With Microsoft's Xbox Live Community Games project set to launch on November 19th, and a plethora of amateur and indie titles likely to be available on day 1, it's going to be interesting to see what titles pop up on the service, which is an attempt by Microsoft to truly democratize console game development.

Though you only need a $99 yearly subscription to the XNA service to test and upload your own games on the Xbox 360, there will naturally be higher-end indies using the service, since you can charge up to 800 points ($10) for your Xbox Live Community Game download. One of the most intriguing of those is Bangkok-based Novaleaf Software, which has completed Biology Battle! as a launch title.

We sat down with Jason Swearingen, the CEO of Novaleaf, which has created the XNA shooter (also available in demo form on PC) over the course of 11 months. The game, which cost just under $100,000 to develop, was originally planned as an Xbox Live Arcade title, before shifting to XNA Community Games, and the Novaleaf Game Studios division is part of a 20-person IT outsourcing and contracting company founded by Swearingen in Bangkok.

In this chat, the company founder answered questions on how the shooting game, in which you "take control of a medical nanobot during its mission inside of a target cell", came about, the local game development scene in Thailand, and his hopes for an upcoming planned ninjas vs. pirates magnum opus.

When was your studio founded, and who are the principal founding members?

The studio was founded by myself. In 2006 I left Microsoft and moved with my wife to Thailand, where I started Novaleaf Software.

Novaleaf started off as an enterprise software and consulting company, somewhat because my business partner Cyrus had some outsourcing leads that brought in a quick revenue stream. But the reason I started Novaleaf was because of XNA. It convinced me that there’s an opportunity to build an indie game studio off the beaten path (here in Thailand).

An easy language like C#, and the power of DirectX and writing games for Xbox 360? I was sold! So in September 2007, Novaleaf Game Studios was officially founded, and it’s been my primary focus since then.

Were you planning this title for Xbox Live Arcade, or has it always been designed for Xbox Live Community Games?

Biology Battle started of as an internal prototype, just to validate our internal business and development processes, and make sure we can actually create a game of export quality. After we had spent about 5 months writing the prototype, the game was (actually to my surprise) quite fun. So we decided to send it to Microsoft’s XBLA publishing.

They actually found it interesting too, so we got some ways in their process, before ultimately being rejected. At that point, we had spent about 7 months of development on the game, and with XNA Community Games on the horizon, we decided to damn the torpedoes and shoot for an XBLCG launch title.

What are its inspirations - are there particular titles or genres that it owes a debt to?

Nothing. The game is totally unique in every way. A perfect gem of innovation.

OK, seriously, the initial prototype was basically Geometry Wars-inspired. It was an idea from Nick (one of our devs) to prototype an arcade shooter. We even used little vector graphic looking shape for the player. I hope that graphic isn’t still buried in the source!

That bit of doppelganger-ism only lasted until about month 2 of development, at that point I have been pushing heavily to make the game as unique as possible, but still appease the hard-core otaku gamers out there. Speaking of otaku (the international definition of the term), we had a demo of the full game setup at GCAC in Singapore last month.

A Japanese businessman, with not a word (he probably didn’t speak English) came up and started playing Biology Battle, and kept playing for 30 minutes straight, eventually getting to about 5th place in the local topscore list.

It was awesome to see him in action, as it really made me happy that there are people out there who can really love and master the game. We really put huge amounts of effort to make the game play easy for noobs, but competitive for the hardcore players.

I personally don’t have any substantial experience with Geometry Wars, so I have to say my primary influences are the games I grew up with: Smash TV, Kid Icarus, and R-Type are probably where most of my inspiration for Biology Battle came from, though there was never any conscious decision to borrow ideas from any of them.

What's Thailand like to develop games in, in terms of available staff and expertise?

Before I moved here, I knew that Thailand’s software industry is small, and the game development industry was virtually non-existent. That’s actually why I focused so heavily on using XNA, because modern games are basically graphically intensive, realtime simulations, one of the hardest challenges any developer could face. I assumed (rightly so) it would be difficult to hire seasoned game developers.

Using C# and XNA, we do not have to deal with things like memory management and pointer arithmetic. When hiring a team of entry level developers, this might make the difference between success and failure. I suppose in retrospect, we have to wait until November 19th to see if it’s a success, but it does feel like the right decision so far.

I admit the lack the industry professionals in the Bangkok workforce is a bit of a challenge. My past life was as a DRM (digital rights management) developer at Microsoft, which is really worlds apart in culture and expertise from the industry here.

One of the things I learned at Microsoft is the importance of a good interview process, and I can quite proudly say that our 6 hour interviews are in stark contrast to the standard 30 minute interviews found at other software companies here in Bangkok. I feel that this has really helped us select the right people so far, and will help us keep finding more in the future.

How many people worked on this project and for how long?

Biology Battle was completed by 4.5 developers in 11 months. I say 4.5 because I include myself half-time. The other half of my time was spent doing businessy things that CEOs do.

The total costs of development (inclusive of expenses like office space and electricity) run a little under the USD$100,000 mark, which might sound a lot (or little) depending on the person, but I think it’s pretty reasonable considering this is our first game, and we needed to learn from square one.

Also I’m personally pretty impressed in the team, because I’m the only one with prior professional experience, and that was writing security SDKs, not games!

I forgot to mention, but Novaleaf Game Studio is part of Novaleaf Software, which is a 20 person company. So if anyone reading this is trying to calculate how much money they need to start their own studio, keep in mind my expenses are a little lower due to resource sharing.

Do you do contracting for other game companies in addition to your own work?

I’m personally not a fan of contracting as it generally doesn’t provide a strong incentive to all parties to put their best effort in. I think that’s exponentially more important in game development, where that elusive “fun factor” isn’t something a design doc can ever specify (not design docs written by mortals at least).

That said, I’m interested in exploring collaboration ideas with anyone, art studios, hobby devs, or even other game studios. A great example of this is Victor from Krazy Games, who wrote a midi player up on the Ziggyware XNA site. I contacted him and he ended up writing Biology Battle’s music engine.

Your upcoming projects (according to your website) include Aarr! Ninjas Beware. Could this be a Ninjas Vs. Pirates game? Is this a real genre now?

I just love the whole ninja/pirate animosity. When we decided on the ninja/pirate theme, I hadn’t heard of any related games either out or in development, but Pirates Vs. Ninjas had already been an internet meme for a long time, so it’s only natural that others gain inspiration from that totally awesome mashup.

The game mechanics for Aarrr! are based on a pitch sent to me by a guy, Ben in Seattle. It’s a fantastic idea and I would tell you more about it, but my undead monkey tells me that I should wait. Oh, don’t forget about the robot-spacemen-cowboy-zombie-werewolf subgenre too. Pure gold there be.

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

['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time, a look at Fallout 3 and morals.]

Washington D.C. is a bleak and difficult place to eke out an existence. From the moment you exit the relative safety of Vault 101 and take your first lungful of radioactive breeze, it’s clear that Fallout 3’s development team has created a post-apocalyptic capital wasteland of grim authenticity.

Indeed, if a player harbours any sort of perverse attraction to the idea of living in an anarchic, rubble strewn, radiation-soaked America, Fallout 3 soon dampens it. These streets, or what’s left of them, are relentlessly hostile. Every can of coke requires a chemotherapy chaser, every rival scavenger you meet while traipsing over the endless debris would put a bullet in your eye sooner than look into it.

This is an America whose dream died a long time ago; whose selfish, writhing instincts were revealed in full when the blanket of social responsibility and respectability burned up in nuclear fire. But while Fallout 3’s America is a bleak place indeed, it is still very much the land of the free.

You see, with anarchy comes a giddy sort of liberty. Despite the hostility of its geography and inhabitants, Fallout 3’s world is pregnant with opportunity. As with all contemporary open world videogames, you are free to be the kind of person you want to be. Should you so choose you can steal from the poor or help them; you can speak with unshakeable politeness or unflinching rudeness; you can make friends and share resources or make enemies and take them. Post-Christian as well as post-apocalyptic, the sum of your moral choices in Fallout’s world is then represented by a karma stat.
But, as with any open-world videogame, the opportunities, while wide and not always binary, are subject to their own limits and boundaries. These are the restrictions imposed by both technology and premise. Technologically, you cannot build a plane from scrap metal in Fallout 3 and fly away to a new, radiation-free existence as a sheep farmer in Australia, for example.

And the boundaries of the scenario mean that you could never be a pacifist in this world. Instead, the choices you have are whether to sneak past the shotgun-wielding leper or to take his head off with a fat boy missile. The basic need to survive in a city whose inhabitants’ existence depends on depriving others of resources is common to every player, whoever they want to be. To play Fallout 3 is to embrace violence: it’s a dog eat dog existence where cruelty and murder are an inescapable reality of the setting.

There is also a third kind of restriction on player freedom in the game, one that forbids a particular action both technically possible and narratively plausible.

In Fallout 3, you cannot kill children.

Writing for Edge Online this week, the game’s lead designer, Emil Pagliarulo, explained the decision to restrict murder to men, women and animals in the game, forbidding the use of violence against children, something that was present in the previous Fallout titles.

“We began to think, really what benefit would there be in killing the kids?” he says. “It just seems gratuitous, unnecessary and cruel.”

Pagliarulo states that killing children using Fallout 3’s impressive engine is not something that would have passed ESRB checks anyway. That some violent games have grisly features cut or dulled in order to secure a specific rating is news to no-one, so why the need to elaborate on and justify the decision in the public sphere? Because, says Pagliarulo, the decision to self-moderate was a moral and ethical one.

Problematically, in singling out and self-censoring one particular type of ‘crime’ in his game Pagliarulo by implication justifies all the others as being non-gratuitous and necessary. Last night I blew the head from a homeless scavenger girl, one who’s barely into twenties. The slow motion camera tracked her head’s explosion before lingering on the crimson fountain spurting from her neck stump. Is this kind of interaction and feedback ‘socially responsible’? And so then what’s the difference to killing a minor?

Is the life of a make-believe child really worth more than that of a make-believe adult?

Pagliarulo states at the start of the piece that the decision was born out of a “heightened sense of social responsibility”. If the decision to restrict the player’s freedom in this respect was to in some way serve players with moral instruction then it sends players a dangerous and mixed message.

Bethesda has implemented half of a legitimate real-world law into a virtual world defined by its very lawlessness and anarchic freedom. In this sense it’s a decision that hurts the integrity of Fallout 3’s setting. Take away the freedom to commit atrocities within an open word game and you undermine the impact and power of the good, philanthropic choices a player makes.

This is not to say that a game designer should not seek to communicate moral values via their game. Videogames are all too often all about the ends and not the means. But self-censorship in this way removes all possibility of communicating moral worth through cause and effect, neutering the power and potential of the medium in doing so.

Self-censorship was the least effective course of action open to Bethesda if they are looking to morally instruct their players. Why not take the route less-traveled and try to implement some meaningful consequence, something beyond an essentially meaningless ‘karma’ stat?

Of course it is the route less-traveled for a reason: it’s a whole lot more work. The framework of systems and rules that govern Fallout 3 serve the setting: a place of lawless anarchy. As such it’s difficult to introduce a potent enough disincentive to murdering children. And, in more general terms it’s hard to make any game talk to a player in true terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, when the medium’s primary vocabulary is one of ‘success’ and ‘failure’.

In real life, if you kill a child you will be imprisoned and, depending on where you live, killed for the crime. Not only that but, insanity aside, there will also be heavy physical, mental and emotional repercussions to your action, things that will stay with you throughout the rest of your life. How can these kinds of severe, complex outputs be communicated in a videogame? Do you, as in Steel Battalion, kill the player and wipe their save game to teach a lesson? Or do you, as in Fable 2, let the player’s evil shape their character’s physical appearance, making them more unpleasant and ugly for it?

Videogames will always struggle to provide deeper, more nuanced consequences. Try to provide multiple narrative routes through your experience and costs will sky-rocket into the implausible. Restrict the player’s abilities in order to impede their progress and you have a weak compromise that offers little in the way of persuasive or realistic moral instruction.

These are difficult questions with few satisfying answers. But no matter what, in removing the opportunity to kill children in their anarchic game, Bethesda has admitted videogames’ ineffectiveness in providing meaningful disincentives and negative repercussions for in-game atrocities. That the team chose to carve the issue out of their game rather than attempt to engage it head on, speaks volumes.

Posted by Simon Parkin at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

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

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

The goodies in this latest version include physics-based games derived from an arcade classic and a traditional Japanese toy, a color-oriented relaxing puzzler and an action game vaguely reminiscent of the Atari ST release Bubble Ghost.

The top titles of the week are as follows:

Game Pick: 'Daruma Game' (Naokazu Terada, browser)
"A Flash implementation of an ancient Japanese game called Daruma Otoshi, with a couple of small changes made by the developer Naokazu Terada. The objective of this game is to knock pieces away from a structure using a ball on a string, so that the head at the top of it touches the ground without overturning."

Game Pick: 'Physics Invader' (nekogames, browser)
"This remake of Taito's arcade classic features the novel use of Box2D physics for enemy sprites and projectiles, although everything else from the original have been retained in this version. This includes an infinite number of levels which are exact copies of each other, with a slight increase in difficulty as the only distinguishable difference."

Game Pick: 'rlax' (Platina Games, browser)
"A colorful puzzle game based on the concept of removing flat 2D tiles stacked on top of each other in the right order before time runs out."

Game Pick: 'Crow in Hell' (Web Cypher, browser)
"An action game which involves guiding a black bird from one room to another while avoiding contact with walls, ceilings, floors, and a variety of traps strategically placed to impede your progress."

Browser Game Pick: 'Grey Matter' (Edmund McMillen, Tommy Refenes, Danny Baranowski, browser)
"Grey Matter is a collaborative project developed by the creators of Goo! and Gish, where players take control of a black dot which can only destroy enemies by running into them. Use the cursor keys to move, hold the shift key to reduce your movement speed, and press the space key to activate your boosts temporarily."

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

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time, he presents a Halloween special in honor of devnull's Nethack tournament, which begins at midnight!]

The most impressive thing about devnull's Nethack tournament is its longevity. This is the tenth consecutive year it's been run. It's old enough that it's spanned multiple Nethack versions. It's been said that it could be the oldest-running computer gaming tournament in existence. It's a difficult claim to prove, but it may will be true.

Despite the great obstacles to making roguelikes work as multiplayer games they have long had a substantial online presence, and a big part of this is the relative ease in setting up terminal-based, ASCII games for playing over the internet via telnet, SSH, or some other form of remote console.

Originally intended for local networks, when the internet hit it big suddenly games that were originally shared between a group of students could be enjoyed from the other side of the planet. In the case of Nethack, despite the availability of graphics when played locally, a good case could be made that online play, such as though alt.org, is the best way to play.

It gets you other people's bones files (remnant levels of past, lost games), a community score list (now so bloated that the lowest entry on the top 2000 list is an ascension with over 4 million points), ghost names taken from prior players, realtime game spectating, game recording through TTYRECs, and even the sending of messages to players during the game by retrofitting Nethack's mail daemon monsters.

What is probably the best-known public Nethack server isn't even up year-round. The yearly Nethack tournament hosted by dev/null/network only runs during the month of November, usually making the front page over at Slashdot shortly before it lands. (Slashdot stories: 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2001) While light on features compared to alt.org's (mostly) perpetual setup, their tournament is interesting for many other reasons.

<oldnews>
Despite Nethack's great suitability for online play, there are some difficulties with running an actual tournament. Probably the biggest is that, in the years since the release of version 3.4.3, Nethack has been extensively analyzed and spoiled, even wikified, and its source code has been made searchable on the web more than once.

Anyone willing to put the energy into it can build an extensive bulwark of knowledge against the game, and a player that has acquired it can play amazingly well. New players are lucky to get to level 7, but people who have really studied the game win all the time. A few players, given enough time and effort, seem able to win on demand.

