[Over at sister console digital download site GamerBytes, editor Ryan Langley has been doing a neat interview or two recently, and I wanted to highlight this one because it's a chat with a neat micro-indie about a PC and potentially XBLA-bound robot-jumping combat game with some nice leftfield gameplay ideas integrated into it.]

With the recent announcement of Plain Sight, a new game being created using Microsoft's XNA tools, Gamasutra sister site GamerBytes got in contact with Robin Lacey over at Beatnik Games to ask get to know more about this game, how it all works, and how they've been working with XNA - the ups and the downs.

First of all, thank you for doing this interview. Straight up - who are you and what is Beatnik Games?

Robin Lacey: My name is Robin Lacey. We don’t really have job titles at Beatnik Games, but I suppose the closest match for my role would be ‘producer.’ The way I see it, my job is to make certain that this game is finished on time, on budget and is fun to play. Everyone here has a heavy hand in the game creation process. For this reason no one has taken the title of ‘designer’.

Beatnik Games was set up by me and an old friend, Damien Cerri, about a year ago; we moved into our office in January and started working on Plain Sight a few weeks later. Additionally there are four others guys currently working with us full time: two programmers (Lawrence Bishop and Alex Ashby), and two artists (Hin Nim and Sam Jacobs).

What’s unusual about Beatnik Games is that we’re not hardened industry veterans (the age range in the office is between 24 and 26). The way I see it, everyone here knows how to do their job and do it to a very high standard – as long as people can do that, age and experience is immaterial.

You've just announced your first title, Plain Sight. Give us a rundown of what we can expect once the game is released?

RL: When telling people about Plain Sight, the first thing we do is explain the rules:

1) You’re a small glowing robot. You’re small because you have one point.

2) You can get more points by killing other robots with your sword and stealing their points.

3) The more points you get, the bigger, faster and brighter you get.

4) However, these points don’t count towards your final score until you bank them. To get your points into your bank you have to blow yourself up.

5) The bigger you are, the bigger the bomb. The more players you take out, the higher the multiplier.

6) Respawn and repeat.

7) At the end of the round the player with the highest banked score wins.

The idea is to present a game with as clear a ‘risk and reward’ mechanic as possible: You get more powerful with every player you take out, but likewise you become a bigger and brighter target for someone to swoop in and kill, thus stealing all your hard earned points. If the competition gets too close, you can detonate at any time but then have to start again from scratch, but if you hold out for just a few more kills, you can access bonuses to give you the edge.

How many players are able to fight against each other online?

RL: Currently we’ve had up to ten people playing. However by that point we ran out of computers – so, we’re hoping to get a lot more than that...

How does the combat work in the game? How do you balance out the sword combat with the ability to blow yourself up?

RL: Melee combat in the game is very simple: ‘attack’, ‘block’ and ‘one hit kills’. It was originally going to be a more complex kind of ‘dueling’ system, but there were a couple of problems with that. One was that online melee combat is hard to do well at the best of times, let alone with a skeleton crew dev team, the other was that we wanted Plain Sight to have a feeling of continual momentum; that every second wasted was a second lost, but long drawn out sword battles tend to disrupt this flow and encourage other players to loiter until they can mop up the eventual winner. So, we decided to nip both of these potential problems in the bud and opt for a more immediate and arcade-y style.

At first we were worried that stripping the combat this aggressively would take away from the depth of the game, but from our test sessions I’m glad to say that it isn’t proving to be an issue. It seems that, although we’ve dramatically reduced the player’s actions, we force them to explore as many possible uses for those actions as they can in order to gain an advantage. It’s great seeing the strategies that emerge from that one simple necessity.

Because the combat is as simple to tackle as the detonations themselves, both tactics get brought closer together in terms of risks and rewards. With a complex combat system, players would detonate themselves after only a couple of kills rather than risk losing it all in a long winded and highly volatile fight. Now that the outcome of each fight is more easily assessable and quickly resolved, there’s less hesitation over risking your points for the benefits you’ll gain if you win. Even so, I particularly like that the lowliest player can still take on a giant fiery robot and steal its points with a single stroke; it’s harder to pull off than against a low-scoring player, but completely do-able and satisfying as hell.

How do you get new weapons in the game? When does a game "end"?

With the current fighting system the only difference between killing a player with a sword or, let’s say, a golf club is aesthetic. Although you essentially ‘power-up’ by killing other players, we’re also throwing in a bunch of pickups dotted around the levels to give you a boost when you’re in a tight spot.

The game can end based on a time limit or a maximum number of points. We’re currently mucking around with a few game mode ideas. One of the most popular ones is what we call ‘King Kong’ mode – it’s basically a re-enactment of the final scene of the movie. Honestly, we don’t know if that’s going to make the final cut, but the game clearly has a lot of potential for innovative gameplay types and we’re always open to new ideas.

Is there a single player mode at all, or strictly multiplayer?

RL: At the moment it’s multiplayer only. This is mostly due to time constraints. We’d love to implement AI but at the moment our primary focus is getting a solid multiplayer game out.

The game seems to have some crazy physics - using entire "planets" as the level like Ratchet & Clank 2 or Super Mario Galaxy. Has this been a difficult challenge for you?

RL: Simply put, yes. We’ve implemented a few styles of gravity at the moment: In one you are drawn towards a planet in pretty much the way you would expect – you can run and jump around its surface quite freely even if it’s an unintuitive shape like the cube city level from the trailer. Another always draws you down towards and surface below your feet – essentially this allows you to run up curved walls and makes for some pretty bizarre interior levels. Lastly there is gravity which we simply set to be one particular direction for different parts of a level.

All of these gravity styles have opened up many level ideas for us, it’s crazy. Your mind is constantly being bent as you try to comprehend how different players are interacting with the world in seemingly impossible ways. It is not uncommon for you to be running along a corridor only to be overtaken by another player rocketing past you in mid-air, because from his perspective he just jumped down a vertical hole, not the horizontal passageway that you see.

Players can make the buildings and roads light up when they jump on them. What does this do?

RL: One of the fundamental ideas behind Plain Sight was that you are always in ‘plain sight’. When making a multiplayer game I believe there always has to be an incentive to keep moving. Counterstrike is a great example of this. Yes, you can camp in the corner, but certain game mechanics (such as bomb defusing, etc.) keep most players on the move.

With Plain Sight everyone can always see you. Not only that, but they can also see from the colour of your body, your light trail, and the building you’re standing on how many unbanked points you have and, therefore, how many they can steal from you. Naturally, you want to kill these high-scoring players because it will allow you, with a single blow, to get bigger and better without having to slowly work your way up the ladder of other low-scoring players. Of course, you’re not the only player to have that idea; everyone else will be after the grand prize, and it’s entirely possible that the guy they’re chasing is luring them in to a cunning and exploding trap.

The game is being made using Microsoft's XNA platform. What is your opinion of it so far, in terms of the ups and downs on developing for it?

RL: The programmers both agree it’s fantastic that Microsoft have put these tools out there for people to develop simultaneously on PC and Xbox, for free. There’s a great community around it trying things out and building various different libraries to share and use in each other’s games. Even without any kind of endorsement from Microsoft, we have received fantastic support from the team behind XNA. There only a couple of negatives from our point of view: one is that the requirements to play XNA games (the XNA framework, .NET, DirectX) have still not been assembled into a single easily distributable package and makes it harder for us to send the game out for people to take a quick look at (even the most recent release of Vista lacks these requirements out of the box), the other is that developing for XNA does mean a port to PS3 or Wii for example would be very difficult.

You're planning to release the title on Xbox Live Arcade, but you haven't made any arrangements for it. Would you consider releasing this through their XNA "Community Games" initiative? Are there any limitations to that format you've found?

RL: We’d certainly think about it. I think what Microsoft are doing is pretty brave: they’re essentially opening the floodgates. But I think most developers will agree that there is a concern that a game like ours could be drowned in a sea of Arkanoid clones despite the differences between us.

Have you been following other independent developers on Community Games?

RL :Unfortunately, the beta for the community games initiative has been U.S. only. Personally, I can’t wait to see what’s on there.

What are your thoughts on other independent projects using XNA - any favorites?

RL: With XNA still in its infancy it’s great to see the community making more ‘concept’ games. When looking at (or playing) a lot of new XNA games it’s refreshing to see people taking gaming concepts and stripping them down to what is essentially ‘fun.’ Some may look pretty simple but I think we’re going to see some really impressive games emerge in the next year or so.

As for a personal favorite, it’s got to be Dishwasher Samurai. Not only does the game look fantastic, but it’s also a poster-child for what XNA, and a strong fan-base, can achieve.

What kind of games do you think are more suited for XNA?

RL: I think with enough time you can make pretty much anything with XNA. So far, we haven’t hit any major obstacles that couldn’t be overcome with creative thinking.

Unfortunately, XNA has a stigma because many believe that it’s only good for ‘hobbyist’ games. To be honest, when I first started looking into XNA I thought it was only good for 2D platformers and side-scrolling shooters. I soon realized that, because it was a new development platform, the projects using it were also new – of course they were going to be basic.

I like to think that Plain Sight is a great example of what a team of people can do with XNA and what it’s capable of.

Do you have any advice for other budding developers out there?

RL: I think humility is the most important thing really. Welcome criticism, you can use it to improve upon your work, you’re never going to know it all. If you accept this you’ll not only be more adaptable but also more approachable. Also, keep making things, even if you’re not sure that you will be making the next epic narrative trilogy (or Portal, if you prefer), it can only help to prove your enthusiasm and abilities to any prospective employers.

Are you currently playing any downloadable games on the XBLA, PSN or WiiWare?

RL: I think XBLA has some fantastic titles. But, as I’m developing an XNA title, I’m bound to say that! Our favorites at the moment are Castle Crashers (The Behemoth are awesome) and Braid, which was stunning.

On the PSN the top trumps are Echochrome, Eden, and The Last Guy. We are also looking forward to the quite superbly named Fat Princess.

What games would you love to see some day on these downloadable platforms?

RL: I can’t wait until you can get all your games though download. I honestly believe that when that day comes we’ll see a serious slump in piracy. I have a lot of respect for Cliff Harris for actually going out and asking why people pirate games. From what I gathered it came down to two key things: accessibility and awful DRM precautions

Steam, XBLA, PSN etc are great example of how these things can be overcome.

Thank you for your time.

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

While at NVision a few weeks back in San Jose, I got a chance to chat in detail to Jason 'Textfiles.com' Scott (pictured, left, in his natural habitat), who was at the event ahead of wandering off to Penny Arcade Expo to shoot MC Frontalot videos.

After that he is probably jetting around the world, maybe to grab interviews for the 'Get Lamp' documentary he's currently working on, chronicling the history of the text adventure. [EDIT: Oh, he really is jetting round the world, though merely to present computer history talks in Europe.]

Anyhow, Jason specifically mentioned to me that his Flickr account had some gems on it related to his interactive fiction research, and then showed me something spectacular - a set of Infocom scans revealing the sales numbers for the Zork creator's games from 1981-1989, in two parts:

This is the data from 1981 to 1986, and reveals that Zork I was by far the best-selling title in that period - selling around 380,000 units from 1981 to 1986, with quite an impressive 'long tail'.

Of course, the classic Douglas Adams co-authored Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy game is second, with 254,000 sold, but there are some other surprises in there - Planetfall has a decent 70,000, and even the super-odd, super-rare Fooblitzky sold 8,000 or so. I guess that's not too good, actually - oh well.

The total is just over 2 million units sold, and considering that I believe Infocom games retailed for $30-$40 even back then, this was a bit of a raging success, one suspects. (It's surprising how little the games' purchase cost has appreciated - anyone know exact costs for Infocom games at the time?)

In fact, the Infocom Wikipedia entry specifically notes how well the company did with its 'evergreen' approach: "Infocom had a successful marketing approach that kept all their games in store inventories for years. Because of this, older titles' sales often kept pace with sales of newer games. For example, because Zork was available for years after its initial release in 1980, it continued to top charts in sales well into the mid-1980s."

Anyhow, Infocom got bought by Activision in 1986, and there are also some handwritten sales figures for 1987-1989 which help to chronicle the company's (relative) sales decline, though, as can be seen, some games still did reasonably well:

While Fooblitzky actually managed negative sales (returns, oh dear) during that period, Hitchhiker's and the immortal Leather Goddesses Of Phobos seem to have been two of the better selling titles.

In general, a relatively small number of the games managed more than 30,000 in the time period, at least according to this document - and helped contribute to Infocom's demise as a standalone developer (though Activision still owns rights to basically all of its games, of course).

Now, I'm hardly an Infocom expert, so excuse me if I even got any of this basic info wrong. Obviously, a lot of this material may appear in some form in the upcoming Get Lamp, which has quite a bit of Infocom in it. And I don't _think_ I'm stealing Jason's thunder here - just proxy blogging for him!

But it's awesome to see some of this material posted online - quite stealthily and incidentally, for whatever reason - ahead of the documentary for us to marvel at and interpret. This, folks, is video game history.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

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

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

The delights in this latest version include a new release from the creators of the DROD series, an action game set under the sea, two space shooters and a 2D 'demake' of the PSP puzzle-platformer Crush.

Game Pick: 'DROD RPG - Tendry's Tale' (Caravel Games, commercial indie - demo available)
"A new game by the developers of the Deadly Rooms Of Death series which mixes puzzle and RPG elements together, while retaining the tile-based movement that has made Caravel Games' flagship title one of a kind."

Game Pick: 'Bounce Shot' (Nigoro, browser)
"A cross between Breakout and Space Invaders. Walls and ceilings in each stage are padded with barriers that bounce shots fired from both your ship and from the enemies. This calls for the practice of prudence when firing shots, else you'll find yourself dodging a hail of bullets in no time."

