[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 murder mystery adventure set in space, a frantic arena shooter, a cute Flash-based game development toolkit, and a fiendish platformer that will have many tearing their hair out in frustration.

Game Pick: 'The Vacuum' (David Proctor, freeware)
"The Vacuum is a sci-fi adventure game which tells the story of a couple traveling home inside a cargo ship, when a pair of explosions set off a chain of events that will forever change their lives. An admirable first effort by David, coded with the popular AGS engine and bears more than a passing resemblance to Yahtzee's 7 Days a Skeptic."

Game Pick: 'Torque' (Jesse Venbrux, freeware)
"A new arena shooter by the developer of Frozzd and the Karoshi series, where players get to pilot a rotating ship engaged in an intergalactic war with a nameless alien race. Plays a bit like Paperblast, but with entirely new graphics and gameplay modes."

Game Pick: 'OmniLudiCon' (Zara Tustra, browser)
"A browser-based development toolkit consisting of a fully-featured editor and a host of example games for users to test out or experiment with - no programming skills required."

Game Pick: 'Breaking the Tower' (Markus Persson, browser)
"A strategy game which involves careful resource management as you attempt to destroy the stone tower located at one end of an island. This solid coffee-break game was created in less than two days for the twelfth Ludum Dare competition."

Game Pick: 'Jumper 3' (Matt Thorson, freeware)
"The much-awaited sequel to Matt's series of frustratingly difficult platformers, where players will once again be able to assume control over Ogmo and his various forms while taking on the challenges presented by carefully-placed traps and obstacles in each area."

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

[Regular GSW column 'The Game Anthropologist' is all about gaming communities. This week, Michael Walbridge attempts to summarize the world of the World of Warcraft in its entirety.]

"Oh no, not another article about World of Warcraft. Tired of hearing about it." If you've ever thought that, stop reading. You won't find this interesting.

Some of you still are reading, though, and we both know why that is: because the topic is humongous. There is the universe, and there are galaxies, solar systems, and planets. There are development platforms and genres, there is World of Warcraft, and there are individual games and their communities.

World of Warcraft has spawned at least two books of published essays. One of them has an entire chapter on the most mundane of the most mundane--fishing. World of Warcraft spawns entire blogs and sites that are dedicated to the many, many corners of WoW. To the experienced gamer, games have the ability to be an entirely different experience from person to person.

To the beginning gamer who plays WoW as one of his first games, this is understood quickly instead of gradually. This leads to an opportunity for intelligent observation, the scale of which equals insight into an entire country. Take a comment from a non-official WoW forum: "At 70, you can choose from one of three factions: Raider, PVP, and Casual. You then blame the other two factions for 'ruining the game.'"

Only in an MMO that is as large as World of Warcraft is it made clearly apparent that there are all kinds of players (people) and that video games can be a setting for social interaction, larger than life. You can meet another player and that player can feel, unlike the ones you regularly play with, like someone from another country, another world, another clique.

Even the division of the players into over 100 server still leaves your own cities populated with people who make themselves authority figures, public artists, savants, professionals, entrepreneurs, professors, thieves, beggars, preachers, and thugs. All who play it, know it.

Welcome To The Real World....(Of Warcraft)

And that is the curious thing about WoW--it's the game that doesn't feel like a game, and not just because of the grinding factor. It's very easy to forget what you're doing is playing a video game. This is what makes WoW so different in the video game world in every way imaginable, including its business model, finance and profits, aesthetics, sociality, and culture. To some, there are video games and there is World of Warcraft, and that can be either an insult or a compliment.

As I've been hinting, however, there is more to WoW than its hugeness. There is a common theme, one that testifies both to its greatness and its shallowness, its "just-a-game-ness."

Even though there is a maximum level, there is still a lot of work to be done, ways to become better and more powerful. There are five ways to do that. PVP, Raiding (killing the bosses in dungeons, etc.), leveling (to 70 and then your reputation with factions), talents and crafting, and, of course, money. Just buying it.

Ways to become powerful? Isn't it just one way to become powerful? Powerful gear? Glowing weapons? Purple armor? Epic lewtz?

Well, yeah, you got me there. Multiple routes, but one destination. And that's what makes World of Warcraft the same for everyone: anyone who wants to play it seriously and long-term must subscribe to a standardized measure of success and play by such rules. The result is that unlike other multiplayer games, there is no fun in losing.

It's funny to watch other people lose, but it's not funny to actually lose. In PVP, you are usually frustrated due to teammates; in a raid, you are frustrated due to the mistakes of others leading to a lack of your progress in the game (or, conversely, you causing everyone else's lack of progress).

If you accidentally overspend, that's literally weekend time you can't get back. If the materials you need from the auction house have experienced a spike, you have to wait for the market to send prices downward, or you overspend. And no matter where you die, it always costs money, honor, and time waiting to be resurrected, whether you walk or not.

He Who Dies With The Best Loot - Wins

And that's the point: the world of the World of Warcraft is inherently, if unintentionally, materialistic. It's the rat-race, it's climbing the ladder, it's who has the best clothes in the world of fashion, who has the most money in the world of business, the most honor and acclaim amongst professors, authors, scientists, and other creators, all simplified into stats in the form of armor and weapons that are received by one of five means. In today's world, the only glory, respect, or honor that is guaranteed to transfer from world to world and gain recognition everywhere is also just as simple.

You may accuse me of being unfair to Blizzard, or of being too critical of the way the world is. I'm not here to describe Blizzard or what they've intended. I'm here to examine the people who play one of their games, and what that game's rules proscribe for the rules of sociality. And those rules are:

1. Success is the only option.
2. If your lack of success is harmful to others' success, admit your fault(s) and work to improve.

Some might say the materialism and shallow behavior one often sees in WoW is due to the volume of high-school and college students--the volume of adolescence. But it goes further than that. That reductivistic explanation doesn't work here, though. Coworkers at the workplace are usually a type of family with its own rules; family members at the home are often like workplaces with power struggles and competing ambitions. Guild drama involving married couples and people over the age of 30 occur, too.

Of course, there are still parts of the World of Warcraft that we have to figure out for ourselves, such as what's meaningful, how we choose to socialize and relate to others, and if, how, and when we want to break the rules of society. Society itself can't, shouldn't, and won't do that for us unless we let it. Neither will World of Warcraft.

Just like real life, just like work, just like dealing with people in open, public society? Yes. But here, the successes are easier and more common, and the failures have weaker consequences. If there's anything about World of Warcraft you don't get, just remember--it's a beta for real life.

Posted by Mike Walbridge at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Time for some weekend-ish GameSetLinks, headed by Ryan at sister site GamerBytes kindly pointing out what's probably the announcement of GC in Leipzig so far for me - that GTI Club is due out for PS3 digital download later this year. It's a beloved, if obscure mid-'90s arcade favorite for me, so kudos to whoever decided to dig it out.

Also hanging out in here somewhere - some preposterous deconstruction of the even more preposterous Red Alert 3 trailer, MSNBC on layoffs in the game biz (aw), the tremendous Magnetic Shaving Derby, odd Lithuanian console games you haven't noticed, and lots more besides.

Set to stun:

GamerBytes - GTI Club+ Coming To PlayStation Network
Wow, this is a cult classic arcade game particularly beloved of Europeans, so MUCH kudos to whoever decided to bring it back for PSN.

Red Alert 3 Trailer Analysis: “War and Boobs” | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Leigh and Gillen are the Sonny and Cher of live-action trailer criticism.

Jeremy's 1UP Blog: Famicom 25th, Part 25: The podcasted finale
Megaton in podcast form, with Kohler, our own Nutt, Parish and others rhapsodizing x100. PS - I had a ZX Spectrum.

Going to Space? First Stop: Eight Months of Grueling Training in Russia's Star City
Great Kushner article on Richard 'Lord British' Garriott's run into space.

Super Colossal » Componetry
Intriguing, an Australian architecture office blogging about Braid's component-based level construction and comparing to buildings.

Pink slips in the Teflon-coated games biz - On the Level- msnbc.com
Interesting piece on the recent layoffs, despite a quote from me.

IndieGames.com - The Weblog - Magnetic Shaving Derby (nyarlu labs)
Awesome DS homebrew: 'The objective of Magnetic Shaving Derby is simple - attract the razor using the magnet as you attempt to make a clean shave without incurring any injuries.'

Agetec's product page for 'Fading Shadows'
Whoa, some kind of abstract Lithuanian (!) PSP fantasy puzzle game. Interesting. It just came out, too. Also for PS2 by the same folks - Falling Stars - also looks v.intriguing.

MTV Multiplayer » If Video Game Boxes Gave Credit, They’d Look Like This…
Alllmost, but DVDs don't do this, right? Would make a lot more sense on the back of the box, not the front.

Joystick Division: Video Game News, Views and Reviews - CHUCK NORRIS: Unboxing porn?
Gameloft is _really_ doing a Chuck Norris game?

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

[Well, this is interesting - longtime GSW friend and MMO fiend Michael Zenke has been talking to some of the folks at Red 5 - recipient of almost $20 million in VC to make what is presumably meant to be a WoW-beating MMO - and they have some interesting, high-level thoughts about persistent online worlds. Can they pull it off? We'll see!]

Ed Stark and Dave Williams are veterans of the tabletop gaming industry. Between the two they’ve had a hand in publishing major revamps of pen and paper roleplaying systems, popular trading card games, and a number of board games.

Between the two they've had a hand in the revamp of Dungeons and Dragons to the 3.0 rule set, the Legend of the Five Rings RPG, the West End Star Wars Roleplaying game, and numerous card- and board- games.

Last year they joined the still-running-silent, VC-backed MMO developer Red 5, based out of Orange County, California - the World Of Warcraft veteran-founded company has been in existence since 2005, has $18.5 million in backing from Benchmark Capital and Sierra Ventures, and most recently announced former Oracle exec Michael Weingartner joining the firm as VP of engineering.

Since they signed up for the team, Stark and Williams have had the chance to realize some pretty far-out development dreams. Namely - bringing a sense of the tabletop gaming world to the grinding, sometime-soulless world of MMOs.

With the Red 5 title still very much under wraps, they still wanted the opportunity to speak on the subject of developer vision. Specifically, they wanted to address the two concepts of persistence and community, two of the core ideas around which MMOs have coalesced in the past. The level of persistence the Red 5 developers are talking about, though, seems entirely different from the average massively multiplayer game.

Though they weren’t able to provide any substantive promises, Stark and Williams offered a bold vision of an MMO shaped and molded by its players. The concept is of a game world built up of communities that reinforce each other and explore their own goals -- in short, an MMO much more like a vibrant pen and paper campaign than the usual static landscape.

What is it about persistence and community that make them so important to massively multiplayer games?

Dave Williams: It’s my opinion, and largely the opinion of the folks here at Red 5, that persistence and community are essentially the two elements that massively multiplayer games do almost exclusively compared to offline games. Offline games just cannot do persistent worlds, persistent characters - all of the things that persistence means – the way online games can.

Online games are running 24/7. Those worlds continue on even after you’ve logged off. That means something. It gives it a “world” feel. People talk about the sandbox games, and the freedom they represent, but those sandboxes disappear when you’re not inside of them.

Ed Stark: A good community will drive the interest in a game, the development of a game, will keep a game alive, for a long time. If you are playing it, if you have friends playing it, then that makes you want to play that much more. If your friends quit the game, no matter how good it is, eventually you’re not going to feel like you want to play anymore. Any MMO that doesn’t focus on providing good community tools and functionality is really missing an opportunity.

How would you say that your backgrounds with pen-and-paper gaming translates to this persistent online community-based style of gaming?

DW: Tabletop games have existed for thousands of year, and eventually they added this concept of persistence and story – D&D, basically. It went from being just this tactical experience to something where you got to change the world around you from the inside out, you get to experience the world on a more personal (rather than abstract) level.

The persistence that massively multiplayer games have right now has overtones of that, but they really miss a lot of what tabletop games have been doing since the days of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in the 70s. A lot of MMOs are a one-way street, where the player get to play “in” the world, but not affect it.

ES: Dave and I have both worked at companies where we’ve built mechanisms by which the players can affect the storylines and changes in the world directly. The thing with tabletop games is that all that reaction tends to be slow. Even if you’re publishing on the web, it takes some time for whatever mechanism you’ve created to tally the information, record the information, and then send out a response to the players.

DW: Yeah, that could be a six-month feedback loop, where the players do something cool before the world changes and the players find out what the repercussions of that are.

ES: One of the great things about MMOs is that you can develop a computer’s artificial intelligence so that it reacts to what the players are doing. It can provide changes in response to what the players have done quickly, almost automatically based on the designer’s intent.

DW: Right now for most of these games, when the player saves the princess and he starts walking away from the tower – if he looks back he’s going to see the princess at the top of the tower again. So the persistence we’re talking about doesn’t really happen in MMOs a lot today.

That’s the sort of thing tabletop players are used to and expect from our games. We really think that the electronic games need to move towards that place where the actions of the players actually have an effect on the world.

ES: Yeah, it’s funny. You have this high-tech series of games, more processing power than we’ve ever had, and they’re stuck back in the pre-70s era of having a static environment. We think that games should be able to react to player response and change over time to the way they play their game. And not just because the designer says so, not just on an expansion pack level.

What you’re driving to here seems to be something that a lot of people who play these games really want. They dream of the day where something as simple as a village “staying saved” for a little while can happen. Can you talk about how this would show up in a real game, though?

If you can’t get into a lot of specifics that’s understandable, but are we talking something like the village “staying saved”, or something like NPCs on the other side of the world talking about your character with other players?

DW: I think the village staying saved for a little while is the first level of what we’re talking about here. If you save the village, it stays saved – you saved it! But maybe now that village becomes an objective for another player; maybe something has to be done now because that village wasn’t destroyed. And so on, and so on, and so on. Building those mechanisms to make it a world that reacts to a player’s actions instead of existing in a static state. That’s the world we’re talking about.

ES: One of the things MMOs could take advantage of that I did as well back in my tabletop days, is take advantage of the idea that there are a lot of people playing in the same world. You can forge a community through shared experiences. The idea that “I played this adventure, you played this adventure, and it gives us something to talk about.” We can also talk about the outcome of the adventure. It’s not too much of a disconnect to say “Hey, my character went and saved the princess, but when you did it you weren’t able to save the princess.”

Then what we do is have the world adapt to that, by seeing what the ‘normal’ approach to an adventure is. These changes don’t have to solely result from one person doing something very strange. It just has to take into account that that could happen. We can take that approach that you don’t really see in MMOs. Designers don’t say “oh, most people did this so we’re going to change the world that way.” They just leave it static. And that bugs me.

