[In this passionate opinion piece, Codemasters principal designer Phil O'Connor outlines 10 different ways you can spot a "real game designer" during the resume and interview process, and avoid hiring ineffective or unqualified applicants.]

I have the incredible fortune of being paid to design games. I consider this a privilege, the result of some luck, but at the same time, it’s something I worked for years at achieving.

I wanted to be a game designer from a very young age, and I built up the experience and knowledge that eventually convinced people to hire me to do this.

As someone who worked so hard to break into the industry, I have a somewhat stronger opinion than most about the quality of game designers that get in. I feel that every designer should pay their dues before they're allowed anywhere near game design, and that they should be supremely qualified as students of gaming! Sadly the demand for designers has created a situation in the industry where many people getting into design positions don’t fit the bill.

Game design is one of the most tricky and contentious positions in the game industry. No two companies I have worked with have treated the position of design in the same way. Some designers have producer-type duties/powers, others treat them like artists, and yet others don’t have design positions at all but instead assign the job to a producer, coder or artist.

The only thing that everyone seems to agree on is that you need game designers. The problem is, however, that everyone is a game designer, or thinks they are. What I mean by that is everyone can come up with game design ideas, ideas are a dime a dozen.

Game Designers Suffer From a Credibility Problem

The art of game design is getting the right combination of ideas for a game, communicating them effectively to the team, and executing those ideas through the cycle of development (from conception, to prototyping, to modification, and to the final implementation/cut stage).

The problem is that game designers suffer from a credibility problem. One of the causes of this is the lack of professional accreditation for game design. I realize there are schools now that supposedly “teach” game design, and you can even get a degree in it now, but most developers laugh at the idea of a 23-year-old graduate in game design having any clue about designing a computer game.

The best school for game design remains industry time, at least the years development experience and, at the very minimum, one shipped title. Since most designers working in the industry don’t have a degree in design, many of your peers are reluctant to treat you as an authority in your field, especially since anyone and their dog can come up with game ideas.

There is constant skepticism from colleagues holding computer science degrees and art diplomas about your qualification to make critical decisions about the game. Producers are also prone to “suggest” designs because they have managerial authority, and this makes them sometimes believe that they are better qualified to make design decisions than you are.

Another obstacle to the credibility of game designers is that the field attracts a good degree of charlatanry. The very nature of game design work (mostly ideas driven, no professional qualification necessary) attracts the kind of people who think they can BS their way into the job. Too many of them succeed and thus give designers an even worse name.

For development studios, this can have a fatal effect, and in an effort to improve the reputation of my profession among my peers and help developers hire the right people, I am providing some advice on how to properly interview for game design positions.

Obviously, if the candidate has dozens of shipped AAA titles under their belt and has a proven record, you don’t really need this list. Any candidate who has less than three years in the industry is more difficult to assess, so hopefully these suggestions will help pick the right people.

Ten Ways to Spot a Real Game Designer

The Resume:

1. Look for signs of a deep interest in gaming. The resume should indicate gaming as a way of life, not just a job. Modding experience is especially a key sign. Anyone who wants to be a game designer has an extensive record of making games in their spare time, for free: making levels for favorite games, modding, writing game material, creating board games, RPG background, story writing, etc.

Game designers must be gaming fanatics, not just playing them, but making them in multiple mediums. Beware any game designer that doesn’t play games every spare second of their time or have an extensive history of game making. Look for a long history of gaming interest, not just a sudden career change decision.

Some developers decide that they are tired of being producer/artist/programmer and they want to go into game design. Although experienced, they may not be suitable for design work despite this. Candidates that have a knack for game design usually have demonstrated a passion for game mechanics stretching from early adulthood.

2. Look for a wide variety in gaming taste: A real designer should have a wide interest in games, not just a single format. Look for signs of this wider interest in their hobbies, or ask them what kinds of games they play.

Ask them to describe what they like about each kind of gaming. They should be able to do this at length. I am talking cross platform, boardgames, RPGs, and the classics: cards, chess, backgammon, etc. Good designers borrow the best ideas from all mediums.

3. If the resume lists design credit on shipped games, ask them to describe in detail what their design contribution was to those games. A real designer should be able to go into extensive detail on this, most designers are proud of the work. If the response is vague, you are probably talking to a charlatan.

The Interview:

If you follow these steps in an interview process, you should be able to spot the bull from the real deal:

1. Any designer should be able to describe mechanics in a way that is understandable. If you ask the designer candidate to come up with a sample feature for your game, ask them to describe how the feature will work mechanically. A real designer can describe mathematically and mechanically how a feature will function and be implemented with other game systems, down to every detail.

For example, if a designer talks about how the AI will be able to react to the player’s actions, they should be able to detail exactly how that will work: will it be based on how many “bad behavior” points the player has accumulated, will it depend on triggers set in the dialogue system that will play specific responses, will it be based on a proximity system that the AI checks when the player is within range, assessing the player’s reputation points, shown weapons, clothing, etc.

If a candidate cannot describe probabilities, mathematics, or outline game systems supporting a feature, then they probably are not the real deal.

2. A game designer should be able to explain clearly any of their design ideas. If they cannot make you understand how their idea works, then you should pass. All true designers are able to explain how their ideas work and play to any audience.

That is one of the biggest jobs of game design, translating the feature to the team in a manner that they can understand it and integrate it from their point of view: for coders its codese, for artists its artese, sound language, producer talk, and marketing speak.

3. Making the game is also selling the game. A designer must be able to communicate why the game is fun to you. They have to be able to do this in under a minute and leave you with the unmistakable feeling that they are right. Any designer who doesn’t understand that you are selling it the minute you start making a game, is not a designer.

A designer has to sell to all sections of development, not just the management and marketing departments. Designers have to tell everyone working on the game how fun it’s going to be without a playable version for many months to come.

They are the cheerleaders for the project early on until there is something to show. In an interview, ask the potential candidate to pitch you a favorite game concepts they would like to work on, and if you are not convinced it’s fun, them maybe they are not right for you.

4. A true game designer should be able to describe in detail what they like/dislike about a game. Ask them to talk about their favorite and least favorite games. Ask them to explain why they like/dislike them.

Lackluster opinion in this area is a Bad Sign. So is an answer that amounts to them not liking the color of the interface or the names of some of the characters. They should be able to provide clear and solid reasons for their opinion.

5. Wide areas of interest: A real game designer is inspired by the world around them: books, news events, music, history, movies, art, etc. Depending on the type of game you are interviewing for, this may be one of the most critical questions you can ask.

Ask the candidate to talk about their personal interests, what kind of books they read, movies they watched, any other personal interest them may have. A real designer should have extensive and wide interests, bringing those interests to bear in their design. One question I ask is what their favorite movie is and why. The answer can tell you a lot about the kind of designer they are. A short answer is usually a Bad Sign.

6. Attitude: Beware the Ideas Man. Some people think game design is just about coming up with bright ideas. They fancy themselves the smartest person in the room, therefore employers should be begging to hire them so they can get their hands on their wonderful ideas, which naturally will make millions. This attitude is fairly easy to spot. Stay away!

Another type to stay away from is the Industry Fanboy. A fanboy is someone who is intimately aware of the debates and major conventions of gaming, knows all the top games and the buzz about them, but doesn’t understand game design or have anything original to contribute. They rely on the game press and popular opinion for their understanding of games, basically copying what other people have said and done. They known the canon, but cannot elaborate on it or expand on it themselves.

Some may think this is not such a bad thing, so as an illustration consider someone who has learned a guitar piece by heart: they can play it perfectly, note for note, but if you ask them to interpret the piece by adding a blues feel to it or a jazzy tone, they cannot comply. They known the piece, but they don’t know much about music. Designers can be like that.

Listen to the candidate talk about games and the gaming industry -- if a lot of it sounds familiar, if it sounds straight off the pages of the game press, or if the words are not their own, you are probably dealing with a fanboy.

7. No design survives first contact with code: Ask them to describe an example of a feature change/cut and how they adapted to it. If they worked on a game, they should be able to describe at least one feature in the original design that was cut (for whatever reason), and describe why they chose that feature and how it impacted the rest of the game.

Make sure they go into detail on how the cut impacted other gameplay features, as well as how they took that into account. A real designer should be able to recall in detail the circumstances surrounding such traumatic (but inevitable) events. If they sound like they didn’t care about the feature in the first place, or if don’t have a feature cut story, this could be a bad sign.

Conclusion

Note that none of these 10 points on their own are an indication that the candidate is not suitable. But if you sense that the person in front of you checked off a good number of these warning signs, you might want to reconsider giving them a position on your team.

Of course, even if your candidate checked positive on all of them, there is no guarantee that the person will work out for your project or your culture. There are many factors that make someone a good employee that are beyond the scope of this article, but at least you may have better confidence that they are actually real game designers. Happy hiring.

[O'Connor has worked on several upcoming and shipped titles, including O.R.B, Battlefield Europe, Operation Flashpoint 2. He previously worked as a consultant for his company Iconoclast Games before joining Codemasters in 2006.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

[I think this is the last WiM Atlas entry from sister online worlds site WorldsInMotion.biz before we're up to date again - and this time, Mathew Kumar takes a look at the v.interesting Urban Dead, which has, hush your heart, lots of zombies in it.]

