In this round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Snowblind Studios, Diesel Games, Pandemic Studios, RealNetworks, Armature Studios, and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted in each market area this week include:

Gamasutra.com - Game Industry Jobs

Diesel Games: Tools Developer
"Diesel Games is a startup game studio located in Tempe, Arizona, founded by industry veterans to foster the creative and technical talents of its employees. Our passion is to create games that push the envelope, both technically and creatively. We've begun work on an original FPS title targeted for next-generation consoles, and we're looking for talented people to join our team."

Snowblind Studios: Technical Artist
"Want to make art for the next great, AAA fantasy action RPG...something that really pushes your creativity? How about working in a fun, laid-back environment in gorgeous Seattle? Snowblind Studios (makers of the highly-acclaimed Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, Champions of Norrath, Champions: Return to Arms, and JLH) are currently looking for a Technical Artist (Character rigging/Environment art optimization/Physics/Collision/Shaders) for our exciting, next-generation AAA console title."

Pandemic Studios: Senior Gameplay Engineer
"Pandemic Studios develops high-profile titles for some of the top publishers in the industry. With a series of best-selling hit releases, Pandemic has built a reputation as a premier developer of innovative, award winning games for all major platforms. We are seeking sharp, ambitious, visionary talent to join our team. Pandemic is looking for an experienced gameplay engineer who has a proven track record of producing high-quality gameplay systems and can collaborate with others to iteratively improve them."

Armature Studio: Senior Game Designer
"Located in Austin Texas and founded by the key developers of the Metroid Prime franchise, Armature Studio’s goal is to create compelling new intellectual properties in an innovative development environment. Our company combines the creative flexibility of a small independent studio, with the financial security of a large development house due to our long term, exclusive publishing deal with Electronic Arts."

SeriousGamesSource - Serious Games

Blue Duck Education Ltd.: Game Designer for Mangahigh.com
"MangaHigh.com is the hot new start-up changing the way kids around the world learn and build core academic skills. Founded by Toby Rowland, Co-Founder / Co-CEO King.com, one of the largest casual games businesses in the world, MangaHigh will launch in early 2009. Further details disclosed at face-to-face meetings."

GamesOnDeck - Mobile Games

RealNetworks: SDE, iPhone
"We need you to bring our hit games to iPhone! You will adapt our cross-platform (Mac/Windows) engine to support a new platform. You will be responsible for adapting existing titles for iPhone, and will become involved in simultaneous development of new ones. You should be familiar with the iPhone SDK and OpenGL/ES."

To browse hundreds of similar jobs, and for more information on searching, responding to, or posting game industry-relevant jobs to the top source for jobs in the business, please visit Gamasutra's job board now.

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

[Originally posted on big sister site Gamasutra and of interest to GSW readers, I think, Christian Nutt chatted to Internet security firm ESET about why online game password hacking - and then item/account stealing - has become such a big for-profit sport of late.]

Every January, security software firm ESET releases its Global Threat Report -- and this year, online game password security has become a primary concern. Gamasutra spoke with Jeff Debrosse, ESET's research director, to learn more.

ESET, a vendor of virus and malware removal solutions -- best known for its Smart Security software -- tracks threats across all aspects of computing, not just games.

But over the course of 2008, says Debrosse, "We saw [gaming] just spiking above all of the malware or types of security threats that we've seen."

According to the Global Threat Report, the transition of virus and malware activity from thrill-seeking hackers to criminal syndicates is also what's driving the targeting of games.

"That's really the crux of it all, that's really what it boils down to," says Debrosse. "In the past, it was really mischievous. People would deface a website or send a virus... something that would be more of just an irritant. But the criminal element has really figured out that if folks are going to spend their time creating malware, why not make it lucrative at the same time?"

Why Games? Why Now?

Games became a natural target, because of the "money trail" crooks follow, says Debrosse. "It really comes down to the really simple fact of they're looking for the trail where the most money is amassed... and in this case the money trail really leads to online gaming."

Continues Debrosse, "A big part of it is really around the reselling of what I'd like to call 'virtual assets', whether it be the actual characters themselves... weaponry, shields, energy, any of those things that you can actually transfer in the virtual world... that's the goal behind getting the username and the password, and literally stripping it of all of its assets."

But it's not that the games themselves are compromised by the malware creators, though, cautions Debrosse - rather, the user's machines are hacked to extract their passwords.

What's Really Happening Out There?

Attackers rely on more traditional, broader tactics -- tools like social engineering, or interacting with and convincing players to fall victim to attacks. This helps them introduce viruses and malware, like keystroke-logging Trojan horses.

Debrosse notes, "From a research perspective, we look at the amount of malware that we're detecting that's targeting password stealing -- Trojans specifically -- that's built for games. We can see that when we reverse engineer [the software], that it's trying to get passwords and it's targeted to certain strings... and that has grown immensely over the last 12 months."

The method? Debrosse explains: "It's a two-phase attack. If someone's account was compromised, then someone else can actually [using their avatar] during a chat session, or through in-game communication... they could leverage that people trust this person and point them at various URLs, and those URLs will either have drive-by malware or a specific [malware] executable."

"What ends up happening is that folks may end up downloading and using it. This is just one methodology."

These attackers also target gamers in external community sites, says Debrosse, through "banners on websites or URLs in chat rooms or forums" -- which can lead to unsafe URLs. "If [users] don't have adequate protection, they could very well be downloading malware without their knowledge."

"The folks that are trying to get your credentials, your username and password, to get something from you, or to get you even to click on malware -- it all comes down to armchair psychology. A lot of the infections do not occur without user interaction."

The Criminal Motivation

What drives these criminals, and why don't they typically try to hack game clients directly? Says Debrosse, "What it comes down to... Someone who's on the non-criminal side tries to look at what their return on investment is."

"The criminal element is thinking, 'Well, if I could just steal these credentials through a social engineering/malware method... it's easier to capture it from a keylogger than it is to create a specially-targeted piece of malware for that game'."

And what's the major target? It's no surprise, says Debrosse. "World of Warcraft is the big prize for a lot of these criminals, because they know that there is a lot of in-world commerce and value, and they go for where the money is, and they know that there's a lot of money tied into World of Warcraft."

"It's a volume game with them. Even if they don't get a lot per account, there are a lot of accounts they can go after."

Though gamers can discover that their characters have been stolen and petition MMO customer service reps for assistance, it may be too late. These attackers often move quickly, strip the account of goods, and sell them off at bargain prices -- and once they have the money, they're gone.

"Because it's at an attractive price, and the games are so popular, they'll have quite a few takers," Debrosse says. "It's fairly quick, the process is done... if [the stolen equipment] can be tracked down, the person who paid for it is out of luck at that point. They're gone, they've made their money, and they're going to move on to the next victim."

What Can Developers Do?

According to Debrosse, "The developers are doing a fairly good job. It's not that the games themselves have all of these vulnerabilities where someone can exploit them."

"The problem comes around the client operating system, where the user is. It typically comes back to a user problem. It's user behaviors that come back, that level them vulnerable to someone exploiting them."

"There's no software that's 100%, you'll always find some vulnerability," Debrosse maintains. "But what we've found from the stealing of online gaming credentials, it revolves around that malware and that social engineering, and if you were to figure out the root cause, it's someone doing something not correct -- trying to run stolen software, or clicking on a bad URL."

While developers could put more warnings in games and forums to try and deter users from trusting strangers with their sensitive information, or to avoid clicking on external URLs, social engineering often wins over automatic messages.

Debrosse does think that "if the developers were able to continue adding verbiage, to educate or remind their gamers" that security is important, there might be a positive effect.

However, he also warns that, between human interaction and automated messaging, "there's a tremendous difference in effectiveness... There's this thing called click fatigue. If you were to pop up these warnings... people just want to click their way through so they can get started."

There are also some possible technical aides. For example, Blizzard has introduced the World Of Warcraft authenticator RSA key generator. This is a physical token device that allows you to augment account security by entering a specially generated password created by the device every time you log in.

But stopping attacks, in general, has little to do with adding better security to games. Debrosse concludes: "It does come down to something as simple as behavior modification. That behavior -- having not risky behavior online, but having a more careful, more insightful personality online," is what will protect users from having their accounts violated.

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

[In her latest Bosslady Blog update, which we're also carrying here on sister site GSW, Game Developers Conference event director Meggan Scavio discusses the newly announced Nintendo keynote, as well as the GDC Vault and new Dead Space, LittleBigPlanet and Flagship Studios lectures.]

Hopefully by now, the news of GDC 2009's first announced keynote has made the rounds as far as... you. But if you happen to live on the planet formerly known as Pluto, let me bring you up to date.

Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo Co., Ltd, will deliver the opening keynote at this year’s GDC, titled “Discovering New Development Opportunities.” Mr. Iwata has spoken at GDC twice already and always manages to surprise and inspire. Can’t wait to see what he’s got to say this year!

For anyone who happens not to be a morning person, please take note: Iwata’s opening keynote on Wednesday, March 25th will begin at 9.00 am. GDC keynotes have historically started at 10:30 am, but we thought it would be nice to open the main conference with everybody gathered in one room. Expect bonding - hand holding not required...

Another neat new thing we’re doing this year is the GDC Vault. This new site will host video/slide/audio sync-ed recordings of all GDC Summits, Lectures and Panels, and will be available for online streaming one week after GDC this year. Not only is this quite a task (we’re recording 250 sessions), but it's free to GDC 2009 All Access pass holders. You need never miss another GDC session again - like I said, neat.

Browsing the website, I found a lot of intriguing new sessions that have popped up since my last update. Sister website Gamasutra has kindly been posting their top picks by track, but here are some new announcements even they haven't picked up on:

- EA Redwood Shores senior producer Chuck Beaver is going to be presenting “Dead Space: How We Launched the Scariest New IP.” In a year of sequels, find out how EA brought this new title to market. Expect to hear their “successes and stumbles”, as well as what it takes to create a horror-genre title. It's a more difficult question than you'd think - how do you make things scary?

- You first learned about this game at Game Developers Conference, and now, six months after the launch, GDC attendees can hear from the creators what went wrong and what went right, in: “Media Molecule: 'Winging It' - Ups, Downs, Mistakes, Successes in the Making of LittleBigPlanet.” Alex Evans, technical director, and Mark Healey, creative director, share their experience as a small development team launching their first game.

- To get a wider picture of the critically acclaimed PS3 title, check out the other LittleBigPlanet sessions newly announced at GDC 2009: “The LittleBigPlanet Jam” will discuss their 'jamming style' of game production, and “The Art of LBP: From Conception Through to Finishing” will look at how the game's art and visual direction was developed. And let’s not forget one of my favorite lecture titles so far - “How Sackboy Learned to Love Physics” - where MM will talk about “the conflicts between the physical consistency demanded by the physics engine and the player's expected behavior of the character.”

- Finally, anyone currently working at a start-up or independent developer may want to attend “My Lessons Learned from Flagship Studios.” This lecture will follow the life of the Hellgate: London developer - from their peak in 2007 to their demise 8 months later. Former director of business development and general counsel Stephen Goldstein will provide his personal list of the 10 lessons he learned the hard way from the company's demise.

GDC 2009 has also got some more amazing sessions that will be popping up in the next week or two, as well as the second keynote announcement. It’s so good that I wish I could tell you now, but... can't. Don’t you hate it when people do that?

[Meggan and her colleagues will be posting regular updates from behind the scenes through the lead-up to this March's Game Developers Conference 2009, including content reveals and other helpful information. You can subscribe individually to the GDC News blog via its RSS feed.]

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

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

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

The delights in this edition include a one-key action game with multiplayer support, the commercial release of a long-awaited music-oriented puzzler, a new game from GameSetWatch columnist Gregory Weir, and a charming 2D adventure game with art drawn using a limited six-color palette.

Game Pick: 'Auditorium' (Cipher Prime, commercial indie - demo available)
"In Auditorium, players attempt to direct a flow of sound into audio containers, releasing the music. As each container is filled, more parts are added to the music, eventually resulting in a full musical piece. The game looks brilliant and plays like a dream - well worth checking out."

Game Pick: 'Mystic Mine' (Koonsolo, commercial indie - demo available)
"A single or multiplayer experience in which players control the direction of a minecart with the use of a single keyboard button. The main selling point of the game is the fact that up to six people can play at the same time on one keyboard, leading to some hilarious gameplay."

Game Pick: 'Bars of Black and White' (Gregory Weir, browser)
"An escape the room game created by the developer of that popular pixel-horror Flash game, (I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors. The adventure involves using a barcode scanner to read clues scattered around the room you're trapped in, with hopes that a key can be found to unlock the door blocking your exit."

Game Pick: 'Annie Android' (Ben Chandler, freeware)
"A short 2D adventure game created by Ben Chandler (developer of Man Boy vs Doctor Sock), featuring art drawn entirely with a six-colour palette as a self-imposed artistic limitation. The story centers around a female Robot named Annie Android, who is thinking of asking her good-looking Mailbot friend out on a date."

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.]

"Probably the easiest way to describe Spelunky is that it's (kind of) like La Mulana meets Nethack - every time you play the levels, items, monsters, and so forth, are all procedurally-generated. [...] My goal was to create a fast-paced platform game that had the kind of tension, re-playability, and variety of a roguelike. In roguelikes, the gameplay tells the story, and I wanted to give Spelunky that type of a feeling... but make the player rely on their reflexes rather than their brain (or knowledge of what 50 billion command keys do!). If there's a best of both worlds, that's what I was trying to go for."
-- Derek Yu, introducing Spelunky on TIGSource Forums.

Spelunky has been talked about on a fairly substantial number of blogs in the short month of its public existence. Considering that its aim is to bring some of the unique characteristics of the roguelike games into a different genre, I figured it was fair game for examination here. The result is quite a clever little game, highly addictive and quick to play. Death is incredibly frequent, but that should come as no hindrance to us, right?

Right?

[Note: This is @Play's fiftieth column. At the end is an overview of topics already covered and a list of links to them.]

The object of Spelunky is to work through a series of cave levels, avoiding damage and sudden death while collecting treasure and working towards the mysterious goal. Every level begins with the player at the top, the exit somewhere at the bottom, and a lot of loot and pain to discover along the way. Yep, sounds like a roguelike all right.

But Spelunky is a platformer, an action game presented with a side view. Its controls are greatly simplified, and the emphasis is on finding clever ways around obstacles. Treasure is found in the form of money and jewels, as extra supplies, as carryable tools like teleporters and shotguns, and as special equipment ranging from climbing gloves to jetpacks.

Making its array of dynamically-created action puzzles possible is a fairly deep system of object interactions, which helps to push this borderline case back into our purview.

Nearly everything can be made use of in the right circumstances, including a lot of the enemies who are trying to eat our poor hero, unofficially dubbed "Indie" by the TIGSource Forums. Bats can be lured to set off arrow traps. Exploding frogs can break open sealed chambers. Falls from great heights can be survived by landing upon a hapless snake. One of the most impressive examples of these interactions has to do with the many ways of defeating arrow traps. Found in the first four levels, they are one of the game’s most interesting obstacles, and they well illustrate the kind of situations the game's excellent random level algorithm can produce.

Avoiding the Point

One of the best ways to design traps, in other games as well as in roguelikes, is to give them an activating method, to simulate some operating mechanism. Not to just automatically harm the player when he enters the trigger area, but set some process in motion that harms him. It feel less arbitrary, but it potentially gives him a way of escaping the effect if he can come up with a way to avoid or subvert the process. In Nethack, for example, levitation means floor triggered traps or pits will not be set off, and if one can find and move the boulder-half of a rolling boulder trap, it is made harmless. This way it feels lell like damage by fiat. It makes sense.

Spelunky’s arrow traps are another good example. They operate by sensing motion. It doesn’t matter what, of the game’s many types of objects, is doing the moving. What follows, in the name of examining the kinds of design decisions that went into making Spelunky, is a fairly in-depth examination of them. It should go without saying that this is a spoiler, although in this game it's a relatively minor one.

In the image above, the trap is circled in white, and the extent of its sight range is represented by the red line. That’s about six-and-a-half blocks in front of the statue. The orange line shows about the route the arrow will follow.

Now take note that, in Spelunky, objects in rapid motion may harm the player. A stationary or slow-moving arrow is harmless, yet if you throw a rock against a wall so it bounces back and strikes you at full speed it’ll hurt you. So, when the arrow reaches the end of that orange line it’ll be at rest on the ground and cease to be a problem. If there were a wall in the way, the arrow would bounce off, and possibly harm Indie on its rebound. If it hurts it hurts bad, for arrow hits in Spelunky do two points of damage. That's half the player’s base total, and a enough penalty this early in the game to warrant a restart unless some other advantage has been found.

One way to thwart an arrow trap is simply to fall straight down through its watch line. If the player is a full block away from the trap as he falls by the arrow will miss him, even with the arrow’s high speed. So, falling from point 1 will set the trap off safely… but only if the player can bend his fall so he lands on the steps below; if he landed on the low portion of the ground, the fall might be enough distance to inflict a point of falling damage. (This, mind, could be avoided by doing a ledge-hang from the upper platform, a good technique to utilize if you’re unsure if the fall is safe or not.)

If the player is approaching from ground level, then the situation is a little trickier. In many cases then it might be best to walk under the trap and let it be. But what if there were some prize on the upper route the player wanted to obtain, like a supply box or treasure chest? Standing on the upper-most step, at point 2, and jumping is a bad move. Indie would set off the trap at the apex of his jump, leaving him hanging for too long in the arrow’s path, giving it plenty of time to strike and bleed off two pints.

But one of the enemies circled above is a bat. Bats trigger when the player enters a wide area beneath it, causing it to give chase. They’re slow enemies, so in this case when it crosses the red line it’ll trigger the trap and get killed instead of the player. Just standing at point 2, at the top of the stairs, should do the job. Triggering the spider would probably work too, though it activates only if Indie walks directly beneath, and it's more unpredictable in its attack than a bat.

What if the player is moving in from the right, and wants to pass the trap going left? It’s a little expensive resource-wise, but he could drop a bomb above the trap at point 3 to outright destroy it. The player would have to be sure to get out of range of the blast; bomb hits are instant kills in this game. In a pinch he could also throw the bomb across from either point 3 or, in an upward arc, from point 4, and use its motion to set off the trap. Bombs are important equipment though, and it’s best to look around for something else, like a rock, jar or skull to throw and set off the trap.

If none of these tools are available then it’s really best to avoid setting it off at all, but if the player could find a way to enter the trap’s sight at the very end and move slowly, he might be able to take advantage of the difference between its straight vision range and the arrow’s curving path. This can be used to safely trigger arrow traps lying on flat ground; if the player slowly walks towards the trap, the arrow will actually hit the ground around the player's feet.

Spooky + Spelunky = Spelooky?

Roguelikes get their tension from the fact that the player, ideally, never has all the resources he might want. The tradeoff used in Rogue is food vs. experience; the player could stick around on the easy levels forever killing weak monsters to rise in level if he didn’t have to keep moving to keep himself fed.