Just to be clear: it doesn’t sound like you’re talking about pure instancing. It sounds like you’re talking about a shared world where player actions can have an impact on those around them. That’s fair to say?

ES: Well, definitely. If someone could say that playing a game where there are other people “around” is an MMO, then Party Poker is an MMO. Really it’s just a collection of instances. If you don’t have areas where players can interact with each other, then you’re not setting up a shared world – you’re setting up a whole bunch of unshared worlds. Where’s the fun in that?

DW: The type of things we’re talking about here have been addressed, somewhat, in instances in many games. But we are absolutely talking about making changes to the shared world experience. Having the players change what’s going on.

ES: And, I wanted to say, that doesn’t mean we won’t make use of instancing. That can be a fun experience too. But you have to bring everybody back to a place where they can all do things together.

DW: It’s certainly much easier to do in the instancing areas. You have more total control of the experience as a designer. There are things you can do in the shared world to let the players feel like their actions matter. That’s one of the big problems right now; yeah, your character got a little bit stronger than he was five minutes ago because he saved the princess, but did it really have any effect on the world? No.

When you’re talking about “a shared world”, to clarify, are you talking about what most MMO players think of when they think of a server? IE: a space with a few thousand players inhabiting it? Or something smaller?

Dave: We don’t have any firm numbers as far as how big our servers would be, but we are definitely talking about a shared world with many, many, many players.

It’s worth belaboring, because this is something that players have definitely been looking for – for some time. It’s worth clearing this up so as to avoid any vagueness here.

DW: We are not playing word games with you.

ES: When you think about RPG design or MMO design, I keep coming back to the idea that MMOs are still a relatively young industry. People are still learning how to design these things well.

I look at a game like World of Warcraft or City of Heroes, where they have these scripted events and I’ve had a lot of fun playing over the years, those are very similar to the way a pre-published RPG might be presented to the players. Here’s an adventure with a beginning, middle, and end, it works pretty much the same way. Dave and I have been doing that for almost twenty years. We know how that works.

We want to do something more, where the world can react, where you don’t just have to have the scripted events. We want the world to produce outcomes that are unexpected.

DW: Frankly that’s one of the most exciting things for us moving over to the electronic side. By putting these experiences out there for the players, instead of this very scripted, straightforward experience, you let the players go crazy. Who know what the players will come up with? That’s really cool.

So when you’re looking to do big additions to the game, you’re really looking to be more like a DM than a designer – you’re looking at what the players have done and liked and thinking “where can we go from here?”

ES: Absolutely. It’s more like providing options rather than just railroading people. I think you’ve hit it right on the head there. It will allow the players to have a vested interest in the game world. It will let them figure out what is fun for them, and go do that. Because not everybody will have the same idea of what that is, the world will take shape in different ways.

DW: It empowers the player to create the story that they want to create, by finding the types of content in the world that they think is fun, rather than “here is some content, consume it as fast as you can.” We really just want to put more control in the hands of the players.

ES: We’ve all seen it. No matter how vast or big an MMO world is, players consume the content way faster than the design teams can get it out there. If you create a game where players have some say, where they can create their own content, then you could theoretically never run out.

How would you compare what you folks are talking about here to Nevrax and the Ryzom Ring project for Saga of Ryzom, and what the NCSoft developers have talked about doing for City of Heroes?

DW: The NCSoft developers haven’t said a lot about what they’re going to allow or not allow, but what I think they’re talking about is not really what we’re talking about. By my understanding, they’re going to essentially put some of their tools literally in the hands of the players. “Go ahead and make stories.” That’s cool, I love that. I think it’s going to be great to see what kind of great stories people can come up with. I’ve got my superheroes ready and raring to go play that.

But that’s not really what we’re talking about. They are going to be creating a bunch of instanced little stories that take place outside of the shared world. You go to the story, you consume the story, you go back. That’s not what we are talking about. We’re talking about the idea that as you’re moving around in the shared world your actions change the game experience you and everyone else in that shared area.

ES: Let me use World of Warcraft as an example: You’re an Alliance player of some stature. You’d like to organize a raid against Thunder Bluff. Right now you can do that, but the game doesn’t provide you with any way of making that ‘interesting.’ There’s no story element, there’s no reward – the game doesn’t incentivize you to do it.

DW: You do it because you think it would be fun!

ES: Right. We want to put systems in place so that when the player decides to do something like that, he can actually create missions in the world that will allow him to go do that. He can create rewards that will compensate players for participating.

DW: The idea is that there will be repercussions for making the things you do in the shared world actually matter. Beyond just personal character advancement.

ES: And this is all in-game, rather than leaving the game and creating like a script or writing up your own adventure. That’s exciting, but it’s not part of the game.

To transition from that to the other topic at hand, how do you see this kind of interaction creating a more vibrant community around an MMO?

DW: When it comes to communities I believe it’s about giving them purpose and tools. It’s sort of the same thing we were talking about with persistence. If you give players a reason to care about the community, and you give them the tools to make the community work well, then you’ll end up with a strong experience.

ES: I think what we’re talking about will end up evoking a great amount of investment from the players. You’re going to build your community through the persistence of the game, but you’re also going to get people more and more invested in how the game progresses. I mean, think about it: Every time you log into the game world you’re not necessarily going to change the story. That said, groups of players are going to get together and will cause changes.

The more you change the world the more you’re going to want to log in and see what’s happening – you’re going to want do ‘defend’ those changes and correct the changes you don’t like. You’re going to band together with like-minded players, and you’ll create your own community out of similar vested interests.

When you’re talking about “groups of players”, are you interested in supporting small groups /static parties? Are you thinking larger groups, guilds? Duos? What are you thinking about in terms of supporting grouping in your game?

DW: Why do we have to pick one of those?

ES: Let’s face it, most games have content that is “great for groups”, or “great for soloing” or “great for guilds”. That’s not always true. We’re not going to try to say we’re all things to all people. You do that and you end up being the middle of the road, nothing for no one.

DW: Unfortunately, yeah, any answer we gave on that would probably sound like what everybody else says. It all starts to run together and sound kind of pathetic.

ES: One thing I will say, though, is that we want these small groups – two, three, four players that you’d traditionally think of as a party – we want them to have a really fun game experience. We want them be able to go out and affect the world, even on a small level. We’re also looking at what other games have done for guilds, and … it’s not that great. “Oh, I have a chat channel! And a tabard! Don’t I feel special?”

You shouldn’t. That’s almost nothing. Guilds are the backbones of MMO communities; you have to give these people tools to make them feel special. There should be actual game incentives to be part of a group. Whether that’s a squad, or some big giant guild, we should have some reason to make you want to join up with other people. The game should reward you for doing that, and it shouldn’t penalize you for not doing it.

DW: Character advancement is a big part of a lot of MMOs, and as almost anyone will tell you, this creates a strong incentive to care about your character. You have all these choices for how to improve him, and it’s really cool and fun … and almost none of the games out there build these incentives at other levels of the game. We all enjoy the character persistence – why isn’t that also something that exists at the group level?

If you are talking about the community in your game, why not extend that concept from group, to guild, to the entire server? You’ve got personal goals for your character, why shouldn’t there be goals for your guild, or your whole server? Or maybe everyone in your faction? You’re going to have goals, right? So there will have to be repercussions for succeeding or failing at those goals as a result.

If servers have goals, and failing or achieving those goals can have repercussions, does that mean that you’re interested in having the game states on servers differ? That is, the storyline of the gameworld might be significantly different depending on which server you’re on?

DW: (joking) That sounds interesting, doesn’t it?

ES: I can’t imagine how you would do the things we’re talking about, and somehow keep things the same on every server. That would just be artificial. On our server, perhaps, our group is doing really well. But on other servers people of our same faction are doing poorly, we shouldn’t try to ‘fix’ that. We’re creating our own world here. I honestly see the case being that a few months to a year after our game releases, you’ll go onto different servers and see things being completely different between the two communities. It will be like a parallel universe. That’s the hope, anyway.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

['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 play a fair number of casual games, and I'm interested in story-telling, so I was intrigued by Mathew Kumar's recent Gamasutra article about the state of the casual games industry, particularly this bit, from John Welch at Playfirst:

"At PlayFirst we introduced character and narrative to our games -- we obsessed on meta-structural devices such as story development and even simple-sounding aspects like map screens and expert levels, all in service of answering the player's question, 'Why am I doing this?' which wasn't being answered by abstract match-3 games."

"Our consumers could say, 'Oh, I'm solving this level to help Flo fix up her restaurant and become a successful entrepreneur.' The ability to nurture our consumers' connection to the characters and provide them with a clear sense of objective through storylines has proven very powerful," he continued.

This made my eyelids twitch.

I would love it if casual games took more seriously the kinds of stories they can tell, and the ways in which casual-game types of interaction might be narratively interesting. To do that, though, they need not to kid themselves about what constitutes a narrative.

The plot arc of almost all the Dash games -- and the majority of time management games of all brands -- is essentially the same: an entrepreneur in the burgeoning field of (waitressing/dog grooming/wedding planning/dairy farming) gets a break-through opportunity at a (restaurant/pet salon/catering business/farm). Through hard work and perseverance, the entrepreneur does well enough to expand the business over and upgrade her own talents and equipment, until she (it's always a she) reaches some zenith of business acumen. Then the game ends.

(One caveat: as so often, the original in this field is considerably better than most of the follow-ons, and the first Diner Dash does have a more interesting ending than average. The developers of the sequels also seem to have conveniently ignored the surprise outcome of the original because it's somewhat difficult to build on.)

Now technically, on some definitions of narrative, the following would qualify:

Flo works at someone else's restaurant until she can open her own.
Flo works at her restaurant until she has a chance to open another.
Flo works at the new restaurant until it is successful.

But I think we can agree that it's not a very interesting one. There are no reversals, no twists, no surprises; there is no character growth and no significant relationships are involved; the setting reveals nothing interesting about the conditions of human existence; no theme or idea is explored.

There is rarely any suspense about what might happen later in the story. I say "rarely" because a handful of games do throw in some kind of minor mystery hook -- "Vogue Tales" and "The Great Chocolate Chase" both describe incidental events that set up curiosity and are subsequently resolved -- but this is uncommon.

Moreover, the player has no ability to affect the story other than in the sense of persevering through it. There are no narratively significant choices available. All choices the player makes are purely on the level of gameplay tactics (do I seat this party now, or should I first take that party's order?). From the perspective of gameplay, that not-very-compelling narrative boils down to an even-less-compelling one:

Flo carries plates.
Flo carries plates.
Flo carries plates.
Flo learns to walk faster.
Flo carries plates.
Flo carries plates.
Flo carries plates.
Flo has a bad day in which she doesn't carry enough plates fast enough.
Flo carries plates.
Flo is successful.

In his book on videogame theory Half-real (I know I risk losing half my readers at this moment, but hang in there), Jesper Juul makes a useful distinction between narrative (a structured sequence of events, which not all games have) and fiction (any elements attached to a game which are not part of the ruleset but are there to give it color or thematic significance, and which are thus much more common).

In those terms, the Dash games certainly do have a fiction, and part of that fiction is the local color applied to the game's leveling-up mechanism.

But let's not deceive ourselves: the maps which track our progress through a time management game, ticking off the levels we've finished and putting gold stars on the levels we've finished really well, do not correspond to narrative.

They gratify the same impulse that gold star charts have always gratified since kindergarten: the impulse to finish tasks and take pride in their completion, no matter how arbitrary the tasks themselves might be. The "stories" attached to such charts, in fact, cannot be very interesting, because a system of steady progress and reward contains no suspense and no opportunities for choice, surprise, or setback.

I don't deny the value of this mechanism in getting people to play. Having something about a game that I can finish (even if the game continues to be available in free play mode afterwards) is a strong incentive for me to spend time on it. Part of the reason is that I like to see all the gameplay variations the developers have put into a work, and if I play through all the levels, I can be pretty sure that I've one that; it would be less satisfying to play if I didn't have some idea at what point I would have tried everything out.

But Welch goes on:

"I believe that the next step... is to create a similar metastructure to answer the question, 'Why did I do that last night?' We need to help the player get something or somewhere more tangible, maybe to another level of status, or fill out a collection, or help a friend, or in some other manner to achieve something worth talking about. But keep it simple, or it won't be relevant to the masses."

I realize that my take on this isn't as statistically significant as whatever market research Playfirst and similar companies may be doing. But I can't help thinking that narrative -- real narrative, in which interesting and varied things happen, and the ending isn't just another predictable apotheosis when your character has carried her 20,000th plate -- does answer the "why did I do that?" question. It gives the player something of value to take away from the experience, something to remember and think about, which is of far more value than any arbitrary form of status a casual game could confer.

To do that, the solution isn't necessarily to add more modes and structural features to the format. That bloats the system, and I can understand why it might put off new casual players. It's also, fortunately, not required. Here's what I think does work:

A) create gameplay in which multiple strategies of play are possible and valid (with different strategies becoming relevant at different levels); then

B) create a narrative in which the choice of gameplay strategy affects or is affected by the story events;

or

B') create a deep fiction/setting which continues to be interesting to explore for the duration of the game; have the choice of gameplay strategy affect or be affected by the features of the setting.

"The Great Chocolate Chase" does some of (A): it adds quests to certain levels, in which the aim is to accomplish something beyond merely earning money. This makes the gameplay more interesting than it would be otherwise, though it is, I think, hobbled as a technique because the player usually also has to be meeting the same monetary quotas as ever; it would have to be tuned slightly differently for strongly distinct strategies to emerge on different levels.

The "Dash" games tend (to varying degrees) to accomplish some of (A), inasmuch as levels bring different combinations of character types into play. But for the most part, the trick involves recognizing how the different characters (patient seniors, fussy businesswomen) can best be prioritized in accordance with a (consistent) strategy of sequencing more urgent events first.

"Flo on the Go" goes a bit further, since it introduces such gimmicks as the scenes one has to play "in the dark", and not being able to see all of the screen at once does mandate some slightly different approaches; on the other hand, I found that specific gimmick a bit frustrating, and the gimmicks are only loosely tied to the storyline.

"Miss Management" does both (A) and (B): it relies on quests to make the central mechanic interesting, and ties the quests to your relationship to the other characters. It's also just about my gold standard among time management games -- and almost alone in its success.

Deepening the fictional setting is a little more common. Cooking variants on the time management theme, such as "Hot Dish", create strategic variation by requiring the player to assemble a range of different recipes, and since the recipes are somewhat related to real food preparation methods, that allows the player at least to engage with the nominal setting of the restaurant more completely: there's still no plot to speak of, but the game's fiction has more depth and content than the average "Dash" spinoff, and one comes away with the (possibly spurious) sense of having learned something.