Here's an overview of Urban Dead, developed by Kevan Davis. Strongly based upon classic play-by-mail games, this online world is inhabited solely by players -- with not one single NPC -- as both humans and zombies in a city-wide battle for the streets.

Name: Urban Dead

Developer: Kevan Davis

Established: July 2005

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

Overview: In Urban Dead, players create a character, either a zombie or a survivor (and if a survivor, from a number of classes, including consumers, firemen and army privates) and is dropped into the city of Malton either to cause as much destruction as possible (as a zombie) or to survive by an means possible -- most usually by banding together with other players in barricaded buildings (if a player.) Players have a limited number of action points each day, but are forewarned that even if they have run out of action points, the rest of the world goes on around them, while they "sleep".

Payment Method: Urban Dead is free to play, and earns revenue via banner advertising on the site.

Key Features:
- Massively multiplayer “always on” virtual world where every single inhabitant of the world is played by a real person
- Heavily based around player vs. player (or more accurately, survivor vs. zombie) combat
- Survivors who die becomes zombies
- Players can talk, use radios and join groups to “socialize”.

Urban Dead: In-Depth Tour

I know what you're thinking -- Urban Dead isn't much of a looker. In fact, with its near-luddite pure HTML basis and lack of graphical finery, you might wonder why I've decided to talk about it.

Well, because in its own strange way, it's one of the truest MMOs I've ever experienced. Beginning to play Urban Dead is easy enough – pick your character's class, pick their name -- I went for "Echo Bunniman" (an obscure reference to Ian McCulloch, star of Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2, by way of Ian McCulloch, singer in Echo and the Bunnymen) and made him a consumer (one of the hardest classes to start out as) due to my interest in really "roleplaying" the experience.

Dropped in a church in Havercroft (a suburb in the middle of Malton, the game's location) I was immediately lost -- but realistically so! After all, do you know what you'd do in a zombie outbreak? I set about doing the obvious -- trying to find myself a weapon and then shelter. I searched the local police station but didn't turn up much of use, so headed off to find a fire station, where I got my hands on a fire axe, as good a melee weapon as I could imagine. On seeing that the fire station had been very strongly barricaded (Urban Dead's buildings have a barricade level, from "doors open" to "extremely heavily barricaded" -- a barricade level so high that even human players can't get in unless they have the right skills to bypass the barricades) I so decided to rest, as I was nearly out of action points. Action points are replenished at one point every half an hour, which sets the game apart from many other browser RPGs which tend to "tick over" once per day. The reason? So players don't get stuck in dangerous places for as long as 24 hours without a chance to move.

The most important thing to remember when playing Urban Dead is that every other human or zombie in the world is another player. So while playing the game it can feel odd -- a frozen world, where you weave in between motionless zombies while using up your action points -- for all you know any one of those zombies could be a live player ready to attack you the minute you log out.

And the way my game continued bore that out. After resting at the fire station and wandering about lost for a few days more, stocking up on supplies such as first aid kits in hospitals I stumbled across and picking up a radio which, when correctly tuned, informed me of what other players were saying, I found I had gravitated to the nearby Ackland Mall. Under siege by zombies, I took the opportunity to dash inside the mall during the confusion (malls are usually extremely heavily barricaded, barring new players from entry) and hid in the "safety" of the north-east corner healing other players with my first aid kits -- secure in the knowledge that my fellow players would repair the barricade and keep us all safe.

But then I didn't log in for a full 24 hour cycle – and when I returned, Ackland Mall had fallen; Echo Bunniman had been sadly killed, and everyone in the mall now lived again as zombies!

I was not particularly pleased, but as a zombie you have just as much potential to raise your skills and play an interesting game, only one far more interested in death and destruction. But I didn't want to play as a zombie, because I was having quite a good time playing as a human. So I shambled across to the nearest "revivification point" – locations designated by players as places where zombies can stand to wait for other players to inject them with a special syringe that will turn them back into a human.

And since then, that's where I've stood. Waiting. And I'll probably wait quite a bit longer, as zombies far outnumber human players -- who are definitely fighting a losing battle. But it's one that I was having fun fighting.

You might notice that I haven't discussed the social aspects of the game in very much detail -- well, that's because while there are many possibilities for socialization, they're limited by a strange decision for it to cost action points even to speak! As a result most players remain quiet, but in cases such as the defence of malls, players actively work together (even if sometimes silently) and with every agent in the game controlled by a player, simply stepping back to watch the ebb and flow of the zombie/human war is a quite remarkable thing to see -- but I'll go into more detail on that in the upcoming conclusion.

Urban Dead: Conclusion

Well, since my last update, poor Echo Bunniman has stood as one of the living dead at the Randal Monument, waiting to be revived by a passing lab assistant (filling in the time by attacking, and being attacked by, the other zombies also waiting) and with so much waiting around Urban Dead maybe doesn't sound that amazing. But it absolutely is.

What makes Urban Dead special is that in the world of MMOs (where the temptation is to add more and more features) the designer, Kevan Davis, has made the limitations inherent in the HTML-based world strengths -- part of the reason its one of the most successful MMOs I have played in terms of adherence to its themes.

The themes of the zombie genre are generally loneliness, hopelessness and desperation, and the game makes the most of these while never stopping being fun. It's lonely because although everyone in the world is a human player, talking takes effort and many of the players are your enemies; it's hopeless because attacking zombies is hard (the hit percentages for most weapons are shockingly low); and it's desperate because finding anything of use, or anywhere safe to hide, is a difficult and lengthy quest.

Just survival is hard, and so the world is deeply compelling, without requiring missions or obvious playthings to keep users entertained -- users truly do make their own fun by trying to defend (or ransack) locations such as malls. The design decisions don't only fit the theme but are what make the game work functionally -- for example, hit percentages are low to give everyone (zombie and human) a fair chance of surviving one on one attacks.

There are a few problems here and there. While the lack of chatter between players is an interesting decision, I can't help but feel being able to talk a little more might make the game feel a bit more alive -- as would an improvement in the graphics (which is actually offered by a third-party add-on, the UDtoolbar). Players can't trade items either, but I'm not disturbed by the lack of an economy -- it's something that would crumble in a zombie apocalypse anyway. The biggest problem I've found is the length of time I've spent as a zombie when I don't want to be one -- players who wish to play zombies seem to have an easier time of it as they can never die permanently, while humans face a long slog if they succumb to a zombie horde. It's be nice to see how a "hardcore" world would work where both zombies and humans could die permanently and the world was rebooted after one side or the other won; but that's a personal idea, not a complaint one way or the other.

Urban Dead is a great example of the possibilities that MMOs have when you think outside of classic RPG or social world formats: a genuinely scary and compelling world that needs no embellishment to the central concept of survival in a dangerous world -- one filled with other human players.

Useful Links:
Game Statistics
The Urban Dead Wiki - Official Wiki
UDToolbar – Firefox Extension

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

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

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

The delights in this latest version include an arcade shooter, a Unity games portal, a diving simulator, and a browser game with similarities to Circle Infotech's addictive puzzler Blocksum.

Game Pick: 'Dogfight 2' (Rock Solid Arcade, browser)
"An action game which takes place in the skies, where players assume control of a fighter plane engaged in a series of missions for the German side during World War I."

Game Pick: 'Blurst' (Flashbang Studios, browser)
"Everything that Flashbang Studios had released, now under one roof. Choose from Jetpack Brontosaurus, I Hate Clowns, the fan-favorite Off-Road Velociraptor Safari and physics-based matching game Splume."

Game Pick: 'Diver' (Jeff Weber, browser)
"An action game where players attempt to jump off springboards, perform stunts, and land inside areas marked by two red buoys. Requires the installation of Microsoft's Silverlight web browser plugin."

Game Pick: 'Zerosum' (Shockwave, browser)
"A puzzler which involves shifting numbered tiles from one location to another, in hopes that matches are made, chains occur, and more turns are generated. The seconds are counting down, and you will lose your turn if a decision isn't made quick enough."

Preview: The Unfinished Swan (Ian Dallas)
"There's video but no current public playable version of the "surreal maze game set in an entirely white world", in which, to find your way around, you'll need to splatter paint all over the place. This project was recently chosen as one of the finalists for Sense of Wonder Night 2008 and also Indiecade 2008."

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

['Bell, Game, and Candle' is a regular GameSetWatch column by writer Alex Litel, discussing stuff that happens in the game business. This time - a sociopolitical analysis of recently released Wii platformer de Blob is abound.]

For the past week or so, I seem to be reading the financial crisis into everything I watch, hear or play—Annie Hall, Dear Science and even de Blob¹ suddenly have an acquired meaning. This might have some psychological significance, but I would attribute it far more to the topic ‘s ubiquity in present news cycles. Last Thursday, I waggled my way through Chroma City Uptown level of de Blob, where I transformed financial institutions² into music halls. Something that was merely an ironic happenstance at the time—financial institutions are becoming so valueless that they might as well be music halls.

