['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

   

After I lamented in this column that I can't find the UK edition of PC Gamer anywhere nearby (even though PC Zone is oddly not a problem), deputy editor Tim Edwards kindly came to my rescue and sent me the June and July issues. My thanks go out to him. I'm going to be sending him meat and a novelty hat shortly.

I wanted a recent look PCG UK because they undertook a large redesign back with issue 201 in June, one where apparently everything from the front-cover logo to the main text font was reworked. It was apparently a substantial change of pace, because even though I don't get to read the UK PCG all that often, I still got emails asking me what was up with the redesign, about how weird it was to see Britain's best-selling print PC mag in this shape and form.

And it's all a bit surprising to me, because what may seem like a remarkable transformation to the Empire's eyes looks a lot like...well, US mags of past and present.

Like any US mag, the UK PCG is mainly about previews and reviews, with the remaining space devoted to news, one or two features, and the "Extra Life" section in the back. Extra Life itself has existed for a while; it covers aspects of the scene ranging from MMORPG updates and free online games to "Now Playing," a look back at games from the past couple years that the editors are playing.

I've had the impression that in the UK, PC Gamer was the "serious" computer game mag and PC Zone was the "funny" computer game mag, even though the art design for both titles wasn't all that different from each other. This redesign seems to be a bid to separate the two titles visually a bit more and reinforce PCG's authoritative-ness with a "slightly more grown-up look," as EIC Ross Atherton put it.

And grown-up it is -- primarily white, fancy serifed font, very few extraneous sidebars. At least one or two pages are entirely text, something unheard of in game mags since the old Computer Gaming World days, albeit with large pull quotes or some other visual feature to avert boredom.

The changes are interesting to me because the two PC Gamers seem to be going in opposite directions mission-wise. The US one, with Gary Steinman running it, has gotten remarkably loose and free-form over the past half-year, experimenting with a lot of unique features and boasting extremely innovative and experimental art designs for its features.

The UK edition, meanwhile, features an extremely standardized look across the entirety of the mag. Other than a very cool feature in Issue 201 devoted to Wurm Online called "I'm Bleeding to Death," nearly every page looks the same visually -- a bit of an issue, because at a glance you have trouble telling the difference between a preview and a review if you're just thumbing around.

I like PCE UK's new style -- it's a unique approach, and the art guys were extremely thorough in their design and implementation. However, is it dangerous for a print mag to be seen as...dare I say it...boring? I subscribed to Computer Gaming World in the early '90s, a pioneering and important but visually ugly publication, and compared to its boring double-columned text, tiny screenshots, and bare acknowledgement of first-person shooters, PC Gamer's colorful, vibrant debut issues were a revolution to my eyes in 1994. Now I can't help but wonder if PC Gamer US is trying to find a future for print game mags while PC Gamer UK is simultaneously going back to the past.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a really cool weblog about games and Japan and "the industry" and things. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

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

[This piece has already got scads of feedback in its original Gamasutra form, and on Slashdot, but nonetheless, it's worth reprinting here - Benj Edwards asks if advances in video game technology toward photorealistic gaming experiences make virtual killing more and more disturbing.]

You know, I used to laugh at the term "murder simulator" when it was bandied about by knee-jerk opponents of video game violence some years ago. Preposterous, I said: video games are video games -- easily distinguishable from reality, and reasonable people know the difference between fantasy and reality. That was in the Mortal Kombat and Doom era, where the violence seemed cartoonish. And I love those games.

Then I played BioShock. For the first time, hell started to freeze over, and I found myself beginning to understand the critics' point of view. As real-time computer graphics inch ever closer to absolute photorealism (which some industry professionals believe to be no more than 10-15 years away), violent video game critics' arguments are slowly beginning to look more sane. And yes, you're reading this from a life-long video game fan who staunchly opposes institutional artistic censorship.

But censorship is peanuts compared to the conundrums we'll be facing in the future with our favorite hobby. Once our computer simulations of the real world (still called, somewhat quaintly, "video games") begin to effectively duplicate reality, the issue of video game violence won't be a matter of artistic merit or censorship anymore. It will quickly become a matter of morality, ethics, and law.

The coming storm is inevitable: turn one way, and you'll see ever-more realistic portrayals of graphic, gratuitous human violence in games like BioShock, Grand Theft Auto 4, and Fallout 3. Then turn the other and observe the exponential explosion of computing power and graphics rendering potential driven my Moore's law. Put two and two together, and you've got quite a mess brewing.

Welcome to the Slippery Slope

Within the next 10-20 years, your virtual victims in Grand Theft Auto 6 could look, sound, and behave exactly like a real human would if you stabbed him in the neck or shot him in the gut. There'd be plenty of blood, screaming, and carnage to go around. You could watch as they bleed to death in agony.

The funny thing is -- and I'm just guessing -- you wouldn't want to do that in real life to a real human, so why would you want to do that in a video game? The violent scenario above seems silly now, but the stunningly realistic, PS3-era violent games we play today would have seemed unthinkably graphic just fifteen years ago.

At the moment, we rationalize our simulated violence with statements like: "It's just a game. It's not real. The people don't suffer." All this is true (at the moment); but as the experience of virtual murder becomes ever more realistic, I believe that we as players will begin to suffer emotionally every time we cause realistic suffering to any virtual person, just as if we caused suffering to real living creatures.

With each act of violence, a piece of us grows cold, calloused, and uncaring towards the well being of others. Repeat that, and we become slowly desensitized to pain and suffering.

As gamers, we've already begun desensitizing ourselves to simulated murder, or else we wouldn't be able to play the violent games we have now. Games featuring endless killing for points are nearly as old as video games themselves, with Space Invaders, (1978) probably being the most influential. Back in 1992, Wolfenstein 3D was the most graphically realistic simulation of murder you could find in a video game. It shocked people (including the author) at first.

But as the body count racked up, each Nazi became easier to kill until we no longer had a second thought about the act. The same desensitizing effect stretches back to every violent video game that pushed the limits of realism -- all the way back the early arcade title Death Race (1976), where players mowed down human-like "gremlins" with a car.

Today, we see older violent games like Wolfenstein 3D as primitive and cartoonish, but technology didn't stop there. As the years went by, graphical realism in violent games continued to ratchet up as each generation of software took advantage of the increased computing power available to it.

As violent graphics have grown more convincing, we as a gaming populace continued to de-sensitize in tandem. Despite leaps and bounds in graphical rendering power, Death Race's kill-everything gameplay stayed the same. We're still killing those gremlins and Nazis, but today they look a lot more like people you'd find on the street.

In fact, due to our continued cultural desensitization toward violence in video games, certain game developers kept pushing the limits culturally thematically with ever more violent, gory, and shocking gameplay than before -- what was once forbidden was forbidden no longer, so it took a greater controversy to get attention. Thankfully, this quest for controversial violence is not a universal goal of the industry, but there are always the standouts who effectively "push culture forward" by testing the boundaries of what we consider acceptable.

So, for the moment, we're ok, right? Photorealistic graphics aren't here yet, and we continue to justify our violent entertainment by saying "it's not real." But if we're not careful, we'll be justifying our consumption of violent games all the way to, say, 2030 when, thanks to photorealistic graphics and improved mind-machine interfaces, the experience of virtual murder may be nigh-but-indistinguishable from reality.

As technology improves, the well-defined boundary between reality and fantasy provided by a TV set and hand controller might evaporate, making the gaming experience less like a game console and more like Star Trek's holodeck. (And we needn't wait two decades for that boundary to start blurring: with Microsoft's Project Natal -- a camera that captures motion with no other peripherals required -- the line between real and virtual is already disappearing.)

If, in this hypothetical future, we're capable of stripping away our empathy and compassion to murder a 99% realistic virtual human (and maybe even enjoy it), will we be psychologically any different from people who actually murder those of flesh and blood? Having perhaps unintentionally trained ourselves to become cold-blooded killers through systematic desensitization, will we be emotionally capable of doing the same thing in waking life?

With that kind of realism, we're not talking Pac-Man blip-bloop video games any more: to give you an idea of what we're really in for, imagine walking up to someone on the street outside your house and shooting them in the head. By 2030, the video game experience of murder could be exactly that realistic -- if we choose to make it that way.

As Common as Murder

In our modern western society, death is a relatively rare event. One can live 50 years and know only of a handful of personal friends or family members dying. Those deaths usually result from an illness that strikes in the later years of life, or occasionally from accident or suicide. But how many murders have you personally witnessed in your lifetime? How many people have you killed?

When someone kills one real live human, it's a terrible tragedy that makes the local news. They usually go to prison for life. When a crazed gunman shoots down eight of his coworkers, it's called a massacre, and it stays in the national headlines for months.

Last year, a grand total of 31 real live humans were murdered in Raleigh, NC, my city of 380,000 people. But that figure is chump change for a video game: just the other day, I murdered 40 virtual people in one BioShock session. If eight is massacre, then what's 40? Wholesale slaughter? Systematic genocide?

Every real murder has far-reaching effects that ripple through the fabric of society, tearing apart the lives of both the murderer himself and the victim's friends and family. Each murder influences the practice of law and law enforcement and compels people to feel a little less safe and a little more paranoid about their neighbors. But we simulate the act all the time. For fun.

Speaking of BioShock, it's not like murder is incidental to the main premise of the game. The developers have specifically created a virtual world where you are forced to kill realistic humans to succeed. The fact that you're inflicting suffering and death upon very realistic humans is a key game mechanic. That's a very large part of why it's supposed to be fun. Take away that, and you take away the game.

These BioShock victims aren't like cartoonish Doom monsters anymore. They're definitely humans, and they look very real. They talk and rummage about, then run at me and attack. If I bludgeon them with my wrench, they scream in agony and blood gushes forth until his/her limp body falls to the ground like a rag doll.

To maintain the persistence of reality, that bloody, lifeless body stays where it is on the floor, able to be trampled, pushed, and even bludgeoned further if so desired. BioShock's designers have put a lot of thought into making the experience as realistic as is practical on today's hardware. And they should be commended for this technical feat -- BioShock is an incredible work of art. But dagnabbit, it really is one of those once-mythical "murder simulators" we've been hearing about for years.

This sort of interactive death-as-entertainment is very mainstream (BioShocksold over three million copies, including one to me) -- but only in the video game world. Show BioShock to a non-gamer -- someone who hasn't been desensitized to killing virtual people -- and watch their reaction. Show them how you bludgeon people to death with a pipe wrench. If they don't wince and express some form of shock at what's taking place on the screen, they're either seriously disturbed or they're a seasoned gamer.

Industry Ethics

Ethics and morals vary by region. They vary by culture and religion, and they vary from person to person. Dare I say it, but ethics and morals can be downright arbitrary. Despite this fact, and despite the wide spectrum of opinion on what is right and wrong, there's one moral I think most of us can agree with: killing humans is usually bad. World legal systems made that judgement long ago and codified it in law. In spite of this, if many popular mainstream video games were your guide, killing humans is also incredibly fun.

Then again, many video games are fun because they let us do many things that are impossible and/or illegal in real life. But the fact that murder has become a ho-hum event in mainstream video games is something that should make us re-evaluate our hobby.

As a card-carrying member of the human race (one of those things you're pretending to kill), I can't help but feel that such a profound and tragic event as human murder or even "justified" human killing should be a rare and powerful statement in games, not a common theme. With the ever-increasing power developers have in their hands to rip apart virtual lives, I think it's time to re-examine the use of death and killing as a core game mechanic.

Perhaps the public is already beginning to tire of wantonly violent gameplay with its enthusiastic embrace of both casual games and the Nintendo Wii's lighter fare. Many players are flocking to innovative, less intense games that make the "hardcore" (read: "mostly violent and/or realistic") gaming world shudder.

If the video and computer game industry doesn't begin to show concern over widespread and flippant depictions of realistic human violence, game publishers will soon be asking players to regularly murder scores of astoundingly realistic virtual people, enjoy it, and defend the practice from critics of the art form. (Actually, they already do, but I digress.)

But the industry shouldn't be asking this of its loyal fans and customers. This is not just a financial issue between publishers and their wallets; it's an ethical issue that will increasingly affect our laws, culture, and society on a deep level.

But make no mistake: not all violence in video games is bad. After all, I love Doom, and Monolith's Blood (1997) is one of my favorite games. I alone have been responsible for the deaths of countless thousands of residents of the Mushroom Kingdom over the past two decades.

Despite this, I am reasonably confident in saying that my violent video game escapades have left no lasting damage on my psyche. Nor do I feel that any violent game play necessarily hurts any of us at this moment. But if things get as realistic as what I've mentioned above, they very well might harm us in the future. My concern centers solely on gratuitous and graphic violence against ultra-realistic virtual humans -- the kind you'll be seeing more and more of in video games over the next decade.

Some violence will always be necessary in games that portray the human condition. There are many times when very decent people in our real world have been forced to kill to survive. It would be a disservice for the exquisite and singular art form that is video games to restrict portrayals of violence or human suffering outright.

If handled properly and sensitively, violence and even murder can be a powerful political, ethical, or artistic statement. But the use of gratuitous, gory violence against realistic humans as the main point of any game needs reconsideration.

We should start rethinking these issues now before we all slide down the slope together and can't pull ourselves back up again. Or, even worse, before governments step in and dictate what can and can't be depicted or simulated in video games via legislation. But then again, if things get as realistic as I'm predicting, there might not be anything we can do about it.

A Legal Quagmire

All this brings us to the question of what we can do -- or what we'll have to do -- as a society about this fast-approaching issue. If, as I have postulated, certain video games eventually become so realistic that they convincingly mimic reality, then no self-imposed rating system like the ESRB will cure the problem (i.e. It doesn't matter if it's an "adults only" game -- even adults shouldn't murder realistic virtual people).

In 2040, the only difference between killing a virtual human and a real one might be whether you're linked to a computer when you do it. And the virtual humans you kill might very well be representations of real people in a massively multiplayer online world like Second Life, leading to all kinds of confusion between what's "real" and not. And we're not even scratching the surface when it comes to AI that could be close to human-level sentience by then.

As a result, governments might have no choice but to step in and define a legal ethical limit to virtual killing and simulated suffering, opening up a can of worms that will only be untangled through years of difficult deliberation and hand-wringing.

If we come to that, should it be illegal to simulate player imposed suffering of photorealistic humans in video games? If so, where do we draw the line with regards to realism? For example, BioShock is "OK" now, but how much more realistic will the virtual human's appearance and behavior have to get before virtual murder is considered genuinely and irreversibly harmful for the player?

Will it matter if it's done "by hand and knife" in a holodeck-style brain-machine interface, or if it's executed through a 10-button game controller? Will it matter if it's a quick death or a slow, drawn-out one? Will it matter if the human-killing enacted by the player fits the legal definition of murder or if it is done in self-defense?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but I do know that they won't come easy, especially if the game industry fights back against government regulation. As we grow ever closer to 100% graphical and situational realism in games, hopefully game publishers will decline to encourage the stunningly accurate simulation of gratuitous human suffering.

My concern is not that these violent simulations described will happen; they probably will at some point. I'm concerned that we as an audience will continue to consider gratuitous virtual murder a form of mainstream entertainment. The kind of violence I'm describing should be relegated to the bottom, back-corner shelf of any game store -- not by law or punishment, but by consumer demand.

Forget the Kids

Contemporary opponents of video game violence inevitably mention "the children" and how we need to shield them from evil media like video games. Yes, 100% photorealistic violent video games of the future would have a profound impact on children. But you know what? It's not the kids I'm worried about. It's the adults.

After all, reasonable parents can protect their children from exposure to harmful media, as they (ahem) have been doing for decades with movies and TV. But when adults -- the supposedly responsible people of our world -- find it morally acceptable to enjoy the realistic suffering of others as mainstream entertainment, we have a real problem on our hands.

Obviously, what makes an acceptable game play experience for each player is a personal choice that should be judged on a person-by-person basis (or on a parent to child basis), and I believe it should stay that way. As for me, I'm already drawing the line at BioShock -- I can barely stomach the game as it is.

Sure, I could play it more and desensitize myself, but I don't want to. And that's just me. It's up to you and a million other adult gamers to decide what's best for yourselves and to draw the line on virtual violence where you feel most comfortable. And it's up to the video game industry to recognize exactly where they're taking us, because quite frankly, it isn't looking good.

The next time you load up your latest, greatest super-gory shooter, stop and think about what you're doing. If you weren't already steeped in the video game culture of thematic violence that stretches back to the 1970s, would realistic simulations of human murder like BioShock seem acceptable?

In case you've forgotten how a non-gamer thinks, show these violent games to your grandparents, or better yet, a WWII veteran. You'll get a better look at the moral compass of people born before the video game generation, and it might make you take a second look at that long, steep slope you're already sliding down. Because, honestly, we don't know how deep it goes.

[Benj Edwards is a freelance writer who specializes in video game and computer history articles for publications like PC World, Gamasutra, Ars Technica, and 1UP. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Vintage Computing and Gaming, a blog devoted to vintage technology.]

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

[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.]

Well, happy 4th, everybody, and it's time to wrap up a boatload of links from earlier last week (and previous!) before the new set start spooling in, including a neat NowGamer piece on Eugene Jarvis and the making of Defender.

Also in here - 2D Boy interviewed, exercise games examined, Edge magazine's pixel poster artist quizzed, Guitar Hero examined in an academic stylee, Jon Blow's latest ruminations, and rather more things besides.

Dance is a mysterious art:

The Making Of Defender | NowGamer
'In these enlightened times, we’ve seen hundreds of side-scrolling shooters, but when Defender appeared, it was so revolutionary, so different, and had such complex controls that many assumed it would flop.'

A Twist in the Tale | Resolution | Diverse commentary on videogames
'But even something like BioShock, heralded for its big reveal, isn’t really defined by that crowning moment, and doesn’t change substantially after it. Games like Portal are rare, imaginitive, risky gems - titles that only succeed due to the single-session play time required.'

Health Meter: An Open Letter to Publishers and Developers > Steve Steinberg > | Crispy Gamer
'People who don't enjoy traditional -- and some may say boring -- workouts aren't going to, all of a sudden, love them just because they can do them on the Wii.'

The Reticule: A Quick Chat with the 2D Boys
Some interesting post-World Of Goo updates: 'I’m working to bring back the Experimental Gameplay Project with Mr. Gray and our other friend from grad school Allan Blomquist.'

Interview: Edge’s Pixel Perfectionist… Gary “Army of Trolls” Lucken « Just One More Game
The awesome Edge magazine pixel illustrator interviewed.

Press Pause to Reflect: Reflections with Jonathan Blow
'Jonathan Blow, the developer and designer of the game, was kind enough to answer a few questions for us on being an independent game developer, the role of interactivity in games, and the inspiration for Braid.'

FlowTV: 'Just Add Performance' - Kiri Miller / Brown University |
'My standard strategy for explaining my research to those caught up in the effects debate is to point out that playing these games isn’t just like playing real instruments, but it’s nothing at all like just listening to music.'

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

Over 91 members of pixel art community Way of the Pixel worked in concert to create this hallucinatory piece. Each artist staked their claim on a tile from the hex grid, using a 16-color limit and outlines from adjacent grids to guide their own contributions -- because of how the project was structured, the participants didn't even see each other's completed work until the entire field was published.

As a result, you'll see a nest of birds next to a mechanical hand with a chainsaw, a plate of spaghetti turning into a head of hair belonging to a topless girl, and other odd juxtapositions. You can see the full piece below, but you should really head to the forum to see a much bigger version. I've also included a poster version that one artist printed out.

[Via Minusbaby]

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

[Continuing a set of interviews by Game Developer magazine EIC Brandon Sheffield for GameSetWatch, he talks to Thatgamecompany's Kellee Santiago on a multitude of neat topics regarding downloadable games and the Flower creators' future.]

Kellee Santiago is cofounder of Thatgamecompany, known for genre-shaking downloadable titles such as flOw and Flower, which both push the boundaries of games and their emotional resonance, but also give Sony something to point to in the way of artistry in the PSN space.

Thatgamecompany has been growing, slowly but surely, to where Santiago can now step out of the defacto-production role she often held on top of her studio running duties, so that she can now look externally, to see how TGC can potentially help other smaller indies, or expand the company's offerings in targeted ways.

We spoke with Santiago recently about changes within the company, the potential of a Flower expansion, PSP Go and Project Natal, as well as the viability of a TGC game based on an emotion like rage:

Thatgamecompany's Next Steps

Can you talk a little bit about what's next for you guys?

Kellee Santiago: I have to admit that it's probably going to be a little frustratingly vague just because we're in the middle of just solidifying the details on our current PSN project.

But I think the last three years we've spent building up this brand of Thatgamecompany and what it is. We hope what people are getting from us is Thatgamecompany is about providing meaningful experiences and unique experiences through video games.

And as I see us going forward and growing as a company in the future, I think what we'd like is to bring more titles under that brand. Whether that's us growing an internal team to handle multiple projects or by going with more of like a label structure where we have "Thatgamecompany presents," and we're able to help other teams that we see and other projects that we see that we really want to see come to light, that would fit under that brand as well.

Interesting. So, not exactly like a publisher, but like a liaison or something?

KS: Hmm, a liaison? Yeah, I think it would be kind of... That's partially what we've been doing in some ways, and I think just formalizing that as a business plan maybe.

How would you say you've been doing it already?

KS: I think we've become involved with a lot of the other indie developers. I mean, we're all more connected now than we've ever been before thanks to venues like the Independent Games Summit.

What we've also tried to do in addition -- I mean, I always say that we're one of the few companies that hopes that other people copy us, because we don't want to be this little niche random thing. This is where we want things to go. We want a lot of games to be made like ours.