Game Pick: 'Squish' (Terry Cavanagh and Josiah Tobin, freeware)
"Another entry in TIGSource's Bootleg Demakes competition (voting now open), and inspired by Zoe Mode's Crush for PSP. Your character onscreen is endowed with the ability to reduce multiple levels of platforms into a single flat line - a useful trick which can be used to grab the marbles required to open the exit door."

Game Pick: 'Alien Assault' (The Games Page, freeware)
"An homage to classic vertical shooters created by the developer of Super Bubble Blob and the Hurdler series. Each stage only lasts for about a minute long, and power-ups left behind by defeated bosses are crucial items that should be acquired if the player has any serious intentions of surviving for longer than five minutes in space."

Game Pick: 'Kaleidoscope Reef' (Trickysheep, browser)
"A new action game by Jeff Nusz, developer of Sprout and Anika's Odyssey. This particular effort features art by Tom Robinson in a style neatly reminiscent of Derek Yu's work in the IGF grand prize winner Aquaria."

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

[Having returned from the online-centric Austin GDC, Gamasutra publisher and GSW editor Simon Carless takes a close look at the event and the top ten lessons he personally discovered about the state of MMOs, free-to-play games, writing, and the local scene - the good, the bad, and the ugly.]

This week's Austin Game Developers Conference (organized by Think Services, which also created this website - I helped AGDC out by helping pick the IGF Showcase winners and some Worlds In Motion Summit content) was the first that I'd attended, somewhat surprisingly.

So it was a great opportunity for me to take a look at the state of online games in 2008 -- as well as the other diverse submarkets that AGDC services, spanning writing and audio professionals through virtual worlds creators and game students/neophytes.

The show, which took place at the Austin Convention Center (pictured below), had as many as 8 or 9 lectures and roundtables simultaneously. These were split across the central Online Game Summit alongside Writing and Audio Summits and the Game Career Seminar for aspiring developers. But it still had a somewhat intimate feel, certainly compared to the frenetic grandeur of San Francisco's GDC.

The organizers seem to have split up the thousands of attendees fairly well. The top keynotes were still attended by a good 750-plus people, even while the show floor and other informal get-togethers went on.

In addition, my experience of Austin is that it really is an interesting, Neapolitan town. The various AGDC parties -- from official bashes through Sony Online and Valve parties -- were well integrated into the 6th Street experience.

Heck, I even did some retro game shopping at Game Over after the show ended, and it's a more impressive classic-focused game store than anything in the Bay Area right now. It's a hipster thing, apparently.

In any case, in a somewhat gimmick-laden, but nonetheless punchy attempt not to rehash the mountains of Gamasutra coverage that we've already provided to you, I figured I'd try to sum up what I learned from Austin GDC in ten key points. They'll be numbered, too - so I guess that means it's a 'Top Ten', whatever that is.

1. World Of Warcraft Is Still AGDC's Elephant
Not really surprising, but Blizzard's MMO not only makes $1 billion a year, it's successful worldwide, a tremendous rarity in the space. ZeniMax's Matt Firor was probably the most eloquent of the speakers I saw on this subject.

Overall, I think he's right - there will be a million-subscriber MMO every couple of years or so in addition to WoW, and there's no reason why there shouldn't be multiple companies vying for that spot. Even a partial miss can be profitable over time, after all (see EVE Online). But it's very, very tough to get it right.

2. It's Fun To Be Mysterious About Monetization
The fact that there's still a 'subscription vs.free' battle is due to one reason - the 'free to play' business folks being incredibly slippery about how they monetize their online games. There's probably a couple of reasons for that. There's competitive advantage, and the complexity of multiple revenue streams, for starters.

Nonetheless, I do think there are a number of the companies in the space -- at least one of which I saw in a panel -- who are being needlessly obfuscatory about it. Maybe it's because they're just not making that much cash?

3. Some People Are Not Being Mysterious About Monetization!
On the flip side of the previous point, it was good to see Nexon's Min Kim come out and reveal 2007 U.S. revenues -- an impressive $29.334 million. One does wonder if getting in early on the 'pre-paid cards in Target' boom helped that a little, but it's clear that MapleStory is still a stand-out for well-monetized microtransaction games in the West.

The key metric here, and one that should be burned onto the foreheads of VCs funding this type of thing, is that most free-to-play MMOs see $1-$2 monthly from active users. That's good, but to make good money you will need a lot of users (and/or a large media company wanting to buy you out, I guess.)

4. Infrastructure Is An Important Thing
Something we're definitely seeing in both the subscription and free to play online game space is the rise of service companies. Gamasutra actually ran an interview with the online billing folks at Vindicia recently which helps explain the complexities of dealing with financial fraud online.

There are also networking, engine, virtual currency, advertising and other companies all helping to power today's online games. All this modular tech is going to make the space a lot easier to enter - which is both a boon and a crowding factor.

5. The Local Scene Is Still A Powerful One
Although I think it's fair to say that the Austin game scene is a little bruised up right now, post-Midway and NCSoft shifts, the legacy of Origin and its myriad of spinoffs keeps things ticking over.

Heck, even the folks at Armature, subject of our feature interview today, are from Austin. The Chamber Of Commerce's Tony Schum helped explain some of the positives, and I was really pleased to help pick local Southern indie developers for the Austin IGF Showcase (pictured above).

6. Keynotes Are Key
I confess that I was a little initially skeptical of the AGDC keynotes, because they weren't, in conventional terms, 'big industry names'. But not only does this fit the conference's vibe, all three of them were genuinely entertaining and provocative. In particular, Lane Merrifield's Club Penguin-related keynote (below) was incredibly genuine, particularly in his pleas to focus on the customer. This is likely the single overriding facet that got his kids online world to a multi-hundred million dollar Disney acquisition.

But also, Bruce Sterling's 'solo spoken word performance', now available online in written form, was delightfully difficult -- especially when he started smoking onstage and gave the AGDC show director a minor fire marshal-related heart attack. Also, Jason Page's keynote on audio? Perceptive and grumpy, all at once.

7. Writing Is Hard, Talking About It Is Harder
The Writer's Summit has been an important part of AGDC for some time, shepherded by Susan O'Connor and compadres -- and again, from what my Gamasutra colleagues and I saw, there was an excellent mix of the practical and the aspirational. We had the writers behind Tomb Raider: Underworld discussing their advanced storytelling techniques. There was even a talk from Six To Start's Adrian Hon on the v.interesting We Tell Stories multimedia storytelling project.

To be sure, there were many of the obvious writer/game integration pains, also exemplified in a crossover audio track session which extended the pain proclamations to voice actors. But I think integration _is_ improving - and hey, how about more indie games showcasing storytelling, writers?

8. The Spaces Between Are Some Of The Most Interesting
The aforementioned Adrian Hon talk on We Tell Stories, a collaboration with UK book publisher Penguin, was a great example of the kind of crossmedia projects which bring game-like elements into other social media -- and are absolutely key to games' wider social relevance.

Other prime examples? Both Area/Code's Frank Lantz, discussing Parking Wars for Facebook and his other multimedia projects, and the Bunchball/NBC.com duo on making DunderMifflinInfinity.com as a social site with significant game/leveling aspects. Sometimes the industry may ignore this type of thing, because it's not what they're expecting from a conventional definition of a 'game'. That's a major shame.

9. MMO Gold Rush? Not Entirely
Actually, one of the things that I felt strongly about AGDC was that it focused on the practical and the tested in terms of making money with online games - companies like Blizzard and Nexon are living proof that it can work.

Nonetheless, one of the quirks of the MMO/online game market is that (possibly because you only want to play one of these games at once) it's possible for one product to capture a disproportionate amount of the market. But with much of the world's population still only just getting into broader-skewing, web-based online games - there's a long way up.

10. Things Prevail, Even When The Surreal Happens.
As Brenda Brathwaite blogged during the conference: "I got my speaker badge for the Austin Game Developers conference, and met a woman and her dog over coffee. She and her family - like hundreds of other families - had lost everything in Hurricane Ike and are presently sleeping here in the Austin Convention Center. They’re on the other side behind the pink curtains. The game developers occupy the rest."

But as J. noted at Broken Toys, there was some nod to the tragedy of the situation, even as the conference continued -- with Austin itself unaffected by Ike: "They have little boxes out on some of the [AGDC] expo booths so attendees can donate to the Red Cross." And that's as it should be.

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

['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.]

Confronted with a new game with minimal narrative trimmings, my instinct is to ask: how could we do a story with this mechanic? How do we make it good? Sometimes I have to conclude that we really can't -- that the game is so abstract or so essentially lightweight that the elements of narrative can't be convincingly hung on that hook.

But sometimes I can imagine what the story would be -- except that it would fundamentally change the nature of the game.

Take "Monster's Den: Book of Dread": it's a dungeon-crawling game, with a party of four who can engage in tactical battles with assorted monsters.

I've had a guilty fondness for this genre since Wizardry, though Monster's Den is slicker and easier to handle than the versions I tried in the 80s, and it's free, too. Monster's Den offers a little bit of framing narrative for each of the three campaigns available (one of which is a survival mode where you face wave on wave of attackers until you and the city you defend finally collapse).

At level changes, the characters are usually given some portentous dialogue to say, too. And that's about it as far as narrative arc goes in this game.

But a few features of the mechanics contain the seeds of narrative significance. Your party can earn regenerative abilities, so that each move during battle raises health and power. When battle isn't raging, though, you can only increase these stats through the use of healing potions.

So I soon found -- especially in survival mode, but even during the regular scenarios -- that it was most efficient to play against a group of enemies until the last enemy was essentially harmless but not dead: weak enough to be killed with a single blow, and maybe blind and poisoned as well.

Then I'd have my characters pass for turn after turn while their health and power stats rebuilt themselves. Sometimes the remaining character dies on his own, of poison inflicted earlier in the battle. Sometimes one of the party executes him when they have no further use for him.

There could be a scene there. Not a pretty one, either. My party of hard-fighting adventurers becomes much less admirable when they are essentially standing around smoking cigarettes while their dwarf maniac opponent -- wounded, blinded, poisoned -- slowly dies in the corner. We could put him out of his misery with a single blow of our Vampiric Mithril Longsword of Insight. But we choose not to.

That same interaction takes on a different meaning in the survival mode framing of the game. This time, my beleaguered heroes allow one attacking wave to survive a little longer because it knows -- knows! -- that this pause is the only thing holding off another wave of enemies. The next one will be better equipped, stronger, meaner. Each new group is hardier than the last. That's the way it goes.

So yes, we'll let the wounded man in front of us struggle on a little longer, just to buy ourselves a moment's respite. Now it's desperation, not gloating. Knowing you're going to lose in the end changes the calculus.

We can start to see, too, how character dynamics might shape up within the party. The different characters have lots of opportunities to protect and heal one another (or not): might the mage resent being allowed to die and await resurrection because the cleric had something more important to do this turn?

And what if the player's tactical decisions about how to arrange characters for battle were instead attributed to the group leader? Might some of the other members of the party start to resent his favoring one character or another? Or be angry that they weren't put up front to prove their macho-ness? Or be wistful because they never got assigned the best weapons and armor?

As I said at the beginning, a game that used the mechanics of Monster's Den to do small-group personal dynamics would be very very different from the original in tone and style, even if it kept the nominal frame story of descending through nine levels of dungeon to defeat a boss monster.

It might turn out to be a story about hubris, or raw determination. The group might start out as strangers and become friends -- or they might start as comrades and find themselves too divided by the end to share any joy in their profits.

Does this all seem far-fetched? Maybe. But a number of games have proven that character stories don't have to use dialogue or combat as their mechanic. Adam Cadre's Textfire Golf uses the mechanics of a putting game to represent power-plays in office politics.

There are a lot of ways to communicate. All of them are valid bases for character interaction.

[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 (1)

There seem to be a frighteningly large amount of RSS links awaiting my return from Texas, so here's a few I accidentally saved up in the meantime - starting with the full text of Bruce Sterling's AGDC speech (with Rudy Rucker illos!), which I am enjoying tremendously.

Also hanging out in here - that Soulja Boy/Braid thing, the Smithsonian on game experts, Japanese robots causing chaos, and a v.interesting critique of that game whose title is slightly unrepeatable in company.

Go go Beckham:

Bruce Sterling, "Computer Entertainment," Flurb #6
Aha, the full text of his AGDC speech - read and decide!

Llamasoft's Space Giraffe info/FAQ page
Holy crapola, somebody (the creators and their associates!) explained properly how the game works, in a FAQ stylee. Probably should have had that for launch.

YouTube - Soulja Boy reviews Jon Blow's 'Braid'
Mind. Officially. Blown.

Gameheads, web experts help Smithsonian go digital - 16 Sep 2008 - NZ Herald: Gadgets and electronics news
'Clough, 66, who was president of the Georgia Institute of Technology for 14 years, says he's working to bring in video gaming experts and web gurus to collaborate with curators on creative ways to present artefacts online and make them appealing to kids.' Interesting.

The Real World meets The Virtual World: Evacuees and AGDC « Applied Game Design
The presence of evacuees was/is a bit surreal, yes - Brenda sums up well.

best ebay auction ever - NES CLASSIX! - NeoGAF
Yes, yes, linking GAF will get me kicked off the journalism bus, but this is cute.

The PixelVixen707 Zombitacular Fall 2008 Preview » PixelVixen707
Kinda not GSW-y, because it's actually populist and witty, but hey, Kotaku/GiantRealm or other aspirants, good writer alert!

wakamaru USA | NEW YORK – TOKYO
A Japanese robot runs amok in New York! Play is a game, too.

Acid for Blood: C*nt (the Game): Gynophobia and Misogyny
Really interesting critique of the game, past the explicitness (and yes, there's explicitness).