The next day I went back to that Uptown level and realized that you were transforming a private entity (a financial institution) into a public one (a music hall). Of course, private proprietorship to public proprietorship is one of the definientia of communism.

Like I assume any gamer would, I immediately paused the game and queried “communism” and “de Blob” on the Google. Surprisingly, only a pseudonymous member of the Edge staff remarked on this similarity in a a preview, but suggested the game’s usage of communism is primarily for humor value.

If only one person (excluding me) has picked up on the similitude, it suggests one of two things: de Blob is less successful as agitprop than Dance Dance Revolution or only a modicum of the métier is familiar with introductory sociology or political theory.

It seems the primary obstacle to the comprehension of the sociopolitical underpinnings of de Blob may be that the game is just so…unusual. The Downtown level might very well be one of the most baffling hours I have ever spent playing a game, I converted the Church of Inktology³ into a skatepark with skateboarders and a divinization of the extreme; I transformed monochromatic lots into soccer fields and posts of oppression into football idolatry.

I would be more forgiving if the politics of de Blob were not blatant even admist the bizarre, and even more salient than those of the notedly scathed first person polemic BlackSite: Area 51⁴. Other than de Blob, I have never encountered an E-rated title that speaks of “imperialism”⁵ or allows one take the mantle of a labor organizer and liberate suppressed miners and gardeners from unbearable conditions of the slums. If I am doing my math correctly, this means the game is subversive⁶.

However, subversion does not necessarily entail profundity. I could make a first person shooter where you play as the gun; I would probably get a mention on NPR, if not plaudits. In other words, I could make a game version of American Gun⁷, and I would get plaudits and a mention on NPR.

Likewise, an overwhelming majority of gaming enthusiasts are quick to confuse clumsily and tritely didactic spectacle (GTA, MGS⁸, BG&E and others that invite shorthand reference) with profundity, when it is really just simple mastication. Really, said enthusiasts have little right to feel indignant in response to folk ignoring of pseudo-profundity

Quite often in de Blob, the player is tasked with liberating allies of the “color revolution”⁹ from prisons and transforming them into something more productive, which often takes the form of a structure that literally incorporates art supplies into the design. I have never seen a game even attempt to tackle the topic of correctional efficacy, but for the first game that touches on the subject matter to be a quirky, brisk platformer suggests that there is quite a bit of work to still be done. Still, this is confirmation that the medium is capable of tackling such a serious topic without excessive violence.

Footnotes:

¹ This might be superfluous, but just because it is next to the other two does not mean it is qualitatively comparable.
² I am guessing that in Australia, “uptown” means “downtown,” much like how “liberal” there means “center-right.”
³ I assume it has little to do with any other -ology and does not symbolize mental liberation from a cult with confusing imagery, but I could totally be wrong—thinking about this makes my brain tell me that it is going to explode.
⁴ I played through BlackSite and found it rather enjoyable. So, that vitriol was not coming from me.
⁵ The Imperial Troops of Star Wars do not count. Not to mention that the game’s statement on imperialism sounds like something a somewhat obtuse nineteen year-old art major under heavy influence of a substance would say.
⁶ If a tree falls down and no one is around, is it still subversive? If someone makes a game of this, is it doomed to the fate of being a budget title? If a sexagenarian vegetarian does not purchase Chicken Shoot for their grandson because of the aforementioned vegetarianism, is it a victory for gamers?
⁷ A derided drama that is pretty much Crash except even worse and with guns instead of race relations. Aside from the qualitative objections, the film does for the gun issue what 24 does for detainee treatment (and my perception of Kiefer Sutherland).
⁸ New York Times, will you put my analysis about how my very comfortable New Balances are a commentary on the rise of the military-industrial complex in a Sunday edition? I even drew a tank on the left side of the right shoe; I drew a peace sign on the right side of the left shoe.
⁹ Divorced from the actual color revolutions, but is comprised of “color revolutionaries,” which sounds kind of like “counterrevolutionaries”—I would posit that this was intentional.

[Alex Litel can be reached at alexlitel@gmail.com and occasionally found at alexlitel.blogspot.com.]

Posted by Alex Litel at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

['The Game Anthropologist' is Michael Walbridge's regular GameSetWatch column looking at gaming communities and subcultures. This week he speaks from the trenches about the developing community of EA/Mythic's new MMO, Warhammer Online.]

If you want the real dirt on Warhammer Online, the best reading comes from those who've played. Electronic Arts, Mythic, and the publications covering WAR can discuss features all they want, but that hasn't always kept those investigating satiated, which is why you'll see forums, comment threads, and sometimes published articles directed toward what it's like to play WAR with other people. There's playing a game by yourself, and there's playing a game with people, and when we have a rare challenger to World of Warcraft, we need to compare both parts.

So, what's the community like in WAR? Plenty of factors make this question a very personal one, but I'll attempt to answer it from these two simple viewpoints of trying it alone and trying it with someone else.

If you try WAR alone, it'll feel lonelier than some other MMOs. For starters, grouping requires less communication, which enhances play time but lessens bonding or memory of other players. I've not yet added a single person to my friends list because it simply doesn't enter into my mind.

Because WAR gives you multiple paths to level your characters, there's no urgency to find someone you can rely on for a specific task—if a task is difficult, it is not an opportunity you regret skipping. Continuing to explore or saying “you know, I'd rather do something else instead, I don't want to wait around” give the journey a different flavor.

The path to glory is still heavily shaped by the game design, but it makes players feel like they have more control due to the abundance of options and the ease with which a person rotates among those options. More control means less submission to imposed standards, which means less cohesive socialization.

I decided I wanted to join a guild early, and so I chose to join an official Penny Arcade guild, the Candymancers. This required me to switch servers, but it was a minor penalty since it was the first week of launch. The game changed for me a bit since I now had a guild forum, guild Ventrilo server, and guild chat to give me a group of people to work for and to help.

Still, were it not for those things I'd have felt alone, and to a degree I still do. The text in this game is non-intrusive and there are fewer breaks in the game. When I chat in a party or in the open, more than half the time a player won't say anything. Trips to the city, even to go to the bank, are less frequent and there is no need to eat food and drink water in-between fights.

The game never stops you; only you do. There aren't long flights or waits for boats to pick you up, either. The Auction House has few items, and there isn't very much to do in a city. Training for your abilities is located in almost any spot that has a cluster of NPCs. The crafting and economic system are minor and nothing close to the scale of those in EVE Online or WoW.

There simply isn't any reason to sit around and chat because of boredom, economics, or forced breaks due to game design. Except for the influence user-interface standards, WAR feels very little like WoW; the graphics and lore aren't the only things that have an opposite tone.

Still, a lot of people are playing it, both out of curiosity and because it has quite a few converts. Why are so many excited? Because it's new? That can't completely account for it; there are plenty of new games, and if they're bad, the novelty wears off quickly. I know of many players who plan on keeping their subscriptions.

Perhaps its audience is a product of the game's PVP system and how fun it is to actually play it. That must be part of it; yet an MMO feels like a place, and it has to be a place where everyone knows your name. The community side has to be there, the game mechanics don't bring people closer together, but there are reasons players have for playing together and sticking together.

In order to answer this question, I had to go back to the beginning. I was in beta, but I came in at the last week; my characters were to be deleted, and the server names changed again; I was busying myself exploring the game, but couldn't commit to the people. But there were people at the beginning of beta who got into beta guilds. I wondered what brought people together.

Before the beta for WAR launched, the Warhammer Alliance forums were designated as unofficial official forums for members of various factions, including developers and testers. And the discussion there is similar to the chatter during Beta, which is similar to the current discussion, which is all focused on game mechanics.

And that is why WAR's community feels like it's in a premature, yet post-larval stage—because the game is too. One example of a hot issue right now is whether accepting alternate characters in the guild halts the progress of a guild's rank (guilds have their own levels in order to make them more stable). This has caused many guilds to hold a one-character-per-person policy, at least until they hear contrary evidence from EA or Mythic.

Some followers of WAR have said that it's a more “intellectual” game compared to other MMOs; it surely feels that way. But it's not necessarily because WAR is a more intellectual game or one that is for smarter players; it's because it's a game that the players are partially helping to build. We haven't yet discovered the full scope or content of the game. We are still figuring out how the stats work and what some of the preferred combinations and strategies are.

The rules, quirks, and game design principles of the game aren't fully understood yet, so those of us playing WAR are not excited only by its newness and the fun that we've seen so far; we're also stimulated because we like to be the pioneers, the true scouts and explorers of an MMO world. Players speculate and engage in friendly debate about what the game will be like in a few months.

The race isn't just to discover the geography or even to level to rank 40; the race is to understanding the game, thus forming a complex, expanding, and digital community. Some players are almost like scientists; they do little experiments and spend plenty of time on analysis and math, then present their findings on the forums.

There's a reason so many of the reviews or features on WAR express some caution; as the game is right now, it cannot be fully understood or fully reviewed until a large number of players have reached the highest mountain and can view the valley and bellow to all below: “It's great up here, and it has been for a few months.”