Three games over on alt.org have earned exactly the maximum possible score in the signed 32-bit integer variable the game uses to record it, over 2.7 billion points, and one of those wasn't even a winner. If more than one player is capable of reaching MAXINT-1 points then, it's sad to say, score is probably no longer the best measure of playing ability.
</oldnews>

devnull's award setup takes this into account by measuring some accomplishments other than score. To this end, there's roughly four levels of trophies, with some aimed at nearly every type of person who plays Nethack.

Things Most People Can win

The lowest tier simply measures progress towards winning a game. There's an array of several Stars, from plastic to dilithium (the most valuable gemstone in Nethack), that are awarded for making game progress. Each player earns one of these, corresponding to his best progress into the game.

A Plastic Star, for instance, is earned for completing the Sokoban levels. A bit further up the scale is the Iron Star, for beating the Quest dungeon. The Copper Star is awarded for entering Gehennom. The most notable stars are Silver (getting the Amulet of Yendor), Gold (reaching the Elemental Planes), Platinum (reaching the Astral Plane), and Dilithium (ascending).

Notably, one of the stars is earned from reaching the bottom level of the Gnomish Mines, which, with persistence and luck, most players can probably accomplish. Because of this, a good majority of players can win something. (Note that by winning "something," I mean a small gif suitable for linking to a website. I do not think there are physical trophies involved this year.)

Another category that tends to be wide open are the challenges. One of the most distinctive things about the devnull tournament is that it's not played, strictly speaking, with vanilla Nethack. Every year since 2003 2005 the maintainers have written and added a new patch to the game that implements a substantial new feature. The feature is never revealed ahead of time; the player must discover it during the game.

It always revolves around some thing that a player must accomplish. These "challenges" are sometimes surprising in their wide-ranging scope: the very first one required that players go to popular web game Kingdom of Loathing and complete a quest in a Nethack-inspired parody dungeon! Other challenges haven't required going to another site, but have some fairly heavy Zork references and a Pac-Man maze.

Nethack adepts may shaking their heads in dismay at that news, so they'll be relieved to hear that devnull's challenges are optional. The first time the player does something that in any way affects a challenge he's told and asked if he wants to participate, although the nature of the challenge itself isn't otherwise revealed. If he chooses then, he can completely disable challenges and play what amounts to (barring bugs) standard Nethack 3.4.3.

Most of the really good players know that to do well at Nethack requires knowing as much about the game as they can and so pre-disable them in their tournament config file. But to players who don't care so much about winning one of the big trophies, the challenges can be a fun diversion, allowing them to liven up a game of which they thought they had known everything.

Note, especially, that each year all the challenges from previous years remain in the game, in addition to the new challenge. All of the challenges get their own trophy awarded to players who complete it. This year, as revealed by the trophy description page, nine trophies center on the new challenge!

Things Experienced 'Hackers Can Win

The next tier of awards are for those players to whom ascensions are expected and foregone conclusions, and counts what a variety of ascensions they have during the tournament month. Ascending a character of each gender (that is, any male character, and any female character) has "shot the Birdie."

Ascending a character of each gender and alignment (lawful, neutral and chaotic) in any combination, requiring a minimum of three victories, is "throwing the Double Top." Add in all the races (human, elf, dwarf, gnome and orc, so five wins minimum) to "do the Hat Trick." "Hitting the Grand Slam" is to also ascend every role of the game's 13, which by implication means also winning 13 games during the one-month contest period. Last year, three players accomplished this.

Finally, "going the Full Monty" is doing all this, plus keeping all of the game's conducts in at least one won game. They don't have to all be done in a single game, but a few of the conducts, like foodless, weaponless and pacifist, are still quite challenging all by themselves. All of these awards can also be earned "with bells on," which in the jargon of the tournament means meeting their requirements in consecutive games.

So, to win the Full Monty With Bells On is to win 13 games in a row, one of every role, and getting in the foodless, atheist and pacifist conducts along the way. Last year someone won this for the first time in the tournament's history. Predictably, it was won by marvin, maintainer of the Atari ST port of Nethack, scourge of alt.org's scoreboard, and probably the best overall 'hacker in the world.

Things Really Good Players Can Win

Another set of awards goes to the player who earnest the highest score with each character role. Score, as mentioned, is no longer the best measure of playing skill, but the game still tracks it and it does serve an important historic value. It's interesting to note those cases where a score listed as winning a role trophy also appears winning another trophy; in this manner, one can discover that the player who won Most Conducts did it while playing a Monk.

The top tier of trophies are the mutually-exclusive (except for ties) ones that record the best players, according to various measurements, played during the contest period. The best scoring game played during the month is recorded here.

In 2007 that top score was 134,520,114 points, obtained in a game played by user nopsled. This was also that Monk game that won Best Conduct, with 10 of the game's 12 earned. (I've been unable to find conclusive details of the conducts he kept, but it was probably all of them except pacifist and foodless. The reason playing a Monk is significant is that they actually get bonuses for fighting unarmed, so the conduct for never hitting with a wielded weapon is relatively easy to keep.)

Things The Very Best Can Win

Another top-tier trophy notes the lowest scored ascension, which in 2007 went to theta's game of 25,360 points. Earning an extremely high Nethack score is mostly a matter of patience, but earning an extremely low score for a winning game is a tremendous challenge.

The player gets one point for each experience point earned through combat (no free experience grants are counted), and that score is doubled upon victory, so to do this one must nearly play as a pacifist anyway. The first ascension trophy goes to the player to get the first victory during the contest period, usually on the first day.

The fastest ascensions in game time (turns elapsed) and real time (only actual playing time counted) are now tracked by separate trophies. 2007's fastest game in real time was aardvark's credibility-defying four-and-a-half-hour game, and its fastest counted in turns was r.g.r.n regular rast's playthrough of 10,067 turns, which is even more eye-popping to someone who knows what a player must go through to win.

Getting to the penultimate level of the dungeon rapidly is not hard at all for a player with just the right equipment (controlled levelport has been a trademark Nethack trick since ancient times), but getting that one last floor down requires getting three specific items that usually require a lot of fighting to earn. But the worst bit is that the player cannot purposely levelport while wearing the Amulet of Yendor, so he must walk all the way back up, while getting sent back levels randomly, purely through the malevolent whim of the game.

Things Marvin Can Win

Of the four remaining exclusive trophies, two of them, Most Ascensions and Best of 13, are nearly always won by marvin. Best of 13 is the number of won games out of 13 consecutive ones. Hitting a Grand Slam with Bells On would also earn one a perfect score in this, but I don't know what happens if two players qualify.

Things Kenny From South Park Can Win

Another trophy notes the "death by trickery" that the game reports when, due to a bug in the game's code, it wrongly counts a game as having been tampered with.

If Nethack thinks it detects tampering with the game files it'll end the game, reporting "A trickery" on the scoreboard. Since the tournament version patches the game software, it is always possible that this will occur (as it did a number of times last year). In that event this trophy is offered as a consolation prize.

The last trophy is a real favorite, awarded to the player who encountered the most unique causes of death during the contest period. 2007's trophy for Most Unique Deaths was won by theta who, with 141 different types, had 72% of all the possible demises.

This is pretty impressive in itself; much is made by all the ways a Nethack game can end, but the tournament's maintenance software lumps most monster-caused deaths into a small number of root causes, so one can't just get killed by every monster there is to shoot up his total. Many causes are rather obscure.

Everything that clips even a single hit point is potentially a source of mortality, and Nethack has so many sources of piddling low damage that the great majority of those death types, in practice, only occur to players who are shooting for them. And many death types, like being petrified by Medusa or dying to a demon lord, basically require giving up a game so advanced that winning would be a foregone conclusion to many players.

If this sounds like fun, new players can sign up once the tournament begins on November 1 on the registration page. If you just want to watch, check out the bragging board. You can also help the tournament out by purchasing merchandise at the swag page, which has new stuff as well as a few items left over from the very first tournament. Go have a look, and bask in that warm glow of awesome that only a printed adaption of a green-screen terminal display can provide.

[Come back in a couple of days for part two of @Play's devnull Nethack tournament special, a Q&A session with devnull maintainer Robin Bandy!]

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

[A final IGF reminder is here alongside a neat Easter Egg for those who want to see prominent indies looking sheepish and/or triumphant in front of a few thousand people - the 2008 IGF Awards video is now online.]

The Independent Games Festival has debuted the full streaming video of its 2008 IGF Awards ceremony, also reminding interested possible entrants that the final deadline to enter the 2009 IGF Main Competition is Saturday, November 1st at 11.59pm PST.

The 2008 IGF Awards Ceremony was held in February 2008 during Game Developers Conference. It was presented by Venture Africa/Arctic designer Andy Schatz, alongside IGF content directors and Offroad Velociraptor Safari creators Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink.

With the ceremony accompanied by interstitials from comedic video troupe Mega64, the 2008 IGF victors included $20,000 Seamus McNally Grand Prize winner Crayon Physics Deluxe, Kloonigames' 2D physics puzzle game that allows players to experience what it would be like to transform drawings into physical objects.

Other major winners at the IGF ceremony included physics-based puzzle action game, 2D Boy's World of Goo, which won the awards for both Design Innovation and Technical Excellence, and Audiosurf. As well as the streaming video, there are also now pictures of the IGF Pavilion and Awards available on IGF.com.

The organizers are also giving a final reminder about deadlines for the 2009 Independent Games Festival, which is already seeing a very strong set of entries ahead of this weekend's initial deadline.

Games selected as finalists in the Main Competition (due November 1st) or Student Showcase competition (due November 15th) will be available in playable form on the 2009 Game Developers Conference show floor, with their creators given complementary passes to attend the event, which includes the third annual Independent Games Summit.

Entrants will compete for nearly $50,000 in prizes, including awards for Innovation, Excellence in Design, and the coveted $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the IGF Awards, held in March 2009 during GDC.

In addition, the IGF Mobile entry deadline is on November 17th, with $30,000 in total for those indie creators making games for iPhone, cellphone, and other handheld devices.

More information on the competitions are available at the official IGF webpage and the official IGF Mobile webpage.

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

[Happy Halloween, GameSetWatch readers! After a short hiatus, Mister Raroo returns to discuss some of the games he’s been playing this Halloween season. As is par for the course in Raroo’s articles, other topics manage to find their way into the mix, including embarrassing Halloween costumes, scurrying cats, The Puberty Fairy, and more!

Halloween Time With Mister Raroo

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday, going back to my earliest memories of childhood when my mom wouldn’t allow me to buy pricey costumes, opting instead to settle for budget-priced fare that was, in her opinion, just as good. “Just as good” didn’t cut it when I was a Return of the Jedi-obsessed elementary school kid in 1983 and had my heart set on dressing up as one of the pig-like Gamorrean Guards from Jabba the Hutt’s palace.

Since my mom wouldn’t fork over the cash for an expensive costume, I had to don a cheap plastic mask and body suit that made me look more like a Gamorrean Janitor than anything else. Such a get-up effectively made me a subject of mockery for some of the hooligan junior high kids who also chose to dress as Gamorrean Guards but were lucky enough to have realistic-looking rubber masks. But, I forgive her! Now that I’m a parent, I understand that there’s not always money available for frivolous expenses like costly Halloween costumes.

Still, even something like the Gamorrean Guard embarrassment wasn’t enough to deter my love of Halloween. I don’t think there’s been a year yet when I haven’t dressed up, and between chaperoning my niece Autumn and my son Kaz, trick-or-treating has continued to be an annual ritual for me. This year will be no different; Kaz and I will be dressing up as bees and Missus Raroo will be taking on the role of beekeeper. I’m hoping that having such a cute theme will score us extra candy when we make our trick-or-treat rounds!

Halloween was the first major holiday Missus Raroo and I celebrated together, and the memory was so special that we decided to make it our wedding date. Having our anniversary on Halloween makes it feel like the world is celebrating right along with us. Instead of a cheesy romantic dinner over candlelight, Missus Raroo and I will be carving pumpkins, eating candy, and watching Kaz take in the wonder of his second Halloween.

But when all is said and done, one of my favorite ways to wind down after a long evening of Halloween festivities is to kick back and play some video games. Over the years there has been no shortage of game releases perfectly suited for a creepy Halloween night, and this year has been no different. So, without further ado, I present you with Mister Raroo’s Top Picks for Halloween 2008!

Silent Hill: Homecoming (Konami, Xbox 360/Playstation 3)

The original Silent Hill on the Playstation will always be my favorite, not necessarily because I think it’s the best game in the series, but because it really scared the heck out of me. The game was released during a period in my life when I really didn’t have much going on. I had just graduated from college and was living back at home, working part time and basically trying to figure out what to do with my life. With so much free time, I often stayed up into the wee hours playing video games until I finally passed out from sheer exhaustion.

Silent Hill was one such game that I’d stay up playing until almost daybreak. While the game featured some pretty frightening visuals, it was the brilliant sound design that quickened my pulse and made me question if there weren’t unspeakable atrocities lurking in the darker corners of my room. I don’t think I’ve ever been more scared playing a video game, but that’s why it was so fun.

In the past few years, though, I’ve become less enthused about being frightened. I’ve stopped watching movies that give me the creeps and my gaming tastes have moved towards more light and cheerful fare. Perhaps avoiding scary games has lowered my tolerance for fear, but whatever the case, when I decided to give recently released Silent Hill: Homecoming a try, I once again came down with a serious case of the heebie-jeebies.

I dabbled with all of Silent Hill’s sequels, but none of them managed to capture my attention as much as the first. Homecoming, however, has grabbed hold of me more than I expected, and I’ve spent quick a few late nights cautiously exploring the game’s unnerving world. In a lot of ways, Homecoming feels more like the first game than any of the other sequels, and while that might turn some fans off, it made me feel comfortable diving into the world of Silent Hill once again..

As always, a frightening atmosphere is set by appropriately gloomy sound design, and thankfully, the game’s environments are detailed and filled with dreary fog and shadows. However, what appeals to me most of all is that the character control is vastly improved, making navigation and combat much less cumbersome than in previous Silent Hill games. There were too many times I died in the other Silent Hill games because I couldn’t get the character to move how I wanted (or at least I’ll just keep telling myself that so I don’t have to admit that maybe I just wasn’t very good at the games!).

I’m not sure how well the hardest of the hardcore Silent Hill fans have reacted to the familiar ground explored by Homecoming, but I’ve had a blast staying up past my bedtime, jumping at any tiny noise I hear in my house. For some reason my cats become particularly mischievous whenever I play Homecoming and decide to dart around the room at particularly tense moments. Or, at least I hope it was just my cats and not some gruesome monsters!

Dead Space (Electronic Arts, Xbox 360/Playstation 3)

Dead Space is billed by EA as a scary game, but it really didn’t have that effect on me. Sure, there are a few moments when a monster unexpectedly leaped out and frightened me, but overall I never had the same sense of perpetual dread that I did with Silent Hill: Homecoming. Still, exploring the game’s desolate setting—namely a dilapidated husk of a giant space ship—is the perfect fit for any Halloween.

Feeling like a mix between Resident Evil 4, Metroid Prime, and BioShock, Dead Space caught me off guard with its quality. I’m not anti-Electronic Arts by any means, but besides the Burnout series there really isn’t much released by the company that interests me. Imagine my surprise, then, when I first booted up Dead Space and found that not only was it damn good, but I couldn’t put the controller down.

There has been some criticism that the game’s overall structure is too linear, but to me it just makes playing Dead Space feel like I’m on an awesome amusement park ride I don’t want to end. The game begins with a dramatic voyage to the doomed spaceship and the pace stays brisk from thereon out. There are times when it feels as if the game is on-rails, but I can’t imagine the pacing would be so steady and engaging if a different design direction had been adopted.