Infovore: TIGSource Bootleg Demake Competition
Good round-up of the competition Tim has been featuring highlights from on IndieGames.com recently.

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

[Almost the final AGDC lecture write-up, woo, and in this case, I was really stoked to see Frank Lantz speaking about Parking Wars, since it's possibly the best originally-designed Facebook game so far, and I keenly follow him and his developer.]

In a Worlds In Motion Summit panel at AGDC, Area/Code co-founder Frank Lantz has been discussing the creation of Parking Wars, the Facebook game sensation created as a promotion for the A&E TV show, and pinpointing the "core values of good games" along the way.

Area/Code, the New York-based developer which recently made Gamasutra 20 list of Breakthrough Developers, saw Parking Wars turn wildly popular, with 400,000 people signing up in two months.

Another Area/Code-designed title, Sharkrunners, promoted Discovery Channel's 20th Anniversary of Shark Week by having a game where the shark movements in game were determined by the actions of real sharks out in the ocean using GPS.

Lantz, who formerly worked at Diner Dash creator Gamelab, explained of the company's philosophy: "We make games for the cloud", explaining that games are really a "stylized form of social interaction".

Thus, gaming on social networks -- as Parking Wars is -- is in many ways "a return to what gaming has always been about", primarily about interacting with other people.

As for Parking Wars, Lantz explained: "We wanted to try to take advantage of Facebook as a space in which a new kind of game design would flourish."

The game, in which your park your cars on your friend's 'street' on Facebook, is specifically intended to take advantage of a "light but persistent" rhythm of interaction.

Lantz explained that, sure, there is a competitive aspect, but there's also a sense in which it functions as a light social MMO. In fact, it's "...designed specifically to be something that you would do twice a day for five minutes."

Most importantly, your relationship with your friends was an inherent part of the gameplay - making it a true social game, where you battled to ticket your friend's cars or sneakily put your cars on their street.

Of course, one of the problems with Parking Wars was simply that people played it a lot more -- and for much longer -- than the developers expected.

Lantz joked that the hardcore player were complaining vociferously: "I played this game all day every day for 6 weeks", and now there's nothing more to do. So the developers needed to create some kind of advanced level challenge, to appease and please those hardcore influencers.

Overall, Lantz -- who revealed that the company is working on more Facebook games, alongside projects for MTV and other media clients -- suggested that "under the hood, there are certain core values of good games" that transcend whatever medium they're produced on -- something they've acted upon in the creation of Parking Wars.

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

[Wow, we're basically done - I'm about to hop on a plane back to California - but here's the remainder of the AGDC pieces we haven't features. Hope you liked our show coverage!]

Gamasutra was at Austin GDC 2008 this week, and we've compiled the best of our industry-leading coverage of the major MMO and virtual world, game writing, and audio lectures presented since Wednesday. You can also read our coverage from Monday's presentations and Tuesday's sessions.

AGDC, which is organized by Gamasutra parent Think Services, is took place in the Austin Convention Center from Monday 15th-Wednesday 17th September, and multiple Gamasutra reporters were on hand to document many of the lectures and panels taking place there.

Here are the highlights of Wednesday's sessions at AGDC 2008:

AGDC: Storytelling at id Software: The Experience Matters
"FPS pioneer id Software doesn't exactly have a reputation rooted in strong game stories. But in his presentation at AGDC, Rage creative director Tim Willits urged developers to change the way they look at stories -- and emphasize just what's important to players in delivering them -- and also offered a few new tidbits of information about the upcoming Rage."

AGDC: Building Battlefield Heroes, EA's First Free To Play Game
"How did EA DICE's free to play Battlefield Heroes take shape? Development Director Bjarne Rene delivered a comprehensive pre-mortem on what he would probably call the beginning of the project -- getting the game and the service that supports it up and running."

AGDC Interview: How NetDevil Got The LEGO Universe Deal
"The 'hot thing' in recent months has been branded online worlds -- the industry's now got multiplayer spaces for everything from Hello Kitty to Build-a-Bear Workshop, and toy tie-ins like Webkinz are beginning to crop up everywhere."

AGDC: Sony's Page: 'Next Gen Audio - Is That It?'
"In his delightfully morose keynote at the Austin Game Developers Conference, Jason Page, Sony Europe's R&D audio manager discussed the present and future of game audio, musing that 'working in the games industry can be an insular experience,' but then going far beyond -- revealing new Sony tools Sulpha and Awesome along the way."

AGDC: If You Build An Online Game, Will They Come?
"Margaret Wallace of venture-backed startup Rebel Monkey -- itself developing an MMO -- was at Austin GDC's Worlds in Motion Summit to discuss user retention in multiplayer spaces. The question she posed: If you build it, will they come?"

AGDC: Arkane's Smith Reveals iPhone Strategy Game, 'Immersive' First-Person RPG
"Former Ion Storm and Midway designer revealed that Arkane Austin is working on both an "immersive first-person RPG" and an iPhone casual strategy title at the Texas developer."

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

[Christian Nutt has written up what seems to be one of the best-received AGDC Writer's Track talks, both from an conference and external point of view - high levels of thinking here on the practicality of writing for games.]

Eric Lindstrom, creative director of Tomb Raider: Underworld at Crystal Dynamics, delivered an impassioned and even frustrated presentation about the need for more nuanced storytelling techniques and roles within the development team, to create satisfying next-gen game stories.

Setting up his talk, Lindstrom says, "I am a creative director which means I don't actually do anything -- what that means I get a lot of other people to do things. I am a designer, and have been for many years."

This is the understanding and leveraging of how to use all of the techniques available to make games more meaningful -- from game design to cinematic techniques. And Lindstrom's argument is that the understanding and effective us of the latter must improve.

The Challenges Facing Tomb Raider

He framed his talk around the challenges he and the team are facing telling the story of this fall's upcoming Tomb Raider: Underworld (being careful to disclaim that they might not solve all of these problems in that release -- but that they are working their hardest to do so.)

"The first storytelling challenge [of Tomb Raider] is an obvious one: the original characterizations of Lara Croft and tomb raiding were not deep enough to sustain many games without change. It was good enough for a couple of games, but after that it got pretty thin."

Lindstrom contrasts this against James Bond, which does not have this problem because he can battle a new criminal mastermind in each film -- giving the franchise a strong character impetus. "Lara is different -- she was going out and finding an artifact." Though even the first few games had stories with human antagonists, "after a couple of games it became obvious what that template was."

When Crystal Dynamics inherited the franchise from prior series developer Core, the developers chose to change her back story, by having Lara accidentally kill her mother -- which affected the story of Lara's father and gave Lara a motivation: to find and deactivate these dangerous ancient devices.

It turns out that fans disagree with whether Lara is a hero or an anti-hero. Lindstrom polled the room -- half the room thinks she's a hero -- but several also went for anti-hero, which actually surprised Lindstrom -- he chalked it up to game professionals being more aware of the anti-hero. "It's kind of a trick question, because Hollywood has trained us into [confusing] what hero and anti-hero mean."

Hollywood, Lindstrom thinks, complicates the definition of hero and anti-hero by presenting anti-heroic actions in a heroic context -- like James Bond killing essentially defenseless soldiers. "What we have are these rules which advocate violence if it's in service of a noble cause."

Lindstrom presented the description of Lara from the original game's design document -- version 1.3, dated March 3, 1995. "Lara Cruz [not Croft] is a modern day adventurer and procure of rare artifacts which she relieves from Johnny Foreigner with the gay abandon of a five-year-old stealing Mars Bars from the local cornershop."

The point? "She was originally designed as a psychopath... in the original design she was in some ways a criminal, thief, and murderer. But the truth is irrelevant -- because so many people know and love Lara Croft." The Hollywood movies have made her even more positive -- which has complicated things for the design team.

There are thus two audiences for the character, one which believes her to be a hero and the other which believes her to be an ant-hero, says Lindstrom, "which need to be reconciled. So what we do is help people think what they want to think. We depict Lara doing harsh things, what the anti-hero crowd wants, but we depict it in Hollywood ways that make it palatable to the hero faction."

The back story introduced in Legend -- where her mother may not have actually died, and decides to investigate this and potentially rescue her mom -- was appealing to the hero crowd, not the anti-hero crowd, it's worth noting.

The "Inflammatory" Storytelling Technique

The term Lindstrom used -- "inflammatory" -- is a response to his obvious frustration with the lack of forward motion in storytelling quality in games. "Storytelling methods really still have a long way to go."

Lindstrom doesn't mean to tackle the problem of innovative interactive storytelling -- because others are working on that. He's talking about using the basic tools that have been used in other media, which "are not being used at all, or not being used effectively, and there's no reason why they can't."

Here's his mini-manifesto:

Stop saying that storytelling is less important than game mechanics. "There are lots of people who say this, but they don't really mean it."

Start putting storytelling on par with other pillars of game creation. "There are plenty of people out there who say this is true, but when push comes to shove, it's not true."

Stop hiding behind the word "interacrtive". "If there's really one thing to take away today -- it's that 'oh, but it's interactive' is used as an excuse for bad storytelling all the time, and it just doesn't wash."

Start training and employing storytelling experts. "Hollywood knows how to write dialogue more than anybody in the industry on average. The last 10 movies I saw, seven of them had pretty crappy dialogue -- so it's not going to be perfect on average. But you're going to find more people who understand storytelling." It's worth noting that Lindstrom is pro-training on all fronts, not just hiring from outside the industry.

Advanced Storytelling Techniques: Tomb Raider's Choices

As a creative director, Lindstrom clarifies, "My role is to make sure [all of the following techniques] are understood and can be included in the final product. Really, it all comes down to details. Because details matter -- all of them matter. It doesn't mean that every game has to be a big story game... but they all matter."

Content. "To emphasize drama and avoid stereotypes." A major issue right now? "First, don't think of stories as screenplays -- that's why most people get locked up by the interactive problem. If you stop thinking of stories as screenplays, you will stop asking writers to give you screenplays, and will stop looking at them and saying they're unusable. Stop asking for screenplays -- ask for treatments."

Compelling characters. "Imagine if we created Lara Croft using stereotypes -- she would have a generic Hollywood starlet voice, be a sex kitten, and speak in innuendo." However, Lara speaks in a witty, smart, and meaningful manner, is attractive but not overtly sexual, and speaks in an upper-class British accent.

If you build your character out of clichés, Lindstrom says, "It's very easy to stop seeing the top line and start seeing these little bits. Don't fool yourself. Look at the top line. What are people going to see? Don't talk yourself in to what you really have." The component elements of the character are not the character, and one mitigating positive quality does not rescue you from cliché.

Memorable settings. "Lara's [settings]... are memorable and consistent. An experiment that was made that was less successful was Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. It was in Paris, a large city... yet the city was unpopulated, so the credibility was largely zero. It didn't function credibly as a setting for Lara Croft, or even as Paris. Don't fool yourself."

Unusual Circumstances. Here he discusses the concept of the log line -- the basic summation of the story. He started with Tomb Raider: Underworld's, which isn't predictable. Then he delivered a log line for a sci-fi shooter -- "A soldier finishes basic training and fights a series of pitched battles to stop the waves of invading aliens." He wouldn't divulge which actual game it was from, but notes, "I didn't make this log line generic just so I could talk about 30 games."

Structure Matters. Lindstrom again takes cues from Hollywood, and illustrates a salient point. "Games are about progressive growth and success, but stories are about sudden change and failure. I've had a lot of argument about this over the years -- that people don't want failure in their stories because game players don't want to fail. But look at any action movie, they're about failure. Look at John McClane in Die Hard. He's running away the whole time." How do you make that palatable to the player? "The player can succeed even when the character fails -- it's about how you frame the action."

The three-act heroic structure -- an exceedingly common framing structure for Hollywood films and other fiction -- was discussed briefly -- and almost surprisingly, both Portal and BioShock fit this structure extremely well.

In contrast, Lindstrom notes, "If your story is that a nuclear bomb is going to go off and it's fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, and then at the end you cut the red wire, that's not a story, it's a framework."

Size matters. "Especially in video games. Just because your game is 20 hours long doesn't mean you have a 20-hour story. Imagine what Lord of the Rings would have been if you multiplied it by two. People just don't remember that much -- especially in the context of interactive, as they play a game."

Lindstrom brings up an excellent point about storytelling in games: "People don't play in one session -- they play over two days, two weeks, two months. They will forget. So it's important to build in reminders. You don't want a lot of exposition, but when you have dialogue where the characters don't use each other's names, you don't know who anybody's talking about. It takes a good writer to thread in a lot of information that, in a movie, people would not have forgotten -- because it was 15 minutes ago."

Interactivity matters. "It does matter, obviously -- but I did want to talk about how it matters with respect to what I'm talking about. We sympathize with characters we see, we associate with characters we control." A story about a weak character who becomes strong by the end -- that's "classic Hollywood" but it won't work in games, says Lindstrom.

"Movie characters can behave in ways game characters would not. What matters is whether you believe people are controlling their character like a puppet master or if they are inhabiting their character, in their shoes -- it changes the way you write."

Don't injure your game progression for story. For example, a movie might bring a character down to nothing -- and have him rebuild. But in a game, that would translate to taking away the main character's full equipment and you have to build everything up again -- which is no fun in a medium that's built around consistent progression.

Mood matters. "Mood matters a lot -- every moment has tone, mood, and emotional goals and you need to know what they are all the time, and support them all the time. Score, audio design, lighting, camera angle, color correction and other full screen effects, and weather... all of these affect the mood. You need to know how to use them," Lindstrom says, and clearly believes strongly. "As a storyteller, if I know you're not going to save the girl at the end of the scene, the music needs to foreshadow that."

