[“The Blue Key” is a new biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Connor Cleary that explores the wide arena of gamer culture -- where it's been, where it is now, and where it might be going. This is the first installment of a series exploring the violence in modern gaming -- the potential benefits as well as the potential problems.]

You are a man alone in the wilderness with only your carefully tended fire for company. Your clothes are made of fur and hide, and you have become separated from the rest of your hunting party. It looks like you have to spend the night alone— A twig snaps in the woods behind you. You turn around baring your teeth and tense up for a fight.

In this particular scenario, the aggressive tendencies of masculine nature are priceless assets. If that happens to be a predator sneaking up behind you, you’re ready to defend yourself; on the other hand, if it happens to be prey you may have just found dinner. However, in modern civilized culture those very tendencies that used to save our lives have become—for the most part—social liabilities. No matter how much we might want to, we are not allowed to beat our chests and throw feces at a crappy boss.

In video games we have a safe and healthy outlet for this aggression, we can transfer everything into the game and just vent—a kind of interactive catharsis. This is why you’ll often find the most mild-mannered geeks suddenly bright eyed and giddy at the sight of an exploding skull a la Fallout 3, or laughing maniacally while playing GTA and enacting schemes worthy of moustache-twirling villains. It is the purging of everything negative that we suppress in our daily lives.

We now know that we can’t entirely dismiss the influence of our hunter-gatherer past on our current behaviors. Millions of years of evolution cannot be undone by several centuries of civilization and culture. Our “lower” brain is still dominated by emotion and instinct, and it is only by the grace of our pre-frontal cortex that we are able to suppress the negative emotions that naturally occur through the course of our daily lives.

Deep down, our instincts are remarkably similar to those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. So, it would be only a slight overgeneralization to say that males are—by nature—more aggressive than females, and that females have—by nature—more of a gathering instinct than males.

Beyond these in-born tendencies, we also have to consider cultural concepts of what little boys and girls should and shouldn’t do. When boys roughhouse it is generally considered normal and all but encouraged, meanwhile girls are usually discouraged from such “unladylike behavior.” This is not to say that there aren’t scores of female gamers who enjoy popping off a few thousand rounds a day in some FPS, but there is a reason that these games tend to be dominated by a male audience.

So how do those of us on the testosterone-weighted side of the scale deal with our socially unacceptable instincts toward aggression when we are suddenly all-grown-up and roughhousing isn’t cute anymore? Well, some of us are into sports, and some of us play violent video games—I’m pretty sure we all love explosions and action movies though.

Think about it, what do males do when we win? We raise our clenched fists in victory and grit our teeth, often we shout or growl—cue the Tim Allen sound byte—and if there happen to be other men around we usually exchange celebratory high fives or something equally primitive. This is what the fulfillment of instinct looks like—and it looks the same for the athlete who just won the big game, and the geek who just won the big boss-battle.

Our non-gaming loved ones tend to be more than a little disturbed by our hyper-violent games. But this is primarily because there is a fundamental difference in the way we see these violent situations in games. In this hilarious article from GameSpy, author Michael Drucker makes a brilliant comparison: “In the same way you don't actually disappear from the universe when you're hit by a dodge ball, you know that you're not actually killing enemy soldiers in Call Of Duty.” Parents aren’t disturbed when little Timmy violently tackles another player in football, but cringe when he blows up alien monsters.

But, according to this article from the New York Times there may actually be legitimate sociological benefits to having video games as a healthy outlet. A labor economist named Lawrence Katz has put forth a tentative theory that video games may be contributing to a steady drop in crime rates. This is in spite of high unemployment numbers and the financial difficulties of our economic recession—factors which have historically produced a rise in crime.

So instead of contributing to an increase in violent behavior, as so many vocal game-haters would have you believe, it appears that video games might just do the exact opposite. By allowing us to fulfill our most deep-seated destructive and negative tendencies in a virtual world, we purge ourselves of these urges and are therefore less likely to lose control in real life.

To speak further on the old “blame video games for every act of violence” shtick, a special issue of the Review of General Psychology examined various studies regarding videogames and sheds some interesting light on the topic. One study confirmed something many of us have always said: People who are going to become hostile or physically violent after playing video games or watching violent movies are people who had serious behavioral issues to begin with.

According to researcher Patrick Markey, PhD, "Those who are negatively affected have pre-existing dispositions, which make them susceptible to such violent media," these “pre-existing dispositions” are generally stated as: high neuroticism, low agreeableness, and low conscientiousness. In other words, exactly the kind of people you already knew shouldn’t be playing violent games.

On a more positive note, we have Christopher Ferguson, PhD, researcher and guest editor of the special issue, who remarks on the potential benefits of video games for kids. Ferguson writes, "Recent research has shown that as video games have become more popular, children in the United States and Europe are having fewer behavior problems, are less violent and score better on standardized tests. Violent video games have not created the generation of problem youth so often feared."

So there you have it, straight from the desk of Dr. Ferguson, PhD, video games are clearly not some abominable evil that is poisoning the youth and—from the desk of Mr. Katz—they might actually be good for society.

We all have sources of frustration in our lives, and whatever those sources may be, we are lucky to have a healthy way to vent. We can slaughter demons instead of breaking dishes, demolish buildings on mars instead of putting holes in our own walls, or go on a virtual vehicular rampage instead of giving in to real-life road rage—even if that jerk totally did cut us off.

[Author's Disclaimer: It is nearly impossible to discuss general concepts on topics like gender roles without some kind of generalization -- definitely the case in this article. Nonetheless, I've tried to bring some interesting concepts to the table - feel free to comment on them below.]

Posted by Connor Cleary at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[We're partnering with game criticism site Critical Distance to present some of the week's most inspiring writing about the art and design of video games from commentators worldwide. This week, Ben Abraham examines several bloggers' discussions of women in games, the deconstruction of level design, thoughts on Limbo, and more.]

Since last week's installment, Justin Keverne completed his annotated walkthrough-meets-examination-meets-deconstruction of Deus Ex's first level – Liberty Island. Weighing in at six lengthy parts, it's very thorough.

Missed this one in the shuffle last week but it's too brilliant to omit; Auntie Pixelante teaches us some level design lessons by way of Castlevania.

After Leigh Alexander's claims about Activision discouraging its developers from taking creative risks and, in particular, having female protagonists, Dilyan Damyanov at the Split/Screen Co-Op blog writes in defence of the much maligned company, in a post titled 'Activision's all-male games are quite okay, really'. And Dilyan's blogger-mate Vanya Damyanova concurs, in a follow-on post about 'Evil game makers and women's rights'. Are they convincing?

Pippin Barr writes about 'Playing With Your Dinner' on his personal blog: "Being a modern couple, we watch a whole shitload of movies and TV series when we eat our meals. Yeah, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks – we're watching something. That's what meals are for. Surprisingly, though, Tales of Monkey Island has taken over all of that."

Over at the PopMatters' Moving Pixels blog, G. Christopher Williams looks at 'Brutalizing Children in Limbo' and, um, stares longingly at Chun Li's thighs. "Chun-Li's sexuality becomes something more than an incidental quality to be admired merely because she inherently possesses an extraordinary physical trait. Chun-Li's thighs might be eroticized, but they represent an earned physical extraordinariness."

Williams' blogger-mate Nick Dinicola comes back with another piece on Limbo in 'Dreaming in Limbo'.

Mark Cullinane at the No Added Sugar blog has a rather different reaction to Limbo, turning his attention to the critical response to the indie XBLA title and finds its reception unwarrantedly hyperbolic. Cullinane says, "Starved for such avant-garde minimalism, visual novelty and effective mood-setting elsewhere, Limbo has become a receptacle for the hopes and dreams of a videogaming generation: and it is here that the problems begin- because it simply can't bear such a weight on its slim shoulders."

On the subject of the critical response, George Kokoris looks at the Echo Chamber nature of our responses to media and video games in 'On Echo Chamers'. Kokoris explains himself, saying, "I've found that I'm really uncomfortable with the world of videogames. With all aspects of it; commercial, indie, academic and journalistic. My reasons for this are still largely intuitive, but I know enough to say that homogeneity is at least partly to blame."

At the Border House blog, Quinnae Moongazer asks 'Ain't I a Gamer?' It's an unfortunate tale that seems to indicate Microsoft doesn't think that any women use their Xbox LIVE service: "Chantaal describes a customer service letter that was sent to her by Microsoft that assumed she was writing about an issue her nonexistent son was having, instead of making the correct inference that she was the gamer in question."

Jake Adelstein writing for Boing Boing involves some real life Yakuza in an assessment of Yakuza 3.
"S: I don't know any ex-yakuza running orphanages.
K: There was one a few years ago. A good guy.
M: You sure it wasn't just a tax shelter?
K: Sure it was a tax shelter but he ran it like a legitimate thing. You know."

Steven Poole's 'Don't Believe Everything You Read' for Edge Online made me chuckle this week. It's a short piece about an imaginary world in which books are treated like the moral degenerates games are often assumed to be.

And similarly, Kieron Gillen at Rock Paper Shotgun writes about parallel universes in games. Well not in so many words, but that's the implication I took from what he's talking about here – it's regarding StarCraft 2's method for dealing with certain player choices in the campaign.

Emily Short writes this week on her personal blog about Braid, Tom Bissell's book Extra Lives, and explains her unique diagnosis of the issue afflicting many (dare I say, most?) indie/art games: "This ghastly indie-art-game prose: it's writing that tries to communicate ideas in the same way that game mechanics communicate ideas. Such writing offers allusions and suggestions, hints for the player to assemble, but it shies away from specifics or a through-line plot. Characters often go unnamed, or are named something thuddingly symbolic, or are Everyman. Theme is presented heavy-handedly (you wouldn't want players to miss it!) and via the most cliche images."

Robert Yang at his blog Radiator takes a very quick look at a particular videogame title and why it's so good. Which videogame? 'Sins of a Solar Empire'. It does have a certain ring to it. Click through to hear why it makes for such a great title.

Adrian Forest at the RedKingsDream blog makes a case that Ian Bogost's Facebook game Cow Clicker 'Isn't Exploiting You Enough'. Forest's exceptional thesis applies only to a particular kind of social game, one that “…is running a social structure, and treating it like a business.” Essentially Cow Clicker, while an excellent pastiche of the act of playing this type of game, fails to replicate the social forces involved in playing a game like this. "A game that might follow the logic of Bogost's procedural rhetoric in a way more relevant to the social gaming system might be something along the lines of a management sim about running a social gaming development company."

David Carlton at Malvasia Bianca looks at 'Operas, Musicals and Videogames' and wonders why, "If these well-respected art forms can use a threadbare narrative as a vehicle for glorious set pieces, why on earth shouldn't we do the same?"

Kirk Hamilton on how Grand Theft Auto IV should have ended – I never got around to playing GTAIV so this one's all Greek to me.