More than the spectacular visuals and sound design, more than the fantastic pacing, and even more than the innovative removal of a typical HUD in place of ingeniously-integrated in-game menus and options screens, what had the biggest impact on me is that at any point in the game I can press a button and a line will appear on-screen directing where I should go next. The line only appears for a few brief seconds, functioning more as a clue or reminder than a way to hold your hand, but it has been integral to my Dead Space experience.

I have a tendency to get lost and frustrated when I play games that require even the slighted bit of exploration, so I am very thankful to whatever member of the development team decided to integrate such a smart navigation feature. This means that instead of the annoying omnipresent direction arrows found in many other games, Dead Space players who want to explore without any unnecessary guidance can do so. But for a doofus like me who can’t find his way around the game’s spaceship, being able to bring up the visual guideline whenever needed is a godsend.

Though Dead Space may not inspire the same visceral sensations of horror that I felt while playing Silent Hill: Homecoming, it’s still a great choice for a Halloween romp. Dead Space’s eerie spaceship is the type of destination that’s almost begging to be visited on a dark, quiet night. And, it’s worth pointing out that the main character’s outfit that sort of makes him look like he’s wearing a Halloween costume! In fact, since killing the game’s monsters often results in them dropping a useful item, it’s almost like trick-or-treating!

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (Konami, Nintendo DS)

About halfway through fifth grade, I arrived at school one morning and found a strange man sitting near my desk. I thought maybe he was a new student teacher or one of my classmates’ fathers. It turns out this “strange man” was actually an unusually tall new student named Adam. Standing at 6’4”, Adam was literally head and shoulders above the rest of us. The Puberty Fairy had definitely visited him early; he shaved regularly and had a deep, booming voice. Needless to say, the rest of us boys were in awe.

Despite looking like a man, Adam was definitely still a kid when it came to his interests. This became abundantly clear when I attended his sleepover birthday party near the end of the school year. Adam’s parents went all out, turning the family living room into what most of us deemed to be heaven. There was a table overflowing with every type of junk food imaginable, a stack of action and horror videocassettes to watch, and a massive pile of Nintendo Entertainment System games to play. It was at Adam’s party that I became acquainted with one of my lifelong loves: Castlevania.

Since that fateful gathering, I’ve played every Castlevania sequel imaginable, even those there weren’t quite up to snuff with the rest of the series. I love the atmosphere, I love the music, and I just love the core gameplay. Cracking skeletons with a whip (or sword, or axe) never gets old! Whenever a Castlevania game hits stores, it’s a pretty safe bet that I’ll be there on day one to pick up a copy.

In the past few years, the Castlevania series has become a Halloween tradition of sorts, with annual releases coming right before the big day. This year was no exception to the rule as Konami released their third Castlevania for the Nintendo DS, Order of Ecclesia. Thankfully, the development team did more than churn out a cookie-cutter sequel. Order of Ecclesia makes a number of small but interesting changes to the formula, including a darker art direction, an intriguing magic-based attack system, an overworld map filled with atypical locations, and (not counting Sonia Belmont’s lackluster starring role in Castlevania Legends for the original Gameboy) a female lead character that can go toe-to-toe with any of the rugged protagonists from previous games.

All things considered, Order of Ecclesia seems to have been a labor of love. The sprite animations and background graphics are meticulous, the music is catchy and often hauntingly beautiful, the character control feels spot-on, and the entire package comes together into what I consider to be one of the best Castlevania games ever constructed. With this in mind, it's no surprise that I adore it, except for one troublesome aspect: Order of Ecclesia is hard!

Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the relative ease of the past half-dozen or so Castlevania games, but Order of Ecclesia’s enemies and bosses really seem to have it in for me. It’s shameful how many times I’ve seen the Game Over screen, but I’ve got to hand it to the strength of the overall game design that I’ve jumped back into the mix every time. That being said, would it have killed the development team to put in an Easy Mode for sissies like me?

Like many of the kids I grew up with, chances are Adam has left playing video games in the past. Of the few friends I’m still in contact with from my youth, most of them no longer partake in gaming, instead funneling their efforts into other uses of their free time, such as watching sports, playing golf, or getting drunk. Nevertheless, some part of me hopes that Adam is still a Castlevania fan and gets excited the same way I do whenever a new entry in the series is released. Who knows, maybe Adam will happen across this article and realize his birthday party is what got me hooked on Castlevania in the first place!

Happy Halloween from Mister Raroo!

The three games discussed above are but a few pebbles upon the massive mountain of video games ideal for a Halloween night. Whether you dust off your Atari 2600 and go vintage with Haunted House, pop a well-loved Luigi’s Mansion disc into your Gamecube, or download Siren: Blood Curse for your Playstation 3, I hope your Halloween gaming is pleasant and satisfying.

And if you’re not doing any gaming on Halloween, have a good time all the same! Halloween is one of the rare holidays that you can have a blast without spending any cash. There is a certain type of magic in the air that only appears on Halloween night. Whatever you have planned for Halloween, I wish a safe and fun evening to you and your friends and family. Happy Halloween, GameSetWatch readers!

[Mister Raroo is a happy husband, proud father, full-time public library employee, and active gamer. He currently lives in El Cajon, CA with his family and many pets. Some of his Halloween costumes from past years are a creepy old man, a flower, Super Mario, and a giant banana. You may reach Mister Raroo at mister.raroo@gmail.com]

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

OK, still trekking across the universe with plenty of RSS-related GameSetLinkDump goodness in tow - and this episode starts out with MTV Multiplayer discussing the state of game over with some smart developer types.

Also hanging out in here - hidden-ish characters from Grand Theft Auto 3, the best ZZT games ever, the MUD's birthday, Crispy Gamer's cash injection, new shooting game figures, LBP fun and games, and... some other things!

Link 'em up:

MTV Multiplayer » Are ‘Game Over’ Screens A Thing Of The Past?
'I recently spoke to three developers who’ve all been making dying in games a little less painful.'

QBlog: XXX
Richard Bartle: 'Today is the official 30th birthday of MUD. This anniversary has been reached without causing a ripple of interest. There are no articles in newspapers, no radio interviews, no podcasts, no blogs:'

Essex Girl | Technology | guardian.co.uk
'The animated electro-pop artist RiK has launched a new single called Essex Girl, and simultaneously launched this game as a 'game single'.'

The Independent Gaming Source: Recommended ZZT Games
Tim Sweeney's ASCII make-your-own adventure tool has spawned a lot of good stuff.

Hidden beta characters have been found in GTA3 | Unseen 64: Beta, Unreleased & Unseen Videogames!
Interesting, some game characters that got dropped before the final version and still have on-disc assets.

Game journalism sucks: So Crispy Gamer raises money for an alternative voice » VentureBeat
Interesting... only $2 CPM? I love Crispy Gamer conceptually but I think something like Giant Bomb is a lot closer to the future (for the Wiki awesomeness, not just Jeff, sorry Jeff!)

Shoot The Core: Gashapon Shooting Game History volume 3
Just picked up Vol.2 in Tokyo, is yummy.

The anatomy of the first video game - On the Level- msnbc.com
'“Tennis for Two” created in 1958, was a science experiment'

Media Molecule - we make games. » Blog Archive » Creator Pick - Geosautus
Already some super-impressive LBP stuff coming up, despite network/holy book-related problems.

Lost Levels - Happy Camper for NES discovered
'Game collector “NationalGamesDepot” has recently discovered, via his collection of various Color Dreams memorabilia and development assets, a copy of the unreleased action-adventure game Happy Camper for the NES.'

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[So Christian Nutt was kind enough to attend this event for us in SF, and here's a write-up of what Microsoft is planning with Xbox Live Community Games. Looks to me like there's some strong indie goodness going on here, though as remarked later, it'll be interesting to see how the wheat/chaff separation is done - maybe we can help on GamerBytes. Overall, looking forward to it!]

At an invite-only event in San Francisco last night, Microsoft execs Chris Satchell and Boyd Multerer welcomed the press to play and enjoy a slate of the most promising early examples from its XNA Community Games lineup, at the same time introducing some of the key developers of these games.

The event, held in a San Francisco nightclub with a lounge atmosphere -- plenty of comfy couches and HDTVs -- was a showcase for some of the most promising, professional-looking games in the Community Games lineup.

These drew from the top entrants to Microsoft's 2008 Dream-Build-Play competition, as already showcased in video form on Gamasutra.

Those most notable titles gave the press a roadmap to which games are likely (but not assured) to be included in the launch lineup for the service. The titles will come online for Xbox 360 alongside the New Xbox Experience update on November 19th.

XNA Community Games As 'Sea Change'?

Satchell and Multerer praised the efforts of Microsoft internal staff in getting the service ready, and the developers in creating their games -- noting that this project had always been part of the Xbox 360 roadmap since the beginning of the console.

Multerer, in particular, believes that this will lead to an "sea change" in game development, with indie game development finding a truly wide audience. This is, according to him, thanks to the easy access to a built-in console audience and simple, standardized monetization of the titles. (It's worth noting that, unlike with Xbox Live Arcade, there's no expensive or excessively lengthy submission process, other than a peer review.)

In discussion with Gamasutra, Multerer compared the incipient ability for indie developers to reach a large, commercialized console audience on the Xbox 360 to be akin to the shift in the film industry precipitated at the end of the '80s.

He noted the example of how Steven Soderbergh's 'Sex, Lies, and Videotape', in 1989, helped spearhead the indie film movement which was explosive throughout the '90s and beyond, and hoped XBLCG could do similarly for games.

An important distinction between Community Games' strategy -- and the vaunted user-created content in Spore and LittleBigPlanet -- is that these games are fully created by those with game development skills. This is significantly different to gamers modifying content within the parameters defined by individual games' editing systems.

With XNA Game Studio, Microsoft allows complete game customization, custom coding, and content insertion, with creators needing the software package (and some reasonable C# coding skills), an Xbox 360 to connect to your PC, and an inexpensive yearly XNA subscription.

Multerer and Satchell were both also keen to point out at the event that over 700 schools are currently using XNA Game Studio in their computer science curricula.

Surprisingly Professional Results

One thing that was notable is that the games -- which will retail from 200, 400, or 800 Microsoft points (US$2.50, $5, and $10), and which will all have timed demo versions -- seemed to be on par with many of the "professional" games on Xbox Live Arcade.

This is perhaps because some of the top titles were created by small groups of former industry professionals, or well-resourced, talented academic teams.

For example, CarneyVale: Showtime, winner of Dream-Build-Play, was created at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Weapon of Choice (pictured, another DBP entry) was developed by Mommy's Best Games -- which is principally Nathan Fouts, an ex-Insomniac staffer who worked on Resistance: Fall of Man and Ratchet & Clank Future.

Both games exhibit a high level of polish -- in line with games already released on the commercial XBLA service -- and mature gameplay ideas.

Conclusion: The Road Ahead

While the event was slick and the games were polished and enjoyable, it still leaves us wondering what cornucopia of games will debut on November 19th.

After all, the 3.0 version of XNA Game Studio, required to package and submit the games through the final stages of readiness for distribution, has just been officially released today.

And while the games on display were promising, even these hand-picked examples sometimes failed to show breakout innovation -- relying on tested, traditional gameplay concepts, albeit adapted in charming ways.

Nonetheless, it appears that Xbox Live Community Games is a service uniquely positioned to deliver indie games to a broad and receptive audience (and monetize them quickly and close to seamlessly).

But will the amount and varying quality of the games overwhelm the average player? This remains to be seen.

Nonetheless, Xbox Live Community Games is the beginning of something, not the end. It should be fascinating to see something closer to the iPhone Store's open marketplace on a console for the first time.

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

['Design Lesson 101' is a regular column by game designer Manveer Heir. The goal is to play a game from start to completion and learn something about game design in the process. This week, in honor of Bethesda's release of Fallout 3 we take a look at Interplay's classic post-nuclear apocalyptic role-playing game Fallout and its sequel, Fallout 2.]

Every single day of my life I make choices. I choose what clothes to wear. I choose what food to eat. I choose who to be friends with. These choices I make affect my life and the lives of those around me. My choice to eat yogurt this morning probably doesn't have huge consequences, beyond how hungry I am later. However, my choice many years ago to work towards being a game developer has has major consequences on not only my life, but the lives of others around me.

These consequences and the choice that fuel them are the heart of the Fallout games and the focus of this week's design lesson.

Design Lesson: Fallout and Fallout 2 use choice and consequence to deliver a world of enormous opportunities to the player and give the player agency over the type of character they develop.

Like in many RPGs, Fallout lets you choose if you want to be good or evil. Your actions will decide your alignment. If you save the people of a dying town or kill the slavers that look to put all humans into bondage, then your actions will be looked on favorably. If you kill children and women for sport and perform unsavory deeds for mob bosses, you will be looked at as an evil person.

No matter what your actions, your choices will have consequences however. In Fallout, saving a girl from a group of Raiders gives you the ability to have her join your party and adventure with you. As a result, you can get into tougher fights, since you have the help of another person.

In Fallout 2, I was granted a temporary day-pass to go inside the gates of Vault City, a very closed-off city that could have information that would help me with my main quest. While inside Vault City, I spoke to a high-ranking official in a rather rude manner. As a result, I was immediately kicked out of the city and my pass was permanently revoked.

Unless I fought my way into the city and killed everyone within, I was now unable to get inside the walls of Vault City. All of the quests that I had accepted in the city, were now impossible to complete. The important information inside the city was unreachable. The people in the city would not speak to me, sell me goods, help me out. They reviled me.

In many games, this would be the end. The poor choice I made in talking to an official in a snide manner would result in the consequence of game over, since the critical information was hiding within.

However, in Fallout, while the consequence of making my life more difficult was apparent, the game wasn't over. There were other sources that had the same information elsewhere. I just had to explore some other cities to find them. I had to find an alternate path. A path that the designers made available, knowing that someone would talk themselves into a pickle inside Vault City.

The game never told me if I talked back to the man in Vault City that I would get the boot. It just did it. I made that choice. I remember clicking the dialog option and thinking to myself “Man, this guy is a little annoying. I'm going to be a smart-ass”. Nowadays, many games would broadcast you the consequence of your choice before the choice is made. Give the player all the information up-front, and they can make the right decision.

But life isn't about having all the information up-front. Often you make your choices and have no idea of the consequences until much later. Fallout emulates this with it's game mechanics, and as a result it results in the world feeling richer and deeper. Your choices feel like your own and not what the designer wanted you to do. You are able to make your own mistakes and recover from them. Your choices are your own, and the unique set of choices you make as you play is what makes the game play differently for all different players.

Being evil opens up doors that aren't available if you are good, and vice-versa. The game uses the different choices you can make and offers alternatives in-case you ever make a “bad” choice. Those alternatives fill the game world with opportunity and gameplay. As a result, there is no right way to play Fallout. The same can't be said for many modern games, where there is one correct way and path to play (or two paths to choose from).

The choice and consequence also affected my character and how I role-played him. I ended up rolling my vilification by Vault City into my character's personality. Since there were rival cities, I sided with the other cities and not Vault City. I didn't want to help Vault City; they hated me.

This led me to feel like I was playing a true character, and not just a cookie-cutter blank slate that is prevalent in many games. The game gives enough background to keep the story interesting and relevant, but lets you impress enough of your own personality into the character to make him yours.

My personality came through in my actions and the choices I made. I controlled the actions of my character and how he responded to the situations of the world. Nowhere is that more apparent than at the end of both games, when the narrator talks about what happens in the future to different characters and areas. Some cities will prosper because you helped out. Others will die off, because you abandoned them. Still, others will fail even after your best efforts.

All of this makes the world of Fallout feel bigger and richer than it really is. It doesn't end up feeling strictly like a sequence of designer-created events. It feels like a world that responds to you, that lets you be the person you want to be, and gives you a chance no matter what. That's the beauty of Fallout and it took replaying both games to realize why I consider them to be my favorite games of all-time.