Spelunky’s version of this takes the form of the Ghost. On all levels except the first and last, there is a two minute timer on the level. After that the music turns spooky and a warning message is displayed. 30 seconds after that and the Ghost enters the level, relentlessly chasing the player down and causing instant death on contact.

Some have complained about the timer, but I find that it’s a brilliant addition, and the time limit seems quite well-tuned; if the player is working towards nothing other than reaching the exit then he has plenty of extra time; most levels can be beaten in less than a minute. But there are plenty of other rewards to find: damsels to increase health, idols worth a fortune if brought to the exit, and an abundance of gold and jewels.

There are also shops to buy from (or rob), supplies to collect and treasure to uncover. If the player is going along collecting these things as fast as he can, he might be able to get them all, but he’ll have used up lots of his bombs and ropes getting them, and has probably taken a good amount of damage as well. The proper way to look at it is to look at an early exit, in the early levels at least, as a waste of resources. There’s no benefit from having extra time at the end of a level (except for achieving a special trophy), so the player must strike a balance between efficient progress and loot collection.

Somewhere, Izchak Miller is Looking Down on Us, Smiling

Of most interest to us roguelike fans is perhaps Spelunky's shops, which are lifted just about as completely as possible, given the completely different style of game it is, from Nethack. In Nethack a shop is a room with a shopkeeper at the door; the primary reason not to steal from the shop is that the owner will attempt to take out payment in flesh if you abscond with his merchandise. Spelunky's shopkeepers are similarly protective over their inventory; every one of them carries a shotgun, perhaps the game's most formidable weapon.

The following things will draw the wrath of a storekeep: walking out of a shop carrying inventory without paying, damaging the walls, floor or ceiling of a shop, harming inventory or otherwise causing it to leave the premises, harming the shopkeeper either directly or indirectly, or sending an instakill object into a shop. (Throwing in a bomb is particularly entertaining, even if you are unlikely to survive the situation.)

Even if you escape the shopkeeper, or manage to kill him, all the remaining shopkeepers in the game will be out for blood. They'll also camp out by the exit waiting for you for a couple of levels. Of course, there are strategies to decrease the danger of robbery,but… but I don't think I'll be spoiling those kinds of things today, sorry.

Raising Real Estate Values in the Caves

For everything Spelunky does well, there are a couple of things that could perhaps use some work. (Well it is beta software after all.) What there is usually errs on the side of being just a little too difficult. There are a number of carryable items the player can use; firearms, exploration tools, flares, idols and damsels. But only one of these things can be carried in-hand at a time. The player can make due by running back and forth ferrying items along towards the exit, but this is somewhat annoying, and rapidly approaches unworkability as the player juggles more than two such items.

This could be seen as a limiting factor, to prevent people from being able to make full use of their inventory or to limit their usable possessions, but when the player encounters a dark level, carrying around a flare is essential unless the player wants to stumble into an arrow trap or jump down onto a bed of spikes. The result: dark levels tend to act as an effective barrier to carried items, making it difficult to keep even a single useful tool, like a shotgun, through them.

Even if the player manages to keep a flare all the way through a dark level, the odd way that light behaves in the game makes them less useful than you'd think. All light sources in a dark area display a very small portion of the (otherwise black) terrain around them. The player has a similar aura around him. If the player is physically close to a light source however, his own circle expands, getting bigger the closer he is. The upshot is, the technique of throwing a flare into a hole to see if there's spikes, monsters or arrow traps nearby is less useful than you'd expect, as the flare won't reveal anything beyond a block around where it lands. (It may also find water, which kills the flare.) To see further, the player will have to jump down to be closer to the flare, but will then probably end up getting feasted upon by whatever lurks there unseen. This is potentially a big problem with the man-eating plants in some of the later levels.

Those arrow traps I mentioned before, for all their charming complexity, have a problem that makes them slightly too difficult in certain situations. Their sight range is 6 and 1/2 blocks. The play window 20 blocks wide. The player is typically in the middle of that, giving him 10 blocks of vision horizontally. The result is, when walking along level ground, the player tends to have little time to react to arrow traps lying on the ground in front of him, especially if he's using the run button to escape some other danger, like giant spiders or crushing boulders.

Some of the later areas are unusually demanding upon the player's supplies and equipment. He begins with four bombs and four ropes. Bombs can break through rock, generally one space horizontally and two spaces down; ropes allow the player to go upwards in a level without needing platforms to rest on. Extras can be found in the levels and bought in some stores, and while they're often common, they're just as often absent in the game. Not to spoil things unnecessarily, but the third area (levels 9-12) seems particularly bad in this regard. Making it through usually depends on loading up on ropes on the earlier levels, but sometimes there just aren't many ropes to be had.

All of these things comes to matter a little more than it might in a traditional roguelike because Spelunky severely limits the number of hit points the player has. He has no maximum, but can only regain hits from damsels, and then only one at a time. Each level contains an huge variety of ways to get hurt for one or more hits, or get instantly killed, and our hero only has one life. As a result, everything that can harm the player effectively does so permanently; the player can never let himself just eat damage to get through a tiresome situation. This may be the hardest thing of all about Spelunky, and it's something that even roguelikes tend to offer more leeway towards; to regain health in most, the player need only find a monster-free room and rest a few dozen turns. I can't say if Spelunky's system really works; most games end far short of level 15, even for an experienced player, unless he gets a lucky break along the way. But then again, the action-oriented nature of the game, and relatively large number of empty spaces, means the player is more more able to avoid damage than in Rogue or its kin. It seems to be another case where the game is only slightly too hard.

Spelunking Along, Singing a Song

Yet surprisingly, these issues don't detract from its addictiveness too much. Overall, difficulty is only a little high considering the mood of game; that is to say, the game is often brutal yet fair. It's only when the flipside of that "often" comes in that the player is screwed over, and then it's usually masked well enough that he's not sure if it was his fault or not. And in a game where you're expected to die hundreds of times before you win; the fact that the game plays so quickly helps to counter the frustration this might otherwise cause.

Spelunky's generation system seems to work by filling in map spaces with sections of pre-generated level templates and then "roughening" them up a bit before inserting extra blocks, monsters, traps and treasure. It's a mechanism not used often in true roguelikes, but it seems to work rather well for a platformer. And it's good that Spelunky doesn't tame its level design too much as it generates its randomized levels.

Lots of commercial games that make use of random generation do that. In their efforts to ensure all areas are fairly completable, they also restrict a lot of interesting generation results. Those interesting juxtapositions and finding ways to overcome them, or even utilize them, are most of the fun to be had in Spelunky, and it turns out to be rather a lot of fun after all. This makes me rather anxious about my complaints above: in a rush to fix them, it would be easy to go overboard and rob Spelunky of its delicious challenge. This, really, is the biggest challenge to roguelike design: making it hard but fair. To thrust the knife at the player's throat, but to never touch him, relying on his own actions to push it in.

This is @Play's fiftieth post! Here's a listing of prior columns (thanks to the links page at http://nethackwiki.com/), sorted by topic:

Overview:
A View of the Field
Roguelikes and OD&D
More on Roguelikes and D&D

Learning to play:
Introduction
Keypresses
Roguelike movement & implications

On specific games:
Rogue
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue & Red Rescue Team
ToeJam & Earl
ADOM
Dungeon Crawl
DoomRL
HackLite
Mysterious Dungeon series
Seven Day Quest
POWDER
Angband
SLASH'EM
Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer DS
Larn
Super Rogue
Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja
Vulture's Eye & Vulture's Claw
Legerdemain
Monstania
Incursion
Spelunky (You are here.)

Roguelikes as stories:
Giant Eel Stories, Volume 1.
Giant Eel Stories, Volume 2
Storytelling in roguelikes

Playthroughs:
Taloon's Mystery Dungeon
Shiren the Wanderer SNES Part 1
Shiren the Wanderer SNES Part 2

Minutae:
Ways to die in Nethack
Metagame elements
Humor in Nethack
Quests in ADOM
Wishing in Nethack & spoilers in general
Shiren the Wanderer: Fei's Problems
On representing monsters as letters
Items (overview)

Development:
Nethack patches
Borg players
Dungeon generation algorithms
Game balance in Nethack
Homebrew Roguelikes on the Nintendo DS
The Nethack source code
Time and speed in roguelikes

Social:
devnull 2008 (10th anniversary)
devnull 2008 interview

Posted by John Harris at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

[Industry folks reading GameSetWatch, maybe you can do us a favor and fill out this survey for Game Developer Research - we're hoping to learn where outsourcing is going, and you can also win a GDC all-access pass along the way.]

Sister service Game Developer Research is conducting its Outsourcing Research survey, aimed at all game developers whose studios conduct outsourcing or are considering it.

Highlights of this anonymous survey will be published in an upcoming issue of Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra.com, as well as in much more detailed form as a Game Developer Research report.

In appreciation of your time and effort, once you complete the survey, your name will optionally (and separately of your responses) be entered into a drawing to win an All Access Pass to Game Developers Conference 2009 in San Francisco.

The survey addresses a broad range of topics related to the growing trend of outsourcing, including reasons for outsourcing, methods of studio selection, global outsourcing regions, types of content outsourced, and others. It is open to all developers whose studios have used outsourcing or are considering it.

Interested participants can now click through to take part in the survey, upon completion of which they will be entered to win an All Access GDC 2009 pass.

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

[In an impassioned opinion piece, designer Tim Carter argues that the industry's current studio model is set up to develop game companies, not to develop games -- backing an alternative model that follows the film industry's system and better rewards creative talent.]

Is the game development industry a software development or entertainment one?

Sounds like a dumb question, but the way it does business, a disinterested observer would wonder.

The game industry is about fun. It sells products that compel and engage; take people to worlds and let them attain personas they could not in real life. These are all elements of creative entertainment.

Yet, business-wise, this industry sees itself heavily as software development, not entertainment. Game designers focus a lot on company management while their filmmaking, novel-writing and music-composing contemporaries are off to the next project. If you want to share in the wealth for a film you're making, you sign a good contract and that's over with.

If you want the same in the game industry, you have to split time between developing the game and running the company that's making it. Or, you can give away your best work as an employee in a large studio -- but you'll be doing just that: giving away your best work, the studio and publisher reaping the lion's share of rewards if it leads to a hit.

Why? Should this be the case? And what effect does this have on games?

An Inherited Business Model

The game industry probably did not consciously choose its business model so much as inherit it. The pioneers of the game industry were not in show business. Gary Gygax was an insurance man; Sid Meier and his contemporaries software engineers.

They undertook business in the classic manner (operations-based) because that's what they knew: make a company to make a product or service that meets a need, then operate. When the entire roster of a company consists of five people, you can get away with this.

But when you need a hundred people to make a game, does this way of working still make sense? What fallout will using a business practice ideal for making widgets or providing financial services have on what is, after all, an entertainment venture?

Perhaps it might lead to a creative crisis.

Beyond The Creative Crisis

The creative crisis of the game industry is well known. Game companies stuck making sequels, trapped inside old and stale genres; innovation done on the backs of tiny self-funded indie developers; massive publishers staying only with the tried-and-true -- unoriginal takes on space marines, alien invasions, WW2, orcs and elves.

But there has been response to this. High-level parties have declared, "Okay, everyone, let's start innovating here." Sincere attempts have been made.

But there has been little examination and questioning of the underlying process used to make games. So isn't this just whipping a horse? How can using the same fundamental process that brought us into the creative crisis now facilitate innovation for the larger game projects that form the backbone of this industry?

Outsourcing & Prototyping

To be fair, there have been two progressive strides: outsourcing and prototyping.

But are these enough? Can we tack them on and, voila! -- it's all better?

Outsourcing follows the film industry somewhat. Actually, it follows almost the entire outside business world, not just the film industry. Do architectural firms possess heavy construction fleets in-house?

Instead of maintaining large, cumbersome pools of internal personnel who have little to do between projects, the outsourcing model strips the studio to a few key creators who then subcontract bulk work to external suppliers. Makes sense, and the game industry is moving toward it.

Prototyping is merely an acknowledgement and application of some disciplined process toward something we've done a long time. To innovate, you have to spend time fooling around, dreaming up new ideas, puttering about inventing things, building prototypes before the raw work of actually making the final product.

This has always gone on in game development, but in the past was camouflaged within GANTT charts dutifully produced for fearful money types who wanted the cake of innovation and the eat-it-too of straightforward scheduling. (Anyone remember the anonymous Slashdot programmer who said you might as well write "and here the miracle happens" right on the MS Project waterfall chart?)

So, today, we've "outted" prototyping: it occurs, and needs to. Let's pony up for it (somebody other than indie game jammers, that is). Let's do it with discipline: agile, spiral, iterative methodologies. It's happening.

Then why, if we've done these things, do we still see homogeneity in games? Why is the staleness of "grind" still so prevalent? Why are we still afflicted by sequelitis, on the one hand, or no ambition beyond being making what are really toys, on the other?

Well:

- We don't use a project-based business model.

- We don't cast projects.

- We don't package projects.

- Game designers don't claim their power.

Project-Based Game Development

The traditional game industry model -- development studio makes a vertical slice, pitches it to publisher, publisher advances the production funds, owns all the IP, markets and distributes it and then pays a royalty (less the advance) back to the dev studio -- is not really set up to make games, per se.

It's more set up to make game companies. Each game is just a vehicle for the company. We're really talking more about game company development here than game development.

In any conflict between the needs of the development studio and the needs of the game, guess which loses? The game. The game is there, ultimately, to further the development studio's agenda, not the other way around.

Since the company's purpose is to stay alive and operate -- pay overhead and salaries -- the easiest route to do this is to follow the path of least resistance: make sequels; work within comfortable boundaries; don't push it.

To do a really new game, our game development studio here will need to spend a million or more of its own money making a vertical slice, to show to decision-makers for a greenlight.

Said decision-makers don't seem to have as much imagination as those in other industries -- are little inclined to read a game design the way a film producer reads a screenplay -- wishing to passively wait until games appear nearly complete before greenlighting. The burden to pay for early visualization -- the design phase -- thus falls almost entirely on creators.

If, for some reason, the studio does get a really new game greenlit, it will usually retread its static roster of staff and technologies for this new project. Nobody wants to let go of old key talent in favor of hiring new persons perfectly suited to the new project. Again, the game is a vehicle for the company, in the same vein as a factory. But should a game studio be a factory?

Many key designers are held as employees and expected to kick in their best work for a mere wage, no share in the benefit if the project is a hit and no incentive to reveal their best work, often held under a "we-own-your-dreams" contract by the employer.

A talented game designer in this system holds his prize projects close to his heart, hidden until some day in the future when he and some partners might jump ship and start their own game company to realize this dream game. Hoping that when that day comes, possibly years later, the original passion and vision will not have slipped away.

This doesn't cultivate talent and creative projects. It controls them. There are probably only two kinds of original IPs that can be initiated in this system:

1.) gigantic projects based on yesterday's games, funded by large publishers, staffed by chiefly static rosters of talent (who sell all their IP rights, even residuals, to the publisher; waive their creative moral rights, seek no rights reversions and so forth); or

2.) small indie casual titles

By contrast, under a project-based system, the company making the game is a vehicle for the game and core talent. This is how it happens in film.

The spirit is "If you build it, they will come." It's still a business with a profit mandate, but it's tailored to entertainment requirements: focusing on making the best possible individual title, the result of said quality leading indirectly to large sales.

Each game is a project -- its own company. Projects are assembled in slates, mitigating risk, allowing for more creative chances to be taken. What usually sparks a project is an early game design, by one or two individual designers, which is shopped around. This project is then cast and packaged (see below).

Everything is outsourced -- even the core team members. There are more financing tools, utilizing film finance experience, such as optioning and negative pick-up deals. The game is made virtually during early prototyping; but in late prototyping and full production, a temporary office is set up for the core team. Large outsourcing companies work from their own permanent facilities.

Once the game is done, everyone exits. This is also a strength of project-based development. The temporary office is wrapped; the IP rights of the finished game assigned to the marketing company (typically a publisher that funded the project through a slate) for distribution. Core talent and outsourcing suppliers all go their own way: take a break, or on to the next project elsewhere, each free to follow an independent path

Since grunt employees are working for outsourcing suppliers, they do not suffer the kind of mass layoff that we are seeing occur every time a major publisher wraps a project: their company is just off the project, and is on to the next.

All talent, core and non-core, is protected by standardized crediting procedures, allowing them to efficiently build a resume to move rapidly from project to project. Core talent, who actually created the spine of the game, is featured up front, on the box -- this lets a key developer promote the only brand they have that ultimately matters: their actual name.

Casting & Packaging

This system works on casting and packaging.

Casting is to find the best person for the project -- not the company. If game developers Anne and Jim are best suited to Project X, choosing them will strengthen it. This is starting to happen in game development, though it's not that formalized, and the concern is often over what technology or game trope Anne and Jim and experienced in rather than what core sensibility they bring. There's a subtle but vital difference.

Packaging is related to casting. Packaging is starting with a game design -- a prototype, design document, et cetera -- and attaching elements to it -- core creators, technologies, outsourcers -- based on what that design needs.

Packaging is not throwing a game design into a static team of developers with a static set of middleware tools, concerned more with the team's or studio's agenda than the design's. Another subtle but important difference.

Packaging is actively scouting out new designs, building an ensemble of creators around it, a roster of production outsourcers, and then raising money. Star talent "attaches its name" to a project it feels worthy -- advancing the investment rationale.

Packaging has a kind of perpetual motion, absorbing some of the greenlighting basis. That's why it has its name: do it well and you're handing it to an investor "wrapped up with a bow on top", a no-brainer. Here's the design, this key talent believes in it, let's make it.

It's difficult to explain its snowballing quality in a methodical way. It works on relationships, hustle, and intuition. You have to trust it and see it in action. It's bootstrapping on steroids.

We're starting to see some of what we might call casting applied in the new core-team/outsourcing paradigm. Perhaps many wish to leave it at this -- without actually going to a project-based system.

But isn't project-based game development inevitable? When a game studio strips from 100 to 10 or so key creators, what is holding those last 10 together? Misplaced loyalty perhaps? Is your loyalty to nine other people, or is it to seeking the depths of your own talent? Are you here to develop game companies or games?

If the system is going to reinvent itself, why strip it down but then stop at the core team? You're still left with the old situation -- static genres, cranking out sequels, constrained by the talent of the unchanging roster you're "glued" to -- except in a 10-person situation instead of a 100-person one.

You still have your idols and status quo. Perhaps you have even more status quo, given there's less anonymity in a 10-person boat than a 100-person ship.

Project-based packaging recognizes game creators can be independent professionals. Just because they haven't been cemented together the past five or ten projects doesn't mean they can't be put together as an ensemble for one -- as ensembles have in other creative fields for years -- and then go their own ways once the project wraps.

An ensemble is unlike a team. An ensemble is a temporary group of creators who bring divergent sensibilities and principles to a project and are prepared to stand for those even if it causes some internal tension.

