[In this opinion piece, semi-pseudonymous Game Developer magazine columnist Matthew Wasteland takes a look at gaming's place in the creative canon, looking at what critics miss within gaming, and what everyone needs to understand about games as an artform.]

Most people in the video game industry, and many people who write about them for a living, hope for games to be taken seriously as art or literature. It’s just around the corner, we believe— the day the establishment flings open the door to us and lets us in, apologetic tears streaming from their eyes. “We misjudged you,” they’ll cry, “Just like we initially misjudged movies, jazz, and prose poetry.” Games are a brand new medium, we console ourselves, and these hidebound fogeys just need time to understand it.

The conventional wisdom is that we’re nearly there— that everyone on our side is just being a little too uncreative, or that the software tools are just a bit lacking, and that our wildest dreams are possible with just a little more cleverness in our game designs and some new technological developments. “Design challenges” at industry conferences exhort professionals to stretch their brains by sketching out an idea based around something perceived to be an unconventional subject matter (for games, anyway); Moby Dick, for example. We may not have much cachet, people may shrink away when we explain what we do at non-industry social gatherings, but hey! Just the other day we were talking about ideas for games based on Moby Dick! How could that not be serious and important?

We all believe in the future of the games (I think this is why we are here, right?), and while my Magical Wasteland weblog has become known for its skeptical tack, I want to point out I have nothing but respect for those who are courageously trying to expand our thinking about games. I am questioning things because I want them to get better.

If there are significant limits to what games (as we know them now) can do, we need to understand those limits so we can overcome them. Critics of older media often dismiss video games without fully explaining why; this is an attempt to do it in their stead.

Some Possible Approaches

Firstly, we have our “traditional” adaptations. Given that we wanted to maintain at least some semblance to the original work, we have a couple familiar options for Moby Dick: The Video Game (there are also ways to combine both approaches to varying degrees, but for the sake of the exercise I will talk about them as separates).

The first approach would be to keep the sequence of major events— Captain Ahab’s first encounter with the title character, his desire for revenge, his madness, and subsequent death— and attempt to insert gameplay sequences around those fixed points. The player therefore could have fun sailing the Pequod and catching whales at some point between Ahab’s first and second encounters with the whale. Success at these parts of the game would allow him to proceed further in the story. But no matter how much freedom the player was given to navigate the ocean in his own self-directed way, ultimately, the predetermined story of Captain Ahab’s obsession wins out, and at the end of the game, Moby Dick destroys the Pequod no matter what happened in the intervening time.

Most large-budget titles made today take this route (the average consumer does not seem to mind it at all), but many game designers and commentators find themselves dissatisfied with it. It means the player’s agency in the game world is only an illusion. No matter what the player does, or how well he plays, the white whale will kill Captain Ahab in a short cinematic scene after the gameplay is over.

That’s the story that’s been set up for the player to experience, and he travels along that path like a tourist on a Disneyland ride. However much choice the player seems to have in between these story checkpoints, the overall path of the game is geometrically equivalent to those of film or theater or books. We choose to ignore the fundamental quality that makes games different and so compelling— their interactivity.

The other approach is to “open up” Moby Dick, to allow the player real, significant choices in the course of events and their outcomes. In this configuration, an especially skillful player might be so good at the game that he does indeed catch and kill Moby Dick, triumphantly achieving Captain Ahab’s revenge— and along with it, destroying the whole point of Melville’s story. Allowing such an alternate ending robs the work of its power; the story of Moby Dick is engaging precisely because Captain Ahab cannot find extra lives, rewind time or load an old save for a second chance, and the story of his obsession and undoing is fixed over time, a static sculpture in four dimensions.

The issue of these changeable outcomes is what the critic Roger Ebert infamously identified as the central problem with games-as-art, and despite the emotional flurries and dismissive grumblings from the gaming community, it is actually a good point without a clear answer. If Melville had so much as allowed for any possibility at all where Captain Ahab “wins,” no matter how remote, the work’s message and its interpretation of the world completely changes. Instead of destiny and fate, we would now speak of probability and chance. Work hard enough, get lucky enough, and anything is possible.

The problems of these two approaches show why, despite our high hopes and our big money, it sometimes feels like all we have to showcase for our vaunted new storytelling medium is either something that is basically a film or a book conflated with pockets of gameplay, or a cheesy Choose Your Own Adventure affair where no single story can really be granted sole authorial intent.

This puts us in a strange bind: we’re either imitative of, and beholden to, the arts that preceded us (“if you want a good story, why not read a book?”), or we are unmoored in a postmodern haze, trying to argue that a quantum superposition of many possible outcomes is just as artful as a linear story (“this painting is a work of art and self-expression— but it doesn’t matter if that part is red or blue or green”). Neither of these options is fully satisfying.

On 'Systems As Art'

Then, we have what I will call “systems-as-art”. An example of systems-as-art in its simplest and unvarnished form is Rod Humble’s experiment, The Marriage, wherein a couple of floating squares (one blue, one pink) drift around a field but must meet certain different conditions in order to prevent the “game” (that is, the marriage) from ending. Playing it is an exercise in attempting to sustain equilibrium in the face of change, something we understand to be the author’s interpretation of what being in a marriage feels like.

Humble argues that a set of rules by itself can communicate meaning and achieve the status of art. By the same logic, if The Marriage is a work of art about marriage, then chess is a work of art about conflict and war, Monopoly might be a work of art about capitalism, even the sport of basketball could potentially be a work of art about, say, agility and endurance.

Jonathan Blow, the creator of Braid, goes even farther, suggesting that the creation of internally consistent rule systems is a superior method to writing for the conveyance of philosophy (although in the same interview, he also mentions that nobody has yet fully understood the meaning of his game).

The Marriage is almost completely devoid of context. The system of its rules exist and operate with the barest of any qualities that might attach the player to what is going on. The two squares change position grow or shink in size, and become opaque or transparent. The player may understand (by dint of the game’s title) on some level that one of the boxes is meant to represent the husband, and the other box is the wife, and he may try to keep them together. But it’s also likely that he will see the colored, geometric shapes and not feel much of anything. What brings us to care about a colored square in a video game world?

One of the moments of emotional resonance in Portal is the incineration (by the player’s own hand) of the coyly named and designed Weighted Companion Cube. One could argue that the Companion Cube is just as nonrepresentational as the boxes in The Marriage, but context is the key. It is the only cube of its kind (it has hearts on it, as opposed to the numerous nondescript cubes strewn throughout the game). The level in which the Companion Cube appears is impossible to solve without it. The player’s nemesis, tormentor, and unreliable narrator has specifically advised the player not to become attached to it.

Finally, this villain suggests that the Companion Cube cannot speak, but if it could, it would politely ask the player to destroy it. This is very clever: at that moment, the player can’t help but to imagine the Companion Cube speaking. What would it say? “Please don’t incinerate me,” probably. We feel sorry we have to destroy the Companion Cube to progress in the game. Despite ourselves, we hope we will see it again somehow.

Why would you care about a simple box in a video game? Portal, I think, offers a better answer. Our experience of the Companion Cube sequence draws us in, it interests us. The Marriage doesn’t do that, and that is its fundamental weakness: it is not particularly fun or engaging, except by virtue of the fact that it is one of the first and few deliberate explorations of systems-as-art. Humble comes close to acknowledging this, saying that “The Marriage is intended to be art,” and “meant to be enjoyable but not entertaining in the traditional sense most games are.”

Distancing the work from the “entertainment” of popular games is fine, but even the most artsy, obscure and difficult works must connect with an audience somehow. I am not sure a system of rules by itself is the best method to achieve that. If rules are art, could not one just as easily publish a rulebook, and leave it at that?

None of this is to say that a system of rules cannot be of artful construction. I have no doubt that, if we wished it and worked for it, we could at some point have departments at forward-thinking arts colleges devoted to the creation of not-very-representational rule systems as art. This might make some of us feel better about ourselves— that there is a recognized, serious side to our medium.

But I can’t help but think something like that would be a Pyrrhic victory, with “art games” sharing space in an airless pantheon next to twelve-tone music or hypertext novellas while the rest of the world goes on listening to primordial melodies and timeworn stories reinvented in the style of the day.

Conclusion

It has become a recognized cliché in these kinds of conversations to ask, “have games had their Citizen Kane yet?” It’s not as if the moment Citizen Kane was released, everyone suddenly decided that the medium of film was serious and important and the next great art form. But I think there’s a reason we have been speaking in terms of Citizen Kane and not, for example, Un Chien Andalou.

While both are important milestones in the history of the medium, Citizen Kane is accessible and easy to like. It synthesized much of what was known about filmmaking up to that point into a coherent whole. It married technical innovations with a good story. It showed that a film could be high and low, art and spectacle, serious and entertaining all at once. A medium that can deliver all of that in one package is a great medium indeed.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (77)

[Mathew Kumar is continuing his excellent work on our sister online worlds site WorldsInMotion.biz, and in the course of compiling the Worlds In Motion Atlas has had reason to check out Ikariam, which is a browser-based Civilization-ish type thing and it... well, interesting, for lack of a better term.]

Here's an overview of Ikariam. Online worlds are usually avatar based, and if they're games, they're normally RPGs. Developer GameForge bucks the trend with a browser based real-time strategy title that is most usually compared to Sid Meier's Civilization series.

Name: Ikariam

Company: GameForge

Established: February 2008

How it Works: Ikariam is browser based and runs in HTML and Javascript. Navigation and gameplay are accomplished via mouse and keyboard input.

Overview: In Ikariam, users create a town on a randomly assigned island. On their island are up to 15 other players, plus a sawmill and a unique resource. The aim of the game is for the player to create the largest and most prosperous city by accumulating resources through production, trade or warfare, and developing new technologies and buildings as a result.

Payment Method: Ikariam is free to play, and earns revenue via "Ikariam Plus" a system where players can purchase "ambrosia" which can be spent to receive in-game bonuses.

Key Features:
- A massively multiplayer real-time strategy title
- "Always on" - players' cities are costantly working, even when they're not logged in
- Players can not only fight with each other, but perform diplomacy, forming alliances and trade agreements

Ikariam: In-Depth Tour

When most gamers think “real-time strategy” they tend to think of games like Command and Conquer and Age of Empires. However, Ikariam is a lot more leisurely paced, but can also be (perhaps surprisingly!) more stressful!

You see, Ikariam is a “real time” title in that after you’ve founded your city (in my case, Arx Prosperitas, which I hope means “Prosperous Fortress”, but I’m not particularly good at Latin) you simply set your townsfolk to some tasks -- usually researching discoveries, working at the island’s saw mill for materials, and constructing new buildings.

And then you wait in real time.

This is a genuinely surprising thing when you first begin to play Ikariam! The first time I began building something -- an academy, to make research possible -- being told I had to wait 15 minutes for it to be completed was a shock!

However, it’s fairly quick to get into the groove with the game, but what it does mean is that you’ll (certainly in the beginning stages) be leaving the browser window running for a long time while you perform other, non-game related tasks (catching up on e-mail, work, etc.) while you wait to be able to build your next structure, as you can’t stack building orders.

Once you’ve built your town up to at least a basic level -- with an academy, barracks, trading post and port -- you can start to take part in the larger game. A little earlier I mentioned “your island’s” saw mill, and in fact you share your island with up to 16 other players/towns, and all use the same resources. Each island has one saw mill and one luxury to mine (either sulphur, marble, grapes or crystal) and though there is no limit to the amount that can be mined, players are advised to work together and contribute building materials to the improvement of each resource to allow them to mine as much as possible -- especially as players can attack other players on the same island if they feel they’re not pulling their weight.

But the majority of the play is formed through trading and battling with the inhabitants of other islands. A great deal of the game is based on trading across the free market using cargo ships, but if you’re of a more warlike persuasion you can also choose to pillage other cities with your units too.

All of this takes time, of course! It can take several hours for cargo ships to reach their destination (it isn’t instant!) and even time for them to load goods, so Ikariam is a game that requires a lot of patience -- and trust, because the situation on your island, or with your trading partners, can easily change in a few hours while you’re away.

Due to the game’s heavy requirements on patience, it actually takes a very long time to get into the position where you are going to feel like you’re able to compete/interact with other players across the world (rather than just with the inhabitants on your own island) but once you are ready there is plenty of potential for taking part in the game’s social aspects, such as alliances, trade agreements and more.

Yet the question remains – is this a game that benefits from being massively multiplayer? Is the resulting community interesting from a social worlds stand point? I’ll take a look in the upcoming conclusion.

Ikariam: Conclusion

Ikariam is an odd one. Not just because of the way it’s chosen to be a Civilization-styled title in a MMO market dominated by RPGs, but in the way it has chosen to be that. There are a lot of odd design decisions.

The most obvious first -- the complete inability to stack building projects. Want to build a trading post upgrade, then a hideout, and then a embassy? Well, you’d better be prepared to log back in each time you want the next object built, because your townsfolk can’t be given a list of things to do.

I can see why they did it -- without this restriction, the beginning stage of the game would consist of setting up your townsfolk a huge list of things to build, and then coming back in a few days once they’d done it all. But even then -- why is it fun, or at all interesting, to have to build all of these essential buildings anyway? There are few (if any!) you can get away without building, so in your first town at least it’s a slog to get to the point where you can play the game.

This is made slightly worse by the complete lack of any usable tutorial -- in the end I simply resorted to using the beginner's guide on Wikariam, which details, by and large, roughly the only way to progress in the early stages of the game. The initial Ikariam experience is complex enough that I’m sure it puts most casual players off.