What we've also been trying to do is when we see stuff that's awesome, or if people come to us asking for advice or connections or something, we always try and set them up. In these interviews, I think we try and drop a lot of projects, you know, names, and try to gain exposure for the indie dev scene as a whole.

Talking about the next project I didn't realize that you were necessarily tied to PSN. I just knew it was with Sony. It didn't connect for me that it was PSN specifically.

KS: Well, the goal has always been digital distribution.

New Platforms

What do you think about PSP Go then?

KS: The PSPgo... It's interesting. I just remember Jenova saying that when he was in Shanghai, he saw a lot more people having PSPs than DSes. I mean, this is totally anecdotally, but that they were very much like fashion accessories, and that they would watch media on it or something or browse the internet but not really play games. And I could see the PSP Go continuing that, like being that. I don't know as a game system... $250 is a lot of money.

That's true.

KS: [laughs] I thought that was expensive, but...they're also putting out a lot of major franchise games on PSP, so it will be interesting to see if that helps more people on PSP playing games, checking out the new stuff that's there as well. Fat Princess is going to go PSP.

It's definitely been a piracy vehicle previously, so it will be interesting to see how the PSPgo does in that regard. I also wanted to ask you what you thought of Project Natal -- it seems like a Jenova kind of thing.

KS: Yeah, well, I was going to say, it certainly falls under a lot of the... Or touched on the things that I know he's been interested in as far as that. Especially when you think about accessibility, removing the controller completely.

I guess one of the major criticisms that I've heard the last couple of days is people saying, "Well, how are they going to first-person shooters on it?" It's like, "Well, maybe they don't do a first-person shooter."

And maybe it's about making new games, allowing for different kinds of games. We don't have to think about games that already and how they're going to translate to that control. I think what it is is it allows for new designs to emerge.

My question is how much of it is real.

KS: Yeah.

The New Hire

So you have Robin Hunicke (previously a design lead at EA) now. How did that come about?

KS: It grew really organically. I mean, as you probably know, we got her fresh off of shipping Boom Blox Bash Party. So, I think as she was wrapping that project, she was thinking about her next steps. She's just one of those people we also like to bounce ideas off of, so we started talking about some of the ideas we had for our current project, and it just seemed like a really great match.

I think that with our experimental game design process, one of the issues that we've had in the past is tightening up the production of that and tracking it and developing a better process for it. And Robin just really has a passion for designing a team experience around creating these kinds of games that we saw as a huge value.

My question will be how many incredibly strong personalities can Thatgamecompany hold without exploding? I know that even as a small team, it's difficult to get everyone to push in the same direction.

KS: Well... [laughs] I mean, part of that is Jenova growing as a director, and I think he has. I think that also allowed for this to happen on this project. I mean, hopefully we want there to be lots of strong personalities at Thatgamecompany because we want to be a company that attracts the best and the top talent.

You can find a lot of people who are willing to do whatever you tell them, but when you want to continue to create unique games and unique designs, you need people who will also step up as leaders and also champion their ideas and bring new ideas.

Flower

Certainly. Jenova talked a bit about whether there would be a Flower update. Can you talk about that at all?

KS: Again, there's nothing to confirm or deny right now. We're unfortunately still so small that it's hard to divide our resources effectively. Flower was certainly designed as a complete experience.

One of the ethical challenges we face as a company is that we really strive to provide meaningful experience to the player. So, in the past, when we've thought about developing expansions or developing downloadable content, it becomes very difficult because we really, really want to make sure that it's very meaningful, that we're not just trying to get more money out of people that love our games.

So, that's added to this challenge of Flower being a complete experience as well. So, when we think of what to add and what would be meaningful. It's very difficult. At the same time, it's regrettable right now that we haven't been able to support those fans and those players in a better way because the outpouring of expression after that game and the emails we get have just been amazing. We would really like show them that we care about that.

BIt's quite difficult when of course you sort of want to go on and do your next thing but people still want more of what you've already got.

KS: Yeah, yeah. Hopefully, part of that is satiated by just our next project, and that will be another Thatgamecompany project, and I think the players of Flower and flOw will enjoy it.

Right. But how long is that going to take?

KS: Right. [laughs] Yeah. And also, when we think about the projects, I mean, right now, as I was saying, it's like our current project is requiring an all hands on deck sort of approach, so it makes it difficult to then try and manage downloadable content or an expansion. But it's something we're trying to improve.

I guess you could go with like external help like you did with the PSP version of flOw, but I don't know if that's appealing.

KS: Yeah. I think that's also something where now that we've gained Robin as a producer, that will allow me to focus more on that stuff, hopefully opening up the opportunity of doing exactly that.

And certainly the code for Flower is a lot better, so in that way, it will be easier than flOw was. [laughs] Yeah, poor Supervillain had like the worst time, and I just really, really give them mad props for dealing with that.

I guess that's what happens with indie teams' early projects. It's like, "Well..."

KS: "No one's ever going to look at this ever again." [laughs]

As long as it works.

KS: Exactly. As long as we ship it.

On Rage

Are you going for a specific feeling for the next project?

KS: Yes, but we can't talk about it right now. But we always start with emotions, and this is no exception.

Well fine! I assume that... I always wonder what would you all do with an emotion like rage, or something like that, which I know is really outside of what Jenova wants to do. But I've always found that curious.

KS: Well, part of our mission statement is to create games that communicate emotions that aren't currently available on the video game apartment. Rage is well-covered.

Right.

KS: But that's not to say it's out of the realm of a Thatgamecompany game because if one day, we've moved well beyond, I don't know, the emotions that are communicated today, which I can't see because I think there will always be an audience for this -- I mean, I'm so stoked for God of War 3. I think it would be really interesting, that's all I can say.

I think it would be interesting to start a game with, you know... Well, maybe God of War, you know, that's what they captured so well, with that like visceral rage, and then designed everything around that.

I'm really interested with this Six Days in Fallujah project that keeps getting picked up and dropped and dropped...

Well... Have you actually seen the gameplay?

KS: Nah, I don't know.

That's the thing. A a lot of indies are coming out to stress the importance of Konami, but having seen it, it didn't look very complex to me -- like just another male power fantasy video game.

KS: I wonder, because I know some of the guys at that development studio, and their heart is in the right place. So, I guess I was excited by... Well, maybe partnering with Konami, they would have been able to get it to a very meaningful place.

But yeah, you're right. Intention isn't everything. There has to be execution behind it.

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

In an engaging retelling of his time at Atari, former programmer (now a principal software engineer at Microsoft) Landon Dyer revealed that there was a yet-undiscovered Easter egg in the Atari 400/800 version of Donkey Kong. Though he described the hidden message as "totally not worth it", the fact that he couldn't remember how to bring it up anymore surely compelled a few gamers to try and find it themselves.

Sixteen months later, Don Hodges has posted details on how he uncovered the Easter egg (displaying Dyer's initials), though he didn't find it after suffering hundreds of playthroughs. Rather, he activated the game's debugger and sifted through over 25,000 lines to find the relevant subroutine.

According to Hodges, of all the game hacking he's previously done, this find was the most rewarding and enjoyable for him. Here are his instructions for bring up Dyer's initials:

1. Play a game and get a score of 33,000 through 33,900. This score must become the new high score.

2. Kill off all of your remaining lives. However, your last life must be killed off by falling too far - by walking or jumping off a girder that is too high to land safely. If the last life is killed any other way, the egg will not appear.

3. Set the game difficulty to 4 by pressing the Option button 3 times. The icon for this difficulty is a firefox.

4. Wait a few minutes, and the demo screen where Kong jumps across the screen will appear.

5. The title screen will then appear, and Landon Dyer's initials [LMD] will be at the bottom center of the screen.

"I’m totally impressed," said Dyer after reading about Hodges' accomplishment. "And no, getting the Easter egg to pop up still isn’t worth your time…"

[Via @retronauts]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The vector art cover for Telltale's PC DVD edition of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People (which collects all five episodes of the series) is attractive enough, but pulling out and reversing that cover will reveal a fantastic alternate Atari 2600 version bullet-pointing the adventure title's notable features: pointing, clicking, and pixels.

Sure, the Venture Brothers third season DVD set pulled a similar stunt with its jacket several months ago, but that homage didn't sport a huge Videlectrix logo on the back (or the lurking, sinister shadow of Trogdor, the "beefy-armed dragon of legend "):

[Via Whimsical Phil]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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 Blizzard, Microsoft Game 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

Volition Programmer
"Volition, Inc., a video game development studio in Champaign, IL, is seeking experienced C/C++ programmers to work on games for the Xbox 360 & PS3. Volition is one of THQ’s premier internal game development studios. We are the creators of such franchises as Saints Row, Red Faction, and the Descent/Freespace series."

2K Sports: UI Artist
"At 2K Sports our goal is simple: Make AAA games that are the best in the genre and have fun doing it. 2K Sports is proudly developing the critically acclaimed NHL 2K and MLB 2K series of games. Owned by Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTWO), 2K Games is a successful, stable company that produces high-quality titles every year."

Harmonix Music Systems: Senior Producer
"Harmonix is seeking an experienced Senior Producer for a large, internally-developed project. We are looking for a creative, flexible, and resourceful project driver who will understand the vision for the game and distill it into a sensible, prioritized schedule, ensuring both title quality and timely delivery."

Microsoft Game Studios: Senior Level Designer
"No Strings or Controllers Attached. Introducing Project Natal, a revolutionary new way to play: no controller required. See a ball? Kick it, hit it, trap it or catch it. If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips or speak you and your friends can jump into the fun -- the only experience needed is life experience."

WorldsInMotion - Online Games

Tencent Boston: Environment Artist
"We are looking for outstanding individuals with passion, talent and a team focused mindset. We are located in the Boston area and offer competitive salaries, superb benefits and profit sharing. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor of a great new development studio, a studio that can produce top tier quality games and bring them to market worldwide."

Blizzard Entertainment: Software Engineer, Tools
"Blizzard Entertainment's corporate applications team is currently looking for an experienced software engineer to join our corporate applications engineering team. This person will design and develop internal applications that aid the company and our players. The ideal candidate is a .NET expert, has successfully delivered robust solutions that can handle high-load situations, and isn't scared of ambiguity or tight deadlines."

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 Simon Carless at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

After three years of putting on Blipfest -- one of the world's biggest annual chipmusic events -- in New York City, Manhattan arts organization The Tank and artist collective 8bitpeoples is bringing the festival across the Atlantic to the Danish city of Aalborg, where they will put on a two-day version with Danish art and technology venue Platform4.

Taking place from July 24 - 25, Blip Festival: Europe will include U.S. acts like Nullsleep, Minusbaby, and Glomag, but almost half of its lineup will consist of European musicians such as Bodenständig 2000, La Belle Indifference, and Rabato. Japanese artist Hally will also deliver a set. I've included a flyer listing most of the acts slated to appear after the break.

Along with the nighttime music performances, the European event will have other attractions during the day such as a film screening of chiptune documentary Blip Festival: Reformat The Planet, a workshop on creating visuals with an NES presented by Don "No Carrier" Miller, and more.

Says organizers, "The goal of the festival is the same as earlier incarnations, to inform and to rock, to push this nascent scene beyond its underground roots and into its rightful place as one of the worlds most exciting and dynamic electronic music movements."

You can find more information on the event and purchase tickets at Blip Festival: Europe's official site.

[Via Enso, Minusbaby]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 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.]

We've discussed the information-heavy balance of the game Nethack before. How, once the player learns enough about the nature of the game world, all of the difficulty turns out to be front-loaded, before the player has had the chance to build up experience levels and equipment.

Recently, a couple of variants have arisen in order to remedy this perceived problem. Two years ago was the release of Derek Ray's Sporkhack, and only this past month saw the release of another, UnNethack, created by Patric Mueller.

Nethack's mysterious Dev Team is presumably aware of the problem, and though it is known that they're still around, updating bugs and answering email, and thus we assume are still working on the game, it has been a very long time since the last version. It has been over five years since the release of Nethack 3.4.3, the latest version of the game.

A rising current of opinion on rec.games.roguelike.nethack is that the Dev Team has abandoned the game. Even if they haven't, a few of the more irksome characteristics have survived for multiple versions, long enough that it begins to look like the Dev Team is perfectly happy leaving them in.

Both are games that, to the many characters who die in the earliest regions of the dungeon, seem almost unchanged from the original game. While not any unfriendlier to a new player than vanilla Nethack, most of the changes in these games are aimed at the experienced hacker. Unlike uber-variant Slash'EM, neither seems to be interested in radical reinvention of the game.

The idea of a expert-foiling balance patch has actually been around for some time. One of the most popular variants of 3.1.3 was Stephen White's Nethack+, which also took it upon itself to correct some balance issues. Unicorn horns in that version, for instance, degrade with use.

So, what are the things that they balance? Quite a lot, really. Following are just two of examples. This list contains spoilers, of course, but the effect of these changes is to make the game harder for players who are already spoiled. Still, you should probably move on if you care about such things. We'll probably pick this thread up again later, after UnNethack has had some more development time.

Balance fix #1: Loosening up the "ascension kit."

This is particularly a focus of Sporkhack. In Nethack, nearly all players who aren't actively avoiding them for some reason strive to build up a certain set of equipment which make success all but certain. Nearly all ascensions not only contain some form of dragon scale mail, due to its light weight, non-hindrance to spellcasting, unequaled protection and special protection based on color, but in practice it's only three colors that are even used: gray, silver, and, coming up distant third, black. One way this is done is through the addition of a fractional resistance system. Permanent intrinsics from eating resistant monsters don't immediately go to 100% upon success, but must be reinforced through several such meals. This makes equipment-based sources, such as from the off-colors of dragon scale mail, more useful.

Related to this is the place of magic resistance in the game. After poison resistance (and in some ways surpassing it), magic resistance is the most essential intrinsic in vanilla Nethack 3.1-3.4, nullifying a wide range of dangers through the acquisition of one characteristic. Vanilla Nethack balances this by making equipment the only way to gain it, and few items grant it: basically, to get magic resistance, the player must wear a cloak of magic resistance, a suit of gray dragon scale mail, or hold one of a few quest artifacts, which must either be wished for or the matching class must be played.

Sporkhack's solution is to make magic resistance both less needed and less useful. Magic resistance is essential because of the high-level monster spells of Touch of Death and Destroy Armor, both most-often cast by opponents who are able to teleport after the player and are thus difficult to escape without fighting them, and thus taking a few spells. They may even decide to use one immediately after a teleport, giving the player no opportunity to avoid a potentially deadly attack. Magic resistance protects against both states, and so it is of great value in a game of vanilla Nethack.

No, more than that: because the player's whole game can be ended, or grievously harmed, by a single unavoidable moment, magic resistance is an essential characteristic. If you don't have it by the time teleporting liches start showing up (usually the Castle), then you are subjecting your character's life to the whims of the dice, and as we covered before, high-level roguelike play is about eliminating such risks wherever possible.

Sporthack makes Touch of Death do high physical damage and max HP drain instead of killing the player outright (think of it as an "aging" attack....). Magic resistance helps reduce this penalty but doesn't eliminate it. It also makes it so that the Destroy Armor isn't outright blocked by magic resistance.

Balance fix #2: Make the game's levels more unpredictable.

This is a focus of UnNethack primarily, which merges in more versions of many special levels. It gets its levels from other variants and patches. Both it and Sporkhack also fold in Pasi Kallinen's "flipped levels" patch, which sometimes mirrors a special level on its X or Y axis. Sporkhack also contains new code that allows more doors to be randomly placed, in order to keep long-time players on their toes.

The level additions are made possible by the fact that most of the game's important locations are not random in layout, but come from a level file, a utility file created from a source definition during the compilation process. This setup was developed in order to allow more coding-friendly hackers to modify their game dungeons, but it also allowed the Dev Team, eventually, to make multiple versions of the most important special levels, which are randomly selected for inclusion each game. This makes it relatively easy to add new levels to the game, so many variants feature them.

Both Spork and Un add in some level variants, but more in order to liven things up by presenting more options for those levels that are chosen from pre-made templates. One of the biggest sources of new levels is Pasi Kallinen, who has written a range of patches that include new versions of levels such as Sokoban, Medusa, Castle, and other levels. Some of these versions post new challenges; word is one of the new versions of the Medusa level must be travelled carefully to avoid catching sight of its star monster before engaging in combat with her.

Unnethack also brings in the "Heck² patch," a radically reorganized scheme for what most players consider to be the most boring area of the game, Gehennom. It also has variants for the demon lord lairs, and additional lairs for previously-neglected lords. It also includes a Very Special Guest Star subbing in as Amulet guard for the High Priest of Moloch....

Basic Nethack has four primary level generation systems. Dungeon levels are those found throughout the main dugeon, Cave levels are found in the Gnomish Mines, Mazes are generated in the deep dungeon and Gehennom, and the Rogue level has a unique generation scheme. After some plays, these schemes, while suitably chaotic for new players, can become fairly familiar to an experienced hacker.

UnNethack livens the early dungeon up a bit by adding in the "town" generation scheme from Nethack Brass. Sporkhack tries to mix up Gehennom a bit by randomly changing its maze walls to other types, such as lava, a rude surprise for players used to leaning on direction keys to hurry through. Both games also do away with one of the most frustrating aspects of Nethack's ascension run, the "mysterious force" that sometimes random teleports players downward while carrying the Amulet.

Posted by John Harris at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Official BioShock site The Cult of Rapture has posted another batch of concept art for the upcoming sequel, this time for the series's second most iconic characters, the Little Sisters. "They may be small in stature," the site explains, "but their glowing eyes and eerie, echoing voices tell a very large and memorable story."

The shots above show a Little Sister before she's saved in the game (left), complete with a syringe gun, and after she's saved. 2K Marin also shared close-ups of a Little Sister from the chest-up, and some thoughts behind the character's outfit:

[Via Super Punch]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 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.]

As we saunter happily into a long weekend in the States (yep, that July 4th thing in full effect), let's bust out a new set of slightly extended GameSetLinks, headed by the latest GAMBIT/MIT Game Lab student title, which continues their customarily interesting attitude to experimental student games, with an oldskool adventure twist, even.

Also in the latest set of links - looking circumspectly at Okami, examining a book on ethics in video games, high-heeled claws, Japanese audio games, the apparently drifting delights of Afrika, and iPhone costume hijinks from the Dead Or Alive ladies, oh dear.

Yay hooray:

GAMBIT: Updates: Introducing Rosemary
More interesting student games from MIT GAMBIT: 'Rosemary is a point-and-click adventure game whose core mechanic is remembering events of the past in order to uncover a mystery.'

Critical Distance | Ōkami
Another super-nice round-up of critical reaction to the notable Clover Studios title.

Print Screen: The Ethics of Computer Games > Troy S. Goodfellow > | Crispy Gamer
'Though many in the serious games movement have consciously worked to invoke reflection and emotion, it's doubtful that the makers of Manhunt were driven by a desire to make a meditative commentary on violence.'

Costume GET!: Costumes of DOA Blackjack Kasumi
On the weblog that 'discusses the finer points of videogame character costumes', Tecmo's blackjack iPhone app gets a lookover.

The Brainy Gamer: Safari with me
'In Afrika, you take photographs of animals and other wildlife. That's it. That's the whole game. I'm calling it a game. You may decide to call it something else.'

Acid for Blood: A Few Quick Thoughts on the Aion Beta
'Asmodians don't wear shoes because they have these big fucking claws on their feet. This is cool. The females don't wear shoes either. Because: really big claws. So, naturally you would think that their heels look just like the males -- a flat fleshy pad on the bottom of their foot. But no. They have a bony protrusion there that looks like the pointy heel of a high-heeled shoe. They have HIGH HEELED CLAWS.'

The Weird World of Japanese "Novel" Games from 1UP.com
'In Japan, there's a long history of games that are pretty much just reading, and can only really be considered "games" due to what they're being played on, and that they allow some choices from the player.'

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

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Atari 7800 ProSystem's release, the Atari Historical Society has unofficially released the source code for over a dozen of the system's games such as Centipede, Xevious, Robotron, and more.

According to the Atari Museum site, the games were rescued from Atari ST format diskettes that were thrown out when Atari shuttered one of its offices in 1996. "I hope these will be great learning tools and the basis for code for many coders to develop on the 7800," says Atari Museum founder Curt Vendel.

He continues, "And just as the Atari 2600 developers have stretched the boundaries and created games no one would've imagined in their wildest dreams, it is my hope that this same enthusiasm can carry over to an open and active 7800 developers community and bring forth games that would make even a NES owner envious."

The Atari Historical Society also posted details about a newly discovered prototype of the original High Score Cartridge (HSC), the planned but never released 7800 peripheral that was designed by General Computer Corp. and recorded players' high scores for multiple games. You can see documents and specifications detailing the HSC's design and production here.

Online retailers have sold reproduction versions of the HSC for several years now, but Vendel says that he plans to produce 25 special edition Atari 7800 25th anniversary High Score cartridges with a new label design. Unfortunately, he isn't taking preorders, but he promises to make an announcement sometime this month about when the special edition carts will go on sale.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Diamond In The Rough' is a regularly scheduled GameSetWatch-exclusive opinion column by Tom Cross focusing on aspects of games that stand out, for reasons good and bad. This week, Tom continues his previous discussion of calls for video game design reform in the areas of narrative and story. In the latest instalment, he begins with a discussion of what "narrative" is.]

Narrative can’t help but have an internally coherent organizational logic (called “plot”). The important things about this logic are that it a) unfolds in time for a reader, that is, has a beginning, middle, and end, b) that the experience of reading is one of reading—of discovery and deciphering rather than production and self-creation, and c), that because of this, narratives appear for readers as pre-existing objects, things separate from a reader that demand to be seen and interpreted.