Posted by Mike Walbridge at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Having one of those 'catch-up' days today, what with contracts to amend and press releases to prepare and, wow, news to help write too - and GameSetLinkDump is also playing catch-up somewhat, since these links wander in from much earlier in the week.

Luckily, they're mainly esoteric enough that it doesn't matter - with a fun Dessgeega interview, American Indian language learning through game tech, gold farming weirdness, scientific learning through games, and plenty more.

I'm Alan Partridge:

Contrast 2008 - Saving the Earth!
Interesting Singapore game jam results.

Videogame Helps Revitalize American Indian Languages | GameCulture
'Don Thorton, the grandson of one of the few remaining master speakers of the Cherokee language, has developed RezWorld, a videogame designed to engage tribal youth with their cultural heritage.'

Game PR firm owner fails to disclose ownership of game review site » VentureBeat
Pleased to see a sane explanation on this: 'You can put this one down in the “major whoops” column. It’s going to be hard for people to give the PR firm the benefit of the doubt and to trust GameCyte’s reviews, given how the relationship was unearthed. But so far, it doesn’t look like anything worse than bad judgement.'

The IT Crowd on Automat | On IFC | IFC.com
They're showing the UK version on the immaculate geek comedy on IFC, for those 3 people who haven't seen it - random background clutter includes game consoles, yay - heck, the Season 2 DVD has a text adventure hidden on it.

The Forge · Dual Currencies in MMOs
Matt Mihaly piles onto the gold farming discussions - plenty of links to other good posts on the same subjects in here.

The Zerg: <i>Starcraft</i> Invades Korean Stand-Up Comedy | GameCulture
'Bits, Bytes, Pixels & Sprites found this video of a Korean stand-up comic doing a Starcraft routine.'

Game-ism: 'Selling an Experience'
Good post on, basically, immersion in games and how increasingly important it is: 'I want to be poured into a role. Give me an environment so compelling I can’t resist it.'

Eegra: Interview: Anna ‘Dessgeega’ Anthropy
Interesting interview with the always opinionated Mighty Jill Off creator.

Stinger Report Article: Very Large Arcade Show Shakes Consoles Confidence « Arcade Heroes
The Stinger mainly talking out of his curly mustache here, but I didn't know that Examu's hardware for Arcana Heart 2 has a Supergun option for those fans who want to play along at home.

Games Without Frontiers: How Videogames Blind Us With Science
Looking at Steinkuehler's research to conclude: 'Videogames are becoming the new hotbed of scientific thinking for kids today.'

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

['@ Play' is a kinda-sorta bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

A month ago I was roaming the Dealer's Room aisles at Dragon*Con, the foremost convention for those who can't make it to PAX. At that particular moment, I was looking at the wares of the dice guys: some store who rents one side of an entire aisle side and fills it with all, yes all, kinds of dice. d100s, studded like golf balls, alignment and class choosers, corridor determinants with different dungeon hallways on each of 12 sides, and others still. They even made customs with a special dice burning machine.

For someone with an greater-than-usual interest in randomness and how it relates to gaming, it was awesome. But right across the hallway was something better. I nearly missed it, and probably would have if it hadn't been for the eyes of fellow 'Con-goer Matt Chew, who said aloud while I gawked at the dice: "Huh, roguelike?"

In these situations, I tend to keep my expectations low. I can hold forth on a dozen topics that no one will ever expect me to hold-forth-upon anywhere other than the internet. And Dragon*Con, despite being one of the largest fan conventions in the United States, has a relative dearth of game-related booths due to being scheduled for the same weekend as PAX. So hearing someone bring up roguelikes unprompted is a unique experience for me, and it took a few seconds before I turned around to see what it was.

It was the booth of Nathan Jerpe beneath a banner reading "Roguelike Fiction," selling deluxe packages of his game Legerdemain. He had a table with a laptop set up demonstrating the game, with its output directed at a projector to show it off. And despite the fact that the game, written in Java emulating a console, is available for free from the game's website, he was selling packages containing a CD, a map and a hintbook for $20 a pop. The packages were contained within Ziploc bags in such a way that brought fond memories to this player who barely remembers the days when the first commercial CRPGs were sold in similar plastic bags containing cassette tapes and xerox'd instructions.

The similarity was not lost, it seems, on many convention goers. In a conversation we had on the last day of the con, Jerpe mentioned that several people had talked fondly of those old days, some of their experiences with such as the early Wizardry and Ultima games, others of Rogue, Moria and Angband. In all, Jerpe reports that he sold nearly a hundred packages during the con, an impressive accomplishment for an admittedly-obscure game, with ASCII graphics, available for free on the internet.

I was one of those purchasers, and not just so as to better write a column about it. Despite being one of the most widely-defined video game types (for nearly any game sold anymore can legitimately call itself a role-playing game if it chooses to carry that baggage), those games that do bear the name are often depressingly similar to each other. If it's a Western game, it's either fantasy Grand Theft Auto or Baldur's Gate. If it's a Japanese game, then it's probably a Final Fantasy wannabe. The reasons for this have less to do with developer ingenuity than the influence of marketing people and executives, so it's not unexpected to find that the most interesting design work done in CRPGs is by independents. When I paid my $20, I wasn't sure it would be a good game, but I was pretty confident it would be different.

Tricorder Readings Indicate an ASCII Planet with Static Areas, Captain

I've now been playing it sporadically for about a month. It's surprisingly large; I've only found two towns so far. (You should probably take this into account while reading my comments.) I should point out that it's not a true roguelike, by the usual standards of this column. The term means different things to different people, of course. The spectrum of opinion runs from anything with that overhead-view, grid-and-turn-based, tactical play, to any game that could surprise its creator, a definition given by Glenn Wichmann, who, being one of Rogue's creators, should know. Usually I consider the important characteristics to be randomness and item identification.

Legerdemain's areas are not random. All the maps are pre-set into the game, and transitory things about them like monsters or items on the ground remembered between visits. Dropping an item in an area and leaving, in most cases, means it is lost forever. However, according to the game's creator, there are things that can be done to some regions that are remembered. An example he gave is that a certain city in the game can be flooded by the player. This permanently changes the city's state, so that if the player comes back to it later it will remain flooded, for better or worse. The static nature of most areas may seem like it would harm replayability, and it is true that on subsequent playthroughs the game probably loses much of its mystery, but different starting magic (which is decided based on an Ultima-like series of questions before play begins) can potentially make a big difference in early play style, so that helps the game retain its challenge upon beginning anew.

Legerdemain has somewhat randomly-generated loot, a mix of hard-coded stuff and miscellaneous things. The set things seem to be awarded on the first time a given spot is examined (more on that in a bit), but random things are spawned each time an area is entered, as well as sometimes upon defeating opponents. Both sources of equipment are probably important. I know in the time I've spent with the game, I've had to heavily rely upon food found lying around, and purchased with money dropped by dead monsters, to keep myself fed.

At least at the beginning, food is a major concern for new characters. Play begins with the player's character two levels below the surface with unknown upstairs to find in order to reach the overworld. Once the surface is reached then the player can hunt for food (assuming he's selected at least one rank of the Outdoors skill at level-up), which is game-time-consuming but at least can bring in some sustenance, and further it's not uncommon to find random rations or mushrooms in the above-ground areas. But that's only once he finds the way out of the starting caverns. This tends to lend an aspect of panic to these beginning explorations; survival depends on exiting the starting caverns as soon as possible.

Live On Stage: The Magic Style of Jack Vance

Magic is a particular interesting aspect of the game, and hews closely to original Dungeons & Dragons' Vancian spell system. (Trivia: It's called "Vancian" because Gary Gygax got the idea from Jack Vance's classic fantasy novel The Dying Earth. Lots of classic D&D comes directly from fantasy literature.) Instead of using magic points, the player must memorize rituals, which are what spells are called here, and are forgotten upon use. But unlike that system, just having skill ranks in a type of magic is enough to be able to memorize its spells; there is no spellbook that the player fills out during the game. And ritual memorization is lengthy; with one rank in a school of magic, it takes around 400 turns to memorize one use's worth of a basic spell, making food consumption even more of a concern. And although the player's character can be customized somewhat at the start of the game by going through an Ultima IV/Ogre Battle-style personality quiz, it seems that all characters are magic users to some extent.

Magic in a given school (of five) cannot be used without the right brush. After the personality quiz you'll be assigned one of the five magic schools as a specialty, automatically be given a couple of skill ranks in that school, and a brush for using that magic. At any level up, you can select any two skills you wish (more at higher levels) to gain ability in, but even if you choose to gain ability in one of the other magic schools, the skill will be useless until you gain a brush of the matching type. With some searching, one of the early towns turns up a store that sells brushes, so it need not necessarily be long before the skill can be used, but it's worth keeping this fact in mind since the right skill gains can make the early game much easier.

I should mention that "school of magic" is jargon, relating to the 2nd-edition Dungeons & Dragons term for the same kind of thing, a dividing of the spells into categories that a player can specialize in. The game calls them "philosophies." Each school of magic in Legerdemain has a focus: Logos, for instance, is information-oriented, and its rituals can inform the player of monsters outside of the range of vision, a very useful spell out in the field. Chaos is the offense-related school. I haven't had the chance to try the others yet, but one of them's Bios, and it likely has some healing in it.