Once you get over that hurdle though there’s a strange sort of addictiveness to the basic play -- trading and mining materials to build and improve your city (and, indeed, your empire, once you’ve reached the point where you can colonize other islands.)

But notably, there isn’t very much drive to interact with other players inherent with the game. It does have an economic model based around trading and pillaging which is at least slightly interesting, and there is both power and meaning from taking part in trade agreements and alliances, but it’s very unlikely that you will “socialize” with them at all. Certainly in the early stages, when it comes to trading, you may as well be trading with NPCs.

Now, a game doesn’t have to have socialization as an important part of its gameplay to be a virtual world (and in its way, Ikariam very definitely is a virtual world) but it’s rather interesting how quiet a world it is despite all of the hustle and bustle of trading.

Not to say that Ikariam isn't a good game -- one that is very addictive even if you’re only able to spare a few minutes each day to play. I’m not sure if GameForge have a particularly excellent handle on why it is good though, nor how to improve it. As the game continues to have basic interface flaws, they recently began offering an Ikariam Plus premium account, a new interface upgrade that you can pay for on a weekly basis.

It’s only of particular use to high level players, unfortunately, and also doesn’t fix any of the most obvious problems (like not being able to list orders in advance). In addition, they’ve created Ikariam Plus bonuses, which allow players to pay some real cash to receive some instant bonuses to their trading values of specific luxuries for a week or so.

This is a genuinely weird decision as it unbalances the game somewhat -- unlike many developers who have sworn that their paid-for content isn’t going to allow some players an unfair advantage, and this very definitely does, and seems like something less useful to players in general than the aforementioned interface changes.

But Ikariam soldiers on. Though its social aspects are underdeveloped the game’s economics make it a virtual world of interest, and it’s a very playable game. And in particular, by choosing to do things differently, it opens up the virtual world market to gamers who wouldn’t normally be interested in the genre, and for that reason has a place here.

Useful Links:
Ikariam Board - Official Forum
Wikariam - Unofficial Wiki
Ikariam Tip - Unofficial tips site

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

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

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

The goodies in this latest version include two major commercial indie releases, a Castlevania-type platformer, a collection of interactive puzzles, a procedural generated shooter, and a DigiPen student project.

Game Pick: 'Multiwinia' (Introversion Software, commercial indie - demo available)
"The award-winning Darwinia was recently given a huge facelift under a new name and boyo, did the guys at Introversion deliver. This multiplayer strategy game now sports six different gameplay modes to choose from, as you engage other players for ultimate supremacy online."

Game Pick: 'Mount & Blade' (TaleWorlds, commercial indie - demo available)
"A 3D open-ended RPG set in medieval times, and possibly the best (and only?) sandbox sword-fighting game available in the market today. There's just so much to do here that the slightly steeper price is more than justified, as the value you get from it is near limitless."

Game Pick: 'Armed Generator Doom Machine' (Beau Blyth, freeware)
"A game not unlike mon's Fraxy and Hikware's Warning Forever, where every boss encounter is procedurally generated to ensure a small percentage of randomness and variation."

Game Pick: 'Hoshi Saga 3' (Nekogames, browser)
"Yoshio Ishii is back with his latest work, as fans gather for more star-searching activities in this unique browser game. Some of the puzzles presented here will have visitors scratching their heads at least a couple of times while figuring out the solution to all thirty stages."

Game Pick: 'Glitch' (Team Glitch, freeware)
"A first person shooter created by a group of DigiPen students, freely available for download from DigiPen's gallery page. Your given objective is to survive twenty-five waves of enemies whilst trapped inside a room with high ceilings and rising platforms."

Game Pick: 'Vampire Blaze' (RED, freeware)
"A freeware platform game which seems to have taken the best elements from early Castlevania releases and updated them for this project with improved controls, decent graphics and a catchy soundtrack."

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

[Disney's original IP Spectrobes for DS has surprisingly sold over a million units, with a follow-up imminent - and was really pleased that Chris Remo went off the beaten track to hunt down producers Kentaro Hisai and Tim FitzRandolph - talking about the Jupiter (The World Ends With You)-developed title, its genesis, and why it, perhaps puzzlingly, is not yet a big Japanese success.]

There's a first time for everything -- even for major companies like Disney Interactive Studios. Next month, it launches Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals, the second game in the publisher's monster-collecting RPG series -- its first franchise not based on any existing Disney works.

The Spectrobes IP was created explicitly for the international video game market as a collaboration between Disney's American and Japanese offices. Development has been handled by independent Japanese studio Jupiter (The World Ends With You).

Though the first game sold over a million units worldwide -- a relatively impressive feat for a third-party Nintendo DS title -- it underperformed on its home turf of Japan, as international producer Tim FitzRandolph told Gamasutra in a recent interview, and the franchise is being essentially "relaunched" in Japan with the follow-up.

FitzRandolph was accompanied by Disney Interactive Studios Japan producer Kentaro Hisai, whose Japanese-language comments FitzRandolph interpreted.

The two developers spoke on the genesis of the Spectrobes IP, the impetus to create a game-specific project, and the challenges of developing a game concept with studios located on different continents.

It seems unusual for Disney to develop a game not already tied to a known Disney quantity. How did the project start?

Kentaro Hisai: Long ago, the basic environment in which Spectrobes was originally created was that first Disney started investing more in games, and Disney Interactive Studios became a larger part of the company, and we started instead of just being a licensor, being a publisher.

The next step was to create our own IP as part of the company, a creator, as opposed to just taking contents from other parts of the company. Inside that environment, we wanted to make new IP in the game space.

It started organically from, "We want to make a new IP. We want to make a game that kids would like, something that's a game first." Kids love monsters, they love creatures, they love collecting things. We wanted to make this a boys' franchise, so things like battle and action came up.

When we started to combine these elements together, that was the early stage where Spectrobes started to come together. We knew we wanted to start on the handheld platform, particularly the DS, so when we were originally looking around for developers, Jupiter's name came up as one of the strongest handheld developers in Japan, so that was the original main reason we contacted them.

Disney also worked with Jupiter on Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories; was that prior to the idea for Spectrobes?

Tim FitzRandolph: There was actually a Disney connection prior to Chain of Memories between Jupiter and Disney with Disney Sports, some games that were done I think in the GameCube time frame. Then, Chain of Memories was Jupiter's first step into RPG games. At that time, Spectrobes didn't exist yet.

But right about the time Chain of Memories was finishing up was when Spectrobes was starting to form. There has been a relationship that had existed over a few titles at that point, so it seemed like a good fit. They had just taken the step into making full RPGs for Square, and that was a really well-received game, so it seemed like it would be a great fit.

How did you go about creating a new IP between the North American and Japanese arm? What were the challenges?

Kentaro Hisai: The challenge of making a new IP is certainly a big one. Just taking an idea and making it into a game is comparatively not so difficult when you look at how difficult it is to pick something that's right, and work through the whole process of making sure you're making something that's appealing. Coming up with the idea for Spectrobes was a pretty complex, involved process.

Actually, the interaction between the U.S. office and the Japanese office to work together to make sure what was being created was something that not only the Japanese team and the Japanese market felt was appealing but that we felt would be successful in the U.S. as well was extremely difficult.

It was the first time our company had done anything like that. The office in Japan is not particularly large, so it was a very big project to be working on.

Originally, the U.S. side didn't have a lot of support, because it was the first time we had done this. Actually, throughout the process, a lot of times there was communication trouble just with working with a team across the ocean.

Actually, throughout the whole process of the game, every time it seemed like we were hitting walls, a new member would be added to the Japan side or the U.S. side who would fill that missing gap, and now we have a team that works quite well.

So the Spectrobes 2 development has gone much, much smoother than the first one. The first one was pretty long and involved, a difficult process with cultural differences and communication problems.

Were there lessons you learned between the first and second game, or was it more of a systematic improvement?

Kentaro Hisai: Rather than a big lesson learned, it was a natural progression as we improved the team, and got more people. It takes quite a long time to make a game, so throughout that process we picked up a lot of improvement and learned better ways to do things, and get things done.

In Game Developer magazine we're running a postmortem of Jupiter's The World Ends With You, and the Square Enix designers said they often had development incongruities and communication issues with Jupiter -- and that's with no language barrier. Did you have similar experiences?

Kentaro Hisai: Now, we're finally in a position with the relationship not only between the [Disney] offices, but also between us and Jupiter, where we've done this for so long now, [with] so many years getting through the differences, that we're finally at a point where we can appreciate and enjoy the differences between the company.

It's much easier now when we have a conversation with Jupiter maybe listening to Disney's request, and sometimes from Jupiter's point of view, it's a ridiculous proposition, but when they try it, it turns out well.

Sometimes it seems like the kids would think it's stupid, but when you try it, it makes sense. We've had the opposite quite a bit as well. We can actually appreciate and enjoy the differences between our companies.

Tim FitzRandolph: From the U.S. side, I can also give you a little bit... When I first joined the company, I was hired to work on Spectrobes. We were lucky that a lot of our executives were really understanding of a lot of the differences between the way games are developed in Japan versus the U.S. -- I'm sure you're familiar with the biggest difference being that the U.S. is about planning ahead, making milestones, so we know exactly how much of the game is left to make, with a very detailed schedule.

The culture in Japan generally doesn't tend to be that upfront about it, because there are a lot of things you don't understand about a game until you make it, so what's the point of planning all that out?

I think a lot of times that's how it actually ends up in the United States too, they just don't figure it into the schedule. (laughs)

Tim FitzRandolph: Yeah! (laughs) We keep fooling ourselves into making a schedule. But we had a lot of trouble with that, where there was a milestone scheduled on paper, and Jupiter struggled a lot.

Jupiter was very good about being as accommodating as they could to change their style also to give us deliverables sooner than they would have liked, or things like that, to make the relationship work well.

But also the team in Disney U.S. were quite understanding, trusting the managers whether they actually delivered everything they said they would in the order they said they would a year and a half ago when we first started the project. That was a big thing we've become much better at, and we trust each other more, so we don't have as much friction.

When making a game explicitly targeted at kids, how do you get accurate and useful feedback between the first and second game?

Kentaro Hisai: The first step was to ask the game creators to take a look at the finished game, and just analytically see what we felt could have been better, or where we didn't do as well as we could have, or what could have been more appealing. We took that and created a concept for the second game.

Luckily, we had about a million copies of the first game worldwide sold, so we were able to do an extensive test of the concept for the second game, with the actual consumers who had played the first game and new players as well.

After that test we got a lot of feedback, and that helped us focus the direction. We used that feedback to build an early prototype of the game, and then we did focus testing with real kids playing the game.

We thought we had answered everything and we had made a perfect answer to all their requests, but there were a lot of problems with the game, we found. It wasn't as friendly or as easy to play as we thought it was, which I think is often the case. We had a lot of feedback on how to make the game easier to play, easier to understand.

A million is pretty good for a third-party DS title, isn't it?

Tim FitzRandolph: Yeah, I think we were in the top three or top five third-party games when it came out overall. We might still be. It was definitely a success; we're certainly looking forward to even more.

You said you were explicitly targeting the Western and Japanese markets; did you find the first game performed to your expectations in all markets?

Tim FitzRandolph: We actually had the result we anticipated before the game came out, which actually is unfortunate, because Kentaro and the team making the game in Japan obviously wanted to make a game that would work well throughout the world. We had excellent sales in the U.S. and Europe.

They were actually quite concerned about the sales in Japan, because of the way the market is right now, and they weren't sure we had enough momentum in the market in Japan to break through and get good sales.

As they expected, we weren't able to get the sales we would have liked in Japan from the first game, which was a big surprise to some of us in the U.S., but the team had been quite concerned about it.

So we've gone back and we're researching how we can do better in Japan. We're basically relaunching the franchise in Japan, making a lot of changes to the way we're communicating what this game is and why it's fun.

It is a fun game; it's not necessarily the problem with the product, as much as the way we were presenting it. So that's one of our challenges with Beyond the Portals, to make sure that it's as successful as we know it can be in Japan.

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

['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time, he ventures into his MMO past to find out whether buyer's remorse exists, where virtual characters are concerned.]

“My total time played is 110 days, 23 hours and 11 minutes. See? No time at all compared to some!”

This is Lindsay Machin. For the last three years she has spent every day or so playing make believe in the magical kingdom of Vana'diel. It’s a lifestyle with which I’m familiar: battling monsters, earning gil, questing with friends and strangers into the early hours. After all, four years ago it was me who sold her the entry ticket.

Delve into the world of an MMO and you’re buying into more than just a video game. You’re taking on a new reality, one that makes almost as many demands of you to succeed as real life does. A year or so in to the first global console MMO, Final Fantasy XI and I needed out but, having imported a PlayStation 2, harddrive and copy of Final Fantasy XI from America at great expense, I also needed some recompense.

That’s where Lindsay came in. I sold her my MMO life via an Internet forum as a way out. Now, nearly four years later I’ve tracked her down to find out what happened when the experience left my hands and fell into hers.

I’m wary of MMOs; they steal time in a more relentless and vicious way than other videogames do. I‘ve see friends’ lives turned upside down by their unyielding intrusion. And the thought that I pushed something so potentially ruinous onto another human being has nagged at me for the last few years. I’ve some guilt to assuage.