To explain more, Lindstrom illustrated how Underground starts with Lara on her yacht, on a nice sunny day. "It has to be nice, to get bad later." As the plot turns more serious, all of these techniques are used to change the mood of the game: the game darkens, color correction changes from bright to dim, and the soundtrack gets more foreboding, among other things.

"Even later, things are getting really bad -- the score becomes creepy and dangerous. The lighting becomes drab and washed out, and we get more extreme and claustrophobic camera angles." Lindstrom believes you must employ a cinematographer -- either hire a Hollywood guy or train one of your people, an intensive process either way -- "but it doesn't just happen" typically.

Quality matters. "Too often story design and written dialogue get lumped into the same discipline and they're not. That's why you get story credits and writing credits in Hollywood. Story design is about compelling interaction, it's about beginning and middle and end." In fact, Lindstrom believes that many roles should be more specialized. "I originally had vocal performance broken out into talent and direction -- but every [facet of production] should be broken into talent and direction."

Conclusion

"It looks simple but it's really not -- understanding what your audience wants. It's a very important part of not only your basic story construction, but when you are dealing with the interactivity of your story." And the bottom line is, Lindstrom says -- as you would for any other discipline -- "Employ experts or make experts -- because that really matters."

Q&A

A question was raised about whether back stories are really deeply necessary when creating characters for games. Lindstrom is not so sure, "I don't think that back story is a very important piece because it's hard to deliver in games... it leads to exposition, which is bad. What happened with Lara is that I don't think people thought we would be making nine games."

"When she started off, she was adequate... but when you start to get past Tomb Raider 3 and 4... back story was an imperfect solution, among many imperfect solutions. We could have completely redesigned her character, but we chose not to do that," which Lindstrom notes is the route Prince of Persia recently took.

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

[Alongside all of the online game stuff at Austin GDC, let's not forget that there are audio and writing summits, too, and this neat melange of the two has a voice actor and a writer discussing how dialog comes out correctly (and not horribly!) for AAA games.]

In a talk at the Austin Game Developers Conference, God Of War 3 writer Marianne Krawczyk and voice actor DB Cooper discussed some notable changes needed to stop terrible game dialog or voice acting that might "haunt game writers for the rest of their lives."

Cooper explained to the audience, which was divided between audio professionals, writers, and voice actors, that "we want to keep your game off of AudioAtrocities.com," noting that it's the lack of useful direction on the character's intent or in terms of how you want the gamer to feel that can hobble things for everyone.

The voice actor, who has previously worked with publishers such as Electronic Arts and Midway, had surveyed her game-related voice actor compatriots on what they were given in terms of material to work with on voice acting. According to her, game voice actors will often get an Excel document with a referenced intonation style ("serious" or "upbeat") and individual lines to say.

Often, this just isn't enough to do the lines justice from an acting point of view, with no rehearsal, and "very little information about their characters unless they're very lucky," according to Cooper.

Chipping in, game writer Krawczyk, who is currently working on God Of War 3 for PlayStation 3, added: "I write in screenplay format [for the God Of War series]", suggesting that the Excel/intonation method seems "very limited, and out of context to any relationships."

In fact, Krawczyk revealed that for the currently in-production God Of War III, "we're going to do some rehearsals and some table reads," in order to have everyone understand their characters.

This is the first time that a TV show or theater-styled table read (with actors present and rehearsing ensemble ahead of the voice recording) has been done for Sony Santa Monica's series -- and is still extremely rare throughout the entire game business.

Going on, the writer, who has also worked on titles including Midway's Area 51, the upcoming God Of War III is "a very specific three-act experience," adding that the script is probably 120 pages in length.

Later in the discussion, Cooper gave an example of "jamming" on voiceovers to work out the context of a talk between Kratos and Athena in God Of War II -- pointing out that with a game like God Of War, "We expect Gods to have lofty language... you just want it to sound good."

But it's easy to "play it safe" by just booming those lines in an authoritative fashion, and the duo explained how working out the precise motivation of the characters beyond simply authority made the lines so much better when correctly sourced, explored, and acted.

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

[On the last day of Austin GDC, there was a rather neat lecture about the Dunder Mifflin Infinity website at the WiM Summit - and I had a lot of fun in writing it up. Actually, I'm tempted to join up to the website now and flex my ASCII skills for the season premiere - corporate drone-age is what everyone should aspire to.]

In a unique keynote for the Worlds In Motion Summit, Bunchball's Rajat Paharia and NBC.com's Stephen Andrade discussed the creation of the Dunder Mifflin Infinity website, a promotional website for 'The Office' TV show which has surprisingly detailed and game mechanic-inspired social website.

Paharia explained the concept behind his firm Bunchball, that "gaming should be multiplayer".

The firm originally developed a synchronous game-related set of websites, and gradually built 'level up' mechanics into their business model, and have essentially "turned game mechanics into a service" for multiple websites - rewarding achievements.

Thus, Bunchball and NBC Universal created the DunderMifflinInfinity.com website, which is essentially a 'level up' centric social website, including lots of in-game game challenges and competitions to win 'Schrutebucks', with teams competing against each other to be the best 'branch office' in the game.

The project started with 100 'branch offices' recruited, each consisting of viewers banding together -- later increased to 200 offices. In total, they had 160,000 people playing the advertising-supported game - but why did people do this?

Andrade noted that these people were "pretending to be members of a corporation", which is a little bizarre, to say the least. But, as Paharia noted, the concept of virtual currency really helps people want to contribute -- as do leaderboards. DMI had multiple leaderboards -- with both individuals and teams referenced.

In addition, levels are really important to the game-based mechanics behind DMI. As you earned more Schrutebucks, you can move from Temp to Assistant Regional Manager in the game.

And virtual goods were also a key part of the Dunder Mifflin Infinity experience - you can buy items for your virtual desk on the site -- and there were some items that you could only buy at certain levels.

As an example, a competition was based around an excruciating dinner party with a song called 'That One Night' on it - with a user-created music video based on the terrible song. Schrutebucks were given out to the winners -- and with lower levels of participation, perhaps, but in much more detail and with impressive user contribution.

What worked in relation to the show? Well, these 'Creative Social Networks', with significant game-style scoring and competition elements in them, really help create more interest in the show and also increase traffic.

In fact, the site has a 120% traffic increase on previous years, and with advertisers very keen on associating with 'The Office', Dunder Mifflin Infinity was a big hit for them.

Andrade noted that the simplest casual Flash-based games were the best for getting the mass market involved, and they're going to ramp these up for the next version of DMI, but the more complex ideas like video creation worked well too. He explained: "You've got to throw some more complex, more involved tasks in there to keep the hardcore people interested."

As for lessons learned, the big virtual branches tended to win a disproportionate amount of the tasks, because the quantity of employees often trumped the quality of the submissions - but "this time around we're going to try to solve that problem."

In addition, allowing branch managers (actual users) to choose their own employees was a little too restrictive, and people got left out in the cold.

As for Bunchball, Paharia noted that it's important to get your client (in this case NBC) to be self-sufficient, while keeping a certain degree of background help. It's important to watch the show, he noted amusedly, to make sure that the call to action on network television didn't melt (or "spark") the servers.

He also noted that revenue opportunities with virtual currencies -- with Mastercard and Toyota sponsoring virtual items -- are also a great opportunity.

Going forward, what's changing in DMI 2.0 is that they're going back to 100 branches, and everyone gets to choose the branch we want. In addition, players will start fresh with new Schrutebucks and job titles, and regional managers have to prove themselves in order to get the job. Of course, there will be a desk upgrade, with new items, and item sellbacks.

Regional managers can now moderate their branch forums, and they can choose the Employee Of The Week -- and also award gifts to employees with corporate money.

They've also fixed a possible gamesmanship element, in that employees can't vote on their own submissions, and branch members can't vote on their branch's submissions -- helping to stop the biggest branches dominating excessively.

So what's next? On the first night of The Office's current season, September 25th, Pam creates an ASCII art illustration of Dwight -- so DMI employees are going to be asked to do their own ASCII versions of Office characters as the first challenge. In addition, NBC is adding other similar creative communities based around The Biggest Loser, Jay Leno's Garage, Chuck (an Inside Buy More site) and Heroes.

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

[Still hanging out in Austin for AGDC, and here's the best stuff we haven't GSW-featured in terms of neat online, writing, and other lectures - enjoy.]

Gamasutra is at Austin GDC 2008 this week, and we've compiled the best of our industry-leading coverage of the major MMO, virtual world, and game writing lectures presented on Tuesday.

AGDC, which is organized by Gamasutra parent Think Services, is taking place in the Austin Convention Center from Monday 15th-Wednesday 17th September, and multiple Gamasutra reporters are on hand to document many of the lectures and panels taking place there.

Here are the highlights of Tuesday's sessions at AGDC 2008:

AGDC: Property Rights In Online Games - Who Owns What?
"Raph Koster from Areae, Scott Hartsman of Ohai, game lawyer S. Gregory Boyd, author Erin Hoffman, and moderator Erik Bethke of GoPets discuss how to improve the EULA for all – with significant conversational travel into real money trading (RMT) territory."

AGDC: Hanna Talks Google Lively's Game API Extensions
"Google Lively's Kevin Hanna explained the genesis of the search engine giant's online world space, along the way revealing an upcoming API to embed playable games inside Lively."

AGDC: Jim Lee On Translating Comic Book Designs To A 3D Game
"Speaking in an Austin GDC panel on the art of upcoming Sony Online Entertainment MMO DC Universe Online, noted DC comic artist artist Jim Lee shares some insights on translating 2D characters and designs from comic books to fit an online 3D game's style and needs."

AGDC: Sterling Keynote: A Creative Call To Arms
"Futurist and author Bruce Sterling delivered the Tuesday keynote speech at Austin GDC -- a dual message of the way improved technology will change games and how stagnation in the creative side of the industry will hamper their evolution."

AGDC: ZeniMax's Firor On The Quandary Of The Subscription MMO
"ZeniMax Online president Matt Firor took the 'subscription MMO' end of a subscription vs. free-to-play debate, explaining the current state of the triple-A MMO space, and discussing World Of Warcraft's 'perfect storm' and why there will be million-subscription games post-WoW."

AGDC: Nexon's Kim On The North American Free To Play Business
"Nexon's Min Kim discussed the free-to-play online game model pioneered by his company in Korea, revealing U.S. revenues of almost $30 million in 2007 for their MapleStory-including slate of products -- details within."

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

[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 Gamasutra. This installment helpfully translates common instances of producer-speak into painfully direct English.]

The path of career development in the game industry is fraught with strange hazards, not the least of which are the odd delusions that may be foisted upon you by your Management such that you may be a more productive and harmoniously integrated Work Unit.

Now, far be it from me, an established professional both famous and important, to stir up a hornet's nest of raving discontent -- I simply mean to help you keep a careful eye on your situation. It can spiral out of control very quickly and, like the lovely and tragic GLaDOS, you may find yourself in a kind of frenzied denial about how things really are.

In that light, here are some patterns you should learn to recognize so that you may have some signposts to guide you into the bracing realizations that may eventually lead you along the path of truth -- one which may lead you to greener pastures or to a fortune sought elsewhere. Or at least to an embittered and spiteful temperament that will scare the producers off so you'll be left alone.

"We just have to hunker down and ship this game, and then you'll all be rich -- like me!"

A potential bonus is not something that should be used to justify complete insanity on your part. We all know that money is a great motivator -- all the better when the people in charge don't actually have to pay any of it. Hinting at some breathtaking royalty payout that's just around the corner after the game is a huge hit (which it is practically guaranteed to be, surely!) usually does wonders for the crew, so it happens rather too frequently.

Here's a funny experiment you can try: ask someone in charge to describe how the royalty is actually calculated. You're likely to get a lot of puzzling airy statements, hand waving, and suddenly important phone calls. In the very best case, you may get a fancy chart or graph that tantalizingly teases at some kind of meaning, but never quite reaches it.

If you're truly curious, the real process is this: all that money goes into a big black box, and the tiniest little drop comes out of the other end for you, the diligent worker. That's given that you have a game that sells well at all, which sometimes you don't, exactly.

"Come on, you aren't being a team player -- support your buddies."

Everyone else buys into this whole "crunch for no reason and bad project management" thing, so why don't you? Maybe you're the crazy one!

Blatant attempts to coerce team dynamics like this are another management machination of which you should be very careful. Don't let them try to leverage to their own ends the soldier's camaraderie that develops when people are thrown into crappy situations together. Your grandchildren aren't going to ask you to tell them about the war video game you worked on once. They probably won't even know what video games are, let alone care.

"Well, you could always be flipping burgers."

When people complain about low pay or poor conditions, you sometimes hear the "you could always be flipping burgers" defense (or, "you could always be programming databases" for engineers, since they want to be speaking your language, of course). This is a strategy meant to distract the grumbler from realizing his job sucks by trying to get him to think of something even worse, never mind that a job flipping burgers might actually have reasonable hours.

Passive-aggressive overtones aside, this kind of justification is logically suspect since it confers upon the game industry some kind of special, extraordinary status. It's different than all other industries of the world! Getting utterly, totally screwed is somehow the price one must pay for the glamour and mystique of making video games for a living (or working in porn?). And if you can't deal with it, go get a "real" job.

It would be sublimely ironic if these ended up being the same people who wonder why the game industry doesn't get the respect and cachet it deserves from the other creative media, but that's probably too perfect to really be true.

"At least we have a really fun work environment."

The team is stuck at work late and on the weekend trying to get a disaster of a project into a box and out the door. Is it bad? Yes, it's terrible -- but wait! You get to eat barbecue! And there are fun distractions around the office. Why, it doesn't even feel like work at all, so what does it matter if you're there for all of your waking hours?