Jesus Saves, But He Doesn't Savescum

The game's save system is not roguelike-standard, which may be a good thing for a non-random game of this length. The game supports both "real" saves that can be reloaded indefinitely, like in nearly all other RPGs, and what I call "bookmark" saves that can only be loaded once, which are the roguelike standard. The way to make a real save is to simply save the game in your room in an inn, which you seem to get automatically. So far in my explorations I've only found one inn, but Nathan Jerpe assures me that there are more. If the player saves the game in an inn, then again in a cave, upon death he'll be returned to the inn. This essentially makes for a checkpoint system, where the player is encouraged to use towns as a base of operations, since the further a player explores from an inn, the greater the risk that he'll lose everything found on that trip if he doesn't make it back or to another inn.

There is something like item identification in the game; many magic items, and even some food items, are unknown at the beginning. They are not random though, every time a new game is started they'll have the same functions, which grants a big advantage to people who have played before. The game's UI doesn't seem to "name" identified things after their functions either, which means the player will have to take notes on their function.

That hint book that comes with the deluxe package, "Canticle of the Onslaught," deserves further description. It is surprisingly thick, over 300 pages of good paper, and is written as a journal of a trip through the game. It looks like it took a lot of time to write, and is a fairly interesting read for its own sake, filled with imaginative writing that helps to fill in the spaces between the ASCII characters on the game screen. It is recommended that the player don't read it straight through however, since it is absolutely loaded with clues. Unfortunately, it has no table of contents or index, so players wishing to go it alone (raising hand) have to read it carefully to avoid being spoiled.

Despite its depth, the hintbook is entirely optional. Even if not purchased, the game provides plenty of hints of its own. One of the game's nicer features is the question-mark spaces scattered throughout the maps. Standing on one presents a paragraph of text describing the player's surroundings, and sometimes a little extra loot to collect. It is here that the game describes the putty-like bodies of the player's initial opponents, and their sleeping quarters, which is just a bit put that they pour themselves into. The player can also converse with NPCs in a keyword-based conversation system that again brings Ultima to mind. These conversations are an important source of both quests and other, weirder information. (That "weirder" information makes for some of the better moments of the game.)

In a game in which exploration is such a focus, where the player has to discover the layout of the world for himself, there are different ways to encourage the player to do that exploring. The standard roguelike technique is to litter the dungeon with random loot, some of it very useful, so the more space he explores the more loot he gains. Another typical roguelike approach is to give the player a limited food supply and only generate more food in unexplored areas, nearly literally leading him on with a carrot on a stick. One thing roguelikes tend to be bad at, however, is installing a sense of wonder; being generated randomly, whimsical touches like the shapes of buildings in a certain town, which may not even exist in a given game, are hard to include. Legerdemain points the way to a reconciling of this kind of thing, exploration to see a well-realized world for its own sake instead of just to collect loot, with basic roguelike concepts. It is an interesting experiment, and so far in my own travels through Phenomedom, a successful one.

Overall, Legerdemain plays a lot like a marriage between an Angbandish roguelike and an old-school home computer RPG, again, like Ultimas IV-VI. Although surprisingly difficult (it's easy to get overwhelmed while out in the field and get sent back to an inn), it seems like an engaging, well-realized world, and the desire to see what's in the next screen is strong. Direction is light and exploration is largely non-linear, but this, again, is in the tradition of Ultima. This is a game that wears its Ziploc bag like a badge of honor.

Additional pictures from DragonCon:
Please forgive the lighting, blurriness, and other suckinesses of the pictures, I wasn't using the best camera. They weren't taken by the best photographer either. As always, click on a picture for a better look.

Nathan Jerpe:

Better looks at the game maps that adorned the booth:

Posted by John Harris at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

[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.]

There's a number of high-profile titles on digital download services this week -- with War World and Mega Man 9 making their way to XBLA, and Orbient a surprise revelation on WiiWare.

But there's also a chance for GamerBytes to look hands-on at that oddest of things - Banjo Kazooie, a Nintendo-published second party title turned first-party Microsoft downloadable game.

Xbox Live Arcade

XBLA This Week is War World and Mega Man 9
This week brings you Mega Man 9, the anticipated sequel to the classic franchise, and War World, the long-awaited XBLA game that has been stuck in limbo for over a year now.

GamerBytes Previews - Banjo Kazooie For XBLA
In our own little piece of new content, we have a look at the upcoming Banjo Kazooie port to the Xbox Live Arcade. Guh-Guh-Guh-Guh? Warble Garble!

Peggle XBLA To Come With 4-Player Multiplayer
Peggle is coming to the Xbox Live Arcade in a big way, bringing a ton of new multiplayer modes to the fold.

Gamasutra Postmortem - Torpex Games' Schizoid
Gamasutra was able to get the chaps over at Torpex Games to discuss their first game Schizoid - how it was working on the XNA platform, and what they have learned from this experience.

PlayStation Network

IGN Preview Namco's PowerUp Forever
We haven't heard much about PowerUp Forever for some time - now IGN have gotten a gander at it, and find just what this top-down shooter with a twist is all about.

Zen Studios Bringing The Punisher: No Mercy To The PlayStation Network Exclusively
XBLA developers Zen Studios are done with XBLA for now - they're moving onto the PlayStation Network, starting with an 8 player multiplayer shoot down featuring Marvel's favorite man on a mission.

NA PSN Store Update - You Have Won A Ticket To The Best PSN Day Ever
The best day in recent times - PlayStation Store fans got Wipeout HD, Burnout Paradise, Geon: Emotions AND Megaman 9 last week. Could things possibly get any better? Not really. Wipeout is so dreamy...

WiiWare

NA WiiWare Update - Bomberman Blast and Art Style: Orbient
Bomberman makes its way to North America this week - but the region also get a little treat - Orbient, a surprise WiiWare version of one of the GBA Bit Generations titles, Orbital.

Mega Man 9 DLC Costs You Mega Bucks
Mega Man 9 just hit the store - and we've found that it's got some extra little notices about the downloadable content that will be available for the game in the coming weeks. Characters I can understand, but paying for difficulty modes?

EU WiiWare Store Update: Mega Man 9, Strong Bad Episode 2, and Helix
Europe got a great WiiWare selection this week, enough to keep those Wii owners very happy. Who says Wii doesn't appeal to the hardcore?

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

[In this in-depth opinion piece, 2K Marin designer Steve Gaynor considers the immersive implications of a video game developer's visible influence on a final product, and argues for greater "invisibility" in design.]

When one is moved by an artist's work, it's sometimes said that the piece 'speaks' to you. Unlike art, games let you speak back to them, and in return, they reply. If the act of playing a video game is akin to carrying on a conversation, then it is the designer of the game with whom the player is conversing, via the game's systems.

In a strange way then, the designer of a video game is himself present as an entity within the work: as the "computer" -- the sum of the mechanics with which the player interacts. The designer is in the value of the shop items you barter for, the speed and cunning your rival racers exhibit, the accuracy of your opponent's guns and the resiliency with which they shrug off your shots, the order of operations with which you must complete a puzzle. The designer determines whether you win or lose, as well as how you play the game. In a sense, the designer resides within the inner workings of all the game's moving parts.

It's a wildly abstract and strangely mediated presence in the work: unlike a writer who puts his own views into words for the audience to read or hear, or the painter who visualizes an image, creates it and presents it to the world, a game designer's role is to express meaning and experiential tenor via potential: what the player may or may not do, as opposed to exactly what he will see, in what order, under which conditions.

This potential creates opportunity-- the opportunity for the player to wield a palette of expressive inputs, in turn drawing out responses from the system, which finally results in an end-user experience that, while composed of a finite set of components, is nonetheless a unique snowflake, distinct from any other player's.

One overlapping consideration of games and the arts is the degree to which the artist or designer reveals evidence of his hand in the final work. In fine art, the role of the artist's hand has long been manipulated and debated: ancient Greek sculptors and Renaissance painters burnished their statuary and delicately glazed their oils to disguise any evidence of the creator's involvement, attempting to create idealized but naturalistic images -- windows to another moment in reality, realistic representations of things otherwise unseeable in an age before photography.

Impressionist artists, followed by the Abstract Expressionists, embraced the artist's presence in the form of raw daubs and splashes of paint, drifting away from or outright opposing representational art in the age of photographic reproduction. Minimalists and Pop artists sought in response to remove the artist's hand from the equation through industrial fabrication techniques and impersonal commercial printing methods, returning the focus to the image itself, as a way of questioning the validity of personal and emotional artistic themes in the modern age.

The designer's presence in a video game might be similarly modulated, to a variety of ends. If a designer lives in the rules of the gameworld, then it is the player's conscious knowledge of the game's ruleset that exposes evidence of his hand.

Take for instance a game like Tetris. Tetris is almost nothing but its rules: its presentation is the starkest visualization of its current system state; it features no fictional wrapper or personified elements; any meaning it exudes or emotions it fosters are expressed entirely through the player's dialogue with its intensely spare ruleset.