“So, I guess my first question is…” I pause. "Actually, truth be told it’s probably my only question. Did I ruin your life?”

“Hehehe. You saved me a lot of money actually. Think of all the other games I would have bought if I wasn't playing FFXI every night. Actually, I did still buy a lot of other games, but I just didn't play any of them…” She seems sure. Too sure perhaps.

“Ok. Seriously, did I ruin your life? What's the stat for your character's logged time in weeks and days? Tell me you never lost a job or a boyfriend because of this game. Please.”

It’s a reasonable question. While we in the West are yet have any of those Korean news stories of withered boys dead at their screens after three straight days spent playing an MMO, Square-Enix still saw fit to put a warning at Final Fantasy XI’s start up screen. “Have fun in vana Diel,” the message reads each and every time you log into the game. “But don't forget your family, your friends, your school, or your work." Even the publisher’s aware that this is a videogame that can ruin lives.

“You did not ruin my life,” she answers, two parts smiling, one part annoyed now. “I have made real life friends who I love through playing FFXI. Some of us meet up every 6 months or so, but I’m in regular contact with three people who play, and through them have made even more real life friends, including some who I consider to be amongst my closest now.

“It's never affected my work or my love life,” she continues. “I was lucky enough to have a boyfriend who joined in a month or so after I bought it from you, but he quit 6 months back, around the time we broke up. As silly as it sounds, I find it a little hard still playing without him. I'll go to particular zones or take part in certain events he used to like, and I get a twinge he's not there. My total time played is 110 days, 23 hours and 11 minutes. See? No time at all compared to some!”

Still, it’s 110 days (or 2,663.18 hours) that I’m sort of responsible for taking from a girl’s life. Phileas Fog circumnavigated the globe in less time than that.

So why have you kept playing, I ask. Is it people or game mechanics? “Hmm, I would say both,” she replies. “But mainly the people. I formed a static party with some friends and we slowly crawled to 75, the cap, together. We had such varying work hours it was hard to get together but we stuck at it, and the day we all made level 75 was just brilliant. After all the deaths, to finally make it: I really think that helped me keep going."

While it’s the Grand Theft Autos of the world that attract the most mainstream consternation over our hobby, within the fold it’s the MMO that’s courts the highest controversy. Braid’s designer, Jonathan Blow famously described the design principles behind the MMO as being ’unethical’. I ask Lindsay whether she thinks the genre is constructive or destructive?

“I think they can be both. It really depends on the type of person you are. I think if you get sucked in so you do forget about work, and family and friends, chances are you have an addictive personality. What's to say you wouldn't be doing the same but with gambling, or chatting online, or cross-stitching?

"Having said that, the whole reason behind MMO's is grinding, grinding, grinding; be bigger, be better, be stronger! And that takes time - a lot of time. And I suppose it's far easier to get obsessed with leveling than with stitching. However, I've found it constructive: it's enabled me to play with and talk to people from all over the world. I love that escapism.”

Few players have time to maintain more than one virtual life. For this reason MMO developers work hard to keep the users they have, to constantly discourage what is perhaps an inevitable exodus. I ask what would it take to convince Lindsay to up and leave Vana’diel?

“I would never, never, play another MMO. As much as I've been saying to you that I don't play too much and the game's not ruined my life, I couldn't get into a game as deep as I have this one ever again. Having said that, when I’m booted, kicking and screaming from the servers, I would move onto FFXI-2 in a heartbeat… So many people I know keep saying 'Play WoW, play WoW!' and I just don't understand that. I have my MMO, I don't want anything else.”

And if and when the day arrives when it’s time to leave Square’s servers for the last time, what then? I wonder whether Lindsay would ever think about selling on, not just the system and game as I did to her, but also her very online identity, her character?

“I'd never sell my character. For a start, she'd be pretty much worthless as I've just spent so much time pottering about wasting time I only have one job at cap and no money. Also, she is mine, dammit! The thought of her being used by someone else actually distresses me. A good friend offered to keep her going when I had a wobble about quitting a few months back, but I didn't even want him to have her…"

"That sounds so silly but it’s how I feel. If I did ever sell an MMO character, I don't think I'd feel guilty about it: if someone’s at the place where they want to buy a character, they must have some inkling of what they are getting in to, and be OK with that. It’s fine for you to feel guilty though, Mr Parkin, because I had no idea what I was getting into at the time you sold me Vana'diel…”

Now the million gil question. If you could go back to when you first responded to my forum for sale advert, would you buy the machine again or, knowing what you know now, would you pass it by and not get involved?”

“I absolutely, positively would buy the package again. As silly as this sounds, the game's really made a difference to my life. I probably wouldn't be where I am now without it, and I wouldn't have some of the favourite people I have in my life now. If I hadn't met them, I think I still would do it again. FFXI has been one of my greatest gaming experiences.

"And, come to think of it, also one of the saddest and most poignant at times too. When one of my closest friends in the game quit for good, we met up in game and talked for a while, reminiscing about our experiences. Then he gave me a rose and logged out for the last time. I cried. I really did. Hah. How lame… I still have the rose he gave me. Did you ruin my life? No, in many ways you made it better.

“So, thank-you, I guess.”

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

Yes, a double LBP post - having been lucky enough to get on the LittleBigPlanet beta, I'll be poking around this weekend in the plethora of levels already built by pre-release construction geeks - see below for a handy NeoGAF round-up of some of the highlights thus far.

But in the meantime, please to glory in the reproduction of these GameSetLinks, which include a little more Fristrom-esque feedback on the new Schizoid postmortem, plus indie games, ARGs, embargoes, and, uhm, brainpipes. Whatever they are.

Thunderdogs are go:

GameDevBlog: Schizoid Post-Mortem
There's, like, another postmortem in Jamie's post about the postmortem! Neat.

YouTube - E3 2008 Exclusive Gameplay Professor Heinz Wolff's GRAVITY WII AND NINTENDO DS
Not sure this video is the Wii or DS versions - still, another amusing Dr. Kawashima-related 'we'll get a scientist to endorse our game' thing. But it's a physics game, yay!

NeoGAF - View Single Post - The LittleBigPlanet BETA thread of hoo boy it's judgement time.
The Beta levels are really smart, this is probably the best user-generated content-oriented console game ever.

September 2008 Indie game Round-Up by Game Tunnel
Notable cos The Spirit Engine 2 hasn't got much buzz to date, but 'the illustrious panel' love it.

How USA used the Web to make Burn Notice an even bigger hit - Sep. 23, 2008
More ARG buzz, really.

Interview With Relic’s Tarrnie Williams — Part 1 « Vancouver Game Design
First question references Gamasutra, therefore we must link. Wait, that's a joke!

YouTube - experiencewii's Channel
Very funny, Nintendo/YouTube. Wait around, if you haven't seen the gag.

Drag-and-drop XNA development gets one step closer | Game Development | News by Develop
Good news, RPG Maker folks are certainly getting savvy about Western possibilities here, too.

Crispy Gamer - Column: From the Pulpit: Are Embargoes Really Necessary?
'But in the gaming industry, are embargoes really necessary? What is the overarching public concern?'

Digital Eel teaser image for... 'Brainpipe'?
The Pink Floyd (OK, Ozric Tentacles?) of the indie game scene tease a new title which looks... who knows? Awesome!

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

[GameSetWatch correspondent Matt Hawkins was at the recently held LittleBigPlanet game jam at NY's Parsons School of Design, and he discovered what one of Sony's flagship holiday titles can do in the care of some inventive students.]

Once again, New York City's famed Parsons School of Design played host to another game creation competition. Their 24-hour game jams have become a staple in recent years, with this latest one, which went down this past weekend, being their fourth.

The first game jam saw student groups racing against the clock to produce a working, playable game that could theoretically run on the Atari 2600 platform, via Game Maker. The second was geared towards cell phones, with Flash being the primary toolkit, while the the third was focused on The Sims.

As in the past, it was a game publisher, not the school itself, that got the ball rolling. This time around, Sony offered the ball.

With the release of LittleBigPlanet, arguably its highest profile PlayStation 3 product this upcoming holiday season, the company was curious to see how its level editing toolset -- which was designed with novice game creators in mind -- would fare.

Thus, a student contest was conceived, allowing the game to be played and designed in the presence of somewhat knowledgable students who were still squarely in their target demographic, and Parsons was approached to provide the court.

Though the competition was conceived and executed in only three weeks time, it was Parsons' biggest game jam yet. Organizers on both sides expected a turn out of about 50 students, but received 150 sign-ups, who were then divided into 19 teams.

More or less every facet of the Parsons student body was represented; it was an eclectic mix of undergraduates, some of them first year, and graduate students, hailing from the design and technology, illustration, photography, fashion, and communication disciplines.

After groups were assigned, about a week or so before the event, ten students were selected by Parsons to be "coaches." Those selected were versed in the software beforehand, and were tasked with serving as knowledge bases during the actual competition.

Both Parsons and Sony admitted that they had no idea what to expect. Even the two members of LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule, Kareem Ettouney and Kenny Young, who were on-hand to oversee the competition and assist in the judging, doubted that anything substantial could be produced in such a tight time frame. Despite the software's relative ease of use, it was still a complex beast, even to the most seasoned of programmers.

When the clock struck noon on Saturday, September 20th, every team attacked their projects. Colleen Macklin, the chair for Parsons' Design & Technology department, and who oversaw every game jam the school had held thus far, was once again present.

She noted that everyone immediately went into brainstorming mode. Furious scribbling then followed on all of the dry erase boards across the design and technology's facilities, as well as on paper prototypes.

As is often the case, some immediately dove into the PS3 dev kits (running near final LittleBigPlanet code), while others were still sketching around the 10 p.m. mark. By 10 a.m. the next morning, the judges found bleary eyes all around. By the competition's end, 55 pizzas and gallons of Red Bull had been consumed to keep the creative juices and spirit of competition alive for the entire 24 hours.

Judging began at 12 p.m. on Sunday, September 21st and went on for five hours. The judges were particularly impressed that every team managed to produce something playable. Usually, one or two teams throw in the towel.

All of the judges, especially the Media Molecule attendees, remarked that they had no idea that what they played could be completed in 24 hours. Ultimately, with so many games deserving recognition, additional awards were created, more so than originally planned.

Monday, September 22nd was the day of the ceremony, in which the winners were formally announced at Parsons' Sheila C. Johnson Design Center.

The Honorable Mention award went to Team Smiley, for dealing with an extremely buggy PlayStation 3. During the first twelve hours, the team's system crashed repeatedly, yet they kept restarting the machine and continuing their work.

Some judges even admitted that they would have walked away. Around midnight, however, Team Smiley's machine began to finally cooperate. Though the group only had half the amount of time to work on programming, their level was just as competitive as the other entrants.

The Most Innovative prize had two winning teams attached to it -- Team Makeshift and Team Awesome. Unfortunately, only Team Awesome's entry was playable afterwards. Its gameplay consisted of the player's "Sackboy" being jettisoned in the air, with the object being to make precise landings amid a mostly dark environment occasionally illuminated with lightning effects.

Most Personal, which was one of the new additions, went to Team P3 (Pretty, Pretty Princesses), whose game took place in a gigantic washing machine.

The level starts with the player dragging and depositing a large coin to start the machine, which the player must then traverse inside. The team was comprised entirely of women, all of whom had no prior game creation experience.

The Best Tools prize went to Team Sleepwalkers, and The Most Beautiful nod went to Team Rocket. Regarding Team Rocket, the standout story here centered on one of its members, Samuel Strick, who found himself the lone team member awake during the early hours of development for his team's game.

With not much else to do, he lent a hand to Team Bloody Clowns, which was having difficulty with its own project, and became their "code monkey" for some four hours. Strick explained afterwards that he simply doesn't need sleep.

Speaking of the Bloody Clowns, their entry earned itself the title of Most Fun. Apparently, all was quiet throughout the Parsons facilities around 5 a.m., with the exception of the Clowns' corner of the floor, where hearty laughter kept pouring out.

According to one of its team members, Kevin Restee, the entire team struggled to realize assorted concepts the entire day and night, but to no avail. Everything they crafted didn't work, and a wall was collectively hit. Half the team was lost in the process.

So, as a means to blow off some steam, Restee quickly developed a racetrack around the 5 a.m. mark that was based on a driving engine that the team had stumbled upon earlier. In a nutshell, players must hold onto a rocket-powered car as sped around the track, which actually extends vertically as well as horizontally.

The key to reaching the finish line is proper weight distribution, as well as simply hanging on for dear life. The first real iteration of the level was only finished by 7:30 a.m. Sunday morning, but, by the time the contest was technically over, a little over four hours later, it had racked over 289 plays, the most for any game by far.

Every team up until this point received a prize of $500 to be divided amongst themselves. The final $1,000 grand prize for Best In Jam, which was a combination of best gameplay, innovation, and presentation went to Team Good Sportsmanship.

When presenting the award, Sven Travis, a professor for Parsons, mentioned Team Good Sportsmanship's admirable workflow early on, in which responsibilities were clearly defined.

Some members focused on creating original artwork, while another group was responsible for scanning said artwork -- as well as other real life objects -- into the game via the PlayStation Eye (the PS3's digital camera). A third division headed up programming.

Two team members, Kunal Patel and Zach Gage, went up to receive their prize (unfortunately, because all the participants were students, not everyone could make it to the ceremony due to conflicting class schedules).

Afterwards, they demonstrated the level for the audience - game weblog Joystiq has a video of the winning stage being shown at Parsons.