This last point is critical: narratives happen to readers, and speak of an intelligent, exterior design to readers. This is true even when we tell stories to ourselves (the principle on which psychoanalysis works)—we encounter a structure of meaning, or plot, outside ourselves, and re-narrate it to ourselves.

Narrative always comes first, and unless we’re very clear about what we mean by “story spaces” or “tools for making narrative,” it’s unclear how we might provide readers with tools, rather than pre-existing narratives, out of which they themselves will produce narratives, ex nihilo.

Narrative is, to borrow an academic jargon, always there already. It’s naïve to imagine for the sake of polemic that video games, just because they’re new media, are exempt from these rules about narrative, which are something like rules for human psychology. As Brooks argues, we’re just wired this way. We see narratives everywhere, and when we as authors (or, yes, video game designers) produce meaningful artifacts, whatever we call them, we can’t help but encode meaning in them that a reader is going to decipher.

Narrative Possibilities, Emergent Possibilities

It’s implausible to think that a game could ever exist where players could continually find a consistent, long-term level of narrative fascination without the aid of game-provided elements that are already narrative, elements that already have encoded in them some meaning that the reader has to interpret and put to work.

A game like Far Cry 2 is successful at playing with gamers’ expectations and goals because it has a strong back-story, varied narrative-based and setting-based game mechanics (the physicality of your character, your animations when healing wounds or taking pills, your connections to buddies) that allow players to create their own (hopefully meaningful) narratives within these game spaces.

To say that this is simply a “game space” is to deny the machinations of the designer (even in Gaynor’s ideal game world), their construction of a world, a chain of actors, and a set of rules and motivations that propel multiple narratives through that gamespace. Still, if this is what narrative is today in a video game, then what could it be? What could the future of narrative look like?

I’m not talking about a set of conversations that you can only have with a set number of people, which, when activated in the (always the same) correct order, leads to a reward of some kind of all-encompassing, culminating narrative climax, or that same climax mixed with or preceded by a difficult in-game dilemma. I’m also not referring to multiple chains of branching dialogue and story paths that ultimately lead to one of several conclusions. This may be the form that narrative takes in modern games, but it’s just a certain kind of narrative, not narrative.

When I talk about narrative, I’m referring to the product of an author, a collection of ideas, settings and characters (and their actions) that can be interpreted by the viewer or player as a set of related occurrences and human interactions. As a human being who watches events unfold around us, we understand the potential for actions, reactions, missed opportunities (and missed failures).

While games today have rigid narratives, it’s wrong to think that narrative itself is the problem. The error lies in thinking that because some elements of RPGs and open-world games today are or are parts of a narrative, they can never be sufficiently dynamic or flexibly organized enough to allow user interaction with them.

These interactions can produce an emergent narrative, which, on the above definition, is something too complex to have been completely foreseen and provided for by the designers, and was produced by the user’s interaction with the simulated gameworld. This isn’t just the privilege of some soon-to-be-developed toolset of the future; the tropes and technologies are already here.

How? A game could present multiple actors, and in-game entities that had their own goals, made decisions based on their own desires (as created by the designer), and thus affected their surroundings, and possibly the player. If the unit of simulation isn’t resources, vehicles, day-night cycles, but characters, agents with a scripted set of goals and behaviors relative to the gameworld and the other characters in the system, then it is possible to run a system whose compositional elements are narrative.

The possibility of creating such a system clarifies how much the vagueness of the idea of “story space” and “emergent narrative” depends on uncertainty about what narrative is. Saying that if we give users a good enough toolset, they’ll make their own stories, is as much to say, “we don’t know what story is, but we know that it’s out there.”

To return to Blade Runner: the game created a cast of actors who seemed to follow their own paths dictated by their own motivations. What is so impressive about this idea is that it allows for the “unique” gameplay moments that you’ll find in a game like Fallout 3 for Far Cry 2, but with the difference that those moments carry meaning in themselves that the reader has to decipher, rather than being opaque meetings of meaningless avatars in a simulated world that we naively imagine will “become meaningful” for a sufficiently imaginative reader.

It’s also worth noting that in that game, game spaces abounded. Every payoff for every interaction was determined by your investment in the game and your character, and your reasons for doing what you did, how you expected the game world to react. The fact that it could surprise you, did surprise you, shows that the game allowed for more “emergent” narratives than any recent game.

People like to say that the Fallouts, Far Crys, and GTAs of the world allow for unpredictable, unscripted, emergent narrative moments. In fact, those moments aren’t properly narrative, while Blade Runner was. Think of the kind of moment that people have in mind when talking about emergent narrative in those games.

If I kill a person who I was supposed to help, thus necessitating a firefight with their relatives or friends, then yes, it’s “emergent”—something unscripted and procedural happens and I participate. But it isn’t narrative except in a world where opaque, meaningless random occurrences between human-like entities, empty of content, can be called “narrative” because we’re imagining a user who, like a kid playing with dolls, fills in all the semantic gaps.

Nothing Emerges

And so what’s happened is not an “emergent narrative.” It’s emergent, and the narrative elements are stage dressing that, insofar as the event was unscripted, cease to matter. If in-game actors start killing each other but there’s no narrative armature for why that happens, then it’s beside the point that the agents happen to represent people, friends and relatives or whatever.

The new thing that’s happened with them happens in spite of and entirely separate from their status as characters, because they and the game world can’t speak meaningfully to us as readers about what’s happened. If we project meaning onto it, it’s separate from the meaning that was already coded into it (that the actors are characters in a story)—those elements become throwaway, even though the whole point of making them characters in the first place was, obviously, to create a meaningful world.

Unlike those games, Blade Runner attempted to simulate a game world that could quite happily continue to function without your input at each juncture, and a world in which “function” meant interaction between characters with goals, and “interaction” meant conversation and communicative action. Those things happened in the game, and it wasn’t supposed (impossibly) that the reader would bring it all from the outside. It was possible to miss events and characters, and thus have other events cut off from your purview.

This is not the same as saying “I had a different experience in Fallout 3 because I missed quests my friend did; we can now discuss our emergent gameplay experiences.” Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2 may provide users with hobbled narrative tools, but they do not provide actual independence. You may be able to “go anywhere and do anything” in these games, but what that actually means is “go into some areas, fight guys, and wait to activate missions and story segments.” A game that actually allowed for emergent narratives would need a game with strong narrative blocks (like Blade Runner) to keep the flow of events cohesive, in the face of the player’s actual freedom and independence.

In Fallout 3 quests will never start unless you start them. Alistair Tenpenny will sit on top his tower waiting for a supposedly inevitable nuclear explosion for the entire game, if you see fit. This is in no way interesting or fun, nor does it provide me with an exciting experience. In fact, knowing that Alistair waits atop his tower for me (and only me, no one else can do it, apparently) is unpleasant. Why doesn’t he go hire someone else? What if I then decided to kill that person, necessitating attacks against me by Alistair?

This is not a far-fetched notion, and games attempt to provide such branching story paths all of the time. The problem is that there is never a question of the world’s self-sufficiency or linear temporality. If I sit on my hands watching zebras frolicking, the Jackal and other warlords will stew in their bases, waiting for some brave mercenary to aid them.

This is where proponents of emergent narrative have a point—the narrative elements of these games are indeed too static. But to say that those games are static because they use narrative elements, and to imagine that there are non-narrative, “emergent” aspects to these systems waiting to be mined (and that can be divorced from the harmful aspects of “narrative”), is to mistake one problem for another, insufficient dynamism for something inherently wrong with narrative.

What is an Emergent Game?

It may be quite possible for me to, as Gaynor writes, find developers and games that create spaces to have exciting, new experiences. It’s recently become much easier to find them in fact, in the form of The Path. The Path clearly subscribes to the school of thought that desires emergent, unpredictable narrative experiences and creations (on the player’s and designer’s part). Yet Gaynor contends that such games “Provide people with new places in which to have new experiences, to give our audience the kind of agency and autonomy they might not have in their daily lives; to create worlds and invite people to play in them.”**

But does this sound like a space that can be differentiated from its user-created adventures? It may all be well and good to have exciting, unscripted firefights against mercs on a field in Far Cry 2, but I would strongly argue that such player generated narratives (maybe, in your mind you’re just trying to let off a bit of steam, hang out in the plains, when you get jumped by soldiers. Maybe you’re angry at one of these soldiers because they killed your buddy) are inextricable from (and thus highly dependent on) their structured, designer-produced settings and narratives.

In fact, insofar as they require the user to apply the backstory to them, as they surely do, they’re boring because they don’t have content of their own. And insofar as they relate to the broader narrative frame (as they often do despite themselves), they violate the dictum of story space as sole preserve for the appearance of that rare new species, “emergent narrative,” and smuggle narrative in the back door.

Furthermore, to say that a world – where you could do things (any things) and have those things be meaningful – could exist necessitates that the world be carefully, expansively designed, its players extensively fleshed out, embodied, and horribly, plotted. If a game, its world, and its denizens do not impose a logical set of responses upon your character due to your actions, then a player will always know the “gaminess” of their setting. In most games, gamers instantly (or quickly) recognize the systems of action, reward, repercussion, and recognize their place and weight within the game. It’s rare that you find a game that knows how to make players explore their worlds conceptually as well as physically, and even rarer are the games that get this right.

I find it hard to create “meaningful” moments or experiences in a game that so clearly accepts (uncritically) the standards of FPS design as does Far Cry 2. It’s telling that what “emergent” gameplay and narrative amount to in games is a different kind of enemy assault, a riotous, chaotic battlefield. It’s still the Bioshock problem, the “two people killed the enemies with different powers” fallacy of “choice” gaming.

What if your interface for the shooting itself changed? What if the terms by which you “won” or “lost” an encounter changed regularly? What if these stopped being the only possible outcomes? Instead, your goals changed from killing everyone to getting captured, or doing something outside of the shoot/be shot at paradigm. To move further outside the kill/die and win/lose video game rhetoric (to a more experiential model, say) is almost incomprehensible to games, designers, and gamers, and with the tools and examples we have today, I’m not surprised.

Gaynor’s argument assumes that a reactive, highly realized and modifiable world can elicit genuine emotional responses in me, possibly even responses I’m unfamiliar with. I don’t care how reactive your world is, I cannot be interested in the actions of my character if they are not couched in a broader human context and narrative. This is why so many games fail to elicit responses from gamers. Their characters, plot, and world are at once artificial, unbelievable, and uncomfortable in their own skin. They consistently fail to transparently direct and modify the world in a responsive, enjoyable way (for the player).

When I relate to fictions, to the actions of my avatar and the hidden or visible results of his actions, it’s because they take place within a recognizable, human spectrum of actions, existence and response. If there’s no reason for the queen dying after the king, after all, I’m not sure I care. And I don’t care to dream up a reason all on my own.

A Hopeless Cause

Much like in the blander shooters of today, all of the emergent gameplay and experience in the world can’t make up for badly realized characters and stories. Likewise (and far more importantly), the autonomy and ability of the game world to function, play out, and possibly self-terminate (in parts) is key to the realization of Gaynor’s ideal. I think you need a tangible thread of narrative force running through a world to make these things important, otherwise every happening has the potential to be “meaningful” to me.

This thread can exist anywhere, it can be different for every user, but it will exist, and it will not do so just because a user willed it into existence in the absence of coherent emotional and logical stimuli. This isn’t the case in real life, and it’s not the case for one individual. Yes, one potential gamer may find the relatable experiences of her in game character interesting, but there is a difference between one player and a community of players, and between interesting and engrossing.

Next week, I want to talk about how Gaynor’s goal is one that I appreciate, despite the impossibility or inadvisability of some of his prescriptions. As he hypothesizes: "Under the immersion model, instead of relying on an authored message encoded in a single traditional narrative stream, meaning arises from the content developers' ambient characterization of the gameworld itself and the non-player characters who inhabit it. Instead of gaining perspective by seeing specific events through the eyes of a particular character, the player gains perspective by himself inhabiting a world apart from his own daily experience and coming away with a sense of meaningful displacement."*

I think that this is quite possible, but that there are necessary designer-heavy elements that must inhabit this world, especially if the “sense of meaningful displacement” is to be achieved. I also think that these elements must inescapably answer to the broader rules and results of being part of narratives. To aid me in my discussion, I’ll bring up the notion of “Island-based” tabletop quest creation and modification, and the graphic adventure The Last Express.

* The Immersion Model of Meaning
Storymaking
** Being There
The Challenge of Non-Linearity
A Peek into Game Design

[Tom Cross writes for Gametopius and Popmatters, and blogs about video games at shouldntbegaming.wordpress.com. You can contact him at romain47 at gmail dot com.]

Posted by Thomas Cross at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mekensleep's critically acclaimed DS game Soul Bubbles is finally releasing in Japan courtesy of Interchannel over a year after title's U.S. debut, and the placid puzzler has seen some changes from its trip across the Pacific.

The most obvious change is that the game's previously near bald hero now has a lush mane of purple hair. Not so obvious are the game's reworked level curves, interface tweaks, and a gameplay bug affecting left-handed players.

Mekensleep's Omar Cornut also shared other significant changes that might convince fans of the original (or gamers who still haven't tried out Soul Bubbles) to import:

"We increased the number of calabashes required to reach Agartha to 70, because players who skipped the harder fourth and fifth levels in each world usually faced too much of a difficulty spike in Agartha, and it also tends to increase the game duration for those players.

Finally we added a second save profile to the game, as requested by many players. We really wanted to get that inside the original release but only thought about it late in the process and it was too late for QA to accept it into the build. It's my fault and I really wanted to have it fixed for the Japanese release!"

You can watch a trailer for Soul Bubbles taken from the Japanese Nintendo Channel's latest update below:

[Via Gamersdag]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Online retro gaming mag RGCD has released a new game for the two-decade old Atari STE -- r0x (with a "ready-to-go PC version").

Inspired by the meteor storm bonus stage in Edgar Vidal's Deluxe Galaga for Amiga, r0x has players taking control of the TTA Military Frigate 'Irata' and dodging meteoroids for as long as possible for a high score.

Players can also graze the meteoroids for "serious danger points" and collect treasure, floating cosmonauts, and bonuses (e.g. smart bombs that clear the screen, E-X-T-R-A letters for an extra life). "Maluses", which can reverse controls or instantly kill players, are also scattered in the mix.

The game also has a secret menu (which can be found by reading the messages in the menu screen displayer or by hacking r0x), an in-game playing guide, and a two-player mode in which players compete to collect 20 cosmonauts.

You can see video of an earlier version of the game demonstrated at demoparty Outline 2009 (where r0x was the highest scored game entry) below:

Heavy Stylus posted about the release on TIGForums, where he also shared photos for a "Limited ROXXOR Edition" given out to friends. The package includes an OST audio CD (with a data track containing the game source and all assets used to create the game) and a disk presumably stocked a copy of the game.

The coverart is fantastic:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I haven't watched much of the Escapist's Super Smash Bros. parody video series There Will Be Brawl, mostly because I can't bring myself to take web videos starring actors dressed as video game characters seriously (I made an exception for College Humor's Street Fighter: The Later Years), but I can imagine these excellent photos pushing other similarly disinterested gamers to check the show out.

Shot by Greg de Stefano, these photos of the There Will Be Brawl cast will be collected for a "book project in progress." My favorite is definitely the very Ira Glass-esque Lakitu. Captain Falcon, with the gleaming emblem on his helmet and his noble gold scarf, is a close second:

You can see more images from the book project on Greg de Stefano's site.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[How did Sucker Punch's PS3 exclusive Infamous get its pacing right? In a piece that ran a few days ago on our sister site, but I thought eminently GSW-able, game designer Darren Bridges talked to Gamasutra's Kris Graft about carefully gating progression, power acquisition, and superpowers that got left on the cutting-room floor.]

Pacing can often make or break a form of entertainment. There's the movie that by all means should be highly entertaining, but botches what should have been a smooth crescendo leading up to a climax, a book that reveals too much about the main character up front, or a song that is the same from beginning to end.

The same pacing issues happen with games all the time, whether talking from the perspective of story, gameplay, or otherwise. Sometimes, even the great games are somewhat flat experiences that pay little attention to doling out carefully measured spoonfuls of entertainment.

Sony-owned Sucker Punch’s PlayStation 3 game Infamous, however, manages to pay careful attention to pacing, turning up the fun dial ever-so gradually, drawing the player into the experience and coaxing him to keep playing in order to see what happens next.

Therefore, we recently spoke with Sucker Punch game designer Darren Bridges specifically about Infamous’ well-measured pacing:

It's really clear, from both my own play experience and what I've read from reviews, that Infamous is particularly excellent in its pacing. The "fun ramp-up" is meticulously designed, doling out powers and unlocking areas and enemies in measured amounts.

Can you give some more insight into the design process from the perspective of creating a well-paced game in Infamous? What were the goals you had in mind in terms of pacing, and what are the keys to creating a well-paced game?

From the outset, our goal for Infamous to give players the experience of “becoming a modern-day superhero”. I highlighted “becoming” in that sentence because it is the single word that had the greatest influence on the pacing of Infamous. Cole McGrath, the hero of the story, starts as an unremarkable bike messenger, and ends up a demigod who can summon huge lightning strikes from the sky to destroy two-story tall superhuman enemies.

We wanted every moment of the game to reflect this progression from “average dude” to “super powered behemoth”. Consequently, we tried to instill a sense of progress in everything the player did. This included resolving the mysteries brought up in the story, taking over territory, turning on power grids, gaining new powers, upgrading existing powers, and fighting stronger and more varied enemies.

In addition, we emphasized improving your character through collectibles, building your heroic or “Infamous” reputation among the city’s inhabitants, and unlocking and exploring the three distinct islands that make up Empire City. We wanted the player to feel a constant sense of growth from beginning to end.

I am a big fan of action and superhero games (not surprisingly), and the biggest appeal for me is always the powers I get to play with. In Infamous, the hero’s powers are the primary tools of gameplay, and are consequently the biggest carrots that draw players forward through the experience.

Here are a few of the guiding rules we used to distribute the powers in Infamous:

-Make sure that each power you give the player is useful and adds something to the game that makes it feel fresh again. (Extra points for powers that encourage the player to look at the gameplay environment in a completely new way.)

-Make sure the player immediately has a chance to use a new power and understands what makes it fun and useful. New powers are worthless if the player doesn’t have incentive to use them.

-Make sure the most effective way to play is also the most enjoyable way to play. If you gave players a power where they could mash a button with their eyes closed to become invulnerable and slowly defeat all of their enemies, it would not be fun, but players would still feel forced to do it because it was effective.

-Revisit the power distribution plan frequently to protect the game’s pacing. As gameplay mechanics were tested and replaced, we often had to update the order and timing in which the powers became available.

Have you found that creating a well-paced game in an open world is particularly challenging? What were the particular pacing challenges you ran into with Infamous?

One of the big appeals of open-world games is the freedom they allow. We wanted to provide that freedom, but we also wanted to provide a guided experience that would keep the game interesting through its entirety rather than burning out early.

Our initial attempt at the superpowers macro design did not work well. We allowed players to purchase any of the powers whenever they wanted, giving them as much freedom as possible. However, we quickly realized that this design made it very difficult to create interesting combat setups or integrate powers tightly into mission objectives -- because we couldn’t rely on the players having any specific powers at any given time.

In the end, we decided to tie the power acquisition moments to specific missions in the story, and then to allow players the freedom to upgrade those powers in a good or evil direction.

During one of our last focus tests, we got feedback that there was not enough combat variety in the game. We had been playing missions one at a time as we developed them, and didn’t have the same perspective as someone who played them all back-to-back for sixteen hours.

To address this, we added several new types of enemy weapons and behaviors, and assigned a team of one designer (myself) and two gameplay programmers to go through every combat setup in the game. We rebalanced each battle with new enemy layouts, introducing new enemy types at carefully planned intervals. It was a big undertaking, but the game benefited greatly from it.

Do you think that proper pacing in video games is often overlooked? Do some designers equate pacing with "learning curve" or gradually-lengthening XP graphs?

During development it’s difficult to get a true sense for the pacing of the game until it is nearly content-complete. At that point, everyone is in a mad scramble to get the final details finished, and there isn’t a lot of time left to change the macro structure of the game.

Also, even if problems are diagnosed, the solutions may be too disruptive to implement with the limited time left. It’s definitely easy for pacing to get sidelined for the sake of achieving content completion or polishing other areas of the game.

As the distribution of super powers is one of the central pieces to Infamous’ pacing, can you describe superpowers that you decided to throw out and why?

Behind-the-scenes secrets ahead! Some powers got cut because they weren’t very fun, but several were good concepts that just didn’t make sense as player powers. These tended to sneak their way back into the game in other forms. One example of this was a power we called “Minionize”.

Cole could zap groups of pedestrians and take over their minds, forcing them to charge forward into the fray against his enemies and take the bullets that would otherwise be targeted at him. It was decidedly evil and very fun to watch, but it wasn’t as generally useful as the other powers it was competing with.

"Minionize" was way too cool to leave on the cutting room floor, however, and we eventually found a place for it: (mild spoiler alert) if you play the “Minions” evil side mission in Infamous, you’ll get to see exactly what this power feels like.

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

Ahead of the episodic adventure game's debut on PCs next week (releasing to WiiWare sometime afterwards), Telltale has put out a new trailer giving gamers an idea of what to expect with Tales of Monkey Island, the first new entry to the Monkey Island series in over eight years.

Along with familiar faces like Guybrush, his wife Elaine, and archenemy LeChuck, the three minute clip shows off a conversation tree, much to Elaine's detriment, and how players can combine items in their inventory to create something like, say, a cutlass enchanted with voodoo root beer. You can also see some early artwork for the game past the break!

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[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 Metroidvania platformer, a base jumping simulation game set in the near future, a difficult horizontal shooter, a browser-based puzzle game with sprite editing functions, a dragon breeding simulator, and a puzzler that placed in a 'shocking' competition.