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

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

[Well, it's incredibly early in the cycle, but hey, the GDC website is open, there's some new summits announced, and I'm looking forward to seeing what my colleagues at the conf come up with for this year's event - should be mega.]

Game Developers Conference organizer Think Services has opened registration for next year's GDC event, to be held in San Francisco's Moscone Center from March 23 to 27, 2009.

Also announced was the addition of new summits falling under the GDC umbrella. These summits, which take place on the Monday and Tuesday of GDC week, are aimed at providing specialized coverage for various crucial development categories and practices.

In addition, the traditional Wednesday to Friday main conference, including major keynotes and existing Audio, Business, Game Design, Production, Programming, and Visual Arts tracks will continue for 2009.

Newly established Monday-Tuesday summits include the AI Summit and Localization Summit, bringing the total summit count to nine, as follows:

- AI Summit
- Casual Games Summit
- Game Outsourcing Summit
- GDC Mobile
- Independent Games Summit
- IGDA Education Summit
- Localization Summit
- Serious Games Summit
- Worlds in Motion Summit

Longstanding GDC initiatives such as the GDC Career Pavilion, the Independent Games Festival, the Game Developers Choice Awards, and the Game Career Seminar will also continue.

"You can expect more specialized content through our new and existing summits in conjunction with compelling talks in our main conference," said event director Meggan Scavio, a 10-year veteran of the conference.

"The Game Developers Conference prides itself on continually improving the conference experience based on the needs of our attendees and the industry. With the help of feedback from the community, our advisory board, and editorial staff, we've crafted a conference this year that speaks to the changing landscape of the games industry."

More information on next year's GDC line-up, hotel details and registration specifics are available on the official Game Developers Conference 2009 website.

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

[In this in-depth analysis, Chris Remo looks at fan and critical reaction to Ubisoft Montreal's Far Cry 2 to examine the emergent gameplay elements in its 'slow burn' structure that make initially frustrated gamers later become enthralled.]

Ubisoft Montreal's just-debuted Far Cry 2 is not an inviting game. Like the war-torn (and presumably fictional) African state it depicts, Far Cry 2 is brutal, sparse, and often gives you little guidance.

Right from the start, your vulnerabilities are made clear: weapons you find on the ground rust and jam; you periodically suffer the effects of malaria; damaged vehicles require basic engine maintenance; and serious injuries demand improvised surgery, often with pliers.

On top of that, combat encounters (often approached with those rusted, jamming-prone guns) are fairly straightforward FPS affairs, and with the amount of mission-to-mission driving required in the game's enormous open world, their frequency can grate.

Many gamers have gone online to post initial frustrations with the game -- an understandable reaction from the perspective of somebody unaccustomed to its structure and design ethic, particularly in the context of an FPS.

But in the week since its release, there has been an interesting phenomenon unfolding. I have seen more and more posts by people announcing that Far Cry 2 finally "clicks" with them, that they have internalized the game's structure and systems, and have been rewarded with unique, memorable moments.

For me, those have been Far Cry 2's stock in trade. Game designers often speak about the dominance of the personal player story over the designer's authored narrative. Indeed, that potential is powerful, and clearly more relevant to games than any other entertainment medium. But practically speaking, to me, relatively few games truly exploit that potential.

Far Cry 2 has been an exception. What at first seemed like unfortunate sparseness now feels to me like a canvas for emergent gameplay (those well-worn buzzwords). There's your recurring sickness; the unreliability of found weaponry; the combination of almost uniformly dry environments, video game-y inflammable objects, and fire that propagates convincingly.

The game's persistent component parts feel designed to convey a convincingly (but not flashily) coherent world, but even more importantly to increase the chances of memorable things happening.

In addition to progressing the game's main quest line, you can help out your buddies with their own tangential objectives, sabotage arms dealers' competition to open up new weapon options, or perform hit jobs for that old game chestnut, the deep mysterious unnamed voice.

I find myself constantly telling people stories about my own Far Cry 2 experience. Sometimes they involve the game's rather basic plot, and sometimes they don't. This is not something I usually find myself doing.

There was the time, very early in my playthrough, when I got out of my 80s-era hatchback to track down a diamond in the jungle using the game's No Country For Old Men-esque homing beacon, forgot where I parked the car, passed out from malaria trying to find it, and was safely awoken by the buddy character I had recently rescued.

Or the time I was patiently scouting out an enemy encampment with my sniper rifle scope and startled by nearby sudden movement, reflexively snapping my crosshairs over to the source -- and finding my sights trained on a young gazelle that had wandered out from some overgrowth.

Or the time I had just blown up an entire base in a domino-like chain reaction, with a single well-placed rocket; turning to leave, I found myself blinded by the reflection of the high noon sun on bright white sand dunes -- and out of the shimmering brilliance trotted a pair of zebras.

These events, just a few examples of the many Far Cry 2 moments I take pleasure in relating, are not even particularly remarkable in and of themselves. Part of the game's success is its sense of restraint -- another area that works against it in the short term, but for it if you decide to take advantage of what it has to offer.

Unlike its predecessor (with which it shares only the most tangential thematic bonds of environmental openness and...shooting), there are no supernatural or science fiction elements to Far Cry 2.

Certainly, the player can soak up more bullets than the enemies, and the AI is not going to win any strategic matchups, but when it comes to the setting and the feel, few exaggerated liberties are taken -- a surprisingly (and, to me, unfortunately) uncommon approach in video games.

Africa is not rendered in a particularly stylized way, and the events that take place are often only as over the top as the player makes them (and that potential is there, if you want it).

This is video game Africa to be sure, but closer to real Africa than most video games would bother to go. One doesn't really appreciate Far Cry 2's attention to detail in that regard until the time has been invested to generate enough of the unique moments that result.

Far Cry 2, headed up by creative director Clint Hocking (a vocal proponent of exploration and player-driven experiences in games), is not for everybody. It has its flaws -- the frequency at which enemies respawn, for example, is frequently and justifiably called out.

Some of its impressive features, like its self-constructing narrative, are handled quietly enough that most players may not even notice them at work. And, in the end, some may find its fundamental gameplay building blocks too repetitive to hold interest to completion.

But Far Cry 2 does succeed where many games do not -- and very few shooters even attempt to go there. On the other side of the design spectrum as the Half-Lifes and Call of Dutys (extremely impressive games in their own right), Far Cry 2 doesn't so much attempt to define a memorable experience and effectively communicate it to the player.

In fact, the game tries to define a set of rules and an environment in which memorable experiences are likely to happen, and simply lets the player loose in its world -- a fascinating prospect.

Posted by Chris Remo at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

As the week wends its happy way along, another GameSetLinksDump appears in your RSS, and lo, everything is alright with the world - or at least not terrible, if you like odd homebrew Atari 2600 games with psychedelic visuals.

Also hanging out in here - a profile of Koji Kondo, Jane Pinckard on picking your mate in Fable II, Tom Chick on Starcraft Deux, some good game fiction, Simon Parkin on playing different games without tripping over your shoelaces, and a good sight more besides.

In for mer:

Infinite Lives » Lead: synesthasia homebrew for the 2600
'Lead is a music shmup from programmer Simone Serra, designed for the Atari 2600. It boasts unforgiving gameplay and a catchy ‘glitch’ soundtrack.'

Hit Self-Destruct: Murder Charge
Some really interesting, well-written game-related fiction - I once tried to do something similar with Graves & MacGuffin and an early IC-related piece of fiction, to less effect, I think.

::: C o r e T a l e n t G a m e s :::
Bit of a 'grassroots' approach to game development here. Complex, but will it work? It's interesting, nonetheless.

Greenspeak: A blog about gaming.
Yikes, Jeff Green's EA project (which was early in production) got canned 4 weeks after he joined, he's on SimAnimals now helping to finish it before moving onto something else he will be more instrumental in.

A New Game for Super Mario's Maestro - WSJ.com
Good profile of Koji Kondo - via GameCulture.

game girl advance: Missing: One Husband-to-Be
'It took me a long time to find someone who wasn't a laughable buffoon or a stuck-up prig.'

Why Deus Ex Is Important « Double Buffered
'The element that elevates Deus Ex from a great game to a brilliant one is the way the choices in gameplay complement the plot choices.'

Crispy Gamer - Column: Rush, Boom, Turtle: The Game So Nice They Made It Thrice
Talking StarCraft II-y things: 'But the actual real-time strategy gameplay doesn't lend itself to storytelling, because -- and I almost hate to tell you this -- it's a puzzle.'

chewing pixels » The Videogame Bends
'Move too quickly from one game to the next and you’ll trip up, like a multilinguist moving too fast from one country to another, mixing-up their vocabularies in transit.'

Gamestop.com - Buy Ultimate Shooting Collection - Nintendo Wii
Don't forget about this, 3 Milestone Japanese arcade shooters for $30, including the neat-looking graphically Radio Allergy, Karous, and Chaos Field. Good deal.

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

[Following his ebullient first installment praising Nintendo's Wii, designer Brice Morrison looks at the flip side - discussing just how the console "has failed to deliver on the magic it promised."]

Released in November, 2006, the Nintendo Wii is revolutionary to say the least. With its innovative user interface, it has completely taken the world by storm by reinventing what video games are and who they are made for.

With nearly 30 million sold worldwide and over 160 million lifetime sales predicted (more than twice that of the Xbox 360 or PS3), Nintendo has clearly hit the ball out of the park.

Critics are raving, the crowds are cheering, it seems as though the once sagging console industry has been rejuvenated and ready to run at a blistering pace for years to come.

To this day, two years after launch, you still have a hard time finding a Wii in stores. But what consumers are lining up to buy isn’t the Wii, what they are buying is the idea and the dream of the Wii.

Consumers, many of whom have never played games before, have been picking up a Wii, enjoying it for a few weeks, and then watching it collect dust by their TV. They can’t explain why, but for some reason they just don’t play it anymore.

This is because the Wii has failed to deliver on the magic it promised.

A License to Dream

When I first heard about the Wii, I was completely ecstatic. Though the idea of movement-based controls are now obvious, at the time it was completely and utterly original. Such an idea had never even crossed the average gamer’s mind.

All we saw for the future was a jump from button-mashing to VR Headsets, with nothing in between. This first step off of the classic game controller was nothing short of mind blowing.

Everyone who watched in awe at the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) 2006 also watched their minds begin spinning with ideas. This is a godsend, we thought. We can do everything!

We can make fitness games that work your body, shooting games with actual movement, puzzle games with tactile interface, and much more. Truly, the Wii seemed like a license to dream anything.

But the ceiling was bound to appear.

Waggle: The Empty Promise

The principle failure of the Wii and its Wii remote is in its promise of immersion through movement. When many people imagine what playing the Wii would be like after seeing the commercials and experiences of other players, they imagine an incredibly immersive experience.

The movement based controls of the Wii hearken to a completely visceral play session, becoming one with the virtual world in front of them. We all drooled at the opportunity to dive behind couches in our living room to escape gunfire, being able to replicate a real tennis match without leaving the house, or having a sword fight that was even more real and tactile than the ones we had as children with wooden sticks.

It has been a disappointment, therefore, to see our promised virtual experience reduced to shaking the controller.

The problem is that waggling the Wii remote does not, in itself, add to a gameplay experience. If I want to open a virtual door and am asked to turn the Wii remote instead of pressing a button, that doesn’t make the experience more immersive.

While it may be novel once or twice, the simple movement itself does not enrich the game. In fact, it can become tedious and frustrating. Developers are just as guilty as players in this regard.

Creating one game after another that is essentially a recycled last-generation title, but with new Wii remote action, does not make it any different than the title was before.

The sad truth is that substituting Wii remote movement for a button press is nothing more than an empty promise. Upgrading to a new technology only to have the freshly minted fun evaporate after one run through is not technology well spent.

Looking Behind the Curtain

I remember teaching my cousin how to play Wii Tennis, and when he went to serve the ball, he lifted his left hand, the one not holding the Wii remote, to toss. At that moment, he didn’t understand how the Wii worked.

All he knew was that it was some sort of magical machine that mimicked your real life movements. It was a joyous occasion and a incredible exploratory experience.

But the innocence did not last long. Upon further experimentation, he learned how the controller worked, discovering that a quick snap of the wrist gave the same forehand as a loopy swing of his whole upper body. As the initial amazement wore off, Wii Tennis became simply another video game.

When the public imagined what was possible with the Wii, we imagined complete, full-on physical experiences akin to backyard football. Perhaps, we thought, you may even get a little bruised up in a game on the Wii, playing with competitive friends.

Many of the early press responses to the Wii held this view, with parents saying that they enjoy it because it gets them and their kids off the couch. But to say that you think the Wii gets you off the couch is to reveal a naive understanding of its fundamental gameplay.

Sure, it may get kids off the couch, but when they’ll be doing off the couch is flicking their wrists, not playing basketball.

The limitations of the Wii remote’s accelerometer (even with Wii Motion Plus) reveal it to be far short of the dream machine that players were pining over. The necessary later release of Wii Fit shows that Nintendo developers have come to terms with the limitations of the Wii remote by itself.

Wii Fit may be fantastic for those who want exercise, but it’s too specialized of a peripheral to do much for those who want to explore the virtual worlds present in other games, but in a more immersive way. We wanted the Wii remote to satisfy our needs outside of exercise, too.

What We Bought Vs. What We Have

The Nintendo Wii is an elegant symphony of hardware, software, marketing, and imagination. At first glance, it appears that it can do everything you could think of, an experience full of promise.

Everyone loves the idea of the Wii. The idea of a totally immersive experience. The idea of games that are more like kickball and less like Tetris. The idea of entering a brand new world. But after some time, we learn that we have purchased nothing more than a shakable A-button.

Without doubt, future console releases and peripherals will attempt to satisfy us further. The Wii has made a great leap forward, but those who think we have already arrived are mistaken.

[Brice Morrison is a game designer who has been developing quirky titles since he was in middle school. Before taking a job at Electronic Arts, he developed several successful independent games such as Jelly Wars, an action adventure franchise, and QuickQuests, a casual MMORPG.

While at the University of Virginia, Brice founded Student Game Developers, an organization which continues to produce games every semester and open the doors to the games industry for students. His blog at BriceMorrison.com discusses games in a broader context and how they can be more than simply entertainment.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

[Every week, 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.]

Welcome to another exciting week of console digital download content - with plenty of new released to check out. This week's Xbox Live Arcade releases include Penny Arcade Episode 2 and Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, and WiiWare has just debuted Strong Bad Episode 3 and the latest in the under-rated series: Art Style: Rotohex.

Elsewhere, this week's PlayStation Network titles are unknown as of press time, but last week they got the excellent Prince of Persia Classic and the first episode of Penny Arcade Adventures. Here's our top picks for stories in the last seven days:

Xbox Live Arcade

Penny Arcade Adventures: Episode 2, Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? And Marble Blast Ultra DLC Available This Week On XBLA
This week is the first time we've had double 1200 Microsoft Point titles. 5th Grader actually looks a whole lot better than other downloadable quiz titles, but probably won't get released outside of America. Some long awaited Marble Blast Ultra DLC debuts too.

Zombies!!! And Wings Of War Coming To XBLA And PSN In 2009
Big Rooster are working hard on bringing two strategy board games to the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, both of which are growingly increasingly popular on the board game circuit. Turn based dogfighting and zombie killing? Sounds like a blast.

Xbox Live Primetime Delayed Until Spring In America
The New Xbox Experience coming on November 19 won't have everything originally announced for it - the Primetime service, allowing people to play games like 1 vs. 100, will not be available at launch.

PlayStation Network

EU PSN Store Update - NoveStrike And Prince Of Persia Classic
Europe finally get the chance to play third-party indie PSN title NovaStrike, while Prince of Persia makes its way from the XBLA to the PSN.