Either way, more structural elements aren't necessary. If anything, a good match between interaction style and narrative/fictional content can mean a simpler presentation: there's less need for elaborate framing if the player is experiencing a good portion of the content directly via the gameplay.

[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 (2)

Ah yes, the inevitable return of GameSetLinks, headed out by a chat with a Nintendo Power supremo, and closely followed by a totally gorgeous Crystal Castles retro artifact - I'd actually like to see a Crystal Castles clothing line, if you could, Internet?

Also hanging out in here - scaling your game design scope, another look at a pretty avant-garde indie title, and the obvious question that nobody has asked - who's the Pink Floyd of gaming? (It's not in the same sense as the article asks it, but clear it's Minter minter minter minterminterminter...)

Sheepie go baa:

Crispy Gamer - Column: Press Pass: An Interview With Nintendo Power's Chris Slate
Orland's PressSpotting on GameSpot gets moved to Crispy Gamer under a new name.

Proscribed Word of the Month: Narrative (Magical Wasteland)
'For the following month, anyone writing or speaking about video games who uses the word “narrative” will be administered a mild electric shock to the temples.'

Vintage 1984 Atari Crystal Castles Display unused - eBay (item 150283849842 end time Sep-14-08 19:13:27 PDT)
Completely awesome - via GameSniped.

Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist < Multimedia | PopMatters
'Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist is a prime example of a game experimenting and pushing the boundaries of the video game world with no concerns about explaining itself or fitting into any simple niche.'

Resource Quest: hidden treasures in Sierra’s adventure games - Feature - Adventure Classic Gaming
'There is always the possibility of discovering an unused background, animation or sound file, or even just an interesting little comment made by a programmer in a script.'

:: Temple of the Roguelike - Roguelike News, Reviews, Interviews and Information :: » Blog Archive » First International Roguelike Development Conference: Berlin 2008
More international ASCII-based game summits, plz!

Press release: 'ScreenBurn at SXSW Invites Hopeful Designers to Enter Game Design Competition'
Not playable games, just ideas, which is... a little meh, for me.

Welcome to Jake World: 'Scaling your game design scope'
'The initial scope was too great, how do you scale it without compromising on the initial design?'

Love-de-links - the blog
An excellent Lovedelic fan-blog, dedicated to one of the most avant Japanese console developers - via Lovedelic Life.

The Ludologist » Blog Archive » Games to try to Hate. (What is the Pink Floyd of video games?)
'What is the Pink Floyd of video games? (You don’t have to really hate it, just bring out your inner punk!)'

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

[Back after a few months' hiatus, The Aberrant Gamer is happy to return as a biweekly, sometimes NSFW column by Leigh Alexander, dedicated to the kinks and quirks we gamers tend to keep under our hats – those predilections and peccadilloes less commonly discussed in conventional media.]

"Make her boobs bigger," someone says.

"No, no," I argue. "She needs to be petite. We’re going lolicon-style."

"How is a lolicon-style girl supposed to kick ass?"

I know, I know, but I’ve got this entire set of "kitty" clothes, and fuzzy ears, and am I really going to put them on an Amazon woman? Actually, that might be kind of cool. So I take her – my creation – and I make her a little bit taller and more muscular, and then I put the little ribbon and bell around her neck.

"It looks stupid," I decide, scrolling, overwhelmed, through plate armor and fishnets that might be more appropriate. My woman-in-progress gives me a challenging look, blinks patiently, turns her head a little from side to side while I decide what she will look like.

She should be more tan, she should wear high boots, and, okay, her boobs should be bigger. Tweak, tweak, tweak, and -- "She’s hot," my Soulcalibur IV co-pilot approves.

She is, I realize, when I give her a test run up against a bluish zombie Mitsurugi. I chose her voice and the way she poses, I gave her Tira’s big bladed ring (my proposal), and now I make her fight as if she’s dancing. She’s cool, she’s hot, she kicks ass.

And I made her.

Character creation is becoming a bigger trend than ever in console games. We’ve been able to palette-swap our sprites here and there since the old days, pick between the girl and boy, or the ponytail and the long hair – that’s nothing new. But now, with the distance graphical sophistication has come, we can practically play God and birth new, lifelike people every day if we so choose.

This maximum-customization trend seems to have been inherited largely from PC MMOs, which prize every little development that might enhance player retention – after all, they exist in a field where abandonment spells disaster. In the multiplayer sea, we’ve learned, people invest more in characters whose maintenance is complex and whose individuality is nuanced.

Players get hooked on the rush of pride they get when their character is adorned with stand-out armor, a shock of identifiable green hair – in short, when players can look at an avatar and say, "that’s me," they can care about that digital self’s well-being enough that they want to stick around, see their creation strive, grow and thrive. And, of course, see what it looks like with a spankin’ new hat that nobody else has.

There’s a financial motive that’s driven expanded customization, too. A majority of our lessons and standards on online games are inherited from Asia, the cradle of the MMO market, where piracy makes it challenging to run a game out of a retail box and on subscription fees. Many of the most popular games make their money on microtransactions – and personal items, clothing and visual enhancements for the character tend to prompt just as many, if not more purchases than items that actually add a game enhancement. The lesson there is that players value the ability to personalize, to customize, and to choose in high detail how they represent themselves.

Character creation on console titles is a bit different, however – half the fun is showing off your creations whenever possible, of course, but in a title like Mass Effect, you can build and create your protagonist to an unprecedented degree; the satisfaction comes in seeing your handiwork inside the game at all, a breath of fresh air in the traditionally linear environment of the console epic. Another factor is that audiences often demand protagonists to whom they can relate, whom they admire, to motivate gameplay and enhance immersion – so isn’t the best way to "get it right" to allow players to build their own, to conceptualize and customize and name them, bringing forth a whole human being from a neutral-skinned, staring and bald-headed alien?

Of course, a fair amount of the Mass Effect audience, when creating their characters, was probably thinking more along the lines of, "who’d look the hottest having sex with a blue alien," and less, "who really represents me," but that’s neither here nor there.

Because despite the idea of "personalization," nobody really wants to make themselves. People do, to be sure, just to see how close they can get, perhaps – and interestingly, it’s much more challenging with the present tech to create a faithful in-game replica of a real person than it is to create a compelling, largely original avatar. I’ve seen people post up in-game, character-created versions of "themselves" on their blogs and personal sites, and always with a caption to the effect of, "well, it’s not exactly like me, but close."

Or, if people are replicating themselves, they’re doing it not visually but in accordance with a subtle, perhaps even subconscious language – for example, I find I gravitate toward making red-headed characters not because I’ve got red hair (not naturally, at least!) but because to me, non-visual traits commonly associated with red-headedness are ones I’d like to associate with myself. The result, for me as with others, is an idealized self, not a visual replica.

Of course, that’s not all. Games are the only entertainment medium that puts this god-like power to create a lifelike being directly into our hands, allowing us to project our ideals into the experience. And we are, of course, primeval primates – as we trim a waist here, round a hip there, plump some lips or broaden some muscular shoulders, the experience feels vaguely fetishistic, doesn’t it?

We quickly tire of building self-representations and move onto our ideals, building our own sexy dolls, too unnatural-perfect to exist as real-world people. This is particularly true with Soulcalibur IV -- this column’s discussed in the past the innate sexuality of the fighting genre. And now, we can peel off Xianghua’s armor and swap her undergarments for a racier set, which does absolutely nothing for her swanlike swordplay, but provokes the subtle thrill of control for some.

Perhaps mercifully, game characters are not real people nor representations thereof. But we, the players, are real people, of course, and when you remove the protagonist narrative and instead allow us to customize it ourselves, it’s like opening a door for every aspect of humanity to come pouring through. A Google search for "Sporn" produces 824,000 results (including those unfortunate enough to have it for a last name), and the game isn’t even out yet. Give us the ability to create, and we will, in safe anonymity, create pornography in droves.

We’ve been evaluating game characters for years to see what sort of hero and cast of characters create the best "way in" to the game experience. Letting us build our own, high on the user-generated content trendwave, certainly provides a new angle on things. When we look at what’s happening on the screen now – for example, my beloved tiny half-dressed girl in a witch hat (and the bell necklace, of course!) fighting, thrillingly, my bestial, spike-plated axeman in a gold mask, while I force them to try and grab each other – we’ve suddenly less titillating psychology to analyze in the game themes than we’ve got in our own mad little minds.

[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, freelances and reviews often for a variety of outlets including Variety and Paste, and maintains her gaming blog, Sexy Videogameland. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

Posted by Leigh Alexander at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

A new survey of Guitar Hero and Rock Band players by Brown University ethnomusicologist Kiri Miller has revealed some fascinating trends, including the fact that 76% of the players bought music they heard in the game, and 69% often play in multiplayer modes.

The initial results from Miller, who has previously written on the subject for GameSetWatch and has given permission for the stats to be reprinted here, were first revealed on her 'Guitar Hero Research' weblog.

She explained: "As of this writing I have received 414 responses. Survey respondents were self-selecting; most heard about the survey through recruitment messages posted on several high-traffic online messageboards devoted specifically to these game"

However, even given this, Miller noted that "...the content and range of the qualitative responses in the surveys does seem to match the range of perspectives I have encountered through other research channels."

Some of the highlights of the research to date on these 'core' players of music games reveal:

- 88% male, 11% female, 1% intergender/trans/other
- 60% aged 21 or younger, 23% aged 22-30, 17% over 30
- 100% have played some version of Guitar Hero; 37% have also played Rock Band
- 93% own some version of Guitar Hero; 25% own both Guitar Hero and Rock Band
- 45% typically play for 1-2 hours at a time
- 16% usually play at the “easy” or “medium” difficulty levels; 19% at “hard”; 64% at “expert”
- 76% have used “practice mode” (which breaks songs down into short sections that can be drilled at slower tempos)
- 57% often play with other people watching; 69% often play in a multiplayer mode
- only 41% reported having much prior familiarity with ≥ 50% of the songs included in the games
- 79% stated that the games increased their appreciation for new songs/genres; 76% had added new music to their listening collections because of the games
- 73% had experience playing an instrument; 49% (of all respondents) had experience playing guitar; 32% had played in a band; 14% regularly performed music in public
- 34% reported feeling creative during gameplay

Miller noted as part of her weblog post: "While I must re-emphasize the caveat that these statistics are not necessarily representative of all players, it does seem important that nearly three-quarters of respondents had played an instrument -- particularly given that respondents were recruited primarily from gamer discussion boards (as opposed to some more specifically music-oriented population)."

She concluded: "This fact stands in intriguing tension with the mission statement often repeated in media interviews with Harmonix designers: “to give that awesome feeling [of performing music] to people who aren't musicians, who would never get to have it”."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Veteran, possibly pseudonymous game developer Matthew Wasteland writes the 'Arrested Development' humor column for Game Developer magazine, and we're now reprinting his best insights on GameSetWatch. This delightful installment includes several useful excerpts from nonexistent game development tomes.]

Making Money With GameCube Ports: A Fast And Easy Guide To The Wealth You've Always Wanted!

First of all, you'll need to get yourself one or more "Dolphin" developer kits, which are the devices that are used to create GameCube games. I've had some success finding these in local landfills, but your luck may vary depending on location (I live in San Rafael, California).

Sometimes you see them for sale on Craigslist by a developer's divorced wife or estranged parent, who doesn't know what it is, and you can nab it for cheap. Ask to see it first, of course; you'll know it's a real Dolphin because it has a picture of a dolphin, along with an emergency-eject lever on the front. Hopefully you will never have to pull that!

Once you've secured yourself one of these boxes, you can start the porting process. Even if you've never programmed so much as your VCR before, you shouldn't be frightened at the prospect of doing a port to GameCube. The unique architecture makes it easy! Non-unified RAM keeps things simple, because you won't have to worry about all of the memory at once. The small, 1.5GB discs mean there's a lot less data to load and process.

If you're still afraid, consider this: A famous game industry technologist recently pointed out in reverse that GameCubes are essentially one-half of a Wii -- which means that they are about twice as easy to program! And I don't know if you've played any Wii games lately, but come on. How hard could those have been?

At some point during the process, the publisher will call to see how things are going. Tell them everything is fine.

Game Programming Turds, Vol. V

Here's a great example of a system that checks an entered player name against a database to make sure it isn't taken already.

void GUIUserManager::OnKeyPress(const GUIKeyEvent& e)
  {
    mUsername.append(e.key);
    mThreadMan-> StartNewThread(ValidateUserThread, &mUsername, UpdateValidUserGUI);
  }

void GUIUserManager::ValidateUserThread(void* userdata, ThreadManager::Callback_T callback)
  {
    NetDBConnection dbconn; // Open a new connection to the remote DB
    callback->CallWithBool(!dbconn->UserExists((std::string*)userdata));
  }

AAA+++ Video Game Production For Dummies

Think "AAA+++" is a description for eBay sellers? Think again -- it's a type of video game! And if you didn't know that, this book is for you: the ultimate one-stop, no-nonsense guide to developing and shipping blockbuster titles. Inside, we'll comprehensively cover all the aspects of modern development -- from the exciting initial brainstorming sessions to the embarrassing cab ride home from the launch party.

As a simplified and easy-to-read primer, this book is ideally suited to managers and executives. Common production questions such as "What can we do to make our graphics competitive with those of other titles?," "How can a Visio diagram enhance my credibility?," and "How much can we exploit contractors before they sue us, and do the rules change overseas?" are all discussed and addressed.

And if you're intimidated by the industry's formidable technical jargon, like "ambient occlusion," "procedural," "spherical harmonics," or "work-life balance," don't worry: special care has been taken to explain these difficult concepts in layman's terms.

But if you're a seasoned pro just looking to brush up on the latest tips and techniques, you'll find those here too -- including a section, new to this edition, on how to tolerate casual game people.

Finally, if you've purchased this book because your own project is already on the skids, and are looking for immediate help, please feel free to skip the introductory material and go directly to Chapter 7: How to Turn Whatever You Initially Designed Into a Run-and-Gun Shooter.

[Mr. Wasteland also writes for his own blog, Magical Wasteland.]

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

Good grief, it's Wednesday again - and so time to wander sedately around the array of neat features, interviews and write-ups from big sister site Gamasutra and elsewhere - with some standout neatness headed by a much-debated Ernest Adams feature on the 'tao of game design'.

Also in here - a neat piece on technical artists, a chat with Ubisoft Montreal's CEO, developers on user-generated content, and the world of Chinese gaming cafes, plus lots of GCDC coverage from ze Leipzig, among many others.