Standing around having a blast playing Guitar Hero with all your office mates in the wee hours of the morning is sure to have absolutely no effect on the pile of work that must be done to ship the game -- the pile of work being the reason you started crunching in the first place! -- so all you're doing is munching on the hair of the dog that bit you. I mean that metaphorically in most cases; the others -- you know who you are.

"Okay, we learned our lesson. We'll never run a project like this again. Promise."

After it's all over and the game has shipped, you'll hear this one. The reason is that suckers believe it every time.

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

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

[From what I gather, Bruce Sterling's keynote at AGDC could definitively be described to be 'insane', with varying opinions on ensuing awesomeness. Actually, Christian Nutt's write-up for Gama makes me wish I had a chance to check it out - it's definitely a different perspective.]

Futurist and author Bruce Sterling delivered the Tuesday keynote speech at Austin GDC -- a dual message of the way improved technology will change games and how stagnation in the creative side of the industry will hamper their evolution.

As Sterling was tasked with imagining the next 35 years of the game industry, the address began with the premise that he was a time traveling graduate student sent in lieu of the 89-year-old Dr. Bruce Sterling from the year 2043. According to the "anonymous graduate student," future Sterling sent him back with the warning: "It's all completely real -- but they're not going to believe any of it."

The Future of Computing

Though perhaps spending overlong on sardonic gags, Sterling communicated that the computers of 2043 are ubiquitous and banal: "They're like bricks and forks and toothbrushes -- they're like towels."

Sterling demonstrated his point by pretending that a towel he brought was a computer from 2043 -- more advanced and multipurpose than any technology we have today, and more simple. "Moore's law states that computer power doubles every 18 months -- 35 years in the future means 23 doublings." A laptop (or towel) from 2043 would be more powerful than over 8 million 2008 laptops combined. "All media converged into this device -- there's no media left," he posited.

And the games of 2043? "They're not the kind of games that were developed for flat glass screens -- cumbersome," he said. "We don't pretend that a flat glass screen is a window into a virtual world... the idea sounds silly to us."

Then what do the games of 2043 look like? "I think you would call [them] 'augmented reality' but we don't," Sterling continued. "We think that reality is real -- you can have a lot of fun with [an overlaid] game interface." To Sterling, the games of the future scale from personal "body games" to global games and space games and everything in between -- including "neighborhood games". More importantly, "[In 2043] we've got 70 years of computer games -- that's what we've got that you don't have -- and we got it from you. All kinds of dead intellectual properties and platforms, all being continually re-released."

To make this point even more obvious, funny, and poignant, he decided to talk about Tetris -- a game he "doesn't think" we have yet in 2008, massively popular in 2043. "Tetris... is incredibly popular and compelling. It's spread like wildfire." He spoke about how the future Sterling wanted him to show Tetris to us because it's so impressive and compelling. Though unstated, his point is to think about the elegance of that game -- today already almost a decade on from its heyday of 1989.

Networks of the Future

Sterling dovetailed into a discussion of networks of the future -- his prop, this time, a salt shaker. "This is nano-technology -- but we don't call it that, because it sounds old-fashioned to us. Every one of these networking crystals has the power of an entire server farm."

Sprinkling salt on the stage, Sterling "created a network here about the size of the entire internet in 2004." After making the shaker disappear with a bit of sleight of hand -- he quoted Arthur C. Clarke's old adage "Any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- and then, after destroying his nano-network, as an admonition to the audience, extended it: "Any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from garbage."

A Depressing Future Present: Money Rules All

Sterling was coy about "answering" the question of what the most successful game trends are in 2043. "What's the part of game development that's really going to take off in the future? Is it the web apps, console sales, the games for handhelds? MMORPGs?" On the latter, he sarcastically said -- "I don't know why you people can't come up with a better word for that simple idea."

No, Sterling pointed out, in the future -- the people who control the currency will be the ones who are rich. "It's the bankers and the financiers. They are not game players, they are bankers," he said. Games have their own currencies -- and thus their own financial institutions.

Reading a fictitious, detailed, and plausible service agreement from "Avatar Checkout," an in-game financial firm, Sterling absolutely rammed home the idea that in-game currency will become parallel in complexity and ubiquity to the current real world financial industry. "Does that sound like fun gameplay to you?" Sterling asked. "It's almost exactly as much fun as investment banking." On the other hand, "If you put a big graphic front end on financial services -- people will actually save for retirement."

Blindsided By Tech

Sterling posed the question he know the audience would pose if they encountered a real time traveler: "What would have blindsided me, that I couldn't see, in my industry?"

Rather than answering directly, Sterling pulled apart the semantics of what game developers do -- using the phrase "computer entertainment."

"What is that -- what does that mean?" he asked. "Well, it's got computers and it's got entertainment. That's how you define what you do, but it's not what you do. It's just two old-fashioned words about what you do."

"First, you can forget the word computer -- it's what holds you back," Sterling continued. There are a plethora of current platforms, such as handheld devices and smart phones -- which he says is helping people forget the distinction, but not quite as usefully, or as globally, as they can. "You'd be better off if your start thinking about other phenomena -- interactive billboards, traffic systems, street lights, credit cards, drones, street-based video, doorknobs... do you know how many embedded chips are built into hotel doorknobs? Stop thinking about the chips. Chips always mean computers. You must transcend that." Self-parodically, he suggested, "Think about a far-out hippie zen paradigm -- like clouds, and smoke, and invasive, and ubiquitous."

Moving on to the second word, Sterling said, "Entertainment is fun. Am I right? If it's not fun, obviously it's not entertainment. You definitely want your users to have fun because that's the definition of your industry -- except for three kinds of people. They're not fun people. They're not you're users -- they're your abusers."

What kinds of people? "First, the gold farmers, the rip-off artists... the pirates. The same crowd, invisible to you. You don't want to see them... they're parasites. But they're not accidents. They're important. Second, the griefers. They have entertainment, but it's not your game; it's their game. Third, the weird ones: the convergence culture people. They don't make any distinctions between the media that they use. They don't play the roles of your games. They want to be in the same outside space you're in. They're the same talent from where you recruit your people. They [all] exist outside your box. They're not exactly your enemies, but they're alien to your chosen paradigm. They only way to get ahead of them is to redefine yourself as something that is not computer entertainment. Their fun is not fun. They are a culture, not an industry, and that is why they kick your ass. How to get rid of them? You don't."

Sterling spent a few moments throwing around ridiculous "future" tech terms like "greebles" to parody our need to make up complicated technical terms -- implicitly symptomatic of a lack of understanding and comfort with these concepts.

Towel Designers

So how to predict the future? You don't predict it; you make it, said Sterling. "The best way to make the future is to invent it -- but the best way to understand the future is to study the past. Your past, once involved a kind of futurist prophecy, a dark and painful prophecy made 35 years ago. And that prophecy came in two words: 'towel designers.'"

Towel designers? Sterling continued: "There was a time when Atari was the fastest growing company in entertainment history. So Warner Bros. bought Atari. The Atari geeks said, 'We're creating these amazing high-tech games.'"

Sterling recounted the story of the formation of Activision -- painting it as a struggle between money people and creative people who want money. Warner Bros., in his view, saw it like this: "An Atari console is a factory. It's not a means of expression for artisans." He believes that the execs and marketing people saw the developers as mere towel designers -- taking a basic concept and changing the stripes, the dots, the color. "That was the extent of their value add to the process."

But Sterling seemed worried that we have, today, actually bought into this view ourselves, as an industry. "Some day the computer entertainment industry would be big, big enough and stodgy enough that it actually would employ towel designers, nameless armies of guys. Not visionaries, not game changers -- functionaries, towel designers."

The solution to this factory mentality? "Creative disruption, radical innovations, provocative cultural change," said Sterling. "That is the problem with traditional consumer-friendly towel factories. What kind of game designer is going to ruin that?"

His call to arms, if there was one in this complicated and metaphorical speech, was for a visionary whose perspective is incompatible with this conventional factory production style of game development -- which Sterling obviously sees as pervasive and damaging. "This is your great struggle, and that is what you face," he said. That is what you owe to your predecessors and those who will come after you. You've got your place in the great parade and it's all yours."

Photo of Sterling by Robert Scoble

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

[Our new series of ‘Road to the IGF’ profiles the nine recently announced winners of the IGF Showcase at Austin GDC - with the local Southern U.S. indie developers to be showcased at the Texas game development show next week.]

Continuing Think Services' ‘Road to the Austin IGF’ feature, we talk to Ryan Jenkins and Kyle Pittman about four player PC fighter Toybox Heroes.

Pittman and Jenkins developed the game as part of a team of 15 for their final year project at the Guildhall at SMU. Toybox Heroes uses the Source engine to allow players to “select one of four action figures, each available in four colors, and duke it out in a variety of household environments”. The game is primarily weapons based, with armaments ranging “from crayons to cherry bombs to Rubik's Cubes”.

What is your background with video games?

Ryan Jenkins: I’m currently working as a designer at Volition, Inc on Red Faction: Guerrilla. Before that I attended the Guildhall at SMU and got my Masters in design. Before that, I just played a ton of video games!

Kyle Pittman: I’ve been playing PC and video games for most of my life. I started teaching myself to program in BASIC when I was about six years old because I wanted to make my own games. My earliest efforts were mostly awful clones of popular NES games, but quality was never an issue – I just enjoyed being able to create something and see it come to life on the screen.

I dabbled a little in art and level design here and there, but I chose to pursue programming as a career, eventually migrating to Java, C, and C++ during my college years. In 2005, I enrolled at the Guildhall at SMU, where I received a Master’s degree in game development. I’m now working in the games industry and continuing my hobbyist development in my spare time.

When was the team behind Toybox Heroes formed?

RJ: The team was formed as part of the senior game project at the Guildhall. We were put together in mid 2006 and started production on the game sometime that fall.

KP: Toybox Heroes was our senior team project at the Guildhall. To provide some background, the Guildhall curriculum is broken down into three-month terms. Each term includes one major project, which alternates between team and personal projects. The senior team project spans two terms for a total six-month development time.

In an effort to replicate a publisher-developer model, the faculty gave the students a set of features that the game must include. Based on these requirements, students could submit a concept document. The faculty reviewed these documents and assigned game designer roles for each of three teams based on these. The students were then randomly assigned to teams, and the rest of the lead roles were assigned based on prior performance.

I was selected for a game designer role based on my concept document for a 3D fighting game tentatively called Toy Fighters, which ultimately became Toybox Heroes.

What inspired the game?

RJ: The game was based on an idea from our Game Designer. We really wanted to make a game with a theme that a lot of people could get behind, and everybody grew up playing with toys. I’ve tried explaining other games I worked on at the Guildhall, but nothing ever gets as much attention as, 'It’s toys that fight each other…'

KP: From the very start, Toybox Heroes was pitched as “Toy Story meets Power Stone,” so it’s safe to say those were probably our two biggest influences. As a gamer, I’m less of a fan of hardcore technical fighters as I am of those which mix in action and platforming elements, so we spent some time deconstructing games like Power Stone 2 and Super Smash Bros. Melee, trying to divine what made them fun.

Early on in development, we decided to go for largely weapons-based combat, as it complemented our toy theme well. Contextually, it made sense to have battlegrounds littered with random objects, and each of these could have different intrinsic properties to be learned and utilized. Our rule of thumb became, 'If it moves, you can pick it up.'

One of the earliest design decisions we faced was the choice of characters. We didn’t want to blatantly copy actual brand-name toys, but we did want characters with strong iconic traits that would evoke popular toys and action figures. To provide some cohesion among the characters, we began using the name “Toybox Heroes” as our fictional line of action figures.

To illustrate this fiction in-game, we designed our character selection screen to be themed like a toy aisle in a store, with each character packaged in the traditional action figure plastic bubble card.

What were your expectations from your game, and do you feel the end product lives up to those expectations?

RJ: I think the point was to make a fairly simple game that appealed to a wide range of people, and I think we accomplished that. We really tried to stick to our own childhood experiences - most of us were kids of the '80s and early '90s - but we found that all ages really enjoyed the game.

At our Senior Exhibition, we actually ended up babysitting most of the kids who came there because they really enjoyed playing, and when their parents came back for them, they often found themselves playing against their kids for quite some time.

KP: Comparing the final product to my initial concept document, we fundamentally hit every note. We had characters made of shiny plastic with jointed limbs running through oversized environments, beating each other up with household objects. But what I couldn’t have planned is what the rest of the team brought to the game.

So much of what gave Toybox Heroes its unique brand of humor and personality evolved naturally from having a fantastic and multi-talented team who wanted to share ideas and make the best game possible.

What do you think the most interesting thing about your game is?

RJ: One of my favorite things to work on were the traps in the level. I was always trying to think of environmental hazards to jam into the play areas, and often times we had to pull back because we were afraid of creating to much clutter. But I love the Garage Sale, because I got away with putting more stuff in that level.

Go punch the radio!!!

KP: We have a robot that transforms into a cow. That’s pretty sweet.

How long did development take, and what was the process like?

RJ: We had a little over five months to work on it while we were also focused on other class work and masters theses. We spent a lot of time outside of class in a small studio working to meet deadlines set by our professors.

KP: As this was a school project, we had a fixed development time of about six months. In reality, this was probably actually closer to five months – although our final milestone wasn’t due until March 2007, we had to be in a near-final state by February in order to demo the game at GDC. Development took place in what was referred to as a “team pit,” a large, open room shared by all fifteen students.

This setup was chosen to maximize communication, which was essential, as most of us had little or no past experience working with the Source SDK, and we were constantly having to solve cross-disciplinary problems. In my opinion, this immediacy is the single greatest factor that sets Guildhall student projects apart from mod teams working over the Internet.