The game might speak to any number of themes -- anxiety, Sisyphusian futility, the randomness of an uncaring universe -- and it does so only through an abstract, concrete and wholly transparent set of rules. The player is fully conscious of the game's rules and is in dialogue only with them -- and thereby with the designer, Alexey Pajitnov -- at all times when playing Tetris.

While the game's presentation is artistically minimalist, the design itself is integrally formalist. But whereas formalism in the fine arts is meant to exclude the artist's persona from interpretation of the work, a formalist video game consists only of its exposed ruleset, and thereby functions purely as a dialogue with the designer of those rules.

Embracing this abstract formalist approach requires the designer to let go of naturalistic simulation, but allows the most direct connection between designer and player: a pure conduit for ideas to be expressed through rules and states.

Alternately, the designer's hand is least evident when players are wholly unconscious of the gameworld's underlying ruleset. I don't mean here abstract formalist designs wherein the mechanics are intentionally obscured -- in that case, "the player cannot easily obtain knowledge of the rules" is simply another rule.

Rather, I refer to "immersive simulations" -- games that attempt to utilize the rules of our own world as fully as possible, presenting clearly discernible affordances and supplying the player with appropriate inputs to interact with the gameworld as he might the real world. The ultimate node on this design progression would be the experience of The Matrix or Star Trek's holodeck -- a simulated world that for all intents and purposes functions identically to our own.

This approach to game design bears most in common with Renaissance artists' attempts to precisely model reality through painting, to much the same ends: an illusionistically convincing work which might 'trick' the viewer into mistaking the frame (of the painting or the monitor) for a window into an alternate viewpoint on our own reality.

However, where Renaissance artists needed to model our world visually, designers of immersive simulations strive to model our world functionally. This utilization of an underlying ruleset that is unconsciously understood by the player allows the work of the designer to remain invisible, setting up the game as a more perfect stage for others' endeavors-- the player's self-expression, and the writer's and visual artist's craft-- as well as presenting a more perfectly transparent lens through which the game's alternate reality may be viewed.

Every time the player is confronted with overt rules that they must acknowledge consciously, the lens is smudged, the stage eroded; at every point that a simulated experience deviates from the Holodeck ideal, the designer's hand is exposed to the player, drawing attention away from the world as a believable place, and onto the limitations of an artificial set of concrete rules governing the experience.

Clearly, the ideal, virtual reality version of "being there" is impossible with current technology. Tech will progress in time; the question is, how do current design conventions unintentionally draw the designer's hand into the fore, sullying the immersiveness of the end-user experience?

One common pitfall might be an over-reliance on a Hollywood-derived linear progression structure, which in turn confronts the player with a succession of mechanical conditions they must fulfill to proceed. If I, as a player, must defeat the boss, or pull the bathysphere lever, or slide down the flagpole to progress from level 1 to level 2, then I understand the world in a limited, artificial way.

Space doesn't exist as a line, nor are our lives composed of a linear sequence of deterministic events; when our gameworlds are arranged this way, the player must be challenged to satisfy their arbitrary win conditions, which in turn requires that they understand the limited rules which constrain the experience.

The designer's role is dictatorial, telling the player "here are the conditions that I've decided you must satisfy." The player's inputs test against these pre-determined conditions until they are fulfilled, at which point the designer allows the player to progress. Within this structure, the designer's hand looks something like the following:

Creating games without a linear progression structure, and therefore without overt, challenge-based gating goals, allows the player to inhabit the space with a rhythm that better mirrors their own life's than a movie's pacing, as opposed to focusing on artificial pinchpoints that cinch the gameworld's possibility space into a straight line.

Another offending convention might be a question of where the game's control scheme lives. In character-driven games, the player's inputs most commonly reside in the controller itself, requiring the player to memorize which button does what. The simple fact that the player can only perform actions which are mapped to controller buttons confronts them with the limitations of their role within the world; the player-character is not a "real person" but a tiny bundle of verbs wandering around the world.

Run, jump, punch, shoot, gas, brake, and occasionally a more nuanced context action when they stand in the right spot-- these are the extent of the player's agency. More pointedly, having to memorize button mapping is a ruleset itself, and one that pulls players out of the experience. "How do I jump?" "What does the B button do?" These are concerns that distract from the experience of being there.

Alternatively, the game's control scheme might live largely within the simulation itself. If the player's possible interactions lived within the objects in the gameworld instead of within the control pad, the player's range of interactions would only be limited by the extent to which the designer supported them, as opposed to the number of buttons on the controller.

Likewise, the more interactions that are drawn out of the gameworld itself, as opposed to being fired into it by the player, the more immersed the player is in the experience of being there, as opposed to the mastery of an ornate control scheme. This control philosophy does not support many games that rely on quick reflexes and life-or-death situations, but perhaps that isn't such a bad thing. One need only look at the success of The Sims and extrapolate its control philosophy outward: each object in the world is filled with unique interactions, resulting in seemingly endless possibilities spread out before the player.

A related convention that unduly exposes a game's underlying mechanics results from our need to communicate the player-character's physical state to the player. In many genre games, the player must know his character's current level of health, stamina, and so forth. In real life, one is simply aware of their own physical state; however, since games must communicate relevant information almost entirely through the visuals, we end up with health bars, numerical hitpoint readouts, and pulsing red screen overlays to communicate physical state.

The player then is less concerned with their character being "hurt" or "in pain" as with their being "damaged," like a car or a toy. The rules become transparent: when I lose all my hit points I die; when I use a health kit I recover a certain percentage of my hit points; I am a box of numbers, as opposed to a real person in a real place.

Similar to the prior point, the hitpoint problem presents a limitation native to game genres which rely on combat and life-or-death situations as their core conflicts, as opposed to implying an insurmountable limitation of the medium as a whole. If I am not in danger of being shot, stabbed, bitten or crushed, then I am free to relate to my player-character in human terms instead of numerical status, thus remaining unconscious of the designer's hand.

All this isn't to say that downplaying the designer's hand is an inherently superior design philosophy; clearly, many of us connect deeply with the conscious interaction between player and machine. But as our industry rides a wave of visual fidelity ever forward, our reliance on game genres tied to the assimilation of concrete rulesets only deepens the schism between player expectations and simulational veracity.

It's been posited that games are poised to enter a golden age -- a renaissance, one might say -- and as designers, we might do well to step out of the spotlight, stop obscuring the lens into our simulated worlds, and embrace the virtues of invisibility.

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

Once again, a longer GameSetLinks takes a look at some of the URLs that I wanted to poke at in a little more detail - starting out with Warren Spector's future family craziness, and wandering into indie marketing and cunning achievement concepts.

Warren Spector, Meet... Disney Icons?

It's nice to see Chris Morris (formerly of CNN Money) writing about games again, and he has an article called 'Requiem For The Hardcore' on Forbes.com, which asks the simple but provocative question: "Are hardcore gamers as relevant as they have historically been in the gaming industry?"

It's a good piece, and makes some smart points. And embedded in there, there's this: "'I think people are going to be very surprised when they hear what I'm working on,' says Warren Spector, creative director of Junction Point Studios... 'I'm sure a lot of the hardcore folks are going to be up in arms and I'm really looking forward to getting into that discussion with them.'"

Oh, Warren, you're such a tease! In pondering what he might be working on, I refer interested readers to a Quartermann EGM column from early 2008: "Word is that Spector's new Disney project will be a platformer looking to compete with a certain pesky plumber. And who's big enough to take on Nintendo's star? Only the mouse himself!"

Given that Junction Point is Disney-owned, and Spector has been mentioning that his project is "in collaboration with folks from Disney Feature Animation and Pixar", I think this rumor doesn't sound completely out of wack. Very much looking forward to an announcement on this.

XNA Community, XBLA & Marketing

So, we've been discussing the line-up for 2009's Indie Games Summit at GDC, and something myself and co-organizers Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink have agreed is that we'll have at least one lecture about marketing your indie title - something that's absolutely vital, and quite foreign to the average game developer.

Former XNA community manager Dave Weller - a bit of a squeaky wheel nowadays, really - has been discussing this very problem on his LetsKillDave.com weblog, titled 'More lessons from XBLA on why XNA Community Games _won't_ make you rich' - and suggesting some solutions.

He particularly references the Gamasutra postmortem of Go! Go! Break Steady (pictured), explaining: "I'm not really talking about traditional marketing here, but am instead suggesting that word-of-mouth style marketing won't merely be optional, but will become your #1 priority when it comes to XNA Community Games."

Having buzz, building a fanbase, and getting people to remember who you are (and what your product is!) is just incredibly important on XBLA or XNA Community Games. Weller suggests that an 'XNA Micropublisher", "...a person or small company that knows how to position and promote your game", is the way things will go.

And actually, I do actually think that coolier, indie-style promo mini-companies a bit like Girlie Action for the game biz may happen. But there are certainly a lot of PR agencies already out there, and the informal and word of mouth nature of game buzz on the Internet may mean that it's down to the creators - only they can make the message genuine? Food for thought.