Game Pick: 'The Underside' (Arthur Lee, freeware)
"An exploration platformer which tells the story of Ip, a peculiar little fellow who is attempting to escape from The Underside and prevent the world from being destroyed while he's at it. The plot can be a little complicated to follow at times, but when it comes to gameplay there's not much out there that is quite like it - a classic platform game with gorgeous pixel art."

Game Pick: 'Trigger' (Stephen Lavelle, freeware)
"Trigger is a tough horizontal shooter created by the developer of intriguing experimental projects such as Opera Omnia and Rara Racer. The ship that you pilot is armed with only one weapon, but when used effectively it can destroy just about any enemy ship you might encounter on this dangerous mission. Available for both Windows and Mac OS X."

Game Pick: 'Aaaaa! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity' (Dejobaan Games, commercial indie - demo available)
"In Aaaaa! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, your task is to launch yourself from a ridiculous height, skim some buildings, smash through targets, wave to your loving fans, flip off the whiners and land safely at the bottom with all bones intact. While the experience can be completely casual and open enough for anyone to enjoy it, so too is Aaaaa! fitted for the hardcore gamers. Finding perfect routes to maximise score and achieve the highest rating possible will no doubt help the time fly for many freefallers."

Game Pick: 'CutCopyPasteGnome' (Luke Brown, browser)
"CutCopyPasteGnome is a puzzle game designed by Luke Brown, where the player's objective is to assist a gnome in reaching the exit without any direct control over his movements. This will require manipulating objects with a couple of editor functions, accessible by right-clicking on the game screen and selecting the tool you would like to use."

Game Pick: 'How to Raise a Dragon' (Gregory Weir, browser)
"How to Raise a Dragon follows the rise and potential fall of a mythical beast from hatching to distilling fear in the hearts of pitiful humans. As you'd expect from a Gregory Weir game, there are multiple endings depending on the direction you decide to take. Will you be a fiery tyrant raining down destruction or be a kind soul? How you decide to handle yourself makes all the difference."

Game Pick: 'Shocker: The Electrifying Super Hero' (Alexitrón, freeware)
"Shocker is a puzzle game created by Alexitrón for Game Jolt's Shocking contest, where you are in control of a hero entrusted with the job of saving the planet from a major technology-related disaster. Each area has several blue nodes and a yellow exit point, with your objective being to reach the escape portal without accidentally sliding out of the screen."

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

This real world reenactment of Donkey Kong isn't takes some liberties with the source material, but it's still rad! Gamil Design filmed this stop-motion short at Kirby Derby -- an anything goes (so long as it's safe/appropriate) parade in Raleigh, North Carolina's Kirby St. -- using a pile of post-it notes to create the sprites.

The group says it created the 8’ tall, 12’ wide Donkey Kong at its office when the idea struck: "Once we took it outside and admired our work ... we noticed that the railings of our next door building looked just like a Donkey Kong set. Naturally we had to spend the whole next day creating all the characters for our first-ever stop motion animation movie."

You can watch a high resolution version of the video on the company's MobileMe Gallery.

[Via Pumpkinspice Latte]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[So, we're starting to announce the content for the first-ever Indie Games Summit @ GDC Austin, which I help to run, and though this is only about a third of the total lectures, you can see it should be a pretty neat gathering of the minds. Full info below...]

Organizers of this September's Independent Games Summit at GDC Austin have announced first speakers, with the indies behind titles like Bit.Trip Beat, Age Of Booty, Fantastic Contraption, and DeathSpank speaking on a multitude of notable topics.

Initial information about the September 15th-16th Summit, a separate part of the wider, 'connected game'-focused Austin-based event, is available on the GDC Austin website. Other Summits taking place at GDC Austin this year include a brand-new iPhone Games Summit and the notable, long-running Writing and Audio Summits.

Details on the Independent Games Summit at GDC Austin include specifics on the first five lectures and panels for the first-ever Austin edition of the popular main GDC event, and the highlights include:

- In 'The Bit.Trip Series: Holistic Indie Console Game Design', Gaijin Games' Alex Neuse will speak on "how the small team created the retro-infused [game] series, giving tips on standing out on WiiWare and how to intelligently mine classic gaming for a unique look."

- Speaking in 'Business Managing Your Indie Developer Through The Downturn', Jennifer Bullard of local Texas independent developer Certain Affinity, which has done contract work for big AAA console titles (Left 4 Dead, Call Of Duty: World At War) and developed significant original IP (downloadable title Age Of Booty) will discuss running your indie as a business, and how a small company intelligently juggles work for hire and original IP.

- In a lecture called 'Postmortem: The Design & Business Behind Fantastic Contraption', Colin Northway will explain how the Flash-based physics sandbox webgame -- which has been played by millions of people, and brought in six-figure profits for its single developer -- was designed, monetized and marketed itself, based on an initially free title with paid upgrades.

- Wolfire COO John Graham (co-creator of the upcoming Overgrowth) will discuss 'Effective Marketing For Indie Game Developers', explaining how you use your own website, social networking channels, independent editorial content, and even pre-release versions of your tools to build a robust community around your game before it even ships.

- Finally, in 'The Indie Business Rant', notables including Hothead's Joel DeYoung (DeathSpank, Penny Arcade Adventures), Klei's Jamie Cheng (Shank), and IGS advisory board members Matthew Wegner (Blurst.com, Crane Wars) and Adam Saltsman (Fathom) will "each give short 5-10 minute presentations on aspects of indie business that irk, disgust, or nauseate them, hopefully also including some panaceas for the indie business pain that sickens them."

More information on 2009's Independent Games Summit at Austin GDC, including registration details and other specifics, is available at the official IGS @ Austin GDC website.

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

In this chat between former Atari programmer Owen Rubin (Major Havoc, Space Duel) and Jeri "Circuit Girl" Ellsworth, the former shows off Kermit, a robot originally built as a virtual pet by Atari's Engineering group in the late 70s.

The team eventually became bored with the project for some reason or another and abandoned Kermit. Rubin, however, rescued the robot and reprogrammed it with random functions like playing music and purposely bumping into things -- he reasons that the smarter its programming, the "less fun" it was.

He goes into more detail on the robot, even sharing a humorous "wolf whistling" incident, in the above video. You can see photos of Kermit and read more about it on Owen Rubin's site.

[Via Rotheblog]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Appearing as today's $10 Shirt.Woot sale: Trevor Dunaway's Heather Gray "Heart Fighter" design, which pays homage to Namco's fixed shooter arcade game Galaga. These Shirt.Woot deals tend to run out of stock, so pick one up soon if you're interested.

The shirt would go perfect with this custom pair of Galaga slip-ons from melo_joyce (if you don't mind covering yourself in game sprites):

[Via GoNintendo]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over 30 years since the movie's box office debut, 505 and Paramount Digital Entertainment have announced that they will publish a game based on the iconic Grease film, describing it as "the original high school musical".

The companies promise that players will be able to "sing and dance alongside Danny, Sandy, The Pink Ladies and the T-Birds" with their planned Wii and DS games. Neither mention whether the games will feature Grease's popular soundtrack, a critical component to the movie's success (alongside John Travolta's bad boy attitude and Olivia Newton-John's next-door girl charm).

Interestingly, 505 adds that the Wii version will take advantage of the system's motion-sensing controls and microphone -- as far as I know, the only first-party accessory that can be described as a microphone is Nintendo's Wii Speak. The only retail title so far to use the voice chat device is Animal Crossing: City Folk.

The DS title will naturally take advantage of the system's touchscreen. I wonder if there will be Elite Beat Agents/Ouendan-style portions? Can players relive that scene where the T-Birds moon millions of National Bandstand viewers at the dance contest? Will there be a section where players get to race Greased Lightning? These are essential questions that must be answered.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['The Interactive Palette' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Gregory Weir that examines the tools and techniques of the digital games trade with a focus on games as art, using a single game as an example. This time - a look at video game albums, with a album of three examples.]

Video games are most often compared to movies. They are usually long, monolithic works that tell a single cohesive story. Sometimes, however, a video game release will break this mold and present an experience that is not quite so unified. These games are less like movies and more like music albums, where a group of thematically related pieces are collected in one release.

Some video game albums are more like rock operas, where the pieces connect to form one story. Others are concept albums, where the games share a theme or mechanic but are separate entities. Still others have little connection beyond being released at the same time by the same group. In the spirit of the video game album, this column will discuss three different releases, one of each type: Odin Sphere, Kirby Super Star, and The Orange Box.

The Rock Opera

Odin Sphere, developed by Vanillaware for the PlayStation 2, is a rock opera. Each section of the game has its own main character, storyline, and special game mechanics, but the stories of the characters intertwine, and two final sections serve to complete the plot. The game is operatic in theme as well as structure; the story is an epic one, concerning godlike monarchs, dragons, valkyries, and the armageddon.

The developers of Odin Sphere chose to keep the component works very similar. Each character's story uses the same basic gameplay, the same graphical style, and the same setting. The only things that really differ are the characters' individual chronologies and a single special power that each character has.

Odin Sphere could have been made into a single, unified game. The developers could have organized the events in chronological order and had the viewpoint character shift, or chosen a single viewpoint character and made him or her more prominent in the storyline. By splitting the story into separate segments, the developers encourage identification with each character and highlight the multifaceted nature of the game's storyline.

The Concept Album

Kirby Super Star, developed by HAL Laboratory for the Super Nintendo system and later re-released in an expanded form for the Nintendo DS, is a concept album. It consists of nine games, all starring the character Kirby. Seven of the games use the standard Kirby platforming mechanic, while two of the games are simple mini-games that use the Kirby characters.

Super Star's platforming games all use the same basic engine and mechanics. Kirby can run, jump, and fly, as well as inhale enemies and gain their special abilities. However, the structure and goal of each game is different. "Spring Breeze" and "Dyna Blade" are the most basic: the player must get to the end of a series of levels and fight bosses along the way. "Revenge of Meta Knight" adds a more prominent plot and a time limit for each area. "The Great Cave Offensive" features a treasure-collecting goal, and "Milky Way Wishes" replaces the normal swallow-to-copy mechanic with a system that lets the player switch between any discovered abilities at will. "Gourmet Race" and "The Arena" are the least substantial of the games: one is a platform racing game and the other has the player battle the other games' bosses one after the other.

Super Star serves as an exploration of the potential of the Kirby formula. The variations in theme and gameplay between the component games serve to give each a different feel and focus. "The Great Cave Offensive" focuses on careful exploration, while "Revenge of Meta Knight" is fast-paced and dialogue-heavy. Each game would seem simple and short if released on its own, but combining them provides a varied experience that makes exhaustive use of the potential of the Kirby series.

The Disconnected Album

Valve's The Orange Box is a release for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 that includes three main games: Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. Each game is an independent entity, with different characters, settings, and gameplay styles. Their only similarity is that they use the Source engine. Still, in a way, the games are related; they represent the full range of play styles supported by the engine.

HL2:E2 is the quintessential single-player powerhouse title. It combines fast-paced, action-focused combat with exploration, physics puzzles, a dense story, and cinematic set pieces. TF2, on the other hand, is lightweight and comedic multiplayer, with cartoon-styled arenas for pick-up-and-play team battles. Portal completes the array with gameplay that is almost actionless. It provides a short experience full of puzzle-solving and dark humor.

On its own, HL2:E2 would face criticism for its lack of multiplayer, TF2 for its lack of single player, and Portal for its length. By combining them into a single title, The Orange Box, Valve creates a package that allows them to provide a carefully-crafted, specialized experience in each game and eliminates the need for a hybrid title that is mediocre at all things.

Why Not a Single?

So what are the advantages to this album approach? The first is variety. By giving players a range of experiences in one box, a title is more likely to appeal to more people for longer. Rather than playing one title for ten hours and getting bored, a player can play three titles for six hours each and be entertained the whole way through. Even if a player finds one of the games in the album uninteresting, she can move on to one of the other games and have a new experience.

Second, it is usually cheaper in terms of time and effort to make several games that share the same engine, art, and/or setting than it is to make the same number of games separately. The same amount of game can be made with fewer resources. Additionally, once the core codebase for the games is complete, the teams for each game can be split off from each other, which simplifies communication and lets large development teams avoid the problems that arise with the point of diminishing returns on team size.

Finally, the album allows an aesthetic statement to be presented. The titles within the album can represent segments of a larger story, offer variations on a theme, or simply compliment each other. One can truly have the best of both worlds if each world has its own game.

The titles mentioned here are not the only video game albums out there. Squaresoft's Live a Live and Cryptic Sea's upcoming No Quarter are obvious examples, but the definition could also include re-packagings like Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt or Super Mario All-Stars, as well as minigame collections like Wii Sports or the Wario Ware series.

The one-big-game-in-a-box approach is not the only way to make video games. Video game albums, anthologies, and short pieces all have their place in the art form. By using the album approach, developers can provide greater variety, save effort, and make a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.

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

Posted by Gregory Weir at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Namco announced a new alternative to pre-paid smart cards for arcades in Japan, the Namcoin, a proprietary pre-paid coin with a built-in IC chip. Gamers can charge the Namcoin with ¥1,000, ¥2,000 and ¥5,000 bills and use it with most machines in Namco's arcade locations, inserting them into Coin Selectors that also accept standard cash.

The Namcoin was developed as a joint project between Namco and smart card company Asahi Seiko. It's designed to be used for only one day, but arcade goers can have however much money is left on the coin returned to them as real cash.

Gaming news site Andriasang.com says that the Namcoin is "capable of operating not just at the standard ¥100 per play of most arcade games, but also down to the ¥10 level", enabling arcade operators to hold pricing promotions, such as offering discounts based off time and day.

Namco is currently testing the pre-paid coin at one its locations, planning to deploy them to additional arcades in Japan this fall. The company hasn't revealed yet whether it plans to bring the Namcoin to other markets. You can see a diagram (with Japanese text) for how the Namcoin will work below:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 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.]

Continuing the GameSetLinks fun and games, with another six links of death or so, starting out with, coincidentally, a link all about what happens if death in games really means death. And that's kinda scary, conceptually.

Also in here - the scarily expensive Nintendo World Championships gold NES cart, some very interesting group discussions about physics from the UK newspaper The Guardian, Jason Rohrer's Edge Online interview, the debut (finally!) of a commercial text adventure form Textfyre, and lots more.

A donut with no hole is a Danish:

SLRC - Suspiciously like Red Communism: Permanent Death, Episode 2: From Here to the Hearafter
Playing Far Cry 2 as if death is not a possibility.

Video Game Price Charts: 'How I Got Nintendo World Championships Gold'
One of the holy grails of video game collecting: 'I gave him an offer of $17,500, which was quite a bit lower than his asking price of $25,000.'

Published! – Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter « The Textfyre Times
One of the first commercial text adventures in a long time (aimed at the youth market) is finally out.

The truth about game physics, part five: conclusion | Technology | guardian.co.uk
A fun series, though some respondents clearly have ad agendas - here's the other parts

Can You Make a Board Game About the Holocaust?: Meet "Train" - Speakeasy - WSJ
Spoils the secret behind Brenda Braithwaite's thought-provoking board game - some commenters not impressed. Haven't played it, but I find the concept oddly prankish, interestingly provoking.

Interview: Jason Rohrer | Edge Online
Interesting interview - addresses the alleged backlash over him signing with a creative agency too.

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

Accessing Twitter with a Commodore 64 was impressive, but Dan Nichols has managed to hook up an even more unlikely system with limited capabilities to the social networking/micro-blogging service -- the Meggy Jr.

To display Twitter, the 8x8 RGB LED handheld is hooked up to a computer running a "Processing application" via a USB-TTL cable. The display then scrolls through the five more recent tweets from people you're following. According to Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories's (the company behind the Meggy Jr.) Windell Oskay, who posted the above video, "The camera fails to capture how smooth the animation looks."

While this MeggyTwit application is a neat idea, the setup limits the Meggy Jr.'s portability, and the scrolling tweets lose their novelty before the first user's name finishes running across the screen. Next Twitter/console project I hope to see: displaying tweets on a Thumb Stadium.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[In this opinion piece, originally published in Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine, EIC Brandon Sheffield takes on a common industry ailment, and reminds game developers to take the time to sit down and play some video games now and then.]

In a previous column published in Game Developer magazine, I mentioned that it would be beneficial for developers to look outside games for inspiration. This is something I believe strongly, but on top of that, how many of you out there actually have the time to even play games, let alone consume other media?

It seems that nine times out of ten, when I ask a working developer what games he’s played recently, he’ll honestly admit he doesn’t have the time to play any games but his own.

Those who say they have played contemporary titles, if pressed, often admit only a cursory familiarity with the recent games they’ve tried. Some actually seem to be proud of the fact they don't actively play games but their own. This is a worldwide phenomenon, and not a particularly awesome one.

The Exception That Proves The Rule

I recently heard a story from a friend who used to be a producer on the publishing side. He played a lot of games on his own time, and talked about it vocally with others in the office, as watercooler discussion.

Over time, he became known as a guy who plays a lot of new releases -- even by his higher ups. His bosses would start to come around, asking for opinions on competing titles, and he’d be able to give solid answers.

As a result of being known as the guy who knows about games, he got promoted to an executive-level position dealing with third parties.

This guy is competent and intelligent, so those traits are contributing factors to his rise as well, but even to hear him tell it, his being a developer who actually played contemporary games was so unique and valuable that it warranted a promotion.

Knowing Me, Knowing You, A-ha

Games are, like most entertainment media, very strongly influenced by past successes. If you make an FPS, you’re not just referencing the Call of Duty series, you’re riding on the shoulders of Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and even Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin for the Intellivision.

No product exists in a vacuum, and in this world of iterative improvements, those games which are made with an awareness of the past are less likely to repeat mistakes, and more likely to push forward.

I’ve heard some folks say they don’t want to be accused of being influenced by other games, but theoretically if your design is solid and well-implemented, it should stand on its own. And as I mentioned, what game isn’t influenced by a host of others?

Leads at the very least should be paying attention to the work going on in other studios, or should be playing those studios’ games. After all, what director doesn’t watch movies, and what novelist doesn’t read books? Certainly only the outliers.

The Usual Caveat

Time is every game developer’s nemesis. A 60-hour work week is not unusual, and if you’ve got a family, how can you justify playing games at home (other than perhaps with your child or spouse)?

There is a lot of institutional pressure keeping developers from playing competing products, and some of them may not be solvable in the short term. If people could stop working 60 hour weeks, they would.

In the film industry, the whole team works ridiculous hours for the duration of the project, but they are compensated well enough that they can actually take a bit of a break in between projects.

A potential solution might be to have mandatory scheduled playtime for leads and key creatives during work hours. Of course, when the pedal’s to the metal, that looks like an attractive cut, but building it into company culture would likely be beneficial.

I personally have been trying out the first hour of any game I get, rather than filing it away for the day when I’ll “really have time to sit down with it.” You can glean a lot from that first hour, and if it’s engaging, you might go for another.

Reading reviews and gathering popular opinion on a title just isn’t enough. No judgment is more sound than our own, yes? In some cases it may be impossible to work games into your life more than they already are—but it seems like something worth doing.

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

Artist Sosima (Vertico's Puppets) illustrated this origami-like re-interpretation of Atari's arcade classic Crystal Castles as a commission for an upcoming publication from Über Books, which will presumably feature many other re-imagined video games.

Other talented artists slated to contibute to the book include Jon Burgerman, Drew Europeo, Stuntkid, Buff Monster, Kid Gaucho, Angry Woebots, Kanardo, TV Boy and Lysergid.

The full Crystal Castles piece is below, but you can see more of Sosima's artwork on her Vertico's Puppets MySpace page.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chop Shop, the only online shirt store I know of with a theme song provided by They Might Be Giants, has a new WeScare series of shirts featuring popular monsters from movies, television shows, comic books, video games, and more.

This first tee features silhouettes for Pikachu, Q*bert, a Fygar from Dig Dug, Lizzie, and several others. Its available in a variety of colors for both Men and Women.

The store also has similar silhouette-filled shirts for popular robots and aliens, and though they might not include as many video game sprites as this first WeScare tee, they have glow-in-the-dark versions!

Posted by Eric Caoili at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[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 in chief Danny Cowan and authors Louise Yang and Jonathan Glover.]

This week, FingerGaming highlights notable titles like Mass Effect Galaxy and Annie's Wild Shot, and details the upcoming release of Touch KO and Timeloop.

- New and Notable Free App Releases
"This week's free releases include demo editions of Eliss and Castle of Magic, along with free full versions of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Bent It!"

- EA's Mass Effect Galaxy Hits App Store
"Galaxy's gameplay is a familiar mix of action and narrative, modified to fit the iPhone's capabilities. Players will take on enemies from an overhead perspective, choosing targets and firing via a touch-based interface. Dialog sequences feature a new narrative wheel mechanic."

- Connect2Media Announces Summer iPhone Release Lineup
"The company plans to release four more titles in the iTunes App Store in the coming months, including Timeloop, Tumblebugs, String 'Em In, and 365 Sudoku.

- Top Free Game App Downloads for the Week
"After becoming free to play last week, OOO Gameprom's Wild West Pinball finishes as today's top free App Store download. The App Store's previous chart leader Paper Toss drops to second place, as Target Practice rises up to take third."

- Tecmo Releases Wild West Shooter Annie's Wild Shot
"While Tecmo's previous iPhone games were safe bets, it seemed likely that Tecmo would soon devote its efforts to creating a more ambitious title for Apple's platform. Today, Tecmo releases its first original, non-blackjack game for the iPhone -- the arcade-style shooter Annie's Wild Shot."