NA PSN Store Update - The P's Have It
Penny Arcade Episode 1 and Prince of Persia Classic highlight this week's releases on the PlayStation Network. Some notable updates to High Velocity Bowling also top up this week's debuts.

Sony "Adapting A Global Approval System" For The PlayStation Network?
Europeans are getting sick of having to wait weeks upon weeks for unnecessarily delayed content for the PlayStation Network. According to new media reports, it seems Sony is determined to rectify the situation.

WiiWare

NA WiiWare Update - Art Style: Rotohex and Strong Bad: Episode 3
The third Art Style game has been released in the US, a new simple rotating puzzle game called Rotohex. Strong Bad Episode 3 continues the monthly episodic release for the series, too. Nice to see Nintendo following an actual release plan - now where are the Art Style games in Europe?

EU WiiWare Update - Building Up And Breaking Down
Europe now gets the chance to play Tetris Party along with the rest of the world - rejoice! They also get The Incredible Maze from last week's U.S. debut, and Home Sweet Home, an interesting title which allows you to design your home. A game that came out in Europe first? Do my eyes deceive me?

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

[Attending PopCap's release event for Bejeweled Twist, our own Brandon Sheffield looks at the four-year odyssey to create the latest in the massively popular Bejeweled casual game series, the appropriateness of holding a grandiose launch party during the current economic crisis, and why the 'mom test' conquers all.]

Bejeweled has been incredibly important for PopCap over the years. It launched the company to success, and even now the series claims between 30 and 40 percent of the company’s revenue, depending on who you ask. In fact, the franchise has now had 350 million copies downloaded and over 25 million units sold.

And let's not forget that the firm has sprouted majorly in size -- it has a worldwide staff of over 200 people and offices in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Vancouver, B.C., Dublin and most recently, Shanghai.

The company’s large-scale launch party for Bejeweled Twist in Seattle, held at the Paul Allen-created Experience Music Project museum, only goes to show how much stock PopCap has in this game.

The evening’s activities, which included a presentation from a "Spanish professor of twistology," (who I happened to see in line for the event, and who had a whisk and an egg beater in his pocket), alongside circus-style hoop artists, food and drink, loads of stations to play the game, as well as the usual hoop-la.

The game, which has just launched for PC download, took four years to make, and co-founder John Vechey told me that, at one time, there were four programmers and three artists all working on various aspects of the game, which he categorized as "insane" given its straightforwardness.

But what sets PopCap games apart from other casual titles is their attention to detail, and the look and feel. Vechey naturally agrees, and told me, “Three years ago, we could’ve showed you something that looked a lot like this, and had a similar mechanic, but it just lacked a lot of that slickness.”

During the creators' speech, designer Jason Kapalka commented on the long process. "I guess that’s four years," he said, "which I guess means we suck. I don’t know."

Co-founder Brian Fiete corrected him: "It means we iterate on games, and keep working on it until it’s done, it doesn’t mean we suck. We could make it in two nights if we had to." To which John Vechey responded: "Dude, not cool."

The evening was lined with a tinge of guilt on the part of the PopCap crew, for throwing a huge bash during the current world economic crisis.

During the opening remarks, CEO David Roberts said "I do think it’s important to acknowledge the realities of the global economic situation. We planned this event, the launch of our biggest product ever, well before the economy started its recent slide."

"More recently," he added, "we discussed whether we should even talk about those sorts of issues. But I concluded that the need for fun in our lives may never be greater than it will be for the next year or so, and millions and millions of people will find much-needed relief and comfort in our games and Bejeweled Twist, and we do believe our business is relatively resistant to economic downturns."

As John Vechey said, "You don’t want to be the band on the Titanic."

The core mechanic of Bejeweled Twist revolves around the idea of rotation -- rather than switching jewels as you did in the previous games, you rotate a group of four gems clockwise in order to get groups of three, or four, or more.

Power-ups appear during the game, and different modes have you completing different challenges. This core gameplay is similar in concept to Hexic or even more like Super Puzzle Fighter II’s Z mode, the latter of which none of the founders had played.

The play mechanic really is subtly different, as evidenced by the fellow who played the game next to me stating that the game was "not that much different from their other ones."

He was visually disappointed with the game, but what he failed to note is that in the casual arena, there are one or two game mechanics at max. If you change one of those up, you have a drastically different game for the casual player.

However, some of the over-the-top, borderline psychedelic visuals that appealed to the more 'core' players in Peggle have been added to the game.

Then I saw the true test. There was an elderly woman of perhaps 70, who was trying to play the game. She couldn’t get her head around the mechanic, and a PopCap employee stepped up to help her.

Her response was: "I don’t want you to tell me, I want the game to tell me!" She spent some time in the tutorial, and then finally got it. After that, she was stopping strangers to show them, and exclaiming, "I did it!"

This is going to be PopCap’s true test. The game is, on the surface, still too simple for the hardcore crowd to immediately latch on to. Yet the play mechanic is just complex enough to give its core audience cause for alarm. But once they figure it out, they’re quite engaged, and in fact feel a real sense of achievement.

Interestingly, the game was much more complex before, with more power-ups, more matching patterns, and the ability to rotate blocks counter-clockwise as well as clockwise. But none of this tested well with users, according to Jason Kapalka. Even the original Bejeweled had diagonal matching in its original iteration, but this was scrapped in favor of better playability for the casual market -- or the "mom test", as they call it.

The series is clearly still of extremely high importance for the company, and rare is the casual game company that does an AAA game launch for its new product. But PopCap has taken a risk here, by making the game just a little more difficult to wrap one’s head around.

If PopCap is any indication, the casual market is having its boom time. But the economy, fierce competition, and most importantly confused grandmas and housewives will ultimately determine what the future holds for this mainstay casual series.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, I've already described today's pictured Wii game on the Gamasutra group-chat channel as 'full of win' - though you guys can decide for yourselves whether it is or not by drinking in the exceptionally silly artwork and mini-game descriptions.

But luckily, there's more than just that on here, with some of the below posts poking at Yakuza 2, discussing web developers vs. game developers, looking at the Persona series' aftermarket value, talking about unionizing, and lots more.

Down for the count:

The Brainy Gamer: A cutscene offer you can't refuse
Bravo to Michael for pointing out Yakuza 2 for PS2, almost completely ignored thus far due to format: 'Yakuza 2 (Ryu ga Gotoku) is the best narrative game I've played this year, by a wide margin. Better than GTA IV and way better than MGS4.'

Black Company Studios » Blog Archive » Fustian Future
'That being said, I’m always torn on the unionising issue. It’s been done to death on the TCE forums, and very little new gets said about it.' I think these were pretty much the grounds under which it didn't make it, although it's certainly a shame in some ways.

YouTube - Player One - Space Invaders (1980)
Whoa, a hit Australian single inspired by the arcade game, from 1980? Via ALitel.

T=Machine » Cultural differences: game developers vs web developers
Super-analyze-y comments based on an Andrew Chen post that is also interesting.

:: G A M E H O T E L ::: DIE SHOW
A Zurich edition of GameHotel with Derek Yu, Chris Hecker, Keiichi Yano, and some other neat folks, just happened, completely missed this.

Tiny Q&A: Zombie BBQ's Gammick and EnjoyUp - Tiny Cartridge
'If you’ve accidentally glanced at Tiny Cartridge for even a second, you know that we’re fascinated with Gammick/EnjoyUp’s Little Red Riding Hood’s Zombie BBQ.' Bizarro DS title alert!

The Triforce » Blog Archives » Gaming in The Clinton Years
'NAVGTR — The National Association of Videogame Testers and Reviewers, a grand name for what seems to be two middle aged men who apparently spent the nineties misjudging videogames in the name of artistic progression — have stuck up hundreds of these.' Whatever happened to their video game cruise with Cloris Leachman, anyhow?

VGPC.com Blog: A Tale of Two Personae
'Dickens uses the line to contrast the times in London and Paris, London was doing well and Paris was not. The same can be said of Persona 2 and Persona 3.'

Where’s the Money In Casual Web Game Development? - GigaOM
A few good numbers - via Wonderland.

Gamestop.com - Buy Calvin Trucker's Redneck Jamboree - Nintendo Wii
OMG, and it's being made by French Canadians (Humagade) - check out the game descriptions for more boggle.

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

[Over at sister online worlds site WorldsInMotion.biz, Mathew Kumar is still having a fun ol' time analyzing online games for the WiM Atlas. Here's his overview of Wizard101, as developed by KingsIsle Entertainment, a distinctly Potter-esque teen and 'tween-targeted magic-themed virtual world.]

Name: Wizard101

Developer: KingsIsle Entertainment

Established: September 2006

How it Works: Wizard101 requires the download of a client -- the initial download is of a 8mb installer. Navigation and gameplay are accomplished via mouse and keyboard input.

Overview: Wizard101 is an online virtual world with a 3D client. The title allows users to customize outfits and accessories for their wizard avatars, play puzzles and mini-games, adopt magical pets, and learn from seven different schools of magic -- collecting cards, which can then use to engage in card duels alongside and against other players.

Payment Method: Wizard101 is free to play, but also offers a subscription, starting at $9.95 for one month's access, allowing access to more areas and features. Lower rates are available for families and/or longer term commitments.

Key Features:
- Teen/Tween-orientated 3D client-based virtual world
- "Harry Potter"-esque theme
- Collectible card game battles
- Customizable avatar, pets
- Safe environment with moderated chat (free text chat only available to subscribers with parental permission)

Wizard101: In-Depth Tour

I've struggled with how to start this section of the Atlas entry for a while, probably because I've found it so easy to keep dipping back into Wizard101 to explore it some more -- for a variety of reasons, but as is the format I'm not going to discuss the game's positives and negatives until we get to the conclusion.

However, I will make a fairly strong statement to start this off with. Wizard101 is very much an "MMORPG" rather than a virtual world. The distinction is loose -- we have a lot of trouble with that on Worlds in Motion! -- but sometimes it makes sense to separate them out. With Wizard101 the reason I want to make the distinction is that the game is very much based around playing a character who fights enemies and goes on quests to level up (and vice versa), rather than any concept of creating a community.

In fact, sometimes when I think about it (personally) I consider the distinction to be that in MMORPGs you can often spend most of your time playing alone in the world, where virtual worlds tend to "force" some socialization upon you (usually because they're so boring without doing so). Wizard101 offers instantly such a list of things to do it makes me think of World of Warcraft before I think of anything else.

Ahem! But moving on. Wizard101 isn't especially clear on its website, but to play you have to download a client, from which you play the game. The download is quick, but if you're used to playing MMORPGs the experience of starting the game up each time is familiar -- you usually have to spend a while downloading the latest patch before you can finally run it -- but once you're in everything is pretty streamlined.

After creating my character using the game's very cute Q&A style character creator (it made me think of playing Ultima games "back in the day", which may or may not resonate with you) I ended up with an ice mage called "Scot Frostglen" (you can't create your own name, instead selecting from a small amount of possible names, which can be mixed and matched.)

Scot headed off on his adventure -- which borrows heavily from the Harry Potter mythos, lets not beat around the bush, here -- and quickly learned how to fight with enemies, which involves a turn-based sort-of "card-battle" system.

I don’t consider this an especially important quibble, so I'll place it here rather than in the conclusion, but I was disappointed with the card-battle system. Perhaps incorrectly when I saw it -- you use a series of cards to cast spells, summon monsters, etc. -- that it would be a rather deep system, if not Magic: The Gathering then at least the Pokemon CCG.

Alas, it was not to be. Turn-based battles pan out like they do in nearly any RPG (especially those of the Japanese persuasion, though Wizard101 couldn't be further from a Japanese game in aesthetic) with cards really only limiting your choice of what you can do each turn. Summoned monsters last a turn and everything you do costs mana (which we'll discuss in a minute).

One interesting thing is that as you run around the world you can see everyone who is involved in a turn-based battle (there aren't instanced) so can join in at any point -- notably, whether you'd like to or not (it doesn't make sense to run through the middle of someone else's battle, though, so that's my bad, really).

As a result, the game has a strange sort of dynamic. Characters are split up into classes that roughly mimic the usual MMORPG archetypes -- ice wizards are (supposedly) tanks, fire wizards damage dealers, etc. In the turn based format (and, admittedly, in the still early stages of the game that I am playing) it doesn't seem to entirely make sense, nor do the other players seem to be making much of it (ice wizards should, I guess, be spending most of their turns "aggro"-ing enemies, but that's kind of boring).

As everything you do costs mana, you have to replenish it regularly, something which is, unusually, done by taking part in minigames. These games are largely fun and well put together, but in the context just seem like a timesink. You can replenish you mana by running around and collecting glowing orbs in the world's safe zones, but that's more tedious (unless you manage to pick up a lot while running errands anyway.)

In my time playing Wizard101 I've explored a few zones, fought a lot of battles, collected a lot of loot and beat several quests, but what's interesting is that as a result I didn't do a lot of interaction with other players, bar some occasional battles together. There are a lot of players in the world -- it's obviously popular -- but everyone seems to be doing their own thing.

Wizard101: Conclusion

I have to say that Wizard101 is easily the most impressive kid-orientated virtual world that I've played in my (admittedly short) time investigating them, and it's no surprise. Most virtual worlds are browser/flash based, and that can't compete with the simplistic (but well designed) 3D graphics seen in Wizard101.

It doesn't need a recent PC to run though I'm sure as a client download it is costing itself a few accounts here and there, but might not even need them. As a very impressive 3D MMORPG designed for Western kids from the ground up that's also free-to-play (dare I say this, but a lot of Asian MMOs still seem to be losing something in translation when they come across) it's no wonder the world is so packed. Every time I've played the world has been swarming with players.

The interesting thing is that in a social/community orientated MMO that would be fantastic, and I'd be really excited. The MMOs I've played that were social/community orientated -- Dizzywood, that sort of thing -- are enriched by other players who are excited to meet you, talk with each other…

But in Wizard101 there is absolutely none of that. I'll make no secret that recently I've been playing Warhammer Online, another world that I recently read criticism of being a "lonely" world, but there (admittedly a world very much for adults) I was, thanks to innovations including public quests -- having a brilliant old time fighting alongside other players to get things done -- with a lot of chatter about how do do the next quest or beat the next bad guy. Wizard101 is in comparison an entirely silent world, full of players all acting to solve their next quest on their own.

The "traditional" way to fix this from MMO makers is to make the end-game content far too hard for any player to beat on their own, or just unnecessarily grindy. I haven't seen anything close to 10% of Wizard101's content so perhaps later the quests are clever enough to make players engage with each other, but to the point where I've played it really isn't.

Perhaps it's simply a case of the restrictive chat system. As is so often the case with child-orientated MMOs, your natural method of speech is to select from set phrases, unless you get permission from an adult. Except, in this case, you not only have to get permission from an adult but pay for a subscription too.

Despite this complaint, Wizard101 is very, very playable. I could waste hours just levelling up my wizard and purchasing him the latest gear/spells, and even if the game does use the comic sans font for nearly everything (yuck!) it does have a lot of crossover potential for more than just kids to play it.

Wizard101 is successful at being an MMORPG, and it looks likely to be a very successful endeavour for KingsIsle Entertainment. It's probably the perfect example of how free-to-play can work, actually -- the core game is so fun from the get go I imagine most players want to pay for it just to unlock the extra possibilities on offer.

I'm not sure there's that much to learn from Wizard101's example -- other than to launch with a very polished product with a lot of content -- but that probably won't stop me from dipping in every now and again.

Useful Links:
Wizard101 Wiki
Wizard101 Central (fansite/forum)

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

[What the heck do game designers do, again? DoubleSix (Geometry Wars Galaxies, South Park XBLA) creative director Jim Mummery examines why the designer isn't the "king" or "rock star" of game development - but nonetheless has a vital role to play.]