Linda Holmes at NRP debunks some of the myths surrounding the market for the Scott Pilgrim film. It's interesting in that it exposes the pervasive level of game-awareness that exists outside the stereotypical 'gamer' culture.

Gus Mastrapa looks at how 'Game Designers Can Be Cursed By Their Successes' for the Joystick Division blog. Mastrapa says, "Somehow the Scorsese principal doesn't quite translate over to games. In games, it seems that you're almost forever indebted to your first hit. Only multi-hit geniuses like Shigeru Miyamoto get to flit from one idea to the next like a beaming fairy with a magic wand."

And finally, Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer is compiling something like a list of “What makes each game fun” and is asking for your help. It's called 'The Fun Factor Project'.

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

To promote preorders for 2 Player Productions' chipmusic documentary DVD Reformat The Planet, Penny Arcade TV -- which streams programs shot and produced by 2PP -- has posted the entire the film (broken up into seven parts) for free.

Again, the movie explores New York City's chiptune scene, interviews influential figures in the scene, and charts the genesis of the first Blip Festival concert. In addition to the documentary, the two-disc DVD also includes an extra short film called RTP 1.5, commentary tracks, music videos, deleted scenes, chip music tutorials, and more.

Online video game apparel shop Fan Gamer is selling the set, along with bundles that offer posters, shirts, and pins, with a starting price of $15. If you're anywhere near NYC this Sunday, don't forget that 2PP is throwing a launch party/show with Glomag, Bit Shifter, Nullsleep, and No Carrier this Sunday!

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

Author Edward Packard, who helped create the famous Choose Your Own Adventure book series and wrote many of its titles (including The Cave of Time), has worked with Simon & Schuster and Expanded Apps to start a new line of interactive e-books for the iPhone/iPad called U-Ventures.

The new series looks to adapt, revise, and expand the classic Choose Your Own Adventure books, adding "sound, light, and other special effects, even music and alien voices." The revamped novels will also feature more variations, endings, and "special situations."

The first U-Ventures release is Return to the Cave of Time, which is already available through the App Store for $3.99. Simon & Schuster expects to release at least two more e-books, Through the Black Hole and The Forbidden Castle, this summer and fall, respectively.

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

['Defying Design' is a bi-weekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Jeffrey Matulef analyzing gaming conventions and the pros and cons of breaking them. This week's column is about games that only fully reveal their stories upon multiple playthroughs.]

When it comes to strange and  underappreciated games from recent years, few could top Japanese developer Cavia's swan song, Nier -- specifically the Xbox 360 version, in this case.

Notable for a variety of reasons involving various shifts in perspectives, a memorable cast of characters, and a wonderful foray into surreal text adventure territory, the aspect of design I find most perplexing is how it only fully reveals its story through subsequent playthroughs.

The first time you complete the game you'll have a somewhat murky grasp on Nier's narrative. However, much more of the story is revealed on its new game+ mode. For example, upon beating the game, several wonderfully written short stories are unlocked, revealing the rich backstory of one of the main character, Kaine.

We hear of her origins and struggles she endured as a child as well as tragedies that befell her prior to her entrance in the game. This focus on Kaine permeates the second playthrough. Throughout the story her character was partially possessed by a demonic scrawl in her arm. On new game+ mode we hear it taunt her. i.e. we hear the voices in her head. It's unsettling and allows the player to gain far more attachment to her without abandoning the linear structure of the game. 

Initially I felt like saving this for a second playthrough seemed like a lazy way to pad out the experience by insincerely dangling a carrot in front of the player and enticing them to play through it multiple times (the back of the box even promises four endings, meaning you have to play through it as many times to achieve them).

But the more I thought about it, I realized it had to be done this way to tell a complex story without compromising the limited third-person perspective. The first time you play through the story it's told through Nier's point of view. Thus we shouldn't know any more about Kaine than what Nier is able to glean from his time spent with her. The second time, however, it's told via her perspective.

Cavia, being a small developer lacking the time and resources to create all new environments, missions, assets, etc. had to do more with less. As such, the new voice serves as a commentary of sorts as one would expect in a DVD. But unlike a commentary, it doesn't break the fourth wall, but rather operates within the game's previously established fiction.

Furthermore, in one especially unconventional design choice, the new game+ mode deposits the player a whopping two-thirds of the way through the story, ensuring that Kaine is present almost the entire time (she only leaves when Nier goes to his hometown as the villagers fear her. Presumably she camps out during these sections, so we're not missing much). This way the designers are able to tell the same story from another perspective without altering the core adventure by having you play as her or adding new missions.

There's another major change on the second playthrough that warrants discussion. Upon entering a new level on new game+, the player is treated to a series of cutscenes showing that level's bosses' backstory. In one especially haunting scenario we see a lost boy shade (the shadowy primary enemies in the game) befriend a giant benevolent robot. He names the robot "Beepy" and rides upon its shoulders in a Freak, The Mighty fashion.

Years later Beepy discovers two brothers scavenging for parts in the derelict factory where they live. The boys are on unsafe footing, Beepy tries to save them, but alas, the older lad dies. The younger brother sees Beepy's Iron Giant-like gait looming over his dead brother and holds him responsible. Hellbent on revenge, he hires Nier and company to destroy this machine once and for all. 

The first time you play through this sequence it begins with the brother hiring you, oblivious to Beepy and his young companion's plight. The creature is destroyed, you gain one of the magical seals needed to progress, and for all you know, all is well. 

It may initially seem like a poor choice to relegate Beepy's moving tale to an unlockable bonus, but it makes sense from a dramatic standpoint. If the player were able to see the villain's story first it would not only feel incongruous with the rest of the game told from Nier's perspective, but would ruin the mystery of what devilish monstrosity lies beneath the steal catacombs. The second time playing the mystery is already ruined, so it rewards you in a different way; by unveiling new perspectives on what previously transpired.

This isn't the first game to fill in gaps of a story on subsequent playthroughs. Resident Evil 4's PS2 and Wii ports came bundled with an unlockable add-on called Separate Ways, where you play as Leon's ally/rival, Ada. Her story parallels Leon's and shows what she was up to when off-screen during the main campaign.

Most of the scenery and enemies were lifted straight from Leon's adventure with only one new level and boss. While I wouldn't call RE4's plot or characters particularly interesting, Separate Ways is still fascinating as a remixed version of familiar ground, offering enough new twists to warrant a repeat trip to its ghastly Spanish villa.

It should be noted that more doesn't always equal better. The European version of Ico offered similar bonus content by translating it's ghostly romantic interest, Yorda's, made-up language into English. I'm less enthused about this as I feel like the communication barrier made the story more open to interpretation. Hearing what Yorda says to Ico is like hearing whatever Bill Murray whispered to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation. It's never as satisfying as what's in your mind. The problem with Ico's European unlockable isn't that it adds new layers to the story, but rather undermines the ones it already had. 

Retroactively altering a story is a bold decision and one wrong move can cheapen an already great work. Just look at what befell the original Star Wars trilogy when George Lucas didn't know when to quit. Still, a revisionist retelling of a story is a noble endeavor and one I love to see developers take a stab at. Books can't be altered once written, and while DVDs may have commentaries and deleted scenes, they exist outside the core narrative.

Games, however, with their rigid requirement hungry structures can allow players to peek behind the curtain only when they're ready to, revealing different perspectives and more information than they could as a single unchanging story.

[Jeffrey Matulef is a freelance writer for G4TV.com, blogs about games at JumpingMoustache.com and is a regular on the Big Red Potion podcast. You can contact him at jmatulef at gmail dot com.]

Posted by Jeffrey Matulef at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In a busy week for new job postings, Gamasutra's jobs board plays host to roles across the world and in every major discipline, including opportunities at Freeverse, SCEA Santa Monica and many 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 this week include:

Harmonix Music Systems: QA Director
"Renowned for the hit Rock Band series and the critically-acclaimed titles Frequency, Amplitude, and Phase, Harmonix has pioneered music & rhythm gaming, finding new ways for musicians and novices alike to experience the thrills of music making. Everyone is encouraged to contribute to the design and creative development of our games.

We are looking for people with a passion for music and musical performance to add to our world-class art team. We are an equal opportunity employer and offer a competitive benefits package, an active workspace, and a chance to work with some of the most inspiring individuals in the gaming world.

Freeverse: Software Engineer
"Freeverse is a wholly owned studio in the ngmoco family. We strive to develop and publish seamless software, with a particular concentration on the Mac and iPhone platforms. Our developed and published titles have been honored with six Apple Design Awards. Headquartered in New York City, Freeverse is at the forefront of creating compelling, cutting-edge games."

Sucker Punch Productions: Lighting Artist
"Sucker Punch Productions is seeking an experienced and dedicated Lighting Artist to join our team! You will have the opportunity to illuminate the visual style and objectives of our next project – Infamous 2."

Silicon Knights: Art Director
"Best known for Metal Gear Solid: the Twin Snakes, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem and Too Human. We're currently working on several new and exciting AAA multiplatform projects. If you're talented and inspired to create exceptional games, we invite you to apply!

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 Leigh Alexander at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Independent developer Tripwire Interactive (Red Orchestra, Killing Floor) has been demonstrating some of the new maps and features in its next first-person shooter title, Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad, at Gamescom.

Here, the studio shows off the new game's cover system (blind firing, aiming at enemies below you), Battlefield-style squad spawning, the ability to tell friends from foes by how they're holding their guns, the dynamic soundtrack that adjusts depending on which side is winning, and more.

Tripwire is scheduled to release Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad in the second quarter of 2011, and is also working on an expansion titled Rising Storm (focusing on World War II's Pacific campaign) with its active modding community for next year, too.

[Via Flyxwire]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Along with its browser-based Jagged Alliance Online, German publisher BitComposer Games announced that it's working on a "totally revamped version" of classic tactical PC RPG Jagged Aliiance 2 that aims to give the game a new look and "address the weak points of the original.

Jagged Alliance 2: Reloaded will retain its isometric perspective but offer a contemporary 3D graphic style, a redesigned user interface, and an extensive tutorial designed to better introduce players to the game's complex rules system.

BitCompose plans to release Jagged Alliance 2: Reloaded some time next year. You can see more comparison shots of the Reloaded with the original after the break.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Fuel TV and production company Justin Harder LA put together this awesome commercial obviously inspired by Nintendo's classic motocross game Excitebike. It's missing the game's great music, but it has the chunky sprites (transformed for 3D), the ramps, and even the track arrows.

Justin Harder LA has posted photos of it building the wooden bike model, rider outfit, and trophy -- not everything here was computer generated! You can check out those images on the ad firm's Flickr set.

I had never heard of Fuel TV before seeing this commercial, but I checked out its site afterward and found out it's a cable action sports channel featuring "skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, BMX, freestyle motocross, and wakeboarding". Maybe it will do ads for T&C Surf Designs and Skate or Die next!

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

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog co-editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days 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 monochromatic 2D platformer, a short adventure game that features Another World-style vector graphics, a browser game that focuses on the subject of achievements, a puzzle game about two lovers, and a maze exploration game in which the objective is to seek out a legendary tie.