Yesh yesh yesh:

Gamasutra Features

The Designer's Notebook: The Tao of Game Design
"What's the point of designing games? Veteran educator and designer Ernest Adams examines fun, enjoyment, and personal fulfillment to reveal the key, uplifting tenets of game creation."

The Code/Art Divide: How Technical Artists Bridge The Gap
"In this intriguing technical article, originally published in Game Developer magazine, Volition's Jason Hayes discusses how the Saints Row franchise developer integrates the technical artist into its development pipeline."

Building Believable Worlds: Yannis Mallat On Production At Ubisoft
"With Ubisoft Montreal now housing 2000 employees, Gamasutra sits down with CEO Yannis Mallat to discuss managing the unique studio and its breadth of development, from Far Cry 2 through My Weight Loss Coach."

Gamasutra, Other Originals

The Anti-Auteurs: Developers Speak On User-Generated Content
"User-generated content, particularly on the PC, is here to stay, whether developers planned for it or not -- and representatives from Three Rings, inXile, ACES Studio and Obsidian have been talking about "how to work within the sweet spot" on user-generated levels, quests, and environments."

GCDC: Epic's Capps On Designing The 'New, Better, More' Gears 2
"Epic president Mike Capps discusses at GCDC his company's most ambitious sequel yet in Gears of War 2, talking franchise-building with the original and breaking down the design team's "new, better, more" sequel philosophy.

Devs: Ease Of Development Rules, Outsourcing On Rise
"Game Developer Research has released new data from its 'State Of Development' survey of almost 2,000 creators, revealing ease of development as the most important factor for making games on a platform, and the fact that nearly half of all developers are outsourcing in some way."

Epic's Capps Talks People Can Fly, Epic China Growth
"Gamasutra spoke to Epic president Mike Capps, following the EA Partners deal, to discuss the Epic-owned "little 'studio that could'" People Can Fly and Chair Entertainment, revealing new stats on the now 130 person-strong Epic Games China."

GCDC: What Determines Developer Acquisition Values?
"Consolidation's the norm these days, but acquisition values vary widely -- why was Shiny worth $47 million to Atari, while Black Box only set EA back significantly less? Interactive business strategist Dan Lee Rogers explains just what determines a studio's value to an acquirer, and key rules for studios aiming to sell."

In-Depth: Inside China's Gaming Cafes
"Chinese Internet cafés are surprisingly important to the nation's online game market, according to a new survey - and Gamasutra talks to Niko Partners' Lisa Hanson about the popularity of Western games in the café, the male-female player ratio, and more."

GCDC: Connors On Telltale's Episodic Move To Consoles
"As episodic content pioneers Telltale Games move their 'TV-style' format to the console for the first time with Strong Bad, CEO and co-founder Dan Connors talks at GCDC in Leipzig about the strengths episodic is accustomed to enjoying on PC that make consoles more challenging."

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

['Design Lesson 101' is a regular column by game designer Manveer Heir. The goal 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 Jonathan Blow's critically acclaimed platform-puzzler, Braid, available on Xbox Live Arcade]

In 1977, the Atari 2600 was launched with a joystick that had a grand total of one button to use. Today, the Xbox 360 has sixteen buttons on their controller. In other words, about every two years we get another button on our controllers.

This increase in interface complexity is the result of increased game complexity. Games have added features such as fully 3D environments, complex dialog trees, and crouch-jumping in recent years. Often in these games, the mechanics are layered on top of each other to create a greater challenge. Moving in a first-person game is simple. Shooting in a first-person game is simple. Moving and shooting at the same time, at a target that is also moving and shooting, is not.

So, it's refreshing when a game comes along that not only goes back to a classic genre that is under-represented in current games, but also keeps its unique game mechanics separate, rather than running them together until the game can only be controlled by an interface as obtuse as the Xbox 360 controller.

Braid is such a game.

Design Lesson: Braid uses the inherent complexity of individual mechanics, rather than the combination of those mechanics, to create interesting and unique gameplay that never feels unfair to the player

Braid looks like a 2D platformer at first glance, but it quickly becomes apparent that it is a puzzle game. The player has the ability to rewind time at any moment, making death impossible and mistakes easily fixable. If only life were this easy!
This simple manipulation of time is present for the entire game and is the basis for the rest of the game. The game takes place across six different worlds, each with a unique take on time manipulation.

In one world, items with a green glow on them are not affected by the rewinding of time. This allows players to interact with objects, such as keys to locked gates, that are not affected by the rewinding of time. The player can ultimately affect the world to be able to use the key to solve the puzzle.

One of my favorite worlds has time move forward as the player moves to the right, and rewind as the player moves left; Time is being controlled spatially. Another world has the player make a recording of themselves that can interact with certain objects, similar to Cursor*10.

What is interesting is how easy it would be to combine these mechanics together to create challenging puzzles. Having a puzzle that would require the player to move to manipulate time, while recording a copy of himself, would be an easy design trap to fall into. Layering mechanics would make the puzzles more difficult, and somewhat difficult puzzles are part of the point of a puzzle game right?

Luckily, Braid doesn't do this. Each world has a specific mechanic and overlapping rarely occurs between world mechanics. Instead, the player is given just enough objects on the screen to solve the puzzle with the limited tools available. By being able to concentrate on one mindset of solving the puzzle, eventually the solutions make themselves apparent.

What is amazing is how complex and devilish some of the puzzles can still be, even though they revolve around the single mechanic for that world. By finding more interesting and intriguing ways to make puzzles complex, Braid is able to make players feel like geniuses by solving them.

There were a couple puzzles that took me well over a half-hour to finish, and when I stumbled across their solutions it was a true “Aha!” moment instead of an “Are you kidding me?” moment. Feeling like you have to guess what the designer was thinking is how many old adventure games played out, and it was rarely fun. Feeling like you just made a discovery on your own is what makes this game and games like Portal work so well.

Making more complex puzzles with multiple mechanics would have the opposite effect. Thinking about a game with time manipulation is difficult enough as it is. It's not the way we linearly progress through the real world. Trying to figure out multiple mechanics at once would probably become an exercise in futility for many players. It would be frustrating and unfair. The game would become “Guess when the designer was thinking” rather than “explore the rules of the world”.

Instead, by using intuitive puzzles and concentrating on one mechanic at a time, Braid finds complexity within each given mechanic. It's the ability to find this inherent complexity that makes Braid one of the best games I've played this year. It's also proof that complex game mechanics that require sixteen buttons on a controller are not necessary to make an amazing game.

[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 (0)

[In this editorial, originally printed in Game Developer magazine and already causing much debate on online messageboards, editor-in-chief Brandon Sheffield questions whether oft-theorized "graphics plateau" has already occurred, as supported by the continued success of graphically modest systems such as Wii and PlayStation 2.]

Developers and journalists alike have talked about the inevitable point past which graphics do not matter, and the focus turns to gameplay. The question I pose to you is -- has that already happened? Were we just not listening?

I was considering this when confronted with a few facts from Japan, firstly. The most popular “modern” consoles there are the DS, the Wii, and the PSP. None of these consoles have the graphics push of the big boys, as we know.

Further, Koei recently released Dynasty Warriors 6, “exclusively” for PS3, but due to fan reaction, subsequently ported it to PS2. Atlus is still releasing its largest product, Persona 4, on the PS2.

In the U.S., the DS is doing famously, the Wii has sold like gangbusters, and PSP hardware (though perhaps not official software) is doing quite well. The PS2 still has the largest installed base in the country. Now, does that mean the Xbox 360 and PS3 are doomed? Certainly not. But I propose the possibility that PS2 and Wii-level graphics were and are enough for the average gamer.

Whither Art Thou, Exclusives?

Metal Gear Solid 4 was a big console mover for Sony, and the game sold over a million copies worldwide. But how integral were the graphics and tech to that experience, really? Granted some scenes would have been different, but are graphics the reason anyone played that game? If MGS4 had been released on PS2, how many copies would it have sold? Certainly not less, and quite possibly more.

This comes to mind especially now that Square Enix announced during Microsoft’s E3 press conference that it would be bringing the next full stop in its Final Fantasy series, XIII, to the Xbox 360 day and date with the PS3 version in North America.

The hype of exclusivity, or even special graphics hardware features has essentially come to naught. The phrase “only on PS3” means even less now than it did then, before we really knew whether SPUs were magical fairies that could handle all our various processes.

Now that we know we can make essentially equivalent products across both of the high-end consoles, and indeed on PC, that rhetoric starts to fall by the wayside.

I want to reiterate that I am not proclaiming the death of the next-gen console. But I do think that the era of graphics wars is gone, for your average consumer.

Would anyone have complained, really, if GTA IV had been released on PS2 or a machine with similar graphical fidelity? I doubt it -- everyone would have been able to buy it, play it, and like or dislike it as much as they did the 360 or PS3 versions.

Graphics don’t make that game fun, and it is not nearly the best looking game on either the 360 or PS3 -- yet nobody minds. The fact that Rockstar is releasing a GTA on the DS only pushes this idea further.

What Of Blu-Ray?

Blu-ray won the high-definition media wars -- but what does that really mean? A recent Gamasutra commenter noted that traditional media formats, from music to movies, are all quickly shuffling online. Sony has effectively won a war that is no longer being fought.

It’s been demonstrated time and time again that the mainstream user is willing to watch streamed videos of movies on YouTube, or torrent them on The Pirate Bay, or even download them at only slightly lower quality on legitimate portals like you see on the Xbox 360 or Netflix.

Again, the high end isn’t going to be supplanted by the low -- there are people who want the highest definition everything. But there are a lot of people for whom it’s just not the largest concern anymore, especially as the market broadens.

And Then The PC?

I’ve made much ado about the potential of the PC to retake the mainstream market recently, and I won’t fully retread old ground here, but I will reiterate the fact that the casual PC market is booming, while developers like Crytek feel they can no longer play to the high-end PC consumers, as the market simply isn’t there (or when it is, it’s through piracy). The PC is the place where this postulate holds the most water.

The majority of gamers on PC these days do not need the highest-level graphics. World of Warcraft is a great example, and the multitudinous casual games only put mortar on the bricks.

Tech Junkies

Who is pushing this graphics and tech thing anyway? Really, isn’t it just the people who want to sell tech? While the core will always care about graphics, I don’t think the average consumer does. The average consumer doesn’t complain about the graphics on the Wii, because they know what to expect, and understand the approach.

The best innovations today are coming in terms of gameplay implementation. Cover mechanics, intuitive UI and HUDs, natural in-game tutorials, and persistent worlds are just a few examples. All of these things can be done on the two most recent generations.

While the tech of the PS3 and Xbox 360 certainly make streaming and seamless worlds much easier, a lot of this can be done to users’ satisfaction (please note the words “to users’ satisfaction” here) on the lower-end.

It turns out the average consumer of today does not necessarily want a Ferrari hooked up to his or her entertainment system, to paraphrase our production editor Jeffrey Fleming.

The average consumer is content with the Toyota Corolla of video game systems, and for that reason, I propose that the war of bigger and badder graphics can safely end, and we can finally focus fully on continuing to push gameplay to the fore.

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

Aha, the ever-present GameSetLink-age bus is trundling up to the WWW stop again, headed by another of those well-researched MSNBC.com articles that don't often get noticed by game sites - this time, on social network gaming.

Also wandering around in here, the (pictured) super-cute Shooting Historica Vol.2 classic shmup figurines, as well as a review of Billy Mitchell's family restaurant, a disturbing Rooster Teeth cartoon, Cliffski on talking to pirates (in case you hadn't seen), and plenty more.

Go go gooooo:

Social networks get friendly with games - Citizen Gamer- msnbc.com
Another good piece from MSBNC - monetization is still somewhat iffy on this type of stuff, but it's darn popular.

NCSX Import Video Games & Toys: Shooting Game Historica Vol. 2 - New Import, In Stock
'Japanese toy manufacturer Yujin launches the second volume of Shooting Game Historica gashapon which features starships from another six shooting games.'

Hidden Gems - Looney Tunes: Cartoon Conductor - The Quixotic Engineer
'For a licensed DS title, Looney Tunes: Cartoon Conductor has a surprising amount of polish and depth. If you’re a fan of rhythm games, especially Elite Beat Agents, I highly recommend checking it out.'

Crispy Gamer - Feature: The Crispy Gourmand: Rickey's World Famous Restaurant
Billy 'King Of Kong' Mitchell's family restaurant, reviewed amusingly - via RPS.

mentisworks: You're My Guitar Hero
Metaphorical, and ever so slightly video game-ish?

I'm Playing Soul Calibur IV and I Don't Know Why - Nerd World - Lev Grossman - Technology - TIME
Influential Time mag tech columnist is digging SCIV and can't explain it - maybe '...partly because the environments and the characters just look so unbelievably beautiful.'

Positech: 'Talking To Pirates'
Kudos/Democracy creator Cliffski: 'A few days ago I posted a simple question on my blog. "Why do people pirate my games?".'

NDS Homebrew Bounty! - GBAtemp.net
'We at GBAtemp are proud to announce the creation of a Monthly Homebrew Bounty, a bounty (fund-raising using donations from organizations and people) that will reward, each month, the author of the best homebrew. For now, this only goes for Nintendo DS homebrew but we might extend it to other platforms later.'

Rooster Teeth · 'Double D Vision'
An Aberrant Gamer-friendly cartoon: 'I don't know if you've played Soul Calibur IV yet... but let's just say that there are assets in the game that are a little...ridiculous.'

Sirlin.net — Your source of shocking insights on game design » Blog Archive » Evolution 2008 Results and Stories
Great retelling of his path through the EVO championship by the SFII HD Remix re-designer.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There's been a lot going on over the past couple weeks in magazine-land (not least of which being the destruction of my laptop, which is why this column is a little late), but I'd like to start instead by officially inaugurating the UK's Retro Gamer into the regular rotation of what I cover in Mag Watch. It's only fair, after all, given that I cover the extremely rough Video Game Collector and RG beats it in every single aspect -- content, features, industry access, art design, and covers -- except for price.

(People on classic gaming forums in the US complain constantly about the $11.99 newssstand price, but considering the direction that retro-game collecting is going, you can't help but wonder about the hypocrisy afoot.)

I think it finally dawned on me that I ought to be discussing RG more often with this issue (the 53rd one, not the 50th one above -- sorry, blame the laptop). This isn't just because of the cover (which I adore) or the massive Konami retrospective or the beautifully-designed history of Boulder Dash.

Mainly it was the interview with Mark Cerny where he discusses the development of Marble Madness, his maiden effort. Back when I worked for GamePro I tried several times to get him to talk about this game, one of my all-time favorite "game-as-art" pieces, but he always dodged the question 'cos he was too busy plugging Jak II or whatever he was busy consulting on at the time. But Retro Gamer did it! Cerny didn't talk to "the world's #1 multiplatform gaming magazine" about it, but some piddly 20,000-circ pub in Britain? Sure!