We work in an industry in which, it would outwardly appear, the designer is king. Only a designer would get their name before the title of the game or have a credit that reads: "A Game By." They are the new rock stars who conjure the entire game fully-formed from their amazing minds all by themselves. All hail the games designer, for without them, surely we would have no games. Right?

Wrong.

But I'm getting ahead of myself -- let’s jump back in time to a strange land.

In The Beginning

In the games industry there was a time, long ago, when games were made by coders – just coders. They knew what worked, how they worked and no one else was needed. They programmed, they made the assets, they built the game. Small pixel stickmen ran and jumped over small pixel spears. The games were simple, times were good.

Then games became successful, and so became competitive, and so it was deemed that they needed to look good. So artists were summoned, artists who could work in the medium of D-Paint and turn pixel stickmen into beautiful animated sprites.

The battle between what looked good and what worked began (and still continues to this day). These coders and artists, both of whom knew how to make games, both of whom had clearly defined roles, worked together (albeit grudgingly) and the world of games became a happy and productive place.

Until games became even more successful and even more competitive and so the games had to become more complex; more in-depth. There was simply much more to do, more code, more art. The coders were too busy, the artists were too busy. Someone was needed to do the odd jobs, the little tasks, putting the pick-ups in the game, spawning enemies, making the coffee…

This little guy worked with the other more talented people, the artists and the coders, he helped them out but more and more, the things that needed changing in the game were the things he was doing. The game looked great and worked great but the publisher didn’t like the little things, like where he had put this enemy or that power-up.

And so the publisher needed him to make changes. The little guy didn’t mind, he could fix that, he would make a difference. He began to feel important -- at least when he wasn’t getting the coffee.

More and more his relationship with the publisher grew, after all they were talking all the time and lo, they coined a term for what they were fixing: gameplay.

Birth Of The Designer

The fateful day came when they found something he couldn’t fix with the simple tools he had been given. Egged on by the publishers, he turned to the others, the ones busy doing the real work and asked for better tools, for more enemy types, for less coffee making. With no time to argue, they gave him what he wanted and when he saw the difference he’d made, he realised what an unadulterated genius he was…

Thus the designer was born.

Okay, so writing fairy tales is an easy way to fill space -- but what’s my point?

As ‘designers’, we came to this party last. Everyone else here has a defined role; we exist only because coders and artists were, for lack of a better term, too busy. Some designers even claim to know games better than anyone else -- but this is obviously a fantasy.

These days, anyone who enters the industry (coder, artist or designer) has had similar game-playing experiences; they all know games and what they like in the games they play.

The big difference is the coder can program (it’s a small word for making worlds) and the artist can draw (not literally -- hell, these days half these guys can’t even sketch, but the stuff they can do in Maya and Max will make your head spin). They would not need us except for the fact someone needs to do the ‘other stuff’.

Luxury Of Time

There is a misunderstanding that a designer is someone who mysteriously understands how games work and knows intuitively what is needed to make them good. All gamers know this on some level -- and we, the game developers, are all gamers.

The only reason designers often have the answers when others don’t is that we have the luxury of time to think about it. That being said, due to the industry’s history and because of the fact that everyone, no matter what their role, understands games, the designer can never be ‘the guy with the knowledge’ -- or, at least not the only guy.

He works with people who, like him, live and breathe games. His role is to support them, not dominate them. To work with them to create games they all want to play, to create a game that belongs to them all. As a result, the designer is the collector of ideas, opinions and feedback. The conduit for what the team believes.

The thing is, listening is harder than not listening; it is easy to walk over anyone with an idea. It takes far more effort to convince them of your way of thinking (in fact it is often impossible) and harder still to know when to climb down and accept theirs.

It is his job to take all their passion and filter it; find which ideas fit together, which don’t, which are ideas that the publisher will buy into and which ones aren’t.

The game does not form complete from out of his tiny mind. It is formed by the varying talents of the team and the by the happy accidents that occur along the way.

So where does that leave us?

Designer, Not Director

First, let’s get rid of the idea of the designer as the director of the game. Games are made by teams – one guy cannot do it alone (with a few brilliant exceptions).

The designer is part of that team and because his job (the scripting, the documentation, tweaking game-play and making the coffee) is reliant on everyone else – it is his job to listen to what they have to say and find a way to make as much of it work as possible.

He is a listener and communicator. His job is the flexible one. His tasks can stretch to fill the available time. Theirs cannot.

Design works best when it’s finding solutions to problems that cannot be resolved elsewhere, solutions that fit within the restrictions created by budget, timescale and the other disciplines.

At its best, design is about technical pragmatism and team co-operation rather than selfish and singular idealism.

A case in point: say our designer needs a new tutorial element for his game. The game has evolved into much more than was originally conceived (thanks mostly to the enthusiastic involvement of the team) but he now has more to teach the player than he did before.

Currently, all he has are load of static screens with images and text but, whilst they are clear and concise, they just don’t get the message across. Players read them but do not take it in. It’s not enough. The game is well into development and there is no time for any major changes.

Ultimately, if he’d thought about it earlier, he’d have asked for a playable tutorial but the game didn’t need one then and, now it does, he doesn’t have the assets to make one.

What does he do? First things first – he has a quick discussion between other members of the team, in this case the other leads, the artist responsible for level building and the coders in charge of the front end and scripting.

Very quickly, everyone agrees that a playable tutorial is the obvious choice. Why didn’t we do that in the first place? Static screens were never a good idea! Our designer looks down into his shoes and mumbles something about how everybody else does it.

Quickly the conversation moves on to what would be needed if a playable tutorial was put into the game.

The level artist is first to point out that if the level requirements are kept simple, he can build it very quickly. So they find a theme the artist is a) interested in and b) he is sure he can build as quickly as possible.

Next, the front end coder is equally enthusiastic and can easily change the front end to accommodate the tutorial level and allow more text to be shown on screen during gameplay.

Lastly, the scripting coder says that as soon as he has a list of requirements, he should easily be able to provide the parameters the designer needs to build the tutorial scripts he needs.

But our designer knows that ideally, tutorials don’t progress until the player has proven they’ve understood the instructions. The gameplay is usually held up until the player does what they’ve been told. Despite everything the team has given him, he won’t have the tools to enforce that kind of control and so will have no way of knowing whether the player has understood the tutorial.

However, the designer knows the game’s scripting system well enough to know how it can be manipulated. If he simply breaks the tutorials up into multiple levels (and therefore multiple tutorials) – all with on-screen instructions – he easily has enough tools to give each tutorial a very focused, very specific, very simple goal that will allow the player to demonstrate what they’ve been taught.

Working in this way, he can script the tutorials so that the player would have to understand the objective of each tutorial to unlock the next one. Each lesson leads neatly onto the next. Since the tutorials are optional, the player is never prevented from playing the game and if they fail the objective they can always replay the tutorials again if they want to.

Problem solved.

To clarify, the idea of the playable tutorial (the obvious solution) could not come from the designer alone since at that point he did not have the tools to make it possible nor could he assume the team had the time to give him those tools.

The solution came from the team as a whole (more specifically from the people who would actually have to do the work) and from the real world constraints laid upon the game at that point in development.

So far, so obvious, right?

Except who is making this game? Is it our designer – the rock-and-roll visionary – or is it actually the entire team working together to make the best game possible? We'll explore this in the next installment.

[Jim Mummery is a small man who cannot code or draw and he lives at the mercy of people who can.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Time to pile on the GameSetLinkDump once more - this time with a couple of under-the-radar games/game compilations that I found at the weekend while checking out the insane amount of titles debuting now and in the next few weeks.

I think Majesco's smart use of the Jillian Michaels license (she's the trainer on The Biggest Loser TV show) is perhaps the most interesting, because that game is going to sell, regardless of whether it's high quality or not - and I'm genuinely not sure whether it is or not.

But I hope titles like this aren't going to be further reasons to keep people tied to first-party Wii games due to their guaranteed quality.

Anyhow, onwards to links:

L’art pour L’art it…Is? « (mashedmarket)
'I’ve realized that this sometimes all-consuming obsession is a bit stupid, because I’ll be damned if there’s anything wrong with storyless video games.'

Knocking off Games for Windows | Procedural Dialogue
'As you can clearly see up close, developer and publisher Clear Crown Studios (a small local outfit, as it turns out, just south of San Francisco) simply listed itself and the game title at the top, using the same layout, color scheme, and a similar font to the Games for Windows strip.'

Women left on sidelines in video game revolution - Los Angeles Times
Another good Alex Pham piece - even despite a quote or two from me.

Programme 08 - Playful: Game Design London, 31st October 2008
Interesting abstract UK con thing - the Europeans seem to do these better in the game space.

The Indie Game Magazine
Nice idea, not really a full physical mag, but a Magcloud print-on-demand or download on demand type thing, I believe.

Amazon.com: Jillian Michaels Fitness Ultimatum 2009: Video Games
This is very interesting - Majesco have got exactly the right license (it's selling super-well for those bored with the Wii Fit pack-in game), but some reviews seem to indicate it's unresponsive and a bit annoying, oh dear.

Dare to be Digital 2008 - Game Download Page
The excellent UK student game competition puts all its games up for download - not under a login wall like last year (yay!) Via Kumar.

Crispy Gamer - Column: Press Pass: How Hype Helps (and Hurts) High-Profile Hits Lots of alliteration, good quotes by industry journo types.

Gamestop.com - Buy Pac-Man Power Pack - Playstation 2
Didn't know about this Pac-Man 3-pack on PS2, cheap multi-title PS2 bundles are great for families and Xmas.

Byte Me: Inside Digital Gaming - 92nd Street Y - New York, NY
New series of talks about games in NY, good cross-cultural stuff going on here - Costikyan and Zimmerman kicking things off.

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

[Here's a new report from Game Developer Research, which Gamasutra editors Eric Caoili, Chris Remo and I also work on. Our research is useful for those in the game industry looking to get actual, empirical info on game development and publishing - if a bit out of the 'pocket money' price range for many GSW readers to purchase, heh. Still, interesting to see growth patterns...]

Game Developer Research has revealed the results of its second ever Game Developer Census, surveying all companies working within video game development and publishing in North America.

The census has revealed a 12 percent year on year increase in U.S. employees, with 44,400 now working in the industry in America, up significantly from 39,700 in 2007.

Canadian companies also saw an increase in staffing and number of studios, with total employees up around 17 percent -- to 9,500 from 8,100. In total, the North America industry increased in size 13 percent, from 47,800 to 53,900 staffers.

Some of this North American increase appears to relate to a filling-out of major next-gen game staffing, but much is due to the continued funding for MMOs and online worlds.

Thanks to the success of products such as World Of Warcraft and a continued growth in free-to-play game worlds, venture capital funding into game-related online companies has increased significantly. While the effects of the current financial crisis and credit crunch could manifest itself in the longer-term, there are no current signs of it in the aggregate numbers of people employed in game-related sectors.

In fact, there is still much vibrancy, and almost 48 percent - around 21,200 - of those working in the game industry in the U.S. do so in California – according to Game Developer Research’s estimates. Washington is the second most-popular state for game employment, with over 4,700 employees, and Texas is third with 3,300.

In total, seven states (California, Washington, Texas, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Florida) have more than 1,000 game professionals working in them, with states like North Carolina and Maryland close behind.

Not included in the current Census estimate are game tools companies, game contracting/services companies, external PR, marketing, legal, and other business services, and liaison or licensing divisions at larger media companies. Game Developer Research putatively puts this figure at around 18,000 across North America.

The Census report lists more than 650 companies alphabetically by U.S. state and Canadian province, along with generalize contact addresses, website information, estimates of employee numbers and details on their market specialties (from casual gaming, online gaming, mobile gaming and serious gaming to PC, handheld or console gaming).

The report is intended to be a valuable tool for game industry trendwatchers, contractors, service companies, and other entities wanting to acquire accurate information to reach out to the North American game market as a whole.

“We’re delighted to present our second Census report, showing a notable increase in the amount of professionals employed in the game industry. With industry revenues at an all-time high, we believe that we’ll continue to see a vibrant market for those employed in the art and science of gaming.” said Simon Carless, publisher of Game Developer Magazine and director of Game Developer Research.

For more freely available information, including sample data, or to purchase the complete Game Developer Census 2008 report, please visit the official Game Developer Research website.

Purchase of the full report includes both a 170-page in-depth report with listings by U.S. state and Canadian province, and a separate Excel document featuring the full, comprehensive data set in sortable and exportable form.

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

[Our sister site GamerBytes has been interviewing some interesting console digital download developers of late - here, Ryan Langley chats to Joju Games studio manager Juan Gril about working with Nintendo, gameplay ideas, and why holding the Wiimote like a shopping cart made amusing sense to them.]

With each coming week, we're seeing more and more games announced for WiiWare - sometimes releasing the exact same day.

This week, we got the first look at Mart Racer from Joju Games in the form of a video trailer, so we contacted studio manager Juan Gril to discuss how they became Wii developers, what their previous work and credentials were, implementing online play in a WiiWare title and much more.

GamerBytes: Please introduce yourself and your company. Who are Joju Games?

Juan Gril: My name is Juan Gril and I'm the Studio Manager at Joju Games. I've been doing online and casual games for 10 years now. I started Joju back in 2005, after working at Yahoo! Games for 5 years.

I wanted to create a studio that focused on creating simple and fun games for people like me who weren't interested in playing 3-in-a-row games, and didn't have time to play AAA games. It turned out that there were a lot of us out there, so it has been a good run so far.

GB: You've just announced Mart Racer for WiiWare. What was your inspiration to make a game where you run around a supermarket?

JG: I think it came from two different places. On one hand, a recurring theme in our games is humor. We wanted to come up with something that was funny and really different from themes you usually see on videogames.

On the other hand, the first time I grabbed a Wiimote instinctively I grabbed it with both hands like a bar. That made me start thinking on a game where you would maneuver it as you would be grabbing a bar.

GB: How does the game work? Is it first to get all the required items, or are there actual tracks involved as well?

JG: You can play the game alone, or with 3 other people. There will always be 4 contestants; AI will fill the the spot for the rest of the players. The premise is pretty simple: everybody gets a list of 6 items they should collect, and run to the cashiers before anyone else does.

The 6 items are spread around the supermarket, but they only re-spawn every 1 minute. So after the first few seconds you either need to decide to wait until the items re-spawn (that would be the bad strategy), or decide to steal items from others (that would be the good strategy).

So one thing you could do is to grab plungers and throw them to your opponents. If you hit somebody, they'll be knocked out for a few seconds, and that's when you can run to their card and automatically steal an item from them. There are 6 different power-ups you can use in the game. Some of them are for attacking other people, and some others are to protect yourself from their attacks.

GB: Does Mart Racer use any Wii Remote functionality?

JG: Yes. We let you pick what type of control you would like to use. We have the Wii Style mode that let's you tilt forward to accelerate, tilt backwards to brake, twist to move left and right, and tilt backwards and twist to drift (drift is pretty useful to make turns without losing speed).

However, we are also including a Classic Control mode. We realize that the tilt is not for everybody, and we have tried to balance the game out so you don't get an advantage using one type of control over the other. I actually play with the Wii Style mode all the time and I can beat people who play with the Classic Control Mode.

Interestingly enough, we found that people who don't play video games can get a grasp of our game thanks to the Wii Style mode, so we are hoping Mart Racer is the type of game that can be as inclusive as possible.

GB: What made you decide to go to WiiWare?

JG: Nintendo has been really good to us. They were the first console manufacturer to open their doors to us. They saw we've been trying to make different and innovative games for years, and they said "yeah, you guys are ready to start making games for consoles". Their premise is pretty simple, you guys make the games, you know what you are doing. And I think we are starting to see the fruit of that premise with the recent releases.