Here's the highlights from the last seven days:

Game Pick: 'Tower of Heaven' (Askiisoft, browser)
"Tower of Heaven is a monochromatic 2D platformer that features eleven levels to play through, originally released by Askiisoft in 2009 as a Windows-only game. This Flash port contains new musical arrangements, achievements, and a level creation system that can be accessed after you've beaten the game once."

Game Pick: 'By the Numbers' (Aki Ahonen, freeware)
"By the Numbers is a short adventure game created using the AGS engine, featuring full voice acting and characters rendered using a combination of motion-capture script and simple vector graphics. You play as lieutenant Timothy Orman, a cop who has to question an eyewitness to a kidnapping for clues that'll lead you to the criminal."

Game Pick: 'Achievement Unlocked 2' (John Cooney, browser)
"Achievement Unlocked 2 is the second in the series which made that little blue elephant famous, and this time he's got even more achievements for you to unlock. While many of the achievements are very tedious and tiresome, there are some genuinely interesting ideas thrown in there. You can even play it co-op multiplayer this time around."

Game Pick: '[Together]' (Michael Molinari, browser)
"[Together] (pictured) is Bean's entry for the Casual Gameplay Design Competition, where players have to help a pair of lovers pluck out hearts from the ocean and the skies. You would also have to actively avoid being swallowed by a giant worm that is chasing the couple, but a quick spin of the mouse will fend it off and give you some breathing space."

Game Pick: 'Dot Order Tie' (Dylan Van Cleave, browser)
"Dot Order Tie is a 2D adventure game set inside a maze, where your objective is to seek out pieces of a legendary tie that was thought to have been lost forever with the passing of time. After collecting all 999 pieces of the tie, you'll have to head back to the starting point to end the search."

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

It isn't nearly as cool as Bandai's Gun O'Clock (then again, what is?), but this miniature arcade alarm clock is still pretty neat. Standing only 15cm tall, the "Planet Attack" cabinet lets you set the time/alarm with its joysticks and plays "a barrage of retro gaming sounds" to wake you up in the morning.

UK-based online shop Lazybone isn't selling the item for cheap, though, asking $22.27 (before shipping/handling), and not even including the two required AA batteries! That seems kind of expensive for machine that doesn't even play games like these other mini-arcade cabinets!

[Via Technabob]

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

THQ and Brutal Legend developer Double Fine has posted this first footage of the studio's next title, Costume Quest for XBLA and PSN. This downloadable title -- Double Fine's first -- is a Halloween RPG that seems a lot like cult-favorite Earthbound, at least in its charm and young heroes, but with a 3D setting.

In Costume Quest, players are out to rescue their kidnapped sister from a monster (who confused her for a real, giant piece of candy corn), and can recruit up to four friends for the adventure. They'll explore the neighborhood, complete quests, gather candy, and more.

The battles are the real highlight, though, as characters transform into giant figures based on their costumes (e.g. robots, knights, rainbow unicorns) to fight enemies. As they progress through the game, they can collect more costume parts, too.

Expect THQ and Double Fine to release Costume Quest in the fourth quarter of 2010.

[Via CVG]

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

[After we reported on the first day of GDC Europe, the other two days have gone by like a flash. Here's a round-up and info on how we're coming back for next year, and look for free GDC Vault videos from the show soon, too.]

The Game Developers Conference Europe 2010 has concluded a second successful year, confirming record overall attendance across paid attendees, media, speakers and exhibitors to the August 16th-18th show.

At the same time, organizers have revealed a return to Cologne, Germany for a third GDC Europe show -- again opposite GamesCom -- on August 15-17, 2011.

Produced by UBM TechWeb Game Network, organizers of the leading worldwide Game Developers Conference series and makers of this website, GDC Europe is the largest professionals-only game event in Europe, presenting the latest trends and technology in all aspects of the online gaming space for developers, consumers, publishers and trade professionals.

Highlights of day two and three major talks at the show, reported by sister website Gamasutra.com, include the following notable talks:

Day Two

-In the day's first keynote, Heiko Hubertz, CEO and founder of Bigpoint, advised attendees that to conduct business in America as a European company, the time to do it is "right now." Throughout the talk, Hubertz elaborated on the differences between the U.S. and European markets and educated the audience about how to be successful in America as a European, based on Bigpoint's experience there. Hubert advised "There are only two existing markets in America, the console market and the Facebook market."

-In his keynote, Killzone developer Guerrilla Games' managing director Hermen Hulst discussed his studio's genesis, and its successes and failures in evolving into a Sony-owned AAA console powerhouse. Hulst began with the mantra: "to survive and to grow... you need to consistently improve yourself. He took attendees through examples of how Guerrilla's experiences have informed their history and the key decisions made from the time Sony signed the title that would become Killzone through to today. Plus, he revealed the studio is expanding to work on a "game with a scope and a level of ambition that once again makes us nervous" -- specifically a "brand new IP."

- Eric Chahi, creator of Another World, spoke about his newest project: He's director of Ubisoft's wildly ambitious downloadable title tentatively titled Project Dust, which allows players to re-terraform the world around them, creating islands, rivers, and life using simple tools that interact with each other intelligently. Chahi's talk centered on the idea that a correct meeting of technology and game design can allow for the creation of something truly unique. To do that, Chahi said one must "keep only the essentials for the purposes of optimization, and to keep these things simple for the player."

- Zenimax Online head Matt Firor talked about the complex definitional relationships between the 'casual' and 'hardcore' in games, showcasing how games like Zynga's FarmVille have "serious hardcore gaming characteristics." Going back to the beginnings of the industry, Firor pointed out that early, iconic titles like Donkey Kong or Super Mario Bros. weren't actually that casual -- they were, if anything, "fun but hard." These days, he says, "games aren't casual or hardcore... the gamers are."

Day Three

- Researcher and Malmo University associate professor Mikael Jakobsson says achievements aren't extrinsic to games, and suggests the Xbox Live Achievement experience is akin to its own MMO. If you think about it as a metagame, then the achievements aren't outside the gaming experience, "they're just part of the other gaming experience," he suggests, discovering that console users who judgmental of PC gamers and "addicted" MMO players might be doing the same kinds of things.

- Diverse engine makers, including Epic's Mark Rein, Terminal Reality's Joe Kreiner, Crytek's Carl Jones, StoneTrip's Philip Belhassen and Unity's David Helgason -- valiantly refereed by Google's Mark DeLoura -- traded jokes, caused chaos and squared off as they discussed new frontiers like the web and the 3DS, noting along the way that "we all seem to be converging into the same space."

- PopCap CEO Jason Kapalka explained why Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook hasn't taken the same hit to its user numbers as many other games on the platform since Facebook changed some of its viral aspects -- and described in fascinating detail how the company built an early Facebook success in a time when "nobody actually liked Facebook games." Social games are just a little bit "evil", suggests Kapalka, highlighting how the team had to get over the "disturbing" sense that "a large part of the social game industry is about finding loopholes in the system."

Another highlight of the show was a talk headed by Google's Mark DeLoura, in which the developer advocate showed off the progress the search engine giant has made in the gaming space. The company plans on launching an app store for its increasingly popular Chrome web browser in October, and games will be a major focus of the company going forward.

In addition to the conference content, GDC Europe provided several opportunities for creative exchange and business development, with venues including the GDC Europe Expo Floor, VIP Lounge, and the GDC Europe Business Lounge which continus to take place at Gamescom until Saturday, plus a host of industry parties. For more information on the show, which has just concluded, please consult the official GDC Europe website.

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

Daniel Pesina, the original actor who played Johnny Cage (before Midway fired him due to the Bloodstorm controversy) and now a martial arts teacher, is posting videos he show himself from the early '90s motion capture sessions of the original Mortal Kombat game.

So far, he's posted nine videos of himself and the actor who played Kano performing sweep kicks, punches, and other moves that were captured and digitized for the game, all in costume. Pesina says he plans to upload a lot more, with Sonia clips coming up next! You can watch everything he's put up so far here.

[Via Shuri]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Inspired by that recent story of an arcade collector snatching up a super-rare Sundance cabinet from an abandoned, "meth-ridden, decrepit, [and] feces-riddled" lodge, KLOV forumer Hyde has created a game based on the controversy and released it for free: Arcade Bandit And The Raiders Of The Lost Bar.

The game has players navigating a maze of trash in an abandoned building, collecting tokens/capacitors/moon pies/boost energy drinks, and capturing the Sundance machine. Along the way, they'll need to avoid "druggies and their bullets", while trying to complete the stage within 60 seconds.

Hyde even came up with an entertaining back-story that sounds awfully familiar:

"A couple of days ago, I managed to track down a highly rare flyer for the game Arcade Bandit and the Raiders of the Lost Bar. It appears that the game is based upon the whole Sundance controversy unfolding here on the forums.

Anyways, after days of laborious effort, I located and dumped the roms for this game onto my computer. After writing a quick emulator program to run the game, Arcade Bandit and the Raiders of the Lost Bar is now 100% ready to play."

Download it for free here!

[Via Arcade Heroes]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Developers Tak Fung and Rex Crowle have released Epic Win, their to-do list and RPG hybrid that's been much anticipated by people looking for extra motivation to complete everyday tasks (and by people who just love the idea of adding RPG elements to everything, even real life).

The iPhone app lets you set your chores and errands as quests that you can complete and earn XP/treasure for, and level up your virtual character. Epic Win features three different avatars (two more that you can purchase) that evolve depending on what tasks you complete.

The dressed-up to-do list also has several useful features like the ability to enter repeating tasks, display reminders for overdue events, set time-critical events for specific days, and add "aspirational quests" that you hope to complete some day.

You can buy Epic Win from the App Store now for $2.99.

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

[Brendan Keogh wrote up a talk from Canabalt's Adam Saltsman at Melbourne's Freeplay independent game festival about the nature of play and media -- a concept far bigger than, but highly relevant to, games.]

Adam Saltsman, creator of games such as Canabalt and Gravity Hook HD, began his morning keynote at Melbourne's Freeplay independent game festival by asking of himself a simple but significant question: "Why do I make games?"

"Scott McCloud says this matters a lot," said Saltsman, alluding to the comics theorist. "I like Scott McCloud a lot, and I am going talk a little bit more about him as I go," Saltsman warned.

As Saltsman's keynote topic branched across the broad scope of "play and games and video games and us", McCloud's theories from Understanding Comics would be just one of the many sources Saltsman reflected on. Johan Huizinga's seminal 1938 study of play, Homo Ludens, and Roger Caillois's 1961 Man, Play, and Games also featured prominently yet abridged as Saltsman explored the answer to his own question.

"If we are going to talk about video games, we have to talk about games first," explained Saltsman. "And if we are going to talk about games, then we have to talk about play first."