But you can totally see why when you read the thing. If this were Video Game Collector, then all you'd get is 4 straight pages of Q&A text, denser than the 1897 Sears catalog, with maybe one or two blurry screenshots that are heavily JPG-artifacted for no apparent reason. Not here. You get a beautiful art design modeled after the game's distinctive isometric look, lots of smart-looking screenshots, and even a step-by-step through every level complete with Cerny's commentary on each one.

It's not just a great piece -- it's a piece, and a magazine overall, that's truly worthy and respectful of the subject matter it's talking about. RG's approach takes a subject that often bores younger gamers and makes it engaging and fascinating. There are things I don't like about it, including the occasional factual miss and a still-prevalent UK bias (the cover piece opines that Imagine Software's 80s computer conversions of Konami's arcade games were better than Konami's own NES efforts, which makes me wonder exactly which NES games they could possibly have been playing).

But -- and I've said this before -- this mag is so good, and so worth the money, that there's no point in any US publisher launching a retrogaming magazine now because there's no way it could outclass this one. Between this and Edge and PC Zone, it's amazing to me that the UK gets the best in game mags but the worst (oftentimes) in support from game publishers.

Anyway, moving on to the rest of the past fortnight's game mags:

Edge September 2008

Cover: Xbox 360 reinvented

Edge loves doing "big picture" game-industry cover stories; this is well documented. Sometimes they are fascinating, sometimes they aggressively polish a turd, but they're always readable, at least. This month's piece on the new Xbox Live is somewhere in between -- the extensive coverage of Microsoft's Mii ripoffs is a bit silly (so, what, they're revolutionary because you can put clothes on them?), but the rest of it is very fascinating and reminiscent of the gee-whiz stuff written way back before the original Xbox came out.

The "theme" piece on the design of main menu and option screens that follows is classic Edge -- nice design theme, and while the text reads like someone's term paper from Game Design 401, it's still engaging somehow. That, in turn, is followed by eight pages on the Funspot arcade in New Hampshire, which is about 6 more pages than any US mag would ever give it.

GamePro September 2008

   

Cover: Fall Preview Guide

Two major changes (again) happening in GamePro land. First, they are experimenting with separate covers for the newsstand and subscriber editions, like OXM did for a few months last year and other mags have messed around with in the past. The newsstand version is coverline-laden, while the subscriber edition concentrates on nice art instead. More immediately noticeable no doubt is the logo, however -- the first time the logo's been redone since the inaugural issue 20 years ago. I'm not sure I see the point -- unlike EGM's large revamp from a while back, this logo is just different enough to confuse, but just similar enough to make you wonder why they instituted a change in the first place. "Design by committee," sorta thing.

Anyway, your typical fall preview issue, nothing too special to report.

Game Informer September 2008

Cover: Batman: Arkham Asylum (2 covers)

Bucking the general trend of US print mags, Game Informer totally blows out E3 this issue, with page after page of interviews and previews. This coverage is in the Connect section, which makes Connect easily the largest part of this mag, not ending until page 60.

Be sure to check out GI Spy on page 12 for a shot of Andy McNamara leering at the camera so hard, so sharp, so killingly that I got a paper cut on my forehead just looking at it.

PC Gamer October 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Diablo III

Between the cover and the big hands-on feature for Warhammer Online, this is one chaotic issue. An oddly text-heavy one too -- the Steam piece touted on the cover is basically a spread of plain text.

The Others

   

Guitars and Gaming is one of the better Future specials of recent memory. They're almost always good when they're mostly original content, of course, but this one is special -- an entire mag on music games, with the video-game bits (over half the innards) written by OXM's Dan Amrich and the rest done by the folks at Guitar One magazine. Pretty obviously an attempt to squeeze some ad bucks out of the advertisers from Future's guitar mags, but still quite impressive and extensive if you're into the topic.

Play Magazine Presents Girls of Gaming Volume 5.5 is about what you'd figure. Quite, uh, impressive and extensive if you're into the topic.

And, of course, Game Developer is always over my head but rad. Hirokazu Yasuhara has worked on more platform games than you have ever played (not true, but almost so), and reading him pontificate about game design is kinda neat.

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

[Every week, Gamasutra sister weblog GamerBytes' editor Ryan Langley will be summing up the top news tidbits from the past 7 days, including brand new game announcements and scoops through the world of Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and WiiWare.]

The real news this week is that the "secret best game ever" Death Tank is making its way from the Sega Saturn to the Xbox Live Arcade. While some may simply brush it off as "nothing but a clone of Scorched Earth", it is much more than that.

Unlike Scorched Earth or Worms, Death Tank was entirely real-time. Grab 7 of your mates, a stack of controllers and a Sega Saturn Multitap and you'll have bullets, nukes, rolling mines and air strikes flying over your head. It was the Geometry Wars of its time, and is still a blast to play with a bunch of friends. Death Tank! Ready for action? I certainly am.

Xbox Live Arcade

Galaga Legions Is Your XBLA Game This Week
This week gives us the next iteration of "Championship Edition" style games from Namco - first Pac Man CE, and now Galaga Legions. It looks like it's going to be just as addictive as the former title - can't wait.

Duke Nukem 3D On XBLA - Finished, Passed Cert, September release?
Today 3D Realms have confirmed that the classic Duke Nukem 3D is coming to Xbox Live Arcade with 8 player co-operative play, recordable gameplay clips, Xbox Vision support, as well as the ability to rewind time in single player mode.

OH #%!& SON, IT'S 'DEATH TANK' FOR XBOX LIVE ARCADE
You have absolutely no idea how happy I am that finally, after 10 years of being the best multiplayer experience on the SEGA Saturn, that Death Tank is making its way onto the Xbox Live Arcade.

Sierra Online Still Publishing 'Zombie Wranglers'
While everything at Sierra appears to be crumbling under the weight of Activision Blizzard, it appears that they will still be releasing some new titles - 'Zombie Wranglers' is being released by Sierra on XBLA.

Castle Crashers Priced - Tons Of Fun For Only 1200 Points
The Behemoth have finally announced a final price for their game Castle Crashers. After rumors of the game being 1600 or even 1800 Microsoft Points, they've settled for a little less.

What You Should Be Looking Forward To In The XNA Game Community
Destructoid have gotten their hands on the Microsoft XNA developer kit and had a look around what is currently available for play in the Xbox XNA Community games, and have made a list of 5 titles you should definitely be interested in being a part of.

New Trailer Of Multiwinia From Darwinia+
While not exactly the Xbox Live Arcade version of Darwinia+, Introversion have released a trailer for Multiwinia, the multiplayer version of Darwinia being released onto PCs, and supposedly one half of the XBLA title.

Mega Man 9 Achievements Revealed, Not For The Faint Of Heart
The achievements for the upcoming Mega Man 9 have been released. Good luck getting them.

PlayStation Network

'Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars' Announced For PSN
Psyonix Studios today announced Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, an arena-based online vehicle sports game for PlayStation Network. Psyonix have actually got quite a history - they've been contractors for some of the last few games by Epic Games - including Gears of War, UT 2004 and Unreal Tournament III.

PlayStation LifeStyle Interview Doublesix Games On Burn Zombie Burn and Underfire
PlayStation LifeStyle have tracked down Jim Mummery, creative director of Doublesix games to discuss what their current plans for games on the PlayStation Network. Notably discussed were their two leaked titles Burn Zombie Burn and Underfire.

WiiWare

NA Wii Store Update - Get Cosy With "John the Sheriff" In Midnight Pool
One WiiWare addition this week - Midnight Pool by GameLoft... Along with that are two new Virtual Console additions - Mega Man, which many people have been waiting for, and Neo Turf Masters - supposedly one of the best golf sims of the 90's.

Wii Store Update - Cool Games For Attractive People
After a few delays, it's finally here - you can now buy the first episode of Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People Episode 1 - Homestar Ruiner for 1,000 Wii Points on the Wii Shop.

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

[When our own Chris Remo went to the EA Partners event late last week, we were figuring maybe to be talking to Tim Schafer. But no - Epic/People Can Fly and, even more unexpectedly, Grasshopper were the two announcements. Since GSW is pretty Suda-friendly, here's the chat we had with him and producer/Resident Evil supremo Shinji Mikami.]

When Electronic Arts announced two new developers signing to the EA Partners program for independent studios, the more surprising one by far was Grasshopper Manufacture, the Japanese team behind Killer7 and No More Heroes.

Details about the upcoming game -- in development for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, and Wii -- were sparse. Studio founder Goichi Suda, often known as Suda51, described it only as a "mysterious, very unique, horror-packed action game."

More interestingly still, it is produced by Shinji Mikami, the acclaimed director of games such as Resident Evil, Resident Evil 4, and God Hand; he also produced Suda's own Killer7 (pictured) and is working on a title with Sega-signed Japanese development studio PlatinumGames.

The deal was brokered by Tetsuya Mizuguchi's studio Q Entertainment (Lumines, Meteos), and represents Electronic Arts' first major high-profile partnership with a third-party Japanese developer since its venture with Square that ended in 2003.

Following the announcement, we sat down with Suda and Mikami to discuss the deal, as well as Suda's reflections on game design and producers.

How did you actually end up communicating with EA? It's an unusual situation.

Goichi Suda: I came to EA last June with Mikami-san and other staff to present ideas about this project, and they showed a big interest in the ideas I presented. They totally understood what I wanted to do. That's why this deal happened.

This is the first game you've done on this many platforms. Is that intimidating at all?

GS: When I presented the ideas to the U.S. publisher, I expected that they would require a multiplatform [game] because that's the market. So I prepared to make this happen from the beginning, so there are no worries or concerns. It will turn out well.

Killer7 was published by a Japanese-headquartered publisher; then No More Heroes had a Japanese publisher in Japan and a Western publisher over here; and now you're starting from the beginning with an American publisher. Was that just a natural progression?

GS: Actually, that's how I planned it out. Because if I don't think that way, it will never happen. The situation after shipping Killer7 was totally different -- Mikami-san was the first person who helped me to open up the worldwide market. He's the person that helped me to work with a U.S. publisher directly. If Mikami-san wasn't here, it would never have happened. So I really appreciate Mikami-san and I'm very happy. Mikami, what are you thinking?

Shinji Mikami: I think that the history of the game industry has been changing. Now, if you think about the worldwide market, you have to work with the publishers who are well-known in the worldwide market, and are good at it -- that's what I feel right now.

You've spoken on your punk aesthetic -- you even call Grasshopper a "video game band." This is presumably a higher budget than you usually have, particularly it being multiplatform. Are you worried about the ability to hang onto your punk feel?

GS: Well, for example, the Sex Pistols -- when they came out, they started to perform in very small venues, like civic centers.

In the end, they ended up performing in very large places -- but the style of their performance never changed. I don't think the style of my performance will change now that I'm performing somewhere huge.

A common thread in your games is that your stylistic influence as a designer is extremely apparent, even in your licensed games -- I feel you make your creative intent more forceful than many developers. Do you have any thoughts as to why that attitude doesn't seem to be as common in video games?

GS: I wonder why that is... First of all, I'm very pleased to hear you say that.

SM: [To Suda] You can do it because you're talented.

GS: I don't really understand it myself. Why? Why, Mikami-san?

SM: Your style is not understandable. It's difficult for people to understand.

GS: But then why does it seem that he can understand it?

SM: That's your talent.

GS: Oh, I see. That's how it is, is it?

SM: I think that your style is not accessible -- the reason why he probably feels the direction you want to go is because he understands it completely. But it's a rare case, normally.

Suda-san's scenario and his style -- it's not easy for everyone to understand it. But ever since I've been working with Suda-san since the first draft of his scenario -- the first draft of the scenario is great.

After that, he continues to move forward, and the characters -- they behave in a way that nobody really understands where they go.

You've indicated that you felt like you found a new audience with the Western market -- do you have any idea why gamers in the West connect to your work? It's sort of surprising in a way, because your games are fairly unusual.

GS: Of course, I have a fan base in Japan as well. I'm not sure why, but there are more fans in Europe and the U.S. Since I realized that, it's better to work with the publishers based here. That's why I ended up working with a U.S. publisher.

But do you have any ideas as to why that is?

GS: Before Killer7, I was making games for the Japanese fans. When I started creating Killer7, the market was worldwide. My motivation and efforts goes in different directions -- I targeted the market worldwide, not only in Japan.

I'm not sure why it is, but the target market did change to worldwide. But my situation is completely different now, compared to before Killer7. The feeling, or motivation, maybe made the situation like this.

During GDC 2007, you gave a presentation about the importance of designers having good relationships with their producers -- it seemed different to how the Western designer/producer relationship sometimes is. Can you speak on your partnership with Mr. Mikami?

GS: We've known each other for a while. Mikami-san understands a lot of different things.

SM: I have some parts that I can't do well, in terms of creating games -- the same as Suda-san. There are some parts that, in terms of creating, he's not good at.

Once we work together and collaborate, it helps us -- we each work on the parts we're good at. Now we're collaborating together. Up to this point, we've worked really well [together], and helped each other well.

Mr. Mikami, you were with Capcom for nearly two decades, and now you're working on more of a contractual basis with a few companies. How has your situation as a producer changed?

SM: I always feel very excited to work on something different and new, so I'm very happy about the situation I have now. I have two projects -- one with PlatinumGames, and one with Grasshopper and EA.

When I worked at Capcom, I worked on more than two projects at the same time. Two projects at the same time is actually not as hard as before, so I really appreciate and enjoy what I'm doing right now.

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

Some more GameSetLinks to continue the week, then, and it's headed by an inspiring, poignant piece by competition fighting game veteran John Choi about his family and victory at a recent Las Vegas meetup.

Also hanging out in here - Kokoromi's new indie game challenge in THREE DEE, the 'Reformat The Planet' chiptune documentary streamable for a limited time only, inside Guitar Hero research, and lots more neatness besides.

You miserable maggots:

John Choi - 'Where's the cheese' - Shoryuken.com forums
Amazing story of a father's fight against cancer and a son's triumphant Street Fighter tournament win at EVO. Read it. (Via Sirlin).

Kokoromi Collective - GAMMA 3D
'Kokoromi challenges you to create a game that uses red/blue stereoscopy in an innovative, experimental, and/or integral manner.' Entries showcased alongside Montreal Games Summit in November, and cool indie types should enter now, damn you.

Wonderland: Webwars: EVE
'WebWars: EVE is a new type of game about conquering territory and controlling territory - but, in this case, the territory is websites.'

