, but I had learned that it was possible to do a sort of balancing act: that I could help out my friends and family -- and should -- but that that shouldn't come completely at the expense of my own goals for each level.

The basic message here is, I think, a reasonably healthy one -- that the protagonist has things to do for her family and within her community, but that she also needs to be responsible for setting her boundaries and making time for herself. That includes activities that increase her sense of "harmony", from reading to yoga to going to the movies. I mostly disagree with the criticism that Ciao Bella is deeply regressive, that it forces the female protagonist into a set of subservient and unrespected roles. Elena needs to eat right and exercise in order to get through the game, but this is presented mostly as a matter of health, rather than weight maintenance to fit into some specific look.

She's allowed to work as a waitress or an accountant (and will need to do both at various points in the game), but there's no particular indication that the waitressing job is meant to be the total of her abilities -- it's just that her family owns this cafe, and sometimes it's useful for her to help out.

There are indeed some points at which stereotypes of gender and ethnicity come into play -- though these stereotypes are delineated with more nuance than the ones that provide so many casual games with, say, the characteristics of the Italian vs. the Asian-themed restaurants. In many games, a cultural context is just wallpaper to make one level look less like another. In Ciao Bella, there's a sense of a definite time, place, and community. The participants' attitudes may occasionally be uncomfortable, but that's presented as part of their character.

All that said, I think Ciao Bella stops short of being as interesting a story as it could have been, or using its interactivity for greatest emotional effect, and the reasons do have to do with ideology.

Overall, Ciao Bella felt to me like a game version of those women's novels with hot pink or lime green covers, on which a stylishly-drawn cartoon protagonist is seen with shopping bags in each hand. These books tend to be less socially conservative than the average romance category novel: they don't always end with a wedding, and the heroine is usually concerned with her career as well as, or instead of, obsessing about future children.

The heroine's family is slightly dysfunctional; her friends outspoken; her boss second cousin to Lucifer. She worries and worries over her relationship to one or more men, and ends up, ultimately, with things more or less sorted out. They don't exactly present a repressive patriarchal view -- women are allowed and encouraged to have their own views, ambitions, and plans, and if they're often shown liking to shop, they're usually given plenty of other less stereotypical interests as well.

But very often, in these novels, the romantic problem is framed as an extension of the heroine's more general difficulty making her life chic, efficient, and glamorous. If only she buys the right shoes, keeps the right diet, laughs at the right jokes, then the man of her dreams will be at her feet. It's a take on life that's half The Rules, half home shopping channel.

A happy existence is something constructed through a combination of consumerism (to make yourself appear enticing and successful to others) and ruthless self-discipline (to make sure you nonetheless excel at your job, diet, and social obligations, and never, ever expose your vulnerabilities to a man).

And that's the ideology Ciao Bella reinforces. One spends the levels interacting with Elena's friends and family, solving their problems and sometimes receiving help from them, while also maintaining one's sanity and health. This takes hard work, daily gym visits, and extensive use of the options available at the mall. Dates with Elio, the hero, are doled out as rewards only: if you've done well enough, you get a romantic evening with him. If not... well, too bad! But you don't interact with him during the week, except occasionally to receive additional phone calls giving you things to do. He never becomes an ally or confidant in any functional sense.

As a result, the game's romance, which is supposed to be its main point, its arc story around which all the episodes are based, is its least interesting aspect. I was far more emotionally involved with the parents, sister, brother-in-law, uncle -- because my exasperation with them, and gratitude to them, was driven by the interaction rather than by the cut scenes.

Elio, on the other hand, came to seem like a dictatorial nuisance who, each week, announced when, where, and under what circumstances he wanted to see me a week later -- and then left me to live up to his expectations. In game mechanics this is an effective way of establishing level goals. But from a story-telling perspective, it's a terrible way to set up a romantic hero.

[Emily Short is an interactive fiction author and part of the team behind Inform 7, a language for IF creation. She also maintains a blog on interactive fiction and related topics. She can be reached at emshort AT mindspring DOT com.]