Referring to Huizinga's work (and stressing the brevity with which he was appropriating it), Saltsman outlined a "broad but not too broad" definition of play. Not games, he stressed, but play.

Most crucially, "Play is beyond the human sphere," explained Saltsman. "This means animals play, and they play for the same reasons we do... This means play was around before us. First there was play and then there were humans."

However, while play may exist separate from humans, Saltsman argued, it is not disconnected from the real world, but linked to the very foundations of culture and civilization. "Play is not a techniques or an art form. It is a fundamental part of who we are as mammals," he said.

For Saltsman, games are just one of many things that can be played. "The thing I like about games as an isolated concept is that games are only about play." Callois's Man, Play, and Games defines four inclusive forms of game, competition, chance, simulation, and vertigo, that exist on a sliding scale of fun from 'joy' to 'challenge. Or, in Saltsman's terms "from spin-until-you-puke fun to solving-a-Rubik's-cube fun".

However, for Saltsman, the crucial thing games add to play is uncertainty. "If the outcome is predetermined, then it is just play and not a game." Uncertainty requires the player to improvise and to take initiative, said Saltsman.

"Okay, now let's talk about actual video games," he continued. While video games can be situated within this history of games and pre-history of play, they also have "an entirely different bloodline" in their relationship with other modern mediums.

"Lots of video game creators are focused on imitating books and movies. This is a good idea and a bad idea," warned Saltsman. His concern, drawn from McCloud's Understanding Comics ("Which is the most inspiring thing you will ever read about video games, obviously") is that "it is too easy for new creators to just copy surface design of other artists and art forms instead of exploring the unique abilities of the medium."

Saltsman emphasized again that video games could draw a lot of inspiration from comic books. "Over thousands of years, comics have used every conceivable style of presentation to tell every conceivable kind of story." Similarly, claimed Saltsman, "Games can tell a lot of different stories and we can tell them in a lot of different styles and they can be about a lot of different things."

"But too often we are only telling this kind of story," he said, showing a slide of Modern Warfare 2. "Or this kind of story," he added as the screenshot shifted seamlessly and indistinguishably into one of Killzone 2. "These are two different games, people!"

While acknowledging that, just as for movies, communicating with the audience visually is a significant aspect of video games, Saltsman is concerned that we still use 'cinematic' as a term to praise games. "We are praising games' movie-like qualities, but these are just surface qualities... We are simply scraping off the top level of cinema."

Saltsman's point is that while games and films share a lot of common ground both on and beneath the surface, video games must look beyond film in order to find their own language for the experiences they are truly capable of."For me, the video game medium is this incredible awe-inspiring thing," he said. "It is the pre-human force of play combined with the entire history of art in all its myriad forms."

Bringing his bibliography together, Saltsman summed up, "Video games combine play and tension with art to create a whole new medium… the first pure marriage of game and art."

"We can create original works of art that demand audience participation in ways that have only been imagined by our most gifted futurists. Art that can be rendered in any imaginable style, about any imaginable subject, art that begets more art through mere consumption, art that demands both players and an audience, and art that needs to be filled with mystery and explored not just by the creator but by the player."

So why does Adam Saltsman make games?

"That's kind of the long answer. The short answer is: 'I need to play'."

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

European publishers Gamigo and bitComposer Games -- the latter of which acquired full rights to the property earlier this year -- announced a a browser-based, MMO interpretation of classi tactical RPG series Jagged Alliance.

Titled Jagged Alliance Online, the new title promises to transfer the original games' mixture of tactics, strategy, role-play, and management to what the companies describe as "a modern MMO world", offering both both turn-based battles and real-time action from an isometric perspective.

In this browser-based version, players once again manage a team of mercenaries, earning cash as they complete missions. As with previous titles, gamers hire soldiers of fortune, train them, and equip them with a variety of weapons and equipment as they progress.

One new social feature Jagged Alliance Online will include is the ability for players to rent mercenaries from others, or rent out their own soldiers. The game will also enable players to "support or fight others on campaigns or missions".

Cliffhanger Productions, which has previously contributed to titles such as Gothic 3, Spellforce 2, 7million, and Risen, is the primary developer for the game. You can register for Jagged Alliance Online's upcoming beta here.

"The Jagged Alliance series is a cult classic and an online version has been on Gamigo's wishlist for a while now," says Patrick Streppel, an executive board member at Gamigo, which typically publishes free-to-play titles. "So we're all the more excited to have the global rights to this exciting project and will do everything in our power to live up to fans' expectations!"

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

Different Cloth, the indie studio behind Independent Games Festival Mobile award winner Lilt Line (available for iOS devices here, coming soon to WiiWare courtesy of Gaijin Games), has revealed Helicoid, an upcoming App Store released designed to get gamers spinning and shaking their iDevices like "a total butthorn maniac."

The trailer makes it look like all you have to do is spin an iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch as fast as you can, but there's more to it than that. You need to rotate your system and collect points with your moving circle, shaking your device to advance up the spiral while adjusting to increasing speeds and changes in direction.

Different Cloth goes on to describe the game as a "kind of like an orgasm in your hands but without the guilt or cleanup operation this would normally entail". If all goes as plans, you should be able to download Helicoid (which also offers OpenFeint support for local/global high scores, by the way) in about a week.

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

[Independent Games Festival chairman Brandon Boyer speaks at Melbourne's Freeplay festival, and Brendan Keogh wrote up his keynote urging indie developers to "be yourself" and create the kinds of games that can be meaningful to new fans.}

"You’re probably wondering why I am standing in front of you all as I’ve never actually made a game before,” Independent Games Festival Chairman Brandon Boyer began, kicking off Freeplay's independent game festival in Melbourne.

"Standing" is too gracious a term. He almost hid behind the lectern, his voice soft and hesitant, not in any way hinting at the impassioned plea he was about to make. His thinned, blond breakfast bowl haircut looked like that of a five-year-old. His beard could easily sneak him backstage at a Fleet Foxes concert.

"But I have certainly lived the life of an indie," Boyer, who has previously written for influential game weblog Offworld, Edge, and Gamasutra, and still writes on games for geek culture blog Boing Boing, reassured hastily.

Boyer’s keynote lecture was titled: "All Play Is Personal" and begins with his own personal confession: "Giving up games is the best decision I ever made."

The PowerPoint presentation shifted into a slideshow of old school photos (indeed he did have the same haircut at five years old). Boyer grew up on games. "All my early memories are about computers, arcades, and video games. Video games were the primary way I related to my peers."

However, Boyer’s relationship with games grew strained as he entered his teens, and his interests diversified across underground art movements in a variety of mediums. Among these interests was a "life changing discovery" of a small music zine, Chemical Imbalance, and the record stuck to the front cover that included a song from then still-unknown Californian band Pavement.

"It was massive for me to discover that there was something happening out there under the shiny veneer of the major magazines and MTV, this underground network of tiny record labels operating out of their living rooms. So I gave up on games."

At eighteen, Boyer began a record company and started putting out his friends’ records. Staying with one of these bands, his friend had just imported a new PlayStation console from Japan. "He had a few games, but only one he thought we would truly dig."

This game was PaRappa the Rapper and was the motivation Boyer needed to come back to video games. "If this was what I could now expect from video games, I knew I desperately wanted to be part of it again," he said.

According to Boyer, the indie movement has significant contributions to make to the video game business. Indeed the foundations of the industry were laid by garage and bedroom indie programmers who shipped out their creations one sealed Ziploc bag at a time. "Our history books are littered with these people who by themselves essentially built video games into the massive industry they are today."

The key difference the early game designers have with the modern indie movement, Boyer believes, is the opening up of means of distribution and production. While "our indie ancestors" were constrained to the networks and publishers with access to the retail channel, it has never been easier for anyone to create a game and deliver it to an audience than it is today.

"If you have never even thought of creating a game before, now is the time to try your hands at giving us something new."

Boyer’s ultimate message to the indie developers present was "Be yourself... It’s a schmaltzy, retro cliche but it is so hard to find this in modern gaming culture."

To drive home the point, the screen fills with mug shots of Caucasian, male, unshaven game protagonists. From Niko Bellic to Nathan Drake to Marcus Fenix. "The absolutely amazing capacity of this medium is that it can express anything we can possibly imagine, but too often we are reducing it to this," he said.

Rather than seeing the medium "endlessly stuck recycling its own tropes", Boyer sees indie developers as positioned to put the personal expression in games that the monolithic companies are incapable of. For Boyer, this is how the indie movement is crucial to bringing the entire medium forward and why all play must be personal.

"Existing and creating under your own auspices means the player needs to feel the 'you' in your game. It’s what people respond to. They feel when your game was something you were burning to create. People say, 'I didn’t know video games could do this.' That is exactly what we want."

Boyer urged the audience to explore the true artistic potential of the medium by looking at broader influences such as those he discovered in his own self-imposed gaming exile. Exemplifying his message with a short film of crayon-neon foxes and hawks stalking across a black landscape to a distinctively indie soundtrack, Boyer shook his head sadly. "This is a world I desperately want to play in."

Indie games are situated to show the broader public that games can do more than they ever thought possible. "What we should want is for people to remember that time in their life when they played. and so deeply identified with your game that it became part of them in the same way their favorite albums have in the past. Everyone in this audience can change it by being the cultural force that helps a new generation of people shed their video game shame.”

Boyer closed by clarifying his earlier message: We should not only strive to be ourselves, but to be wonderful. "So please let me know when you have done something wonderful."

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

If you missed out post about the contest last week, or if you've just put off on entering, here's a quick reminder that our giveaway of Scott Pilgrim merchandise ends tonight! We've teamed up with video game art group i am 8-bit to reward our readers with lots of awesome items based on Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim comic book/video game/film franchise.

If you'd like to win one of five sets that include a limited edition Scott Pilgrim shirt designed by i am 8-bit, a Scott Pilgrim baseball cap, a copy of the movie's soundtrack, an iPhone skin, and a theatrical one-sheet, all you need to do is leave a comment in this post about your favorite video game allusion in the series.

Don't forget to leave a valid email in the "email" field, so we can contact you if you win (this will not be publicly displayed on the site)! Oh, and don't forget to check out Ubisoft Montreal's awesome retro brawler Scott Pilgrim vs. The World for PSN (and for XBLA in a week), too!

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

From September 3rd to the 22nd, art collective The Autumn Society and Gallery 1988's Los Angeles location will host "The 3G Show", an exhibit dedicated to three unforgettable '80s film series: Ghostbusters, The Goonies, and Gremlins.

Jude Buffum, whose 8-bit works we've featured here many, many times before, is contributing three pieces for each of the three properties, recreating pivotal moments where "one of the characters makes a crucial discovery (or error)" as a video game scene.

For the above art, Buffum explains, "I always wondered what would have gone down had ghostbuster Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) answered 'Yes!' to Gozer’s inquiry 'Are you a god?' Would he have averted Stay-Puft peril? Sadly, we will never know."