Imagine an encounter in Shadow of the Colossus, with one lone Sackboy up against a gigantic beast. But instead of just climbing around the body to get to the top, you also have to go inside the beast. As Patel played, Gage described the action and pointed out additional elements.

First the player has to climb up to the lower part of the body, then enter via the giant's rear and traverse through the lower intestines, where the player must immediately avoid lethal stomach acids.

Once inside the stomach, the player must push a foreign object, in this case a random tire, into the pit to create indigestion bubbles, which the player then hang onto to get to the next part of the level, the rib cage.

The ribs themselves are levers that catapult the player even further up until the Sackboy is once again on the outside, walking across the giant's feathered body -- the textures were apparently real feathers, photographed in.

Eventually, the player travels back inside the giant through its ear, arriving right under its brain, where the player can see the monster's thought process conveyed by a funny hand-drawn animatic of a Sackboy being trampled to death.

Then it’s out of the mouth, across rows of jagged teeth to the tongue. The entire level featured some tricky looking jumps, but this part especially hearkens to the hardcore platforming found in the golden age of 8 and 16-bit gaming.

Once at the tongue, the player is supposed to do a flip to end up at the top of the monster's mouth, but Gage kept missing. While watching on, Patel lamented, "This is embarrassing! The two worst runthroughs, and it’s for this presentation!!!"

It was clear at this point that these two have a real potential to be an amazing game-creating team if they stick with it. Patel also said that by far the hardest part about assembling the level was getting the monster to walk, which it does the entire time.

More than one game jam participant afterward mentioned how tricky it was to get everything working due to the engine's dependency on physics; if one detail wasn't executed just right, the entire game fell apart.

In the end, however, everyone was able to get their projects running. Both Macklin and Travis observed that if they received just 15% of the content actually created in the end, every organizer would have been ecstatic.

But the tools, along with the students, proved themselves beyond expectations. This was sufficiently true that Parsons recently decided to hold an entire game creation workshop utilizing LittleBigPlanet, starting next semester during this school year.

With a wide grin on his face similar to that of one his creations, Media Molecule's Ettouney noted, "It's a dream come true... today is only the beginning. Our team is committed to keeping an eye out on how the public reacts to LittleBigPlanet, and we intend on keeping up with their pace, which, as proven, has already exceeded our wildest expectations."

The student creations will be available for download to the general public once the game launches, since there should be a Parsons planet dedicated to the school containing all of the above-mentioned levels, not just the ones mentioned.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Aha, it appears that our GSW colleagues who put together Game Developers Conference have been busy setting up a new event, GDC Canada, set for next May in Vancouver. Which is neat, because both Canada and the Pacific Northwest are pretty hot for development of late. Here's the official announce.]

Game Developers Conference organizer Think Services Game Group (also owners of Gamasutra and GSW) has announced that is partnering with Reboot Communications to create GDC Canada, with the first event to be held in May 2009.

In response to Canada's increasingly important role in the international game development landscape, the GDC has committed to bringing a world-class conference focused on fostering critical information exchange, creating connections and stimulating creativity.

Building on the success of the Vancouver International Game Summit, which this year featured keynotes from Microsoft's Shane Kim and Naughty Dog co-founder Jason Rubin, GDC Canada will feature global perspectives on cross-discipline and cross-platform content, with an eye to serving the increasingly significant Canadian games business sector.

The first Vancouver Game Summit, dedicated to bringing the Canadian sector international perspectives on developing games for the new generation of consoles, took place in 2007.

For the last two years, the Summit has served an audience of programmers, artists, game designers, producers, and studio leads. GDC Canada will retain the focus of serving developers, and promises to bring GDC-quality conference content through top-tier speakers offering fresh viewpoints.

GDC Canada will take place during Vancouver Digital Week, organized by local government entity New Media BC, billed as "...an immersive week of innovative programming and partnership opportunities for the digital media industry that features top minds from around the globe."

"GDC's strength is in its ability to translate its core values to provide both global and local relevance," says Kathy Schoback, Think Services' Executive Vice President of Global Events. "We are incredibly excited to partner with Reboot and New Media BC on GDC Canada, which will serve the regional development community with conference content designed to engender learning, networking and inspiration."

The show adds to the global portfolio of GDC events that currently includes the main GDC in San Francisco (March 2009) and Austin GDC (September 2009). More information on GDC Canada will be available in the near future at the official GDC Canada website.

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

['The Interactive Palette' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Gregory Weir that examines the tools and techniques of the digital games trade with a focus on games as art, using a single game as an example.]

One of the nebulous terms that game journalists seem to use to taunt developers is "replay value." According to many reviewers, a game's not very good unless it's fun to play multiple times. This is partly an issue of economy; a game that bears replaying provides more hours per dollar than one that does not.

It's more an issue of breadth, however. Replay value comes from many things, and one of them is the ability for the game to let players have a different experience each time they play. This breadth of experience means that players who enjoy a game the first time can experience more entertainment from the game by replaying in various ways.

Replay value's not just a buzzword. It means that players that like a game can see more of it without the developers creating an expansion pack or a sequel. It increases the longevity of the game in the hearts of individual players and, on a more mercenary level, increases the amount of time word-of-mouth can spread about the game.

There are three basic kinds of replay value. The first is the ability to reexperience previous game content, in relatively unaltered form, with a minimum of fuss. The second is the ability to reinvigorate the game's challenge by making it more difficult or adding constraints on the gameplay. The third is the ability to reimagine the gameplay by changing the goals or the style of the game on a second play-through. Each of these three has a different appeal to different players.

There's really no excuse for a developer making a large game to leave any of these three types out. Each of the three kinds of replay value — reexperiencing content, reinvigorating challenge, and reimagining gameplay — can be added to a game with little additional effort.

Daniel Remar's new indie game, Iji, is a good example of a game that gets this right. Besides single-handedly creating a strategic platformer to rival Flashback and Turrican, Remar included an array of features to enhance Iji's replay value.

Iji is a game with graphics inspired by Another World/Out of This World and a storyline involving alien invasion and nanotechnology. The main character, Iji, is a young woman who happens to be visiting her scientist father's research facility when aliens attack and make the building their base of operations. Iji is badly injured, and human scientists manage to rebuild her with alien nanotechnology as a tool of resistance against the aliens. As the game progresses, Iji can upgrade her abilities and learn more about why the aliens have attacked and how humanity can be saved.

Nanofield Reboot

The first kind of replay value is the ability to easily reexperience familiar content. Iji does this in a number of easily reproducible ways. One of the simplest is allowing the player to skip cutscenes. Most cutscenes and conversations in Iji can be skipped by hitting the escape key, which means players who want to replay without rereading can get to the game faster. Additionally, Iji allows level selection after the game is beaten once, which means that if a player especially likes, say, Sector 6, she can replay just that level without having to keep a specific save file around.

Each of these techniques — skipping cutscenes and replaying levels — is easy to implement. Additionally, games with separate cutscenes often benefit from letting the player replay interesting cutscenes. One thing Iji doesn't do is provide a "New Game +" feature like in Chrono Trigger, where a player can start a new game with characters at the experience level they were when the game was previously completed. Developers can add these features to games with minimal expense of time and effort, and satisfy players who want to go through the game's story again.

Teching

Another kind of replay value is the ability to reinvigorate the challenge of a game for an experienced player. Players who have completed and enjoyed a game typically have gained a high level of skill at the game. These players often want to experience a harder version of the game. Iji, like many games, offers variable difficulty levels, which is an excellent start. A player who has beaten the game on "Normal" mode can replay on "Hard" to regain the sense of challenge that she felt the first time through.

Iji also offers some less common features in this area, though. First, there is in-game support for time trials on each level, which provides an "official" way to record time for players interested in speedrunning the game. Second, the game records various statistics like kill count and nanocracking success rate, allowing players to challenge themselves to achieve a high score. Finally, there are a few hard-to-perform "hidden skills", such as "teching" out of attack knock-back, that let highly-skilled players gain an advantage but don't penalize less-skilled players for not mastering them.

Difficulty levels are already standard for most video games. Providing an in-game timer is less simple than it seems at first; decisions need to be made about what happens to game time if the frame rate lags and whether to include cutscene time in the official count. The feasibility of including advanced techniques differs from game to game, and does require thought about game balance and the introduction of bugs and exploits.

Cybernetic Endurance

The last sort of replay value is the reimagining of gameplay. The most common form of this is the ability to customize the player character's abilities. Iji's title character can upgrade herself at cyborg stations, spending points to enhance various abilities she possesses. During multiple play-throughs, a player can choose a different upgrade path, providing her with a different play experience depending on which abilities she makes her focus. This option, though, is really only applicable to games with roleplaying-game-style character advancement.

Iji also provides a hidden poster in each level, however, and this is something that can apply to any game. The addition of collectible secrets can provide an alternate goal; instead of following the central plot line, the player can take time off to search levels for things she missed the first time around. An alternative to Iji's approach is to have achievements or trophies that are awarded for tasks that are outside of the central gameplay, such as performing a certain stunt or finding a certain number of collectibles. The achievement system is the simplest option, as all that is required of developers is to record and monitor certain statistics about the player's actions. Additionally, both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 already support achievement tracking as part of their online services, and Valve's addition of them to Team Fortress 2 is likely to make them more popular in PC games.

Iji is a game which provides all three kinds of replay value, by allowing players who have completed the game once to play it again without fuss, to make the experience more challenging, and to change the way they play the game. Remar, by single-handedly creating a freeware game with such replay value, has set the bar quite high for commercial developers.

Luckily, there are simple techniques that allow developers to satisfy each of these types of replay without expending much work. Players who enjoy the game will thank developers for including ways to extend their fun, and their enthusiasm will lead to more people interested in the game. There's little excuse for developers not to include these techniques in their game design.

[Gregory Weir is a writer, amateur game developer, and software programmer. He maintains Ludus Novus, a podcast and accompanying blog dedicated to the art of interaction. He can be reached at Gregory.Weir@gmail.com.]

Posted by Gregory Weir at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

We gots to provides the GameSetLinks, and this time, there's a whole random knot of them - starting out with some impassioned, video-strewn backup for a recent controversial Game Developer magazine editorial.

But also in here - a couple more games created by the Singapore/MIT Game Lab, the latest 'Dash' franchise addition from PlayFirst, some rare prototype info from a canceled Atari 2600 game featuring The Residents, an attempted Lester Bangs game rant, and much more besides.

Big top peewee:

Brandon Sheffield declares graphics have become a commodity « Malstrom’s Articles News
Just noticed this v.interesting editorial replying to GDMag EIC Sheffield's piece: 'What Sheffield is talking about is when customers are at a level when technology is ‘good enough’ for their needs.'

Ludus Novus :: Benmergui’s Three Views of Love
Some interesting experimental games made for TGS' Sense Of Wonder Night - one of which is going to be featured!

GAMBIT: Updates: GumBeat debuts!
'Master our mastication-engine and gleefully guide a cohort of cavorting citizens past the police in order to persuade city hall to relax its War on Snacks in GumBeat!'

Press The Buttons: Penn And Teller: Bullshit! To Cover Game Violence
'The gaming community's self-appointed nemesis, Jack Thompson, claims to be part of the episode.'

PlayFirst® - A Not-So-Little Place Called DinerTown - PlayFirst Grapevine
Building a franchise around Diner Dash, and introducing "...Parking Dash... a time management game with a healthy dose of puzzle play."

A Brief History of A & B - The Quixotic Engineer
'With all the variety in gamepad mapping, it should come as no surprise that even veteran gamers can be betrayed by their muscle memory sometimes.'

GAMBIT: Updates: Announcing Moki Combat!
'No gamer will deny the abundance of games with the simple objective "defeat all enemies." What is remarkable, though, is that so few of them feature mounted combat, never mind having it as the primary focus.'

UNIQUE! - RESIDENTS / ATARI 2600 Video Game DEVELOPMENT - eBay (item 280269053469 end time Sep-29-08 19:00:00 PDT)
'Between 1982 and 1984, I developed games at Atari for the 2600 VCS system. One of the games which was about halfway done and (obviously) never released, was based on the San Francisco cult music band known as The Residents. Specifically, their album, "Mark of the Mole."' [Via GameSniped.]

dConstruct round up | Technology | guardian.co.uk
'Every time I've suggested to games people that they meet up with the weberati - an industry that has a far more mainstream and accepting audience than interactive entertainment, mind - I get a slap.'

Video Game Reviews and Essays: Lester Bangs rant
Some experimental game-ish writing based on that fellow that we don't have one of in game journalism, or something.

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

['Design Lesson 101' is a regular column by game designer Manveer Heir. The goal is to play a game from start to completion and learn something about game design in the process. This week we take a look at Telltale's episodic Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People, which recently commenced with Episode 1: Homestar Ruiner.]

Dialogue trees are a standard part of many RPG and adventure games. These games usually narratively center around interactions with characters, so allowing the player to at least choose what to speak about with the character is important.

Often the designer will present the options to the player in a verbose text format, then have the other character in the conversation respond. Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People – Episode 1: Homestar Ruiner (which I am just going to call Homestar Ruiner from now on) chooses a different approach that made me consider the execution of dialogue trees in games and features that could be useful.