Posted by Emily Short at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As E3 rapidly encroaches - and yes, we have a lot of Game Developer and Gamasutra staffers mingling with the unsuspecting populace of the Los Angeles Convention Center area - it's worth rounding up the interviews we did on Gama in the tail end of last week.

And there's some pretty neat stuff in here, actually - particularly a mammoth Soren Johnson interview about his work on Spore and the state of the RTS, but also chats with Games For Windows' Kevin Unangst, the folks behind new classic PC game download site GOG.com, honesty from the Swedes at GRIN, and a bonus 'What Gamers Want' article.

Blast go go:

Interview: Soren Johnson - Spore's Strategist
"Having lead designed Civilization IV, Soren Johnson was a perfect addition to round out Will Wright's team completing Spore - and in this in-depth Gamasutra interview, he discusses the game's layers, franchise plans, and more."

In-Depth: Far Cry 2's Guay Talks Dunia Engine, State Of PC
"Ubisoft Montreal's Far Cry 2 is an ambitious open-world sequel to Crytek's original, and engineering director Dominic Guay has been talking to Gamasutra about the game's new Dunia engine, team management, and why it's "probably not a good idea to make an only high-end PC game.""

GRIN Co-Founders On The Hard Road For Independent Developers
"Swedish-based developer GRIN has had a tough path to success, and founders Bo and Ulf Andersson (Bionic Commando) have been discussing the hard lessons on founding and growing an independent studio, suggesting "you’re not making a game for a gamer, you’re making a game for a publisher.""

Microsoft's Unangst: 'Too Early To Judge' Microsoft's PC Progress
"Microsoft's Kevin Unangst heads up the company's Games For Windows efforts, and in this in-depth Gamasutra interview, he discusses how Microsoft Game Studios has learned lessons from Gears of War, and Shadowrun and why it's "way too early to judge or put a report card out" on the company's PC efforts."

Q&A: GameTap On Grimm Pushing Episodic Further
"Turner-owned PC gaming site GameTap is preparing to debut the episodic American McGee's Grimm with an intriguing new business model, with each bite-sized instalment available for free for 24 hours - we talk to the site's Rick Sanchez about episodic gaming's opportunities."

Interview: CD-Projekt A-'GOG' About Classic PC Game Download Site
"The Witcher developer CD-Projekt has revealed GOG.com, an upcoming site offering DRM-free downloads of classic PC games, with games such as Fallout and MDK on board, and Gamasutra spoke with the company's Tom Ohle about the project."

BONUS: What Gamers Want: Silver Gamers
"How should game creators build titles to appeal to wider audiences? Following Gamasutra's look at kid-focused gaming, observing older gamers gave us 10 more lessons for game creators."

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

['Bell, Game, and Candle' is a regular new GameSetWatch column by game commentator Alex Litel, discussing stuff that happens in the game business.]

I, self-described all-around interactive aficionado Alex Litel, am here to deliver a definitive debriefing on the “hot stuff” to look forward to at this week’s E3 Media & Business Summit that will occur at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Downtown Los Angeles. You may not have heard of some of these games before. Well, now you have.

The Panic in Needle Park Game: A few months ago, I copped some hazel named The Panic of Needle Park from my balloon Netflix. I must admit that I only cooked sixty-three percent of the hazel, but I assume Bob and Helen kick their habits and open a detective agency or bakery. If this is the case, Epicenter Studios is bringing us Sam & Max with humans in place of the dog and rabbit or Cooking Mama sans kitsch. In the improbable instance I am incorrect, I imagine this is a cross between the 2005 version of Narc and that one mission in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 where you collect pink elephants.

Sam Mendes’ Yellow Lasers: Nintendo heard the monotonous shrills of gamers all over the globe demanding more mature titles for the Wii and DS and took action by beaming a bunch of money (via Bluetooth) to Sam Mendes in exchange for his help in crafting what the fact sheet describes as “the most mature work to ever grace the medium.” The game, developed by Retro Studios, “captures the sincere and unadulterated thematic language that has put Sam Mendes at the forefront of British people creating media about America.” The trailer I am not supposed to be telling you about is wicked confusing: a cheerleader in clown makeup engages in racketeering solely because she is bored. Also, according to an insider source, the game involves lasers that are yellow. And by insider source, I mean the title.