A team, on the other hand, is a group so invested in sticking together, its members may suppress their own creative views to maintain cohesion (we call this "groupthink": hey, this game may succeed or fail, but I have to live with these guys...).

A team's goal is essentially institutional: to propagate its own existence, whatever reason it was brought together. An ensemble is not institutional -- or you might stay, it propagates itself only through that which it makes. The cast of Seinfeld is no longer together, but what they made lives on.

Thus an ensemble -- working in a project-based system -- is foremost concerned with what it is making. Creative tension may occur between members, but this is welcomed: it leads to heightened output, raising the bar, a "studio hothouse" effect. Each ensemble has a unique chemistry. Ensembles can afford this, being made of free agents who may go their own way after a project wraps. Teams cannot.

The power of packaging depends on appreciating the ensemble concept. On talent being cooperative but also separate. It depends on the "name on the box: individual recognition. Glued to a team, you basically go with the group, with little power to attach your name -- to wield your individual vote of sorts -- to this or that project.

Fluid in ensembles, top-level talent moves about and influences what should or should not be made. In the film industry, a major star likes a screenplay, attaches their name, and that greenlights it: that's classic packaging. Talent realizes and wields its power.

Packaging can unite the incubating drive of the small ensemble with the production power and market appeal of a large budget. The game industry simply doesn't do this, which probably underlies the creative crisis.

Package the design and small core ensemble; get investment; coordinate prototyping and production work through outsourcing. We need a route other than tiny indie casual development, on the one hand, or large productions driven by static companies, on the other.

Realizing Game Designers' Power

Ultimately, casting and packaging forges a project by seeking and growing its most elemental working part: the individual creator. Individuals are essential: not just talented ones, but the best of those; as free agents under a fair contract; who are rewarded for success; who seek to follow their own creativity to its depths; bringing their vectors of ambition in line with others going in mutual directions on projects.

This is cultivation of talent, not control of it. Developing and respecting game designers, not binding them. Individuation of creators has lead to greatness in film, theatre and music. It could lead to that in the game industry, too. If we let it.

In a free agent system, creators license their IP in a different way: through an aggressive contract.

In the present game industry, creators basically toss all their IP into a development studio and count on being compensated for any hit they help make through their ownership and management stake.

But the additional organizational workload is a distraction from focusing on creating IP. And this can be a tenuous strategy: you can be diluted; you can be forced out; your studio can get bought out and the projects you tossed into it, eager to make, now shelved by new management; companies are ever-changing.

This company/team focus is institutional in its nature. Its main concern is propagating the ownership vehicle of the IP (the company); its secondary one to propagate the IP itself. This gives us the creative crisis.

A similar institutional practice used to exist in film. It was called "the studio system."

The film studios then were like the game publishers now. Writers, for example, would work in offices on studio lots, like employees; executives would assign them scripts to write; star actors and directors were kept under tight leash; an unchanging roster of talent and technology was used on each new film, regardless of the film's needs. The range of output from the old studio system was very limited.

Then, several decades ago, core film talent questioned this. This gave us the agent-based system we know today. In film, core talent doesn't waste time managing companies as a means to share in the wealth from their creative work.

They do assign their IP, as they must, but by drawing up a new contract each time they do, clearly laying out all ways said IP may be used and how they, personally, will be compensated in each case. And then they just make the IP.

This example can serve game talent, too. There is little compensation you can get from ownership of a company you cannot get through a strong, specific IP licensing contract; one that means you can leave the administrative hassle for other parties better suited to deal with and then focus on your work.

A solid IP transfer agreement can make a creator personally wealthy -- can give you a share of the wealth from a hit (including from ancillary sources), your name on the box, consideration for sequels, and so on.

Remember: even if you're a principal owner of a development studio -- even if that studio retains all the IP rights -- you, as individual creator, still have to assign your IP. In a sense, the holy grail of "developers owning IP" is an illusion. It's always a company that owns it in the end. Not you. Think of your own creative ambition. Seek a better deal.

This new practice, also gives an instant exit for core individual creators -- so they can promote their name (their own name) and go on to a new project. Forget the added distraction of being company manager, which offers no easy exit.

If you are a core owner-manager of a game studio, you've taken on the burden of steering that studio and managing that IP for far longer than the duration of a single project. You're stuck. You can't focus totally on your personal design ambition here. And your studio is now associated with its first game: again, you wind up making sequels.

To compensate for this immobility, key game creators seem to do a lot of analyzing, deducing, explaining and so on -- at conferences, in web articles, or what have you -- about what "we" need to do in the game industry, and about how to make games. Sometimes giving away trade secrets.

While in other entertainment fields, core creators "speak" to each other by, as free agents, moving on to the next project and getting it out there, and developing a mystery and aura around their talent.

Some may try to mitigate game development's creative immobility by "democratizing" game design (without wondering if there isn't a better way to do so). By condescendingly making "everyone a designer" to disguise the reality you are bogged down here with little hope for a shot to really become a designer (no quotation marks).

Again, we inherited this system without questioning it. Do you really want to do sequel after sequel, et cetera, inside the same technology framework, the same talent roster, project after project, while also managing a development studio?

Do you only want to work in a two-person shop with no way to make a really ambitious project based on your design? Have you ever thought that after your first-person shooter set on an alien spacecraft, you'd like to do a persuasive game on pharmaceutical exploration in the Amazon, and then a real-time strategy game on the English Civil War? Imagine that kind of creative freedom?

In the film industry, a director goes from doing a trippy caper movie about heroin addicts, then years later totally reinvents the rules of the zombie genre (rules which, by the way, game designers obediently follow in titles like Left 4 Dead), and then does a romance movie about a poor kid in India on a TV game show (Danny Boyle).

Why can't the game industry facilitate the ability of its core talent to explore its dimensions the way the film industry can?

The screenwriter William Goldman famously said, "Nobody knows anything." It's a way of saying that if Jill has the special gift to make a piece great, instead of trying to dissect and analyze that gift and pry it from Jill's hands -- to "know it, "as the game industry attempts -- feed Jill, support Jill, fund Jill, market Jill; and then reward Jill for success. Because the equation for making a hit is essentially mysterious and unknowable.

If we want to capture the magic we know games can have, we must stop treating core creators as cogs in a machine. We have to help them realize their power.

Those who insist on dissecting these organic and mysterious elements of gamemaking -- treat it as a kind of static science rather than a living art -- will never realize this value prospect. They'll kill it -- reduce it to dead mechanical parts, classically focusing on exactly the wrong thing; not "getting it," like the fool who looks at the sage's finger when the sage points to the moon. Again, are you making games or game companies?

Film and other mature creative industries have people who really care about individual talent. They've learned you can thrive and profit being project- as well as company-focussed. This also helps explain why films are important -- influencing the culture, identity and policies of entire nations -- while games remain largely trivial entertainment.

Daring new films command the attention of top thinkers; draw tens of millions to televised awards ceremonies. Do games? Do our decision-makers even care?

The Challenges of Free Agency

Science-fiction great Arthur C Clarke famously identified the two main barriers to innovation in all fields: failure of imagination and failure of nerve. These challenges we also face in creating a free agent game development universe focussed on making projects with a spirit of largesse.

Can we see games this way? Can core talent claim its power?

The Challenge of Imagination: Developing Design Literacy

A free agent, scouting, packaging paradigm must formalize to some degree the discussion of designs and concepts. To imagine the game unmade. To develop a clearer framework for discussion: design standards.

The challenge of imagination is to work on designs, themselves, the way in films much work is put into the screenplay prior to the film; or in architecture much is put into the blueprint before building.

True that no design survives contact with gameplay. But to obsess over that is to miss the point. Even effective prototyping depends on first imagining and documenting gameplay (i.e. designing), then building a prototype, then re-documenting design, tossing out old code but retaining what you learned and repeating the process in a new iteration.

So the "moon" of the design informs the "sage's finger" of the new code, which informs the design, which informs new code, and so on, as a master swordsmith folds the steel then hammers it, folds and hammers, folds and hammers.

We're following Einstein's advice: imagination is more important than knowledge. Imagination, the design. Knowledge, the code.

But in a free agency paradigm, we're also talking about selling the design. To this end, game designers must learn to write stripped-down, effective, engaging documents that convey the fun and sell the vision. Designs that can, themselves, be read and sold.

Pitch documents aren't enough. Sure, it's a great way to get to know your project, but unless you're an industry giant like Will Wright, we can't execute a deal on that.

Designs that are semi-organized notes and stuff thrown together, ad hoc, for designers' own internal purposes -- not meant to be read by external parties -- also won't work in free agency.

You need to draft a design understanding it's also a marketing tool: will journey beneath many eyes in a quest for buy-in. You need good writing, editing and diagrammatical skills. To move design drafting from an implosive, pedantic process to an externalizing, disciplined and visualizing one.

This also means those who greenlight projects need to better visualize designs -- in a sense becoming designers themselves.

In this process, the software development is heavily supported by middleware and is recognized as an important means to gameplay: a price of admission: the sage's finger where the moon is the meeting of design and player.

Does the design have something to say? Even though a game has a player, the designer shapes its overall experience. That is its lasting value. Remaining when the ensemble has long parted ways.

It is to miss the point entirely to argue a design has little value because no game can be made directly from it without adaptation. That utterly dismisses its legal and business properties. Neither is any screenplay filmed precisely -- but a screenplay can still be the bedrock of a package: you can do a deal on it: it can be a legal hub as well as a creative one.

Standardized literary forms -- the script, sheet music, blueprints -- have lead to legal and business practices which brought theatre, film, music and architecture into agility and profundity, and innovative freedom and fair compensation to their core creators.

No game could ever be made directly from a design document without being adapted, but doing a deal on a design -- optioning it as a literary work -- is a way to facilitate a new project. A way out of the prison of corporatist-agenda game development.

Every new game starts with a conversation -- even if it's two employees talking in a cubicle about jumping ship make it. Without formalizing this conversation -- through effective design, scouting, packaging -- it is a long, cumbersome, oral process plagued with demons: lack of foresight; resistance to visualize things unmade; the catch 22 of needing to see things built before deciding on a little funding; confusion of social and creative talent; chatter, slang and gossip; core messaging that drifts with each retelling; chasing after fad and gimmick.

A process leaving many projects with true merit untouched while others of mediocre quality are greenlit. (Assuming you care whether projects of merit are greenlit.) Vision requires all the stuff that brought humanity out of the jungle. Formal, disciplined communication, with both firmness and flexibility. Deep literacy. Imagination. Describing and perceiving stuff before it's made. That's why it's called "vision."

The Challenge of Nerve: Facing Free Agency

The final challenge to free agency is one of courage.

It's very telling that in film, core creators are among the most powerful industry participants, but in games producers, studio heads and other largely executive or managerial types reign supreme.

Do the core creators of games have the courage to assume their mantle?

There's probably a lot of risk-aversion among the game industry's creative types compared to those in other entertainment industries. Maybe because there's an element of calculation in gaming and game development -- of gaming the system.

When you play a good game, you learn to game it -- to find the exploits. But gaming the system of game development itself -- playing the exploits (cranking out sequels, controlling talent, and so on) -- is not a route to innovation. Because it's underlain with fear.

True artistic development is about knowing your talent, claiming it in your guts, and using it to passionately reinvent. Knowing your worth and expecting to be rewarded for it. In other media, new growth has always come by rewriting the rules even as the game is being played. From Rembrandt to Van Gogh to Picasso; Duke Ellington to Elvis to The Clash.

To enter a world of free agency is to be prepared to sacrifice, patiently, knowing this risks amounting to nothing. It is to face true fear. If you have a game design hidden close to your heart -- your game, your vision -- to realize it in free agency means to believe in it.

It means to design to at least first draft, then to shop this design around: sell and promote it in the uncertain world of people and aesthetics (compared to the nice, clean predictability of rules and technology); redraft and prototype as much as you can on your own dime or with your few partners; to talk about it and develop mindshare for it; and, if greenlit, work for the duration of a single gig then start all over on an entirely new project. None of this carries guarantees.

It means to be prepared to work for times alone, away from the comfort and security of the group and steady employment.

The price to continue discovering the depths of games is to work as individuals within ensembles, envisioning games, believing in them, and working them in the space of imagination and promotion before that of technology and production. This may scare the hell out of core talent, but it's the panorama of a free agent game development universe.

But here's the good part: The added payoff a designer can earn from a hit will sweeten this deal greatly. The appearance of badly needed organizations such as a Game Designers' Guild (for health, unemployment and other assurances) will help mitigate risk. Some companies are already starting to build this future. There isn't just risk in the Wild West -- there's also opportunity.

We believe history is due to repeat itself: that the game industry is where the film industry was around 1950 -- when that industry began to transform from a large, bloated system to a light, agile network of virtual studios and talent mobility.

So I guess this brings up the classic questions. Who will be an early adapter? Who wants to be in on the ground floor? Who has a game design, close to the heart, they know will change the world? If we ask to see it, will you have the guts to show it?

[Tim Carter is the CEO of Core Talent Games, which packages and produces free-agent-driven game projects. A freelance game designer and producer in Toronto with film industry experience, Tim has worked as core and consulting game designer for companies such as BreakAway, Amaze Entertainment, Kaos Studios, and most recently on a hospital pandemic training game for Simquest funded by the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense. Tim also teaches game business and design at the University of Ontario Information Technology in Oshawa, Canada.]

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

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

A little more esoteric with the GameSetLinks, this time out, and this set of the best of game randomness on the WWW starts with Eegra poking a little fun at the adolescent side of UGO, oh dear.

But the gem in here, aside from 'Inventory Tetris' and some hilarious whiteboard doodlings from industry folks, is an IndieGames.com comment you may have missed 'reviewing' The Graveyard from Tale Of Tales, hardcore gamer style. In fact, this whole update is a little tart, isn't it?

It's not loading:

Eegra: Updates a thousand times a second!! : An Email to UGO
Patrick Alexander writes a good snark, but really, UGO wouldn't do it if people didn't want it. Which is the bad bit, I guess.

DOOMGUY9000's comment on: 'IndieGames.com - The Weblog - Road To The IGF: Tale of Tales' The Graveyard'
Haha, a beautifully sarcastic pastiche of the hardcore gamer, but I have no idea who it is making fun of - everybody?

The Reticule: Leaving the Industry No Quarter - An Interview With Edmund McMillen
He's a tricky one, but by gum, I respect him.

Inventory Tetris - The Quixotic Engineer
This is, conceptually, incredibly cute.

The Plush Apocalypse » Blog Archive » “Ten Trends That Are [NOT] Saving Videogames”
A counterpoint, if you will.

My name is Mercurio Silver, and I don’t like… Interviews
'Just remember, dearest reader, that interviews are worse than pantomimes. You will invariably know the story before you go, and be subjected to two or more flamboyant idiots dancing around to such a fantastical degree that by the midway point you will have forgotten why you bothered opening your web browser.'

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

['Hit Self-Destruct' is a regular GameSetWatch column by blogger and writer Duncan Fyfe, focusing on alternative approaches to game criticism. This week, he shares some Rock Band-related anxieties.]

The last time I played Rock Band, I was in someone's living room and the game was running on a PlayStation 3 hooked up to a HDTV and 5.1 surround sound system. Playing bass along with Blitzkreig Bop, a basic enough track that my mind has time to wander, I start thinking about the Ramones at the time they made this recording.

The original line-up were alarmingly dressed in leather uniforms and hammering out no more than three chords in New York dive bars with horrible acoustics. Their act was an aggressive endorsement of simplicity in an age of overcomplicated prog rock, delivered to a bemused audience. After the set Dee Dee, the real bassist, would get stabbed in the ass by a prostitute.

Here I am, 30 years later, button-mashing in time to the flashing lights with a look of grim determination. The biggest concern I have in the world is whether my cellphone is fully charged. My problem with Rock Band is that I overthink it. This is as close as I get in my life to rocking out, and that's a depressing notion.

Not that it should matter, since Rock Band isn't a rock band. It's a video game, and one I like. The mechanics are enjoyable in the same way that Tetris is enjoyable, aside from whatever fictional veneer is pasted over them.

I haven't committed to the game fully, however: I get into it exclusively as a casual party game and social experience. I don't own a copy, mostly because if I dragged a drum kit into my small apartment it would have to double as at least one additional piece of furniture. Keeping up with the franchise's additional instruments, accessories and iterations seems totally irrelevant to my appreciation of the game.

I like rock more than Rock Band and as much as I do video games. I tend to gravitate towards a lot of relatively unsuccessful indie or punk bands who spent a lot of their careers slightly above the poverty line, sleeping on urine-soaked floors during tours, or pulling multiple day jobs so they could afford to be in a band that they loved.

Either that, or they suffered from all kinds of internal conflicts, creative frustrations, ill-fated vacations on major labels and alcohol or drug problems, because they wanted to make music, which a majority of the population found to be inaccessible. Their music is why I like them in the first place, of course, but those circumstances, which I find so instantly endearing and relatable, are why I continue to think about them.

These same bands, despite their devotion, weren't technically expert, didn't have classically trained voices and gave shambolic, noisy performances. It's a bit ridiculous that the music I like colours my feelings about a video game that I otherwise should, but there's something a little too inauthentic about the role the Rock Band player is supposed to assume.

Rock, to me, is about chaos and Rock Band is tightly controlled, with defined victory and failure states. I still enjoy the act of play, and perfectly understand those who can embrace it without reservation, but for a fantasy fulfillment game, Rock Band captures none of the idealism I have about rock music.

When the Replacements, a bunch of mean and heartfelt drunks, were propelled to a major label and an appearance on Saturday Night Live, they got trashed, destroyed their dressing room, threw their performance and said "fuck" on the air. When forced to make a music video for one of their songs, they filmed a three minute-long close-up of a stereo speaker.

That contrarian attitude was a big reason why people liked the Replacements at all, even as it detonated the band's chances at commercial success. A Replacements track appearing on Rock Band 2 without irony is like they performed at the Academy Awards with complete solemnity and reverence for Hollywood. It's almost subversive, but the Rock Band fan is on the wrong side of the subversion.

Rock Band songs are adorned in shiny colours, lip-synched to by animated hipsters and contained in the trappings of a franchise that so quickly became synonymous with completely crass commercialisation and exploitation. It's a series that in seeming earnest produces official Rock Band smoke machines, disco balls and eventually, probably, Rock Band-branded red cellophane that you tape over your ceiling lights, and a footstool that gives the illusion of being on a stage.

It's not exactly in the DIY spirit. That kind of glitz is antithetical to actual rock bands that gave everything they had with utmost conviction and then fell apart. It's the fantasy of four-star hotels and one thousand brown M&Ms; rock that's overindulgent but safe in its excess.

I feel self-conscious pretending to emulate that raucousness in front of a TV screen and by jamming on plastic instruments, and concerned about looking stupid. It's a little pathetic, I'll admit, compared to the stage fright these actual bands felt getting up in front of anonymous and unreceptive crowds, possibly including Black Flag fans who would try and burn all the band members with lit cigarettes.