The tools we work with - hardware notwithstanding - are freely available or at least able to be substituted for an open-source alternative, but trying to remotely coordinate a project of this scope within the allotted schedule would be a nightmare.

Why did you decide to work with the Source Engine?

RJ: This was actually the decision of the school, but I believe it was because the system is very robust. It worked surprisingly well, considering it was designed for an FPS and we were making a fighting game

KP: This was one of our requirements for the project. Historically, the Guildhall senior projects have required students to adapt an engine to a genre that it was not necessarily intended to support. In the case of Toybox Heroes, we were given the task of recreating a console gaming experience, with multiple players gathered around a single screen.

To this end, our requirements included supporting PlayStation 2 controllers, designing the levels in a “set” or “vignette” style, and ensuring that the game was presented synonymously on all users’ screens. On top of this, we had to produce a prototype proving each of these features in little more than a week. That was a fun week.

What’s the scene in Austin like?

RJ: Since I’m not currently developing in Austin, I can’t really answer this question

KP: There are a number of major developers in the Dallas area and many more in Texas as a whole, but the industry still feels young, especially in this region. The veterans of this scene are people whom I was looking up to barely a decade ago, back when making a career out of game development seemed like an insurmountable dream. It’s exciting to me that more concrete, established paths into the games industry are being paved, and I hope that having a school like the Guildhall in this area will help the scene to grow and improve.

Is there a feeling of community?

KP: There is, to a certain extent. I would say my own sense of community is mostly anchored around the Guildhall, as I still live and work in the same area, and many of the connections I’ve made in the last few years have been through the faculty and my classmates.

What do you think of the state of independent development, and how do you think independent games fit into the industry?

RJ: Independent game development has really come along way. If you look at the history of film, it’s really the next inevitable step. As the equipment to make film became cheaper and easier to use, more people were able to tell their stories and experiment on film.

We’re starting to see that with video games. It’s much easier to buy a game with a level editor or purchase a simple 2D engine, and we’re seeing people doing that. Xbox Live Arcade has seen some awesome games lately that are cheaper to make and get.

Players aren’t expecting huge technical leaps from these games, so developers can concentrate more on gameplay and story! Remember in the early '90s when people were excited about independent film because it was edgier and smarter than normal Hollywood fare? Well, I think we’re starting to see that from independent games. It’s very exciting.

KP: It’s fantastic to see more venues arise for indie, amateur, hobbyist, and student development. When I was first learning to program, it felt like the barrier to entry was impossibly high; there was no way I could have created anything of comparable quality to funded commercial titles, so I was relegated to making simple games for my own amusement.

With the advent of toolsets like XNA and distribution models like Steam and Xbox Live Arcade, it feels like a new market is forming where games like Audiosurf and Braid make sense and can be successful. And even ignoring commercial viability, one of my favorite aspects of the scene is simply having a venue where amateur developers can share their hobby projects among each other and provide feedback and encouragement.

Where do you see your game going from here?

RJ: Honestly, it’s exciting that a game we finished back in March of ’07 is still getting recognized and played today! All of the team has gone on to bigger projects and companies, so no one is really looking to work on it anymore. In a perfect world, it’d be great to redevelop the game for XBLA or something, adding characters and levels, maybe developing it’s own engine.

Then again, in a perfect world, I’d be the King of Australia.

KP: Since finishing Toybox Heroes, the team has graduated and dispersed across the globe. I don’t foresee any future development on Toybox Heroes, but I also didn’t foresee winning an IGF showcase a year later, so I suppose anything is possible.

What kind of feedback have you received so far?

RJ: Generally positive, and everyone has their own thoughts. 'You should have a He-man character!' 'How about a level in a bathtub!'

It’s fun to see players get excited about it.

KP: We got a mention in the June 2007 issue of Games For Windows Magazine as one of their “10 Things We’re Into This Month” feature, so that was pretty sweet.

Have you checked out any of the other Austin IGF games?

RJ: Mushroom Men looks really cool, and who doesn’t like Dodgeball (or Pirates and Ninjas)? I haven’t gotten a chance to play the other ones, but hopefully I will at the conference!

KP: I’ve been following the Road to the Austin IGF series, but I haven’t played any of the games yet. I’m hoping to get a chance to check them out in person next week.

Which recent indie games do you admire, and which recent mainstream titles do you admire, and why?

RJ: Well, I’ve been playing the heck out of Castle Crashers lately. It’s a very simple game formula, but it’s got tons of character! Other than that I’ve been playing WoW and Rock Band when I’m not at work. They’re small independent games, I’m not sure if anyone has heard of them.

KP: I realize raving about Braid and Portal is nothing new, but both of those titles married novel gameplay elements, puzzles, and fiction in a way that just clicked perfectly and produced something greater than the sums of their parts. There were both a little experimental without being inaccessible or pretentious, and they were both concise enough that I didn’t get burned out hours before the credits rolled.

Do you have any messages for your fellow contestants or fans of the IGF?

RJ: Check out the games on XBLA and online, as well as student games from the Guildhall and other schools! Oh, and check out Saint’s Row 2 on October 14th - shameless plug!

KP: Never stop learning.

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

[We've posted a couple of write-ups here on GSW already, but mainly not so much - so here's the full list of Gamasutra write-ups from the still in-progress AGDC. Apologies in advance if coverage gets a bit AGDC-heavy for the next couple of days, but it's mainly cos we don't have time to write anything else, and, heck, it's our conference and we'll cry if we want to.]

Big sister site Gamasutra is at Austin GDC 2008 this week, and we've compiled the best of our industry-leading coverage of the major MMO, virtual world writing, and audio lectures presented thus far.

AGDC, which is organized by Gamasutra parent Think Services, is taking place in the Austin Convention Center from Monday 15th-Wednesday 17th September, and multiple Gamasutra reporters are on hand to document many of the lectures and panels taking place there.

Here are the highlights of Monday's sessions at AGDC 2008:

AGDC: Austin's Schum Talks Future Of Austin Game Biz
"Talking to Gamasutra as the Austin Game Developers Conference kicks off, Austin Chamber Of Commerce's Tony Schum says there are vibrant opportunities for industry growth in the area -- despite recent layoffs at Austin."

AGDC: Club Penguin's Merrifield On Why Genuine Counts
"Customer service, above all, will drive all online game creators to create better games and businesses, said Club Penguin co-creator Lane Merrifield in a densely-attended Austin GDC keynote. Merrifield looked to his Disneyland origins -- and now his Disney-owned online game smash -- to explain why genuine respect and caring make a massive difference."

AGDC: The Psychology Of MMO Players: Community Managers, Psychologists Speak
"Anyone who has played an MMO or participated in any online forum or service knows that anonymity creates problems -- and large groupings of people invites those with psychological issues to act them out on the larger populace. A group of MMO community managers and psychologists from the University of Texas came together at GDC Austin to examine common scenarios -- and take a peek into why these problems persist, and maybe come up with new ways to solve them."

AGDC: Multiverse's Moore On Why Social Worlds Need Games
"Multiverse's Bob Moore, a sociologist, says games have always been social -- even Pong had a two-player mode. But most of the sociability that occurred happened around the game. With MMOs, sociability has moved further into the virtual environment itself, where players interact avatar to avatar instead of face to face. So how can we design environments for sociability?"

AGDC: Graner Ray On Bringing In More Players With Better Tutorials
"Tutorial design may create one of the largest barriers to entry in an MMO, according to veteran creator Sheri Graner Ray, who spoke during Austin GDC about ways tutorials can welcome in more players by speaking to a broader variety of learning styles."

AGDC: BioWare's Schubert On Why The MMO Endgame Matters
"Damion Schubert, lead combat designer for BioWare Austin, argues that your endgame -- what happens when MMO players have finished all the lower level quests and “made it” in the game universe -- realizes the true potential of MMOs."

AGDC: BioWare Duo Dish On 'Cinematic Design' For Mass Effect
"In a fascinating lecture on the first day of Austin GDC, BioWare senior writer Mac Walters and senior cinematic designer Paul Marino talked about the concept of cinematic design for games such as Mass Effect, sketching the move from 'The Dark Ages' through today's 'Golden Age.'"

AGDC: A Generative, Adaptive Music System for MMO Games
"Bay Area headquartered, John Romero-headed MMO developer Slipgate Ironworks has developed a robust system for its music, which audio director Kurt Larson considers the only viable way to move forward with MMO soundtracks -- which he presented with programmer Chris Mayer and composer Jim Hedges."

AGDC: MGS' Abernathy Talks Importance Of Game Characters
"In this presentation from Tom Abernathy (Destroy All Humans), formerly of Pandemic and recently moved to Microsoft Game Studios, a call to arms for both more compelling characters and tighter integration of writing and design is heard -- with the benefits clearly enumerated."

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

[Lots of MMO-friendly GSW goodness from Austin GDC this week - and this time, Brandon Sheffield has extended highlights of GDMag columnist Damion Schubert's excellent talk on endgames in MMOs.]

Damion Schubert, lead combat designer for BioWare Austin, argues that your endgame – what happens when MMO players have finished all the lower level quests and “made it” in the game universe – realizes the true potential of MMOs.

“People talk about massively multiplayer online games – whenever they gravitate to one of these games, they always gravitate to one of the big ideas,” says Schubert. “What would happen if you could burn down another guild? What would happen if you had a boss that needed 25 people to kill? What if you had a battle that was 100 ships versus 100 ships?”

“The most important thing about your endgame, about elder gameplay, is that it’s one of the few things in your games that’s actually massive. And at the end of the day, that’s what we’re talking about here.”

“Whenever you’re talking about things with your producers, (the endgame) looks like something to cut,” he says, “because maybe nobody will even get to that level. I think a lot of producers underestimate what happens at the endgame.”

It’s commonly said that in World of Warcraft, the game starts at level 70. That’s what Elder gameplay is all about. “It represents the third act of the series,” says Schubert. “You’re taking whatever you built inside the gameplay experience, and you’re applying it to something that’s interesting and challenging - you’re at the apex of your character’s development.”

Schubert says that most MMOs are pretty easy, most of the time. “It’s like popping bubblewrap. It’s low-investment activities.”

The endgame, he says, often represents the game's true challenge.

Sense Of History

History, legacy, and lore is important to players, Schubert says, but not necessarily the history of the game world. More specifically, he means the social history of the game. "When my raiding guild killed [a certain boss] in World of Warcraft, we were the first to do it, and a cutscene was going to be activated, and by the time we went to turn in the quest, there were 250-300 people just standing around waiting for us to turn in the quest. People feel like they want to be part of that history,” Schubert maintains.

Aside from the fact that the endgame represents the true massiveness of an MMO, “The other most important thing about elder gameplay is that it occupies the time, and keeps the investment, of your most devoted customers. If we start with the maxim that it costs 10 times as much to get a new player as it does to keep an existing player, which is a pretty standard marketing maxim,” then you should cater to those people, he says. They’re important people to the game, and they need something to do.

Territorial Control

One major endgame scenario is territorial control, which is popular because it’s cheaper, both for players and designers.

“One important thing in territorial games is respawn and attrition,” says Schubtert. “How long does it take for a player to get back to the fight?” Designers need to make it so that the balance can change properly such that through attrition someone can lose their respawn points or graveyards. You also don’t want to have players spending the majority of their time running back to the battle.

“You don’t have to have a political map,” he says, “but if you don’t, you’re stupid. The thing is a newbie can see these maps, and understand what’s happening.”

Looking at WWII online, you can see how territory changes hands from day to day on the game’s front page. “This sells your endgame. It makes people want to come to it, and acts as advertising.”

Six Rules Of Endgame

Schubert outlined his six overarching endgame rules as such:

1 - Player versus player endgames always excite the imagination more than player versus environment endgames.
2 - Players aren’t as hardcore as they think they are.
3 - 5% of your population can destroy the other 95%.
4 - Teamwork and numbers dominate.
5 - Fairness matters more than in PVE.
6 - Losing repeatedly sucks.

“If your endgame is PVP, you need to think about how PVP is introduced to characters at the low levels,” Schubert cautions. “If players decide along the way to the endgame that they don’t like your PVP, they will decide the endgame is not for them.” Argues that you should protect players more at the lower level, so they have a positive PVP experience.

“People don’t pay money to suck. People do not want to pay $15 a month to be the Washington Generals.” This is something he learned when making Shadowbane – “the winners now had lots of resources and the city could thrive, and the losers had nothing. So what happened is eventually the losers stopped logging on, and the winners eventually had nothing to fight.”

“We had one server where one guild was so in control, that they banned a player class so they’d have somebody to fight,” said Schubert. Players woke up in the morning and found that they were “wanted.”

The solution, he says, is to be able to hit a button, in the game (so to speak) to indicate that one group of players have won, and that they can begin again.

Raid Encounters – PVE

“My experience with raids is mostly through playing,” Schubert admits, “so this is all theoretical mumbo jumbo, but I look for patterns.”

Many claim that only a very small percentage of WoW players raid, but research found that “more than half of the level 70 characters have a piece of raid loot on their character. When they reach level 70, they don’t want to stop, and they at least give raiding a try.”

A raid encounter is “a Mario boss,” he says, “only with 25-40 people.” The puzzle is designed for that amount of people. With Mario, there are a number of things he can do, and you know what those are. “The problem with raid encounters is you don’t know what everyone can do.” You try to design raid encounters that require a mix, but you don’t know who’s going to show up. Players have certain tools, but not everyone has everything.

In a game like Everquest 2, a boss can manipulate players via the player’s magic pool, because everyone has it. Positioning is another common element. “The reason positioning is so heavily used,” he says, “is that it’s a tool everybody has. Everybody can determine a position.”