Achievements That Play For Keeps

GameSetWatch columnist Simon Parkin has written a neat article on his Chewing Pixels blog, pointing out some very interesting Xbox 360 achievements in Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway - angled for player retention in the longer term.

Parkin explains: "A number of the game’s achievements are dependent on the player continuing to log in to Xbox Live and play the title on a daily basis for a considerable length of time... one final achievement, ‘Remember September ‘44', rewards players with no less than 50 achievement points for simply playing the game at some point on September 17th, the anniversary of the events depicted in the game."

As Simon points out: "Gamers who want the full 1000 points on offer will have to hang on to the game for close to a year from now (and then remember to put the blasted thing on)." It's a cunning, and arguably borderline iffy ploy to get people to keep hold of their copies - but given the used market's flourishing, is it not surprising that developers and publishers might want to encourage people to not sell back to, say, GameStop.

But as I was reminded - and a commenter also notes - that Burnout Paradise's gradual, incremental expansion packs are a much more productive and positive way to guarantee people keep their retail release. Of course, the industry is moving oh so gradually to digital downloads, and by gosh, you can't trade them in, so that'll fix this particular conundrum eventually.

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

[In an in-depth opinion piece, both technical and evangelical, Day 1 Studios core architect Kyle Wilson (Fracture) takes stock of lessons learned during the construction of the LucasArts-published action title, asking -- what makes middleware work for you?]

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."

- 1 Corinthians 13

Love is easy. Middleware is hard.

We used middleware on Fracture for physics, tree rendering, audio, animation, facial animation, network transport, and various other systems.

Now that the game is finished, we’re taking stock of the lessons that we learned and deciding what packages we want to keep and what we want to replace as we move forward.

Middleware offers two main benefits, each of which is balanced by an associated cost:

1. Middleware provides you with more code than you could write yourself for a fraction of what it would cost you to try. No matter how clever you are, that’s how the economics of the situation work. The costs of developing a piece of software are largely fixed. But once written, any piece of software can be sold over and over again.

Because they can spread their costs over a large number of customers, middleware vendors can afford to keep larger, more experienced teams working on a given piece of functionality than independent game developers can. During Fracture, we watched a couple of pieces of immature middleware spring up after we’d written similar tools ourselves.

We watched those pieces of middleware grow and surpass our tools, because we couldn’t afford to devote the resources to our tools that the middleware vendors devoted to theirs.

The corresponding cost is that none of the functionality you get is exactly what you would have written yourself, and much of it will be entirely useless to you.

Middleware is written to support the most common cases. If you have specific needs that differ from the norm, you may be better off implementing a solution yourself.

2. Middleware offers structure. Middleware draws a line between the things that you have to worry about and the things you don’t. As long as it’s reasonably well documented and stable, you don’t need to waste mental bandwidth worrying about the things that go on underneath your middleware’s public API.

As games grow ever-larger and more complex it’s become incredibly valuable to be able to draw a line and say, The stuff on the other side of that line isn’t my responsibility, and I don’t have to worry about it.

The associated cost is that you can’t change what’s on the other side of that line. If you’re going to use middleware, you have to be willing to accept a certain amount of inflexibility in dealing with the problems that the middleware solves. You have to be willing to shape your own technology to suit the third-party libraries that you’re buying. Trying to do otherwise is a recipe for misery.

Given those benefits and costs, it makes sense to use middleware wherever you can–as long as you don’t try to license technology in the areas where you want your game to be unique. Every game has certain unique selling propositions: things that make it distinct from every other game on the market.

Likewise, every game has certain characteristics that it shares with many others. When it comes to the latter, you should buy off-the-shelf technology, accept that technology’s inflexibility, and modify your game design to suit it. When it comes to the former, you should write the code in-house. As Joel Spolsky says, don’t outsource your core competency.

So now that you’ve figured out which game functions you should be implementing through middleware, how do you decide which of the scads of available middleware packages is best for you? There are a number of issues to keep in mind.

Good middleware lets you hook your own memory allocator. If your approach to memory is to partition the entire free space up front and minimize runtime allocations, then you’ll want the ability to reserve a block for your middleware and allocate out of that.

Even if you allow dynamic allocations at any time, you’ll want to track how much memory is used by each system and instrument allocations to detect memory leaks. Any piece of middleware that goes behind your back and allocates memory directly just isn’t worth buying.

Good middleware lets you hook your own I/O functions. Most games store resources in package files like the old Doom WAD files. Middleware that doesn’t let you hook file I/O doesn’t let you put its resources in packfiles. Many modern games stream resources off DVD as the player progresses through a level.

If you can’t control middleware I/O operations, then you can’t sort file accesses to minimize DVD seeks. You’ll waste read bandwidth and your game will be subject to unpredictable hitches. Again, any piece of middleware that does file I/O directly just isn’t worth buying.

Good middleware has extensible functionality. No middleware package will do everything you want out of the box. But you shouldn’t have to modify any piece of middleware to make it do what you need. Good middleware offers abstract interfaces that you can implement and callbacks that you can hook where you need to do something unique to your game.

An animation package may let you implement custom animation controllers. A physics package may let you write your own collision primitives. Your objects should be first-class citizens of your middleware’s world.

Good middleware avoids symbol conflicts. Beware of middleware that uses the Standard Template Library carelessly. It’ll work fine until you try to switch to STLPort or upgrade to a new development environment, and then you’ll suddenly find that your engine has multiple conflicting definitions of std::string and other common classes.

To avoid symbol clashes, every class in a middleware library should start with a custom prefix or be scoped inside a library namespace. And if a piece of middleware is going to use the STL, it should do so carefully, making sure that every STL class instantiated uses a custom allocator. That allows you to hook your own memory allocator and avoids symbol conflicts.

Good middleware is explicit about its thread safety. We live in an ever-more-multithreaded world, but one where most game engines are still bound by main thread operations most of the time. For best performance, you want to offload any operations you can onto other threads.

To do that with a piece of middleware, you need to know which operations can be performed concurrently and which have to happen sequentially. Ideally a piece of middleware will let you create resources asynchronously so you can construct objects in a loader thread before handing them off to the game.

Good middleware fits into your data pipeline. Most companies export data in an inefficient platform-independent format, then cook it into optimized platform-specific formats and build package files out of those as part of a resource build.

Any piece of middleware should allow content creators to export their assets in a platform-independent format. Ideally, that format should still be directly loadable. The build process should be able to generate platform-specific versions of those assets using command-line tools.

Good middleware is stable. One of the main benefits of middleware is that it frees your mind to focus on more critical things. In this respect, middleware is like your compiler: It frees you from having to think about low-level implementation details–but only as long as you trust the compiler!

A buggy piece of middleware is a double curse, because instead of freeing your attention from a piece of functionality, it forces you to focus your attention there, on code that was written by a stranger and that no one in your company understands.

Worse still, if you’re forced to make bug fixes yourself, then you need to carry them forward with each new code drop you get of your middleware libraries. You shouldn’t need to concern yourself with the implementation details of your middleware. Middleware is only a benefit to the extent that its API remains inviolate.

Good middleware gives you source. Despite the previous point, having access to the source for any middleware package is a must. Sometimes you’ll suspect that there’s a bug in the middleware.

Sometimes you need to see how a particular input led to a particular result before you can understand why the input was wrong. Sometimes you’ll have to fix a bug no matter how good the middleware is. And frequently you’ll need to recompile to handle a new platform SDK release or to link with some esoteric build configuration.

There are other questions to ask about any piece of middleware: How much memory does it use? How much CPU time does it require? What’s the upgrade path for your current code and data? How does it interact with your other middleware? How good is the vendor’s support? How much does it cost?

But those questions have vaguer answers. Acceptable performance or cost will vary depending on the nature of your product. A cell phone game probably can’t afford to license the Unreal Engine – and probably couldn’t fit it in available memory if it did! Data upgrade paths are less of a concern if you’re writing a new engine from scratch than if you’re making the umpteenth version of an annual football game.

The rules that don’t vary are: You should buy middleware wherever you can do so without outsourcing your core competency. And to be worth buying, any piece of middleware should behave itself with respect to resource management and concurrency.

[Kyle Wilson has worked as a game developer for more than a decade. He's currently a Core Architect at Day 1 Studios, which means that he spends more time writing e-mail than writing code. In his scant free time, he writes at www.gamearchitect.net.]

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

[With the 2008 E For All Expo taking place later this week, the official exhibitor list has revealed a formal presence from just three major publishers - so what will the show be all about? Myself and Eric Caoili whipped up a quick article looking at what's been announced and how organizers seem to have come off worse in comparisons with PAX, unfortunately.]

The conference, held at the L.A. Convention Center and organized by tech giant IDG, has struggled this year in competition with Seattle's rapidly expanding Penny Arcade Expo, which has seemingly had geek cred on its side, and logged 58,500 attendees at its late August event.

For example, when E For All announced heavily merchandised pro gamer Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel as a special guest at the show, Penny Arcade's Gabe revealed that Fatal1ty would not be at PAX, adding: "Seriously, if he even tries to come we'll kick him out."