- Interview: Diorama Developer Finn Ericson
"Developer Dromsynt's Marble Madness riff is as enjoyable to marvel at as it is to play – and it's a lot of fun to play. FingerGaming briefly chatted to developer Finn Ericson about the game's development, and managed to wrangle some new details about what he calls Diorama '2.0'."

- Flick Fishing Hits One Million Downloads; Freeverse Details In-App Purchasing Success
"iPhone publisher Freeverse announced that its popular accelerometer-controlled fishing sim Flick Fishing has become the first paid application in the iTunes App Store to surpass the one million download mark. Nearly ten percent of Flick Fishing owners have used the iPhone OS 3.0's In-App Purchasing functionality to purchase additional game content."

- Chillingo Reveals Touch KO, Vampire Origins
"App Store publisher Chillingo has released details and screenshots for two of its upcoming iPhone titles -- the boxing simulator Touch KO and the third-person action game Vampire Origins."

- Top-Selling Paid Game Apps for the Week
"Gameloft's weekend-long price drop for Let's Golf! appears to have been a success, as the title finishes just behind reigning chart champion Sally's Spa in this week's App Store sales figures."

- 22Moo Reveals GameBone Pro iPhone Controller Peripheral
"Little has been said about the iPhone OS 3.0's support for third-party gaming accessories, as no such peripheral had yet been announced at the time of the firmware's release. Today, Australian iPhone accessory manufacturer 22Moo revealed one of the first controllers to take advantage of the iPhone's new functionality -- the GameBone Pro."

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Organizers for Mini Ludum Dare, a monthly version of the tri-annual Ludum Dare competition challenging developers to create a game around a particular theme in 48 hours, held its tenth event last weekend, and the entries are now uploaded and online for everyone to try out for free. Mini Ludum 10's theme: domestic violence.

As depressing as that theme sounds, Noonat managed to produce a fun platformer with Queens, though he admits that he did work on it a bit longer than the allotted time. The game has you controlling a series of queens through a dungeon filled with traps (perhaps a dungeon built specifically by the Henry VIII-esque king for the easy disposal of his wives?).

Having to restart the game each time after you die can get annoying, but it's a really short experience, and once you've trained your finger when to hit X, you should be able to run through Queens in less than two minutes.

As with every other game I've seen built with Adam "Atomic" Saltsman's Flixel engine, Queens' minimal graphics are charming and efficient. You can see a bit of it in this video I recorded (this was before I figured out how to get through that dangerous hall!).

Terry Cavanagh's (Don't Look Back) entry, The Best Years of my Life (pictured), is also a short platformer but more dispiriting and requiring two players. Both players sit at one keyboard, guiding a bickering couple as they clean their house.

Mighty Jill Off developer Anna "Auntie Pixelante" Anthropy astutely notes, "The players’ roles are equal at the outset of the game but become increasingly asymmetrical as the game goes on. In Terry’s game, the controls represent control, and how it shifts in an abusive relationship."

You can see and play the other Mini Ludum Dare 10 entries, which include titles like Domestic Abuse: The Fighting Game! and March of the Zombies at the Ludum Dare blog.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Another illuminating interview from Game Developer magazine EIC Brandon Sheffield's recent trip to Finland, he talks to veteran studio Housemarque about the challenges -- and rewards -- of surviving as an indie in today's game market.]

Housemarque is the most venerable of Finnish game developers, having been around in some form or another since the 80s, and the era of the Commodore 64. The company was formed by a meeting of two Finnish developers, Bloodhouse, known for the Amiga shooting game Stardust, and Terramarque, which made a fighting game called Elf Mania among other titles.

The two merged to form Housemarque, which has gone on to do a wide range of work, from mobile games on the N-Gage and Gizmondo, to Xbox snowboarding games, to a downloadable golf title, and even a casual online world. Housemarque faltered for a few years.

It tried to establish itself as a PS2 developer, but created a demo that was too large to pitch in 2003, and indeed, worked with the Gizmondo and N-Gage platforms, which clearly never took off. Then, perhaps most famously, the company created Super Stardust HD on the PlayStation Network, and found itself back in the positive popular view.

As a company, Housemarque is currently working on two orginal IPs with publishers, and a third game to be self-published, called Rope, which Gamasutra covered in an earlier story.

In this interview, we talked to CEO Ilari Kuittinen about the company's Maya-based pipeline, in which they use the art suite as a game editor, as well as Housemarque's lack of producers, and the new push toward self-publishing.

Origins

Can you explain a little bit about your origins even before coming into games? It seems like a lot of people came from kind of demo scene areas.

Ilari Kuittinen: Yeah. My guess is I'm a bit different in a sense that I've always been on the business side of things. I had a friend, one of two friends, one of two guys who used to be doing Commodore 64 games in Finland. Back in the 80s, I happened to be a friend with this guy. So, there were two guys in Finland who got internationally published Commodore 64 games.

And then fast forward some six, seven, eight years, to the early 90s, he asked me to help him found a company which was called Terramarque, to help him out and do managing stuff and things like that. So at the time, I was a student of general history at the University of Tampere.

So, we had that thing going for a couple years, and then we found that, you know, we should combine some forces with a fellow Finnish company. It was called Bloodhouse and we found it 14 years ago. We combined, and come to this company now, which is known as Housemarque.

So, I'm here basically because I just happened to know somebody when I was a kid, and I ended up helping him, and I ended up being in this business, and in the process dropped out of university. But I haven't regretted it. I've had a ball, some interesting times with this job.

It seems like Housemarque has really tried to almost every game tackle a new genre.

IK: No, not really. [laughs] There are too many genres. But yeah, we've been doing quite a lot of different things. Our first game was a traditional shoot'em up game, Super Stardust on PC. But we at that point were doing point and click adventure as, well.

So, we did that inspired by... There were huge LucasArts fans inside the company, so they wanted to do that, and we did that. Then we got into doing another shoot'em up game, and then we went into extreme sports. We've had a lot of different ideas, but I think the most common nominator for all these games are that they are more action-oriented than strategy or RPG or things like that.

We haven't actually touched any strategy games or RPG games. We're mostly concentrating on the action side of things, although now we are doing a 2D physics puzzler so to speak, so I guess we're breaking our rules.

Going from snowboarding to golf to shooting to puzzle is kind of unusual for such a small company. And the casual social environment that you created.

IK: Yeah, I guess, you know, I wanted to do different things. And I guess it's all about opportunities as well as what you can do and what you're allowed to do.

You know, I presented to you our PlayStation 2 stuff that was never published. We never got the deal. That was action, a third-person action adventure game. So, I'm hoping to do something like that at least in the future, but let's see whether we get a chance to do that.

Were publishers usually commissioning a certain thing for you, or when you were doing these different kind of genres, were you pitching? The golf game with Activision, for instance

IK: We just pitched that to them. We had a green light, and we had a demo. There were two alternatives -- try to find some funding to do it on our own or have a publisher, and this ended up being a publisher-funded game.

I find it interesting because in companies that are not that big, usually they wind up trying to establish themselves in a single genre, but you guys have seemed like, "Well, what should we do this time?".

IK: Well, you know, that's not entirely true in a sense, but I guess it's about opportunities. What happened with us seven years ago is we were doing an Xbox snowboarding title. That was our second snowboarding that we had had done. We had done a PC snowboarding title three years earlier.

When we were pitching new ideas that were not actually sports or anything, people still viewed us as an extreme sports developer, even though we had a rich history of doing all kinds of stuff.

I guess because of that, we have had so many different things now since then that we tried to make happen. And now we are in a lucky position in a sense that we have sold two new original ideas to publishers. They are action-oriented games, but they are not particularly... They may involve some shooting elements or things like that, but the subject mater and the thematics are quite a lot different than what we've done in the past.

I think that what is common with those is that it should be quite tightly controllable action games. One of the expertises that I feel we have is to find out some sort of time, cadence, or timbre for the game that will get you into the flow of the game. So, that applies with snowboarding, how to design those things, or shoot'em up, or you know, some of the stuff we're doing right now.

What did you learn from that unreleased Trader demo for PS2? It seemed almost too complex for publishers to understand that it was just a concept. Was it a little misleading?

IK: I agree that we made it too long a demo. That we kind of learned, that we were trying to make a, you know, almost 10 minute long demo to go through. I guess part of the reason for doing that was that we were also back in the times of 2003 and 2004 doing that, we were viewed as capable of doing Xbox titles only.

So, we felt like we needed to prove that we could do the best possible PlayStation 2 technology as well, so that took a lot of time. I guess that was also sort of a mistake that we invested so much time in doing that. On the other hand, I don't know whether we would be here if we wouldn't have done some investments in technology back then, some of which we are still using anyway.

The direction we took with our production pipeline and switching from our own editor and using 3ds Max to using Maya and putting all the stuff on top of the Maya. In fact, Maya is our game editor right now.

The Maya Pipeline

Yeah, you mentioned that. It seems like... Certain studios have actually done that, but obviously it's not the most robust kind of editor. It can't really be used as a proper... You know, it's not an engine.

IK: It is not an engine, but the thing is that you can program it to do your own plug-ins, so different games from our golf game to Super Stardust are made with that. And two other games are going to be made with that. Rope uses some old editor stuff as well, but I think still we have proven ourselves.

We have done several other kinds of projects with the same approach, so it proves to us at least, that you can very impressive stuff with that, and it's really flexible. And if you miss something, you can add some more flags for instance, or these things that you can manipulate that environment. You can get a lot of data out, and you can use that in a game.

What other kind of benefits do you see for using Maya versus like creating your own full editor or using an off the shelf engine or something like that.

IK: I guess the main reason why we switched over to this Maya-based production line is that it felt like updating the editor was that big a task to do. We're not a big team, you know, 20 people strong here. On the other hand, Maya seems to be the kind of editor that is developing all the time. They have, I don't know, how many dozens or hundreds of developers updating that.

And also, to side-track myself for a moment, it's been used by the movie industry as well. At the time when we made the switch five years ago, it seemed that way, that you needed to have some sort of movie license attached with your project in order to make it happen.

So, we did our share of calling Hollywood studios and IP owners of some of the coolest movies we know that might do well. I think that was one part of it. Still, if you use an off the shelf engine, you will do quite a lot of work as well to adapt that to your system. We had a long history of doing sort of libraries, technologies, and engines, so it was felt that this was the best way to do it.

I assume there's also a cost issue because Maya is only a few thousand dollars versus an engine, which is several hundred thousand or so.

Ilari Kuittinen: Yeah, that's true. Of course, we have guys working on new technologies and tools and upgrading what we've got, so it's certainly a decision to the four guys all the time who update our tools.

As a studio that's 20 something people, how is it that you are making three games simultaneously?

IK: Well, the third one is quite a small one.

Rope, you mean?

IK: Yeah. It only takes one to three guys at any time to move forward. So, it's kind of a project that is going more slowly than the publisher products. So, then we have six to eight people per project, plus we are using some outsourcing to help us do the content. So, I guess that's how we can do it.

Even with that, two projects with 20 people is quite a lot.

IK: It is quite a lot, but I guess it is manageable because we do have years and years of accumulated technology and tools. On those, we have spent I don't know how many hours, and we have proven that they are working, and they are working very well. We can do state of the art stuff there.

So, I guess that's the main reason we don't have to concentrate on technology that much. Of course, we improve it. We might have some specific needs. What we view as the R&D track of development is always a bit separated... It of course benefits all the projects that are happening, and we are prioritizing our task based on the acute needs we have. But somehow, it seems to be working.

Working in Finland

And in the case of R&D, are you able to get funding help from (Finnish government organization) TEKES?

IK: Yeah, yeah. This is basically the, I don't know, not really the only, but one of the very few places you can have funding for a game development company like us. So, we have this national technological agency. It has been operating for 20, 25 years. I think they have been really helpful when it comes to the games industry.

It also helps of course to have subsidies to make something happen. You can plan those things on a much larger scale. Like we have been able to do much larger scare technology, at some point even overkill technology to take into account some of our future needs. Otherwise, without that funding, we wouldn't have been able to do that.

More generally, what do you see as kind of the strengths of game development in Finland and also like the weaknesses of it?

IK: I think we have very different kind of businesses here in Finland. I guess that's a bit of a strength here. We have console game companies, we have people concentrating on the digital side of it like us. But we (in Finland) also have online things going on. Some of them have already made some big success, some are up and coming. Then we have the mobile sector. So, there are many different things we do here. I think the general...

For some reason, I don't know what it is, Finns are pretty good at -- or you would say excellent -- with technology for some reason. I think we were one of the first to adapt and to use telephones for instance, like 19th century here in Helsinki. Somehow people started to have telephones for instance, or to use electricity in the city areas of Finland.

I think it might have something to do with our environment, that we need to have tools in order to survive our diverse environment or conditions, from spring to summer to autumn to winter. We need to have different kinds of tools in order to make our living and lives a bit better. That might be something to do with it.

There are some overall structural things. We are a quite well developed country. We have a good educational system in general, even though the gaming side isn't catered to yet. But there's an understanding that education is important, and that's why I guess we have this sector.

Our parents used to buy us computers because they knew that this should be the future, and that's how we got that generation of people who got into demoscene, play with the computers, and use all the dark nights of wintertime to do that. It wasn't warm outside so that you could go surfing or snowboarding. It was snowy and dark, and you wouldn't really want to go out at the time. You'd be eaten by the wolves. [laughs]

It's funny, it kind of creates a nation of indoor kids.

Ilari Kuittinen: Yeah, that's true. On the other hand, at one point, I don't know how it is at the moment... There was, I don't know, out of the top 100 snowboarders in the world, I think 30, 40 were out of Finland. And that's really funny that a really huge portion of that was training on a very small hill. It has been documented.

There's a really small, small hill there, and there was a group gathering... It's a bit the same with demo groups. You have a group of people and they gather some expertise and it spreads around. It started to be a sort of culture that you want to get into. You see all the guys doing these wonderful tricks, and you as a kid try to do that afterwards. I think it's the same thing with every expertise-based subculture. It's like I saw the documentary of how skateboarding was done.

What would you say are the difficult points of development in Finland.

IK: I think the main difficulty has been finding venture funding for our games. I think it has been better for these newer opportunities like mobile gaming companies or online gaming companies. But for more traditional companies, it has been a bit hard. The culture of investing in new companies is really new. It hasn't been around here for more than 15 years.

There hasn't been that many, you know, software entrepreneurs, for instance, who would be investing in second round, you know, second generation or third generation companies. All these entrepreneur things here in Finland related to software or related to knowledge space are pretty young. It's a new thing. So, I guess that's why it hasn't grown... You know, the game industry hasn't grown as fast as it might have grown, but it has grown considerably since 15 years.

I think one of the other challenges is to find good people. And I mentioned that there's not that much education support specifically tailored for games or game development. I think that's our biggest challenge, being a factor that has slowed our growth as an industry here already a few years, these past few years. So, that's now the challenge.

I've noticed some companies like Recoil hire people from outside Finland sometimes. If they need to, you know, expand in a certain area, they may have to look outside of the borders.

IK: Yeah. We hired our first foreigner here earlier this year, so it's slowly happening with us as well. [laughs]

Becoming a Boutique Publisher

In terms of moving into trying to become a boutique publisher, does that add any management overhead? Does it change the way that you have to do anything? Or has the way that the game industry has changed, has that meant that you don't actually need to change because if you can distribute it yourself, there's maybe not that much that you have to alter?

IK: I'm sure there's going to be changes for sure for us as well. We need to take care of the marketing and PR and meet journalists more, which we don't do because typically we've worked on publisher-funded and externally-promoted projects.

Actually, we haven't been able to do any PR because there's always this marketing department, and you need to go through them, and all our contracts are forbidding us from being directly in contact with journalists. So, that's definitely going to change. Of course, that's quite a lot of work for management.

I think that there should be in the future more people taking care of these publishing aspects of things, that's for sure. But on the other hand, you know, it's all about how many channels you really want to cover. The more you want to cover, the more you might need to have things like producers here, which is a title that we don't really use at the moment here.

There is no producer guy in that sense at Housemarque at the moment. Because we are smaller, people are using quite a few different hats. So a game designer might be helping with business development and the business meetings, for instance.

Interesting.

IK: So, it gives us a... I think it has depth. Me telling all the details of game design of a certain game, I wouldn't be able to do that probably. So, it's helpful to have a game designer that pitches the product, for instance.

Do you see the future of your company being split between self-publishing and developing sort of for other publishers? Or do you hope to go entirely to self-publishing?

As far as short-term or mid-term, I think we would continue doing both. So, doing some titles for publishers, and on the other hand trying to get our own games out there and hopefully grow a bit more so we can do those ideas we have been taking years and years, and find out the new ones. I guess it's both ways right now, it feels like that.

Of course, it might be in the future restricted into doing only first-party or things like that, but what we have been pretty much doing is to do only games that are based on our own ideas, so we haven't had been doing that much contract work or doing like renewing some old IP into a new game. We haven't been doing that, and we haven't been pitching toward that area that much.

Are you planning to do any kind of larger scale stuff as well?

IK: Yeah, well I think we're going to see that these games are getting bigger and bigger all the time, so I think we hope to grow with that process. For instance, budgets for our current games are twice as much as they were for the first batch of games we did for publishers. So, there's some growing there in that those games are getting publishers.

I think that in that sense, we are going to be doing some bigger games that are taking a bit longer in time or taking a bit more resources. We haven't really decided whether we'll go back to pitch retail games or $10 million plus products yet. I think it's a different kind of ball game that we kind of had a hard time doing at one point.

And it takes quite a lot of effort to even do the pitch document. With that money, we might even be able to get some games out of the door of our own, instead of just investing in pitch materials.

Do you think that it's even important to make those kind of triple AAA games because it seems like the market for those... The risk is much higher anyway.

IK: Yeah, I think the risk and reward ratio is totally different with these games. I would say that... Let's say Sony says, "Hey, here's a lot of money, and we would like you to do this and that, and you had that whole idea, whatever, Trader. Let's do that." I don't think we could say no. But we've been enjoying doing these smaller scale games anyway.

So, it might be that we end up being in this space as one of the leading publishers [laughs], boutique publishers at least, doing these things, and trying new things when we have the freedom to that. It might be that we don’t feel the pressure at all to make any sort of bigger multimillion, ten million budget plus games.

It's been an interesting ride so far. I just see that there's a... We are at the right spot at the right time now. Previously, we started some of the initiatives a bit early. We started our internet game back in 95, late 95, early 96. So, I would say 8, 10 years too early. We spun off a mobile gaming company late 99.

So, again, I feel that now, ten years later, it would be time to get into that. Like, iPhone is the first viable platform really. So, I think this downloadable thing, I think we're quite early on.

Yeah, but not too early this time.

Ilari Kuittinen: Not too early. Not too early. Not five years or ten years too early. It seems to be there's business already available, and the business model is pretty understandable.

As people get used to it, I think it will get better and bigger. It seems like all the people are not used to buying games like that yet, but I'm sure that it's going to be the majority of gamers who are going to get some of their games at least through that.

But I think that having Stardust HD out so early was probably really helpful.

IK: Yes, certainly.

And, you know, people are still buying it to some degree. A lot of games that came out that had the dual thumbstick control right after Geometry Wars, everybody wanted to do it. But yours is a little different but also based on an IP that existed already.

Ilari Kuittinen: Yeah, in a sense, it was funny. We actually didn't even think that it would be called Super Stardust.

Ah, really?

IK: No, it was pitched as such, but, you know... Somehow, Sony wanted to have that. We were like, "Okay, we don't mind." It was interesting. Actually, when we looked back, we were a bit lucky as well. Well, you create some of your own luck, I suppose. You create some of the opportunities.

But afterwards, when we found out how many dual stick games were coming into the market, we were a bit confused later on that, how on earth they decided to get another dual stick shooter. But I guess they haven't regretted that at all.

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

In anticipation of Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box's release this August, Nintendo of America has setup of a Twitter account for the top hat wearing sleuth, dispensing bite-sized riddles for followers to solve. It's a cute idea, and it almost makes up for the long delay since Diabolical Box's Japan release nearly two years ago.

The professor is quick to admit the silliness of the affair, though. "Frankly... I'm ashamed," he discloses in his first tweet. "I have made myself a Twitter page and officially joined the world of technology. Perhaps Luke may help me update."

[Via GoNintendo]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 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.]

Phew, and Tuesday is upon us, and some more GameSetLinks, including GSW co-editor's site TinyCartridge continuing to document the chances of Retro Challenge 2 coming to the States -- shame that DSiWare can't take big games like this easily. (Or can it?)

Also in here: XKCD, a documentary featuring Chris Crawford and Jason Rohrer, a new TIGSource competition of interesting provenance (see the post title!), iPhone game sales, the top architecture used in games, and lots more.

The foals:

XSEED: Retro Game Challenge needs to sell at least 20,000 more copies [before it will consider localizing the acclaimed title’s sequel, Game Center CX 2] - Tiny Cartridge
'The publisher’s president Jun Iwasaki says that still isn’t enough, though, predicting XSEED needs to see a total of 100,000 units sold.' That's a fairly high number, from what I know about niche-ish DS release.

xkcd - A Webcomic - Game Theory
The slightly precocious webcomic gets game-related from time to time - like this!

YouTube - INTO THE NIGHT WITH CHRIS CRAWFORD & JASON ROHRER
The first 5 minutes of a documentary filmed at GDC this year with indie creator Rohrer, seminal CGDC founder/Balance Of Power creator Crawford - really amazing to see such high-quality cultural programming targeting games.

TIGSource: Adult/Educational Compo
V. interesting new indie game competition on TIGSource: 'The fact is that most game designers shy away from sex and education. They're difficult topics to sell directly in mainstream entertainment. But why not sex and education in games?'