We were one of the first developers to get in the program. But we didn't want to release a title on launch date just for being first, we figured this is our first console game and we wanted to have all the features of a game we would like to play. That's why we are just getting ready by now.

GB: How many levels does the game contain?

JG: The game contains 12 supermarkets. Each one has its own theme and soundtrack. In single player mode you unlock the supermarkets as you win. When you go into Wi-Fi Connection, the more supermarkets you unlocked the more options you have for choosing what supermarket you want to play online.

GB: Do the playable characters all control differently, or have different stats? In the character select menu you can switch the position of your characters. Does this effect the game at all?

JG: We decided to make it more of a personal, visual choice and keep the game to be more casual in that sense. The position selection has been more of a choice to allow people to decide what sex should be the lead and what sex should be the sidekick.

You appear to use plungers as projectiles. What do they do to your opponents? (I think this one is explained in the how to play question, but let me know if you'd like me to expand it here)

GB: You've previously worked on a lot of 2D Flash titles for Comedy Central and MTV. Mart Racer is your first independent project. Has it been a difficult change from PC to console? Was it difficult to become an independent Wii developer?

JG: I think it has been quite challenging. The biggest challenge we faced was to learn how to go through the process of making sure that every detail of the game is compliant with the requirements Nintendo has. We had to keep attention to detail as much as possible. The other big challenge has been the online functionality. Thankfully we did made a couple of right decisions and it's coming along really well.

And yes, being an independent console developer is a huge challenge. But I think the audience we make our games for is definitely playing downloadable console games, so I think it has been a good decision to focus on them.

GB: Mart Racer supports online multiplayer for up to 4 people - something that tends to be missing from a lot of WiiWare titles. Is fitting the game under the size cap and fitting in online infrastructure a difficult task? Were Nintendo give you any additional support for this?

JG: The size cap fortunately hasn't been that big of an issue for such as small team as ours. We focused more on making a fun multiplayer game than producing a lot of assets (I hope we made the right decision!). Making the online part of the game usually takes a lot of time, and it was the case for us too. Right from the beginning we made the decision that we wanted to create a multiplayer game, so being able to have a fun game to play with your buddies was the #1 priority, then assets.

Nintendo tech support team is fantastic.

GB: Does online support Friend Codes? What games modes are supported online? Are there any online leaderboards?

JG: Yes, we support Friend Codes. You can either play with anybody online, or search for friends. We don't have leaderboards for this title.

GB: Will the game be getting a worldwide release, or only in America?

JG: We are planning to launch as soon as possible in the Americas, Europe, and Australia/New Zealand. We hope the game does well so we can launch in Japan as well.

GB: What downloadable games, for any of the three consoles, have impressed you the most? Any classic titles you would like to see show up in the future?

JG: I'm fond of classic titles, but frankly I usually play more new games rather than a good classic game. I feel this year it has been a pretty good year for console downloadable games.

I love Gyrostarr, Braid and PixelJunk Eden. I liked Groovin' Blocks and Echochrome. I've heard good things about the Art Style series and World of Goo, but I haven't started to play them yet.

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

Some marvelous new links here, headed by What They Play's look at, like they say, sex, violence, ratings and game design - all of which tend to be of interest to GameSetWatch readers on any given day.

Yet also in here: weird PlayStation 1 games, the indie video goodness of Bytejacker, 'morality and gameplay' in the Bring Down The Sky expansion for the excellent Mass Effect, and a few other things besides.

Vulcan mind meld:

What They Play - Sex, Violence, Ratings and Game Design
It's interesting that What They Play is talking about sexual content on a family site, but I see the point - education, rite?

Takashi Tezuka - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Random thing I just noticed: 'Tezuka's wife was the inspiration for the Boo, a ghost-like enemy in the Mario series. Like Boos, she is often shy but one day became very angry at him for spending too much time at work.' Wow, so the Boo is a quality of life parable?

YouTube - I Heart Geeks! (DS) - Trailer
Atari is distributing this CDV title in the U.S., seems like an Incredible Machine-type thing in association with... Marc Ecko's game company? Wha?

ferricide: 'gamestown'
Our own Christian takes a look at the weeeird PS1 games he picked up in Japan. They're weird, folks. And cool.

IndieGames.com - The Weblog - Bytejacker Episode 13
I hadn't been paying total attention for some reason, but Bytejacker is an awesome indie/downloadable game review show with really high production values. Bravo.

1UP: Top 5 Religions Offended by Video Games
More short, sweet goof-offs from '2008's SeanBaby', Mr. Sharkey.

The European Innovative Games Award for 2008 [PDF]
An interesting, if slightl obscure German award: 'Besides "Sharkworld" by Ranj Serious Games (Netherlands), "Rider Spoke" by Blast Theory and "Heavenly Sword" by Ninja Theory (both UK), German entries "Crysis" by Crytek, "PES 2008" by Konami Digital Entertainment, "Blake White" by Games Academy, and "Somersault" by Enter-Brain-Ment made it on to the list of nominees. Also, "The Graveyard" by Belgian Tale of Tales, "Swinxs" by Swinxs (Netherlands), "Wii Fit" by Nintendo of Europe (Germany) and "Remote Impact – Shadowboxing over a Distance" by Distance Lab (UK) managed to become part of the short list.'

Grand Text Auto » Morality and Gameplay in “Bring Down the Sky”
On the Mass Effect DLC: 'More troubling, however, was the morality embedded in “Bring Down the Sky.”'

Crummy.com: I've made no secret of my distate for the ridiculous...
Categorizing the Mega Man bosses by type!

Wieden+Kennedy /// Portland · SPORE ATTACK!
'W+K and EA rolled out Will Wright's much anticipated game launch last month with a multi-city "War of the Worlds" attack pattern.' Via Brandonnn, again!

Photos: Robo Japan 2008 ::: Pink Tentacle
Robots are games too!

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[One of the reasons I love having Editor-At-Large Chris Remo working with us at Gamasutra is that he, well, knows stuff about games. And this means we get neat interviews like this, talking about the live-action festooned, semi-gonzo update of the C&C Red Alert series.]

After lying dormant for several years, the long-running Command & Conquer real-time strategy franchise got a revival from EALA's RTS team with the high-profile and well-received Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars.

Now, the team is days away from shipping Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, the latest entry in the series' zanier alternate history spinoff line -- which hasn't seen a new title since 2001's Red Alert 2 and its expansion.

C&C3 re-established the franchise's trademark live-action full motion video cutscenes, which we recently quizzed the developers about, and for Red Alert 3 EA has built a rather insane marketing campaign around them.

We sat down with EALA senior producer Amer Ajami and producer Greg Kasavin to discuss Red Alert 3's development, including the series' heritage, challenges in simultaneously creating PC and Xbox 360 versions, the history of the RTS dev team, and why the game is influenced by Red Alert 2 more than the first game.

Did you develop the PC and Xbox 360 versions in parallel?

Amer Ajami: Yeah, and by the same team.

Greg Kasavin: This is the fourth game that we [the RTS team] have released on the 360. In the 360 market for RTS, we've been growing, and not just because of the work that this team has been doing, but you look at what else is out there with what Ubisoft is doing, what Microsoft is doing. Clearly that market is... it is certainly not as big, but it's constantly growing year on year.

How these games generally perform at retail?

GK: They do well. We're not supposed to quote our internal sales figures, but the NPD data is out there. Certainly, we wouldn't be working on them if they didn't do well. And EA holds higher standards, a different definition of what successful sales are than most other companies. So, they do very well.

And it bears mentioning that in Europe, and in Germany in particular, the C&C series is huge. I don't know that the average Command & Conquer developer can readily articulate why.

I suspect that it has a lot to do with the PC platform remaining so strong there.

AA: Correct. And, interesting enough, Russia is now a big emerging market for C&C. I was there earlier this year and the following that we had was kind of surreal.

GK: They knew the most about the game. At the [press] event they would follow up and know all the details and everything.

So they still sell better on PC then?

AA: Again, without quoting actual data, we do sell -- I don't want to say significantly better on PC, but -- well, certainly with every release, the 360 catches up with the PC, but the PC is still the lead platform from the sales perspective.

What about as a development platform?

AA: Yeah, also from a development perspective. Although this is the first time that we actually took on the development of the 360 internally. When I say internally I mean the actual PC team. All 360 SKUs that we've done for our previous RTS games were also developed by an internal team, but one that worked alongside us. This is the first time that the PC team was responsible for both platforms. Greg, was essentially the producer in charge of the 360 SKU.

It seems like there'd be two challenges. One is that the series goes back so far on the PC as compared to the console; does that create marketing or awareness issues? Then there's interface -- I've played recent C&C games on console at press events, but when I buy my own copy, it's the one with the mouse. Do you battle with that?

GK: With regard to the game itself, we think it stands on its own, even though there's a "3" in the title. Basically, the setup is that it wipes the slate clean, and it's this new world that the characters enter into. We think it's a pretty fun, weird, and crazy place. It's a deeply strategic game. You are not going to win just by throwing one type of tank at the enemy; you have to think about what you are doing.

But at the same time it's got, we think, a really appealing premise to it. There is nothing that necessarily feels PC about it. It seems like it's just as accessible of a concept to whichever audience enter.

So as a player, if you are amenable to the control, you are not going to have some weird historical barrier.

GK: Right. And as for the controls, that was our big goal with the 360 version of the game, to come up with a control scheme that lets you accomplish the things that we wanted to accomplish on the PC front.

This was to be able to micro-manage battles effectively and to be able to pull different types of forces into and out of battle and switch their weapon types, and be able to do all these types of things quickly without struggling.

We came up with a variety of ways to make that happen in a way that the average player is going to be able to execute on the 360 just as well as on the PC. I think the high-end tournament-quality player is still going to be superior with PC controls. But for someone like me -- I've been playing RTSs for years and I consider myself an intermediate player -- I am not going to win any tournaments, but I can hold my own. I am basically as proficient on the 360 controls as I am with PC.

Hopefully, people will find that these controls deliver on that. The controls that we released in [Command & Conquer 3:] Kane's Wrath for 360 were sort of a step in the direction the RA3 controls were taking.

AA: It was a test bed for the RA3 controls. It was developed by the team largely through the feedback through Greg that we essentially gave to the team developing Kane's Wrath to see if it was viable.

It's interesting that you chose to call it Red Alert 3. It's similar to Bethesda with Fallout 3. Red Alert 2 came out seven years ago. You've got to assume a sizable chunk of the players may not have played the previous ones. And yet you still have the confidence to say, "It's that series and I am going to put a number on it, and that's it."

GK: I know what you mean. There's an interesting phenomenon with that. It happens with movies also sometimes, like Spider-Man 2. It has a much bigger day at the box office than Spider-Man 1. Intuitively, it doesn't make sense. You'd think that the audience would be limited to whoever saw the first one, but there is some kind of groupthink around it and even people who haven't played Red Alert might talk to their friends.

AA: They know somebody who has played Red Alert. Conversely, if you had played the first two there is a lot there to appreciate.

GK: Yeah, as long as there is the impression that it's not going to be this continuation of some complicated story that you have to have played the other two games to even understand. We definitely didn't want to that going into it, especially since Red Alert 2, is, what, seven years old now?

But a lot of people on the team hold Red Alert 2 to be pretty sacred among real-time strategy games. So we definitely wanted to live up to a lot of the cool ideas in that game.

You were telling me before that Red Alert 3 derives more from RA2 than RA1. Can you elaborate on that?

GK: From my point of view, I think Red Alert 2 had a more defined tone, period. Red Alert 1 took itself pretty seriously compared to Red Alert 2. Red Alert 2 had something really, really special about it. You can go back and watch the cinematics right now and there are still just as great today, apart from the compression quality.

AA: Even fictionally, it didn't seem like Red Alert 1 knew what kind of game it wanted to be. In one cinematic, they had Kane, who is a staple of the [main] Tiberium franchise of the C&C games.

Yeah, I remember that.

AA: Red Alert 2 was the game that said, "You know what? This is our own branch. It's not related to Tiberium or C&C except in name." In that sense, Red Alert 3 is a continuation of that tone, rather than of RA1.

GK: And it lends itself overall a feeling to the game that is pretty unique. There are plenty of serious war games out there that are heavy, whereas something like this has much more of that graphic novel, over-the-top action feel to it that pokes a little bit of fun at itself, but in hopefully a pretty clever way. It's just more distinctive, and hopefully will be more memorable to players than another serious World War thing that weighs on them.

It's almost hilarious the extent to which you guys have been highlighting the insanity of the game world in the marketing. When you're conceiving the fiction, do you ask yourselves, "God, how do we top this last ridiculous thing?"

AA: It's not so much pressure, it's just not putting... Often times, when we worked on previous games, especially the Lord of the Rings games, there are a lot of limitations that you have to stay within. Working on this one, it was the first game in a long time where, really, that limitation wasn't there. Those handcuffs were off. It was more a sense of, "What can we do?" rather than pressure that we have to make this as crazy as possible.

GK: At the same time, you'd be surprised from seeing the end result how conservative we can be in terms of the internal logic of the world -- just making sure that within this everything is sensible.

So you ask yourself, "Would somebody really need war dolphins with sonic disruptors [an Allied unit]?"

GK: Yeah, exactly. It was really important to us to make at least the three factions feel very cohesive so that they don't seem random. All the units in the faction feel like they belong to some particular ideology that's interesting and at least vaguely plausible and likable. Depending on which side you're playing, the other two guys are the bad guys, but we wanted players to be able to feel good about all three of these sides. They all have cool characters.

Was that a challenge with the Japanese faction, since there was no existing Red Alert faction to draw from?

GK: Yes, though with that faction, we had so many cool places to dig into, so many pop culture allusions. And we have a lot of people on the team who love giant robots or anime. Those influences all went into a big melting pot and hopefully we came up with something that doesn't feel slapdash. It still feels very cohesive, but it's pop-culture inspired.

AA: At the same time, if you look at the history that the Red Alert franchise concerns itself with -- alternate versions of World War II -- the only major world player that Red Alert 1 and Red Alert 2 didn't explore was Japan. Of course, Japan was a huge part of World War II.

It felt logical as well to include them into the game and use them as the vehicle with which we drive a lot of our experimental gameplay, such as transforming units. It's stuff that we wanted to do in the game, but we really didn't want to affect the Soviets and Allies too much. Those are two factions where fans of the series would have felt disillusioned if we transformed them too much.

GK: They have really well-established gameplay.

So how long were you guys in development?

AA: Well, we officially started on Red Alert 3 about 18 months ago, about March or April of 2007, though a small group of the RTS team initially did a little bit of pre-production on RA3 back in late 2004, early 2005.

As the second team was working on Battle for Middle Earth II, they found out what they wanted to find out about RA3, and then they rolled on back into BFME2, and here we are years later.

We primarily have one main RTS team, and then we splinter off smaller groups of that to fulfill whatever needs the company asks from us [such as expansions].

It seems like the EALA RTS team has gained some prominence in the last couple years. When did it form?

GK: It was for [Command & Conquer:] Generals, right?

AA: Well, even before that, we have certain team members who have been around since Red Alert 2 [released in 2001], and even before that, with Nox [from 2000].

GK: Yeah, it's basically spun off. I don't know how best to put it, but some of those guys do hail back from the Westwood days. There are definitely connections. The guy who's our story and cinematics producer, Michael Pedriana, he hails back from those days. He worked on Red Alert 2, and it was very important to all of us to capture that same type of spirit and tone with the cinematics of this game. He came from those days and knew what that was like.

AA: The majority of the team's DNA comes from Westwood Pacific originally, and then it became EA Pacific. But, we do have some actual Westwood employees still working with us -- one of our senior modelers worked on Command & Conquer 1, back in '95.

GK: That's a guy who dates back to Dune II -- one of the six Dune II programmers. It's incredible.