You can see his other two artworks for The 3G Show after the break:

"I’ve probably watched the film Gremlins at least two dozen times, but it was only upon my most recent viewing that I realized that Billy’s girlfriend Kate is probably the most successful survivor of the film.

Sure, Billy racks up the highest body count, but only because he [SPOILER ALERT] blows up the town movie theater. Even Billy’s mom kills more Gremlins in hand-to-claw combat in one of the most unforgettable mother-kicking-ass scenes of all time.

But the fact that Kate survives who knows how many hours behind the bar at Dorry’s Tavern with barely a scratch and discovers (without any knowledge of Mogwai and Gremlin lore) that bright light is their weakness, and uses a Polaroid camera to escape to safety, is a testament to how much of a badass she is."

"In The Goonies, I often wondered what Sloth and Chunk were doing right before they swoop in to save the rest of the Goonies from the Fratellis.

Were they spying from afar? Was seeing his mother make a pre-pubescent girl walk the plank at sword-point the impetus he needed to rebel against his own flesh and blood? Or had he simply watched too many Errol Flynn movies while chained up in the basement of their hideout?"

[Via .tiff]

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

For those of you who can't get enough of Pyramid and SCE Japan's rhythm-based, real-time strategy series, Sony debuted a new trailer for Patapon 3 at GamesCom showing the upcoming PSP game's new hero customization features, multiplayer modes, and more.

As with previous iterations, Patapon 3 has you commanding a tribe of silhouetted characters against their enemies by tapping out commands to the beat. You'll see in this new video that this new game introduces the ability to play through all of its levels cooperatively with up to four players, as well as a four versus four mode.

Though Patapon 3 isn't slated to release until some time later this year, you can try out a free multiplayer demo for the game right now on the PlayStation Store.

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

['Diamond In The Rough' is a regularly scheduled GameSetWatch opinion column by Tom Cross focusing on the best bits of less-than-excellent games. This week, Tom enjoys King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame.]

In my last column, I expressed my disappointment with Starcraft 2’s wasteful, inelegant mixture of RTS, upgrade menu, Normandy Mark 2 spaceship time-wasting, and turgid narrative. It’s not easy to find exciting, convincing strategy game narratives, to let Starcraft 2 off the hook just a bit. My favorite RTS, Dawn of War 2 has a better story than Starcraft 2 mostly because Dawn of War 2 doesn’t rub your face in its story, unlike Blizzard’s new masterpiece.

As is the case with most games, when story and play are well-interwoven, the gameplay that emerges is all the more exciting. When Left 4 Dead 2’s characters exclaim over new finds, it makes the game and its action feel much more reactive. The same can’t be said for the Prince and Elika’s conversations in PoP 2008.

They may be entertaining, but the fact that I had to sit through every one (you can’t move while talking) caused the game to lose any sense of momentum or pacing. The more unimpeded and granular the flow of play and story are, the less jarring the transition (or cohabitation) between the two are.

When games resolve the play/story issue with inelegant, stilted solutions, it’s plain for everyone to see. The ubiquitous cutscene (replacing the ubiquitous wall of text) is the most obvious, most vulnerable approach to reconciling play and story. Cutscenes have nothing to do with playing games, by and large. The adventures and acts cutscenes depict are almost entirely impossible to replicate ingame. Sometimes in-cutscene characters will talk, shoot, punch, or jump, as they might ingame. Still, they carry out these actions with a fluidity, specificity, and grace unattainable for in-play characters and gamers.

If play is a narrative of action, reaction, and consideration (all in response to AI or player-controlled actions), then out-of-game story is a narrative of inaction, passivity, and disassociation. Players notice this gap between the two experiences. More and more people complain about the difference between the lovable, bumbling-yet-competent Nathan Drake of Among Thieves’ cutscenes, and the deadly killing machine and Olympic gymnast of the same game’s playable portions.

Turn based and real time strategy games tend to integrate story and play inefficiently. The seams always show through, and even more than games with strong, carefully written heroes like Drake (who are so different from their more cinematic representations) strategy game cutscenes and exposition have almost nothing to do with playing strategy games.

My squads in Dawn of War 2 (lead by individual characters with roughly sketched personalities) spend all of their time under my command assaulting fortified locations, weeding out snipers, and launching surprise attacks on enemy squads. My squad leaders spend each cutscene talking about faith, honor, and courage. Admittedly, they discuss these same things in-mission, but this repetition is just that: the story and the script (and thus, these characters) don’t really have much to say, though they expertly reproduce 80’s and 90’s action movie clichés.

Dawn of War 2 isn’t trying that hard to tell any kind of story, however. The collectable miniature game from which DoW 2 gets its setting is full of honorable men in huge mech suites and dastardly aliens (and honorable aliens in mech suits, along with dastardly men, to keep things lively). That’s all the game aspired to portray.

Some strategy games try to do a bit more, and it’s quite interesting to experience the design gymnastics these games go through to present players with stories and play that (hopefully) work well with each other. King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame (a title that unsurprisingly belies the game’s conflicting impulses) goes so far as to introduce a series of truncated Choose Your Own Adventures into the main campaign. Instead of reading through a bunch of text and “completing” a mission (like recruiting your next Round Table knight), characters click through a short interactive text adventure. Each adventure has a point on the map that kicks off the text portion. From there, players chose dialogue branches, courses of action (wait for nightfall to attack, or rush in half-cocked?), and how to deal with crises.

Interactive text adventures are much more exciting than your average cutscene, block of text, or other non-interactive bit of exposition. They’re tied to ingame stats and consequences and they’re colorful and descriptive. It helps enhance the “RPG” vibe that both the game and its earnest title are trying to emphasize. These CYOA story scenes have their work cut out for them, sadly. If there’s something that’s not unique about Arthur, it’s the game’s more real-time, strategic elements.

Towns and cities offer players various recruitment options, and there are a large number of units of differing skill levels and strengths available for hire. Though they may have different looks about them, most of these units are wearyingly similar. There are 3 or 4 kinds of sword-based, pike-based, and horse-based units for each tier. They’re all somewhat different from each other (one sword unit may be stronger against heavy armor than another), but in battle the only noticeable differences are between unit classes, not sub-classes within each general area.

Each hero’s special powers are almost as underwhelming as the units. Most of them are passive skills or buffs (even those that have to be activated), and the offensive spells aren’t really that exciting either. When combined with the game’s well-intentioned (but completely broken) real time capture point-based battles, the result is a bland Total War knockoff. An Arthur campaign really only has two things going for it: the CYOA’s and the beautiful art and music.

I’m not thrilled with entering instanced areas in games. I prefer games like Far Cry 2, or Left 4 Dead 2, games whose combat, exploration, and conversations all take place in spaces that generally follow the same rules. Just because no one’s attacking me in my Act 1 camp doesn’t mean that I control my character any differently. This consistency keeps me focused on the game, and on the story, for what it’s worth.

Arthur’s expansion, The Saxons, seems like it’s headed in the right direction, vis-à-vis uninterrupted play. All adventures are boiled down to one-screen quests requiring cash or food infusions to gain favorable outcomes. The more you spend, the better the outcome. It’s the same mechanic used to bribe factions and buy services. These stripped down “adventures” are also quite boring compared to the little CYOA vignettes from the vanilla game.

In place of more detailed stories and unique-feeling adventures however, The Saxons has created uniformly identical adventures. They may have different introductions (this one concerns rebellious peasants, this one tells the tale of a lost piece of magic armor), but the solution to each is to throw money at the problem. It would have been better if the CYOA’s had been streamlined and integrated into the main game, retaining their extended, unique stories, but using an interface and set of resolution techniques that meshed well with the overworld and strategic map. Really, all The Saxons needed to do was provide more than one way of solving adventure “problems.” It completely fails to give players meaningful choices, something its predecessor excelled at.

King Arthur is in desperate need of another expansion, one that combines the faster, more streamlined questing of The Saxons with the charming, intricate CYOA’s of the original game. It also needs to fix its badly broken strategic play. These two elements could be combined for some interesting mechanics. I’d love to see CYOA adventure elements added into the battle maps. It would be great to have the game’s (now pointless) capture be worth something besides a boost to strength or movement speed. What if different capture points housed mini-adventures or story bonuses and consequences?

Arthur’s problems stem from trying to mix a well-established brand of strategy game with a quite unique method of ingame storytelling. It’s I game I prefer infinitely to its more polished competitors, simply because it tries to do exciting things with its story, setting, and play. I hope they find a way to mix these elements together less clumsily in the future.

[Tom Cross is a managing editor at Rules of the Game, writes for Popmatters, and blogs about games at Delayed Responsibility. You can contact him at romain47 at gmail dot com.]

Posted by Thomas Cross at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Created for a school project, David Arenou's Immersive Rail Shooter mixes augmented reality, an on-rail shooter game, and a real-world cover system to make players feel like they're inside a virtual world, shooting at targets and avoiding bullets.

The project uses a camera and several augmented reality markers to set furniture as hiding spots, which players can hide behind to avoid getting shot. In between shooting phases, they'll need to switch hiding spots or touch one of the markers to progress the game. It also uses a Wii Remote for shooting.

While this isn't a commercial project, it looks like something that could totally be pulled off with the Xbox 360's Kinect and PlayStation 3's Move motion-control/camera setups! All we need is a developer to pick up this idea for a futuristic Time Crisis!

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

Cory Schmitz, the artist behind video game art and culture magazine EXP (not to be confused with Mathew Kumar's exp.), is now working on a follow-up publication called The Controller, which he says will be "very similar in design and spirit [to EXP] but feature more writers and a greater variety of contributors.

Schmitz has started to post a few preview shots for The Controller, including articles on "Why Games Can Not Be Taught" and Playdead's XBLA puzzle-platformer/IGF 2010 award winner Limbo. He's also posted a couple close-ups for the magazine's cover. So far,

So far, The Controller looks just as excellently designed/laid out as EXP!

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

['The Magic Resolution' is a regular GameSetWatch column by UK-based writer Lewis Denby, examining all facets of the experience of playing video games. This time: how some games shine not through the elegance of their construction, but through the imperfections which give them soul...]

Back whenever it was released, I wrote a review of Gears of War 2. It was the first time, I think, that I was presented with a real critic’s paradox, and the first time I started to seriously think about how games operate and how they affect me personally.

Gears of War 2 is, undoubtedly, an enormously well constructed game. It’s pieced together with real precision, the action is as tight as anything, the production values sky high. As a traditional games reviewer, I felt compelled to award it a high mark. But as both a player and a critic of a form, I didn’t like it. I enjoyed myself, but I didn’t like it.

Blasting the Locust hordes was fun, sure. But there was something cold and distant about its unrelenting competence. It felt like a mechanical construction, something created by a sort of games development machine, purposefully built to churn out high-durability action fodder for the masses. Which, of course, it is. And there’s a place for that. But I still came away from Gears 2 disappointed, having just spent several hours in the company of a game completely devoid of character or soul.