LEGO Dog Day Afternoon: Finally, Warner Bros. purchase of Traveller’s Tales appears justified with this unique take on one of the studio’s most famous and acclaimed pictures. The unique charm of TT’s past LEGO adventures has been retained, but the game’s action is primarily “non-verbal communicative gameplay” more along the lines of a mute, cute Façade than block-busting. Seeking to the maximize the value of LEGO Dog Day Afternoon, the game will depart from the film by depicting the robbery in real time in the frame of fourteen hours as actual event occurred and featuring “more than four hundred endings.”

A&R: BioWare Austin’s highly anticipated massively multiplayer game takes place not in the dungeons or far off planets of some established intellectual property, but an industrial netherworld in pragmatic, allegedly irreversible crisis. You obviously assume the role as one in the earthly field of Artists and Repertoire in a dynamic mirror of the real life music industry. Will you go with an indie or major? Will your heart be in it? Will you sink to avaricious depths? Will I stop asking rhetorical questions? It is up to you.

You’ve Got Mail Basketball II: Rebounds Deleted: When Gameloft put out You’ve Got Mail Basketball last year, they brought absolute joy to the three people who wished Nora Ephron would somehow involve herself with basketball. This is obviously the sequel to that game, but the real noteworthy quality about You’ve Got Mail Basketball II: Rebounds Deleted is that the man at the forefront of Anglo nasality—Ira Glass himself—provides color commentary. Yeah, I too had the same “like, wow, this auditory combination is really going to be awkward in a way that is, you know, unprecedented in this medium” response as when I read that The Coup were doing the theme song to MX Superfly. Then, I heard some Ira’s commentary and realized he is simply reading lines written by Nora Ephron.

Madden NFL 2009: A lot of people were puzzled when Electronic Arts announced that they were eschewing the football in favor of "an interactive experience" based on an unfinished and unpublished science fiction novel by Sinclair Lewis for Madden NFL 2008. Then a number of those people played Madden NFL 2008 multiple times, and had little clue on what was happening in the eighty-seven hours or so they spent playing the game, but it was indulgently phantasmagoric. The finale of the game with Milt’s three-hour speech was ethereally didactic, albeit incomplete, and closed with the unforgettable "I snort periphery and I reject superlatives from." I'm happy to report that this year's iteration explains who Milt rejects superlatives from and that acclaimed composer Steve Schnur—whose cacophonous, rough score was primarily why last year’s title was remembered so fondly in the ears of gamers—returns to soundtrack this time around.

In addition to these future masterpieces, there is also the crop of titles announced at E3 that are certain to be “innovative and creative” with the ability to “not just thrill the ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore,’ but attract new demographics to gaming.”

[Alex Litel can be reached at alexlitel@gmail.com and occasionally found at alexlitel.blogspot.com.]

Posted by Alex Litel at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

   

I've seen some scary magazine covers in my time (EGM whenever they covered a Resident Evil game, for example), but I think I may have found a new all-time scary-cover champion in the April 1984 edition of British mag Your Computer.

The cover story is about a suite of software that teaches you languages through mnemonics like the one pictured ("monkey" is "mono" in Spanish). Magazine conventional wisdom says that having the cover subject look directly at the viewer helps attract people's attention on the newsstand, but this is ridiculous. And what's that thing sitting on the middle of the keyboard? A raisin? That better be a raisin.

I've always wanted a few physical copies of Your Computer for my collection because being the most popular multiplatform PC mag of the time in the UK (its ABC figure for the second half of 1983 was 122,642 copies, making it more popular than even most US computer mags back then), it is a perfect snapshot of the utterly chaotic European computer marketplace of the early 80s.

Despite being late spring/summer issues, both books I have are over 200 pages and packed with advertisements from literally every major player in hardware, software and games at the time, including many from big Euro players that hardly (if ever) existed in the US like Sinclair, Amstrad, Memotech, and Acorn Computers.

(Then there are odd surprises, like an ad from Renault that promises a free Sinclair ZX Spectrum if you buy their new sedan. Considering a Spectrum went for £99 new at the time, this was really not much of a deal.)