Bands like the Replacements and Guided by Voices would get over that fear by drinking a lot, and over the years that would become an intractable part of their image. First, they drank to ease performance anxiety, then drank simply because they were performing, and then drank to get drunk.

I play Rock Band as a party game in a social setting, which means I'm usually drinking too. Generally, I don't have to be drunk to play video games. I'm not slamming vodka to get psychologically geared up for Age of Empires, but then I don't have any hang-ups about Age of Empires.

Getting past the hesitation of sobriety, I realise that a Rock Band performance is going to look embarrassing and artificial to a certain kind of person -- including myself most of the time -- but I don't care. I'll do it anyway. In that state of mind, I decide that rock is not caring about what rock is.

This is how I came to insist, after a night of weak Police songs, on ditching the bass so I can sing on the New Pornographers' Electric Version. I can't sing, and in any event I'm thoroughly outclassed by the high pitched vocals, but I launch into it regardless with arrogant and obnoxious self-confidence, not thinking even a little about things like indie rock or ludonarrative dissonance.

Two minutes in, I'm slurring the words. The chorus is this line, repeated: "streaming out of the magnets" and so I yell an absurd lyric in an absurd setting with dead sincerity. Then the amp blows out and the song abruptly collapses into an awkward vacuum. That was the best time I had playing games all year.

I'm drinking, I'm saddled with unresolved contradictions, I look like an idiot and I don't care. Is this rock? It's close enough.

Posted by Duncan Fyfe at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

[We're talking to this year's Independent Games Festival finalists, and this time, Eric Caoili interviews Edmund McMillen about Coil -- an "experimental art game" that provides no instructions and presents two parallel stories -- nominated for the Innovation Award.]

Cryptic Sea's prolific game designer Edmund McMillen has had his hand in a number of high-profile, thoughtful indie projects -- Aether, Gish, Blast Miner, Meat Boy (coming to WiiWare), and others -- all of which were recently compiled in This Is A Cry For Help, a disc collecting ten years-worth of his independently created games, comics and art.

He collaborated with Komix Games founder and Austrian programmer Florian Himsl for Coil, McMillen's first autobiographical game. The Flash title, which features a haunting soundtrack and beautiful, unearthly illustrations, purposely offers no instructions, encouraging players to explore what they can and can't do in its minigames.

Even the title screen and text interludes are puzzles, requiring an appropriate gesture from players before they can continue.

We spoke with McMillen about Coil, nominated for the Innovation award at this year's Independent Games Festival (part of Think Services, as is this website).

He discusses his motivation for having players work out each minigame's controls, some of the more strange interpretations he's heard for the odd title, and why he doesn't believe he could create Coil in the same way if he were to repeat the project:

What kind of background do you have making games?

Edmund McMillen: I've been making games independently for about five years now. My first and most well known game was Gish. Since Gish, I've accumulated a number of indie flash games under my belt that have made their way around the internet. I was also the character artist and animator for Braid.

What sort of development tools did you use?

EM: I use Flash for all my art, a little Photoshop here and there for edits. The games I work on with [Cryptic Sea's Alex Austin] all run off Alex's engines, which are made in C. All my Flash games are made in Flash.

Could you share how you and Florian developed Coil's premise together, and what led you to break the game up into its different segments?

EM: Well, I knew I wanted to break Coil up into seven segments. The original idea was to base it on the seven stages of death acceptance, or seven sins, but [I] moved away from those early on in development. I liked the number seven, though, so we stuck with it.

For the gameplay (fetal story?), I wanted the player to play each stage of development from conception to death, so it had to be broken into the seven stages in order for that to work.

Why did you decide not to include any "instruction or clear direction" with Coil

EM: Well the basic idea behind Coil is there are no instructions because there are no instructions in life. I think people get more out of experiencing something firsthand without help than having someone hold their hand through the process. That's the basic premise of what I was trying to do with Coil.

I think having no instructions makes a game feel magical and is more rewarding to the player when they know they have figured something out for themselves.

You've mentioned before that one of Coil's portions developed from a previous idea you had for a Nintendo DS game. Could you talk a little about that?

EM: Oh yeah, I had this idea for a DS game based off an old flash game of mine called Viviparous Dumpling. I write down a lot of my ideas, and one of the ideas was a game where you stimulate sections of a creature's brain or organs to get them to move on the top screen. I pulled from that in the fifth stage of Coil.

The second minigame, in which you have to separate the groups of colored balls -- it's really different from the other minigames, in that you're not controlling a being of any sort. What made you decide to include that portion?

EM: I'm pretty sure that one was Florian's idea. He made a prototype where these balls would move away from your mouse, and it just seemed perfect for the cell splitting phase of fetal development.

How did you come about developing the text that bookends each minigame?

EM: I don't want to go that much into detail of what inspired every aspect of the text because its something everyone seems to have their own interpretation of, but the most important thing about the in-game text was to set a mood that put the player in an uncomfortable position.

I felt that if I threw something at them that wasn't expected from a video game, they would be more open to the out-of-the-box gameplay I was about to throw at them.

For the most part, the text was inspired by the death of my father, and my mother tending to my terminally ill grandmother. I wanted to explore how I felt about death, and the story was a way for me to kind of open up a dialogue with my audience and explore the feelings and ideas I was having at the time.

What are some of the more interesting interpretations you've heard or come across for particular elements/text?

EM: Oh man, I've heard so many. The cool thing about it is that it seems like each person changes the story to fit some aspect of their own personal life.

If you've been raped or abused, then I'm sure you might think the story is about rape. If abortion has affected your life, then you might feel the story is about that as well. I've also heard it's about incest, abusive relationships, Jesus, the afterlife, a serial killer and so on.

Each person's interpretation of what's going on in Coil is very telling, and [it's] one of the things I find most interesting about the project. Coil really got the player thinking and talking about what they thought and how the game made them feel, and that is what I set out to do when I made it.

If you don't mind explaining it, once you've completed the game, you're given the option to restart, and you're taken into the first minigame, in which you're controlling a sperm cell, except this time, it's missing its head. I hate to sound so slow-witted, but what's that all about?

EM: It's an error that we left in because it kinda fit the theme. :)

Were there any elements that you experimented with that just flat out didn't work with your vision?

EM: Yeah, the seventh phase was actually a second conception phase when the "creatures" mate. We cut it because it felt weird and we just didn't have the time to get it working the way we wanted it to. So, really the seventh phase was originally the "credit roll," but again, things seemed to just work how we had them, so we shipped it as is.

If you could start the project over again, what would you do differently?

EM: I would give a better visual cue to the player when they solved the title screen puzzle. I didn't test Coil out on many people in-person, so I didn't think that people would accidentally solve it.

The solution is used again for each text screen, it's a simple circle with the mouse, but any one who accidentally solved the title screen puzzle wouldn't realize this at all and get stuck.

Really, though, if I started the project all over again today, it wouldn't at all be the same. I'm not in the same place mentally that I was when I made Coil so the game doesn't speak to me in the same way anymore.

I still enjoy it and feel it's a valid piece of art, but for me, it's a reminder of how I felt at a really low point in my life, and its not something I want to throw myself back into at this point.

What do you think of the state of independent game development, and are there any other independent games out that you currently admire?

EM: I enjoy how things are going. There have been a lot of games out there that have impressed me a lot. The greats aside, Braid and World of Goo, I'm really into Daniel Benmergui's work, he's one of few artists out there who are also exploring autobiographical game design, and I'm a big sucker for that kind of stuff.

I'm also really into Cactus' work, he's the king of rapid prototyping, I really wish someone would give him a publishing deal already. I'm also down with anything by Metanet, Anna Anthropy, and The Behemoth.

You've commented that you believe Aether, another excellent title that you created and that was entered into IGF, is a "far superior game" to Coil. Why do you think Coil might have been chosen as a finalist over Aether by IGF's judges?

EM: I'll probably get a better idea of why Coil made it over Aether when we get our submission feedback. Personally, I think because Coil is more abstract, people might be tricked into thinking it's more innovative. Aether basically does the same thing as Coil but does it in a more accessible way.

It sucks to say it, but because Coil comes off a bit more pretentious than Aether, it probably manipulated people into thinking it was either really good or they were dumb.

And that kinda sucks if it's true, but maybe I'm wrong; maybe Coil is more innovative because it was the first autobiographical game I made? I dunno, I'm bad at reading minds.

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

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

While it's almost trans-Atlantic flight time, we're going to post ahead a little on GameSetLinks, and here's the start of that - with a couple of neat UK Guardian posts on Scottish innovators Denki starting things off here.

Also hanging out in here - MSNBC digging IGF Mobile and iPhone games (the v.odd Zen Bound pictured!), Clive Thompson on Fallout 3's bleakness, the Wall Street Journal gets all game design analytical, and all sorts of other fun (or worthy) stuff.

Supernatural superserious:

Gary Penn on the rules of game design | Technology | guardian.co.uk
The second of two excellent interviews with Denki, who are emerging from their interactive TV hibernation to do some interesting things.

iPhone lifts profile of on-the-go games - Citizen Gamer- msnbc.com
MSNBC continues to support indie games by looking at IGF Mobile and awesome iPhone titles such as Zen Bound.

Games Without Frontiers: Bleak 'Fallout 3' Dazzles With Great Depression
Minus - it's another Fallout 3 editorial. Plus - it's poignant and well thought-out.

Water Cooler Games - You Have To Defecate Upon King Bhumibol
Fascinating, a Burn The Rope-pastiching political statement: 'The game is presumably a statement of objection to Australian author Harry Nicolaides's 3-year jail sentence, handed down last week for defaming the king in a novel.'

Kotaku: Love Life Game Design Challenge Kicks Off
The second year of the Flash game competition to prevent teen dating violence - I'm judging again, a very worthy cause.

Videogames: Obscuring The Line Between Player and Character - WSJ.com
Really interesting to see game design discussions like this in the Wall Street Journal.

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

['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time - a sad tale.]

The candle snuffed itself out, a wisp of smoke curling upwards and around the wooden beams of the cottage. He sat, body hunched, forehead rested dead upon the kitchen table. In front of him a row of empty bottles lined up like icicle soldiers, beside them a scrumpled note rocked in the near imperceptible breeze that breathed down the chimney and about the room. The fire was turned to embers. Through the numbness, he felt his body growing cold.

There were no tears: he had known this day was coming and so its arrival brought with it little surprise. He had conjured the sense of loss he now felt many times in the past, curious of the pressures and pains it would one-day inevitability exert on his heart. As such, he was familiar with today’s feelings, even if their intensity was far keener in reality than in imagining.

On the floor next to the chair lay a crumpled dress. It was pink with a rustling skirt, peach buttons and a ribbed bodice. There was a hollow in the centre of the bust, the hole left by a plucked jewel.

Earlier, before the drink and fury, he had torn the dress from her wardrobe, held it against his face and breathed in so deeply his lungs burned. Then he crushed it in his arms until his strength ran dry.

A rap at the door.

“Who is it?” he croaked, raising his head from the table.

“It’s-a-me. A-Luigi,” came the muffled reply.

“It’s open.”

“Brother,” Luigi nodded, closing the door behind him with a click.

“Here,” the first man said, voice brimming with sorrow, pushing the note across the table toward his sibling.

Luigi un-scrumpled the piece of paper, and in a low voice, read aloud what was written on it:

“It’s me, not you. I…

Keep the dress.”

“Oy-vey,” grimaced Luigi, his eyes then narrowing and manner shifting from sympathy to something deeper and more solid: a black sort of resolve.

“I honestly don’t know what I did wrong?” the other man said, as much a question as a statement.

“We’ll make her regret this,” replied Luigi, ignoring him. “The things she’s done: the men, the drink, the gambling: her vices would make Houser blush. And you! You supported her through it all. She’s right in sense: you are an imbecile; an imbecile to have turned a blind eye to her ways for so long. She’s made a mockery of you and all you’ve ever done is make excuses for her.”

“I was away a lot. I guess.”

“Don't say that. Don't justify this.”

“It’s a reason, not an excuse.”

“You know where she is right now don't you? She'll be with him, Bowser with his green eyes, blonde hair and Aryan jawline. I’ve a good mind to go down there with some lead piping and beat them where they lay.”

As his brother worked himself into a familiar fury, he closed his eyes, letting the words wash over him, hot and indistinct, hearing but not listening. He held her in his mind, turning her like a doll, examining her frame from all angles.

His imagination didn’t wind back the clock on her face or body: there was no need. She was as beautiful today as she had ever been, a captivator whose claws were so embedded in his being he could never push himself off them.

He smiled. He always knew it would end like this but it had still been worth it. Even so, he could not divorce her, in the same way that he would be unable to cut off a gangrenous hand: the loss, while sensible and necessary to survival would be too unbearable. He’d rather not survive at all than survive without.

“…her name will be muck. Our children’s children’s children will hear stories of her infidelity and her myth will instruct our young girls and warn off our young men. I will make her infamous. I will cut her reputation to shreds on rumour, hearsay, and the grim truth of her...”

“No Luigi.” He cut his brother off. “These are not the stories we will tell. I will not have it.”

Here, in this moment of admonishment, a plan birthed.

They would tell stories about her, about him, about the two of them together and their tangled mess of regret and hope and half-love. Yes. If he couldn’t have her right here, right now, he would settle for forever instead. Their love and its pursuit would survive in the stories that his children’s children told their children.

“She was kidnapped.”

“What are you talking about?” Luigi cocked his head to one side.

“She was kidnapped and I left to rescue her. And maybe there is no happily ever after, and maybe there is but, but what’s more important is that we will forever be tied to each other in myth: her kidnapped, I pursuing. This, this is how I punish her: the whole world shall know our story and say to one another: did you hear the one about the reluctant princess and her unlikely saviour?

He relit the candle.

"Luigi, find a pen and take this down:

World 1-1.”

Posted by Simon Parkin at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[Every week, Gamasutra sums up sister iPhone site FingerGaming's top news and reviews for Apple's nascent -- and increasingly exciting -- portable games platform, as written by editor Matt Burris and guest editor Danny Cowan.]

This week's notable items in the iPhone gaming space, as covered by FingerGaming, include the debut of Apex Designs' GTA-like Payback, the release of Fantastic Contraption, and a review for EA's iPhone port of SimCity.

Here are the top stories over the last 7 days:

- Politically Charged Pay2Play Submitted to App Store
"Mere weeks after the controversy that followed the rejected Prohibition 2: The Dope Wars (and its sugary-on-the-outside sequel Prohibition 3) comes Pay2Play, a Dope Wars-styled simulation title that parodies the recent scandal involving former Illinois governor and accused Senate seat auctioneer Rod Blagojevich."

- Payback Hits App Store
"Payback includes nearly all of the features and details seen in Grand Theft Auto's early days, and comes complete with a similar overhead viewpoint. Players will carjack dozens of different vehicles and travel through 11 different cities to complete missions and cause a good deal of general mayhem."

- Review: SimCity
"The problem with SimCity is that while it's admirable that they've crammed SimCity 3000 onto the iPod Touch/iPhone, the already tiny, isometric graphics aren't especially suited for such a small screen, and as a result it will be rare, if ever, that you manage to select the area on screen that you wanted to first time."

- Reo Nagumo Returns to Rhythm Gaming with Aero Series
"Seeing as how Beatmania basically invented the kind of rhythm-based gameplay seen today in games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, Nagumo's contributions to the genre are not insignificant."

- Super Monkey Ball Gets Free Lite Version
"Today, Sega released Super Monkey Ball Lite, a free demo version of their flagship iPhone title that includes three levels from the full game, along with a tutorial."

- inXile Releases Fantastic Contraption
"A physics-based puzzler in the vein of The Incredible Machine, Fantastic Contraption challenges players to build motorized vehicles from simple parts in order to solve each of the game's 21 levels."

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

[We get some interesting, slightly random letters to Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine from time to time, and, after asking permission from the original author, we've made this one available on GameSetWatch. Why? Because we reckon he speaks for a lot of today's gamers.]

Name: Joe Below Average
Title: accidental gamer
Company: Coach when possible

I have to let some steam off, and I was looking for place to do it. My first langage is french, so edit my mistakes.

I'm a not-so-young dad, not even a casual gamer. I would rather say accidental gamer, like many of my colleagues (35-40 y.o.). I have developed an urge to slap in the face the a**h***s who wrote some games I have just tried lately.

Have you ever think to add a "DAD" or "MOM" mode, just to be able to see some levels, just to figure out what the hell this game is all about, just to be able, in the next 15 min. available, to enjoy a kind of ride?

Don't talk about "the learning curve" or whatever reasons the beta testers gives you to make it impossible w\o 35 hours of practice to make it to the save point.

Don't talk about the joy of trying 20 times a level just to make sure you master the supadupa combo moves, and the length of the level, w\o saving possibilities. Or a game w\o the possibility to customize the controls.

So many stupid things are being put or omitted in games that cost so much to develop, it makes you wonder where those slap in the face (coup de pied au cul) went, or who forgot to give them.

Cheats sometimes make it enjoyable. They must be included in the game, for Christ's sake.

Don't think I will spend DAYS in a game when I have 15 min per week to spare.

WILL YOU HEAR ME ??

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Zooming into midweek on the GameSetLinks tip, and almost into my holiday (which starts Thursday, fact fans - GSW posting may slow down a little for the next 10 days or so. Or may not!), we start out with a suite of Dreamcast articles from Eurogamer that are, well, lovingly crafted.

Other than being able to use a pic from Mr. Raroo's Dreamcast special, this post also features lashings of development professionals, art direction and features on indie game creators, and why Beyond Good & Evil was ahead of the game in something unexpected.

Do spirits return?

Dreamcast Cult Classics Article - Page 1 // Retro /// Eurogamer
Seems like Eurogamer is one of the few mainstream sites set up to do these intelligent retrospectives, which is odd, since they must be v.good for page views.

Eating Bees » The Passion of the Developer Eating Bees
Sanya Weathers is pretty close to the most ornery game professional I know, at least blogwise - but that doesn't mean she's not worth reading.

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Desmond Wong and the Art of CarneyVale
Nice piece on the art direction for the IGF Grand Prize finalist from MIT/Gambit.

Citizen Game » Behold: The Greatest Console Text Input Mechanism Ever
Interesting, Beyond Good & Evil is the future, here?

Posts tagged Igf at Big Download Blog
Nice - in-depth comments on each of the IGF finalists for this year from James Murff @ the Joystiq sister blog.

Fullbright: Storymaking
Another good Steve Gaynor post: 'Different games allow the player to make his own stories out of the gameworld in a variety of ways. These stories range from the humblest anecdotes to the most sweeping historical sagas.'

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

[Why do game developers keep making the same mistakes? Game Developer magazine EIC Brandon Sheffield cites developers from Harmonix, Hothead, and Neversoft to discuss how the lessons of postmortems should actively be applied to new projects, in this editorial from the January 2009 issue.]