Design Lesson: Homestar Ruiner presents iconic representation for its dialogue trees, which fails to inform the player what he is going to talk about and if he has exhausted the conversations on that topic

When you start a conversation with another character, such as Coach Z, a number of icons appear over Strong Bad's head. Each of these icons represents a different topic to talk about. Clicking the icons will start the conversation, and since this is an comedic adventure game, hearing the dialogue is half the fun of the game.

However, the issue is you don't know what some of the icons mean initially. Luckily, many of the topics of conversation are available with multiple characters, so after a little bit I began to understand what all of the icons mean.

The advantage of using icons like this is that what Strong Bad is actually going to say is unknown, so you get the enjoyment of truly hearing both sides of the dialogue. If you already knew the line, and it was repeated by Strong Bad, it would become tiresome quickly.

The disadvantage is that what you are trying to discuss isn't fully understood by the player, which means you aren't always making choices in the game, but rather clicking through. There are no game consequences for clicking through, and it's actually encouraged, but it still gives the perception of taking away some amount of agency away from the player.

This leads into the next major issue. Each topic can be clicked on multiple times, with different responses available each time. However, once you've gone through all of the available conversations with a character on a topic, the icon usually still persists. Clicking it again will repeat the critical information (if there is any) or just play some repeated flavor dialogue that makes you laugh the first time you hear it.

The issue is not knowing when a topic is exhausted. At the most basic level, the player wants to know when they have been given the critical information from a character. The game is pretty good about drawing attention to the fact that something a character said matters to progress gameplay, and isn't just a throwaway line, so that case is mostly handled already.

On a deeper level, a game like Homestar Ruiner has funny dialogue and a lot of the enjoyment of the game is just hearing that dialogue. As a result, I wanted to hear all the dialogue the game had to offer. I clicked on every available area, to hear Strong Bad's observations about the world, and clicked through every dialogue tree possible to hear all the topics discussed.

Usually, I ended up clicking one extra time and hearing a line repeated before I stopped that line of questioning. This makes it hard to make sure you listen to all the dialogue in the game without hearing repeated lines regularly. It forces the player to poll the game to see if a topic's conversation is exhausted, mentally remember that it is for the future, and move on. To me, this is the dialogue tree equivalent of having a player draw out a map on graph-paper instead of just giving them an in-game map.

All of this stems from using the icons that don't change for conversation topics. There are a few ideas I have of ways this could be handled without resorting strictly to text. I would try coloring the icons depending on the situation. If new conversations have opened up in an area, highlight the icon green. If an icon's topics have been exhausted, but the critical information is available to be repeated, highlight the icon red.

This would give the player the information immediately, in-game, about dialogue. Additionally, I don't think it's a terrible idea to have pop-up text over the icon to tell you what the topic is, so the first time you are talking to people you realize that the picture of a snake refers to your Snake Boxer V video game manual and are able to draw that parallel faster.

I know some people will view this as unnecessary hand-holding of the player, but the purpose of this game isn't to make talking to characters difficult. It's about puzzle-solving and humor. This allows the player to access the humor faster and doesn't affect the puzzle-solving in the game (the game sports a rather gracious hint system and is rather blunt about when something important is being told to the player).

By giving the information up-front the player with dialogue trees, especially in a game that rewards you for trying all of the dialogue, the game becomes less frustrating and more enjoyable. It also gives you the ability to torment Homestar Runner for longer. And isn't that really what life is all about?

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

Posted by Manveer Heir at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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

It's a big week in downloadable games -with Duke Nukem 3D debuting for the Xbox Live Arcade, Mega Man 9 for WiiWare, and WipEout HD for the PlayStation Network.

Despite these debuts, there hasn't really hasn't been a whole lot of big news this week. Still, there have been a few great bits and pieces that have allowed us to understand the ways the downloadable game market is going - companies getting into the business, companies getting out, and companies trying to figure out what went right and wrong on their first attempt at it.

Xbox Live Arcade

- Duke Nukem 3D Is Your XBLA Game Of The Week
It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum against your friends online in glorious Dukematch! Coming this Wednesday to Xbox Live Arcade.

- Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection Getting Disc Release on PS3 and 360 - The End Of SEGA XBLA Games?
A new disc-based collection of Genesis games appears to be on the horizon. Will we ever see Xbox Live Arcade Sonic 3 & Knuckles?

- 2K Sports Officially Announce MLB Stickball
A new kids Baseball game is coming to the XBLA through 2K games. With MLB '09, MLB Power Pros and Fantasy All-Stars, will it break into the casual market? And how will it stack up to the RBI Baseball game for XBLA?

- XBLA Postmortem: Little Boy Games' Go! Go! Break Steady
Gamasutra let the fellows over at Little Boy Games throw it all out there - the good and the bad sides of working on an Xbox Live Arcade title.

PlayStation Network

- Mega Man 9 Release Dates Revealed
While WiiWare has just got the game, the PlayStation Network will also be getting Mega Man 9 this week.

- Burnout Paradise Releasing This Week On PSN
If Mega Man 9 and WipEout HD weren't enough - you can also buy Burnout Paradise over the PlayStation Network starting this week.

- New Features Of Geon: Emotions For The PlayStation Network
Geon, a game previously available for the XBLA, is coming to the PlayStation Network sometime this year - and with a ton of new features and modes.

WiiWare

- NA WiiWare Update - Mega Man 9 Is Out, As Is Plattchen: Twist & Paint
Mega Man 9 is out right now! Are you up for some classic, frustrating platforming? Then this game is for you.

- A New WiiWare RPG - Sorcery Blade?
It seems that some Japanese companies are pushing WiiWare to its very limits - a new RPG is on the horizon, and it's looking pretty swank.

- Sand Castle Creation Coming For WiiWare
Sand Castle Creation? Seems so - Frozen Codebase are hard at work at Sandy Beach - a tool that allows you to build your very own sand castle without it being ruined by the waves.

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

[In this editorial, originally printed in Gamasutra's sister print publication Game Developer magazine and extended with further material here, magazine EIC Brandon Sheffield comments on the precarious nature of the developer/journalist relationship, and argues that game journalism shouldn't be a one-size-fits all endeavor.]

Developers and game journalists have a love-hate relationship. On the one hand, writers for the enthusiast press can drum up interest in a game among the hardcore. BioShock is a notable example, wherein the dev team used an exclusive GameSpot preview to drum up interest in the game, which was as-yet unfunded.

This was a response to publishers thinking they didn't need to spend money on a successor to System Shock 2, which was not the greatest financial success. In this case, the developer/journalist relationship worked quite well for the developers.

But then there are review scores. Developers often feel that journalists harp too much on one point or another, or that the score doesn't represent how they really feel, and myriad other misunderstandings. At the same time, developers seem to respect the journalists, insomuch as they often will feel that Metacritic ratings are an actual arbiter of quality, or in fact read reviews to influence a purchase.

Journalists, for their parts, often aspire to be developers, and possess a certain idolatry for anyone in a respected company, though they rarely understand exactly what it takes to do the job.

Who Are These People?

Here's what most game developers don't realize about game journalists. First, the grand majority have no training in criticism or journalism. You may not think this matters, but when you feel that a reviewer has unfairly focused too much on one element, such as lack of difficulty in a kid's game that wasn't designed for them, the problems start to come to the fore.

Most game journalists simply like games, and this is their "qualification" for working in the industry. They are fans, first and foremost, and they understand what they like and don't -- but they may not understand why, or how it's done, or how to express it with concrete examples.

Journalists generally don't understand the development process, what's simple to execute and what is not, and what can and can't be done. And realistically, they often don't have the time or interest to find out.

A related problem is subjectivity versus objectivity. I've seen many people, developers, and fans alike, call for more objectivity in game reviews. This is completely ridiculous. You don't expect the JRPG fan to like the new Madden title.

Games are subjective experiences, and that's part of what makes them special. That's what lends them the pretense toward art. All art is subjective! You can't ask for objectivity in game reviewing or criticism, it's simply not realistic. When you have a Madden fan reviewing a Naruto game, you're in serious trouble.

The current system that reviewers exist in is partially at fault. In fact, it's completely broken. These poor people have to review almost every game that comes out, and most of these persons are male, ages 22-35. As normal members of the human race, they like certain kinds of things, and don't like others. This means they necessarily have to review games within genres they have no interest in, or which aren't targeted toward them in any way.

This inevitability, plus the pressure of deadlines, plus the lack of formal training, can lead to exasperated reviewers, and less thorough and so-called "inaccurate" review scores.

The Fall Of Babel

On top of all this, you have the blogs. Much has been said about blogs and both the advancement and decline of journalism in general, so I won't address it too heavily. I will say that game blogs have the largest disregard for the English language, almost no fact-checking, and even less of an employee vetting process than do traditional game mags or websites.

It is common to see posts on popular game blogs which contain very few complete sentences, or which are poorly written to the point of the meaning being indecipherable.

On top of that, you have the "rumor as fact" posts, which once made, affect the tide of public opinion -- online opinion at least -- forever. When you have a "Sony announces PlayStation 4" post, it's tough for people to internalize the followup "actually it didn't" post.

On the other hand, blogs are great for getting information out about smaller titles, and are really the only place you can find something close to reporting -- that is to say investigation and rooting out of stories, which generally doesn't happen in traditional game journalism. This is partially because bloggers have more time, as they are often non-professionals, and they also don't sign as many NDAs as the rest of us.

The biggest revelation with the blogs is that the readers just don't care about quality in game journalism, by and large. There is simply not much incentive to do it right, when you can get a lot more hits by going the tabloid controversy route, and by parroting something another blogger said, or simply lifting whole paragraphs from other sources.

A New Hope

Now that you've got the extremely brief infodump of what's wrong with game journalism (I'm implicated in this as well, of course, but I can claim a cinema/television critical studies degree at least), here are my proposed solutions.

First, reviewers should not be striving for objectivity for objectivity's sake. If you can get certain reviewers to be known entities, and you understand their opinions, then you have something valuable.

As an example, Jeremy Parish from 1up/EGM has publicly stated often that he enjoyed every main-series Mega Men game except 5, which he can back up with personal experiences. So if he winds up liking or not liking Mega Man 9, that will mean something. It will be for a reason.

Subjectivity is incredibly important to this equation. Even a better example would be Jerry "Tycho" Holkins of Penny Arcade fame. Millions of people read Penny Arcade and understand Holkins' opinions, likes, and dislikes.

When he has an opinion on something, you understand where he's coming from. Same goes for Ebert on movies. If you understand the journalists, you can measure their opinions against yours. But they need to be given the structure and vehicle through which to express this.

Legitimate, understandable criticism is an incredibly important step toward video games entering the mainstream entertainment sphere in full force. It's not that average people need to read reviews, but like with film reviews, criticism and analysis helps bring to light the terms, concepts, and methodology, not to mention the important creators. This is how awareness of auteur directors, and words like cinematography, or concepts like film editing trickled down into the minds of the average moviegoer.

If you're a film director, you don't have to tell your family what you do, they understand it. They may not know what a grip is, but it's a start. If you're a game designer, well, that's a different story, isn't it?

A scant few journalists do work in this direction, highlighting important advancements in development, getting developers' names known, writing subjectively, attempting criticism, and advancing the state of the art.

Pay attention to who these people are. If you give these people your acknowledgment, support, and information, we'll all be a whole lot better off. Request them in interviews. Give them studio tours. Help educate those who are actually interested about what you really do.

Decline all of the above with those of poorer quality. Learn to tell the difference between a good journalist and a brown-noser, too. Just because someone likes your game, that doesn't mean they're any good. Eventually, with both sides working toward a common goal, we can really make something happen here.

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

Time to return with some timely GameSetLinks, headed by T-Machine's Adam Martin discussing some of the realities (or at least, perceived realities!) of the current publisher/developer split in the game biz, and exactly what to do about it.

Yet also hanging out in here - a v.disturbing and/or silly Newtonica iPhone ad, an original Apple I, a heads-up on Dr. Phil going after games, the U.S. Army and schools snuggling up uneasily, some game history geekiness, some Nelson style blog linking 'ha ha!', and more.

Pyjama rama:

T=Machine » Publishers are from Mars, Developers are from Venus
'How could a Developer ever make a profit? The answer can be found most easily by looking to the one place in the world where R&D laboratories make more money than anywhere else: Silicon Valley.'

Vintage Computing and Gaming | Archive » Apple I For Sale
'It’s not every day that an original Apple I goes up for sale. In fact, it’s not every year that an Apple I goes up for sale.'

What They Play - Blog - Wife of game designer on Dr. Phil
'This week I had the delightful experience of being accused of bias towards the game industry by Dr. Phil. I’ve been accused often of bias against the industry, but never towards it!'

The Top 10 Most Influential Educational Video Games from the 1980s « Educational Games Research
'Educational games from that decade in particular taught teachers, parents, students, and designers things that are still influencing titles today.'

My Childhood Heroes « Game Haus
Early shareware gurus: 'I know the names of these people probably don’t mean much to any of you. But they sure as heck mean a lot to me.'

Water Cooler Games - US Army Invades Schools
'The US Army has announced a "partnership" with a group called Project Lead The Way to "to enhance student curriculum by using a variety of Army technologies to promote student interest in the engineering and technical fields."'

The Secret of Monkey Island [PC - Beta] | Unseen 64: Beta, Unreleased & Unseen Videogames!
Linking to a gigantic website of micro-analysis of various LucasArts beta obscurities/differences - the kind of thesis-level craziness that the Internet helps to enable in microniches, I guess!