Contentwise, Your Computer is probably most similar to COMPUTE! in the US, although with a traditional British design of multiple columns per page marching all the way down to the margins and lots of interstitial artwork. The mag can be cleanly divided into two parts -- one with letters and hardware/software reviews, and one with lots and lots of program listings.

If you thought COMPUTE! had a lot of BASIC listings circa 1983, it has nothing on Your Computer -- there's a good dozen in every issue for all kinds of different computer platforms. The mag is somewhat infamous in the UK for publishing listings that didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of working, even after one or two corrections printed in future issues, a problem exacerbated by really tiny program printouts and a lack of any automatic-proofreader program like every US mag had by this time.

Nearly every program includes a notice from the author that he'll send you a cassette with the software for two or three pounds to save you the trouble of typing, and I can't help but wonder if many submitters made more money this way than through the standard £35/page rate Your Computer claimed to pay.

(I am through with typing in BASIC listings for now, but judging by the screens, some of these games are pretty good -- there's a Commodore 64 Pac-Man clone that looks rad but is made of a massive ocean of hex code that scares me.)

Your Computer's heyday was in 1983-84, before the computer-industry slowdown of '84 and the advent of platform-specific computer and game mags in the UK took away much of its audience.

Its last issue was in 1988, by which time mags like Your Sinclair and Zzap!64 were easily outselling it. As a resource on what the UK's "wild west" computing era was like, though, I can't think of anything better than this one.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The GameSetLinks hits the weekend, with news of some new PSN titles via sister 'console download' site GamerBytes, but also sad news that the Slamdance Games Festival is cancelled for the foreseeable future - after submissions were made for a festival to be held in Los Angeles later this year.

While it certainly got embroiled in controversy at one point, Slamdance was the first major indie games festival outside of the IGF, and helped pave the way for further festivals/showcases such as PAX 10 and Indiecade. So it will be missed.

Un deux trois:

Analyst Whacks Entertainment Industry: Major Cannibalization Set To Begin… Now | paidContent.org
Really interesting graphs on the rise and fall of VHS vs. DVD, cassette vs. CD.

GamerBytes - PlayStation Support Site Leaks New PSN Titles?
Including (pictured) IGF finalist Cinnamon Beats, very neat indeed.

Slamdance - Games Festival cancellation announcement
'It is with heavy hearts that we announce the cancellation of the Slamdance Games Festival for the foreseeable future.' Sorry to hear that - the summer L.A. event didn't work out for them.

Remowned » Blog Archive » Microsoft employee to score hot industry scoops
I'm afraid I showed Remo this page and turned on the torrent of hate. Sorry, guys :P

The Escapist : Ten Things That Don't Suck About the Game Industry
Hey, Jason Della Rocca is happy about things, hurray!

Toastyfrog.com: Games - Everything Wrong Is Right Again
Parish: 'Mega Man 9 may save video games.'

The Gawker Media Style Guide (Magical Wasteland)
Oh dear. Funny but also the reasons why I find Gawker sites readable simultaneously, heh.

Game On: What's Wrong with the Cutscenes-in-Games Debate
Excellent critique of the recent Gamasutra opinion piece.

Versus CluClu Land: I Asked Harmonix about Note Tracking, and Here's What I Learned
V.interesting! Via Insult Swordfighting.

T=Machine » Kongregate’s Rating/Reputation systems
“I saw this game on [other portal] and [other portal], but I wasn’t going to invest the time playing it until it came to Kong and got badges” Kongregate is the Xbox Live for online games?

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

['The Z-Axis' is a bi-weekly column from game writer Michael Zenke, stretching games and gaming trends out planarly to poke, caress, and pinpoint the innards of what makes them great. This week, he crankily denounces beautiful graphics in favor of focusing on other aspects of game development]

The modern face of game development is like that of Janus, the two-faced god. Out of one side game developers and industry commentators praise modern storytelling techniques, cheering on the fledgling stages of an up-and-coming art form. The other face (voiced by those same developers and commenters) is bellowing buzzwords and systems specs to a crowd of slavering graphics-porn aficionados.