MyGamerCard - My Geometry Wars 2 high scores
Hey, a cute GW2-specific custom JPG - you can make your own, it's dynamically updated, and all.

MTV Multiplayer » Pay Attention To The Man Behind ‘Henry Hatsworth’
Nice to see Totilo pointing out Kyle Gray, the press release was v. generic sadly.

Wing Commander CIC News # 3234: 'Chris Roberts Heads to the Hills'
Didn't know Roberts (Wing Commander mastermind) was doing so much movie producing now - he also produced Lucky Number Slevin.

Pitchfork.tv - 'Reformat The Planet' is the one-week only streaming documentary
Oo, the Blipfest-filmed 8-bit doc is up for just a while - Game Boys galore.

PlayStationMuseum.com - StarCon
Neat info, Beta footage on cancelled Accolade PS1 title that would have arcade-d up the Star Control series in space, weirdly enough.

Kotaku: 'Texas Gamer: U.S. Arcades Never Say Die!'
Nice new Austin arcade.

Is it music? | Music | projo.com | The Providence Journal
On Kiri Miller's sometimes GSW-featured Guitar Hero research: 'To some, it is a game, where proficiency and points create competition. To others, it’s a social interaction, a shared activity revolving around music.'

Blurst :: Coming Soon
Uhoh, the Off-Road Velociraptor Safari/Jetpack Brontosaurus massive (and IGF co-organizers) are launching their own web portal with custom wacky games.

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

[This is an interesting, if odd one - Mathew Kumar talked to Gene Hoffman, CEO of billing and fraud management company Vindicia, about the issues MMO publishers such as Blizzard (which we believe Vindicia represented, but they didn't explicitly confirm) face - and what they can do to avoid fraud, which can be massive.]

As MMOGs increase in size and become more like real economies, fraud, either in-world theft or simple credit card chargebacks, become a larger issue.

In fact, chargebacks are a relatively little-known but fascinating part of the MMO world. As recently explained, fraudulent chargeback "...occurs when a credit card transaction is refuted by the cardholder.", and can occur both with stolen credit cards and even when "...the actual cardholder makes the transaction and then decides to refute the transaction after the fact."

For major MMO firms, these fees can stretch into millions of dollars every month, making managing them key. Gamasutra talks to Gene Hoffman, CEO of billing and fraud management company Vindicia about the issues MMOG publishers such as Blizzard face, and what they can do to avoid fraud.

What are the types of fraud MMOGs could face via credit card payment?

GH: The first question about MMO fraud is whether there is a real currency resale market. If there is a way to create cash directly or over on eBay, there will be real fraud attempts to use stolen credit cards to create cash.

If that's less of an issue, then the main type of fraud on the front end will be card thieves using payment method-required free trials or micropayments to test their list of stolen cards. Because MMO's feel they are immune to real fraud (and it doesn't cost them much) they don't institute any protection up front and the fraudsters then do a $1 or $0 authorization or a sub $5 transaction.

Those transactions don't show up well or quickly to the actual card holder leaving the card thief time to go commit actual high value fraud at an online retailer or in the physical world.

On the back end, many MMOs have a very hard time tying their chargebacks to the actual accounts and shutting those accounts off. That means that customers have learned that they can chargeback their transactions to get credit or money back and often still play next month. We actually see this happen around Thanksgiving as chargeback volume spikes so that people have more Christmas spending money.

I believe you've previously worked with companies such like Blizzard on World of Warcraft. Can you talk, even abstractly, about its issues with fraud?

GH: While we can't comment on our merchants' specific cases without explicit permission, what we have noticed across all our gaming clients when it comes to fraud is that the 1% chargeback rate is really a marketing budget.

Having your chargebacks too low often means you aren't being aggressive enough on the customer acquisition side. One of the real side benefits of a large customer base is that the denominator in your chargeback rate is quite large and offset by very safe and trustworthy transactions.

Those two processes create a virtuous cycle that allows you to push hard to sign new customers up if you have someone like Vindicia really watching the chargebacks on the back end.

What do you think about the evolving online marketplace, with new emphasis on micro-transactions and other forms of payment?

GH: We have always liked using micro-transactions on top of a base subscription service but we remain somewhat skeptical of micro-transactions without that base. The "penny gap" looms large and the cost of most any transaction medium makes it hard to run a model whose average ticket is less than $5.

That said, there are lots of commerce models that will allow you to get the same average yearly customer value while having the customer feel that he's paying even less per transaction.

On the fraud side, a lot of the other forms of payment do have one potential downside. They separate you a bit further from who your customer actually is and that can have unpleasant social value consequences. Knowing that your customer trusts you enough to share his data with you leads you to a lot more confidence that he's not going to cause grief in game to the rest of your paying customers.

Well, micro-transactions do seem to work fine in, say, Korea!

GH: Americans love "all you can eat". Even the mobile phone companies have really evolved to all you can eat. We always challenge people to name the bill they get every month or year that isn't in actuality all you can eat.

Outside of government granted monopolies, most people know what they are going to pay. That said, using a base plus metering can make a lot of sense. It allows you to then offer more subscription tiers that allow your best customers to pay you a higher base and less variable - again much like the plans and pricing that the mobile industry has evolved.

Item sales and in-world theft are becoming bigger legal issues - what's your take?

GH: Over the long haul this is going to be the hardest problem to solve for the virtual world and in many ways, one of the most important.

Virtual worlds create a much easier fraud and theft scenario as there is no drop box or re-mailer needed to extract cold hard cash from credit card and auction fraud based on virtual goods or currencies.

But how important are virtual world economies to the real world economy?

GH: These are real economies. In fact, they get much closer to the raw creation of economic growth than many national economies as these "virtual" economies prove quite convincingly that wealth isn't capital or labor but instead knowledge and creativity. Building a working infrastructure to support capital inflows and outflows in a trustworthy manner is very much a core problem we want to address.

In many ways we're facing the merging of intellectual property and "cash" into one entangled entity. When someone steals a virtual thing they've stolen real value. Cash was created in many ways because barter was hard, and cash creates prices. However if prices are now known in some exchange rate, the virtual good that was stolen is a bill denominated in the exchange value of that good in the first place.

All that doesn't even begin to get into the downstream effects of an initial chargeback creating a "false" good sold to a legitimate seller that was an input to some other new good or service or further resold or broken down to others.

Luckily in many cases the world designer can eat the "cost" as there really wasn't an underlying cost (giving away what's free to them here and there) to be able to support the downstream goods and services but as these economies get more complex, even that assumption doesn't hold.

What is your advice for developers who are working on games where they're going to use some form of online billing?

GH: Don't focus on price when choosing a merchant acquirer. There are really only 3 domestic merchant acquirers and 2-3 foreign ones that are good at intangible goods or recurring billing. Be very careful to make sure you own your own customer data so that you aren't at a third party's mercy when you want to evolve your billing and marketing.

Finally, don't wait until you're already successful to worry about customer retention. The most profitable part of your business is ensuring that you do everything to keep a happily paying customer even if his card was stolen, expired, or over its limit.

Do you see future legal legislation and perhaps taxing of these games as a result?

GH: We don't see near term legislation to tax these sorts of entities, but it would not surprise us at all to see the IRS take the position in the next 10 years that any amount you flow out of a virtual world above the amount you paid in should be reported as income on your income taxes. Arguably that's already the law and something some gamers should keep in mind.

The legislative realm that worries us the most for MMOs and virtual worlds is more around the regulation of banking, investing, and prediction markets.

Virtual worlds are going to start having (and already have had) real woes in banking and securities and that could mean that MMOs would have to start complying with thick and painful SEC, OCC, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commision regulatory schemes.

Finally, do you have any response to the MMOG Business Models: Cancel That Subscription! article we recently ran?

Gene Hoffman: Business model flexibility is the key issue for all the various games, and the dynamics of the game itself should drive pricing strategies. When game developers are approaching a more casual market it certainly makes sense to give more access and time to get buy-in and adoption.

It follows something we tell lots of our clients, which is "don't be afraid of giving away what is free to you to acquire more customers and keep them longer."

That said, we think that it is better to give people larger doses of time to create a base subscription service using tools like "payment method required free trials" and then stack additional micro-payments on a base of something more like a $5 per time period price. We see a lot of game developers and other merchants being too shy about the value of their game which leads them to under-price.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | 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 - some opinions and an interview with controversial indie game creator Luc Bernard.]

I pretty freely admit that I laughed quite loudly when I first saw Pitchfork's review of the second album from immensely average Australian rock band Jet. You know, the one where instead of text, they just had that YouTube video of a monkey drinking its own urine?

So, I'm not sure how I can really be about to say that I find the following quote, from Destructoid's review of indie platformer Eternity's Child, to be utterly repugnant. Possibly it's an issue I have with Jet, having had the displeasure of seeing them play “before they were big”. But here we go anyway:

“Whatever you do, don't buy this game. In fact, don't even say its name, for that might give its already unholy form power.”

That's repugnant. Utterly abhorrent. I've done my fair share of criticism, for both games and music, and that's a level I've never stooped to. That's the point where it jumps from taking your responsibilities as a writer in the public sphere seriously, to attention-seeking. 'Look at how funny I am!' It's pretty much everything I find repellent about the world of video game blogging in one sentence. There's a time and place for humour writing. Not every single post needs to contain a joke. Is the audience's attention span really that infinitesimal?

To be fair, the rest of the review isn't actually badly done, per se. It raises fair points in terms of the issues the writer has with the game, but jeez. That conclusion? Just...don't. Show some respect – both for the game, and for yourself, as a writer.

Here's the problem with it – it's trivializing the work of the game's creator, Luc Bernard, and turning him into a joke in the eyes of the readers. And the readers, for the most part, want to be the bloggers. They want to be as Oscar-Wilde-witty and fabulously scathing as the people whose work they read each and every day. That's why comments exist. That's where they try and prove that they can compete.

And, here lies the level of responsibility, which seems to be completely misunderstood. Anyone can laugh, and say that they're not responsible for the comments of the community, but that's not true. You can't play the 'do as I say, not as I do' game. Especially not on the Internet, where the much reposted Penny Arcade rule of anonymity stands so true. To wit:

“Luc,” read one comment, “Go fuck yourself.”

“GO FUCK YOURSELF LUC!!” Read another. “YEAHHHH!!!”

So: the thing. Eternity's Child might not be a good game. I wouldn't know – I haven't actually played it, yet. But I respect its creator, Luc Bernard.

Respect's a good word, I think. It means, according to the first online definition I managed to wrangle up, “To recognize the worth, quality, importance, or magnitude of”.

I think Bernard's reaction to this whole thing in the aforementioned comments section could have been handled with a higher degree of professionalism. In fact, I think even taking part was a bad move.

I think placing the blame on his co-developer, Joseph, was unnecessary. I think his recent – somewhat retracted – comments in regards to quitting video games smack of over-reaction.

But, he's 22. I did some pretty stupid things, and said some pretty stupid stuff at that age. Hell, I tried to steal a pine tree once. And at least he attempted it - putting the game out, I mean, not stealing a pine tree, because that only leads to legal threats and multi-hundred dollar bills. He put something out there commercially - putting a value on his work - and you have to respect that.

'Course, I'm not saying that you have to create something of your own to be able to engage in criticism, because that's just silly. But at least show a little respect, please - at least respect the effort that went into his work.

The following is a discussion with Bernard about his work, and his behavior.

GSW: How did you move from the previous XNA version to getting the game on Steam and Wiiware?

Luc Bernard: Well, at that time there was a lack of information about how how we were able to sell XNA games. Also at that time I was in America just, well, wasting time, so I was not working on the game properly. So, well, once I got back to Europe for a month I decided to go for PC and Wii because there seems to be more players on those machines.

GSW: What was it that attracted you to XNA in the first place, then?

LB: Mainly the HD TV and, well, Xbox 360. Most people like to play on consoles now, and for some weird reason people see you as a success if you get a game on a console rather than PC. Though, PC has some of the best games, and I prefer playing PC versions of Xbox games.

GSW: How did the deal with Alten8 come about, and how did that lead to the game heading to Steam?

LB: Well, I knew the CEO before, because we did a mobile game together, so knowing I wanted to try out the Wii, and they were developers for it, I decided to do that version with them.

The Steam version came because a lot of people wanted it to come out on other machines than Wii, and all the original code was done on PC, so it would have been a waste to not put it out on PC. Plus, you get HD greatness!

GSW: Are you glad you launched on PC first? It seems like it's given you a good chance to at least become aware of the issues that the game has, and have a chance to fix them up.

LB: We fixed them up the first day. I think it was good, yes, but both ones are really different. The PC one will be never ending while the Wiiware one you buy it and when you finish it it's over, no updates.

GSW: Was the $5 pricepoint of the game your idea, and do you think that's worked in regards to drumming up interest?

LB: Yes, I always wanted it to be really cheap. I want as many people to try it out possible. That might have made people interested in it for sure - more people are willing to give it a try.

GSW: How many copies have you sold so far?

LB: Haha, I have a contract with Valve that says no revealing numbers!

GSW: So what other stats have you been able to gather from Steam? You can check the average amount of time spent playing and things like that, right?

LB: Yes that is pretty neat. Steamworks is really awesome.

Steam is taking PC games to the next level; now gamers need to get away from their consoles and play more on PC.

GSW: When was the release date decided upon?

LB: We kept on changing month for the PC version and then set a date and, well, got it out. As simple as that.

GSW: Would you have wanted longer, given the reaction to the unpatched version?

LB: Well, the jumping button worked fine. Angel just bends. The beta testers had no problems and neither did we, so that's what I'm still trying to figure out.

The press never told us it wasn't working in the preview versions, and they didn't like the bending - because we went for a more realistic jumping. But, well, we got a patch out the same day the game was released.

I mean, what other devs do that?

GSW: How do you feel about reviews noting that the game feels like a work in progress?

LB: I totally agree with the Kotaku one: Eternity's Child Steam is a very different game than the Wiiware one. The Steam one is for users; it's going to grow with the community.

Right now for only $4.99, people have got 15 hours of gameplay out of it, while with new chapters added and the level editor being made better and better the game will never end.

So we are doing something new in terms of episode based games. You buy Eternity's Child once you get all the new episodes for free updated via Steam.

GSW: That seems a little weird - I mean, you could charge for them really, couldn't you? Why not price additional episodes as well?

LB: Let's put it this way: I always wanted to do a cheap game so many people could buy it. And I wanted to do something different episode wise.

My plan is to offer the best deal possible to gamers.

GSW: I know you've mentioned in the Steam forums that you're interested to see where future patches take the game - do you think this could effectively put potential buyers off, given that it suggests a lack of a "definitive" version?