I’ve been thinking a lot about imperfection in video games over the last few days. Specifically, since Deadly Premonition was confirmed for a European release. I’ve never played Deadly Premonition, but everything I hear about it makes me desperately eager to do so. As a game, people say, it’s broken beyond belief. But as an experience, there’s nothing else like it.

Just to give you an idea of how much this game split opinion upon its initial release: IGN called it “awful in nearly every way,” while Destructoid awarded it 10 out of 10. To my mind, more games should do this, just as so much cinema and music does - but that’s probably a topic for another day.

Deadly Premonition, from what I understand, is basically a video game homage to early ‘90s drama ‘Twin Peaks’. It’s an open-world survival horror game which lifts several plot elements straight out of David Lynch’s seminal television series, often makes no sense, looks an entire console generation out of date, and occasionally just refuses to work.

But everyone I know who’s played it says there is just something about the game that provokes a reaction, be that a positive or negative one. Through all its imperfections - perhaps because of them? - it shines, in its own very special little way.

The more I think about this, the more I think this applies to ‘Twin Peaks’ itself. It broke all the rules, and as a result emerged as something completely unexpected and original. It had a real soul running through its nonsensical storytelling and utterly bizarre characters, and some of the filmic techniques went so against the grain that the show inherited a directorial style all of its own.

Having not played Deadly Premonition, I can’t make a direct comparison. But what I will compare ‘Twin Peaks’ with is Pathologic. Released in its home nation of Russia back in 2005, and in English-speaking territories a year later, it’s an unsettling, low-budget, first-person horror adventure, in which the player attempts to free an isolated town of a crippling disease which is so forceful that even the buildings are dying.

The game has a lot of problems. Its engine, even with the details maxed out, looks like it’s from five years earlier. The enemy AI doesn’t stem much beyond ‘lock on and charge’, while the friendly AI just stands still. The town, an open-world environment, is so abysmally laid-out that even a map isn’t helpful. And perhaps most crucially, the English localization is just terrible. One character, throughout the whole game, referred to me as his “oinon”. I have no idea what that means. For hours I thought he was calling me an onion, and wondered if I was supposed to be playing a French person talking to a xenophobe.

You’d think there wouldn’t be any excuses for such crippling problems, but actually, I’m going to attempt to excuse them now by claiming that Pathologic is perfect. All its blemishes give it character, and the game beneath that is so unusual, so determinedly difficult and remarkably unfriendly. It’s memorable beyond anything else I’ve played.

These problems were obviously unintentional, but there are some very specific underlying systems in Pathologic that are equally obtuse. The town’s economy is nightmarish, meaning you can sell an item one day, go to buy it back the next day, and find its price has increased tenfold. You have several different gauges to manage - health, fatigue and suchlike, but also reputation meters and all sorts that have to be maintained if you want to be successful. And all the time, there’s a clock running down. You have twelve days to save the town, and you must save one important character every day. Fail to do that, and you’ve basically thrown away all hope.

It’s unfathomably difficult, but that difficulty is purposeful, and it works - especially intermingled with the surreal presentation. And developers Ice-Pick Lodge took this ideology into their next project, The Void, a strange resource management game that deliberately sets out to confuse the player, and confound expectations.

You begin The Void with no idea who you are, where you are, or what you’re supposed to do. Clambering over some surreal architecture, you eventually meet one of the Sisters - strange, hyper-sexual female apparitions who beg you to help them by giving them Colour. Colour is the entire life force of this otherwise desaturated world. You need it to live, but sharing it with the Sisters, you’re told, will free them from oppression, and allow you to progress.

Except after a while, the game suddenly and without warning punishes you for doing this. The Brothers turn up - big hulking hybrids of flesh and metal - and tell you you’re doing it wrong. They threaten you. Sharing Colour upsets the balance of this world, they say. The Sisters are just addicts, and are playing you for a fool. And anyway, you’re one of the Brothers, apparently. You need to do what they say, if you truly want to understand the Void.

And, well, what do you do? The Sisters say the Brothers, who they’re terrified of, are lying. The Brothers say the Sisters, who are destroying the world, are using their sexuality to manipulate you. The game doesn’t make it clear who’s telling the truth until long past the point of no return, and the game has no troubles ruining several hours of progress should you make the wrong decision. It’s an absolute nightmare.

I can’t imagine you’d meet many games developers who’d call that good game design. Confusing the player is pretty much the biggest red light in the medium. It’s just not the done thing. If you get horrifically stuck in a game, that’s called bad design. If you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing or why you’re supposed to be doing it, something’s gone wrong. Except, in The Void, it hasn’t gone wrong. It’s gone spectacularly right. The Void is remarkable.

There are other developers toying with expectations and not shying away from breaking the rules, of course. But it’s Ice-Pick who have done this so resolutely. From what I understand, Access Games have powered in the same direction with Deadly Premonition. Pathologic and The Void, despite initially frustrating me, have since landed among my favourite games. And to these studios who somehow imbue their games with such distinct character, blemishes and defects and all, I say: please don’t ever change.

[Lewis Denby is Executive Editor of BeefJack.com, as well as word-writer extraordinaire for anyone who’ll give him some pennies for his trouble. He never did manage to complete The Void - but that's fine.]

Posted by Lewis Denby at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Rotheblog has a really great story about the discovery and acquisition of a Sundance cabinet, a very rare, late '70s black-and-white vector arcade game from Cinematronics -- so rare that the Video Arcade Preservation Society lists only two known machines. It's suspected that no more than 15 of these cabinets are still around.

Anyway, the Sundance machine was first spotted when a collector was browsing through ArtificalOwl.com, a site dedicated to photos of "fascinating abandoned man-made" structures. He/she stumbled upon the photo you see above in a galery of images for Little Sweden, an old lodge near Sonora, California.

Other collectors caught wind of the find and began researching how they could contact Little Sweden's original owner Donald Williams and legally purchase the Sundance machine, interviewing neighbors and tracking down the owner's property tax status.

Someone going by the name Jehuie, though, was in the area and decided to just walk into what Rotheblog describes as the "meth-ridden, decrepit, feces-riddled structure", and bring the cabinet home. Apparently, the machine is in decent shape, though Jehuie was contacted by the police and advised not to share too much information about it for now.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

British studio Doublesix (Burn Zombie Burn!) is putting out Top Gun, its arcade-style air combat game based on the corny '80s film starring Tom Cruise, on PlayStation Network today, where you can now download it for $14.99.

That might seem pricey for a digital download game, but it includes script written by the film's original screenwriter Jack Epps Jr., 11 campaign missions, a horde mode (video above), 16-player online multiplayer with five modes, custom button mapping for Saitek's Aviator flightstick, six playable jets (F-15, F1-16, F/A-18, MiG-29, MiG-31, and Su-27), and "Danger Zone"!

The game also features many of the primary characters from the movie, plenty of co-pilot one-liners, HUD elements you might remember from the film, and other details meant to capture the feel and tone of Top Gun. Best of all, you don't have to land your jet on an aircraft carrier like in the maddening NES games!

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

Developer Manomio has released a new 1.7 update for its Commodore 64 iPhone app, adding more than a dozen new free and premium C64 games, as well as new features, control improvements, and fixes.

With this new update, players receive three free titles -- Iridis Alpha, Heatseeker, and Bozo's Night Out -- and 11 games they can purchase from the store: Armalyte, Buggy Boy, Druid, Eliminator, Hunter's Moon, International Karate, Snare, Summer Camp, and all three releases from The Last Ninja series.

Commodore 64 1.7 also adds a reimplementation of the control layout system for "complex controls scenarios" in games like The Last Ninja, a fixed-mode joystick in landscape mode, an option to adjust the dead zone of the virtual joystick, OpenFeint 2.5 support, and more.

The update should be free if you've purchased the app before; otherwise, you can buy Commodore 64 for iPhone for $4.99. The app includes eight other free games in addition to the three listed above (Dragons Den, International Soccer, Jupiter Lander, etc.).

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

[‘Design Diversions’ is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Andrew Vanden Bossche. It looks at the unexpected moments when games take us behind the scenes, and the details of how game design engages us. This time - video game progression systems that might not be so different from each other.]

I really adore gamer lingo. Especially the term grinding, because no other gamer jargon inspires as much innuendo. But the only other function of the term, besides inappropriate puns, is to disguise one of the oldest and most prevalent concepts in gaming as some new ugliness rearing its head.

A lot of common video game tropes go into constructing the grind and the concept manifests in many different ways, but the simplest definition of it is the process of unlocking content through repetitive behavior. In most modern games, levels and experience create this system of gated content. Grinding essentially boils down to one thing: players have to do things they've already done to unlock things they haven't.

The main complaint against grinding is that it has the potential to force players to do something boring in the promise of doing something fun later. What's worse, these systems generally measure progress through time invested and not skills learned. Essentially, leveling has the potential to replace thinking, since players can potentially grind until difficult tasks become trivial. The fear is that this system rewards players only for their time and not their skill, resulting in gameplay that is possibly addictive at the expense of challenge.

But before we start worrying about whether or not this will destroy gaming as we know it, maybe we should ask whether this problem is actually a new one. The grind in its most fundamental sense isn’t exactly new. What older video games had instead was memorization--experience points for the player, not the game. Nearly all arcade games were exactly this, partially by necessity, since they weren't capable of saving anything except for the high scores.

In the strictest sense memorization is just another form of grinding: repeating content over and over with the hope of eventually unlocking something new. The clever thing about arcade games is that they save the game’s progress on the player. Memorization is a skill to be sure, but it is also a somewhat tedious one. It is the rote memorization of problems that players have already solved. So is it really any different than the grind?

While We’re Grinding

World of Warcraft is a great example of what grinding has come to mean. WoW’s leveling system is specifically designed to keep players within a certain area of content. It makes content that is too easy worthless and content that is too hard impossible. This minimizes the impact of skill pretty much up until content like raiding or PvP.

World of Warcraft is carefully crafted to not present variable difficulty until the end of the game--it aims for, and mostly succeeds, in making the whole experience up until maximum level a challenge that is neither too great nor too little, so that players (or at least the majority of them) will be entertained without encountering frustration.

This discourages players from risky behavior, which may not be a good thing. World of Warcraft ensures that anyone leaving their comfort zone will be severely punished, so there's no real option for skilled players to skip the grind by plunging ahead. It is one of the many design elements that prevents players from getting too brutalized, and therefore theoretically makes them less likely to discourage themselves. This is how WoW achieves its treadmill pacing, and it’s made possible because this grind is playtime scheduled.

World of Warcraft doesn’t let players encounter much, if any, barriers until the endgame. But at that point, the game begins to function very much like those old arcade games, with bosses that must be memorized and practiced (at least in terms of Player vs Computer content-PvP is a whole other story). The bosses and regular monsters up until this point, despite being much simpler, also require a degree of memorization to deal with. They’re just so simple that players usually don’t even notice. This is what we mean when we talk about the grind minimizing player skill and involvement.