Not only do both of these faces let slip a lie or two as they wail, they're working very much at cross purposes. In trying to work both sides of the coin, developers harm themselves, their audience, and ultimately their game. Ultimately the drive for more realistic graphics is a fool's errand, a tilting-at-windmills crusade undertaken by companies more interested in making a buck than in creating a compelling experience.

Today I'd like to explore how the drive for graphical excellence has forever muddied the waters of game creation. While PC game developers are particularly guilty of this, console developers bear just as much of the guilt.

There is hope, of course, as some developers turn their backs on the siren song of "moar pretty". Still, the laundry list of titles released too little or too late because game-makers listened to Janus is far, far too long.

But It Looks So Good

Let me clarify what I'm saying here. There is a fundamental difference between a game's graphical presentation (hardware requirements, architecture, technologies) and a game's artistic presentation (art assets). I love game art. I think that beautiful visual experiences are one of the main reasons to play games, be they simple handheld puzzlers or epic story-based console affairs.

Game art, though, is a measure of the skill of the artists on staff. The ability of talented women and men to put pencil to paper, digital ink to digital canvas. This skill, this art, is as much a part of a game's soul as the story, gameplay, and dialogue of a title.

The graphics engine used to render that art is technology. It's systems engineering, low-level design choices, hardware interactions and compliance tests. I have a lot of respect for the people that do that work, but fundamentally I think that these elements do not a game make. They're the substructure, the support, that allows a game to happen - and ultimately these systems should serve the game. The game shouldn't have to be bent, tweaked, or twisted to serve the engineering.

Games where the structure takes precedence are numerous, and ultimately even a great game can be weakened by overeager system specs. Wouldn't BioShock have been even more widely regarded if it had run on more systems? How much has Age of Conan's rocky launch been affected by the graphical fidelity Funcom sought out?

Why It Doesn't Have To Look So Good

The last few years of gaming have proven, on several levels, how successful games can be when engineering works to serve the game's best interests. My personal familiarity with online gaming leads me to draw from that genre for examples, and pulls up possibly the best argument on the side of art: Arena.net's Guild Wars.

Guild Wars is a wildly successful online RPG, an MMO with no reoccurring monthly fee. The game's unlimited playability is no doubt a contributing factor to its success, but the game's visual experience has to be seen to be believed. Sweeping vistas, alien landscapes, towering cityscapes, all pulled from the minds of Arena's stable of imaginative concept artists.

And everything renders without a stutter, pop, or slowdown on machines even three or four years old. Guild Wars is a liquid experience because the Arena engineers pride themselves on making a small, fast, tight game. Instead of striving for realism and falling inevitably short, Arena.net created a beautiful experience that still looks beautiful even years after the game was released.

This is what games should be about: fun without the fluster. Why try to reinvent the wheel for the 400th time? Say something meaningful through a well-turned phrase, a beautiful drawing, and a really fun level or two.

Not Just a PC Thing

Many players probably feel this way about PC games, but console gamers are suffering under the same yoke. While it's easy to point out the technological brilliance of Mass Effect, to ooh and ahh over the realistic facial expressions and conversation system, couldn't that goal have been reached sans five-minute-elevator-sequences?

More obviously, console games take just as long (or longer) to develop than PC games. What's going to result in a better game: a three year dev cycle with all new tech dominated by bug fixing, or a two year dev cycle based on existing technology dominated by content polishing?

Regardless of platform, design for the sake of engineering is a disservice to the player. Every second the player waits for your game to load because of that shiny rendering engine is a moment he could be having fun. If games are supposed to be doorways into new realms, doesn't it behoove the industry as a whole to make stepping across that threshold as painless as possible?

Forget About the Porn

My fundamental frustration with this element of the games industry is that it's all about pornography. It's about the conquest of new graphical terrain, hardware thrumming in straining boxes, and high-voiced smacktards grinning as their eyes consume polygons and framerate counts. Why does every game company have to be Marco fricking Polo when it comes exploring game spaces? Do they really think their revolutionary ideas about isometric hack and slash RPGs are going to remake the map? That their FPS-lite stealth game will shake the foundations of the industry?