LB: What I meant by patches was new chapters. I wanted to see what fans wanted to see and know about the world. I mean, listen to your customers! Don't take them for granted.

We reply personally to each message and make sure everyone is 100% happy. If someone is lost in a level, they tell us and we help them finish.

Eternity's Child: Chapter 1: Mother Nature on its own is worth the $4.99, but with us always adding things, why would it put people off? They get a game that is always growing and one that listens to them.

I mean, is it better to have a game that is always growing, or just one that once you play it, it's dead?There will never be a ending to Eternity's Child Steam.

GSW: What do you see yourself adding in the future?

LB: I want to do the sequel to Chapter 1, which will be very story based, and also a prequel chapter.

I think we also need to add new features to the level editor and a website for people to upload their levels, since users love that. And maybe easier ways to make mods: so far I've seen people modding Eternity's Child with Half-Life and Spore.

GSW: Did you expect that kind of modding to happen this soon?

LB: None of us did. It went pretty fast, but it's really neat - I am loving it.

I can't wait until I see someone put porn pictures into Eternity's Child, I would find that really funny.

But, I mean, this is really awesome. Plus, the custom levels will be great: we're starting to see some, and I am trying to set up a website for people to upload them with a Japanese translator who is good at website stuff.

GSW: How many episodes do you expect the story to run over?

LB: There are two others planned, but if Eternity's Child sells constantly all the time, we're just going to add episodes all the time.

GSW: Are there particular points in the reviews that have criticised the game that you have problems with?

LB: Well, there was one review that seemed more personal than anything else. That's the way I felt about it. Plus, I hate it when someone does a review without finishing the game.

GSW: And you can tell, via Steam?

LB: No, because one of them told me, since we made peace behind the scenes. Since I wanted a re-review, since you can't review a game without finishing it.

GSW: Why do you say it was a personal attack?

LB: It felt more like one with the comments like, 'Do not mention this game, it will give it some sort of unholy power.'

I mean, that was not necessary, so for me it was a direct insult.

GSW: Are there criticisms that you would agree with?

LB: Yes, I need the next chapter to focus a lot more on the story. It's what is interesting about Eternity's Child, so even if some people find it cheesy, fans want to know more.

GSW: Do you think you'll be getting the story across in different ways, given the problems that people seemed to have with the approach you took in the first episode?

LB: You mean the fact that the first episode was about Mother Nature? Well, Joshua found that my original story was too cheesy and that I needed to hire a writer to help me because I talk like a retard, so for Chapter 2 I get to hire a writer and Joshua can't say anything if it's cheesy. People like cheesy stuff anyways.

GSW: Are there more positive elements that you're glad to see acknowledged?

LB: The thing I'm the most glad about is the community growing around the game. I mean, it's just great. It's not like we just released this and let it out there, we are looking after every customer, and I'm sure they are also having fun telling us what they want to see.

Plus, loads of people write to us saying that they love the game, and that's it's the indie game of the summer.

GSW: What about comments on your blog like, "as we speak Joshua is tightening up the controls and jump (about fucking time to be honest)"? Doesn't that imply a lack of workable relationship between the two of you?

LB: We are both two different people, so we get into a lot of fights about what we think should be done like this or that, and there has been a lot of drama behind the scenes. I won't go out and tell our personal lives.

But it's mainly different ideas, I mean I don't want to go any further into saying anything. That might sound bad. We are just different.

GSW: Is there any chance you'll continue working together?

LB: Well yes, on Eternity's Child - we've still got chapters to do, and then the Wiiware one with Alten8.

But Joshua has got some game ideas he wants to do, and I've got my own, so for the future we might not work together. But we might end up doing another game - we just won't be doing all our games together.

Haha, do you realise this question makes us sound like we were a married couple or something?

GSW: What I meant, basically, is that it's kind of a blunt thing to say - it's certainly not something I'd say publicly in regards to anyone I work with.

Well, behind scenes you see me and Joshua insulting each other when we don't agree, so why can't we do it in public? Let's put it this way, I will always be honest with people.

I can get mad at someone for something but then after a few hours I get over it and move on, but if I have a problem I will tell them. I guess it's not professional, but I mean, we're indies, I'm not employed by a company so I don't need to be censured.

This is also probably the reason that I do not work for any company. I think what I have done several times on the internet – well, no one would want that.

GSW: How does Joshua feel about the whole situation? Surely the level of blame you've attributed to him can't be a good thing.

LB: Well, I do wish he would listen to me on some elements, but yes, I did get quite angry and I was not nice to him.

These questions really do sound like something you would find in a tabloid - this is weird.

GSW: Totally not my intention. I'm not trying to suggest anything – you've just clearly been working together on the game for a while. It's like...I don't know, Morrissey and Johnny Marr, or something. They worked well together, and not so well apart. But I guess you're really in a position of creative control for the whole thing, right? I'm assuming you wouldn't exactly view the game as a team based exercise.

LB: Well, I don't get to control as much as you think. I mean, me and Joshua - it's really a parternership so if he disagrees with something he won't do it. He also designed a baddie in Eternity's Child.

I mean, I need to listen to ideas from other people because they can bring in some cool ideas. But yes, I must admit, I would have preferred maybe to control everything, but then that would be like me being a dictator.

But, on all graphical elements I got my say! Like, where things are placed, etc., and what is a big no and when there was graphical glitches.

GSW: I'm just curious about his reactions to the blame that you seem to have placed on him, to a degree.

LB: Hmmm, I think he was angry at me for a day or two. But he got over it, since I'm the public guy so I always have to deal with the hate mail.

GSW: Why did you decide to remove the Destructoid robot?

LB: Well, I put him in, because one of the journalists on that website was a friend so he asked me. So then, with the owner [of the site] we agreed to have him in.

However, after the review where they did not finish the game, and well, most of the users telling me to fuck off and that they hope I die, and that then spammed my email account: why would I leave it in there?

So I might just leave him in Chapter 1 and keep him out of the Wiiware one and other chapters, but I've got other better baddies planned that are part of the world of Eternity's Child.

I'm not on bad terms with them, I still talk to some journalists there.

GSW: But not all of them?

LB: Well, I don't know them all. And the ones who reviewed the game I had never talked to before.

GSW: Does the reception of the WiiWare version worry you? How involved are you with that version?

LB: Alten8 is porting the PC one, and we are adding extra levels, making it easier and some other elements. The worst is trying to figure out how to compress everything. Last time, from what I heard, the engine is 80% ported.

I am quite involved in that version - they don't take a decision without asking me, because they want to be as close to my vision possible.

GSW: Do you worry that your response to the situation might have influenced people's opinions of you negatively?

LB: Well, I will ask you a question: if loads of people came up to you, trying to beat you into the ground for fun with 'fuck you' and 'go and die' in your email.

Would you be nice back? Or would you want me to put on a PR act and just pretend that everything is okay?

I'm just human like everyone.

I reply to every email of a fan personally, and I'm on the Steam forums all the time. The people who support us? I owe them the world, and I don't go and ignore them, so I think that's what matters is what people who have talked to me think.

At least you know that I'll be honest with what I say, and I won't lie.

Of course, I think that my publisher might be a bit angry, and other business people might run away from me now. But it's not the first time drama happened, and it's probably not the last.

So, I'm keeping a low cover now! The only place people can find me is in the Steam forums.

GSW: I understand the attacks are bound to get you pretty riled up – and I'd agree that they're really not necessary, and a sign of gross immaturity on the part of those who attacked you. But, I think you've also got responsibilities as a public figure.

It sounds like you're aware of them to a degree, I suppose. Has the publisher actually said anything to you about it?

LB: I'm a human, I'm not going to act like a PR guy and pretend everything's fine. If someone came up to you on the street and said, 'Fuck you!', you would probably not just stay there, but you'd punch him.

The bad thing is, why do people have to be so rude on the internet and in real life they act normal?

Plus those were personal attacks. You know, since Eternity's Child got a lot of hype - for some reason - and it just made people feel better to be able to try and bash me to the ground.

GSW: What's with the quitting, though? As I said, I think there's a great deal of immaturity out there, and I don't really think it's something that should be affecting you to the degree that it seems to be.

LB: It's not so much about the stupid 14 year olds. It's really about I'm not in a financial or personal position right now to do anything at the moment.

I might have a bunch of fans, but the fact is this, it's really hard to work on games without any money!

That's the main reason.

GSW: Where do you see your career going from here?

LB: Well ,an industry friend who has a lot of experience told me that I have dug myself in a gigantic hole. And I basically destroyed my career. That's why I am taking a break from video games.

I am just going to work on Eternity's Child, add new chapters to the Steam version, get the Wiiware one out, and on the side just maybe do some graphic novals.

And then if those both sell well, I will be able to finance myself my dream video game. Getting financing, even if the budget is only $40,000? It's near impossible. Even if there are fans of Eternity's Child and what I do, there are also many, many haters.

And, well, no companies take me seriously either! I mean, what I am mostly is entertainment to people, and I am aware of that.

GSW: Are you working on other projects at the moment? I know a while back you told me that you were pitching a film to various people – how's that going?

LB: Well, I wrote a story in the Eternity's Child world that was perfect for a film. Okay, it would not be suitable for young children probably, and then I showed Uwe Boll - since I was thinking, 'Well, Uwe Boll's films aren't that bad. They are B movies, and I love B movies, and he's never tried 2D animation yet.'

But we'll see what happens; if anything happens or not.

That's how Eternity's Child started out really. It was at first a pitch for a French TV channel as a series.

There is just so much in the world of Eternity's Child: different species and side stories, and different parts of that planet. So that's why I want to also have a go at a graphic novel. Angel is not the only main character of the world. I did several, but I would really love to explore this as a 2D animated series, since there is just so much you can do.

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

[The Gentleman Nerd is a not entirely weekly column written by Jason McMaster and is dedicated to the more discerning tastes of the refined dork. Due to Jason's extreme nature, most of his columns will be subtitled 'Why I Love...' or 'Why I Hate...' - in case you were wondering.]

Well, I made it back, gentle friends. I swam through the river of man and came out the other side with schwag and a few business cards. Thanks to my high level of alcohol tolerance, I managed to almost pull off a straight-faced interview with David Gaider from Bioware as well as demo a few new board games.

Now it be time to regale ye with tales from the nerdy sea. I sat in on a 20 minute Dragon Age demo, and as I mentioned earlier, interviewed David Gaider, the lead writer for this game and long-time BioWare contributor. If you're curious, he's the guy who wrote HK-47 in Knights of the Old Republic. That means he's awesome.

Anyway, Dragon Age looks pretty interesting so far. Fans of Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale will not be disappointed when this game drops early next year. Being developed exclusively (well, as of this writing) for the PC means that many of my hardcore PC friends will be completely psyched.

BioWare is going back to the 4 man party system and has developed this story and world from scratch, so we won't be seeing any old D&D or Star Wars friends this time around. The content and design appear to be M rated, so we won't be having to worry about this story having a happy-go-lucky feel to it. Overall, I'm pretty anxious to get my shaky hands on it.

Mythic, as was the case last year, was busy showing off Warhammer Online and doing so very successfully. They were having PvP demonstrations and had a few stations set up to allow the public to beat each other senseless. The ever-charming Jeremy Dale was there, showing off his leet animating skillz by, uh, standing around. Eve Online was there, as always.

Turbine games were also present at the show. They were handing out trial subscriptions to Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online. The booth was packed all day, so someone had to be doing something right.

The Atari booth was basically the same way. They were demoing The Witcher and running trailers for Sacred 2. There were a few other PC gaming booths, but most of them didn't really draw my attention. The Fable 2 booth was handing out free pub games vouchers. There were running demos of the Champions game, which looks cool if you're into super-heroes.

I spent a good amount of time in the board game area as well. I'd hate to short change those events, so I'll save that for my next installment. I even saw Bud Bundy. I just hope he didn't see me.

[Jason McMaster is a freelance writer who has written for Gamasutra, GameSpy and several other publications. He’s currently working on a few small projects and updating his blog, Lamethrower, as often as he can.]

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

Woo, some final GameSetLinks for the weekend, and in here is the excellent return of 'A Vampyre's Story' - which has been hanging around in development for at least a couple of years now, and it's great to see will finally get a release later this year.

Also there - Richard Jacques stars in the Summer Of Sonic, blimey, as well as crazy Cactus unfinished game videos, the RPS' Japanese correspondent on PC gaming out there, and an incredi-explicit indie title, plus much more.

Oh, and before we go into the links, wanted to mention that Nvidia's Temis Nunez pinged me to remind about NVScene 08, and as a oldskool demo-scene guy (1988-1996 in Jetset, Axis, Valhalla, Kosmic on Amiga and PC, among others), I wanted to make sure all Bay Area geeks knew about it. As the site/Temis explains (and yes, this is in some ways promotional for Nvidia, but much more interesting than that):

"Arranged in strong cooperation with Scene.org and the Breakpoint demo party, NVScene (demo reel)... is held in San Jose, California from the 25th to the 27th of August. In addition to an... international demo competition in both Demo (Presented by HP) and 4K Intro (Presented by EA's Spore) categories on our huge screen and sound system, there will be a very strong lineup of seminar speakers, featuring Navis/ASD, Bonzaj/Plastic, Chaos/Farbrausch, IQ/RGBA, Mentor/TBC, Preacher/Traction and Pixtur/Still."

And a Spore talk with Chris Hecker and Dan Moskowitz of Maxis, actually, all as part of the bigger Nvision event which has game-related technical talks, a LAN party, etc. Anyhow, I'm planning to go for at least a while, so expect some GSW reports on it. On to the links:

SturmMod Mod for Far Cry Performance image - Mod DB
Far Cry mod which "...provides an environment in which the places and actions described by William Shakespeare in his play "The Tempest" can be visited, explored, experienced and reflected by the player." Nice!

Games Media Awards finalists revealed | Gaming Industry | News by MCV
UK-only, interesting/wacky stuff - naturally, Rev. Campbell turns up in comments to ask why Edge journos are named when the magazine is anonymously credited - interesting point.

Ascaron - Press Release: A Vampyre's Story to Be Told on Halloween 2008 - GamersHell.com
This LucasArts alumni graphic adventure is fiiinally getting a release, yay.

IndieGames.com - The Weblog - Preview: Unfinished Projects (cactus)
Cactus. Blows. My. Mind.

Siliconera » Interview with Yuan-Hsi Chiang: Developer of the World’s Next Dreamcast Game
These guys were IGF Mobile finalists with the GP2X handheld version - they certainly do love obscure systems!

Tokyo PC: Pasokon Gemu! | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Oo, good English-language reporting on the Japanese PC scene, a rarity.