One thing that bears a lot of repeating is that video games involve a lot of repeating. WoW’s grinding involves a lot of repetitive quests, but games of memorization involve just as much repetition. Bullet hell shooters are so thoroughly based on memorization that many have selectable starting levels, anticipating that players would quickly grow tired of playing the same first level over and over again.

It was probably the console ports of early arcade games that were the most brutal in their repetition. This was the sticky point between arcades and consoles where games still had lives and continues but didn't have the option to keep putting money in so players could keep going. Getting a game over--or just turning off the console--meant that players were going to be seeing a lot of that first level.

Sonic 2 is as good example as any, and one in which I was acutely aware of how I was memorizing my way though it. My parents didn't want me to waste all of my time on video games, so they let me play a half an hour a day on school days. I’m not sure that this was very effective at curbing my appetite for the video games, but it did force me to think about what I could accomplish in a half an hour, and it helped me concretely measure my progress.

Before I copied the level select code out of a strategy guide at Borders, I was basically stuck with starting the game over from the beginning every day. Sonic 2 was generous but not excessive in granting lives and continues, so there was also the very real possibility of getting a game over, although this possibility would disappear the more I memorized the dangers and how to avoid them.

In doing so I also discovered how to get through the levels more quickly. Sonic 2 has a ten minute timer for beating a level, but most of the levels in the first half of the game can be beaten in less than 30 seconds in unassisted speed runs preformed by humans without exploits. Day by day, my six year old self got further and further through the game in that short half hour.

Getting through Sonic 2 meant memorizing the level layout and how to get through it. This is where stuff like problem solving comes into play. Stringing these memories together is problem solving too. But as soon as a problem is solved it becomes repetition--the player has to replay solved problems to get to the new content. It's almost a reversal of how grinding works in games like World of Warcraft.

Having it Both Ways

Both of these approaches, grind and memorization, are a function of time=progress. Once the experience points are gained, or the level map memorized, the progress is essentially complete, whether it’s saved on a server or the player's brain. The sense of accomplishment I felt when killing a boss or beating a level in Sonic for the first time is the same sort of relief I feel when I gain a level. I often wonder if I can even appreciate the difference.

Both leveling and memorization actually removes challenge. A boss pattern that players understand is like a level already gained. The game is inherently easier now. The challenge has been removed, and there’s no going back--save starting a new game or setting it down until you forget (which may never happen). Yet, both of these genres will demand that players repeat this solved content in order to reach new experiences.

The difference between the systems lies in the process of discovery. I could spend five minutes or five months fighting the last boss of Sonic 2, but the challenge only ends when I solve its pattern. But the impossible quest in WoW that’s five levels too high for me will be as easy as the quest I’m doing now in five levels. In ten levels, it’ll be so easy it won’t even be worth doing. So, then, the essential difference: with a leveling system, it’s essential possible to skip challenges through grinding through them. This is impossible in a memorization based system, in which every challenge must be solved by the player.

Taken alone this could be a damning indictment of grinding systems, but I want to make two vital points about this system. First, while leveling allows players to skip some challenges it cannot let them skip all of them. Players have to do something right to get experience points at all. There’s potential here for players to pick and choose their challenges--whether they think it’s worth investing in memorization and problem solving, or merely by spending their time on lesser challenges. However, it’s not an especially endearing feature for players that are both frustrated with the challenge and don’t feel like wasting their time.

Secondly, the fact that leveling essentially automates some aspects of the game isn’t necessarily a bad one. WoW, and any other RPG, has a lot going on besides fighting enemies for experience points, a lot of things that require a great deal of thought from players--so maybe it’s okay that there are some things they don’t have to think so hard about. They are not a system that is inherently manipulative, just one that must be used with the upmost care.

[Andrew Vanden Bossche is a freelance writer and student. He has a blog which he's actually updating now called Mammon Machine, which is struggling for life, and he can be reached at AndrewVandenB@gmail.com]

Posted by Andrew Vanden Bossche at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

YoYo Games has finally put out a Mac edition of Game Maker, its popular entry-level development suite for creating standalone PC titles. This release is adapted from the Pro Version of Game Maker 7, and promises "almost all the features of Game Maker 7 and more".

Game Maker for Mac offers full drag and drop support, full GML scripting, an extension mechanism for incorporating third party libraries, a room editor, a sprite editor, and a path editor. It's also much cheaper than most tools, as it's priced at $20 until the end of August (jumping to a still reasonable $25 afterward).

If you'd like to check it out before buying, YoYo Games has posted a demo (.DMG link) that lets you play around with the Mac version of Game Maker for 10 hours before you need to buy a license.

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

Next month, Portland comic shop Floating World Comics plans to hold a Katamari Damacy-themed art show and fundraiser for Join, a local non-profit organization that aims to "support the efforts of homeless individuals and families to transition out of homelessness into permanent housing".

The show/fundraiser won't take place until September 2nd, but many of the artists who are participating in the show have already started to upload their works online. For those of you who can't make it to the event or are looking forward to attending, I've collected as many pieces as I could find to give you a preview of the show!

Floating World Comics will likely post more information on all the participating artists and the fundraiser itself as the show approaches. You can check out the works that have appeared online so far after the break (the image you see above of Freddie Mercury as The King of All Cosmos is by Chris Kuzma):

Katie Skelly:

Michael DeForge:

Alexis Ziritt:

Aleks Sennwald:

Angie Wang:

Edward Kwong:

Stanley Lieber:

Kinoko Powfox:

Pete Toms (NSFW portion blurred out, see original at link):

Kiki Jones:

Ana Galvan:

Kim Roberts (I'm unsure if this is actually in the show, but it should be!):

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Here's a whole heap of info and write-ups for the first day of GDC Europe, which is taking place in Cologne as we speak - and for which there is a spectacular amount of Kolsch beer and sausages being proffered to attendees at any given moment. More tomorrow!]

The organizers of Game Developers Conference Europe 2010 have opened the event's doors at the Cologne Congress Center East in Cologne, Germany, and are recapping highlights and coverage of the first day's proceedings.

Produced by UBM TechWeb Game Network, organizers of the leading Game Developers Conference series, GDC Europe is the largest professionals-only game event in Europe, and has increased in scope compared to its inaugural debut event in 2009, with record attendance ahead of this week's Gamescom consumer and trade event in the same location.

Highlights of today's major speeches at the show include (with links to full write-ups on sister site Gamasutra.com where available):

- At his track keynote on Monday, Tencent Games VP Bo Wang discussed how the billion-dollar revenue Chinese tech/game company has risen to the top of the pack, citing massive growth rates and key routes to success in Asia. Wang noted than in the six months to the end of June 2010, the gigantic Chinese-headquartered firm, which deals with instant messaging, virtual currency, and video games as its major parts, had revenues of $1.3 billion U.S. dollars.

Wang noted that Chinese gamers have a much lower disposable income, so there are unique ways Tencent attracts these gamers. Tencent tries to have 1,000 hours available at launch in its typical MMORPGs, and also encourages gamers to have fun by playing against each other in games. As Tencent also has the top instant messaging service in China, plus a top free email service, a massive web portal at QQ.com, and even a search engine, cross-marketing from all of Tencent's properties seems to have catapulted the firm to the top of the pile in the Chinese market.

- In a session titled "Rethinking a Studio for the Digital Space," THQ Digital creative director Don Whiteford discussed the publisher's burgeoning specialization in digital games, discussing learnings from his rebranded THQ studio. Along the way, he revealed its debut XBLA/PSN title, top down vehicle combat title Red Faction: Battlegrounds, a topdown car, mech and rover combat title for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network with up to four players on the same screen. In addition, various achievements in the game -- which was built by a core team of just four people -- will unlock unique elements in retail franchise continuation Red Faction: Armageddon.

- BioWare's Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk delivered an Q&A-style look back on the founding of their studio and the creation of the seminal Baldur's Gate franchise. The duo referenced their early years' inexperience in conventional game business, yet success with Baldur's Gate through their passion and a love of the art. The duo ended with a teaser of some potentially exciting new titles, as yet unannounced, coming out of the Virginia-based BioWare Mythic office that currently operates stalwart, still-profitable titles such as Warhammer Online and Ultima Online.

- Talking in a packed keynote, Creative Director of Disney's Junction Point studio Warren Spector (Epic Mickey) delivered a lyrical discussion of video games and how the medium should -- and shouldn't -- learn from other media to shine in its own right. Referencing film, radio, comic books and board games, Spector illustrated the importance and power of the user's imagination and videogames' 'power to transport' - the ability to become another character entirely, and how they can immerse people in worlds that appear completely believable.

- In the first of the "Focus Russia" series of sessions, Dmitry Lyust and Konstantin Popov gave an overview about the Russian market. They cited figures suggesting that Russia's online games market will grow from $223 million in 2009 to $400-410 million by 2012, and that the Russian market for casual games will grow from $32 million USD to $42 million USD by the end of this year. Lyust and Popov also discussed Russia's recent welcoming climate for business and investments from abroad, and particularly pinpointed government plans to build up a "Russian Silicon Valley" inside a special economic zone near Moscow.

- Other notable lectures covered by sister site Gamasutra include the creators of Limbo on puzzle balancing for their XBLA hit, plus the challenges of motion control in Red Faction 2, and new analysis of Heavy Rain by its creator David Cage, plus Playfish's Jeferson Valadares discussing intuition versus metrics. Video and sync-ed slide versions of the lectures will also be available to GDC Vault subscribers shortly after the show.

In addition to the conference content, GDC Europe provides several opportunities for creative exchange and business development, with venues including the GDC Europe Expo Floor, VIP Lounge, and the GDC Europe Business Lounge at gamescom, plus a host of industry parties.

More than forty exhibitors and sponsors from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, the UK and the USA have registered for the exhibitor zone measuring 650 square meters. Exhibitors include Crytek, Bigpoint, Epic, Howest University, Imagination Studios and Intel. In addition, GDC Europe also has a business lounge at the accompanying games expo, gamescom, at which Autodesk, Crytek, Epic, Zotac, DigiProtect, Level 3 are confirmed to be exhibiting.

For more information on the show, which is currently taking place and is part of the UBM TechWeb Game Network, as is this site, please consult the official GDC Europe website.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Continuing his regular GameSetWatch column, psychologist and gamer Jamie Madigan takes a complex look at the psychological concepts behind immersion with regard to video games.]

Along with "OMGDUDESOAWESOME" one of the words that gamers like to toss around when describing their favorite titles is "immersive." But what exactly does that mean? And what makes a game immersive? Ask 5 people and you'll probably get 10 opinions, but psychologists have been studying immersion in various kinds of media for decades, including video games, so they could probably shed some light on those questions.

Except they don't call it "immersion." Instead, they call it "presence," which, admittedly, isn't as cool. Regardless, researchers have identified several kinds of presence in regards to how we perceive media, but it's spatial presence that I think comes closest to what gamers think of as "immersion."