Eegra: Updates five times a week. Usually. : Video: Newtonica (part three)
That Newtonica (pictured) iPhone promo ad at the bottom of that link, is, uhh, yeah.

YouTube - SierraMultimedia's Channel
An excellent archival channel for all kinds of obscure Sierra-related video (King's Quest, etc), linked to an even better site I didn't know about - via GDRI.

Kotaku, Joystiq et al get punk'd. - Quarter To Three Forums
Of course, I will point out that GiantRealm (and apparently the entire rest of the world) ran that poorly sourced Google/Valve story - which makes Eric Schild's sanctimony in the GR comments a little painful. Nonetheless, the Internet train rides along, and trolls are an important ingredient!

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

['GDRI Wisdom' is a bi-weekly column presenting highlights from select interviews with overlooked game developers of years past, as seen on Game Developer Research Institute (GDRI).]

Tom Sloper is a long-time veteran of the game industry. For the bulk of his career, he worked for Activision as a producer, involved with the popular Shanghai series and other titles.

Prior to that, he had stints designing games at Western Technologies, Datascan, and Sega Enterprises and was Director of Product Development at Atari Corporation as that company tried entering the post-NES video game market with the 2600 and 7800 systems.

Today, he works as a freelance game development consultant under the name Sloperama Productions. He also teaches a game design and production class at the University of Southern California. GDRI chatted to him about his fascinating history in the game biz.

GDRI: Could you tell us about your time at Atari Corporation?

TS: That was the worst job I ever had in games. But it was also the best learning experience I could have asked for. The company "structure" was basically a bunch of little independent kingdoms. Every interdepartmental request was a negotiation. Sam Tramiel would say, "Just talk to so-and-so, and he'll help you with that." I'd go to so-and-so, and he'd say, "Oh yeah? What's in it for me?" I had to solder my own devkits! And getting my developers paid. Hoo! Don't get me started.

GDRI: The Sega Master System games you produced at Activision say on the front of the box "Distributed by Activision." Did Activision and Sega have a special deal in place (i.e., Sega published, Activision merely distributed)?

TS: Sort of. [Then head of Activision] Bruce Davis met with [Sega CEO Hayao] Nakayama-san and hatched a deal so Activision (Mediagenic) could be the first publisher on all three platform holders' systems at the same time. Until this, Nintendo apparently held a tight rein on its licensed publishers. Publish on our system and our system only, that kinda thing.

GDRI: Why did Activision release those Master System games instead of Sega (or Tonka or whoever decided what came over to the US)?

TS: Bruce Davis and Nakayama-san got to talking, and they both wanted to break Nintendo's exclusivity stranglehold. Bruce wanted Mediagenic (Activision) to publish games on all the major consoles, and Nakayama-san wanted to get some of the big Nintendo third party publishers to publish games on Sega consoles. I have no idea what this Tonka reference is about.

[ED: Tonka was the distributor of Master System products in the US for a time.]

GDRI: The ending for NES Ghostbusters has been made fun of in recent years for its bad English. In another interview, you said you "produced the reverse localization (from Japanese back into English)." Why was this not fixed for the US version?

TS: It was. This isn't the released US version depicted. See how the Gatekeeper (the character portrayed by Sigourney Weaver in the movie) looks to be topless? I fixed that. I asked the development team to dress her top. They put a colored band across her breasts. And I never would have permitted that "conglaturations" to go through to Nintendo, and Nintendo never would have approved it. Either these videos were made from the Japanese version, or they were made from a pre-release ROM.

[ED: "The Angry Video Game Nerd" appears to be playing an actual US cartridge in his review (WARNING: crude language), yet the topless Gozer and "bad English" ending still appear.]

GDRI: What was the deal between Pack-In-Video and Activision? For example, NES Die Hard was designed in the States, but it came out in Japan first.

TS: At this time (1988 to 1993), Activision was actively engaged in sublicensing properties to Japan as a way of synergizing licenses for games. We called them "Knight Rider deals." Someone licensed the TV show Knight Rider for games and then, instead of starting off by spending money to develop the game for North America, took the rights to Japan and sublicensed them. The Japanese sublicensee would develop the game for the Japanese market first, then we would localize the game for the North American market. It was a way of reducing development cost, but it had some disadvantages in terms of creative control and such.

GDRI: Did Activision have a deal with Tokyo Shoseki (NES Tombs & Treasure, et al.) as well?

TS: Yes. That whole period we did dozens of deals with a whole slew of Japanese companies. I flew to Japan, like, 3 times a year back then.

GDRI: What was Activision Japan? Was anything developed there, or was it merely a production/publishing house?

TS: When I was there in 1990, we were actually Mediagenic Japan. But since my games always bore the Activision logo, I just always refer to the company as Activision.

I was the first American to work at Activision's Japanese operation. Our mandate in 1990 was to facilitate licensing. "Licensing in" referred to licensing US or UK titles to Japanese publishers, and "licensing out" referred to licensing Japanese titles for publication in our other markets. Because my experience was in production, I also facilitated localization efforts.

Bill Swartz replaced me in Japan. After Bobby Kotick and partners acquired Activision in 1991, Bill became the head guy of Activision Japan. The office employed producers and marketing people, but not programmers and artists. It wasn't a development studio, if that's what you're asking.

GDRI: Some of the naming of these Shanghai games is a bit of a mess. I'm looking at a list here, and there's Dragon's Eye Plus: Shanghai III, Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye, Shanghai III: Dragon's Eye, Super Shanghai: Dragon's Eye (which was released in the States as Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye)...Is there an explanation for this?

TS: Bill and I noticed that, too. Every time we made a new Shanghai of our own (as opposed to licensing to a Japanese publisher), the marketing folks wanted to bump up the Roman numeral, but Bill and I knew that Japan was already out of synch with any numbering, and that numbering no longer made any sense whatsoever. Bill and I talked, and he proposed two rules: 1. No more numbers; 2. The word "Shanghai" should always be first in the title. But Bill didn't want to play the bad cop with the Japanese publishers. He asked me to do that. By this time, I'd been through the Alien vs. Predator mess with 20th Century Fox, and I knew exactly how the bad cop game ought to be played.

But even though we'd established this naming protocol, I had to make an exception with Sanrio Shanghai [SFC]. There was no denying that Sanrio had the bigger name and had more clout. I did have to enforce some design rules on that one, though - they weren't going to implement the most user-friendly features, and I insisted that for kids, those were imperative. But now I've wandered.

GDRI: What is a Brand Manager?

TS: The role is defined differently by different companies. Sometimes it's a marketing person who's responsible for a line of games. Because of my nine years' experience with the Shanghai brand or franchise, with a number of marketing people who came and went, I regard what I did, managing the licensing, as essentially a form of brand management.

GDRI: If you don't mind me asking, why did you leave Activision?

TS: I was regarded as a casual game producer, and the new studio VP didn't want to carry my high salary further, given the company's new focus on high-profile (AAA) titles.

GDRI: Having worked and interacted with American and Japanese game makers, did you notice any differences between the two in terms of developing games?

TS: Of course. They called artists "designers," and they called designers "planners." But more significantly, they didn't believe in writing game design documents. Case in point: Alien vs. Predator SNES. I needed a GDD to provide to 20th Century Fox to get design approval. It took quite a bit of back-and-forth and a little arm-twisting to get them to write me something. And when I got it, it was just 3 pages of bullet points. Reading it, it seemed like a reasonable concept. Not spectacular, but reasonable. And I didn't have time to ask them to do more.

Fox approved it, but when we got the actual game from the developer, we (Bill and Fox and I) were surprised (and I don't mean that a good way). It was a fighting game. The Predator (the player character) was punching Aliens most of the time in the game. Going back and re-reading the design, I finally saw that I could have figured this out if I'd been better at reading between the lines. The document said that the Predator would run into pickups which would give him cool Predator weapons and as an aside, when the weapons were gone, he'd have to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the Aliens. It wasn't at all clear that most of the time, he'd be punching the Aliens. I asked the Japanese what they were thinking, and they said, "Fighting games are very popular in Japan now."

Also, if you give a Japanese developer a GDD, they don't treat it as a guideline. GDDs are taken literally there. Tony Van wrote a design for Die Hard NES and when I got the game back from Pack-In-Video, I was blown away by how the game was exactly like the design. Give a design to a developer in any other part of the world, and you'll see all kinds of liberties taken. But not in Japan.

My first experience with that was the story I tell on my site in article 19 about the scrolling landscape in Space-N-Counter [game calculator]. I'd laid out the landscape in my GDD as a series of frames. The Toshiba programmer took that literally and said there wasn't enough ROM to program it that way. I asked, "If the landscape was one long piece of data, and the screen was like a 'window' moving along it, would that fit?" He said it would, but when I asked him to just visualize it that way, he asked me to give it to him that way. I used scissors and Scotch tape to make him a paper image of the game's landscape, and he was able to implement it from that.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: This was just a portion of the interview - read more at the GDRI website.]

[Game Developer Research Institute is a website dedicated to finding out more about game development companies and people in the industry.]

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

Following the recent announcement that Microsoft-owned Age Of Empires creator Ensemble Studios would close after the completion of Halo Wars, GSW big sister site Gamasutra has discovered that a now-canceled Halo MMO was in development at the studio, unearthing prototype UI and level screenshots of the Ensemble-developed project.

The prototype art, which was at one point made available on an Ensemble-linked online artist portfolio website, further confirms previous rumors that the studio was working on an MMO based on the Bungie-created sci-fi franchise.

[UPDATE: The 'Gone Is Gone' weblog has posted a full Flickr gallery of the concept art and UI mockups for the canceled prototype, sourced from the same art portfolio as Gamasutra's original story.]

Notable, rumors reported in Game Informer magazine in early 2006 claimed that Bungie and Ensemble were teaming up to make a Halo-themed MMO. And, although it was not clear that it was Halo-specific, websites such as 1UP did point out that Ensemble was hiring for an MMO project as early as April 2006.

The title seems to have been in development in 2006 and some of 2007 -- though it's by no means clear that it was the only MMO-related title in development at the studio at that time.

What is clear, however, is that Ensemble's Bruce Shelley mentioned in a June 2008 blog post that they "...set up three prototype teams out of the staff of a major project that we cancelled. After six months of very interesting work, we have now stopped two of those prototypes, with one getting more time to demonstrate the value of its concept."

Thus, it appears that the Halo MMO project was likely internally cancelled some time in mid-late 2007, without any formal announcement from Microsoft that it was ever in development. The below UI mockup and concept/level screenshots also date from the 2006-2007 period.

Gamasutra had a chance to ask Massively.com lead blogger Michael Zenke about the MMO-related elements in the prototype UI screenshot (click through for a higher-res version):

Massively's Zenke explained the following on the prototype UI (of which there were several posted): "The character pane shows a health bar and 'mana' -- or Psion, as is referred to in this title... The upper right icons are for basic character functions. The one on the far left would most likely be inventory, represented by the outline of a man.

Moving right, I'd guess that's a 'talent tree' screen for customizing your character, most likely a powers menu (a brain to represent the Psion?), a titles or achievements screen represented by the trophy, and a support ticket system represented by the chat bubble icon.

There are many obvious tips of the hat here to the World of Warcraft interface. Simplicity and streamlined play appear to be the object of the game, but it's interesting to see so many strange icons on the hotbar. From the choice of abilities, it's easy to surmise that that the game would have been some sort of melee/magic brawler. The upper bar has some similarities to the WoW UI modification Titan Panel - a favorite amongst players."

Also included were a number of in-game level pictures, both concept art and in-level shots, and Gamasutra asked 'Louis Wu', webmaster of the unofficial Halo website Halo.bungie.org to interpret them.

Wu simply noted of this concept screenshot: "None of those [specific] characters or creatures were EVER included in a Halo game."

Of this shot and others in the series, Wu commented: "Clearly broken Halo Warthogs, dead marines, a color palette last seen in Halo PC multiplayer levels like 'Infinity'. The presence of an actual Halo in the background of the last shot is also a dead giveaway [as to the game setting]."

Of course, the cancellation of the Ensemble version of a Halo MMO doesn't necessarily preclude other Microsoft-sanctioned developers from working on Halo franchise titles. And with Microsoft's Phil Spencer recently mentioning: "There are more than two or three teams building Halo things right now", it could be that a Halo title with similarly expansive online options is now being tried at another studio. If so, there has been no public information about it to date.

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

Of course, when we ran those Infocom sales numbers at the weekend, it got a bit of a delighted response from geeks all over the place.

Principal among those was Matt Matthews, whom you might know as co-curmudgeon at Curmudgeon Gamer - or more likely as the stats-crunching fiend behind a bunch of neat analysis articles for Gamasutra, Edge, and other business outlets.

Anyhow, his interest having been piqued by the statistics for the seminal text adventure firm, he went ahead and drafted some fun graphs and pie charts based on them. Infocom infoporn! Here we go:

Some interesting scaling here - particularly notable that the first Zork continued to dominate, even when the two sequels were released. Would this ever happen in today's sequel-happy market? Uhm, no, basically not - though I guess you could argue that the closest to it was The Sims and The Sims 2 continuing to get bought in large-ish amounts as people also snack on expansion packs.

This pie chart further exemplifies the diminishing returns of the later entries in the Zork series - but honestly, even the later ones sold well compared to other Infocom titles.