Sega Nerds: 'Summer of Sonic: Live performances'
Keep hands at chest height or above, Zorg.

T=Machine » 2008 List of MMO Publishers
'I recently needed a reference-list of world-wide MMO publishers … and I couldn’t find anyone who was maintaining a list of them.' Useful!

The Independent Gaming Source: 'This Entire Post Is Inappropriate And NSFW'
This is mindblowingly odd and explicit, game-wise - from some indie semi-stars, too.

Versus CluClu Land: Minigolf with a Story
'Video games are no more a narrative medium than minigolf; their basic contours are defined by the demands of play, not storytelling.'

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

[Aha, another Austin GDC-related event organized by my colleague and GCG supremo Jill Duffy, this time for folks wanting to get into the biz, with the excellent Harvey Smith (what _is_ he working out at Arkane?) giving the keynote.]

The organizers of the Game Career Seminar at Austin GDC have announced Arkane Studios' Harvey Smith as the keynote for this year's educational event, talking about the 'Luckiest People Alive', with other GCS speakers from Vicarious Visions, Nexon, Ghostfire, and more.

The event, organized by Think Services (also parent of Gamasutra) is held on September 17th, and takes place at the Austin Convention Center during Austin GDC.

Smith, currently working at Arkane Studios' relatively new Austin office, will provide the keynote address, entitled "Luckiest People Alive." Smith's previous works have included the critically-acclaimed Deus Ex for Ion Storm, where he served as the lead designer of the 2000 BAFTA award-winning game.

In his talk, Smith will discuss what he sees as an imminent explosion of change, creativity, and possibility within the world of interactive entertainment.

The Game Career Seminar presents an opportunity for students, graduates and aspiring game developers to meet and network with human resources personnel from various game developers and learn how to enter the thriving game development world.

Smith was recognized as the winner of the Game Design Challenge at GDC 2006 with his "Peace Bomb" game concept aimed at winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Working on game development professionally since 1993, Smith has served as studio creative director at Midway Games' Austin office, as lead designer of Fireteam at Multitude, and Origin Systems.

The line-up of speakers at the Game Career Seminar also includes:

- Eduardo Baraf, Director of Product Management at Tabula Digita, Inc.
- Brenda Brathwaite, Game Designer and Instructor at Savannah College of Art and Design
- Jennifer Bullard, Senior Producer, Aspyr Media
- Jill Duffy, Editor of GameCareerGuide.com
- Paula Fellbaum, Vice President of Human Resources, Nexon Publishing
- Darius Kazemi, President of Orbus Gameworks
- James Portnow, Game Designer and CCO of Divide by Zero Games
- Ed Roman, CEO, Ghostfire Games
- Brandon Sheffield, Editor-in-Chief of Game Developer Magazine
- Brandon Van Slyke, Game Designer at Vicarious Visions

To register for the Austin Game Career Seminar or for more information, please visit the official Game Career Seminar website.

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

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

This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The goodies in this latest version include an unconventional AGS game, a survival roguelike, an experimental platformer by Jesse Venbrux, and a role-playing game made as a tribute to the classic EarthBound.

Game Pick: 'Ghosts of Aliens' (Swordofkings128, freeware)
"Ghosts of Aliens is a full-length RPG which has been in production for more than six months, featuring music by one of the developers credited with creating the post-cyberpocalyptic basketball epic, Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. Playing as the ghost of an alien named Atum, the story tells the tale of this restless soul who is given another chance at life, granted that he undertakes a quest to defeat the five Doom Beasts and save the world of Appalathia."

Game Pick: 'CryptRover' (Ido Yehieli, freeware)
"In CryptRover, you assume the identity of an archaeologist who's trapped in an underground crypt with limited supply of air. Strangely enough, air supply can be replenished by collecting air cans, while health is restored by walking over med packs strategically placed in areas packed with spiders. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms."

Game Pick: 'Chatroom' (TheJBurger, freeware)
"A short game designed to simulate an IRC chatroom, created by the developer of La Croix Pan for a friendly One Room One Week competition held in the AGS forums. The story is set in the year 2097, where your character is holed in an underground military bunker with only a working computer to use as means of contact with the outside world."

Game Pick: 'You Made It' (Jesse Venbrux, freeware)
"We've made it to the final recommendation for this week - a new experimental project by the developer of Frozzd and the Karoshi series. Walk, jump, and stumble your way towards the exit cleverly hidden by your own trails in each of the ten levels, only to find a screenshot of your final achievement as the reward."

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

Small French game design studio Mekensleep developed an original DS title with a small team, and Soul Bubbles' story is unique in many ways.

Big sister site Gamasutra has already focused on comments about the DS market being "killed by lack of originality".

In this extended transcript of the Brandon Sheffield-conducted interview, the studio's creative director Oliver Lejade also discusses the challenges that come with the oft-cited goal of "making the game we wanted to make," from conception, to media reception, to distribution.

In Mekensleep's case, this journey was complicated by the casual-hardcore player divide and the extra hurdle original titles sometimes face in the burgeoning DS market - and Lejade was happy to explain the trials and tribulations of ploughing one's on furrow.

How long did you work on Soul Bubbles?

Olivier Lejade: A little bit over three years.

How were you able to afford to do that?

OL: My previous company was a VC funded business, and when the VCs tried to wrestle control of the company, I basically fought back, and wrestled money out of them. So that was where I found the money to fund Mekensleep, and do the game we wanted to make.

How many people on the team?

OL: It went from between two, to up to -- how much were we at peak production? 12? Yeah, 12, I think.

And over those three years, what kind of process did you use in creating your games? I hear it was a somewhat iterative process, experimenting with things?

OL: It was a very iterative process. We started out with a prototype, basically, which had been made by Omar [Cornut, lead programmer], and at that time it was a very simple tech where you could basically blow on soap bubbles; but the bubbles didn't collide with each other.

And from there, we started -- just him and me at the time -- iterating interesting stuff to do on the very low level -- pure interaction, stylus interaction things. And that's where we started looking into cutting the bubbles, rejoining them, drawing the bubbles... And so we did that for something like six to eight months, I think.

And also at that point we were looking at videos of magicians doing magic tricks with smoke -- blowing smoke into bubbles -- and we thought that was cool, that was interesting... We had no gameplay at that point yet; we just had a cool, interactive toy.

And we decided to try to introduce the smoke inside the prototype, and we did that, but the prototype was PC-only at that point, so we could have lots of particles to do the smoke. Of course, when we moved on to the DS, we couldn't do smoke the same way anymore, we couldn't have as many.

So then, we started thinking "What could we be moving around that would be less consuming than smoke?" And that's where the spirits came into play. We basically reduced, very severely, the number of particles; which is good, also, on a gameplay point of view.

When we were prototyping with smoke, the smoke tended to scatter all around the level, and it was hard to pick up. It was too hard. Since we wanted to make an easy game, it was better to have fewer particles, and that's where spirits started to emerge.

So, to come back to your initial question, the development process was very, very iterative. From the start to the end, we were still iterating very, very late into development. I think, actually, the very last month, we were still squeezing in little features here and there.

The game seems like it's got a lot in it, and I wonder if it could potentially be too much. It was marketed somewhat toward a more casual audience, but it actually seems a bit more hardcore, in terms of the range of options.

OL: I understand, but I think when you play it, you'll find out that the actual experience is very different, in the sense that the core gameplay, which is to bring the spheres from the start to the end of the level, you get that fairly easily. After the first world you basically have got that, and even a casual gamer has gotten it.

So, to keep the player interested until the end of the game, we had to diversify the experience. And the way the mechanics are being introduced, world by world, and changing -- we're always turning around that central idea of bringing in the spirits.

But we're introducing little gameplay variations here and there, and I think it's done in a way that doesn't make it overwhelming to the player. The rhythm and the accessibility curve is soft enough that it's not too much challenge for casual gamers.

From what we've seen from the initial reaction of players, I think we hit it right. Because the criticism we've had is more on the other side -- players saying it's too easy, rather than players saying it's too hard, too overwhelming, or whatever.

Specifically, here in France, how much difference do critical opinion and reviews make to whether or not you get a sequel, since this is your first original IP?

OL: I don't really know yet. I anticipate it has marginal impact compared to actual sales.

Do you feel that people really got what you were trying to do?

OL: I think the players -- mostly, the players did. I'm not sure the reviewers all did. The two main criticisms we've had from the reviewers are that the game is too easy, and too short.

They both seem a little unfair to me -- and there's disagreement in the team, around that specific point -- but the "too easy" point I disagree with because that's specifically how we wanted it to be.

And I don't think it's that easy. It's as easy as you want it to be. I think, actually, casual gamers are not going to have an easy time. That's not what we found in tests; data says that it's not easy for casual gamers.

But experienced gamers are not going to have a lot of trouble, if -- and that's an important "if" -- if they do the main line, and don't go after all the Calabashes [hidden treasures] where difficulty is hidden.

It was an actual design decision to make the main path to the exit fairly easy, so that the casual gamers could progress through the game until the end, but push difficulty to the edges of the level, to where the Calabashes are hidden. So if you're looking for difficulty, if you go there, you'll find it.

The problem is, I think a lot of reviewers did not go looking for it. And, also, some of them complained that we give tips; there are little stone monoliths, and if you hit them there's a tip that comes down and basically explains to you what you're supposed to do.

And the reason we introduced that is, we found that casual gamers sometimes were completely stumped, and did not know what to do, and that's where we had a fall-off point, a drop-out.

To help them overcome that, we put in those little stone tips. The thing is, it's an act of the player -- you don't have to click on them. So if you find it easy, or if you think you can find it out by yourself, you can just go at the problem and actually just try to solve the problem by yourself.

Nobody forces you to hit the monolith to ask for the tip, and a bunch of reviewers have complained about those tips -- but then, it's their choice as a player to hit the tip, and nobody was putting a gun to their head for them to do it, so...

The difference between the reviewer and the target audience is quite wide, potentially, because this is found with any game that is remotely casual. Reviewers are not casual gamers; which can be a problem.

OL: But that's not the worst part! Because we've tried to basically bridge between casual gamers and hardcore gamers, and the interesting fact is that even though they did that, even though they found it so-called "too easy," they still enjoyed the game very much. And that's what they say.

I'm talking about the most critical reviews, right? They say that they like the game a lot, but they marked it down two to three points sometimes, just because of they found the game to be too easy. And I think that's a problem.

Because if the only thing you have to say about a game is that -- you're saying, "Well I had a really good time, but it was too short, or it was a little too easy," I don't think that is a big enough criticism to mark down a game the way they do it.

How do you feel the environment for smaller, independent developers in France is doing right now?

OL: I think it's better than it's been in a long time.

To what do you attribute that?

OL: First and foremost? Actual recognition from the state, that gaming is a valid cultural form, and that in turn has helped in financing games, which has helped us have more freedom.

That's the first part of the equation, that makes it better than it's ever been; and the other part is, I think, that it's going to get even better, because online distribution, I think is going to tilt things into the direction of small creative teams more than it's been before.

I'm not saying that it's going to be totally in favor of those teams, but up to now it was mostly in favor of big teams, established teams, doing sequels of whatever previous success they've had, or licenses; but now it's going to be a little bit more balanced.

Do you feel that consoles are a place for that, or will there be much more PC downloading?

OL: I think the platform doesn't matter that much, as long as it's online. It's all distribution channels, and you basically have to see consoles as closed distribution channels, and the thing is to try to avoid being trapped in closed distribution channels.

Like, you wouldn't want -- except if you had something that's really worth it, as a counter-balance, but otherwise you'd want it to be on as many distribution channels as you can.

I wanted to ask you -- do you think there was a disconnect between the front of the box and the actual game design?

OL: Well, let's just put it this way: I negotiated total creative control of the game with Eidos, so we have that contractually, but that did not extend to marketing decisions.

Where do you think the developer's responsibility ends and the publisher's begins, in terms of educating the consumer about the game?

OL: That's a tough one.

I mean, if you want to get more sales, do you feel that you can or should be doing more promotions yourself somehow?

OL: I definitely wish we were more used by our publisher, since we're willing, and I feel that they think they don't need us so much, to do the promotion. And that's kind of...

Well, they do use us, but not as much as I think they should, or as I think is possible. So yeah, I definitely think we could be more involved. The question is, it's not really our job, either... So it's hard to balance.

How do you think the market is now for DS titles?

OL: I think it's being killed by lack of originality. Most publishers are pushing crappy clones, quickly made for little money, and that's having a detrimental effect on the public, because the public doesn't know what to choose, doesn't find any good titles, so it tends to go to established, known titles and games -- Nintendo games, basically. The problem is, that's not just the publisher's fault. I think distribution is largely responsible for that, because they have, basically, selection companies to decide which game they're going to put in front of their--

You're talking about retailers?

OL: Yeah. Large retailers, mostly. They have selection companies that decide what they're buying, and how many quantities they're taking from the publishers, and how they're exposing it on the racks. So the problem is, these committees, they have the publishers come in and present their games, and there are lots of publishers coming in, who have a lot of games to present, and when the publisher comes in and says -- basically a publisher has about five minutes per game, to explain what the game is about.

So when you're selling a license? It's easy. You say, "Oh, well, we're making this game that's Spider-Man 3, it's going to be blah-blah-blah," they know what Spider-Man is, they know they're going to be signing X quantity of it, mechanically. So that's fine.

You're saying, "Oh, this is a game about little girls, pink ponies, and you know that little girls are going to buy this," it's X number of units are going to go, it's an easy sell. But when you come in with an original game, that they don't have any clear reference to the gameplay of something that has been done recently, that has no license, then it's a very hard sell. And if you have only five minutes? I can't explain Soul Bubbles in five minutes. It's not doable -- and I made the game.

Realistically, it would have to be played, anyway.

OL: Right. So what happens is, the committee says, "Ah, this game, I don't understand, I don't know what it is... Uh, no." Or, in the best case, "Just give me a few units, and that's it."

So this comes back to the marketing team, and the publisher, who then forms this image that it cannot sell that type of game; which goes down to the buying arm of the publisher, who doesn't want to buy these types of games anymore, because they don't know how many they'll be able to sell.

And even if they do like the game, they know that they're going to have a selling problem to the distribution. So I think distribution is largely responsible for what's happening right now. And it's not just -- it's very obvious on the DS, but it's true for all distribution.

Do you think download may potentially help with this problem, because then you don't have shelves?

OL: Yeah. And another important distinction is that those virtual distributors are not going to be run the same way as the actual physical distribution, and not by the same people.

We'll see. But right now, at least Steam, or PSN, or WiiWare, or whatever, or the web, basically. It's not run by Kmart, or -- it's not the same people. So, maybe there's hope.

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