Wolfire Blog - Black Shades iPhone Breaks 1000
Nice stats, also references my GDC slides... I wonder if I was too harsh on what the average iPhone game sells (I don't _think_ so, Wolfire has a fan base already.)

Top 10: The architecture of computer games (part I) | News | Architects Journal
This is very silly, and as such, I heartily approve.

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

Before there was the Soulja Boy Dance, the Stanky Leg, or even the Crazy Frog Bros., there was this three-year old tearing the club up at one of Nintendo's early 90s Powerfest events. The festival apparently promoted Mario-themed fruit snacks by providing a small set where attendees could make their own music video.

The kids would dance along to a hip-hop song about the fruit snacks, as the rapper name dropped popular first-party characters like Zelda and Shyguys. Afterwards, the children would receive a free VHS tape of their performance.

Those of you who feel rap music has lost its way, that it's obsessed with violence, material wealth, and misogyny, will be happy to hear that this song has a positive, hopeful message buried in its shilling for artificially colored junk food. "Listen to the words I say. There's going to be a brighter day," the young rapper promises.

Thanks to the wonders and ease of video uploading/sharing, there are actually several of these performances online. You can watch a couple more below:

[Via @rdb_aaa]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Lingua Franca' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Daniel Johnson which discusses the relationship between language, culture and video games. This time he sets a charter in search of the mystical gamer dialect.]

A few weeks ago, just after my last column, the Global Language Monitor, a company specialized in tracking new English words, declared “Web 2.0” as the millionth word in the English language. “Web 2.0” was running in competition alongside other contemporary words such as “slumdog”, “Jai Ho!” and “n00b”.

Scrutinizing these words as to whether or not they're legitimate enough to be christened as ummm....words, is about as silly as it sounds. If I say a word and you understand my meaning that should be enough to qualify it as a word. At least they're the rules I play by.

What this company does is track the use of new words in the media, and once the usage reaches a certain frequency, the word is popular enough to be officially welcomed into the English language. If there's anything we can take away from this headline grabber, it should be the mass acceptance of the gaming term “noob”.

As a group of people who share a common fondness to video games, our commonality creates what one might call a subculture. There are ways in which we interpret and react within this world that is heavily influenced by our role as a member of the video game playing populace. This influence, of course, varies depending on the games we play and the way we interact with others within this community, if at all.

Connecting all of these pieces together is a language. As gamers, when we engage with each other, we speak a dialect of our own which cushions our discourse. This language encodes all of those elements related to our relationship with games. The same applies for when two lawyers meet to partake in lawyer-talk – they have their language, just like we have ours.

With the word “n00b” now recognized as part of the world's lexicon (or at least in the same league as “Web 2.0”) it's worth mapping out the rest of the linguistic structure of this subculture of ours for all those media types who want learn more about our foreign gamer talk. This one's for you, Global Language Monitor!

General Knowledge Language

General knowledge of video game culture demands acquisition of the language which embodies the constituents of our subculture (ie. the language is part of the knowledge), otherwise we couldn't talk about it, right? This works on several levels. The first is related to terminology in regards to general game design and development.

In the same sense that film buffs have a familiar glossary of words such as screenplay, cast and cinematography, video game players too have their base vocabulary including words such as gameplay, game mechanics, cutscenes and 8-bit. For us to be able to talk about games and the way they operate, generally, we need to first have a sense of this language.

The second level corresponds with language encoded information integral to understanding the industry itself, because all gamers need to acquire know some know-how on the industry. Famous developers such as Shigeru Miyamoto and Will Wright, and events like E3 and GDC are good examples.

These people and events are significant elements to the establishment of our culture. Without the developers we would have no products, no culture and no language, so it's only fair game that the language acknowledges this. Furthermore the communal gatherings for members of our culture also exists as part of our vocabulary. Our culture is centralized around products and industry is therefore an essential element of gamer talk.

The final level of generally knowledge encoded into our dialect consists of language which makes up the popular culture side of games culture. The language here encapsulates times, phases and eras of our past, present and foreseen future. Terms like fatality or “Shoryuken!!” are reminiscent of the arcade fighting scene during the early 90s, “All your base belong to us” highlights the usually rocky translation that video games receive during the localization process. In more modern times, Wii60 at least partly represents the idea that a consumer could purchase both an Xbox 360 and Wii for the same price as a Playstation 3.

Complete familiarity with this base is not necessary to understand video games and its surrounding cultural sphere, but the language here constitutes what one might call a wide base of gamer knowledge. Acquiring some of this language is essential for conversing with enthusiast players as well as understanding websites and blogs like GameSetWatch.

It's an invisible barrier to entry that will likely disappear in the same way that my examples of specialized film language aren't so specialized anymore. Everyone is familiar with such terms and as video game markets continue to broaden, this component of our language will too become a normalized part of wider society.

Specialized Language (Terminology)

Strip it all down and video games are fundamentally a series of rules with attached terminology. It's no surprise then that the largest chunk of language within the gamer dialect is that aforementioned terminology. If we're to break this down further we see that this terminology operates of three separate tiers.

-Basic Terminology
-Genre Terminology
-Game Terminology

You might notice some overlap with the previously discussed “General Knowledge Language” and “Basic Terminology” since part of players' basic understanding of games requires some knowledge of terminology. That is, pieces of language which ground concepts such as lives, health points and game overs, for instance, all come before anything else.

Genre Terminology

Genre Terminology is rather self-explanatory. It refers to the language required to participate in a certain genre of game. Due to the constant merging and blurring of genres, such language isn't always exclusive to a single genre, and may instead be mutually transferable across many (ie. frag ).

This language is obviously more in depth since it covers the finer complexities of a more focused area of games. As such, language under this heading references play styles (camping, rushing), mantras used in in-game dialogue (Leeroy Jenkins) as well as the expected terminology (HP, MP), among other things.

Game Terminology

Game Terminology is therefore the language related to the functions and happenings in one particular game. The range of vocabulary per game depends on the depth, popularity and lore of the title. Legendary fighting systems as those in Street Fighter or King of Fighters command a healthy language system due to the depth in play mechanics and variation which yield names for fighting styles, mechanical functions, AI patterns...almost everything related to the mechanical backend.

The Zelda series has a magnificent lore which encompasses many races, characters, locales, phrases – all of which exist in language. Popularity is also a catalyst for language development usually governed by fan communities. For example the way Metal Gear Solid community embraces words such as meme into their community lexicon.

Competitive Language

Gamers truly love to sledge. Having evolved from an original arcade model supporting competition over co-operation it's no wonder we love to fling derogatory terms at each other in the spirit of competition. This property of games culture has created an artillery of language. The most popular word in our lexicon --as by Global Language Monitor!-- “n00b" is the epitome at the centre of all this.

Expressions such as “n00b” and other popular gamer words are often partnered with 133t speak orthography to compose a jumble of language purely spoken in a non-standard tongue. This linguistic flavour is often seen as the more popularized form of video game dialect by the media. As you can see though the article, my personal interpretation covers a much wider arc. This segment of the overall dialect, in contrast to the terminology and general knowledge language is an elective piece of the complete make-up.

Convergence Language

The final piece of the puzzle is in fact completely peripheral from the dialect itself, but plugs back into the language in a significant way, nonetheless. Due the immense variety of situational themes video games can immerse the player in, familiarity with external specialized terminology often becomes heavily integrated into the game itself.

Think of the way Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare familiarizes the player with the language of the battlefield. Or how a Gran Turismo achieves the same with mechanical, driving and enthusiast car language. Even my previous example of lawyer language is applicable in games such as Capcom's Phoenix Wright series. The outreach here is endless.

It isn't just within the games themselves where external language forms mesh with the gamer dialect. Video games are digital after all, there's that “video” part, which brings along with it a technical database of language about resolutions, hard drives and the like, without the familiarity of these terms we'd never be able to run games on our TVs and monitors.

Video games are also a culmination of other media, the complete package, so when players do discuss games they actually also discuss music, art and film as well. The specialized vocabulary of these respective fields not only comes into play as well but so does the language which represents the hybridized media and game elements. “Cut scene” for example makes little sense to film makers but is the most critical part of development for any video producer working on a game.

Lastly, as mentioned previously, 133t speak as well as Netspeak are a significant part of player discussion, namely on the web or in online games, so they feed back into the equation too.

Conclusion

Totaling each of the structural components together: General Knowledge Language, Specialized Language (Terminology), Competitive Language and Convergence Language, we have a rather solid foundation in which to further study the the language of our subculture.

This structural skeleton highlights a dialect that many of us have been –-and will always be-- learning for a large part of our lives. Furthermore, within this structure are various specialized subsets which are themselves surprisingly fleshed out. World of Warcraft is an obvious example. Such examples are still evolving much as with the core dialect and will no doubt make for interesting investigation down the track.

[Daniel Johnson spends too many late nights conversing Mandarin to friends in Shanghai. He studies language and culture, and shares most of his video game musings on his blog at danielprimed.com]

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

Similar to Gamasutra's feature article with Keita Takahashi last month, which featured delightful marker art from the Katamari Damacy creator, gaming fansite N-Sider's recent interview with Little King's Story's director and producer Yoshiro Kimura offers a peek into the his sketchbook, or as the Lovedelic vet calls it, his "Zone Notes."

The piece includes two photos from the dozens of detailed sketches of other games Kimura has headed or worked on, such as Chulip and Rule of Rose. In addition to sharing art of Little King's Story, the Wii-exclusive real-time strategy title releasing next week, the director showed off a drawing of what looked like Little Red Riding Hood antagonized by a scraggly wolf.

"This is the next game I want to make," Kimura said, though it's unclear if he's serious about tackling that project. Another sketch that he showed off but N-Sider didn'capture was "an almost gruesome image of a Ferris wheel with tiny stick-people being wildly thrown off of it to the bottom where others struggle to catch them."

You can see larger versions of the sketches and read the full interview, which has the Little King Story creator discussing how much he had to drink to come up with the title's concept and how he wants to make a "darker, underground type game", at N-Sider.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't think I know anyone who pines for the days of fighting games with digitized actors like the early Mortal Kombat titles and Pit Fighter, but independent developer Galloping Ghost believes there's an audience for that type of arcade experience, and is bringing back that style with Dark Presence.

Originally slated to release last year, this 2D fighter will feature eight playable characters with over 15,000 frames of animation per character (filmed in high definition and running in 1080p).

The studio says that it has implemented "unique finishing moves based on how the characters relate to each other", resulting in a total of 437 finishing moves. Not counting the finishing moves, Dark Presence has over 150,000 frames of animation.

Galloping Ghost spent almost two years on the greenscreening process alone, admitting it's "easy to see why other companies just go with 3D characters". The company plans to show video for the game soon and also tour arcades around the U.S. to show off Dark Presence once it's later this year.

You can see a couple of recently released screenshots from Dark Presence and a photo of its cabinet after the break, and find more information at Galloping Ghost's official site for the game.

[Via Arcade Heroes]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[Another announcement for September's GDC Austin, and a lot of the core MMO big guns are speaking at our colleagues' flagship online event, as you can see. Announcements on Indie, iPhone Games Summit @ GDC Austin line-ups (which I help run) are up v.soon!]

After debuting initial free-to-play online game lectures from Sony Online (Free Realms), Gaia Online and Rebel Monkey (CampFu), September's GDC Austin 2009 event has revealed subscription MMO-specific talks spanning Star Wars: The Old Republic, DC Universe Online, EVE Online, and more.

The first set of lectures announced for GDC Austin span the gamut of 'connected games', from traditional high-profile subscription MMOs through free-to-play online games, social network games, and even online components to console games.

The event, to be held September 15th-18th, 2009 at the Austin Convention Center in Texas, now includes six online-centric 'tracks' for the Main Conference, which takes place Wednesday 16th to Friday 18th.

These tracks, which span design, business & marketing, social networking & community, services, programming and production, have a number of lectures focused on the core, AAA subscription-MMO space. Initial highlights from these include:

- BioWare Austin's 'Come and See the Elephant - Challenges Encountered Growing an MMO' will talk about strategies "pertaining to process and technology" that the much-vaunted firm's technical director Bill Dalton utilized in helping to make the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic.

- In 'Why We Need Heroes And Villains In Games', some of the key creators of the upcoming DC Universe Online MMO, including SOE Austin's Chris Cao and Jens Andersen, alongside noted comic book artist and game contributor Jim Lee and DC Comics writer Marv Wolfman, discuss "why... tension between good and evil is so critical -- not only for telling a good story, but for making a video game."

- CCP Games' Petur Johannes Oskarsson is presenting a lecture called 'EVE Online's Player Elected Council Case Study', explaining that the space trading and combat MMO "uses a democratically elected council of 9 community members to get a feel for what the whole wants, where they want EVE to go in the future and how we, players and developers, can get there together." The study will analyze the Council's failures and successes for the past, present and future.

- In 'MMOs to Consoles – Challenges, Opportunities and Emerging Trends', Turbine VP Craig Alexander will talk about the Lord Of The Rings Online creator's view on the console market for major MMOs, with market analysis, commenting that "given the processing power and connectivity of console game systems, the opportunity to transition massively multiplayer online games to the console platform is enormous."

Further announcements and details on lectures for this September's GDC Austin, as well as multiple keynote addresses, will be debuting over the next few weeks.

In addition, GDC Austin will also include its long-running Game Audio and Game Writer Summits, alongside an iteration of the breakout successful Independent Games Summit and the newly introduced iPhone Game Summit, all debuting on September 15-16, 2009 at the same venue.

Full listings of announced lectures, registration information, and other specifics are now available at the official GDC Austin website.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ever imagined The Path's protagonists as adorable little bears instead of young, gothic girls untouched by the Sun? The controversial indie horror game would probably be a lot less creepy with cute bears humming a happy tune, rather than with the heroines' unsettling laughter and crying in the dark.

Artist Sarah Lomba drew all six of the Little Red Riding Hood-inspired playable characters from The Path -- Robin, Rose, Ginger, Ruby, Carmen, and Scarlet -- as the bears, managing to keep the girls' original designs, costumes, and personalities intact with the transformation. Rose (bottom left), with her smirk, is definitely my favorite.

[Via @thesimplicity]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Our colleagues at Game Developer magazine continue to provide high-quality printed content to 35,000+ professional game developers worldwide every month, yay, and here's some highlights from its latest postmortem, for the latest in the Tomb Raider franchise.]

The latest issue of sister publication Game Developer magazine includes a postmortem of Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider: Underworld, written by the game's creative director Eric Lindstrom.

As custodian of the Tomb Raider series since 2003, Redwood City-based developer Crystal Dynamics initially planned Underworld as "an 'easy' sequel" to Tomb Raider: Legend, but as Lindstrom points out, "it never quite works out that way."

The following excerpts from Game Developer magazine's recent postmortem, published in the June/July 2009 issue, illustrate how Crystal Dynamics overcome a number of significant obstacles along the way to realizing the dark adventure.

As Lindstrom explained, "Previews for Tomb Raider: Legend were very encouraging, and we felt that there was still plenty of unrealized potential to tap in the existing feature set. Enough so, the reasoning went, that we could focus on content and leveraging existing functionality to develop a bigger and better Lara Croft adventure in less time.

In many ways this is what the team accomplished, but as is always the case in game development, reality was more complex than we anticipated."

The Necessity Of Focus

It can be all too easy to make a nearly-carbon-copy sequel, but by maintaining a strong sense of focus, Crystal Dynamics managed to avoid that pitfall, as they explain in this extract:

"When making a sequel, producing a game just like the last one with slightly different content and a few more features is an easy mistake to make. Despite the fact that we had some significant new goals, like making the traversal less linear and bringing back more free exploration, we almost fell into this trap.

But many on the team saw that we needed an additional focal point to both rally the team around and to use as a unique selling proposition for the game. The result of this was the concept of epic exploration puzzles.

Making large-scale in-game devices and areas with multiple layers of connected puzzles gave the game an exceptional expression even compared to previous Tomb Raider games, and it also gave us a litmus test for spending production effort across the game.

This led to the creation of a sub team devoted to these puzzles, which proved to be complicated constructs. While we would have been better off had we foreseen this need and planned for it properly from the start, the fact that we saw the growing concern, created this special sub team, devoted more staff and resources to it, and assigned a dedicated producer was an example of how well we solved unforeseen problems in development."

Pros, Cons Of Shared Technology

Prior to Underworld's completion, publisher and parent company Eidos trumpeted its decision to make use of a shared code base between multiple internal teams. However, as Lindstrom explains, the team responsible for the shared technology wasn't directly accountable to any one team that relied on it:

"At the start of Tomb Raider: Underworld, Crystal Dynamics as a studio decided to pursue the Holy Grail of internal development: a robust and powerful shared code base to use as a jumping off point for all future games. This proprietary engine would be augmented and maintained by dedicated engineers who could provide the common functionality our games would need, while team programmers could focus on features specific to their games.

The studio believed that because Tomb Raider: Underworld and the shared code base would both be based on Tomb Raider: Legend code, the efforts could be combined even given our tight production timeline.

A lot of talented and hardworking programmers were put on the shared code team, including many of those who engineered Tomb Raider: Legend, so skill was not an issue. The biggest problem here turned out not to be over-ambition or complicated dependencies (though these were certainly issues). The problems were much more related to ownership and priorities.

Within a team, when schedules begin to slip and need to be put back on track, the entire team can get together, redefine its mission, and make whatever collective changes are needed to bring production back into alignment with the calendar.

But the shared technology group was not on the team. While its charter was to serve the teams, it had to serve multiple teams with conflicting needs. From the point of view of each team, the shared technology group was a cadre of programmers that didn’t report to our lead engineer. It was an enormous dependency that we could only influence via petition and persuasion, and frequently could not even schedule around as we had limited visibility into their progress.

We knew from the beginning that basing Tomb Raider: Underworld on a nascent and evolving code base was an enormous risk, a big potential pitfall. So why did we walk into this trap with our eyes wide open? At the time, it seemed that the potential payoff was worth the risk, and that we had the right people working on the problem.

So we marched along with the shared technology group and did the best we could knowing that some of the challenges we were facing could ultimately yield more efficiencies down the road. Ultimately, however, some of our fears were realized as we had indeed overestimated our ability to overcome all the known risks."

Acts of God

Any developer knows that sometimes things go wrong that can't be blamed on anybody's poor decision -- they just happen. As Lindstrom puts it, that's what separates "What We Did Wrong" from "What Went Wrong." Crystal Dynamics faced some of these "What Went Wrong" moments:

"This is the category that some postmortems title 'Too Many Demos' or some other problem that comes at a team from the outside. We certainly had the problem of too many demos, but those were only one entry in a class of problems that dropped on us unprepared.

Demos were particularly aggravating because we specifically set out to avoid this issue from the start. We demanded long term demo schedules, and we received them. We refused to bow to some requests for demos that weren’t on the schedule, and this was honored by the publisher.

But there was also a slippery slope, where some unscheduled demos were accommodated because of various circumstances. We sometimes faced a dilemma where marketing gave us a choice in which a particular demo, at the expense of two weeks of production time, seemed like the better long term choice for the success of the product. There are too many stories of great games disappearing into the noisy marketplace to ignore the importance of demos and good PR.

Yes, these demos often result in a reduction of product quality, and yes they distract from team focus, but in the end, as painful as it feels, it’s sometimes best to do the demo. This is a clear example of walking into a trap with eyes wide open—making a mistake that you know about in advance—but it happens repeatedly because the answer isn’t to refuse demos, or to plan for them better. The answer is to make a game that doesn’t come together only at the end.

We also had an unusual number of weddings, honeymoons, production babies, and untimely departures on this project throughout the team, but most painfully among the discipline leads.

We lost our art director midway through production; not to another company, but to another industry, so there wasn’t much we could have done about that. We lost our lead designer toward the end of production when she had a baby; also something we couldn’t have done much about (nor would we have wanted to, as the baby is beautiful!). And most tragically, our lead level designer died suddenly during the first half of production.

These key figures in our effort were extremely valuable not only because they were smart and capable, but also because they were a part of the success of Tomb Raider: Legend, and therefore knew intimately how to make this kind of game. People like that are rare, because Tomb Raider games are hard to make for many reasons, and in the timeline we were under, they were irreplaceable.

We compensated for these losses with people on the team assuming new responsibilities to fill in the gaps, and some of these team members did amazing work and really saved us, but there’s no denying that we would have had a much smoother production and a better end product without these losses."

Additional Info

The full postmortem for Tomb Raider: Underworld explores "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong" during the course of the game's development, and is now available in the June/July 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine.

The issue also includes the annual Top 50 Developers ranking; a piece on single-shard MMO games by the team behind EVE Online; a story on how to keep players completing your game by Microsoft's Bruce Phillips; and much more.

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 June/July 2009's edition as a single issue.

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

UfragTV began streaming the "short cut" of I Got Next, an engaging documentary on the Street Fighter competition scene (no relation to the KRS-One album), over the weekend, with director Ian Cofino planning to release a longer version this Winter.

The feature length film follows three of the U.S.'s top Street Fighter players -- Justin "Marvelous" Wong (best known for this 3rd Strike clip against Daigo Umehara), Ryan "gootecks" Gutierrez, and Joe "ILOVEU" Ciaremelli -- through several tournaments, mixing footage of Street Fighter IV matches with interviews conducted with the scene's notables.

I Got Next provides deeper insight to Wong/Gutierrez/Ciaramelli's motivations beyond just playing to be the best -- the three stars educate viewers on Street Fighter's East and West Cost rivalry, the challenges of playing games professionally for a living, the importance of being involved in the scene if you want to play competitively, and more. Not bad for a free movie!

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 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.]

Thought we'd pick up the pace as we go into the pre-July 4th week, so this is the first of five GameSetLinks, each with special links from the world of video game writing - starting with Game Developer magazine humor columnist Matthew Wasteland's blog seeing what a video game preview of a Shakespeare play might end up like.