Yet as can be seen from the following graph, the first three Zork games are in the overall top five Infocom best-sellers of all time - or at least in non-compilations for the key 'golden age' period of the developer:

We've already done a little analysis into this in the earlier post, but things to note - Deadline, which is really not that well known nowadays compared to a lot of other Infocom games, is the highest non-Zork or Hitchhiker's seller, partly because it was released nice and early.

Also, I'm a little disappointed in Trinity's sales, but it's a pretty adult, complex game, so that's not completely surprising. Anyhow, these aren't all-time sales, one suspects, especially given the compilations with lots of Infocom games on them released latterly, but it's a really interesting starting point. Thanks again to Matt for the awesome work on this.

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

Some more GameSetLinks, then - headed by some more interesting DS homebrew, this time Obama-related, intriguingly enough. Can Nintendo condone this? Yes they can?

Also in here - Mega64 takes on Parappa with predictably charming results, The Silver Case coming to PlayStation Network, a v.neat Yoshiki Okamoto interview, the Street Fighter IV U.S. experience, and plenty more, really.

Vegetable man:

French game magazine Amusement releases 2nd issue
Incredibly stylish, quite French, game mags as art books is still awesome - via MBF.

The United States of Street Fighter IV | Jared Rea
This is our united states of whatever, sadly.

Multiple:Option: Obama Says: Yes We Can
An Obama-themed DS rhythm-y game thing? Waaacky.

YouTube - Mega64: Parappa The Rapper
'Derrick takes the role of the hip-hop-hero and spreads the joy of rapping about everyday life.* *not for people on cell phones.'

1UP: Game Republic's Yoshiki Okamoto Interview
'Street Fighter creator talks about Game Republic, Microsoft, Wii, and more.' I think Ziff is more Japan-obsessed than some of my co-workers nowadays!

> 100% NINTENDO SUPER FAMICOM FULLSET!1500 GAMES CIB! < - eBay (item 280253330747 end time Oct-04-08 07:23:12 PDT)
The seller, Adol, has a bunch of other fullsets, too - this is pretty insane in collecting terms.

Christian Allen's Corner: McDonald's Warns Kids About Video Games...
'I didn’t see any messages that said “Don’t eat the fries here.” Or “Take a break from your junk food and only eat here once a month.”'

auntie pixelante › the jesse venbrux interview
'if you saw me complaining about playthisthing’s interview with jesse venbrux recently, you probably expected i would get around to conducting my own.'

1UP: 'Suda51's PS1 Game The Silver Case Coming to PSN'
Suda's culture jamming style is really important to global game design understanding, innit?

A Short History of Game Manuals | Edge Online
Neat Edge mag article - I'd like to know who writes these, since Edge online credits and offline doesn't and oh headache.

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

On Friday, Gamasutra ran highlights of an interview with the founders of new EA Blueprint-backed Austin studio Armature, formed by high-profile departees from Metroid Prime creator Retro Studios.

As we explained at the time, the company "...is in many ways an experiment intended to demonstrate a different type of development: keeping a small in-house staff to conceive ideas and rapidly prototype gameplay concepts and technology, then working with external contractors and outsourcers for full production."

This approach sparked a notable response from Gamasutra readers, so we're now printing the entire, unexpurgated interview with former Retro principal technology engineer Jack Mathews, game director Mark Pacini and art director Todd Keller (plus Electronic Arts PR representative Tammy Schacter) on the foundation of the studio, their ethos, and their notably different approach.

Why leave Retro and try this kind of fairly unusual idea?

Jack Mathews: Now that the Prime trilogy was up, it felt like a good time to be looking around, and this is an opportunity to branch out more and reach a lot more people with the types of games we like to make. Plus, the venture is one that really fits with our thinking about how games should move forward. It's becoming costlier and costlier, and it's becoming unsustainable for current-gen development to continue this way, moving into the future.

Mark Pacini: Once we started talking to EA, it was a mutual understanding of taking the core idea of distributed development. It was about what we know and how we've done games at Nintendo, and how EA has done games in the past, and trying to find out a really good way to be able to take risks creatively.

The concept was to come up with new ideas, without having to fund a whole team -- eighty people sitting around while ten people are trying to figure out what the game is. That really spurred a lot of discussion between both parties.

The idea is being able to keep a core team whose main responsibility is driving the core direction and vision of the project, while they work together with outside developers. It's not like we're handing off the project to people after we've conceived what the game will be. We'll be working very, very closely with them.

How long did this process take, and how did you get involved with EA?

Mark Pacini: I can't really go into detail about how long the process took, but it was a lot of discussion. As to why EA was chosen, we had mutual friends at EA, and we'd been talking about this kind of idea. It wasn't that either party hunted the other down. We had mutual friends talking about the same ideas for development.

I was under the impression that EA Blueprint [the internal EA division originally founded by Neil Young], was more casually oriented. What exactly is Blueprint, and how does it work with respect to Armature?

Tammy Schacter: It's a studio not defined by location. It's rolling up into the EA Games label. In Blueprint, we have another game, LMNO, which is a game we're making with Steven Spielberg.

And what puts this deal under Blueprint rather than EA Partners?

Tammy Schacter: It's similar. It's rolling up under Lou Castle. It's similar in that it's an external development project, but it's rolling up under a different part of the company.

Jack Mathews: EAP is more for larger, established development studios that are going to work independently of EA, whereas we're working in concert with Blueprint to get everything out the door. There's a lot more involvement with EA proper.

Tammy Schacter: This is an exclusive agreement.

What's the process you guys will follow? Are you going to craft a concept and then deliver it to another studio for production?

Mark Pacini: We're very hands-on, very involved all the way through the process. In the beginning, our main focus is creating original ideas, and coming up with what the game actually would be.

When we get into the production part of it, we'll be working with distributed developers and contractors to execute the game. It's not like we hand it off and move on to something else. We would be very involved in the creation of the game. Our role may shift a little bit to directing a lot of the content, but we'll still be creating content as well.

Do you guys feel you'll be in a better position to make the kinds of games you like, both in terms of platforms and audience?

Todd Keller: For me, it was the opportunity to reach people on other systems. It opens up gameplay to have more powerful systems. It allows you to open up your box a little bit. I've always liked all the systems, but those have a little bit more ability for you to expand your game.

Did working on the Wii [with Retro] give you an appreciation for having constraints, or teach you things about how to do more with less, comparatively speaking?

Todd Keller: From an art standpoint, working on the Wii allows you to really concentrate on the base. You're working from the ground up. The other systems have multiple shaders and different types of rendering going on, but that's added on top of your base. Once you get your base down, you can expand on it.

Jack Mathews: Technically, I think keeping to much smaller constraints and being forced into that for the last few years is probably going to help moving forward, in terms of being a little less sloppy, and a little more refined when it comes to getting features in there.

Todd Keller: Me and Jack, working over the years, have had a pretty technical view of art and engineering, as far as keeping it core and keeping it running well. Everything is utilized. That helps us overall to move forward.

Mark Pacini: Speaking from the design side, it really doesn't matter what console you're on. You design the game for that console. I honestly think a lot of next-generation games don't really run well on these consoles. They're not crafting the game for the console. It's more, 'It's a next-generation game, we'll do all this fancy stuff,' and then their game doesn't run well on a next-generation console. I don't know exactly what console they're trying to make it for.

I think that's why our games [at Retro] have been praised for their technical qualities -- it was really important for our games to run really well on whatever console they're on. That's one of the things we're going to bring with us to work on a new palette of consoles.

I would hope we'd be able to leverage the pluses of the consoles, rather than try to just cram as much eye candy in there as possible and have the performance of the game suffer. I think that's something we always did well, to work within the constraints we had.

Todd Keller: That's a good point, because I know we tried to utilize everything we had to the best of our abilities at all times, as long as it fits the game design and fits the purpose of the game. Whatever you choose -- rendering style, the shaders, how much geometry in your environments -- has to match the game you're making. You just try to utilize everything you can.

Jack Mathews: And still run at a decent framerate. (laughs)

Is it tough having the legacy of the Prime games, which were heavily acclaimed, there in the background?

Jack Mathews: I'm going to cry myself to sleep, Chris. (laughs)

Mark Pacini: From my standpoint, every game we've done, I've been more excited about. When we did Prime 1, trying to look at it objectively, trying to step back from it, I think we did a good job on that. Then you start Prime 2, and you start getting excited about that project, and you remember what you did before, but I think you try not to get hung up on it too much.

Then at the end of Prime 3, I said, 'Wow, I think that's the best thing we've ever done,' from a standpoint of how we executed it and how our process came together. It was really rewarding at the end of it. The stuff we're working on now, I feel the same way. I'm excited about the new things we're coming up with.

It's been so long since Prime 1 came out for me, that it's kind of so far back that I remember, but at the same time, while it's something I'll always be proud of, and it's something people thought was good, you have to move on from that. As long as you're excited about what you're doing, I think that's what's important.

With regard to this new model, some developers seem to think you guys have a great situation in terms of being able to really focus heavily on the higher-concept levels of game development -- is that accurate?

Jack Mathews: One of our core beliefs is that this will actually allow us to do more quick iteration, quick prototyping. One problem with game development is you end up with tons of 200-page design documents, but nothing actually proving out. Once you actually go into production, you find a lot of things don't work, and vast swathes of your design just go out the window, or you've gone too far and you can't afford to throw those things out the window.

One of our core tenets is to be able to quickly prove or disprove high concepts and come up with a focused, playable, very good core of the game as quickly as possible, using as few resources as possible. We want to make sure concepts work, and are fun, and then work with our partners for full production.

Would you say you're taking a similar route to that of [Stubbs The Zombie/Hail To The Chimp developers, also known for their 'core team' philosophy] Wideload?

Jack Mathews: I think a lot of our core development ideals are pretty similar, but hopefully the partnership with EA should allow us to get larger-scale projects under development. I know a lot of their stuff is somewhat smaller.

With EA, what we're looking at it is an opportunity to hit this development model out of the park by being such close development partners with the publisher that we can really just make very fast moves back and forth to make things happen.

Do you think this is similar at all to the Hollywood system?

Mark Pacini: The big difference between the way movies are made and games are made, is that a production staff for a movie is an ensemble cast of experts in their field. Even the guy who holds the boom mic is an expert and has been specializing for a long time. The game industry isn't really like that.

There are concept artists out there, engineers out there who are singular people who only do contract work because they're so good and they're so in demands, but not a lot of people are like that. You aren't going to get a level two artist who just works contract, because there are a lot of people like that out there. The game industry might have to go in that direction.

The model in which games are made -- with a staff of people upwards of 100 people a lot of the time -- is kind of outdated now. It costs so much money to maintain that staff. What do you do with that staff when the game is done? You get these mass layoffs. You don't hear that when a movie's over. Everybody who was on the movie is gone -- but there was no mass layoff, it's just that everybody was a contractor just for that project.

I think in the future, a lot of game development will move towards that. Contractors now are being used more efficiently than they've ever been on game projects, and it's become a more valid way to staff up your project. Rather than being looked down upon as a company that doesn't want to hire somebody, it's more fiscally redponsible of the company to hire contractors, not to staff up and have a mass layoff at the end.

That's been our industry for a decade at least, and I think things are changing. A lot of the reason some people are jumping on the casual bandwagon is that they're cheaper to make. In most cases, they're simpler games that take a smaller staff of people, so inherently they have the potential of being more profitable.

I think what we're trying to do is take a model in that direction, and scale it to larger games, not just casual games. There is a correlation with the movie industry; I don't think it's going to happen overnight in the game industry, but in the next decade you're probably going to see more people willing to live their lives as a contractor rather than a full employee.

How big are you looking to get your core team?

Tammy Schacter: I think they're looking to staff up to about ten.

Jack Mathews: Yeah, to about eleven or so. We want to keep lean.

Tammy Schacter: That's basically the core IP team.

Jack Mathews: We're in hiring mode right now, and we're dealing with company things. We do have some stuff we're working on, but we're not even close to talking about it.

Are you going to trend more towards individual contractors, or outsourcing firms? There are more and more firms cropping up in, say, China.

Todd Keller: I'd say it's a mix. I don't think anything's out of bounds. That's the nice thing about it. Everybody's on our team, but the team can be spread everywhere. It can be single people, or large companies that do outsourcing. We can use a mixture of those in any kind of way to get the project done.

Jack Mathews: For engineering and design, right now there's not much in the way of outsourcing firms internally, so those sorts of resources we'd probably go domestic or Western.

Are you concerned about the challenges of managing a disparate worldwide team?

Mark Pacini: A lot of it boils down to location and time. We have extensive experience working with developers in Japan -- that's who we worked with for the past eight years. We've had to deal with a thirteen-hour difference for eight years, and we've learned a lot of how to be efficient at that communication.

But at the same time, the idea is to create a "virtual studio," where you could have a meeting or a conference call with somebody halfway around the world. It really just comes down to the logistics of when and how often you can meet.

But these are the challenges we're looking forward to coming up with solutions for, and our partners at EA have had a lot of experience doing this as well. I think we'll be able to pool our collected knowledge about this distributed development, and continue to refine how we go about doing it. By no means is it going to be easy, but I'm definitely looking forward to getting into it.

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

Well, readers, you're in luck -- I got power back post-hurricane just a few hours ago, so I can submit a column safely and soundly after all! Sadly, I don't have much to write about at the moment, chiefly because I'm busy cleaning up my pad and trying to get the week-old mildew smell out of my putrefied, possibly self-aware bedroom carpet.