Engineers are explorers. They break new ground in the sphere of possibility, opening up new realms to observe and utilize. Artists are communicators. They convey ideas and concepts, illuminating ideas within the human mind. These two disciplines are equally important, and equally valid approaches to making games.

We've seen a lot of exploration and engineering. We all know game developers can push NVidia's chipset past the breaking point. All I ask is, why not see what the industry can do with some year-old hardware, a decent writer, and a couple of great artists? Just for a change of pace?

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

[Wanted to make sure all the GameSetWatch readers saw this it's great to see the Penny-Arcade Expo folks highlighting indie gaming, and this is a really good mix of student, PC indie, and console indie titles with intriguing and alternative gameplay aspects. Bravo.]

Organizers of the Penny Arcade Expo have announced the winners of its "PAX 10" independent games showcase, to be featured at the August 29-31st Expo in Seattle, including Audiosurf, Schizoid, and The Maw.

With the call for entries first announced in February, the now confirmed ten top winners have received four exhibitor badges and a floor kiosk to demonstrate the game at the forthcoming expo.

Expo attendees will vote on the games exhibited, and will award one with the "Audience Choice Award," which will be announced on the PAX website following the show, held at the Washington State Trade and Convention Center in Seattle.

The full list of winners - with further information available on the official Penny Arcade Expo website - includes:

- The Amazing Brain Train by Grubby Games (puzzle/strategy)
- Audiosurf by Dylan Fitterer (rhythm/action)
- Chronotron by Scarybug Games (puzzle/platformer)
- Impulse by a team of Rochester Institute of Technology students (puzzle)
- The Maw by Twisted Pixel Games (action/adventure)
- Polarity by a team of Carnegie Mellon University students (platformer/puzzle)
- Project Aftermath by Games Faction (tactical/action)
- Schizoid by Torpex Games (action/strategy)
- Strange Attractors 2 by Ominous Development (puzzle/strategy)
- Sushi Bar Samurai by Molly Rocket (exploratory puzzle)

Said Penny Arcade's Robert Khoo, "The variety and caliber of the titles blew us away. Narrowing down the group was a challenging process for the judges, but we're incredibly proud to have these ten games as our kickoff showcase and can't wait to see them on the show floor."

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

[How are exclusive titles affecting PC casual game portals? In an article that has wider digital distribution implications, Reflexive Entertainment's director of marketing Russell Carroll (Wik, Ricochet) delves into the "coopetition" between online gaming portals - and how developers can get caught in the middle.]

The casual games industry got its beginnings online with downloadable PC games. That birth was recent enough to rightly refer to the industry as "in its infancy." With infancy comes both growing up and growing pains, and currently, the industry is experiencing the later.

Competition

In the downloadable PC space, each of the casual game portals fights for customer eyes as it attempts to sell ever more copies of Diner Dash and Bejeweled. There are literally hundreds of websites selling casual games to online customers, but as is the case in any industry, there are a few locations that dominate most of the sales.

Much like Target and Wal-Mart, the largest portals fight over similar customers who are likely to pick one retailer and spend most of their time shopping there. There is nothing amiss in any of this. It's simply capitalism and business as applied to the casual games industry. That is, it's all normal, until you add the next factor.

Cooperation

Unlike other industries, most of the players in the PC casual space are both creators and distributors. They make games in addition to distributing games through their own portals. As a game developer, it is financially advantageous to distribute games not only through your own portal, but also through your competitor's portal.

Coopetition

This leads to a very tenuous balance in the PC industry, where the portals work both competitively and cooperatively with other portals in something I call coopetition. As you might guess, there are flare-ups in this relationship that depending on your point of view are good or bad for the casual game business on the PC.

In fact, one of those flare-ups has occurred over the last few weeks, which has me very interested, and so as a wartime reporter who happens to be entrenched in the action, I thought I'd share a little bit of the news from the front lines.

First Shots

Last October, I wrote an article discussing the differences between the portals and some of combative interactions between them. I want to revisit just one part of that article here, and that is the first maneuvers made by the portals in their coopetition battle.

I noted in that article that there was a large difference in game catalogues between the largest game portals. This came about as some of the portals felt that selling games created by their competitors was negatively impacting them.