In addition, a set of wallpapers promoting E For All were roundly satirized by the Penny Arcade webcomic creators, with a shark-themed E For All effort trumped by a slightly sarcastic 'space dinosaur with a gun' wallpaper.

Of course, this isn't to say that E For All couldn't rise above to success. But it appears that of the three major hardware platform holders, only Microsoft is officially paying for a booth at the event this year, setting up an Xbox 360/Games For Windows Pavilion.

Sony and Nintendo, the latter of which participated in last year's E For All Expo, will not have their own areas at this year's event. (The event is advertising Nintendo-published games including Mario Kart and Wii Fit to be playable, but these appear to be hosted at third-party booths such as Target.)

In addition, Konami, THQ, and 2K Games will not return to the public gaming event either, despite the last two maintaining a presence at August's Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. Several other studios -- including Activision Blizzard, Namco Bandai, and Sega -- attended the rival convention, but do not intend to exhibit at E For All Expo 2008.

In fact, the matrix of comparative attendees last updated by Joystiq/BigDownload in late August appears to still largely hold sway, although Ubisoft has decided to attend E For All since that article was written, a definite win for organizers.

Therefore, a handful of upcoming titles will be available for attendees to play prior to their North American releases, particularly Ubisoft's Far Cry 2, Tom Clancy's End War, and Shaun White Snowboarding -- and Microsoft Game Studios' Gears of War 2 will be at the World Cyber Games booth. (The contents of Microsoft's Pavilion are not specified on the E For All website.)

The remainder of the expo's 41 listed booths are mostly dedicated to MMORPG companies, colleges, gaming gear, and energy beverages. As a result, the product premieres are largely food/beverage and peripheral-related.

Nonetheless, there are a couple of minor show debuts -- Signature Devices are debuting DS games including C.O.R.E, Black Sigil & Air Conflicts and the PC MMO Beyond Protocol from Dark Sky Entertainment will make its first appearance there.

With such a relatively low turnout from major publishers and developers, the organizers have turned to alternatives to fill out the space in recent weeks. Earlier announcements included a Game Career Seminar event from Gamasutra parent company and GDC organizer Think Services, but more recently, a number of peripheral add-ons have attempted to bulk out the show.

Examples include All Games Network's "Meet, Greet and Beat The Champs", which features classic arcade experts on games such as Donkey Kong, Spy Hunter and Missile Command, and 'The League of Legendary Gamers', with more pro gamers helping to collect food for the Los Angeles Food Bank.

Also included are an E for All Education Zone, which 600 Los Angeles Unified School District high-school students will attend, an expanded IndieCade independent games section, and perhaps most strangely, the fourth annual Los Angeles International Children's Film Festival, which is now holding one of its three segments at the show.

Though E For All is clearly well-meaning, its broader, scattershot style contrasts with the geek chic of Penny Arcade Expo, which lured artists such as Jonathan Coulton to give concerts, and is associated with the popular web comic.

Yet other than Fatal1ty, the other celebrity prominently mentioned at the conclusion of today's E For All press release is "Hollywood Yates, best known as 'Wolf' on NBC's American Gladiators."

As such, it's unclear -- attendee numbers pending -- whether E For All could continue to support itself in upcoming years without larger support from the major game publishers.

Gamasutra has asked IDG representatives for commentary on any other unreleased titles that might be showcased at E For All, and will follow up with an in-person show report when the event opens later this week.

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

[We've got the full version of this countdown over on big sister site Gamasutra. Sure, these type of things are subjective to some degree, but we've done some hardcore number-crunching and weighting to see who we think the top folks in the game space are - fun.]

Game Developer magazine’s highly-anticipated annual Top 20 Publishers report has debuted for 2008 and is now available on Gamasutra, revealing that publisher Nintendo, which last year unseated the long-dominant Electronic Arts, has maintained its top position on the chart.

The countdown once again this year included a wide-ranging reputation survey alongside revenue, release count, average review, and anonymous partner feedback.

It saw the Kyoto-headquartered publisher's extremely strong stable of first-party game releases for Wii and DS, alongside chart-topping reputation scores, again leaving it atop the chart.

After Nintendo and EA, completing the top five are: Activision, keeping its #3 spot for the third year running; and Ubisoft, which maintained last year's impressive four-place surge.

Sony Computer Entertainment also jumped into the top five thanks to an increased slate of titles, improving on a review record already higher than most, and maintaining positive relationships with its surveyed partners.

Further down the chart, back on the list at #18 after a two-year absence is Codemasters, whose aggressive expansion and improving review scores helped the company secure its spot in the countdown, in the process displacing last year's newly-ranked import game publisher Atlus.

The 2008 rankings were calculated by considering number of releases by SKU, average review scores, and estimated publisher revenue from August 2007 to July 2008. It also included the results of a survey conducted to gather opinions on the major video game software publishers.

More than 300 industry professionals from all parts of the game production process were asked to give their opinions – including comments – on the reputations of each publisher in the survey.

In addition, scores and commentary were gathered from respondents who had direct experience with the publishers in the recent past, either as workers or partners, including milestone, marketing and pay feedback.

"We’re delighted to present the result of our yearly publisher countdown once again," said Simon Carless, director, Game Developer Research. "Nintendo’s second chart-topping appearance in a row underscores the extraordinary popularity of the firm’s first-party Wii and DS franchises – we congratulate them on their achievement."

The full Top 20 Publishers 2008 countdown is available both to subscribers in the October 2008 edition of Game Developer magazine and, for the first time this year, for free on industry-leading sister site Gamasutra.

In addition, a much larger, canonical Top 20 Publishers 2008 report featuring all statistics, ratings and complete survey feedback – including specific comments for each publisher - is available at the Game Developer Research website.

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

Switching back from the longer, more random link comments, we return to the GameSetLinkDump, this time headed by some more TIGSource demake highlights (yep, don't get bored of that competition, tragically).

But there's also some genuine freshness - including a look at the (pictured) Japanese dating virtual world partially set in Tokyo geek mecca Akihabara, a really odd game about 'free culture', Steve Purcell getting all 8-bit, an English trailer for the Game Center CX game, and various other neat things.

Run to the hills:

Sweet Tiger Sauce - Demakes Compo « Game Haus
The Demakes compo is the single best game competition thus far this year, so I'm going to link to another highlights reel.

Metaplace - Community Spotlight - Virek Online by Fredriksson
Good example of a concrete (but not yet public, sadly) Metaplace-constructed game, a 'folk music RPG', oddly. With this and LBP, user-created content may finally be getting there.

Akihabara Channel » ai sp@ce First Impression
Japanese dating/adult games go all virtual world, with head-scratching results.

Crispy Gamer - Column: Press Pass: September Roundup
Kyle Orland has the best summary so far of why the CAG/Kotaku thing is a little silly.

In-Depth Q&A With Spore Creator Will Wright :: Games Q&A :: UpUpDnDn :: Paste
Hey, ANOTHER Wright interview, but this one's a bit more freewheeling still, so that's nice.

Rhizome covers Molleindustria's 'Free Culture Game'
'Touted as "playable theory," the Free Culture Game offers a ludic metaphor for the battle between copyright encroachments and the free exchange of knowledge, ideas and art.' Heavy, and abstract stuff.

SPUDVISION: Battle Zoe
Steve 'Sam & Max' Purcell jamming on a Tank Girl-ish Battlezone tip, originally for the I Am 8-Bit show. Dig it.

Holy crap, the day just keep getting better for... - Tiny Cartridge
'The above clip is the first trailer to feature English text/audio from GCCX’s U.S. release, Retro Game Challenge. Notice that in addition to keeping Arino’s very non-American name intact, publisher XSeed also left the Famicom-esque system in there, instead of using something more NES-y.'

Wonderland: Operation: Sleeper Cell
'Sounds like a AAA shooty game right? Wrong. It's an ARG to benefit cancer research!'

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

[As mentioned before, the latest issue of Game Developer has a creator-written postmortem of Metanet's N+ for Xbox Live Arcade, and here's some excerpts from Raigan and Mare's article for the mag, revealing how the team dealt with planning issues, focused on a clean and simple design, and ran into certification snags.]

The latest issue of sister publication Game Developer magazine includes a creator-written postmortem on the making of Metanet's N+, the company's Xbox Live Arcade version of its original freeware PC platformer N.

These extracts reveal how the studio of two developers (with some contracted help) faced development obstacles on a platform with tighter restrictions than those to which its members were accustomed, as well as how the nature of the remake allowed the team to focus on refinements and simplicity over unnecessary features.

Metanet co-founders Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns crafted the postmortem, which was introduced in Game Developer as follows:

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

User-Created Content And Level Sharing

One of the chief stumbling blocks Metanet encountered over the course of development was the issue of user-created content, something the team very much wanted to include (and had developed the capability to do so) but for a variety of reasons was unable to ship. As the pair explains:

"At first, discussion was limited to the technical, 'how' it could be done, rather than 'if' it could be done. Microsoft supported the idea but expressed a very reasonable need to limit users from creating offensive content such as hate speech, representations of male genitalia, offensive language, and so on. The problem was that severe limitations would cripple the user's ability to create interesting content,