Without the wherewithal for a magazine update, I thought I'd instead profile a somewhat related Japanese book -- the fall 2000 edition of Kougien, a Japanese catalog of console games and cheats/passwords/info on unlockables (referred to collectively as urawaza in Japanese).

These volumes, released twice a year, are published by Mainichi Communications, which at one point had five or six regular game mags in Japan but nowadays has whittled them down to only one, Nintendo Dream.

The name "Kougien" is a pun on Koujien, one of the definitive dictionaries of the Japanese language (the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary), with the character for "word" replaced with the one for "skill" or "technique" -- i.e., secret cheats.

Kougien is sold mainly as a collection of cheats in Japan, but at one point it was also a complete listing of every console game ever released in the country from 1982 forward, complete with release date, publisher, a short description, and cheats.

This fall 2000 edition, a book roughly the size of the Houston white pages that weighs in at a head-spinning 1540 pages, was the last one to have a full entry for every game ever; later editions include only those consoles that're still actively sold in the Japanese marketplace and are quite a bit smaller in size. A total of 9982 games and 15,100 cheats are listed in this book.

If you know Japanese and collect old games, this edition of Kougien is practically a must-have, an instant reference on nearly every system that Japan saw in the 20th century. (The Sega Mark III/Master System is the only major omission, a somewhat odd one considering that Kougien includes listings for systems as obscure as the 3DO, Virtual Boy, PC-FX and Neo-Geo CD.)

Even today, when all the info in Kougien can be found on the net if you look hard enough, I still refer to this volume at least once a week, part of the reason it's in such "well-loved" shape.

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

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

Well, despite the plethora of AGDC crossposts from Gamasutra and elsewhere on our Think Services sites/blogs this week, we still actually had a full week of non-show related features on both Gama and Game Career Guide, so wanted to pass them along.

I particularly enjoyed the mammoth GameStop interview, since it's not often you get to see opinions and views from the folks who sell a _lot_ of the total retail games -- particularly on the core gamer end of things.

But the Go! Go! Break Steady postmortem is also neat for pointing out an underdiscussed XBLA title, and why it wasn't talked about, and Boutros' game difficulty piece is neato, also, among others.

Onward to the links:

Gamasutra Features

- GameStop in 2008: The Mega-Interview
"In an exceptionally wide-ranging interview, two top GameStop executives talk to Gamasutra about the business of the world's biggest standalone game retailer -- from hardware through used games to demographics and beyond."

- Postmortem: Little Boy Games' Go! Go! Break Steady
"In this exclusive Gamasutra postmortem, the developers of XBLA title Go! Go! Break Steady pointedly detail the trials and tribulations of making an original IP console title as a two-man indie dev."

- Building a Great Team: Communication
"When you've hired a great game development team, how do you get them to work together efficiently? Game HR veteran Mencher has a plethora of pointers in this in-depth Gamasutra article."

- Difficulty is Difficult: Designing for Hard Modes in Games
"In this in-depth article, designer Boutros takes a close look at difficulty in games, asking how creators can add unique, high-end challenges which excite, but don't frustrate skilled players."

- Learning From Crysis: The Making of Crysis Warhead
"As Crytek ships the PC-only Crysis Warhead, Gamasutra gets producer Bernd Diemer to analyze the structure, design underpinnings and creation of the intriguing pseudo-sequel."

GameCareerGuide Features

- Super Growing Pains: Are Video Games Bad for Comics?
"The licensing of superhero stories has spawned a slew of comic-based movies and games, but in doing so, has created a limited take on itself. More often than not, marketing the IP takes precedence over delivering a good game. Are bad game spinoffs hurting comics?"

- Student Postmortem: NJIT and Bloomfield College's The Forgotten War
"When a team of students snagged a group of professional game developers to work with them on a game project, they knew they were in for a treat. Making ‘The Forgotten War’ was a first-of-its-kind teaching project pioneered by Coray Seifert, adjunct professor at Bloomfield College and The New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), and a game designer at Kaos Studios/THQ."

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

['Diamond In The Rough' is a new column by Tom Cross focusing on an unusual innovation that a game makes on an old, tired aspect of game design -- an innovation that contributes to the advancement of video games as a medium, but that might get overlooked because the game is not otherwise remarkable or is hindered by major design flaws. This column? All about distance and Prince Of Persia.]

As gamers, we are often asked to identify with some pretty rough-and-tumble characters, and often, those characters are cruel and violent, not just tough. Whether the hero of a game is good or bad, dumb or smart, we are asked to be that person, control them, and hopefully like them (or at least like being them).

In the previous installment of this column, I lauded games for using certain techniques to increase the sense of immersion and connectivity with one’s in-game avatar.

That got me thinking about the games that head in the exact opposite direction: games that, for whatever reason, choose to divorce you from the settings, characters, or events that unfold before you. Why do these games present themselves in this fashion, and what are the results?

With the emphasis the industry places on immersion and character identification, it’s surprising that these games aren’t singled out for special attention more often. Many older games feature disembodied, voiceless heroes. Myst and its ilk, as well as early shooters like Doom, lacked any kind of serious connection with characters. Where Myst at least had interesting, barren environments, Doom only had its amusing version of hell.

This was usually a consequence of technical limitations. Doom couldn’t show you your character’s body because you couldn’t look down and you were a sprite, anyway. It was common to turn this weakness into a strength, though. You couldn’t see you character, so you could imagine that character was you.

This logic has transferred to modern games, although the technical limitation obviously hasn’t. These days, “immersiveness” is both a goal that some games honestly strive for, and an excuse that some games use so that their designers won’t have to think hard about in-game characterization.

In Mirror’s Edge, it looks like the goal of your in-game avatar is to reduce the gap between the player and the world more than ever before—your parkour-agile body is the thin membrane between you and the city-cum-jungle-gym of the gameworld. On the other hand, in most FPSes you barely speak and don’t have a body; game designers (and PR people) say it’s to increase the “you are there” factor.

One way or another, it seems like getting close to your avatar is the name of the game in modern design. What about the other games, though, like Shadow of the Colossus, where the entire story and mood are created through a purposeful distancing, and a careful brand of aloofness?

Colossus isn’t the only game to take this route: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time also creates an intentional divide between you and the Prince (and especially between you and his actions). It may not be the same kind of separation that we see in Colossus, but both games trade in a rarely seen method of presentation, one that doesn’t fall over itself trying to associate you closely and directly with the main character.

The Sands of Time may be traditional in its narrative, but for a video game, its treatment of the Prince is near-revolutionary. For most of the game, up until the last section, the Prince is clearly depicted as a selfish and ignorant young man. He may learn from his actions, but it is almost always too little, too late.

Interestingly, Sands of Time doesn’t ask us to identify too closely with this willful, foolish, annoyingly self-assured Prince. The Prince is never “badass,” he never tries to get you to sympathize with him too closely (this changes, unfortunately, in the next Prince installment). The entire story is related in the form of a fantastical tale, told to you by the Prince.

When you save your game, the Prince tells you that he’ll start telling the story from that point, the next time you play. This conceit is carefully constructed throughout, and the game finishes with the Prince telling the story to Farah, a woman he meets during the game.

What Sands of Time does with this approach is allow us to judge and watch the Prince as he changes throughout the game, and how his story unfolds. We are certainly asked to be intrigued and entertained by his quest, but the need to be the Prince, to suffer his losses, isn’t insisted on. Where other games would ask you to share in your character’s failures and successes (like the strangely failure-fraught first journey of No One Lives Forever’s Kate Archer), Sands of Time invites you to form your own conclusions about the game’s protagonist.

Not only is he brash and uncaring, but the Prince often shows knowledge of this. In his narration, he flaunts his early mistakes, just as he will eventually flaunt his sorrow and regret. By distancing us from the Prince and his decisions, we are placed in a form of thrall not unlike what you’ll find in less interactive forms of entertainment. We don’t need to “be” the prince, or be responsible for his mistakes, and we can thus appreciate the sweep and grandeur of his story (and judge him more harshly than we would otherwise) from a less involved and more enjoyable position.

Shadow of the Colossus also distances gamers from its story, but it does so for a different purpose, and with different results. You start the game as a silent boy named Wander (something I didn’t know until I looked it up), who travels a desolate landscape to bring his dying companion to a temple where he can save her. From the beginning of the game, almost all dialogue is voiced by the spirit that inhabits the temple, which directs you in your quest to save the dying girl.

This is about as much as you’ll know about Wander, up until the last moments of the game. He is completely single-minded in his drive to kill the lumbering giants that populate the world, all in order to save his friend. The careful and limited drip of information that players receive is designed to do more than make the main character’s motives and moods opaque, however.

By distancing us from the hero’s actions, the developers allow us take a much more complicated view of the hero’s actions. If we were given the details of Wander’s past, his feelings and goals, then the world would have become some arid, drab Zelda knockoff. Instead, we are treated to a stark set of gargantuan battles, in which our hero fells giant, wretchedly vulnerable opponents.

The sadness we feel as we kill each new colossus would be fainter, perhaps nonexistent, if each one had a name, a temple, and an element. We might not be so busy trying to guess what’s “really” going on with the Colossi if they were more knowable, less opaque.

Instead, we are told just enough to intrigue us, and the game’s art, sound, and feel do the rest. You don’t know that your character is horribly alone because the narrator does not tell you so, nor are you told that his quest is taking a terrible toll on him. All this is told through the minimalist presentation that permeates the entire game. It’s why we worry about the fate of our hero, just as we fear that his fate may be nothing compared to the damage he is inflicting on the world around him. This lack of information about Wander doesn’t lead us to feel that we are Wander, though.

Because we’re asked to see his actions as troubling and potentially at odds with our own moral feelings, we don’t see them simply as an expression of ourselves in-game, we see them as the content-rich mystery that lies behind the character we (increasingly uneasily) control. It’s the difference between a flat and a round character. If you already know everything about the character because you are the character, there’s not much to wonder about.

In both of these games, distance is key to emotional connections between gamer and game, and a protagonist whose body we are often forcefully removed from is a key player in that distance. When the Prince saves his game (entering a mote of magic sand), he clutches his head in pain, or some other overriding sense. As this happens, the camera is thrown wide away from him, before rushing back. Immediately afterward, we are treated to a vision of the Prince’s immediate future, the path he’ll take through his story.

You may be the Prince’s aid, as you are Wander’s, but they are both their own creatures, less beholden to your creative wants than Kratos, Nathan Drake, Agent 47 or Commander Shepard. All of those characters are meant to be extensions of the player, as are the adventures those characters embark upon. Wander and the Prince are extensions of players, to be sure, but only in that our intervention allows for the continuation of their stories: we aren’t asked to justify to ourselves what we are doing, only what they are doing.

It’s a shame that other developers don’t practice this careful balancing act. It’s apparent that it can be done in more than one way, for different reasons and leading to different results. When you aren’t required to be a character it can often be easier to empathize with them or understand them, because they seem more real. Making the main character into an actual three dimensional character adds nuance and heft to games that might otherwise lack those traits.

Allowing the player to step back and size up their multifaceted avatar provides a chance for deeper, clearer connections and appraisals on the part of the player. This kind of decision is a vital part of any developer’s bag of tricks, one ignored more often than not.

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

Time for some GameSetLinks, then, starting out with a really excellent series of interviews on the Japanese game scene, thanks to the good Japanophile folks in the Ziff Davis Game Group, chatting to folks including the Monster Hunter (pictured!) makers.

Also in this compilation - the re-appearance of Rent-A-Hero No.1, a mash-up of Gauntlet and Bomberman, and George Lucas' appearance to not-promote Vampyre Story, some post-NGJ silliness, and quite a few other things.

Busted by the cops:

1UP: 'The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of Japan'
Completely vital Parish and Mielke interview series chatting to Famitsu, Monster Hunter, NCSX (!!), LocoRoco creators...

John Davison: Do game reviews help you?
Maybe game reviews, pre-Internet, were information and visual disseminators as much as reviews?

Lost Levels: 'English Rent-A-Hero No. 1 for Xbox Leaked'
Interesting - as a bit of a Sega quirk fan, I was looking forward to this.

Alex Litel's Lackluster Emporium: New New Post New Games Journalism Manifesto
“So essentially New Post New New Games Journalism is silver-tongued nonsense?” Litel goes wild.

IndieGames.com - The Weblog - Preview: Blast Passage (Notch)
A direct mash-up of Gauntlet and Bomberman - cute.

GameSpite: 'The Blink-And-You'll-Miss-It Files #2: Mazes of Fate'
The cosmically odd Patrick Dugan just started working for Sabarasa, actually - they seem to be mysterious Argentinian Japan-ophiles.

Shawn's 1UP Blog: Goodbye
Shawn Elliott was responsible for the 1UP feature content I was starting to dig a lot... oh well. He's off to 2K Boston, apparently. And the consumer game journalist position as the equivalent of the portal drug is increasingly the norm.

Bill Tiller - Interview - Adventure Classic Gaming - ACG
Aha, the Vampyre Story guy again, with hilarious 'not George Lucas really but actually it is' promo photo.

Opinion and Links - September 18 | Edge Online
Amusing Campbell meltdown on GI.biz's use of exclusive - and I agree with him, for what it's worth. We (at Gamasutra) do use exclusive a little bit too much, as is tempting on the web, but it's always when the article is actually, uhm, exclusive.

Games are serious business for Apple - Citizen Gamer- msnbc.com
Some neat quotes from Matt @ our new FingerGaming iPhone site in there.

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