In the December issue of Game Developer magazine, we ran an article called "What Went Wrong," highlighting common mistakes in game development as seen through postmortems.

There was one area I wanted to highlight, but didn't have the space for -- when developers continue to make the same mistakes they've made before.

It comes up quite often. The author begins by saying something like "this is really important to us as a studio," but then goes on to say how they went ahead to retread old ground. Here are some examples from past postmortems:

The Examples

Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness
"Being an experienced team meant a lot of us had developed certain 'best practices' that we used to maximize the quality of the final product. It was sobering near the end of the project to realize that despite knowing these things, we had simply failed to employ them."
-Joel DeYoung of Hothead Games

Guitar Hero
"For the most part, we were successful in creating a complete and detailed schedule early in the project and sticking to it. However, there were a number of seemingly small and mundane features (such as the unlock store, the intro cut-scene, and the win sequence) that were either underspecified or didn't make it into the schedule at all, and they added up to quite a bit of work.

"This is a classic developer misstep, and one that we've made before. We thought we had learned our lessons and applied the necessary structure to avoid this problem, so it really stung when it cropped up again."
-Greg LoPiccolo & Daniel Sussman of Harmonix Music Systems

Age of Booty
"One serious consequence was a breakdown in cross-disciplinary communication, something we take a lot of pride in, as evidenced by our completely open pit-style office."
-Max Hoberman of Certain Affinity

GUN
"With human resources in short supply, we let a critical Neversoft convention fall apart: game and mission reviews."
-Scott Pease & Chad Fidley of Neversoft

Stranglehold
"Quality of life is really important to us, and when we started we really tried to limit crunch but in the end we still failed miserably."
-Brian Eddy of Midway Chicago

Problems of Production

These comments are all from accomplished developers who should know better -- and, in fact, often do. Why then does this happen?

It's one thing to simply have an in-house postmortem, but it's another entirely to actively try to learn from and fix the problems that are highlighted as a result.

A lot of these issues have to do with scheduling and communication, which in turn has a lot to do with the quality of producers. Proper producers seem to be sorely lacking in the game industry, and often wind up as glorified spreadsheet keepers.

A good producer should be fixing problems with the production pipeline -- identifying areas where documentation is lacking, as in the Guitar Hero example, and then making sure that gets done. Or in the case of Gun, making sure that a "critical convention" doesn't get lost in the shuffle.

As far as I can tell, this job confusion isn't solely the fault of the production team, but is also tied in to the fact that the structure of most companies is not conducive to producers actually doing production work.

Due to improper job descriptions, or even a lack of understanding on a studio's part about what a producer should really do, general producers seem to spend more time worrying about the game's direction (which should be the job of a director or equivalent).

Alternatively, they become a conduit through which marketing communicates its ideas to the team. This is often the role they are given, and it seems a mistake to me.

Producers should be solving problems. In a sense, they should be the team's internal Q/A-making sure that all the communication, scheduling, and dare I say production bugs get smoothed out in a timely manner. The job goes beyond ordering pizza for the team and updating the Microsoft Project file.

The issue is clearly deeper than I can get into here, and I don't mean to suggest that producers are the root of these problems-but they should be the canaries in the coal mines alerting the team to these issues.

With some proactive "bug" hunting on the part of a production team, many of these repeated, known problems can be avoided.

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

[This GameSetWatch-exclusive interview, conducted by Todd Ciolek, is a little odd, but also strangely important - that one person would keep creating new versions and conversions of the same game for two decades. Almost a testament to human perseverance, then?]

Qwak may seem a simple game about a duck grabbing snacks and items while pelting enemies with eggs, but that duck has something most game characters never attain: nearly 20 years on the market.

Starting off on the BBC Micro computer in 1989, Qwak has outlasted Bubsy, Aero the Acrobat, Alex Kidd, Titus the Fox, the Battletoads, and countless other animal heroes who had far more expensive games and far bigger marketing pushes.

Qwak’s longevity is the work of Jamie Woodhouse, the programmer who first assembled the colorful duck’s original 80-level game. Over the past two decades, Woodhouse has made Qwak an Amiga and Amiga CD 32 title, a limited-edition Game Boy Advance homebrew, and, most recently, a downloadable PC version.

With Qwak turning 20, we asked Woodhouse about the game's history and just how it’s weathered two decades:

GameSetWatch: What were your influences in creating Qwak back in 1989? Did you intend for it to have any connection to Atari's similarly named arcade shooting game?

I guess playing games myself on the BBC and in the arcades. Games like Frak, Monsters, Blagger, and, of course, Bubble Bobble in the arcades. Bubble Bobble wasn’t a big influence for Qwak, though, of course, it’s an amazing, classic game and Qwak always seems to get compared with it.

As for the Atari game, Qwak! Well, it was pure coincidence, no connection at all. They spelled the name the same way I did, only with an exclamation mark on the end. But really, I just made the name "Qwak" up myself too. Honest, guv!

You've been the sole owner of Qwak's IP for almost 20 years, right? How do you think the game industry has changed when it comes to cute characters like Qwak and the games that star them?

Yes, that’s right, I’m the sole owner of the Qwak IP. The change most obvious to me is how marketing has become more and more important. Back when I started making games, and all through those early years, games would sell on the basis of their own merit. Today, things are very different; marketing plays a major role in determining a game's (commercial) success. And the game character often plays a big role in the marketing materials.

Aside from that, game characters are more sophisticated, better looking (oh, apart from Qwak, the best looking game character of all time) and there’s more animation, etc.

In your 25 years of programming games, what's the biggest change you've seen in the way they're made?

Computers today have a lot more processing power; and game coders can allow graphics cards do most of the donkey work for them. Back in the early days we used to code games in 100-percent assembler, and there was a real need to optimize your code, do clever tricks and squeeze out every last drop of what little processing power there was on target hardware. There isn’t the same focus at that ‘nitty gritty’ level today, the focus just shifted elsewhere. Game developers today have to think about other things...like marketing.

Also, development environments themselves are a lot nicer today; an analogy would be working on a car (doing mechanical work) while it’s perched up on bricks in your driveway. Compare that to several car mechanics working in a fully kitted out garage with all the modern equipment under the sun.

What was the best thing about making games back when Qwak first came out? What was the worst?

Everything was so new and fresh. You had to do it all yourself (assembler functions for software sprites and scrolling, etc.), and there was so much virgin territory to discover.One of the real great things back then was how you could make original games yourself, and if they were good, they’d sell. There was none of this licensed IP nonsense.

The worst thing? Hard to say! I have so many good memories. Perhaps one thing that wasn’t so good was the lack of information; there was no internet back then and you had to either work things out yourself (trial and error) or go visit a book-shop! Today, while there are some awesome games around, I think a lot of games are pretty abysmal, and clearly made with little or no care, love, and attention to detail, and it’s often licensed IP games that fall into this category.

People don’t seem to be making games for the love of it so much these days. I dunno, maybe it’s just me living in the past? Also, I want to say it again, there are some awesome games around today, and you can see, just from looking at them, the love, care and skill that’s gone into the making of them.

Is it true that you tried to get an official publisher for the Game Boy Advance version of Qwak? If so, what was the process like? Is it harder for games like Qwak to get publishers today than it was in the days of the Amiga and BBC?

Yes, and I did have a few interested parties, but in the end; nothing came of it, and I decided to self-publish. But, if you compare the GBA version of Qwak to some of the games that are available on GBA today, well, you’ll have to draw your own conclusions there!

Yes, I think it’s a lot harder getting published today; and probably not a good idea to develop a game on a speculative basis, in the hope or expectation that someone will want to publish it. Though I guess a lot would depend on the game, and what platform it runs on.

On a related note, do you think the currently popularity of simple online games like Bejeweled has given Qwak more attention? Was that a factor in your decision to create a PC version?

No, and there’s a whole bunch of casual games like Bejeweled, and the typical audience for such games is quite different to the kind of person who loves playing Qwak. The big portals are not helping me at all.

In fact, I contacted one or two to discuss selling Qwak for the PC via their sites, and they didn’t have the courtesy to even reply; a simple “nice game, but not suitable for our typical customer” would have been nice! Then again, they’re big business, and I’m just mister little guy.

I decided to create Qwak for the PC because it was a very accessible and open platform. I knew I could make the game, set up a site, and self-publish.

Qwak looks different with each version. How do you go about deciding what to change in the game's graphics?

I don’t really have an agenda as such. I just do the best I can with the skills and equipment I have. The process for making the PC version sprites was quite technical and involved creating them over-sized, in an 8-bit art package, and then scaling them down to get all the lovely anti-aliasing on the edges. It’s a low-tech approach, but it’s just an example of me doing the best I can with what I have.

Also, I should point out that I did pretty much everything in the game myself: code, design, level design, graphics, development of tools, etc. I was spreading myself quite thinly there, and dividing my time and energy between a lot of tasks, which turned out to be both a good and a bad thing..

Aside from the visuals, how does the PC version of Qwak differ from the older versions?

The PC version has pretty much everything the Amiga/GBA version does, and a whole lot more too. There are secret hidden bonuses, more things to pick up, different colored switches and trap walls you can open. Different colored keys and gates to unlock, also corresponding colored treasure chests to open (goodies spray out of them).

There are a few more magic potions that do different things. The flying potion now gives you little jet boots, rather than the helicopter hat. Some of the levels have more of a puzzle emphasis to them. Different kinds of eggs you can collect and throw, including dino eggs and Chico eggs (oh no, they were in the Amiga and GBA versions too). A whole bunch of new stuff.

What are you currently up to now that Qwak's out for the PC? Will you ever make a sequel?

Currently, I’m putting my resume together and will be looking for work. Hopefully I will find a company where my skills and experience will be a good match, and I can make a valuable contribution, make fantastic games and enjoy doing it! It’s not just the fact that I’m skint. I really want to share the creative process. I’ve always kind of been a loner and had control and done my own thing, but I really want to change that and still make fun games of course!

As for Qwak, there’s a few things I could do with it, like the introduction of a level editor, allowing people to create and share their own levels or a sequence of levels. They’ll be able to upload them to the site and rank them, etc. All should help to generate a community around the game.

In terms of taking the game to the next level, I thought having some bigger scrolling levels could be quite cool, with more emphasis on puzzle-solving and doing things in just the right order. Also, to have some bigger levels with some rooms darkened out that light up as you discover them, so it’s more of an adventure or exploration-type game. Also, more monsters and fundamental changes in the way the monsters work.

Oh, and porting the game to other platforms...now there’s an idea..

Posted by Todd Ciolek at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Another of my amusing bird's nest of responsibilities is the Game Developers Choice Awards voting and special awards, so I'm delighted that we're announcing the first two Special Awards and, my gosh, Mr. Schafer as this year's host. It's going to be good.]

The 2009 Game Developers Choice Awards, the highest honors in game development acknowledging excellence in game creation, have named the recipients of two of its special awards, while also revealing that popular host of the 2007 Awards and Double Fine founder Tim Schafer is returning to present this year's Choice Awards.

Harmonix co-founders Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, co-developers of a groundbreaking decade-plus long line of music games culminating in the Rock Band franchise, will receive the Pioneer Award for their work.

In addition, Tommy Tallarico, co-founder of the Video Games Live concert series and founder of the Game Audio Network Guild (G.A.N.G.), will receive the Ambassador Award for helping to advance the game audio community.

Presented by Think Services' Game Developers Conference (GDC), Gamasutra.com and Game Developer magazine, this year's awards ceremony, open to all GDC attendees and held in conjunction with the Independent Games Festival Awards, will be hosted on Wednesday, March 25th in the Esplanade Room in the South Hall of San Francisco's Moscone Center.

2009 Pioneer Award Recipients

The Pioneer Award celebrates those individuals responsible for developing a breakthrough technology, game concept, or gameplay design at a crucial juncture in video game history, paving the way for the many developers who followed them.

Harmonix's Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy have been chosen by the Choice Awards Advisory Committee for their role in pioneering and popularizing music games, a vitally important genre for widening the appeal of games.

The duo created Harmonix Music Systems in 1995 after graduating from MIT, and the Boston-area company experimented with early music games such as The Axe, before developing electronic-based rhythm games Frequency and Amplitude for the PlayStation 2.

Beginning in 2005, Harmonix developed Guitar Hero, and followed that up with Guitar Hero II, Rock Band, and Rock Band 2, fueling the explosive growth of the music games category to over $1 billion in sales. In 2006, Harmonix was acquired by MTV/Viacom. In 2008, Eran and fellow co-founder Alex Rigopulos were named to the Time 100 -- Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

"With the music game genre exploding into a true phenomenon in recent years, we wanted to honor the key developers behind its rise to power," said Meggan Scavio, event director of the Game Developers Conference. "Alex and Eran's dedication to both music and gaming has helped to entwine the two in ways that have truly advanced the art form, and they are worthy Pioneers."

2009 Ambassador Award Recipient

The Ambassador Award honors an individual who has helped the game industry advance to a better place, either through facilitating a better game community from within, or by reaching outside the industry to be an advocate for video games to help further the art.

This year, the Choice Awards Advisory Committee, which includes notables such as Doug Lombardi (Valve), John Vechey (PopCap), Ben Cousins (EA DICE), Ray Muzyka (BioWare), and Clint Hocking (Ubisoft), has voted to give the Ambassador Award to tireless game audio advocate Tommy Tallarico.

Tommy is the founder of the Game Audio Network Guild (G.A.N.G.), which is a non-profit organization formed in 2002, and tasked with educating on interactive audio by providing information, instruction, resources, guidance and enlightenment not only to its members, but to content providers and listeners throughout the world.

In addition, Tallarico, who has created music for games over the past 18 years. from Earthworm Jim through Sonic & The Black Knight, co-founded Video Games Live, a public concert series started in 2005 which features music from notable video games performed by top orchestras and choirs around the world.

The concert show has been performed worldwide to hundreds of thousands of people, from the Hollywood Bowl to major venues in Europe, Asia and South America, and continues to raise the profile of game music as an art form in its own right.

"We're delighted to honor Tommy Tallarico for his work advocating for game audio creators worldwide," said Simon Carless, chair of the Game Developers Choice Awards Committee. "He's a true Ambassador for the game musician, and his larger than life persona includes a heart of gold when it comes to caring about the entire video game industry."

Schafer To Host Choice Awards

Finally, Double Fine founder and general roustabout Tim Schafer has been confirmed as the host for this year's awards, following his well-received appearance as presenter in 2007.

Schafer, the LucasArts veteran designer known for critically acclaimed games such as Full Throttle, Psychonauts, and the upcoming Brütal Legend, sees the awards as an opportunity to, “No way. I'm not writing my own quote. I already have to write my own script for the show! It's not like you guys are paying me by the word!”

Schafer added that this year will surely be, “Actually, you guys aren't paying me at all. That does it--This year, I'm keeping the tux.”

For further information about the Choice Awards, please visit its official website. For further information about GDC and to register for attendance, please visit the Game Developers Conference 2009 website.

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

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Starting out the week, here's some neat coverage, via Arcade Heroes, of the UK ATEI arcade trade show, which has actually outlasted the big UK trade game show, ECTS, showing that small, compact submarkets such as arcade games can still keep tickin', despite taking a bit of a beating.

Also in here - Braid's story, credits in games, the new Atari VCS book from Montfort and Bogost, some AIAS Awards discussion, the new 1UP RPG weblog, and rather more things besides.

Tokyo Police Club:

ATEI 2009 - Full Report « Arcade Heroes
The UK arcade trade show, and yes, there's still new titles hanging out there: 'Armed with a camera, a keen eye for games and a beard that makes small children cry, I decided to capture as much of the show as was practical in order to relay it to loyal readers such as yourself.'

Bardinelli.com: Picking apart Braid’s story
Sure, it's been discussed before, but this is done nice and methodically, so there.

Credit Granularity (and dirty secrets) « Applied Game Design
Fun snippets from Brenda Brathwaite on what those extra credits mean in games.

8bitrocket:Read full chapters from the new Atari VCS book, Racing The beam
Good catch on this - this is the Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort book from MIT Press, seems intriguing.

1UP's RPG Blog
Brand new and awesome, Jeremy Parish and friends have really found their editorial groove with these niche blogs - but then, I'm a fan of niche blogs (see navigation at top of page!)

29 separate Interactive Achievement Awards? Really? - The Cut Scene - Video Game Blog by Variety on Variety.com
'The distinct impression you get browsing through the IAA categories is that they want to give a prize to almost everyone.' Proud to see the Choice Awards are referenced as doing it right.

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

[Originally conducted by Brandon Sheffield and Frank Cifaldi last year for big sister site Gamasutra, we dug up this Don Daglow interview - originally awaiting the resolution of Stormfront's fate - because of some great content on early '80s game industry lessons.]

Don Daglow, is veteran of companies as diverse as Mattel Electronics (where he worked on the Intellivision), Electronic Arts (where he worked as one of its first producers) and Broderbund (where he ran its entertainment software division).

Of course, most recently, he headed independent developer Stormfront Studios, which essentially ended its 20 year run last year in less fortunate circumstances.

In a Gamasutra interview originally conducted around that time, and being published for the first time, Daglow reflects on his history in the industry, unearthing details about the 1983 industry crash, the unreleased Intellivision IV console, and more.

Later in the interview, he also offers insight into the current state of the industry, including casual and PC gaming, as follows:

Brandon Sheffield: First I would like, if you may, to describe in your own words, your storied history.

Don Daglow: (laughter) "Kid who got born at the right time." That's the one-sentence sum-up.

In the '70s, I was in that first group of college students who got access to the computer right when it got into schools. At that point, we had the chance to start writing games as students, back when we thought, "Nobody's ever going to pay us for this, because a computer fills an entire huge room."

I ended up being able to do that for nine years. And then again, lucky, just when Intellivision started, at Mattel, I was one of the original five programmers, and had a chance to enter the industry there.

Then, again, lucky, when the industry crashed in '83, getting recruited into Electronic Arts, back in the beginning, and being one of their early producers. And after I ran Broderbund's entertainment and education division in the late '80s, I started Stormfront 20 years ago. So I've been an indie developer for the last 20 years.

BS: We heard that you had something to do with the development of Shark! Shark! Is that the case?

DD: That is correct. Shark! Shark! was programmed by a woman named Ji-Wen Tsao, and Ji-Wen doesn't get credit as being one of the first video game programmers. Unfortunately, I've lost touch with her over the years. I'm not sure where she's at. I've not heard from her. There's an Intellivision alumni group, and she has not called in.

BS: The Blue Sky Rangers?

DD: Right. But she, Minh Chau Tran... we had a number of women who were involved in the team as programmers, and because there were no traditions set up yet, the fact that we had a team that had a really diverse background... we didn't realize how lucky we were to have as diverse a team as we did at the time.

BS: What did you do with Shark! Shark!? I like that game, sorry.

Frank Cifaldi: We both do, actually.