Also in this round-up - Manifesto Games closing down, the Dogface Show explored, fifteen awesome alt.iPhone games via Offworld, Assembly indie game lectures, sci-fi book store goodness, and more.

OK to play:

Elsinore Baby! New Hamlet Preview! (Magical Wasteland)
'Call him the Bard of Avon or England’s national poet or ShakeyP, there’s no doubt that William Shakespeare is one of the top contributors in the business today.' Oh Mr. Wasteland!

The Dogface Show - NeoGAF
'The Dogface Show is a unique pop culture show, that focuses on the Street Fighter community - the players, the scene, the lifestyle, and everything else that's made SRK what it is.' This GAF thread has the latest episodes on one handy place.

Play This Thing! | Shuttering Manifesto
Sorry to see Manifesto Games didn't work out for Greg Costikyan and cohorts - I do think its heart was in the right place, and its fierce championing of offbeat titles (to continue on PlayThisThing) is greatly appreciated.

The 15 Games You Need For Your New iPhone (pg. 01) | Offworld
Awesome list from Mr. Boyer at Offworld, a blog you should definitely be reading if you like GSW (or vice versa, hopefully!)

Bloggasm » Is Tor Books seeking to become the Amazon of science fiction and fantasy?
Interesting because it's a Steam-like move in the sci-fi/fantasy book space - comparisons with games are apt.

Sessions — Assembly 2009
The oldskool demoparty, nowadays more of a LAN party/demo thing, has neat indie game talks from Svedang, Eskil @ Love, Petri Purho - Scandinavians go!

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

[Should your studio take on work for hire? Sometimes -- in this opinion column, Divide By Zero's James Portnow tackles the deceptively complex issue and breaks down the whens and hows.]

One of the toughest questions for any startup developer is whether or not they should do work for hire. It provides revenue, which can look awfully appealing at times, but it can be a big distraction from the reason you started the company in the first place.

A little backstory: Ever since we opened up our iPhone division, we’ve been flooded with requests to do work for hire. Not just iPhone games, but everything. Up until recently, I had dismissed offers of work for hire out of hand: I tended to consider contract work a pernicious trap.

Of course, something strange started happening when such work came in in volume.We got work for hire offers that I actually thought were neat -- by which I mean we got work for hire offers that were interesting and compelling, independent of what they paid... work I’d be doing in house if I had thought of it first.

Eventually, the temptation was too great and I caved and started taking some of these offers. Below I’ll detail what we’ve done to make contract work as positive as possible for the company, what we’ve done wrong, and what I feel is unavoidable.

The Problem

I’ve seen many studios begin doing work for hire because they needed capital and end up losing focus. They become work for hire houses that die out in a few years without ever accomplishing what they started their studio to do. When I began taking on work for hire I told myself I had to do the following things:

1. Distract as little as possible from the main endeavor.
2. Keep employees satisfied with their jobs (not have them feel like they’re being relegated to ‘lame’ work for hire work).
3. Have the work for hire more than pay for itself (this one sounds very basic, but I’ll explain below)
4. Add value to the company.

The Answers

Establish a New Division: After the first project, when we decided we were going to really start doing work for hire, we established a new division of the company for it, wholly separate from the core development team working on the main project.

This had the advantage of minimizing the distraction from the main project and allowed us to establish new standards and guidelines specific to the work for hire division.

It also allowed us to offer a different pay scale for the work for hire team (they get less salary but they get time allotted to work on personal project which Divide by Zero helps publish and which they get the lion’s share of the revenue from, on occasion they also get part of the rev share from the projects they work on).

When I say Divide by Zero is going to do something, I don’t believe in total subcontracting. I believe the quality of the work and the dynamics of the team are simply better built up over time in house.

This has the disadvantage of keeping people on salary. This means that the division has a fixed cost per month, which either has to be covered by work for hire or we have to take a loss: which means that it’s takes a lot of will to remember to...

Choose Work Carefully: Up until this point we’ve been an entirely equity financed company, this means that we aren’t relying on work for hire to survive.

I’ve seen many studios which will just haphazardly take absolutely everything that comes their way, sometimes because they need it to survive, sometimes because they don’t know when other work will become available (and sometimes because they just get caught up in the whole contract work thing and don’t take a step back and look at why they are doing it). This is fatal.

We’re very careful about what we choose to take: we probably reject work for hire offers on a 6:1 ratio. It was incredibly difficult to take a step back and say, “I’d rather take a loss on the work for hire division and give them more time to work on personal projects in any given month than take the wrong work.” But I believe it’s one of the best decisions we’ve made regarding this part of our business.

Ask Who Wants to do a Project: One of the core requirements for us to take on any particular work for hire venture is to make sure that we have people who are excited and passionate about doing that particular work.

Before I accept anything I go to the work for hire division and say, “We’ve got _____ coming up, who wants to work on it.” If I get back a positive response from a group of people with the required skill set and I believe they have the time in their schedule I greenlight the project, otherwise it’s a no-go, even if management is interested in doing it.

Not only does this increase the quality of work we turn out (in my opinion), this keeps morale very high in the work for hire division and actually makes it easier to get things done.

Anecdotally, people in our work for hire division psyche each other up and ask each other for favors. If a team is mostly formed but doesn’t have one of the people it needs, the people who want to do the project usually convince whomever they need to get on board. I rarely ever have to step in.

Also, this is the only case where I’ll contract out. If we’ve got 3 people raring to go and they need one more person to complete the project I’ve had teams come to me and say, “I know this guy, I’ll get him to work for almost nothing and I’ll totally manage him. If he fails I’ll take responsibility.” In that case I’ll give it a shot. It’s worked out well for us so far (we’ve even hired someone out of a situation like that).

Approach Companies: If you are going to do work for hire, biz dev is important. While a lot of work just comes our way, we’ll actively go seek work if we think it’s cool. Often we’ll be at lunch and someone will say "Wouldn’t working with X be awesome?"

If it gets a resounding "hell yeah," then we go out and approach those people. Part of our core work for hire business is reviving dead IP (you’ll see in a few months…) and helping companies expand their IP into the interactive space. This allows us to continually work on projects that we think are compelling, but would be impossible if we just sat back waiting for business.

Do The Math Right: Don’t try to overbid and don’t try to impress anybody by bidding low. Assume everyone’s acting in good faith and be okay when they walk. You’re not going to get every contract.

Remember, everything’s going to run long or need some extra hands on it, there’s always unexpected changes in this sort of work, so budget for it. So long as you’re giving an honest estimate of what you think your team will require no one will fault you.

A word of warning -- make sure to be very clear on what you’re being contracted to do. Many entities don’t understand what it takes to make games, and when dealing with contract work we find that often people change their minds or come to realize what they actually want only after the work begins.

Don’t be afraid to let your client know when they want you to do something that exceeds what you originally agreed upon and will cost them more money.

We usually recommend to clients that they commission us for a design spec first. This is less risk on both sides and is the cheapest way to attain clarity and make sure that everyone’s talking about the same project.

It also gives both sides a clean break point to work with other vendors if we discover the project is something that we can’t really handle in-house (and if they do choose to walk, at least we’ve provided them with a document that they can take to anyone else to determine if they’re the right vendor for the project).

Be Flexible: We’ve had some crazy stuff come across the desk when dealing with contract work... and crazy stuff is often the most fun (and profitable) to work with. We’ve specifically built the work for hire division around people with a broad set of skills who are willing to dive into anything and learn (who knew how handy a working knowledge of ancient Greek would be?).

Additionally, as a business, you have to be flexible: if someone has a big meeting with their funder and needs a document done in two days you’ve got to figure out a way to make it work (assuming of course they’re willing to take on the cost associated with doing so), if someone wants some crazy payment structure, consider it. You want the opportunity to say no, not the necessity.

Adding Value: We also look for work for hire that adds value to the company beyond what it pays. In some cases this means building out a tool that we can use in other projects, in some cases it means broadening our skill set, in others it’s establishing good relations with an interesting IP holder or even getting to experiment with mechanics we hope to have in our major release.

Downsides: Work for hire is a distraction. No matter how much we’ve tried to mitigate and how much we keep the teams separate it takes a lot of management overhead.

Preparing the contract, finding cool projects, making the deals, managing the relationships with clients, even doing strategic planning for two divisions instead of one requires a lot from the management team.

Don’t delude yourself going in (we did, a little bit) -- work for hire will change how your business functions. It may offset your costs but it won’t fund any major project, you’re still going to have to raise capital to put out your AAA title.

If you are going to do this, do it because it will allow you to employ a few people during a down economy. Understand that it will cost you something and hope that the benefits outweigh the costs.

That doesn’t mean do it stupid: you’re a business and you want to maximize every opportunity you have. Be keenly aware of what contract work is doing to you as a company and be ready to back away if it ever takes you too far off course from your original intent for the company.

Shoot me questions at Jportnow@gmail.com or bother me on twitter @JamesPortnow.

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

Finishing up the last seven days, it's time to recap the top full-length features of the past week on Gamasutra, plus extra features from sister edu site GameCareerGuide and a lot of smart bonus news interviews from Gamasutra.

Those bonuses are behind the cut, but in the main Gamasutra feature area this week, we have interviews with the APB lead designer and Peter Moore, plus some neat technical articles, a discussion among analysts about what was under-rated at this year's E3 Expo, an in-depth academikwak piece on narrative design, and rather more besides.

Harmonicas are nice:

Gamasutra Features

Leading The Design of APB
"Realtime Worlds' EJ Moreland talks in-depth to Gamasutra on designing All Points Bulletin's complex world, from customization to multiplayer combat to its larger vision."

Dramatic Play
"In a wide-ranging article, former Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts narrative designer Stephen Dinehart looks at the future of game story by examining narrative theory through the ages."

Managing Data Relationships
"How does your game data relate to each other? In this practical technical article, game development veteran Noel Llopis looks at how coders should structure and retrieve the intertwined world of game data in memory."

Planning For Fun In Game Programming - Part 2
"How do you legislate for fun from a game planning and programming perspective? Following on from his analysis of the problem, veteran game coder Tom Hammersley proposes a solution that includes 'apprenticing', use cases, storyboards, and more."

Analyze This: What Went Under-Reported at This Year's E3?
"What did the video game analysts think of this year's E3? Gamasutra quizzes notables from Cowen and Company, Lazard Capital and Wedbush Morgan on the event's importance, key announcements, under-noticed gems, and more."

Peter Moore on the Strategy of Sports
"Sega and Microsoft veteran Peter Moore now heads up Electronic Arts' EA Sports division, and talks in-depth to Gamasutra about the expansion into more casual titles, the status of the label's perennials, and lots more."

GCG Features, Gamasutra Original News

Interview: How Bethesda's Fallout 3 Helped Seal id's Sale
"id Software programming maverick John Carmack explains how Fallout 3's success was proof enough that Bethesda could "change the world" with Doom 4. Gamasutra interviews Carmack and Bethesda's Pete Hines."

GCG: How To Pick Indie Game Collaborators
"Educational site GameCareerGuide has published a new feature that gives 11 guidelines that might help you pick your comrades when making an independent game project."

GameHorizon: Making Splash Damage Into A Triple-A Studio
"At the UK's GameHorizon conference, Splash Damage CEO Paul Wedgwood (Quake Wars, Brink) explained how a ragtag gang of modders became one of the UK's strongest indies -- and why staff is your most important asset."

Interview: Muzyka On EA's New BioWare/Mythic RPG Team-Up
"Following the announcement of EA's new RPG/MMO Group pairing BioWare and Mythic, general manager Ray Muzyka tells Gamasutra about the motivation, studio culture, old EA versus new, and his thoughts on Bethesda's id acquisition."

Sony's Edward Talks PlayStation Home As It Hits 7 Million Users
"Sony Europe director of Home Peter Edward talked about the virtual world service as a "lobby" for all PS3 games at the UK's GameHorizon event, as he shared DLC stats on what the service's 7 million users are up to in-world."

Interview: T3's Redbana Launches Western Dev, Publishing Office, Talks Rescuing Audition
"T3 subsidiary Redbana has officially entered the North American game scene, and talks to Gamasutra on taking PC online dance game Audition back from Nexon -- plus future hints on Flagship's Mythos."

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

[Continuing his 'Sound Current' series for GameSetWatch, Jeriaska debuts a really neat indie game music roundtable, talking to the musicians behind PixelJunk Eden, Flower, Night Game, and Jonathan Mak's next project about their attitudes to creating game soundtracks.]

Recently four composers met to share their thoughts on the subject of videogame music. Vincent Diamante wrote the scores to ThatGameCompany titles Cloud and Flower. Teaching at the University of Southern California, while also providing photography for GameSetWatch and Gamasutra during industry events, he displays the skills and interests of an interdisciplinary artist. In the music interview "A Beautiful Flight," he spoke on the subject of the layered, interactive nature of his music for Flower.

Earlier this year Chris Schlarb completed an East Coast tour with his group I Heart Lung. Currently he is serving as the composer of the WiiWare title Night Game, published by Nicalis. He spoke about the challenges underlying the game project, which is in collaboration with Nifflas of Knytt Stories, during the Sound Current series interview "Rolling with the Sounds of Night Game."

Shaw-Han Liem is the musician behind the I Am Robot and Proud album series. In the music interview "I Am Robot Makes Game," he spoke on the subject of his Uphill City tour in Japan, taking place late last year, along with the process of embarking upon his first official collaboration with game designer Jonathan Mak, creator of Everyday Shooter.

Finally, Baiyon is the music and art director of Q-Games' PixelJunk Eden. Speaking during the Game Developers Conference in a session titled Baiyon's CMYK Vision, he offered his perspectives on the creation of new songs and visual designs for the PixelJunk Eden Encore expansion pack.

In a reflection of the international accessibility of interactive audio, the text for the roundtable discussion is appearing online in several languages, including Italian, French, and Japanese courtesy of GAME Watch. English and Japanese interpretation is by musician and translator Ryojiro Sato.

From left to right: Chris Schlarb, Baiyon, Ryojiro Sato, Shaw-Han Liem, Vincent Diamante.

To start off this conversation on the intersection between independent music and independent games, I thought I would bring up a question for the table. I wanted to know if there were any examples that came to mind from the history of videogames where the gameplay has allowed for the expression of musical improvisation in a fresh and innovative way.

Vincent Diamante: I remember a game called Ballblazer. It was by Lucasfilm, back in the mid-80's before they became LucasArts. It was a first-person sports game, and as you played there was this procedurally generated jazz solo. Some reviews at the time said that the soundtrack sounded like extreme John Coltrane solos. It was for PC and for Nintendo, and I remember playing it at the time, being this young music student, and thinking, "This music is different." It was this magical thing.

Chris Schlarb: Ballblazer? I've got to check this game out.

Vincent Diamante, composer of Flower

Chris, during your Night Game interview, you mentioned being surprised by the spontaneity of PaRappa the Rapper when you first encountered the game. Did you feel it was the first time you were able to riff or improvise musically within a videogame?

Schlarb: PaRappa was the first game where I had a sense of wonder about it. I was just talking about it because we were so excited to see the creator of PaRappa at the awards show last night. In PaRappa, you can basically freestyle. You can add extra beats and syllables to play polyrhythmically.

Shaw-Han: You could do that at any point in the game?

Schlarb: Yeah, you didn't have to just play on the beat---you could subdivide all the rhythmic elements in the game and it would start to dynamically change the environment.

I remember there was one time I was playing the level with Master Onion, and I was just going off, and the roof blew off of the room, and PaRappa was in the clouds! It never happened to me any other time. It's that feeling of something special happening. It was absolutely amazing.

Most games are so linear in their approach to composition. I come to composition from outside the game world, and am thinking more like modern composition like Eno, Reich, or Cage, not necessarily looking back at videogames for inspiration.

Baiyon, have you had the chance to listen to the music of everyone here?

Baiyon: I've played Flower. Shaw-Han and I have talked on myspace. I don't know Chris.

Chris is the composer of Night Game, which is coming out for WiiWare. All the music in the game is composed of live recordings and there are no loops. There are several pieces for each world that are from half a minute to several minutes long, and between those pieces there is a silence of a randomly determined length.

Schlarb: Have you seen the art in Night Game? It's all inspired by Chinese shadow art.

Baiyon: Oh, yes. Now I remember seeing it on the show floor.

How do you feel about the idea of adding more content to your games after they are finished? For instance if they were to say, "We want more levels for Night Game..."

Schlarb: That's what happened to me. When I first started Night Game, there was supposed to be ten minutes of music. It was two worlds, five minutes per world. It started off as a freeware game, because Nifflas has done a lot of freeware. It was going to be this simple thing that we were going to put out, and later turned into this WiiWare game. It just got exponentially bigger, and I was saying earlier that the most difficult thing about that was I had already started working on it as a small game and I did not give myself any limits to instrumentation. It then got very difficult afterward. Had I limited myself to a palette of five or six instruments, then I could have breezed through the rest of it.

As it expanded, so did the possibilities. I could use anything, and I was then responding to the stimuli of the visuals, which were changing for each world. It got very difficult because I kept having to bring in more instruments, like the trombone, marimba, mandolin, euphonium... it just kept going and going. I kept strings out of it, thankfully, though I did have upright bass. What was so difficult was deciding where to stop, because it went from ten minutes of music to fifty. I worked on it for a solid eight months in my spare time.

I know now to set limits to orchestration: I can compose for a chamber ensemble. Otherwise, where does it end? Limits can be so good. You choose a set of instruments, and then your mind starts to work within those limitations. I was coming from the perspective that there were really just two options for game music. There was either 8-bit retro-sounding stuff or orchestral stuff.

Diamante: You know, when I think of 8-bit music I think of Japanese jazz fusion. 8-bit music, whether the musicians realize it or not, connects all the way back to guys like Casiopea and T-Square.

Schlarb: I can hear that, definitely. I guess mentally I didn't feel that I fit into either one of those contexts. I really don't program. I feel like my strength is in texture, in writing an arrangement for an ensemble, utilizing instruments and musicians in the right context.

With Night Game, I was thinking the game needs to breathe. In most games you are bombarded with sound, visual input and stimuli constantly. There's no timer in Night Game, so I wanted there to be an ebb and flow. Music would come in, then it would go away, and you would hear the environmental sounds. Then the music would come back in, acting as sort of a subliminal push. Mentally you would not even recognize that the music went away, but you can kind of feel it instead of listening to it.

Ryojiro Sato (right), musician and interpreter

Diamante: In Flower, the music is more gamey, and it's mostly continuous. On level five there are these explicit breaths within the soundtrack that last a minute or several minutes.

Baiyon: Yeah, it's very interesting.

Vincent, could you conceive of how you would respond to a sequel or additional downloadable content added to Flower?

Diamante: Flower already is its own story. In my mind I feel like it is done. I guess it could be its own separate arc at the end. When I think of it that way, it sounds alright. If they asked for additional levels in the middle of things, I'm not sure how it would fit in. The arc is already set for how the music builds over the course of the game. I would definitely have to think long and hard about how to write a new score for this content that sits alongside the arc I have already done.

You never considered the music of Flower as in any way a continuation of Cloud, your previous score for ThatGameCompany?

Diamante: There were elements of Cloud, such as some of the art by Jenova [Chen], that included flowers. I was definitely inspired by that, but I was not thinking of it. The themes that I had sketched out have strong similarities. Cloud is its own thing, especially with the construction of music and how the orchestration builds.

Today, Vincent and I went to Hitoshi Sakimoto's presentation at the Game Developers Conference. Of course, this is among the most famous composers of RPG soundtracks in Japan today. After the talk, Vincent introduced himself and said, almost under his breath, "I just released my first console videogame soundtrack and it's for this game called Flower." Sakimoto's eyes lit up and he said, "Flowery? You mean Flowery? I've played it!" It's one example suggesting independent game musicians might not be fully aware of the level of attention their music receives these days.

Diamante: Yeah, I was kind of surprised.

Schlarb: That's amazing. It's a long and lonely process writing music for these games, so to have that validation really means something. I did work on Night Game for a year and nobody heard it. I got no feedback.

Diamante: And these are games that a lot of people really want to know about. When I first saw Night Game, I needed to know about it. Among both consumers and those who have been making games for years, there are those that want to hear more from the musicians who are really pushing the boundaries and making things that are different.

There are layers to the background music in Flower, and those layers will add up or peel away depending on the circumstances, which makes for an emotionally effective audio technique. You can hear the soundtrack subtly responding to your actions.

Baiyon: As a musician, I think music stands on its own. Contrary to composing for the game, I like to give the music its own individual personality. Interactivity can limit the musical possibilities.

Schlarb: I really understand that. I think it's really an interesting thing about Flower. The music responds to the player, and with Night Game we are making the player respond to the music. I'm really interested in both of those ideas.

Baiyon: Music games are getting closer to allowing the player to actually compose. I think that's really interesting, but if you are able to do some sort of music creation in the game, it does not make much difference whether you actually composed the music. Making music outside the game would be more enjoyable as an artist. What is the value of that compared to the score having been authored?

Diamante: I think they both have their own value. Going through the filter of a performance, whether it is the player playing the game or actual performers performing music, that can expand and encompass all sorts of possibilities. Back in the day, everyone had a piano in their house. People would buy sheet music of popular songs, bring it home, and play it. How would it sound? Well, that would depend on pianist, the singer and their skills. They have a set of instructions, but the music that comes out of it is their own. Maybe if I were to listen to it, I would think it's not how it's supposed to sound, but that's okay. It's their music. With videogames as well, it's their game more than it is the game developer's.

Baiyon: I think there is interaction between the composer's music and player's experience. It does not need to be as simple as pushing a button and hearing a sound. I believe in providing the listener with more musical structure. That said, when I played Flower, it was so fun.