Casual players are an important consideration as well. “How many people can die in your fight before the whole thing falls apart is directly correlated to how casual-friendly that game is. Husbands, wives, girlfriends, are all bringing more casual people,” says Schubert.

WoW is approachable in this way, but if only one person has to die in order to fail a raid, it’s less likely you’ll bring those casuals, and it’ll be more hardcore oriented. This has difficult social implications.

Considerations When Designing Endgames

It should be content-heavy, while watching for overpowered classes. Repetition is a concern - how many times do people have to kill the same boss? “If you have a really really really long raid dungeon, players are going to kill the first boss a whole lot more than the last boss,” Schubert advises, “so you should consider how you reward them for that.”

The bench – if you need 25 to raid, you need to have 35 people in case your main tank is sick or you lose your healer. But this also means you have a lot of people sitting around doing nothing – “Most people aren’t going to sit on the bench forever,” Schubert says. “This creates real politics that is a headache for your guildmaster to manage.”

Considerations For Endgame Physicality

Technology – can your server handle 100 people versus 100 people?

How do you test it? “In Shadowbane, we redid our siege system a month and a half before it went live,” Schubert says. “We basically had one iteration of our game, played for a month and a half before we went live. Is that enough time to determine whether a game is balanced, fair, and stable? From experience, I can tell you no, no, and no.”

Fragility – if the endgame depends on a guild, and there are key players, the guild may be crippled when they lose that player.

Critical mass – what happens if your game doesn’t get enough people for it to take off? Or more likely, what happens if you lose people, and you don’t have enough for a raid or an endgame?

Interface – endgame interfaces tend to look much less like the interface of a lower level game. You can’t play endgame of World of Warcraft with the newbie interface.

Homework – “every time you add a consumable – a potion, or a stim-pack – you have to think about how you’re creating homework players will see as necessary before they get into that raid,” says Schubert. Players will be grinding to get things they think they need for the raid.

Guild management – managing a guild is difficult and fiddly, says Schubert. “For the love of god, will someone please design an MMO that gives these guys the tools they need?”

Matchmaking – “if you can get people who are likeminded together, your endgame is going to be stickier.”

Final Words

“Do massively multiplayer games need an endgame?” poses Schubert. “I argue yes. Massive is your selling proposition, and the endgame does that. That’s the stuff that captures the imagination.”

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

Hanging out in Austin, but still passing along the links goodness - and there's a fair amount of triumph and hurt in here, from Keith Boesky ranting about GameStop, through the alleged first info on DJ Hero, a game I will be all over if it does indeed appear as rumored.

Also in here - the American arcade moves quietly on, Akoha does some kind of funky charity-based gaming business model strangeness, Muslim Massacre gets attention, game mag editors get their own back, and more.

On and on:

Back from AMOA ‘08 - some thoughts, impressions and a fire (and my little part in all this) « Arcade Heroes
Interesting to see the U.S. arcade scene still wandering along.

Sore Thumbs - Dan Hsu and Crispin Boyer's blog on mainstream game journalism
I haven't linked to this, but it does have resonance, because, I dunno - it's watching the fall of a profession that is no longer strictly necessary (the professional game reviewer), and the people who were kings of it are hurting on the way down - my now co-worker Christian has a sense of this loss, too, having been part of the process -- it's painful.

A Tree Falling in the Forest: Gamestop Needs an Intervention Part 2: WTF Edition
'In reality you are not any different than the dude selling bootleg Batman DVDs on Canal Street in New York, you just have a bigger table.'

aderack: Where is Zar? Zar is gone. Eric-Jon Waugh: 'Not to overburden the player with complications right from the start. That's just good design. The hand-holding that's been going on, the last ten years though -- that's something else. Something insidiously banal.' Hey, come and write for GSW, E-J!

Developers face up to the pirates | Technology | The Guardian
'Fed up with his work being ripped off, gamemaker Cliff Harris engaged directly with the pirates. He is not the only one trying to deal with the issue, says Bobbie Johnson.' LOTS of publicity for this.

Kotaku: First DJ Hero Details: Turntable Controller, Mash-Ups, Guitar Co-Op
Sold.

Game-ism: 'What Do You Do? The Series.'
Starting with a most agreeable interview with Gama/GSW's Leigh, all about her close relationship with the UPS guy, from what I can gather.

Akoha ~ Come Play It Forward
'Akoha is the world’s first social reality game where you can earn points by playing real-world missions with your friends.' - video demo!

The Raw Story | Muslim groups condemn 'Muslim Massacre' video game
This SA-spawned randomness is finally hitting the 'ban this sick filth' circuit - to which I give a resounding 'eh'. No major points made on either side.

2008 CEDEC Awards report | Develop Mag
One of the first developer-centric Japanese awards shows, good to see someone English-language covering (even if we couldn't make it).

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

[It's not often that keynotes are as genuinely affecting as AGDC's Club Penguin one today - not only were there about 750 people there, the message was pleasingly humanistic, for a change at these sometimes technologically driven events.]

Customer service, above all, will drive all online game creators to create better games and businesses, said Club Penguin co-creator Lane Merrifield in a densely-attended Austin GDC keynote. Merrifield looked to his Disneyland origins -- and now his Disney-owned online game smash -- to explain why genuine respect and caring make a massive difference.

"If we can truly learn how to put the player first... we will build better games, stronger teams, and thus better businesses," said Merrifield of his essential ethos.

Merrifield was one of the two original developers of the subscription-based kids' Flash PC game, and subsequently presided over its acquisition by Disney in August 2007 for $700 million.

He worked at Disneyland long before Disney acquired his company, controlling a remote controlled crocodile on the Lion King parade. Merrifield recalled that he "...got to see first hand what it was like to be an environment about... serving each other."

The executive referenced Starbucks as being a company that tries extremely hard with customer service, but in his dealings with his local coffee shop, has been consistently misremembered as "Jason," instead of Lane.

"He meant well," Merrifield said, "but great service needs to come from people really wanting the best for you."

Merrifield explained that on the Internet, "children need advocates" to walk side by side with them. The designers' oldest kids were about 4 years old when Club Penguin was created, and its genesis was motivated first by the desire to "build a place online for them to play in."

He also pointed out that there's no room for ego -- developers focusing on games, particularly kid-oriented titles, need to check egomania at the door.

"Far too often, we as developers end up front and center... we remove the player and we start to serve ourselves," he said. According to Merrifield, there's even an internal 'crush the ego' mantra among incoming developers, as espoused by one of the Club Penguin co-founders in a slightly tongue-in-cheek manner.

Also, it's important to get the right people to handle the human interaction in games, Merrifield added. "We rarely hire techies to take care of the kids... we hire people who care about the kids," with backgrounds as teachers and other professionals.

As for support, the support team -- 150 people, plus offices outside North America in England, Australia, and now Brazil -- personally responds to between 5,000 and 7,000 emails every day, and the company uses personal dialogues back and forth, using custom tech support software, to carefully listen to the audience.

But won't they "just send you more emails," Merrifield asks? This is a good thing, he stressed, because the kids will "feel heard", and it helps shape story in Club Penguin. For example, in a story event where feedback was emailed in extensively by the users: "We didn't do what the kids said would be lame, and we did do what they said would be cool."

In an extensive question-and-answer session following the keynote, Merrifield expounded on a number of interesting topics. He first tackled subscriptions versus microtransactions, noting that subscriptions are working for Club Penguin because of the age of the children, and the necessity for parents to buy subscriptions for them. This means that they can serve parents too, by adding a game timer, for example, with no in-game advertisers to get mad at them.

Asked about being child-friendly and even protecting against predators, Merrifield noted that they have a very large amount of checks in place, explaining that they are "adding and removing several hundred words a day" to their censorship list. He particularly referenced the word "lollipop," noting that: "All of a sudden a new pop song comes out, and it means something new."

In addition, there are no beds in the game, partly to forestall any issues -- though the Club Penguin founder can explain it away because "...penguins sleep standing up." The game hasn't had a single reportable major incident thus far.

In addition, he commented on the fact that a percentage of revenues still go to charity with Club Penguin, something they don't generally talk about -- in a separate custom challenge last Christmas, two and a half million kids gave away two billion coins to help decide where $1 million would go to. He noted of the charity revenue part: "Disney was one of the few companies that never even questioned that."

In fact, Merrifield went out to explain, the Disney acquisition choice, in addition to having "the same philosophical values," was "...as much about infrastructure as anything else." But he noted that the biggest challenge is the size of Disney overall - even acknowledged by top Disney executive Robert Iger, who said to Lane, post-acquisition: "We brought you on for more than just a brand... if you ever feel that the size of the company is stifling... I want to be the first to know."

Merrifield concluded his well-received Austin GDC keynote by explaining a central tenet of the immensely popular kids' online game: "If it doesn't matter to a kid, it doesn't matter."

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

[You'll be seeing us publish highlights from AGDC over the next three days or so, since a bunch of Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra editors are in situ here at our own Texas event - and here's an interesting starter I conducted this morning.]

Talking to Gamasutra as the Austin Game Developers Conference kicks off, Austin Chamber Of Commerce's Tony Schum says there are vibrant opportunities for industry growth in the area -- despite recent layoffs at Austin.

Schum, who is Director Of Economic Development for the Austin Chamber Of Commerce, is relatively upbeat about the region's prospects, pointing to the acquisition of Warren Spector's Junction Point Studios by Disney and the acquisition of BioWare (including its Austin studio) by Electronic Arts as key recent highlights.

"The employment growth that those companies are going to bring to Central Texas... are what we want to focus on," says Schum.

However, the headlines in recent weeks around layoffs at Midway Austin and the relocation of NCsoft's North American HQ to Seattle have put somewhat of a damper on the Austin scene.

Schum argues there's still "going to be some emphasis remaining on [NCsoft] Austin" in terms of Q/A and administrative functions, and that that specific issue is therefore not a dead loss for the region.

Schum also says that one of the less-reported reasons for the NCsoft transition to Seattle was that few direct flights between the company's Korean headquarters and Austin presented challenges for the company. But Austin population growth is expected to increase over the next few years, says Schum, who hopes that this will mean fewer such issues for other companies as the city establishes itself as a travel hub.

As for Midway Austin's significant staff cuts, Schum acknowledges the loss to the region -- while saying it actually presents a "massive opportunity" for other commpanies to snatch up qualified, well-trained industry professionals in the area.

"Austin is a very entrepreneurial town," says Schrum, and with major companies like Sony Online still in the area and opportunities for startups, he's hoping to see continued growth. In addition, EA's Austin office now includes both BioWare and a fast-growing, relatively stealthy Pogo.com division.

What can Austin and the state of Texas do to encourage this growth? Schum says some central Texas communities within central Texas will give game companies per-employee grants or a tax abatement, and the state of Texas gives a five percent rebate on total production cost of games to help encourage studios. Schum also hopes that the rebate will increase to 15 percent in the next iteration of the bill, to be discussed in the next few months.

Of course, compared to some major rebates, this isn't the most aggressive offered -- with smaller states and areas plus major regions in Canada actively trying to integrate attractive incentives.

"There's a reason why those [less well-established] areas are having to offer 40 percent" in wage rebates, Schum says, although he admits that Raleigh, North Carolina is a major competitor to Austin in terms of talent base within the non-"core" U.S. development area.

As for the bigger areas such as Montreal, Schum says, "The question is sustainability," arguing that the Montreal model to offer "ridiculous" wage rebates focused on job creation, as opposed to project-based support, may not necessarily lead to a long-term payoff for the region.

As for gigantic deals to get major publishers to commit in any area, Schum says, "There are only so many of those deals per year."

But he points to flourishing companies such as Aspyr, Gamecock and Heatwave as signs of positive trends for Austin, and also hints at a couple of mid-sized, 20-30 person developers that may be relocating to Austin later this year thanks to incentives -- signs that Austin's game biz is still alive and ticking, despite setbacks.

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

[I believe our own Chris Remo has chatted to the Left 4 Dead folks a couple of times recently, and this is just one of the fruits - evil weathermen to the fore! On this front, I'd just like to point out that the Avengers movie also has evil weathermen - specifically Sean Connery - in it, btw.]

Chet Faliszek, writer on Valve's upcoming zombie co-op shooter Left 4 Dead, has been talking about why he wanted to avoid pinning its zombie invasion on an "evil mastermind," instead honing in on the actual effect the invasion has on the game's characters and world.

"The evil mastermind at the end is never as good as whatever you had in your head when you were coming up with it," Faliszek says, arguing that trying to over-explain the cause of a disaster often detracts from its more tangible impact.

He cited Jan de Bont's 1996 disaster film Twister. "They had evil weathermen to justify their plot," he said. "Evil weathermen."

"What the hell? There's no evil weather men!" Faliszek exclaimed. In Left 4 Dead, "we don't make evil scientists that have created a zombie infection to stomp out the USA -- the evil Russian scientists or whatever post-Cold War enemy you want to use."

Instead, Faliszek says, it is more effective to create resonant gameplay experiences that players will remember, particularly if the setting in question, such as a zombie invasion (or a tornado outbreak, for that matter) is already familiar.

That is even more applicable in a cooperative game such as Left 4 Dead, when players have the same moment-to-moment experience.

"I think everyone knows what the zombie apocalypse is," he says. "They register what it is and they, playing it, make the story, because, since you're so close to each other when you play, you see the same things. You have the same experience. You can talk about it afterwards, and it's not like, 'You missed this. When this crazy thing happened, we were over here.' Instead it's, 'We were all right there, and we all saw that.' That's much better writing than I could ever do."

Still, Faliszek notes, it was important to craft dialogue that heightens the experience and gives each of the four protagonists unique voices, even by way of the sporadic dialogue cues heard during combat encounters.