In what was the first major offensive in the battle between portals, the major game catalog holders both pulled their game catalogues from each other and stopped distributing their own games on their competitor's portals.

The effect of this is portals that have increasingly unique catalogues. Personally I feel this division of game catalogues is negative for the industry - I can't imagine having to go to Target to get EA games and to Wal-Mart to get Activision games, but if you consider the situation to be more like Pepsi and Coke, then it is conceivable that it may be helping the industry.

Covert Action

Whatever concerns I've had about exclusive game catalogues, certainly the portals have seen value in having games that are exclusive. Over the last 18 months the major portals have worked feverishly to have exclusive games.

These games were exclusive for a period, typically two to four weeks, after which they were made available to the other portals. As a higher and higher number of games became exclusives, the portals started noting that once they received a game that had been exclusive elsewhere, the sales weren't what was expected.

To quote iWin, the sales were "spent."

In response to losing sales, a rumor of portals refusing to carry games that have been exclusive elsewhere has been circling the industry, and one company, iWin, has officially substantiated the rumor.

On iWin's developer relations contact page, it states that, beginning August 1, 2008:

"[iWin] will no longer be accepting games for distribution on iWin.com that are offered exclusively on another website other than the publisher's own site."

While iWin is the first to announce this policy of not accepting any game that was previously exclusive on another portal, it is not the only portal considering or implementing this, or similar, but less drastic policies that treat games that have been exclusive elsewhere as second-rate hand-me-downs.

iWin, in its thoughtful response as to why it is taking this approach (a must-read for anyone in or interested in the PC casual games industry!) compares the situation to movies, noting, "When Disney launches a blockbuster movie like Chronicles of Narnia, they don’t give Loew’s or United Artist an exclusive." The response further mentions that 70-80% of a movie's revenue comes in the first few weeks.

Though the comparison between movies and casual games isn't a perfect one, certainly if the casual game's industry follows a similar trend of a high spike of sales during the first few weeks, then missing out on those first few weeks would be extremely negative.

However, will refusing games that have been exclusive elsewhere solve the issue? What's the likely impact on the casual games industry in the PC space?

New Combatants

One of the most intriguing pieces of this new battle is how it brings the developers into the fray. Developers must choose between having exclusivity on one portal, potentially limiting their distribution, or fully distributing on all portals, and missing out on the rewards that exclusivity can bring.

There are certainly arguments that can be made as to which is the financially better approach, and certainly there is no clear path that is always financially more viable, but regardless of what path is chosen, developers are choosing a path that aligns them with one portal's approach or another's.

Developers are being unwittingly recruited into the battle and are at the forefront of the current skirmish, and as it true of all battles, those on the front lines are the most likely to be injured by the fighting.

Speculation

So what is the end result of this latest move? Until it has all played out we can only guess, but it turns out that guessing about the future of the games industry is a lot of fun, so let's have at it.

There are few industries that can support competing products that are very similar. In the PC downloadable Casual Games industry, the game catalogues between the largest portals still have a lot of overlap, but due to exclusives over the last year and a half, the titles in each portal's catalogue have become much more unique (even if the products remain VERY similar).

I expect that catalogues will continue to differentiate, and I think that is a bad thing for the industry. The separation of catalogues makes it more difficult for new brands to grow strong (notably that may mean older brands are strengthened in the current climate). Like iWin, I think creating a climate that makes it harder for new brands to grow will ultimately keep the PC space more niche.

When something is only available at Wal-Mart or at Target it hurts sales of that item overall unless it already has a strong established brand. Certainly the decreased availability of a new product does not help it in creating awareness and brand strength.

On the flip-side, exclusives, if continued, I believe are very beneficial to the individual portals. The fact that portals with an exclusive can command such a large portion of a game's sales works out tremendously to their advantage and can be used to build a base on which they can create more sales with each new exclusive. The additional earnings allow the portal to grow faster than its rivals.

While the growth of the largest portals may or may not help the developer, clearly the additional money gained from exclusives will directly help the portal and put it in a better situation than its competitors.

And The Band Played On

The casual games industry, like all other industries, exists to make money. It just so happens to be making money off of casual games, and so we tend to think that the competition is more friendly.