DD: It probably wouldn't surprise you to know that I have seven aquariums in my house and one in my office. Just thinking about games that we could do... this was right on the border between the 4K and the 8K era of cartridges, where we could go to 8K. We were still trying to think of ideas where it wasn't the complexity of these huge 8K cartridges. That was what made the game. It was simple and fun, a lot like what people are thinking now with casual games.

So with Shark! Shark!, I was simply looking at the fish, and when you have aquariums, one of the things you know with the kind of fish I've kept now for years and years is, if a fish is small enough to fit in another fish's mouth, it is likely to get eaten. So what you do is that you look at two fish and you picture, "Would it fit? Okay, they can probably go together!" or "No, they can't."

Out of that, it just got the idea of Shark! Shark! and the idea of fitting the right sizes in and being able to control the difficulty there, and of course having the shark as the trump card that kept it from being an infinite ramp-up.

BS: It was really interesting to me, because it was one of the first games with a leveling-up mechanism. I don't know, you probably weren't actively thinking of it at the time -- maybe you were -- but it's an early example of leveling up as a character, as an entirely player-driven experience.

DD: Thank you very much! I really appreciate it. Let me tell you, after this many years, having people remember a game you did is a great feeling. It's a wonderful feeling.

I really was influenced by the coin-ops, but here, since we weren't trying to eat quarters, we didn't have to think about how you would try -- without being a coin-op, which I had never designed, but from my observation of people -- to kill off the player and get another quarter without actually being unfair, and in being unfair, making him angry. But you're still trying to get that next quarter.

The great thing we had in those early days with the simple consoles was we could do coin-op style games, but we already had the quarters. We didn't need to balance for that. We could balance for the actual experience of feeling good about owning the game, rather than having to think about the quarter mentality.

BS: What do you think about the casual industry right now? I know you're not actively doing things in it, but it does obviously feed a lot off of the earlier era of games.

DD: We're getting to scratch new itches again, because this new form of distribution is available. I think there is a lot of "me too"-ism. There are 1,724 variations on what I think of as Dr. Mario. The three-in-a-row type games... to me, that's Dr. Mario, along in about '91?

FC: Something like that. '90 or '91.

DD: I look at those games and that's what I see. On the other hand, look at flOw. Really innovative, different game. Completely different relationship between player and game, where you just pick it up and explore and find things. I was delighted to see it win the award here.

BS: And it's a lot like Shark! Shark!

DD: Yeah, that's right! With the undersea thing. Let's see how I can attach myself to their glory. Kellee Santiago and Jenova Chen and their team, I think, are really sharp, good people.

One of the other things I like about thatgamecompany is an awful lot of people who -- in any game era -- had a lot of success right out of college, lost perspective and began to think anything they touch was automatically good, or that they could mail it in, or "Aren't I great?" and ego got in the way of observation of game. All my perception is that their team instead has every intention of staying well-grounded and in the real world and continuing to build really interesting product. I really admire them for that sense of balance, because I watched a lot of basically good people self-destruct because they didn't understand what it means if you're successful the first time out.

That can be an exceptionally destructive thing to somebody's career. It's like being a baseball player, not really knowing a lot about how baseball really works, but stepping up and hitting a home run in your first time at bat. "That's pretty easy. I guess I'm pretty good at this! Yeah! I could keep doing this. Okay, where's the ten million?" And not understand there's other pitchers, other situations, and other swings. I think that their team... my guess is that their team is going to pass that test, where a lot of people in 30 years of games have only figured it out after it was too late.

FC: You have the rare experience of having worked in every era of games. Even people who were around way back when and are still here probably took a break at some point. You were around for the entire thing.

DD: I was so lucky, because in the crash of '83, our industry went from... I'm going to take a wild guess and say 12,000 jobs that were really directly in development in North America. It probably went from 12,000 to 400, I'm guessing, because you figure in 1984 we had about 40 to 50 people in EA. I think Broderbund was about 50 people, and Sierra Online may have had 75 jobs. Those were probably...

BS: You're talking in the U.S., specifically.

DD: This is in North America, yeah. And then you went from having these thousands and thousands of jobs to having these little pockets of 30, 40, or 50 people. Activision kind of dragged out longer, because they had their tax losses carry forward, so they actually funded the company for a couple of years. But as '84 went on, the jobs just dried up. Having worked straight through, I feel incredibly lucky.

FC: I've heard differing opinions on this. What do you think caused the crash?

DD: To spare you a one-hour lecture, there's a very important modern relationship, because now, people complain about how Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft control product on consoles, and how on PC, product is not controlled. Yet ironically, the marketplace that is having the most trouble right now is PC, and console is prospering. There are certainly economic benefits these guys get from that. They make a lot of money off of every disc.

But the fact that they cull and restrict how much product can come to market on their systems prevents what happens in '83, because in '83, everybody... the greed for money drew everybody and their uncle into the games business. My favorite example that I always tell about is that Quaker Oats opened a video game division, because they were diversifying. I remember sitting, incredulous, when I heard that. I think it was either winter or summer CES of '82. Or maybe it was the beginning of '83.

So all these guys were rushing out products for the Atari 2600, Intellivision, and ColecoVision, and suddenly, you just have this flooding of the market with this product. Of course, most of it was crap. There were a few gems in there, but most of it was crap. And the toy business operates on consignment. It was something we were acutely aware of, because we were constantly told, "Look, we have to figure out how many of these to make."

There was a lot of market research to figure out how many cartridges to make, because you waited five to six months after you finished a game for them to create draft versions of the ROMs. They'd have to take the source, send it to Asia where they make draft versions of the ROMs, and those would then be air shipped back and tested. If they were approved, then they would turn the air ship back to Asia where they would actually manufacture them like five and a half months later. A container would come in on a ship, and that would be your product. That was after you finished the game. So figuring out how many of those to make...

Because they told us over and over again for good reason, "Look, it's like Barbie. If the stores can't sell Springtime Tea Party Barbie, we have to take it back. If the stores can't sell Shark! Shark! or Tron: Deadly Discs, we have to take it back. So guys, that's why you have to be careful what you do, because we'll have to eat this." And so once you had this huge oversupply, retail was making so much money on video games that they took everything in, because, "Hey, if it doesn't sell, we'll just give it back."

And it came time to give it back to a lot of these little fly-by-night companies, and it was, "Give it back? No, you can't give it back. You're stores! You sell stuff! Consignment? Well... I know that's what it said, but video games sell. All video games sell! Oh. This one didn't? Oh. Just give you the money back? Well, there's a problem with that. We already spent it."

So what happened was all of these companies went bankrupt because they had all these returns, the second-run products were not ready to swap in, and even if they swapped in, they probably wouldn't have sold. They had already spent the money, so they couldn't refund it. Their business models didn't work. So they decay, at which point the retailer's just sitting there going, "God, we've got stuff we paid for that we can't give back." So of course it goes on the discount table. They found that the sweet spot price where they could really dump the stuff... they dumped some stuff at $15 or $10, but they found the sweet spot was $5.

So all the toy stores, you'd walk in and here's all this product that's $35, or $39.99 was the list, and $35 was probably street. Parents would walk in with their kids and go, "Little Bobby, do you want that $35 game up there on the wall, or would you like two of these pretty little boxes on the table?" And Little Bobby goes, "I can have two games?" And so the discount stuff was moving at five bucks a pop, but the $35 stuff was not going anywhere. It was like watching a big truck put on the brakes.

By the summer of '83, it was very clear that stuff was desperately wrong. Yes, there was E.T., and yes, there was the bad Pac-Man that was rushed out, and there's no doubt that they helped take the bloom off the rose, but it was the oversupply that committed the murder, in my opinion.

And certainly that's the way we talked about it at the time, and those were just symptoms of other bad practices that they accelerated. We went from having media in '82 saying, "Video games are a new and exciting form of American entertainment!" and "Where will they go?"

We were working on secret next-gen hardware -- what was going to end up being called Intellivision IV -- that was an Amiga-like machine that I had a team secretly working on in '83, but the press and the retailers swarmed.

The mainstream press started writing articles saying, "Oh, the fad's over. It's like the hula-hoop. Video games came and went. What's the next big fad for kids?" And the retailers reached the same conclusion in the toy business -- fads really do come and go. So they reached the same conclusion and they just stopped ordering product.

BS: I have a lot of questions based on that.

DD: No worries. Whatever is interesting.

BS: Intellivision IV -- tell me more about it.

DD: Yeah, and the fact is now we can. The NDAs were long ago. It was an Amiga-like machine. I don't actually remember all the numbers on it and stuff, but it had multiple bit planes, so we could do a lot of things -- whereas an Intellivision was basically tile-based -- and our resolution was something like 96 scanlines high and 128 pixels wide. It was something like that. I'm not getting it exactly, but it's in the ballpark. It was, by today's standards, hopelessly blocky. Much higher resolution... dammit, I don't remember what it was. Did we have 64 colors? Twenty-eight colors? I don't remember how many colors we had.

FC: What kind of range for the resolution? Are we talking like...

DD: Basically, it was Amiga-like. I remember I had, like, Amiga serial number eight on my desk at EA. It literally had a wooden frame for the keyboard. Everything was just breadboarded inside, because it was such an early one, because Trip had made such a strong commitment to support the Amiga -- this was before the Commodore acquisition -- that we just got everything early and absolutely first, because Trip had gone so all-out.

There were these full-page magazine ads of Trip saying, "EA believes in the Amiga, and we're going to support this box very early on." So we got the first of everything. I remember playing with the machine and going, "My god, this is Intellivision IV." With some advances, but so much of it was heading where we were with Intellivision IV.

FC: So this was after the completion? After you left Intellivision, right?

DD: Yeah. The Amiga... when did we get our Amigas? I'd have to go back and look. That would have to be around '85, probably. Right at the very beginning, when EA first committed to it.

BS: Did Intellivision IV get to the prototype phase?

DD: Yeah, we had prototypes. I did a write-up where I think I proposed six initial games to be the launch titles. I was kind of surprised, because they took the exact list of six that I pitched. There's a certain logic to that, because you're trying to get a variety of games. Sports games were center for us, so there was a baseball game there. In fact, the baseball game that was there was a lot like what ended up being Earl Weaver Baseball.

We absolutely had to have coin-op arcade-style games, so we had to have something like that in there. We had six games, and we'd probably gotten to where we were working on four of them by that point. By then, though, we'd already started to have layoffs, because of the slowdown. We went from having always like two or three open racks -- we never, ever filled every rack.

There was a guy we've always joked about who was fresh out of school named Eric Delcesta. Eric got hired in, I think, March of '83, and two weeks later, we lost all of our racks. There were no open racks -- "Just stand still where you are." About another week after that, we were told, "No, you have to go out and cut eight or twelve people." So everybody looked at Eric and said, "Eric, you are the luckiest man in the world, because you're the guy who got in." In fact, I don't think Eric actually had his college degree then. I think he was just a really bright programmer. So it really swung from, "Grow grow grow, build build build," to, "Hold still. No, cut cut cut!" very, very quickly.

BS: What did the hardware look like? Did it still have a disc on the controller?

DD: On Intellivision IV? In fact, did they ever actually get to where there was a physical prototype? We were using mockups of the capability, but I don't remember exactly how we were doing...

BS: If you designed the games, there must have been some interface idea at least, right?

DD: God, I haven't thought about this in so long. I have to dredge it out of my brain, because it got cut off. It was when we did the second wave of layoffs. The program was canceled, and that was the end of that.

Part of it was that I had been defending the disc for years, and iPod has now defended that for itself. But Mattel had... god knows the disc was not perfect, but it was a different sort of interface than what everyone else was doing. There was a feel you could get with the disc that you could not get with a joystick.

Mattel had a lot of internal politics in hardware, so there were rival groups pushing different things, and that's part of what happened to Intellivision IV when it was shut down -- a much lower-cost keyboard device was substituted, and to be blunt now, it was shoddy and cheap.

Everything about it was cost-reduced. It was their desperate attempt to get something that... the personal computer was becoming a big deal, and we were a video game, and we wanted to make ourselves look like a personal computer, so this is what it was. But instead of being the elegant system they had been trying to build since 1980, it was just thrown together.

And then after the layoff, all the people who were working on it who were on the separate rival team got signed over into my team, so I was thinking, "Oh god, I've got these demoralized people who have come off this other thing. It's a terrible piece of hardware. It isn't these peoples' fault. It was the political fighting that produced this cheap piece of hardware. It's not their fault. What do we do so that this team can feel good?"

So we had codenames for everything, because industrial espionage happens a lot in the toy business. So I gave it the codename "LUCKI" for, "Low User Cost Keyboard Interface." I was just trying to find something to be upbeat about in the middle, because every day you came to work, you got bad news, because the industry was just dying out there.

Of course, LUCKI was unlucky, because it wasn't a very good system, and even if it were a great system, it probably wouldn't have turned the tide anyway. It was too late. It was just a really depressing time for everybody.

BS: You mentioned about unrelated companies getting into the industry. In Japan, that's actually happening a lot on the DS market. Schools, book companies, and everybody and their mom was making a training game on the DS.

It's interesting to me to watch. Like you were saying, media companies were all like, "Games are the future. This is really amazing," way back in the early '80s, and if you look at those broadcasts, they were actually kind of taking games seriously then, and after the crash, it seems like we still haven't gotten back to that point.

DD: It's interesting. I think somewhere around PS2 time was where the emotion tendered to me started to feel about the same. Certainly, Nintendo... Arakawa-san and Howard Lincoln had such courage to bring back a system, because retailers said, "You guys are out of your minds."

And when I signed the letter of credit for the first million-dollar order of cartridges from Japan for Broderbund for the NES, I just thought... I went to the Carlston brothers, who owned the company, and I said, "Guys..."

This wasn't an issue they had been involved with. I said, "Good product. Nintendo seems to be working. I just have to tell you, as I sign this letter of credit, I just have a lot of memories of a lot of cartridge product coming back, so I just want to make sure you two understand the non-negotiable nature of this."

And I tried to say it in a way that didn't sound condescending or know-it-all, because these were my bosses and they had founded the company, but they had never done cartridges, and I had been through both the glory and the hell of cartridges. I just said, "As long as you're cool with that, and this is money you can afford to lose if Nintendo loses momentum and dies..." which they obviously did not.

They did have a tough transition to the next-gen back then, and a lot of software companies did lose a lot of money just at the end of the year. They said, "No, we know what we're getting into." But signing that letter of credit, I just thought I'm covered because I discussed it with them, but I didn't discuss it with them to cover myself.

I discussed it with them because I just had... you know, certain times you have experiences, and memories just come rushing up at you. If you did lighter fluid and match in the wrong order ever, in starting a barbecue, and had no hair on your arms, you would remember that burn the next time you walk up to a barbecue and you have lighter fluid in one hand and a match in the other. You're going, "Oh dude, I don't want to do that again!" That's what it felt like.

FC: Something you just said brings to mind a question I've had for a while now here... are there ever contemporary moments or trends that bring back the memories of that impending doom?

DD: I think in between every hardware cycle there is a miniature imitation of that, but it's unlike '84, at which point people thought, "This is done and it's done forever," or "It's done for a long time." Now, it's understood that it's like fasting for Lent. You know there will be some point in the future which you'll go back to eating. That's more of a ritual, I think, than anything else or that sense of doom.

One thing that's happened now is that... PC games, I don't think they're going through a totally destructive crash, but if you look at PC games where there is no regulating force -- you want to publish it, you can -- what are all the things that are taking eyes away from traditional boxed retail PC games? Downloadable games.

There's a bunch of stuff that never goes through retail. Different kinds of games that are typically being sold in boxes. Consoles. Game genres that used to only be on PCs, like shooters, have now successfully made the jump. Will RTS ever fully make the jump? There's a net takeaway.

World of Warcraft is taking so many hours of play and so many eyeballs and so many passionate players out. There's another subtraction. It's not that the PC market in total is in bad shape. In fact, NPD is starting to count downloads and subscriptions and so on. I think they'll show overall that the market is growing healthy.

But the boxed goods, core strategy, classic PC player market, which used to have continents of categories of types of games, has shrunken to where it's now islands of games that now work. Perhaps if a genre would support three to five really good titles before, maybe now it's supporting one or two.

It's not the same thing in an exact parallel, but that idea of "the waters keep rising..." I think there are some parallels there. But it actually is because so many other opportunities are coming up on PC, and PC players are getting so many kinds of choices, it is an abundance of good stuff, rather than drowning in bad stuff that is leading to the problem.

BS: It's an odd kind of situation to be in. I mean, it seems like the PC market is that it's just really rapidly changing, and it's changing before the console market is. I'm wondering, do you think that the console market is also going to go that kind of direction?

DD: My personal belief is that downloadable and social gaming is only going to grow on console. I think Sony and Microsoft have really started to get it right. I think Nintendo recognizes where this is all going. I think in that respect, the growth of social and downloadable gaming on console is absolutely, positively going to grow.

Against that context, I think that a lot of console-style gaming is still going to be the kind of thing where the on-the-box experience in the room... we're only starting to see the ways in which that can run.

If you look at Guitar Hero and Rock Band, they broke every rule in the book, and one of the things that I admire about the team at Harmonix is that they had done music games and audio games before, and they lived to tell the tale, but they didn't have hits or whatever, but that's what they're passionate about.

The classic book in gaming was, "You can't have expensive peripherals with a game. It won't work." You could have the best idea. It's like a guy chewing on a cigar. "Yeah, you can have the second coming, kid, I don't care. You're not going to get that kind of peripheral. Nobody's going to buy it." That was the accepted wisdom. Off-size packaging? "Think of the shelf space. You're taking up four of my slots. Why the frig you think I'm going to give you four slots?" Another rule they broke.

And look at what happened with Guitar Hero. They broke all the rules and it all worked, because those guys were passionate and stuck with what they did and somebody took a chance with them to make it work.

So I think that suggests that some of the old rules and "thou shalt nots" are maybe really "thou shalt rarely." Music has been a great example of it. I think SingStar... there's the tradition of things like DDR. I think there's going to be more. If I knew what they were going to be, I would go get them right now.

BS: I was going to say, have you been thinking about what the other areas are in which this thing could happen? You probably don't want to give out the secret sauce if you've thought of it.

DD: Yes, it's the vacuum cleaner edition. It's going to go far!

I think everyone in the industry, after looking at what Rock Band and Guitar Hero have done, is trying to think more expansively about that. The rules still apply, in the sense that it's common sense that retailers are not happy about having four slots taken by one SKU. Even a higher-priced SKU, because they don't make enough margin in that higher-priced SKU, typically, to make up losing those four slots.

That's four different chances to make a sale. However, when it sells the way those products have, they're willing to make an exception. I think it's opened a lot of peoples' eyes.

It's still a very tough sell, to do something that's non-standard, but I think you will see other things break through. But I think you'll see retailers and publishers being very selective about how they bend the rules, having broken them.

The thing is, a peripheral will not make a bad game better, and oversized packaging will not make a bad game sell. People have tried that. That gets tried every three to five years in the gaming industry, going back to the baggie era. The first experiment was a good success. Wizardry got a box, and they had foil on their box, in about '79, I think, when everyone was hanging baggies off of a peg board wall.