It's a process that the writer has been honing during his work on Half-Life 2: Episode One and Episode Two -- for which he wrote battle chatter -- as well as on the multiplayer-only Team Fortress 2.

"I'm really excited," he said. "How, in a multiplayer game, do you leak a little story, give a little about a character? [TF2] was a great testbed there. I wanted to add some of the things that I had learned."

Left 4 Dead's characters have slightly different reactions to the traumatic events that unfold. For example, some of the characters are familiar with the undead, having seen countless horror films, but some are not. "We have one character, Frances, who gets confused between infected being zombies or vampires," says Faliszek, "because he's not of the world of zombie movies."

But defining elements like that shouldn't become belabored, he pointed out, or they become tiresome: "You don't hear that every time. You're going to hear that one in every ten or twenty times."

In the end, the writing focus for this type of game was clear. "You can't have the story get in the way. People don't want cut scenes. I think too many of the zombie games get caught up in [that]," Faliszek said. "People don't want this heavy handed story. They want the zombie apocalypse."

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

[Aha, the latest issue of Game Developer has arrived, and we were forced to put the awesome N+ on the cover, tragically enough! Pretty fun issue overall - look for some selected highlights on our sites over the next few weeks.]

The September 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine, the sister print publication to Gamasutra.com and the leading U.S. trade publication for the video game industry, has shipped to print/digital subscribers and is available from the Game Developer Digital service in both subscription and single-issue formats.

The cover feature for the issue is an exclusive postmortem of Metanet's downloadable game N+, by co-founders Raigan Burns and Mare Sheppard, offering insight into the ninja-themed platformer's development. The piece is described as follows:

"N+ is the indie success story of the year thus far, with over 100,000 downloads on Xbox Live Arcade. Here, the developers chart their path from the original N to its high definition iteration, contending with TCR problems, networking issues, and cut features along the way."

Another major feature in the new issue is "State of the Industry: Outsourcing" in which industry commentator Paul Hyman takes an in-depth look at the growing trend of outsourcing, including strategies from specific developers and publishers:

"Outsourcing is no longer something game companies are simply 'looking into.' Outsourcing is now a reality of modern game development, both on the large and small scales. This state of the industry report talks to both outsourcers and outsourcees, to determine where this increasingly important sector of game development is going in the near future."

In a practical technical feature, Sensory Sweep senior programmer Eric Brown describes a clever coding trick that many might assume unfeasible: ragdoll physics on Nintendo DS:

"They thought it couldn't be done, but then did it anyway. This article takes you through the steps necessary to implement ragdoll physics on the DS, without eating up your budgets."

In addition, code columnist and Power Of Two Games co-founder Noel Llopis delves into managing data relationships, and art columnist Steve Theodore of Bungie discusses how to cope with crunch time.

Plus, design co-columnist Soren Johnson of Maxis considers in-game economies, and audio columnist Jesse Harlin of LucasArts tackles the difficult problem of providing sound design for dynamically-breakable materials.

Finally, in a special feature, NanaOn-Sha president Masaya Matsuura (PaRappa the Rapper, VibRibbon) expresses his belief that music games are only achieving part of their potential, and that creators should try to look at new design directions beyond competition and negativity.

As always, the issue also contains product reviews and other notable editorial columns, as well as the latest game development news and industry perspectives.

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

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

['The Game Anthropologist' is Michael Walbridge's take on gaming communities. One time he participated in a psychology experiment that colored his outlook on game rules, game communities, and the influence each has on the other - and here's some ensuing thoughts.]

The "Game Anthropologist" emphasizes game communities because a game is only as good as the community it spawns; not only are games more interesting because of their communities, but the communities that participate in a game and its network tells us a lot about the game.

This begs a question: "Which more strongly influences the other: the demands of game communities and players on the games that are created, or the games on the communities and players that play them?"

I have an anecdote on the matter.

At college I majored in one of the most overpopulated lib arts programs: psychology. At the rather large university I attended, requests for test subjects are frequent. One experiment I participated in involved a computer game a professor had designed.

I don't remember the mechanics perfectly. Participants were told they'd be playing a game and start with forty dollars, represented digitally in the game. The sum of money would increase or decrease in size depending on choices made during the game and upon the game's conclusion an assistant would present the participants with the cash equivalent of what they'd made during the game.

Each round, the players were required to give a certain amount of money to the other three players as they saw fit; the minimum amount was about five dollars. If players gave a lot of it to certain people, and everyone chose that route, everyone would get more money from the game, but if one person chose not to participate in that mechanic, that person would benefit at everyone else's expense. Each participant did this all alone by using a computer in a tiny room; we'd make our choices, and within a minute we'd find out how much each person gave to us each round.

I immediately saw the point of it. Would everyone, without human interaction, choose to do what it takes to benefit the group, or would people choose to look out for number one?

I chose to take the altruistic route, hoping people would catch on; my gaming habit made me immediately analyze the game's rules, and I naively assumed everyone else would do the same. It worked, for a little while; I gave a lot to one or two people and they started giving some back.

Before long, though, everyone started crystallizing and giving me the same amount. I couldn't budge them. I ended up with 17 bucks. Other people I had met had boasted of making twice that much, and I was only a little bitter as I later learned I had earned less than most of the other participants.

But the gamer and psychologist in me later thought that maybe the game wasn't revealing information about people; maybe it's just a game that is designed to encourage people to behave in a certain way. I thought that surely if everyone had been together in person, they'd have all cooperated to make the most amount of money together.

Maybe the game and experiment designer shared my hypothesis in the first place. The point is that I realized that the mechanics of a game have the potential to be as strong as any other context in culture as far as influencing the perceptions, beliefs, and behavior of a person. The well-known Stanford prison experiment shows us that when we agree to certain roles and strive to play them well, those roles can change us.

Money was involved in the game I played, but other games provide other forms of intrinsic motivation; we see the effects of role-playing on people in the games we play.

The long and short of it? The game makes the player. When we play games, we are at the outset making an agreement that we are going to do whatever the game tells us to. We can change our minds. We can find out beforehand what is in the game.

Yet once we sit down and press start or enter, we are promising to be someone we aren't, for a while. And we are doing it with the knowledge that we are doing it within the confines of the game. The game is law, and players choose to subscribe to that law.

"But," you may protest, "people change how games are played—the player changes the game." Sure they do! They do that with mods, and we often see communities invent and even enforce new contexts and rules.

In psychology, chicken/egg questions are common. Genetics vs. environment, emotion vs. action, behavior vs. belief. Which causes the other?

The common answer to all of these is that neither is the sole first cause—they both reinforce each other continually. This isn't a new or exciting conclusion. But for those of us playing and making and talking about games, it's something worth being reminded of. We keep purely blaming the players for being who they are, but consider this: don't game mechanics highly influence how we behave?

I mean, how can anyone who takes games seriously believe that the only factor that influences communities is that certain games simply attract certain audiences? Lots of adults want (or at least wanted) to play Halo 3 on Xbox Live.

Do immature people always choose Halo 3, or do the mechanics for matches and communication in Halo 3 provide an environment that makes it easier to treat people horribly? An MMO is an opposite environment complete with a monitoring system, a government if you will; this might explain why anyone who is gay or a woman feels more comfortable playing those games.

Our laws and most of our minds believe people have agency; abusive gamers should still be held responsible for their actions. Still, it is desirable for anyone who is producing, reviewing or discussing games to ask "What kind of community does this game foster?"

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Those interested in pursuing these kinds of concepts further should read Bill Fulton's recent Gamasutra feature named 'Fixing Online Gaming Idiocy: A Psychological Approach', which has some good thoughts on similar topics.]

Posted by Mike Walbridge at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Well, I'm on the way to Austin GDC, which closely followed the GDC Advisory Board meeting and my holiday to Hawaii (hey, lots of travel time to play Hot Shots Golf 2 on PSP, right?) - so expect some AGDC reports -- with photographic evidence -- this week.

In the meantime, our best-of links list continues to go off the beaten track, with a new Web 2.0-style game creation startup, SETI's full Spore-related press release pitch, G4 on the PAX 10, and plenty more.

Yee haw go:

Video Game Examiner: Top 10 Hip-Hop Songs that Sampled a Video Game
'Hip-hop and video games have always had a symbiotic relationship whether it was rappers rapping about beating each other down in NBA Live, participating in Madden and Street Fighter tournaments or actually sampling game music for their tracks. Which brings us to this list.'

G4 - X-Play: 'The PAX 10: Interviews'
More profiles of neat indie titles.

Canned Dogs » Blog Archive » Eroge production
Interesting breakdown of erotic game development in Japan - via Junkbomb.

GameSpite.net: 'A true disaster'
Parish explains it all re: that DS game, which apparently pirates music, too, oh dear: 'I'm sure people who relish dashing their minds out against a brick wall will love Steel Disaster, but for me it stands on the wrong side of that all-important divide. Alas!'

Holiday reading recommendation: Neal Stephenson's 'Zodiac'
Ahead of his new novel, checked out a greatest hit on holidays from the cyberpunk pioneer - now I have a Lazyweb suggestion for someone to make a guerrilla environmental pollution-busting game, yay.

Atmosphir - Free Video Game / Creation Tool for Mac and PC
Interesting, quite high-end games for custom creation I think? Via Waxy.

Banning Videogames — How We Misinterpret The Experience « Vancouver Game Design
'Is it healthy for any culture to ban something that would explore their taboos in a safe environment?' A little heady, perhaps, but hey!

Koonsolo News » Blog Archive » Mystic Mine: game with impossible levels
Interesting indie PC title, a bit Echocrome-y, perhaps?

SETI Institute - Art Imitates Life
Spore "...takes much of its inspiration from the real-world research of the SETI Institute", apparently. Will Wright quotes, reduced membership, blimey!

Siliconera » Tokyo hosts Extra - Hyper Game Music Event in October
A good post-TGS event, to say the least.

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

[Big sister site Gamasutra's Christian Nutt was kind enough to wander down to Las Vegas to cover the rather unique GameStop Expo this week, and his write-up is definitely GSW-worthy, given not that many journos got to the event.]

Last year, Gamasutra was invited to the recent GameStop Expo in Las Vegas and found it to be a mini E3-of-old, with comparatively tame but still compelling booths from major and minor publishers.

The show is put on for the benefit of the store managers of GameStop's approximately 5,000 retail locations, and showcases the fall lineups of publishers -- with booth space related (but not 100 percent correlated) to GameStop's buys from these publishers.

The intent of the show is to educate and excite the managers of these stores about the upcoming fall games. GameStop's executive vice president of merchandise and marketing Tony Bartel commented to Gamasutra that it's even better-timed for this purpose than was the old E3 -- which was heavily attended by GameStop and its predecessor companies' staff -- as the games are in better shape for the managers to play by September.

The GameStop Expo, Itself

The show, while expanded in size -- taking up the entirety of a bigger hall at the Mandalay Bay hotel's convention center in Las Vegas, as compared to last year -- seemed a little less focused, with a shorter duration of just three and a half hours.

In an interesting move, companies were banned from passing out tchochkes this year, being instructed instead to send them to the GameStop warehouse for distribution to individual store locations. Last year, managers traveled the floor with handheld containers to fill with loot, Halloween-style.

As with last year, a big draw of the booths was signings with popular gaming celebrities, like Charles Martinet -- the voice of Mario -- at Nintendo's booth, or Castlevania producer Koji "IGA" Igarashi reprising his appearance from last year's show.

The GameStop NASCAR stock car was on the floor, with driver Joey Logano signing autographs. Midway and THQ both had pro wrestlers from their respective licenses' stables.

In an interesting move, some publishers were moving more toward debuting new playable builds of games that did not have previous exposure during press events. Square Enix showed a build of its Unreal Engine-powered RPG The Last Remnant that it will not be showcasing at next month's Tokyo Game Show, and Atlus brought the first English build of Persona 4, the latest in its cult-classic RPG series.

Interestingly, consumer sites were on the show floor to play games and report, E3-style, suggesting a potential increase in the show's profile and relevance beyond its traditionally GameStop-internal purview.

Though managers were officially required to visit every booth on the show floor, no obvious organizational system seemed to exist to ensure their dedication, and in fact hordes of GameStop employees were already wandering away from the show onto the Mandalay Bay casino floor by 7:30 PM (the show began at 7:00 PM).

However, it's worth mentioning that these deserters were outnumbered by the generally enthusiastic crowds who surveyed the show and played games, many of whom also engaged company representatives in conversations about them.

Bigger Picture: The GameStop Conference

As mentioned, the Expo is part of a larger GameStop Conference that took place from Saturday, September 6 through the morning of Thursday, September 11 -- though not all staff were required to attend all events.

Presentations on games from publishers such as Sony Computer Entertainment -- which brought in Insomniac CEO Ted Price to present Resistance 2 -- and Electronic Arts -- which offered EA Sports president Peter Moore -- were a big part of the event, as were classroom sessions; press were not officially invited to these proceedings.

Interestingly mandatory "vendor training" sessions showcased the output of 19 companies, including game publishers, peripheral manufacturers, and strategy guide publishers.

In essence, the GameStop Expo and its surrounding conference continues the work that the E3 started with its historical facilitating of retail business -- while narrowing down the participation to only one retail organization.

This has its positives, as one of the biggest complaints many attendees had with E3 was the clog of general gamers -- many of whom were retail employees -- preventing business from being done.

The expo's presentations are also targeted by the publishers directly for an audience of store managers, who will return to their GameStop shops and sell those publishers' games.

On the other hand, the focus has a handicap, as E3 allowed retail staff from any chain, not just GameStop, to participate.

Either way, the relevance of GameStop as a retailer can't be ignored, and with publisher participation in the show all but required as part of doing business with the chain, there's little doubt that it will continue to expand and refine its role.

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