While certainly it's a friendly industry, the latest offensive in the battle has drawn more battle lines and has conscripted developers into the fray, making the tenuous balance a bit more tenuous and a bit less balanced.

The end results are uncertain as the battle rages on and competition heats up, but the change in how portals treat exclusive games is a major one that will greatly affect the landscape for the foreseeable future.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | 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 independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The delights in this latest version include two freeware adventure games, a physics-based puzzle game, a dimension-shifting platformer and a new monthly game from this year's IGF Grand Prize winner.

Game Pick: 'Totem Destroyer' (Gabriel Ochsenhofer, freeware)
"A physics-based puzzle game where players must attempt to remove a certain number of blocks in each stage to progress. Plays a lot like Jesse Venbrux's Mubbly Tower, but in reverse."

Game Pick: 'Dirty Split' (Dreamagination, freeware)
"A point and click adventure game with gorgeous artwork, a catchy soundtrack, professional voice acting and decent writing all woven together to create one of the more impressive freeware releases this year. Take control of a private investigator named Baxter as you attempt to solve a criminal case, which will require trips between three different cities in order to gather new clues and evidence."

Game Pick: 'Shift 3' (Antony Lavelle, browser)
"A sequel to the series of platformers based on the idea of shifting dimensions, featuring more twisted puzzles and achievements to unlock in this episode. The story starts off with a feeling of familiarity but quickly turns into an open-ended adventure with multiple paths to explore."

Game Pick: 'Jimmy's Lost His Toilet Paper' (Petri Purho, freeware)
"Another awesome monthly game under the Kloonigames banner, made in under seven days. You play as Jimmy who embarks on an epic adventure to get his roll of toilet paper back, perhaps finding love or even the meaning to his life along the way."

Game Pick: 'Beauties and Beasts' (MashPotato, freeware)
"A short adventure game created by Marina Siu-Chong for a monthly AGS One Room, One Week competition. The quest basically involves stealing items from unsuspecting contestants who are preparing themselves for a local beauty pageant event."

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

[Regular GSW column 'The Game Anthropologist' is all about gaming communities. So, last week, Michael Walbridge interviewed a number of game writers and summarized their thoughts on why so many game writers spend their spare time writing even more on their personal spaces. In the coming weeks, Walbridge will be detailing some of the key points from the individual interviews conducted for the piece. This week describes the first interview with Newsweek writer N'Gai Croal.]

N'gai was the first writer I interviewed, but not the first person I contacted. On the first day I started asking, which was June 6th, N'gai responds with "Can you do a phone interview at 4pm EST...i.e. in 20 minutes?"

Um.

I realize that it's Friday. He's a busy man, he happened to be in his office, and he has about an hour left before his work week, if it has any semblance of normal standards, is over. In short, I get lucky, and I also don't have my questions because I assumed that I'd have the weekend to write them. Guess not.

So I don't have a way of recording phone calls. I still wonder how a good way to do this would be--not everyone will agree to Skype. They may have better things to do, and they may not be interested in using a headset.

I called him in what seemed an instant later--the last time I felt like this was when I called up a girl to go on a date, a feeling I thought would never resurface in my lifetime. Who the hell do I think I am? I could talk to some of these other people, sure, but an editor at Newsweek? As my very first interview that I'm doing in video games land? When I just have one commentless little first article on a column at GameSetWatch?

"Hi," I say. My first question is incredibly stupid, yet I don't realize how laughably bad it is until weeks later; I'm still embarrassed every time I remember. "So uh, how do you pronounce your name?"
"Guy," he says. Stupid Sprint service blind spot in my stupid apartment! "Excuse me, what?" I say politely.

"Guy," I hear again.

Crap. Well, I'd better get on with it--I can find out how to pronounce it from someone else. I can do that thing where I never use his name in the conversation, and he'll never know. He's an extremely polite fellow; in what little time I had for imagination I thought that he would sound like a New Yorker, with all the speed that implies that every word being said is worth money; and your money, too, so let's get this thing the hell over with.

But that's not what he sounds like--he sounds like he could be from the Midwest, or maybe California (he went to Stanford, I learn);