It seems that EA is putting increasing focus on Command & Conquer as a franchise compared to how it was for a few years. A lot of the properties that EA picked up in the late 90s or early 2000s, especially the old school PC studios EA picked up, are not very prominent anymore. What gives you guys this kind of focus?

GK: What came to mind for me immediately is the success of Generals, although for a lot of hardcore C&C fans, the debates kind of rage on as to whether Command & Conquer: Generals is really a true C&C game or not, because it did a lot of things differently. But it was a successful game and many would hold that it's a really great game. And I think that kept Command & Conquer on people's minds.

AA: And I would argue the hardest core C&C fans hold Generals and Zero Hour to a much higher standard than all the other C&C games.

GK: That's true. Zero Hour is considered one of the best Command & Conquer games from a competitive standpoint and everything. Just gameplay-wise, it did a lot of cool things. So, I think, that helped make the reception of Command and Conquer three much more favorable up front. Because people were like, "Oh cool, it's the guys who did Generals, and Generals is awesome." Then, in the end, Command & Conquer 3 had to stand on its own legs now.

AA: I think the &C franchise would have been successful even had there not been this gap. If you look at the reasons why there was a gap between Generals and C&C3, we had this opportunity as a company to work on The Lord of the Rings movie license. We're all C&C fans, but a lot of us at the time were also hardcore Lord of the Rings fans, so we really jumped at the opportunity.

That took the team essentially offline for three-plus years from doing C&C games, because we did two mainline Lord of the Rings games. We did one for the Xbox 360. We did an expansion pack. So now, when we got those out of the way, it was time to kind of go back to our roots.

C&C: Generals was my first game in the industry. And the engine that was developed for that game was also co-developed by the guys at Westwood Pacific in Irvine, California and the original Westwood team in Vegas. And at the time that we were working on C&C: Generals, the Vegas team was working on the original iteration of Command & Conquer 3.

It's actually funny. If you look at all of the different iterations that C&C3 went through, it's like the third or fourth iteration of the game was the one that was finally released.

GK: If Lord of the Rings didn't exist, C&C3 would have probably come sooner.

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

Time to round up some of the best features and original pieces posted on big sister site Gamasutra and our other sites over the past week or so - and there appears to be plenty of neat stuff in here.

Some things I particularly liked - the feature analyzing 'Missing Gamers', as well as Matt Matthews' super-detailed NPD analysis and Jesse Divnich's database-trawling fun, plus our reports from the Unity conference in Denmark and the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO unveiling right here in the Bay Area.

Here we go:

Gamasutra Features

New, Better, More: Epic's Cliff Bleszinski on Designing Gears of War 2
"With Gears Of War 2 just around the corner, Gamasutra talks in-depth to Epic design director Bleszinski about the franchise's evolution, game prototyping, and expanding game narrative."

Game Law: So, What's the Dealio?
"In his latest column for Gamasutra, veteran game lawyer Buscaglia discusses developer and publisher contract negotiation shenanigans - urging an 'eyes open' attitude from the developer end."

Building Social Communities For Your Game: A Primer
"How do you create game ecosystems? Guitar Hero community creator Ryan references Halo 3 and Spore to show how data-rich websites and social features make games successful."

What Gamers Want: Missing Gamers
"Following Gamasutra's look at Family Gamers and Silver Gamers, we turn to a vital demographic - 'Missing Gamers'. What do adults who are no longer gamers want from today's titles? We find out..."

NPD: Behind The Numbers, September 2008
"Gamasutra's in-depth NPD analysis returns with a deep dive into September's U.S. numbers - exclusively revealing the full top 20 games, tie-in ratios, and plenty more on key hardware and games."

Gamasutra Originals/Others

Erickson: Star Wars MMO Akin To Multiple Full-Length BioWare RPGs
"EA BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic is trying to solve the problem of story in MMOs by employing twelve full-time writers to flesh out the universe -- lead writer Daniel Erickson tells Gamasutra why, explaining: "[EA has] come to me and said, 'Your budget is what?!' but nobody has ever said, 'Why are we doing this?'""

Atari's Harrison: Democratizing Development Is An Industry Must
"At the Unite 2008 developer conference in Denmark, in a roundtable discussion with developers and members of the press, Atari president Phil Harrison has been speaking to Gamasutra in more detail about his vision to "democratize development" by using tools such as the low-cost Unity game engine."

Riccitiello: Prioritizing Profits Can Be 'The Beginning Of An End'
"When it comes to the Guitar Hero and Rock Band rivalry, EA CEO John Riccitiello finds it "fun for people," and talks to Gamasutra about what gives music games competitive edge -- and then segues into discussing the danger of getting hooked on the "drug of profitability" above all other considerations."

GCG Readers Design Jumpless Platformers
"Gamasutra sister educational site GameCareerGuide, which runs a weekly game design challenge, has named the top three submissions to a recent challenge, in which the task was to design a platformer with no jump button - also asking readers to design a new lemming for the classic game Lemmings."

The Divnich Tapes: Which Genres Provide Male-Only, Female-Only Protagonists?
"In a Gamasutra-exclusive market analysis, EEDAR's Jesse Divnich follows up yesterday's analysis on games featuring playable female characters by looking at games that limit players to only controlling male characters or only female characters."

BioWare, LucasArts Talk Design, Chastise MMO Genre In Old Republic Session
"In a Gamasutra-attended Q&A session following the announcement of BioWare and LucasArts' Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, lead designer James Ohlen, BioWare Austin VP Rich Vogel, and studio co-founder Gordon Walton discussed solo-ing and story for "BioWare's biggest game"."

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

[When game journalists pluck out that juicy quote for an incendiary headline, it can have wide-ranging impact -- but unfortunately it's not a simple problem. In this opinion piece, Gamasutra news director Leigh Alexander addresses the dysfunctional relationship between game journalists, the industry and the audience they both serve.]

Video games have the potential to be a plodding, tech-focused industry, and while there is certainly a broad and nuanced consumer base for them (broader than most realize), those who read internet game journalism still represent a fairly niche portion of the audience. We're not accustomed to being buzzworthy or sexy, the way, say, celebrity gossip, fashion or the film biz is.

And yet, we'd like to be a little more buzzworthy, in general -- we've got the hot-looking (albeit digital) icons, we've got the big explosions, the talent, the high action and the tearjerkers. Why can't we have some sexy headlines, too?

It's a reasonable thought; I agree with the sentiment that the industry needs more celebrities, more champions, more people that can really stand at the forefront of things as beloved ambassadors -- as Cliff Bleszinski says in today's Gamasutra's current feature, "visionaries." We've got a few of those, of course, but generally those folks don't talk to the media much. They tend to be "Wizard of Oz" personas behind the scenes, don't they?

Failing actual celebrities, we often make "controversial" figures out of just about anything we can get our hands on, ready to seize on vague quotes to create an imagined feud, ready to populate and respawn relatively tame challenges or dissensions from industry people to craft them into maverick media stars.

Imposing Our Personal Narratives

Though the quote didn't make it into my final interview stories, I remember that during my talk with EA CEO John Riccitiello recently, he noted that "people wanted to impose their personal narrative" on his company's bid to acquire Take-Two, imagining a contentious war of egos, fierce verbal exchanges and slamming boardroom doors, an out-and-out, one-on-one testosterone battle between Riccitiello and the (rather generative!) Strauss Zelnick. Though I'm sure Riccitiello would not have told me if it'd indeed been that way, he maintains the negotiations were professional, civil, and essentially uneventful -- but that doesn't make good headlines, does it?

People want to impose their personal narratives on a lot of things, and often the media caters to this wish -- they do it with politics, business, art and film, whatever you pick. And "the media" is often criticized (as if "the media" comprised some nebulous, single-headed monster) for its steps over the line between sensationalism and its duty to the truth.

This leads me to a recent Edge story about Deus Ex. At PC game blog Rock Paper Shotgun, veteran game journalist Kieron Gillen was the first to discover:

"The forthcoming issue of videogame bible Edge has a large feature on Eidos Montreal’s development of Deus Ex 3. To tease it, Edge Online runs a short story with the headline “Deus Ex was “Kinda Slow” Says Deus Ex 3 Dev” before offering a quote from Lead Designer Jean-Francois Dugas: “There weren’t enough exciting, memorable moments. It was aimed more towards a simulation rather than a game experience.”. Internet explodes. It is only part of the story. In a literal sense."

In other words, the "kinda slow" line was out of context and dredged out of an interview with a plethora of much more relevant quotes, or at the very least, quotes that could have been taken out of context to precisely the opposite effect. And yes, this happens often in media -- but on the internet, news stories can provoke widespread reaction. And that reaction can impact people's relationship to their work at best -- and their game performance and their job status at worst.

Why This Happens

We live in a world where blogs, forums and Digg influence game-buying habits as much as, if not more than, "proper" media. When a journalist takes something out of context to grab a headline, that angle on the truth is free to proliferate across amateur sites and aggregators even further out of context -- in short, it becomes a game of Telephone, where the end result could theoretically turn out so divorced from its source that the source can no longer be found.

For example, Kotaku -- which, in my experience usually aims to be more responsible about context and sourcing than it's often given credit for -- picked up Edge's headline, and Luke Plunkett was apparently so worried about inappropriate reader reactions that he qualified the statement with plenty of context -- in italics, even! But even despite this, a good portion of Kotaku's audience is unlikely to read the whole post, and the editorializing will take place in the comments anyway.

So yes, I do think Edge crossed a line. I think it was poorly done of what's normally a very high-quality site. But while I could sit here and self-righteously excoriate Edge for being irresponsible, unethical, hit-driven, traffic-obsessed, blah blah blah, and all the things it seems knee-jerk to do, it's unfortunately not that simple.

Joined By Challenge

Both game developers and game journalists have a couple key things in common: First, serving their audience is their job, and if they do this well, they will be successful. Both game development and game journalism are highly competitive, even saturated -- developers must do their best to ensure that their game is the one that the average consumer drops $60 on this month, and game journalists must do their best to ensure that their site is the one that garners the biggest piece of the Web traffic pie.

As an aside, though the word "traffic" gets thrown around often whenever someone criticizes game journalism, it oversimplifies things; not all journalists are paid on the traffic they do, and not all sites have a direct correlation between traffic and money. It depends on other factors of a media company's business models. But the point remains that a web site that nobody reads won't be around for long; a writer who doesn't get read isn't going to have a job for long.

And this is the era of New Media. While journalists are busily aiming to score proper interviews, do research, cite their sources and observe embargoes and all those fussy details -- you know, journalism -- blogs not only have more freedom to make entertainment more important than ethics, but they also frequently have a devoted community around them that enjoys being free to speak back. So news sites like Edge (and like its competitor, Gamasutra) face stiff competition in attaining an audience's attention.

Not an excuse, I know; that's just business. And sensationalism is hardly a new issue. But I think we've got something a little different here in the games biz, something unique to us, that makes it complicated.

Consumption Culture

It seems situations like this might occur less often if we didn't have a larger culture within the gaming audience wherein we have, as I recently wrote at length, become extremely demanding in a fashion that borders on entitlement.

Our hit-driven business has created among the consumer culture an environment where each new event is required to be more exciting than the last, and the hype cycle breeds such high expectations that chronic cynicism and negativity is an inevitability. I mean, here we are, talking about how inappropriate it was to bait explosive audience reaction -- regarding what's really a vague, tepid criticism of an old game. Take a wider-lens view, and that "kinda slow" quote is hardly incendiary at all -- why is it such a big deal?

Here's another thing journalists and game developers have in common: They feel, quite a lot of the time, that they will never be able to please their audience no matter what they do.

We won't be able to make audiences happy, so we'll stand for just being able to hang on to their attention. Somewhere in the world at this very moment, game designers are putting heads together trying to puzzle out just what tactic they can try to make players engage with their next game for longer than they did with the last one. At the same time, a game publication's brass are discussing with their editors how they can boost reader retention.

If neither of them can cater to the consumption habits of their audience, they won't last -- especially in an oversaturated space where there is plenty of competition. And so to align with the audience's consumption habits, both games and game journalism are forced to align with the culture of their audience -- a culture that wants celebrity, wants controversy, wants things to buzz about, and, unfortunately, wants things to complain about, to take up arms about, to band together over.

Chickens And Eggs

And certainly, one end does perpetuate the other. Has the audience been trained to expect disappointment, to have minimal attention spans, by the hype-driven (and thus continually disappointing) game industry? Have the mechanics of games themselves engineered a culture that demands logically-placed, tiered rewards interspersed with occasional, unpredictable conflict?

Has the audience developed its resentful mob mentality by being told what they do and don't want by a slate of envious, immature game journalists whose largest qualification is that they are more obsessive enthusiasts than those for whom they write?

Journalists and developers will say that they've become whatever it is they've become because of turning backbends to please an unpleasable audience; the audience can just as easily say they've been made what they are by the media they consume.

I have in the past plucked out what I think is the juiciest headline quote from an interview I've done. And I confess that my standards for juiciness have at least a little to do with an awareness of what people will click on. I like to think I'm responsible about it, but I'm pretty sure Edge didn't think it was being irresponsible with this Deus Ex quote either.

As a matter of fact, I wonder if I might not have zeroed in on the exact same headline. I can't say for sure.

It's a slippery slope with no clear source of blame. In the dysfunctional family circle of game industry, game media, and game consumer, anyone can always point the finger to the left or to the right of themselves.

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

Some more GameSetLinkDump, then, with a tremendous amount of goodness to get through, starting out with a pedometer that's also a role-playing game. I know there's My Weight Loss Coach for DS, but there it would be great if there was something quirkier and more grind-y in the West for RPG idiots, maybe?

Also in here somewhere - details on the making of odd '80s adventure title Amnesia, national gaming day at libraries, the Mother 3 handbook, and plenty more.

Is he dead, Mr. Spock?

Trends in Japan - CScout Japan Blog » Bandai RPG Pedometers animate your steps
'Bandai will soon be releasing two new hybrid pedometer games to keep you entertained while racking up the miles as you go about your life.' Wish they did English language pedometer games, besides Pokemon - or do they?

YouTube - Little Big Planet: Love and Marriage (Engagement Proposal)
'How I asked my GF to marry me in Little Big Planet. My (now) Fiancee was playing the level. She was so shocked she kept playing and knew i was filming. Afterwords we hugged, she cried, and I gave her an engagement ring.'

Back of the Cereal Box: The Legacy of W.A. Stokins
A good, handy Sheng Long round-up, guv'nor!

Mother 3 Handbook - The English gamers' guide to the world of MOTHER 3
Crazily beautiful fan service for a game that, what, won't get released in the States ever? Sigh. Via Brandonnn.

ASCII by Jason Scott: Amnesia, Forgotten and Remembered
Super-neat find - the original manuscript for '"Amnesia", the text adventure that was written by Thomas M. Disch and released by Electronic Arts in the mid-1980s.'

I Love Libraries - National Gaming Day @ your library
'On November 15, 2008, libraries across the country will participate in the largest, simultaneous national video game tournament ever held! Kids will be able to compete against players at other libraries and see their scores in real-time online while playing at their local library.'

The Making of…Deus Ex Machina | Edge Online
'I decided the time had come to go for it. Deus Ex Machina was either going to be my Orson Welles landmark or my Orson Cart disaster.'

The work of play - Los Angeles Times
Good mainstream piece on games, salaries, California.

Live from IndieCade Opening Weekend: Moments of Bliss | IndieCade
Glad to see the fest went well for them, hope it continues!

play online - 360, PS3 : Dave Talks Golden Axe
Parallel universe Halverson strikes again: 'Regarding many of the “reviews” on Sega’s Golden Axe: Beast Rider: Be wary. The majority of these people (can’t call them critics) either didn’t complete a fraction of the game, don’t understand game design, or just plain suck at games.'

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