I remember walking into the software store being like, "It's a box! Dude! Look, it's a box!" And you pick it up, and you're like, "It looks like something real!" So that's an example of something that worked, but then you had oversized boxes, six floppy disk product for a hundred bucks. Sierra tried that, and the ultra-hardcore bought it, but that died and fell off the edge of the table.

BS: What kind of companies do you think are in the best position to do that kind of stuff right now? Not only to identify, but also to capitalize on those trends. Big ones, or smaller ones?

DD: I actually think that hardware manufacturers have a huge advantage in that space. I think the Sonys and the Microsofts and the Nintendos, simply because they control the channel, operating systems, engineering, and so on... I think that's what makes Guitar Hero and the doors it's opened all the more remarkable, in that it did not come from a manufacturer.

BS: I wanted to ask about the 2008 Emmy award you got for [original AOL online game] Neverwinter Nights. I need to turn it into a question somehow. Obviously, it was probably pretty nice, but...

BS: Did you like it?

DD: Yes!

BS: Did you expect this was coming?

DD: God, no. I thought it was a joke when I first got the call. I thought it was a friend pulling my leg or something, because the National Television Academy... I had forgotten about the fact that id Software got honored last year at the Emmys. I remember reading that, and later it came back to me, and I said, "Oh god, this could be for real, because Carmack... oh yeah, last year they did do something."

That's kind of the moment where I thought. I Googled it and I thought, "Well, I guess this could be for real." And it's not like I was offensive to the people when they called, but I was just thinking, "Emmy? Video game? That doesn't sound right." And then you think back to how primitive the games were.

But it was actually kind of cool, because I think that a lot of times, thinking about winning awards is destructive to trying to do a good job on a game, because any focus that is anything other than gameplay and the game player I think in the end is a distraction, as can easily happen with, as we were saying, the people at thatgamecompany.

Any distraction that is about pride or ego or, "I'm going to show them how brilliant I am!" That's somebody focusing on themselves and how they want to feel and how they want others to look at them. That's not them focusing on the craft.

When you're focusing on the craft, you're like, "Okay, what's this going to feel like? I'll just have to try it and I'll see. Might would, might not. Is this mechanic going to be fun for five minutes or five hours?" That's focusing on the craft.

When awards inspire people like, "You know what? If I do a good job on this, it might stand out. We're taking chances on this. It's different. Maybe we'll win an award for this down the road. Maybe people will recognize it." I think that's positive. That's why serving on the board of the Interactive Academy, where we supervise the awards for video games, we try and take that very, very seriously, but I think in general, it's more often a distraction than not.

And not knowing about it until it happened and already having won when we found out was kind of cool, because it was something that you never... when I had that moment of realization, "Oh crap, I know how to do this. We can get graphics. We can take the idea of a MUD and put graphics in, and we can take the idea of a standalone RPG and make it a persistent-world online game. I know how to do this now. Crap, we can do this." It wasn't huge money back in those days, but it was something of a holy grail that nobody had ever done, and I had that moment of realization on how to do this.

Just like with World Series Baseball and camera angles. "Oh crap, I know how to do that. I just watch it on TV." Because you had a chance to code some stuff, and once you'd coded some stuff and got familiar with the machine, then you get to the point where you're not just learning it and doing the basics. You go, "Okay, I know how to trick it into things. Oh, I know what I could do. We could get 8K cartridges now. It'll fit. Cool." But you're not thinking about anything else. You're thinking, "Oh dude, we could do this." That's what you're thinking about at that moment. You're not thinking about glory or anything else.

And there have been plenty of, "Dude, we could do this"es that never went into a game or led to a game that didn't work, or were ideas that turned out to suck. In the retrospective history, the ones that really played out, especially if you were born at the right time so an opportunity was there for you at that moment, those feel great and are cool, but there's a thousand lousy ideas skirting around the landscape that nobody remembers, and you think, "Oh, that was stupid. Why did I think that?" Or, "I thought I could do that, and oops, I couldn't."

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

[Imagine I'll be wandering up to Vancouver for GDC Canada this May, and my colleagues organizing it with the Reboot folks have issued new details on the advisory board and track structure - I hear first speaker announcements are coming v.soon also.]

Think Services Game Group (parent company of this website) and Reboot Communications have revealed new details on this May's GDC Canada, including an advisory board including EA, Next Level Games, Radical, and BioWare execs, as well as a track line-up based around the production schedule of video games.

According to NPD Canada, the Canadian game industry grew by 23 percent in 2008, reaching C$2.09 billion in revenues. GDC Canada plans to serve this fast-growing region by providing a forum for Canadian developers to share best practices for fostering ingenuity and quality within their globally distributed games.

GDC Canada’s content lineup emphasizes the production cycle of game development, with lecture and panel tracks focused on the following stages of game creation: Concept/Preproduction, Production, Finalling and Post Launch/Analysis:

By organizing the conference tracks according to the stages of development rather than specific fields, participants can better understand production cycle efficiencies and their teammates’ point of view.

The advisory board for GDC Canada is composed of Canadian industry veterans including Deep Fried Entertainment's Brenda Bailey; BioWare's Ron Clement and Matt Robinson; Threewave Software's Dan Irish; Ubisoft's Derek Elliott; Pug Pharm's Steve Bocska, Electronic Arts' Dave Elton and Tabitha Hayes; Next Level Games' Douglas Tronsgard; THQ Canada's Tarrnie Williams; Radical Entertainment's Kelly Zmak; Disney Interactive Studio's Howard Donaldson; Gerri Sinclair of Great Northern Way Campus, and Jerome Kashetsky of the National Research Council of Canada.

"It oftentimes gets overlooked how much development activity occurs in Canada. With companies like EA, Activision, Disney Interactive Entertainment, and Ubisoft, responsible for production of major titles the region exerts a greater-than-realized impact on the global game industry," says Izora de Lillard, Event Director at Think Services Game Group.

"It’s important to bring to attention the work, developmental challenges, and opportunities of Canadian developers in a meaningful forum such as the Game Developers Conference."

GDC Canada will take place May 12-13, 2009 at the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Center in Vancouver, British Columbia, and registration is now open at the official event website.

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

[We're talking to this year's Independent Games Festival finalists, and this time, Eric Caoili interviews Tale of Tales' Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn about The Graveyard, a very short but thought-provoking interactive experience about old age and death, nominated for the Innovation Award.]

Though some would argue that it's far from an actual "game," The Graveyard is certainly a noteworthy, introspective title, presenting the idea of death not as something trivial like in most games, nor as depressing or dramatic as many would expect, but as a part of our existence -- death of old age.

In the trial version of the short PC/OSX game, players slowly guide a hobbling elderly lady through a cemetery, towards a bench. Alone and without ever saying a word, the woman sits on the bench while a poignant song, sung in Flemish but presented with English subtitles, plays.

The full, paid release is nearly identical except for one feature -- the possibility of death for the aged woman.

We spoke with Tales of Tales' designers Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn about The Graveyard, nominated for the Innovation award at this year's Independent Games Festival (part of Think Services, as is this website).

The two discuss how death is currently represented in video games, their response to critics who refuse to classify The Graveyard as a video game, and why they feel the independent games community is in a state of transition:

What kind of background does your team have making games?

Our team on The Graveyard consists of two people who worked on the project full time, Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn, and three freelancers who created specific elements of the game -- Laura Raines Smith with animation, Kris Force with sound, and Gerry De Mol with music.

Laura is an experienced animator who has worked on many commercial games. Kris is a musician who has also done sound design for commercial games, even for The Sims. And Gerry De Mol is a singer-songwriter with no other experience with games than making music for our own “social screensaver” The Endless Forest.

We, Auriea and Michael, have always been interested in the immersive and narrative potential of video games. And our work has often been playful in some way, even when it was just sculptures or paintings or performances.

We started our journey into interactive art through creating websites. Those dealt with pure interactivity and not with gameplay at all, though we did include game-like elements here and there.

Some six years ago, we switched tools and started working with video game technology. Not to make games per se, but to explore the immersive and narrative potential of the medium ourselves, rather than just trying to approximate it as we did in our web-based projects.

What sort of development tools did your team use?

The Graveyard was made with Unity. We used Blender for the modeling, and Laura animated in 3D Studio Max.

Can you talk about the differences between the full version and the demo version?

There’s only one difference: in the full version the protagonist can die. When she does, you lose the ability to close the application as the interface to do that is to walk the lady out of the cemetery gates.

While technically the difference is very small, and while you can get a lot of the content from the trial alone -- in fact, we feel that you need to play both for a complete experience -- the death of the avatar can have a huge emotional impact. It can drastically change one’s experience of the game.

We decided to charge a symbolic amount of money for this feature because we wanted to make a point about the value of games. In most game reviews, the value of a game is directly related to the cost of its production and the amount time you can spend playing.

We are critical of this attitude because it ignores the content of the game and depth of the experience of the player (e.g. how meaningful the game is outside and after playing).

Was there a specific event or source of inspiration that made you decide to create a game about death?

Nothing concrete. There was a memory of visiting a cemetery when we were young, to enjoy the tranquility of the environment. There was a very old but very lucid grandmother who talked about her own death all the time.

And there was also the desire to experiment with an interactive piece that was only about playing a certain person in a certain environment.

What are you trying to communicate about death in The Graveyard?

That’s a difficult question. Because we prefer to offer things to the player to think about for themselves, rather than expressing our own opinion.

Luckily, we live in a time that has interactive technology. Non-linear, generative, interactive media allow us to create art that needs to be completed by the viewer. This has been a desire and even a requirement of art for many centuries. But never before has it been so concrete. For us, art is not about what the artist wants to express. It is about what the viewer can see in it.

The Graveyard offers some ideas -- the lively nature in a cemetery, the calm of the dead, the physical problems of an elderly person, the relationship between city and cemetery, etc. -- but we don’t offer conclusions or a message.

It’s up to the player to decide what it means. As a result, different players walk away from the game with different emotions. Some feel sad, others comforted, yet others confused or frustrated. All of these responses are perfectly valid.

Are there any other games you’ve noted that don’t treat death as trivial?

From what we’ve seen, there are three kinds of death in games.

There’s the death of a character in the story, often expressed in a cut scene. That sort of death is seldom trivialized as it often signifies an import turn in the plot. The stories in games are often trivial as a whole, though. But so are a lot of stories in books and movies. So you can’t fault the medium for this.

I guess the death of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII would be the classic example of this sort of death, though we’ve never played that game long enough to experience this moment ourselves.

The second form of death in games is the death of your opponents. Especially single player shooter games are ghastly in this respect. If you stand still and think for a moment about what you are doing, you cannot be anything but horrified.

You’re basically a homicidal maniac on a killing spree, running around like a madman shooting everything that moves. To make this experience more acceptable, game designers often use the traditional tricks of political propaganda: they suggest that the morals and ideology of the hero are superior to that of the enemy and/or they paint the opponents as savage monsters with no other desire in life than to attack you.

We are still sickened to the stomach by the memory of hurling hundreds of living bodies through the air with a gravity gun in Half Life 2. But even Mario and Pikmin are highly objectionable in this respect.

The third form of game death is the one that we criticize in The Graveyard: the death of the avatar, the death of you. In video games, this death is hardly ever a real death.

We can’t think of any game that ends with the death of the avatar. Death is in fact a symbol for failure. The only response that the game expects is “try again”.

Some games even require the death of the avatar in order for the player to learn how to perform properly. There have been games -- Grand Theft Auto comes to mind -- that have replaced death by being wounded and resurrection by healing. This makes a lot more sense in the narrative of these games.

Did you have a name for the old woman while you were creating the game? Or your own story behind her?

No. No name, no story. I think this is because we start working with a character that we feel we already know, a character that already exists. Perhaps it’s the same for writers. But the way in which writers communicate this is by describing the character and telling the story.

Our medium of choice, however, is realtime 3D. So we communicate the character and her story through interactive scenes. The fact that this narrative is a lot more vague, in contrast to writing, is something that we fully embrace. In fact, it is this vagueness, this openness that attracts us to the medium.

The song that plays while the old woman seems to provide, if not an idea of who the woman is, then what losses she has suffered. Was this your intention? Was the song composed specifically for The Graveyard, or was the game designed around the song, or ... ?

We had no clear intention with the song. We just knew we wanted a song to play when the woman was sitting on the bench.

And we asked Gerry De Mol to compose and write this song because we felt that he would contribute something interesting to the game. We often work with our collaborators in this way: while we, consider ourselves to be the authors of the piece, we do open it up for contributions by other artists. We love what they can add to the piece and rarely question it. This is why we always choose the people we work with very carefully.

Some players interpret the song as being about this old woman. And about people she knew. That seems very plausible. But this is not intended by us. Perhaps it was intended like that by Gerry. It doesn’t matter. What matters is what you get out of it. Not what we put in it.

Can you talk a little about the audio design of the game, outside of the song?

The production of the audio elements was done by Kris Force. She has talked a bit about this in the postmortem we wrote about the game’s production. The design and implementation in the game was done by us.

Since our primary concern was to create an immersive experience, we tried to design the sound so it would feel as if you are really there, in that place. It’s a rich and layered soundscape that consists of several loops for wind and lots of random sounds placed in 3D, of birds and such. There’s also a church bell that chimes on the hour.

As you move from the gate towards the center of the cemetery, the sounds of the city become more muted and a sort of garden atmosphere becomes more prominent. We were also trying to change the temperature through the sound because we felt the center area would be warmer than the rest since there are no trees and a lot more gravel to reflect the warmth.

So while we may be minimalists in terms of interaction design, I think we are “maximalists” in terms of multi-sensual experience design. We use all aspects of the medium (and therefore rely on all sense of the player) together to create the atmosphere.

Do you have any ideas for what other games could do to make death not seem trivial?

That’s a huge question. To answer it, we’ll need to share a little bit of our view on video game history.

Just the other day I read something by Belgian Professor Jan Van Looy. He claims that the traditional “three lives” structure in arcade games was a literal translation of the three balls that you get when playing pinball.

I’m sure that in those days, the three “lives” of the “characters” on screen where as meaningless as the three balls in a game of pinball. It was just a game. It wasn’t really about something. Games were not a medium for storytelling and transmitting meaning yet.

But while the technology and the desire to create immersive worlds and believable characters has grown, gameplay design itself has hardly changed. Even though we truly believe in Lara Croft and Altair, they continue to just die and resurrect as if they were a yellow pizza disc with a missing slice for a mouth.

The problem is that while game developers were quick to abandon 8-bit graphics, simplistic AI, and chiptune music, the willingness to reconsider game design and structure has been mostly absent.

So much so that when the narrative potential of video games became what it is today, they actually created stories to fit the structure of game (which, as you remember, was defined by pinball) rather than adapting the interaction to fit any story or theme they felt like dealing with.

So here’s the answer to your question: abandon traditional game structures, say goodbye to pinball. It is pinball-inspired game design that forces developers to treat death or most other narrative elements as something trivial.

Now that the technology (and desire) is ready to allow for video games to become a medium of expression, developers need to take up their responsibilities. They need to start with a theme, a story, a piece of content. And then design all interaction so that it supports and expresses that narrative.

If the medium of video games opens up to the enormous variety of stories that can be told, death will automatically become, first of all, less prevalent -- in many if not most stories, nobody dies, least of all the protagonist -- and less trivial, because the expressive meaning of interaction has become more important than its entertainment value.

If you could start the project over again, what would you do differently?

There are a few faults in the model of the old woman we’d love to fix. To try and make her perfect. Our skills have gotten a lot better in this respect since The Graveyard was released.

I think we would try to find a more elegant solution for the fact that walking down the side paths in the cemetery is irrelevant. But only because several players responded very negatively to this. I guess they didn’t realize that the game was not about spatial exploration. So we should communicate this better in the design.

There’s many more things we would do differently if we could start over with a bigger budget and therefore more time. I think many people don’t realize how difficult and time-consuming creating realtime 3D games is. I know we always underestimate it ourselves when drawing up our schedules.

Were there ever plans to include any more interactivity than what’s available in the final version?

Originally we were indeed weak and cowardly, without realizing it. In early versions of the design, we had considered adding a kind of puzzle element about reading the grave stones and figuring out where the husband of the lady is buried. With every playthrough, this would lead to a different grave.

But we abandoned that idea because we wanted to focus on the open-ended contemplative nature of a visit by an old woman to the graveyard. We didn’t want it to become a story about this specific woman and her dead husband. We wanted the game to be about death in general, and in particular about the thoughts of the player about death, old age and mortality.

What sort of criticism have you received about The Graveyard, or what criticism do you expect?

The two main criticisms have been “it’s not a game” and “it’s not rich enough”.

The first one comes from a purist “hardcore” game perspective where everything that is not a game does not deserve attention and should not bear the name “game”.

We try to ignore this response as much as possible but often fail because we feel that a) video games should be a field open to growth and experimentation and b) video games seem to narrow down the meanings of game and play to something that is more specific than any historic definition of the words.

The second response comes from the adventure-gaming puzzle-solving audience. They basically like the idea of The Graveyard but they hate its minimalism. They want to find more concrete story elements or clues to decipher the riddle. And while we feel that the player should use their own imagination to enrich our work, we do understand that some people are better at this than others.

We have already responded to this criticism both in The Path and in the design of a future game by including elements that allow people like this to get more out of our games. In an attempt to guide and stimulate their imagination.

What do you think of the state of independent game development?

We feel the independent games community is in a state of transition, perhaps even steering towards a schism of some kind. A few years ago, almost all independent games were basically remakes of old 2D games. And still today, many indie games are platformers, shooters, RPGs or adventures.

The only reason to call these independent was that they were made with very low budgets. But in every other sense of the word, they were extremely dependent. On former game styles, on traditions, and even on the commercial games industry which many indie games refer to in a mock-ironic way.

But lately, independent games have been evolving towards something more similar to independent film, while perhaps commercial games are starting to look like Hollywood more and more.

There’s a lot more experimentation going on. And contemporary indie developers don’t feel as trapped anymore by old ideas about game design. There’s more and more games out there that put content first and form second. This way independent game developers are showing the world how video games can become a medium, perhaps even an artistic one.

How often do you think of dying?

Michael: I don’t think there’s an hour that goes by without me thinking about death in some way. Most often my own death, I think. I’m not a morbid person at all. I think I’m even what one would call an optimist. And perhaps my optimism comes from deeply accepting death as a fact, even as a thing of beauty.

I think acute awareness of death leads to an appreciation of life. I’m also very curious. Curious about death. I’m not entirely convinced that death is the ultimate end. I’m curious about what will happen when I die. I’m even curious about the process itself, about feeling life slip away from you, as one does, I imagine, often in day-to-day life at those moments when we lose control.

I think mortality adds to the nobility of man. Daring to live when facing the unavoidable end is the most courageous thing that anyone can do. And wasting life is the greatest of sins.