Shaw-Han: I don't believe there is any non-interactive music. All music is interactive. Just as any kind of conversation that takes place, because it is a communication medium, there is the sound that is coming into your ears and then there is what is happening in your brain as you are listening to it. Every person will have a different bunch of chemical stuff going on in their head that is going to color their experience.

Schlarb: I think it's interesting because both are equally valid approaches. I'm interested in both ideas. With Night Game, I was more interested in creating an environment that the player could not affect. Through the visual art design and the puzzles, everything is very structured. There is a randomness to the order in which the pieces can be played, and there is a randomness to the silence in the game, all of which is something the player has to react to. There, the game does not react to the player.

I think it's really interesting, the approach that Baiyon has taken. The music is very separate from the videogame. Then there's Vincent's approach of treating them like one entity. You know, I love both of those ideas. Is there a way as things progress to combine them so that things feel alive, while cultivating a feeling or an environment?

Shaw-Han: I think it's important, whatever position you end up at on that spectrum. When I make music on a CD, that's my music and I'm the boss, right? If I make music for a game, there's this idea that it has to support the gameplay. If the gameplay has you exploring a world with endless possibilities around every corner, then maybe the idea of having the soundtrack be interpretive of your decisions supports the feeling of that game. Whereas, if you are playing a game where it's you against the world, then it makes sense for the music to be more rigid. The music is a representation of the gameplay. For me, it is interesting to play with that relationship.

Baiyon: I also worked on the visual element of the game. For me, it was a single expression. I was letting my inspiration take me where it needed to go.

Schlarb: When it's one artist, it's very easy to do that. It is coming from one place.

Baiyon: Since you all make music, you probably all understand. When it's hard, it becomes less interesting and you are not having much fun. It has to be part of a process where you have a certain facility and you have confidence in your work.

Did you struggle with the score for PixelJunk Eden?

Baiyon: Not at all. I continued the process of making music on my own and never thought about changing the music midway through. The only thing that I had a hard time with were the sound effects. I always make music to allow people to feel comfortable, but often effects in games are disturbing. Explosions or having to rush the game player, that was really new for me. Technically, I don't know if you can define a genre of "videogame music." I don't think it exists.

How would you describe the genre of minimal techno you brought to PixelJunk Eden?

Baiyon: 110 to 128 beats per minute.

*laughter*

In PixelJunk Eden, are there any specific references between the music and the art design?

Baiyon: It might not be very clear but this game project helped put my pursuits in art and music together. It was not necessarily my intention to match the music with the images on-screen. It just came naturally. Providing people with different experiences through the gameplay, that's the goal.

Shaw-Han: Did you start with the artwork or with the music?

Baiyon: I worked on them both at the same time. Actually, I was doing them simultaneously while talking on the phone, and I used the other ear to listen to someone else's music.

*laughter*

Baiyon: I was very sad to realize that when you are making your own music, you can't listen to other people's music, because you only have two ears. It was startling to realize that. With visual art, you can look at a picture and write at the same time. The process is almost simultaneous. However, there is not the same kind of analog with music. Hearing is not the same as seeing.

Chris Schlarb, composer of Night Game

Diamante: For me there are two ways of thinking of game music. There is obviously videogame music, but while I was in school I did a lot of research into this field called "game music," where instead of scores orchestras were given a set of instructions. On the sheet it would say to the clarinetist, something like: play this motif if you hear the violinist do something over this note.

Whenever I write my music I kind of personify the Playstation 3 or the computer and imagine it to be this set of performers inside the machine, and I want them to enjoy the music just as much as I am. I feel connected to technology and I want it to enjoy what I am giving it to do.

I'm always considerate of the performer. Sometimes the performer is the Playstation. I might decide to push myself a certain way, or push a studio musician or my friend, so I cannot compose without thinking about the performer, whoever that performer may be.

Schlarb: Have you guys played Bloom for the iPhone? I have an eleven year-old and a seven year-old, and I let my children play Bloom when I'm driving with my them. They will play it for... an hour. They come up with the most interesting ideas, things that I would never do.

How has your background in programming, Shaw-Han, figured into the I Am Robot and Proud albums?

Shaw-Han: Well, I spent my high school years playing in punk bands and then went to school, learned how to use computers, and those two things kind of crossed over. I think everyone here will say that the computer is probably one of the greatest musical tools to come around. It was invented to crunch numbers, but it also became this amazing musical tool, right?

I can imagine you and Baiyon performing in some of the same clubs in Kyoto. Do you remember where you played during your Uphill City tour?

Shaw-Han: I can't remember. It was like subway...

Baiyon: Club Metro?

Shaw-Han: Yeah.

Baiyon: That's where I have my event every month. We met there, but maybe you don't remember. My friend introduced me to you at the bar after your set. You looked so exhausted. I asked, "Are you tired?" You said, "Yeah, I'm tired."

Shaw-Han: I think my set time was 4:00 AM. It was crazy.

Shaw-Han designs the visual element of his live performances. Could you tell us a little about that work?

Shaw-Han: The visual aspect of the live performances involves a MIDI translator. Everyone who is playing an instrument is hooked up to a MIDI box, and then there is a computer that takes all that information and will translate it. I use processing, so it is basically interpreting things like the velocity of my playing the keyboard.

Schlarb: You're generating all this data...

Shaw-Han: Exactly. Everyone on-stage. The drummer is generating triggers, and so the idea is I've been performing my own music live for awhile, and I have always thought there is this element, like when you see a guy playing rock guitar, there is this big, physical, visual connection as someone in the audience that you get. You see their arm and then you hear the sound from the speakers.

Schlarb: There's cause and effect.

Shaw-Han: Yeah, and with an electronic performance you don't always get this connection. I play keyboards, but I'm only moving a small amount. The idea behind the visuals is to introduce this element which creates that visual connection. It's kind of a reverse cause and effect. With a guitar, what you see is causing the sound.

Baiyon, how was it having completed PixelJunk Eden, then discovering that more levels would need to be designed for the Encore expansion?

Baiyon: I got a better understanding following the release of PixelJunk Eden of what programmers are capable of. For the Encore pack, the thinking behind the music has not really changed, but for the visual design I was able to specify things in greater detail to the programmers. Little things like having a plant flash if you jump onto it, that has been implemented in greater detail.

How does working in a team change the process of writing music from working alone?

Baiyon: Of course there is teamwork involved and you have to have communication with people. Before the production of PixelJunk Eden, I would draw and make music. If you are a solo artist, you focus on how much you can control the artistic medium. As I was doing that, I got tired of it because I found exercises were too easy to master.

For that reason I started these exercises to challenge myself. I went to an art supply shop one day, closed my eyes, and randomly picked out colors of supplies without looking. Even if it turned out it was all green, those were the colors I took home to paint with. That threw some randomness into my work.

However, that got boring. Back then I was in school and what I did was, whenever someone was about to throw out some art supply, I would ask to have it. If a student finished a painting and left some paint behind that was going to go unused, I would use that in my own work.

Schlarb: That comes back to limits and to a certain degree how they can inspire you creatively.

Shaw-Han: I think that as soon as you get to the end of the tool, that is when you start to be creative. Actually, the simpler the tool, the faster you get to that point where you have done everything and that is when you start to use your brain. Before that you are thinking about "How do I do this?" Once you get to that point, you start to think, "Well, what do I want to do?"

Baiyon: It's actually a new experience for me to get feedback from game players. People have their own feeling when they play the game. I had the chance to witness the difference between how I imagined people would interact with the game and the reality during the playtesting. The players would have a different impression from what I intended, and that experience was very interesting.

Diamante: How do you change in reaction to that feedback? Do you go back to the drawing board and do something entirely new, or do you make slight changes here and there?

Baiyon: The first time the testers played, they said the plants did not look alive. It seemed like a mistake, so I talked with the programmers about it in order to change the layout and colors of the plantlife.

Schlarb: Did you have to deal with that, Vincent?

Diamante: Yeah, I got feedback both from players and the programmers. I could not edit my music. Once I was done with a piece of music, I really believed in it. If they wanted something else, I did not want to disrupt the music itself, so I gave them a different piece of music.

Shaw-Han Liem, I Am Robot and Proud

Baiyon: I think there is a strong connection between music and technology. Nowadays, just about everyone has home studios and can make music. However, the reality is that not everyone is making music.

Schlarb: You have to develop a vocabulary.

Baiyon: For example, if you are selecting saxophone samples, you are going to enjoy the process more if you know how to play the instrument. You become passionate about music in making it.

Schlarb: Once you're at the point where you have the facility to create some sort of language on that instrument or tool, it's only at that point of your cumulative experience that you can start to do something that is expressive of yourself.

Baiyon: I think it's kind of dangerous when you find a tool that is so comfortable that you would prefer not to explore any other options. It's not necessarily the technology or any new method of composition that is important.

Schlarb: I think that danger is there for any instrument. You can have anyone sit down with a guitar and play bad music, just as they could sit down with a tenori-on and do something that is just not inspired.

Diamante: I always thought back when I was a kid that there would be a lot of people making music around this time. Instead, it's lots of people blogging and making YouTube videos. It's kind of weird, because video involves more complex technology.

Schlarb: It's interesting that at this point people seem more interested in understanding technology and utilizing it, rather than pushing it forward. There is a lot of disposable content out there. People blog just to say something, not to be the next Hemingway. It's the proliferation of technology that seems to encourage the creation of more disposable content.

Shaw-Han: Yeah, there are sort of two sides to that, right? There are people who at one point were lucky enough to find the thing that they are willing to put all their energy into to create this art, or music, or whatever. Maybe what you make isn't going to be the greatest piece of music ever, you know what I mean? However, probably making a really bad song is better than having thought your whole life: "I could never do this."

It does mean the signal to noise ratio is high, but if it's a choice between thinking your whole life that music is something that other people do, that you have to have a cool haircut and the right clothes, and you're not in that group, and on the other hand just picking up a controller and thinking, "Hey, I can put together a song..."

I think there's something really powerful in that moment where you realize that, instead of thinking that art is something other people do.

Schlarb: That is definitely a positive.

Baiyon: Your given limitations can be the inspiration. After all these experiments, I found I like to incorporate random elements in my art. As long as at the end I can stand by my music, ultimately that is what is important.

Shaw-Han: I think especially when you are doing electronic music, you have to think about that more. With an acoustic instrument the randomness is in the physicality of it.

Schlarb: That's right. How you mic your instrument...

Shaw-Han: How long your nails are that day when you are playing the guitar. All that randomness is built into the physicality of the playing. With electronic tools, it's so sterile sometimes. If you load up the song today, it's going to be the same as when you loaded the song up yesterday. You are going to get the exact same audio input. Sometimes introducing that kind of randomness, you want to hear those mistakes. They are what make it human.

Baiyon: I don't like that I can feel full of myself while playing guitar. That does not really speak to me. You are forced to look at me playing my music, and it should not necessarily be that way. With electronic music equipment, you can cut it off from visual elements that are not necessary to music.

Schlarb: It's like stripping ego out of music.

Baiyon: With oil painting, I always wondered if you really needed all those layers and lines. If you used a computer, that would solve a lot of the challenges associated with oil painting. I question whether it is really necessary, if there is a more efficient solution. If you make a mistake on the computer, you have the option to just undo it. You can keep the ones that you really need.

Diamante: I would say that painting is three-dimensional. There needs to be that thickness to it because there are some possibility for meaning to be placed there. The painter can do whatever he wants, but I really connect with painters that are willing to allow the meaning to be placed in the painting that may not be his own meaning. There are things that can happen in the process, and there is a beauty to the process, which results in this thing that is actually outside of the painter himself and even beyond humanity. The artwork is this thing that exists long after we die and long after people stop listening to it.

Schlarb: You could take somebody like Pollock. There it was all about the physicality of what he was doing. He could not have understood himself the depth and complexity of his work. There is an interesting parallel, where we are getting to the point where that randomness can be simulated electronically, though there's no human spirit to it. There is a value equally in the cleanliness of the electronic world and the messiness of the physical world.

Shaw-Han: I think all these things fall in this spectrum of what we were talking about earlier. Getting back to gaming, various places along the spectrum of having the player control things and having them not control things. Sometimes it can be interesting to not be able to control something and just be in this thing that's happening. Sometimes it's really cool when you have something in your hand and the thing is responding to you.

As people who are designing these experiences, we go through stages where we think, "I just want it to be my song." On the next project you might be more interested in say, collaborating with the player on a song. You can move back and forth along this spectrum, depending on your interests.

Schlarb: I think that idea of "control" is really extremely volatile. I go back to visual art again for some reason, but I think of Mark Rothko. His paintings are so big. He did that, from what I understand, so that the viewer would not be able to control the painting. The paintings were so large that the viewer had to humble themselves in front of the painting. I think in some ways we deal with that back and forth in how people are going to be interacting with music, whether we are going to be dictating something or whether the player will be controlling what we have put out there.

Shaw-Han: Yeah, in Guitar Hero the music is your enemy. Basically, you conquer the music. With something like Flower, your behavior and the music are sort of one. Depending on where you fall in that spectrum for a particular project, that is expressed in those decisions.

Baiyon, art and music director of PixelJunk Eden

Baiyon: What computers cannot imitate in the work of a Jackson Pollock is what kind of color or line is appropriate to him.

Shaw-Han: For me, the whole idea of physicality in music and why that is exciting is tied up in this idea of risk. There is always this chance that it could just be terrible. You see five musicians playing and you know that at any given point the whole thing could fall apart. That risk is part of what is interesting. These five musicians played the same thing last night, but you know it's not going to be exactly the same.

Baiyon: Lacking total control can be interesting, but everyone then tries to control that. There is always the need to move on to some new process once you've achieved that control.

[Interview conducted by Jeriaska. Translation by Ryojiro Sato. This article is available in Japanese on GAME Watch, in Italian at Gamesource.it, and in French at Squaremusic. Images courtesy of Nicalis, Q-Games, Darla Records, Sony Computer Entertainment. Photos by Jeriaska.]

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['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

There's a lot to discuss this week, including a new mag launch and another UK non-game-mag that US readers will be interested in pursuing anyway, but I have to start with the most humorous piece of game-media news to break this month: Ziff Davis Media selling Electronic Gaming Monthly's subscriber base to Maxim. Some loyal EGM readers started getting Maxim back in April, I guess, but my sub didn't begin until this July '09 issue.

Steve Harris wrote on the new EGM's Twitter last week that this deal "happened prior to my deal," so he didn't have a chance to score the old EGM's subscribers and move them to his mag. It's a bit of a shame, too. Thanks to all the game magazines Ziff has bought out and/or folded in their time, my subscription to EGM had been extended, and extended, and extended to dizzying levels over the years. This means that as of now, I am owed issues of something until March of 2012, according to my mailing sticker.

I would have much preferred that something to be the new EGM instead of Maxim. Not that I dislike Maxim. I subscribed to it for a while in the mid-aughts as part of a package deal I got off some clearinghouse website. I think boobies are great. Especially covered ones, because I'm from Texas and we don't believe in exposing ourselves down here. You know who likes seeing bare nipples? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that's who. Think about that.

This mag is, demographically, a decent enough fit for EGM readers, who (according to Ziff's still-active online sales kit) were 93% male and 86% over the age of 17. But Maxim ain't what it used to be.

The hooters are just as round and tempting, the jokes about cannibalism and fat people just as eye-rolling, but the mag has shrunk to 112 pages and sports an ad-to-edit ratio that's worse than the worst of EGM's tiny issues. (The entire "men's lifestyle" genre of magazines is in trouble, really. Maxim's flagship UK edition folded in April, though it's now available online; the US edition still boasts a circulation of 2.3 million, but it's buffeted by the bad economy, free-falling ad sales, a headcount that would make most game-mag editors green with envy, and an impending FDA ban on cigarette advertising in print.)

In the end, I think I'll send a note to the PO box on the cover sticker. It's actually the first time I've ever canceled a subscription. Normally I wouldn't bother. It seems rude, somehow. But if my calculations are correct, I could potentially get around forty bucks out of a refund, and forty bucks pays for a month of broadband Internet service, letting me download all the boob shots and pictures of rappers holding giant pieces of barbecue that I want. Fair bargain, that.

Let's move on to all the game mags released in the past fortnight, shall we?

NVISION Summer 2009

Cover: The evolution of entertainment and computer graphics

Chuck Osborn, NVISION EIC and former senior editor on PC Gamer US, calls his new quarterly "the first enthusiast publication devoted to computer graphics in entertainment and beyond," which I guess makes it a sort of Cinefex for gamers. Nvidia has a partnership deal with the mag which manifests itself chiefly by coverage of the video outfit's new ION notebook hardware and the word "ATI" not being found anywhere. (Strictly speaking, NVISION doesn't print opinionated reviews of anything the way that PC Gamer would, so you can't call it biased in that respect.)

The internals are a mix of straight articles about graphics, cameras, "the uncanny valley" and so on, and game coverage -- in this issue, the new Batman, The Sims 3, the online game iRacing, and more. A set of one-off spreads called "Frame Rate" gives a quick guide to tweaking three different PC titles for maximum performance on Nvidia's card lineup, complete with annotated screenshots. There are some neat pieces (the aforementioned uncanny valley feature, another one on ancient sci-fi flick A Trip to the Moon), but there's also some filler -- a large piece on upcoming comic book films, "Top 10 Blu-ray Discs" -- that could've shown up in P:TOM or basically any other game or entertainment mag.

Overall I like the concept, which seems a lot more coherent and thought-out than PCXL two years ago. I think it could do with fewer of the traditional filler bits, however, and more of the hard CGI coverage -- more how-to pieces, for example. (NVISION has only a page of that in this issue.)

Game Informer July 2009

Cover: Max Payne 3

GI has a tendency to reach my mailbox the day after I finish this column, meaning that by the time I get to discussing it, the online hype behind its latest world excusive is already a thing of the past.

My take is that this would've been a great piece to put in NVISION. 99% of what it talks about is graphics, animation, Rockstar's dogged pursuit of realism in building the slums of Sao Paulo. It's got lovely pre-rendered screens and even more concept art than usual for GI's features. Approaching the article with the expectation that it's gonna be all about the externals of a game, you can appreciate it. Asking for real gameplay details, though, is asking too much -- and in GI's defense, it'd ask Rockstar PR to do something that it never does at this point in a project's development.

Otherwise, the mag's biggest attraction this month is reviews and previews. I like the Connect news section usually, but it seems a bit lame and GamePro-ish this month -- "the TV-show video games we want to see," "the RPGs we want to see," etc. There's a spread that has no theme other than "here are some cool anecdotes from the dev teams of six different games," which sounds a bit disjointed but is remarkable fun to read.

Play July 2009

Cover: WET

Top piece this month: "All You Need To Know About Game Development Can Be Learned From Bad '80s Coming of Age Films," by Brandon Justice, which is actually about game QA of all things.

Besides the cover feature there's also 10 pages devoted to "The Ties That Bind," the first of a multi-parter where Play's editors sound off on the games that have influenced them the most. It's good writing, but the design is wall-of-text and ultimately it's nothing that you couldn't read on NeoGAF from any number of people.

GamePro August 2009

Cover: Mass Effect 2

It seems like the "Opening Shots" for this issue, the section at the start of the mag where GP prints really big screenshots of upcoming hot games with little captions, is getting really big. The issue is 96 pages, and real content doesn't begin until Page 17.

Said content is neat, though, from a quick look at Katamari art to a look at the best spectators in video games (the crowds of Miis in Wii Fit, for example). The sci-fi preview roundup in the middle is similarly engaging, but unadvertised on the cover is five pages of sports game previews that frankly couldn't be more wall-of-text and boring.

Retro Gamer Issue 65

Cover: Super Metroid

It's a very nice Metroid retrospective decorating this issue, one that extends for eight pages (followed by six more pages with series head Yoshio Sakamoto) and is laden with trivia and shots of armored suits and everything.

Retro Gamer has a new regular column called "Let All Play" where they assign their forum goons a single game to play and print all the best opinions they get about it. It's Castle of Illusion this month, and despite the inherent filler-ness of these four pages, I found myself reading the whole thing and wishing I actually bothered to get involved with the forum. This is one of the few examples I can recall of a print mag recycling content from its homepage and the results actually being worth it.

PlayStation: The Official Magazine August 2009

Cover: Final Fantasy XIII

I have a tendency to overlook PTOM in these updates, which I regret. It is not the most eye-catching of publications, but out of Future's platform-specific mags, I think it does the best job of providing a complete coverage package for users of the platform. You've got bits on PS3 hardware, software, Blu-ray, and online all in one package -- and there is palpable advantage to it all being PS3-specific, since in may ways the platform's still in its own little island in the game industry.

So it is with this issue, which presents its ever-consistent package of material -- all very useful, but not so much of it really eye-catching to the hardcore Internet game news hound. The FFXIII piece is very nice, though -- considering this is the first really concentrated US print-mag look at the game, the design's lovely and the coverage neat, although the specifics of the "world first" content were in Famitsu before E3.

There's another dev profile/roundup this month, following the one in the last issue, that's also worth reading. Find out all about Ubisoft Shanghai's zombie splinter cell and EA Tiburon's animatronic pony!

ImagineFX June 2009

Last but not least, the June '09 issue of this UK digital-art mag, plugged in Edge a couple months back, is available now on US shelves. I bring up this tiny little mag (audited circulation: 16,809) for the 40-ish pages of game-art content inside, which massive graphical spreads devoted to God of War III, Mirror's Edge, Halo 3, and more. There's also a crapload of how-tos on game environments, creating rad-looking 3D tanks and things, designing characters, you name it.

If you're dreaming of becoming an art designer in the game business, buying this would be a superb way to make those dreams, er, dreamier.

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

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