Auriea: Whenever something reminds me. Looking at my dead garden plants in winter and remembering what spring feels like; Certain traditions of still life painting; Reading the news. A few poetic metaphors, and off I go.

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

The latest issue of our sister publication Game Developer magazine includes a creator-written postmortem on the making of Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet, the heavily user-driven PlayStation 3-exclusive platformer.

These extracts reveal how the Guildford, England-based start-up behind the game faced the obstacles of succeeding as a new development house, while capitalizing on a small staff size and "game jam" mentality.

Media Molecule executive producer Siobhan Reddy crafted the postmortem of the Sony-published game, which was introduced in Game Developer as follows:

"LittleBigPlanet's codename was The Next Big Thing, and the support the game received from Sony and from the press shows it. The game makes bold strides into the arena of user-generated content on consoles, and this postmortem simultaneously chronicles both the game's and the company's creation."

Small Team With Area Experts

From the beginning, Media Molecule was determined to retain a small team. While the studio had to expand a bit more than it expected, it largely achieved its goal, to the intended effect:

"Going through this process cemented what we wanted to do: build a small studio of talented and creative people whose focus is to create a genre-defining console game that would be both commercially and critically successful.

"Paradoxically, we also wanted everyone on the team to be able to have input on every other aspect of the game. In this way, the different areas of the game would feel more integrated as level designers, artists, and programmers sometimes switched jobs for a few hours a day. The communication overhead needed to support this practice wouldn't have worked with a large team."

Game Jam Design Style

One key principle of Media Molecule's development process, facilitated in part by its small team size, is its "game jam design style," which allowed for a huge number of potential ideas discussed, as well as copious prototyping. The studio has enviably retained the practice even as its team has grown:

"During the early days, the process went something like this: Conversations would take place that would then lead to some design work being done. Sometimes the design wouldn't stick, but other times it would, unlocking a whole new host of possibilities.

"Now that we're a larger team, we have retained this approach. It's a little hard at times, but with the fundamental idea of a framework being set by the directors, the owners of specific areas of the game are trusted to create great things (and encouraged to try out hard, exciting, or unusual ideas). We regularly review how our projects are coming together. The fact that design documents often come together after you have tried something is a very positive notion in our company culture."

Building a Studio and Making a Game at the Same Time

Like many young game development houses, Media Moleculed struggled with constructing its company in parallel to constructing its game:

"Our focus was often split between building the game and establishing the studio.

"There is an expectation from the team, and a good one, that every area of the company be the best it can be. We underestimated the amount of support we needed to ship LittleBigPlanet and run the company to its best simultaneously."

Additional Info

The full postmortem, including a great deal more insight into LittleBigPlanet's development, with "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong" reasoning, is now available in the January 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine.

The issue also includes the 2008 Game Developer Front Line Awards, highlighting the best tools available to game developers in the past year. Plus, Nicholas Olsen offers a primer on Apple's iPhone SDK.

As usual, there is Matthew Wasteland's humor column, as well as development columns from Power of Two's Noel Llopis, Bungie's Steve Theodore, LucasArts' Jesse Harlin, and Maxis' Soren Johnson.

Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months' and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of January 2009's edition as a single issue.

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

['Bell, Game, and Candle' is a regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column by writer Alex Litel, discussing stuff that happens - or doesn't happen - in the game business. This time, he writes about the first game is looking forward to since Imagine: Party Babyz.]

INT. UNIVERSAL STUDIOS BACKLOT - DAY

A handful of creatives are presenting their pitches for one of the first productions of the newly independent DreamWorks' first productions—a film adaptation of the video game Noby Noby Boy.

Brett Ratner
I am more than infinitely qualified for this film: I am currently working on an adaptation of the hypersexual interactive Greek epic God of War, and I have a compendious knowledge of the American condition. My vision would not stray much from the thematic overtures established by the monumental American cinematic zenith Rush Hour 2, but it would also be intertwined with the familial histrionics of The Family Man, Money Talks’ cunning economic satire, and the perfected, thrilling exploration of an altered psyche from Red Dragon.

Michael Bay
My love for Noby Noby Boy roots in that it shies far away from the evergreen trend of increasingly convoluted reasons for killing people in occasionally exotic locales that a healthy portion of video games are boggled down by. There is a genuine opportunity here to accurately portray the parochial chaos that comes from a biological anomaly and really make a cogent study of the communal, intrapersonal and environmental effects that arise from such. Most of all, there is a sincere probability of ambition unobstructed by formula and unadulterated by malfeasance; I am adverse to profferings, but this provides a ceaselessly fascinating thematic query that I hope to tackle.

Michel Gondry
(please read aloud in a French accent)
The Boy stretching offers many opportunities for cinematic magic—very, very creative imaginative rewards. The growing and the eating is a manifestation of his mind; the clouds, cities, cars and galaxies offer a lot of potential to exhibit this duality. He did not have much of a good childhood, so he is playing in a fantasy to escape his constant maturity; he comes to realize the repercussions of this love and embraces them with a full heart. When he goes on the quest with the detective dinosaurs, he is very disappointed when they turn out to be double spies and send him to a secret place. But then he escapes from the secret place and conquers the bad guys. The town falls in love with their new mayor and returns to peace, happily ever after in puzzle pieces. Also, can I make a film based on the wonderful Imagine: Party Babyz?

Werner Herzog
(please read aloud in a German accent)
Boom! Pow! Noby Noby Boy! Explosions! Robots! Lasers! Looming threat of apocalypse! Tie-in action video game! Action figures! Table napkins! Children's socks! Children's shoes! Children's underwear! Halloween costumes! Limited edition cereals! Fruit snacks! Coloring books! Youth novelizations! Big people novelizations! Handballs! Party hats! Toothbrushes! Band-aids! Shampoos! Neckties! Sunglasses! Pillows shaped like people! Reusable sticker books! Luggage tags! Slippers! Magnets! Postcards! Trading cards! T-shirts! Special edition Blu-Ray with commentary from Werner Herzog! Official magazines! LEGOs! Fast food wind-up toys! Boxers! 3D theatrical release! Sour gummies! Special Edition Blu-Ray re-release Director’s Cut 2.0 Collector’s Set with wireless Smellovision technology! Chk! Chk!

Hideo Kojima
This should be a game because there is an elaborate story here that can only be told through interactivity. It comments on the triumph of expendability over necessity in a way that reminds of Phillip Kindred Dick and Stanley Kubrick in a deep, meaningful and enjoyable way that is much more than a game.

Stephen Daldry
The book immediately struck me as sincere and sensual in its prose: the rich epic of defunct suburbia gone awry. It takes no punches and absolutely challenges the precepts held by the reader in the hours before reading this masterpiece. The boy is a classical inspiration in the tradition of Billy Elliot, although magnified as he overcomes the plight of atrocity; it almost made me want to join the debate team.

Darren Aronofsky
It is a family film, and despite his physical and habitual abnormities, Boy is just a boy in Brooklyn try to get through the trials and tribulations of high school. He deals with first loves, math troubles, and maybe a part or two.

Sam Mendes
There are very quintessential elements of Americana pervasive in this work; the boy’s growth really encapsulates a classical case of avarice. But I feel a filmic recreation must be reliant on the performances of principles rather than the pretension of visual dazzle. I think Michael Cera would be illuminative as the Boy.

Michael Winterbottom
This conservative, Blairian government is suppressing this guy from artistically expressing himself and acting upon his freedoms because he is viewed as proprietor of lewdness. Except it is not lewdness and he is in fact acting upon his natural artistic instincts; he is being hilarious and it is beautiful.

Diablo Cody
This cherry-sweet romcom that deals with this Mr. Bodacious who suddenly discovers that is growing in these grosteque—not like that, this going to be PG-13—he has come to grips with being this giant thing and overcomes his rabid anti-intellectualism to woo over the heart of a geeky scientist.

Ryan Fleck
Geographically, what is the least likely locale for a creature perpetually growing from consumptive tendencies? Minnesota, of course. It is more water-out-of-fish than fish-out-of-water, because film’s settings—and their fate—depend on the central performance.

Terry Zwigoff
A kid who is a bit of an outcast and just decides to eat miscellaneous stuff so he can be this giant creature, this is material I can definitely relate to.

Todd Haynes
Each growth of the Boy is a story in itself, a story that deserves to be told in completely different fashions—one is a horror film, another is a romantic comedy, and so on. And, um, his face constantly changes, so there would be a different actor portraying him every five seconds. And it is a musical with each song in a different fashion.

Paul Thomas Anderson
Daniel Day-Lewis is obviously the boy, whose biological tendencies lead him to the path of infinite expansion by eating non-edible objects; it has a happy ending.

David Lynch
I am sorry, but I already made this film—it was called The Elephant Man and came out nearly thirty years ago. Enter into production and I will sue the pants of your kleptomaniac selves.

Alex Litel
Um, fuck, I Heart Huckabees meets A Few Good Men meets The Sixth Sense meets The Usual Suspects meets Soccer Dog: European Cup.

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

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

Finishing up yet another busy week, so time to break down some of the week's top features on Gamasutra - plus bonus features from our excellent student site GameCareerGuide - there's a bunch of neat analyses, interviews, and so on posted over the past 7 days.

There's some great stuff in here - from Chris Remo's excellent retrospective interview on Far Cry 2, a technical piece on ragdoll physics on DS, analysts on 2009's prospects for the game biz, Ernest Adams on emotional AI, and a postmortem of Bionic Commando Rearmed from Ben Judd.

Here are the stories:

Beyond Far Cry 2: Looking Back, Moving Forward
"Far Cry 2 was one of the most ambitious AAA titles of 2008's holiday season - but what did it actually accomplish? Gamasutra reflects with Ubisoft Montreal narrative designer Patrick Redding."

Ragdoll Physics On The DS
"In this Gamasutra technical article, programming veteran Eric Brown shows how the Nintendo DS can be used for surprisingly complex character-based physics calculations."

Game Audio Theory: Ducking
"'Ducking', or lowering the audioscape volume, can create greater engagement for listeners, and Day 1's Quarles explains how it's done in this in-depth game audio feature."

Sponsored Feature: Real-Time Parametric Shallow Wave Simulation
"Simulating convincing waves is mathematically complex and computationally taxing. In this sponsored article, part of the Intel Visual Computing microsite, John Van Drasek III, David Bookout and Adam Lake tackle the problem with DirectX 10."

Analyze This: New Year Resolutions for the Video Game Industry
"In the latest 'Analyze This', game industry analysts from Screen Digest, Wedbush Morgan, and EEDAR gather to discuss industry predictions for 2009."

The Designer's Notebook: Numbers, Emotions, and Behavior
"Can games be realistic emotional simulators? Game designer and writer Ernest Adams explores in depth how AI might actually emulate human emotions."

Postmortem: Capcom/GRIN's Bionic Commando Rearmed
"In this exclusive Gamasutra postmortem, Capcom's Ben Judd analyzes 2D update Bionic Commando Rearmed, from pricing to online play decisions."

Bonus GameCareerGuide.com highlights: Ask the Experts: How Will I Know? (Don't Trust Your Feelings); Adaptive Audio: A Beginner's Guide to Making Sounds for Video Games; GameCareerGuide.com's Game Design Challenge: Seuss It; Results from the Game Design Challenge: Balance Board.

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

[We ran this excellent niche-y interview a little earlier in the week on big sister site Gamasutra, and we're reprinting the Leigh Alexander-conducted chat, since it touches on indie, creative factors that GSW readers will hopefully dig!]

Paradox Interactive's Fredrik Wester says the Stockholm-based developer-publisher is surviving gamely amid the global economic crisis -- working primarily in the PC game arena to boot -- thanks to a very targeted operations method Wester suggests might be a wise way forward for many such companies.

The company started in 1999 doing development only, but since entering global publishing in 2004 and adding a New York office, has published 20 games, mostly PC strategy titles including Europa Universalis, Galactic Civilizations, Rush for Berlin and fan-favorite Hearts of Iron.

"The type of games we've been doing are map-based, very in-depth strategy titles, like our World War II title Hearts of Iron," Wester explains. "The second installment sold 60,000 units in North America; we're actually doing number 3 right now, this year."

Aside from its publishing activities, the company has an in-house development team of only nine staffers, with a lot of work outsourced. "We try to keep operations here very lean," Wester notes.

Paradox could be said to operate in a highly niche market, on a platform that many developers and publishers seem unsure how to negotiate alongside the current console generation. But as the global crisis makes profitability more challenging for the larger games industry than ever, Wester states: "2009 is going to be our best year ever."

Digital Distribution Is Not Optional

Cost efficiency has always been a large part of the company's business model, says Wester. "We haven't really spent a lot of money on big teams trying to reach all markets at the same time."

But readiness for digital distribution is key to the survival of developers and publishers, Wester says. "I think what's hitting back now is the digital distribution revolution taking place -- especially in the PC business. If you can't take advantage of that, you're going to suffer a lot."

In fact, the rise of digital distribution has helped strengthen the company, says Wester. He's also the founder (and still 20 percent owner) of digital download portal GamersGate, which just yesterday announced it would switch its catalog to a client-free model.

So not only does Paradox handle its own worldwide publishing, but it relies heavily on download services including, but also in addition to GamersGate, like Steam, Direct2Drive, and Impulse. "30 to 40 percent of our revenue [this year] is going to come from digital distribution," Wester says, "and that's obviously a significant part of the revenue stream."

"I think that's one of the reasons we have been growing so much lately," he says. "We are really focused on getting the business online."

In fact, Wester says a strong migration toward digital distribution and alternative business models like microtransactions has become an essential survival move for PC publishers, and "it may already be too late" for those now hurrying to catch up. "To release a game in box retail costs a lot more than releasing it online," he says. "Obviously, you should do both, because in-box distribution is still the majority of all sales."

A Rewarding DLC Model

One strategy Paradox has employed is to charge $10 for large-scale updates to its titles, rather than prescribing a steady drip of smaller DLC. Although such expansion-level releases are usually purchased by the most core players, "it's proven to be very good for us on the cash flow side," Wester says. "When you are as small as we are, you are vulnerable to dips in cash flow."

This model only works on top of a solid basic client-installed game that is strong enough for players to enjoy as a standalone without subscription fees, Wester notes. "But then, for people who enjoy it a half year or a year more... you can add additional content for it that can radically change the gameplay and make it into a new experience. Like reinvent the game, so to speak... I think a lot of gamers appreciate that."

In fact, the expansions were originally simply intended to be an "investment" in user retention and less a profitable enterprise, but they've pulled their weight as far as helping break even on their costs and keeping games "alive" for longer.

Standout Indies

On the publishing side, the company already has six projects slated for the coming year. "We pick up a lot of independent developers these days," says Wester. "The most important thing is they have an edge at what they do."

In other words, to Paradox, focusing on a single area better than any other is of paramount importance, moreso than more popular ideas than the widest-possible audience or the least genre-specific. Largely, Wester suggests that it's better to publish many products that each address a single niche very well -- even if they each sell on average in the 40 to 60,000-unit range -- than to slate a few big budget games aimed at the most crowded market segments.

For example, Mount and Blade, developed by small Turkish indie TaleWorlds, is a medieval combat action RPG -- not exactly a competitive category. But Wester found it was the best medieval combat action RPG he'd seen, and so signed the title.

Dedication on the part of a studio plays a role, too, says Wester, for independent developers seeking a good match in a small publisher. "We're looking for people very, very dedicated in what they do," he says. "That always shows in the gameplay. You can see from a game if they put all their heart and soul into it."

And as many small indies do, TaleWorlds had originally started off by continually offering in-progress beta builds to a small fanbase via its website. Wester noted the players' loyalty, and the fact that they'd even volunteer donations to encourage the game's completion. It took two years to fully polish and rework Mount and Blade for digital and retail publishing, but that initial something that Wester first saw in the title made it, to him, worth the wait.

PC's Passionate Audience

So as Paradox takes an approach somewhat different to the norm -- selecting independent studios and niche titles, and relying heavily on digital distribution to reach a global audience -- how does Wester feel about the state of the PC market right now?

"The PC market is much more... hardcore," he says, taking a minute to mull on the appropriate term. "PC players are more decisive in what they want to play; they're more focused. You can't release a crap game for the PC anymore, and people will just rush out and buy it."

"For the Xbox 360, for example, it's much more mainstream, and you can release titles... of lower quality, to be honest, and still sell a lot. That's not saying all PC games are really great -- because they're not -- but the games that are not great don't get any sales at all, so there is a larger pressure to create great games for the PC. But if the game is good, you can sell a lot of units."

Especially combined with digital distribution, Wester feels there's still a very good market for PC games. "And it's also opening up a market for smaller games," he notes, "Like what Microsoft is trying to do with Xbox Live; that's growing a lot on the PC platform as well."

In other words, a shorter or simple title that would hit a retail shelf at a $19.99 price hardly even outweighs the costs of getting it to retail, ultimately -- "the margin eats up the revenue, mostly," says Wester. So as an established connected platform, he believes the PC holds great potential for smaller-scale, easy-to-learn, lower-priced games.

Announcing Mezmer Games

With that in mind, the company's starting a new sub-brand within Paradox called Mezmer Games, to house high quality, smaller games that aren't at all benefited by retail distribution, focused on supporting independent developers with the marketing to reach a larger audience via digital channels. One of the first titles under the new label, for example, will be a quirky strategy-lite called Stalin Vs. Martians.

"It's kind of an arcade RTS game," Wester explains. "Lightweight, but really fun -- and full of Russian techno music."

Though Mezmer Games as a site is still in alpha, the ultimate aim is to gather independent developers and allow them to conduct their own individual forums there for fans.

It's beneficial to indie developers to start small, Wester says. "I don't think you should aim too high, initially. To create a game like Oblivion, you need the development and marketing budget that they have. It took Bethesda 20 years to get to where they were today... and they didn't have their first huge super-hit until [just a few years ago.] Not everyone can be Bethesda or Blizzard."

The Big-Budget Myth

Wester says an unidentified studio once told Paradox that it required a $5 million budget to build its vision. "It was their first game!" He says. "Maybe you should create a small game first, just to prove -- and to prove to yourselves -- you can create a good game." $5 million, Wester marvels, is generally considered the "lowest of the low" budgets for high-quality titles, and it surprises him how many people believe that's the minimum needed.

"My belief is you should work step-by-step," he says. "If you aim to create bigger and bigger games, you shouldn't go for very niche games all the time -- but if you have to start somewhere, I think that would be a good start."

And he also hopes developers won't exclude the PC as a potential development avenue, even in a climate of migration toward consoles and handhelds.

"We have a company here in the neighborhood who only creates games for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network," Wester says. "All of a sudden, Microsoft just switches the royalty model on them -- they get 30 percent instead of 70 percent, and it was just, 'oh! FYI!'And everyone got really pissed off, but what could they do?"

"I think PC has a great future," he concludes."With the PC, you control everything yourself. More people should develop for the PC -- especially small companies that are totally dependent on the big consoles."

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