Briefly, spatial presence is often defined as existing when "media contents are perceived as ‘real' in the sense that media users experience a sensation of being spatially located in the mediated environment." The idea is just that a game (or any other media from books to movies) creates spatial presence when the user starts to feel like he is "there" in the world that the game creates.

People who experience immersion tend to only consider choices that make sense in the context of the imaginary world. Someone immersed in Red Dead Redemption, for example, might be more likely to use travel methods, like stagecoaches, that make sense within the game, instead of methods that don't (like fast traveling from a menu screen). People immersed in media also tend to enjoy it more.

A Theory of Spatial Presence (aka, Immersion)

But how does this happen? What about a game and what about the player makes her feel like she's leaving the real world behind? Theories abound, but a few years ago Werner Wirth and a team of other researchers sat down to consolidate the research and come up with one unified theory Here it is:

Woah, woah, woah. Sorry. Let's just back up and take a simplified look at the parts most relevant to us gamers.

Basically, Wirth et al.'s theory says that spatial presence happens in three steps:

- Players form a representation in their mind of the space or world with which the game is presenting them.
- Players begin to favor the media-based space (I.e., the game world) as their point of reference for where they "are" (or to put it in psychological gobblety-gook, their "primary ego reference frame")
- Profit!

So, basically, the process starts with players forming a mental model of the game's make-believe space by looking at various cues (images, movement, sounds, and so forth) as well as assumptions about the world that they may bring to the table. Once that mental model of the game world is created, the player must decide, either consciously or unconsciously, whether she feels like she's in that imagined world or in the real one. Of course, it's worth noting that this isn't necessary a conscious decision with the prefrontal cortex's stamp of approval on it. It can be a subconscious, on the sly, slipped into sideways and entered and exited constantly.

Researchers have extensively studied how these two steps happen, but I think it's more interesting for our purposes here to skip to the bit about what qualities of the media (i.e., game) and person (i.e., player) that they've found facilitate both of these steps and create immersion. So let's do that.

Game Characteristics Leading to Spatial Presence

Characteristics of games that facilitate immersion can be grouped into two general categories: those that create a rich mental model of the game environment and those that create consistency between the things in that environment.

Let's take the concept of richness, first. This isn't an exhaustive list, but richness relates to:

- Multiple channels of sensory information
- Completeness of sensory information
- Cognitively demanding environments
- A strong and interesting narrative, plot, or story

Multiple channels of sensory information means simply that the more senses you assault and the more those senses work in tandem, the better. A bird flying overhead is good. Hearing it screech as it does so is better. 3D may also play a role here, and we can all agree that smell-o-vision will herald in a new era of spatial presence.4

Completeness of sensory information means that the fewer blanks about the mental model of the game world that the player has to fill in, the better. Abstractions and contrivances (there are no people in this town because of, uh, a plague! Yeah!) are the enemy of immersion. Assassin's Creed 2 was immersive because its towns were filled with people who looked like they were doing …people stuff. Dealing in a familiar environment also allows the player to comfortably make assumptions about those blank spaces without being pulled out of the world to think about it. Knowing what the wild West is supposed to look like and having Red Dead Redemption conform to those stereotypes goes a long way towards creating spatial presence.

Cognitively demanding environments where players have to focus on what's going on and getting by in the game will tie up mental resources. This is good for immersion, because if brain power is allocated to understanding or navigating the world, it's not free to notice all its problems or shortcomings that would otherwise remind them that they're playing a game.

Finally, a strong and interesting narrative, plot, or story will suck you in every time. In fact, it's pretty much the only thing in a book's toolbox for creating immersion, and it works in games too. Good stories attract attention to the game and make the world seem more believable. They also tie up those mental resources.

Turning to game traits related to consistency, we have:

- Lack of incongruous visual cues in the game world
- Consistent behavior from things in the game world
- An unbroken presentation of the game world
- Interactivity with items in the game world

Lack of incongruous visual cues in the game world is one of the more interesting precursors to spatial presence. If we were discussing the same concept in movies, I'd cite the example of seeing a boom mic drop into an otherwise believable scene. It's anything that reminds you that "Yo, this is A VIDEO GAME."

Examples might include heads up displays, tutorial messages, damage numbers appearing over enemies' heads, achievement notifications, friends list notifications, and the like. It's also the reason why in-game advertising wrecks immersion so much –seeing twenty five instances of ads for the new Adam Sandler movie while trying to rescue hostages kind of pulls you out of the experience.

Believable behavior from things in the game world means that characters, objects, and other creatures in the game world behave like you'd expect them to. It's also worth noting that the cues need to make sense and be constant throughout the experience. This is one reason that I think Bioshock's audio logs kind of hurt the game's otherwise substantial immersion: Who the heck records an audio diary, breaks it up into 20-second chunks, puts them on their own dedicated tape players, and then wedges those players into the various corners of a public place? It doesn't make any sense.

An unbroken presentation of the game world means that the spatial cues about the imaginary world your game has created should not just up and vanish. Which is exactly what happens every time you get a loading screen, a tutorial, or a game menu. When that happens, the game world literally disappears for a few minutes, and we can't feel immersed in something that isn't there.

Interactivity with items in the game world could probably fit under the "richness" list above, but I include it with consistency because it's another way of giving the player feedback on actions and a sense of consistency between various parts of the environment. Operating machines, talking to NPCs, and fiddling with physics makes it seem like the various pieces of the world fit together consistently.

Player Characteristics Leading to Spatial Presence

Of course, players have some say in how immersed they get in a game. Some people just have more spatial ability and can build those mental models of game worlds more readily and make them more vibrant. And researchers have found that people have an "absorption trait" which means that they're quicker to get fascinated by something and drawn into it –something I like to think of this as "the fanboy gene."

Other times the player takes a more active role. Some players simply want to believe in the illusion, and will induce their own bias towards accepting the "I am there" hypothesis. In this state, they'll require less confirmatory information to accept that hypothesis and less disconfirming information to reject it. This is also similar to the idea of "suspension of disbelief" where players wilfully ignore stuff that doesn't make sense (like thunderous explosions in space or the fact that enemy soldiers can soak up a dozen of gunshots without going down) in order to just have a good time.

Other researchers have also pointed to a concept they call "involvement" which is a media user's desire to act in the make-believe world, to draw parallels between it and his life, and to effect changes in it according to their own design. To me, this seems like an overly fancy way of saying "some people like to role-play" which leads directly to greater immersion.

So there you have it. Everybody can cite examples of things that yank them out of the game experience, and it turns out that psychologists have examined, classified, and isolated a lot of them. This isn't to say, though, that ALL games should strive to BE immersive. I think games are kind of unique in all media in that this is so. A game can still be a good game without being immersive, and maybe some types of games are better if they AREN'T immersive. But that's the great thing: game designers have a lot of paths that they can take to good art.

References:

- Wissmath, B, Weibel, D., & Groner, R. (2009). Dubbing or Subtitling? Effects on Spatial Presence, Transportation, Flow, and Enjoyment. Journal of Media Psychology 21 (3), 114-125.
- Wirth, W., hartmann, T., Bocking, S., Vorderer, P., Klimmt, C., Holger, S., Saari, T., Laarni, J., Ravaja, N., Gouveia, F., Biocca, F., Sacau, A. Jancke, L., Baumgartner, T., & Jancke, P. A Process Model for the Formation of Spatial Presence Experiences. Media Psychology, 9, 493-525.

Posted by Jamie Madigan at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Overcoming the many obstacles that face small publishers looking to release a doujin game in the West, Carpe Fulgur has announced that it will release Recettear, its intriguing PC RPG in which players manage an item shop, through Stardock's digital distribution platform Impulse on September 10th, if all goes according to plan.

Originally released two years ago in Japan by EasyGameStation, the game has players adventuring into dungeons in search of items, selling those items in their store, haggling with customers, overseeing and decorating their shop, and more. You can try it out yourself with this free (and updated) demo of the upcoming English edition.

Carpe Fulgur says it was able to secure this deal with Stardock thanks to support from its fans, who downloaded its Recettear demo more than a thousand times in less than a month. The publisher says it may announce more distributors in the future, too. Expect the game to release for $20 in North America, €15 in Europe, and £13 in Great Britain.

[Via HG101

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Adult Swim Games, which has been releasing so many killer indie titles for some time now (Robot Unicorn Attack, Give Up, Robot, Cream Wolf) has just put out another addictive Flash release called Victorian BMX: Death On Wheels, developed by This Is Pop.

The game plays a bit like motocross-style titles like Excitebike, in that you're riding a bike across hills/ramps, performing stunts in mid-air before angling your landing to make sure you don't crash. The twist here is that you're playing as the Grim Reaper, and you're harvesting souls (men riding penny farthings, women pushing strollers) along the way.

Your goal is to collect as many souls as possible, while pulling off tricks and avoiding crashes/spikes, and reach the guillotine at the end of each stage before the timer counts down. Oh, and if you can, try to grab Queen Victoria's floating head if you see it. Play Victorian BMX for free here!

[Via IndieGames.com]

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

If you were pleased to hear that Cave is bringing its arcade shoot'em up Dodonpachi: Resurrection to the App Store but still wish there was a way you could play the game at home on a big screen, you're in luck! The developer has announced that it's releasing the game on an Xbox 360 disc with HD graphics and two new arrange modes.

Dodonpachi: Resurrection is expected to release in Japan on November 25th, and Cave wants to follow that title up with another two arcade shmup ports packed into a single disc, Pink Sweets (2006, sequel to Ibara) and Muchi Muchi Pork (2007), next spring, according to a report from Siliconera.

Cave hasn't yet mentioned any possible U.S. releases for the Xbox 360 ports. While the studio's XBLA games are Japan-only for the most part, North American gamers have had better luck with disc releases -- Aksys brought Deathsmiles here just last June, and the Xbox 360 ports for Mushihime-sama Futari and Espgaluda II Xbox 360 are region-free/import-friendly.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

['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.]

Media kits for old game magazines can often be depressing things to thumb through, especially when you know what happened to the magazine in question right afterward.

When the ad-sales folks from a magazine are trying to attract new advertisers, one of their weapons has always been the media kit -- a slick-looking folder or binder filled with information on the mag, its circulation, and its audience. It's a show of strength for the magazine, a physical symbol of how successful it is and how dominant a position it's got in the marketplace, and as a result they're often very pretty-looking pieces to collect if you're someone like me.

I've picked up assorted media kits over the years (the oldest one I have is from 1979 and covers Creative Computing), but while reorganizing my closet I came across a 2004-era one for Computer Games Magazine and its sister publication, nerd-culture media mag Now Playing that caught my attention. I took this home with me when ADV Films, my former employer, laid off their magazine department in June '08.

In the cover letter, addressed to ADV's old marketing guy Rod Peters, the sales executive for Now Playing tries his hardest to push for the young new mag. "We already have 75,000+ subscribers and we placed 100,000 on newsstands," he wrote. "So if you compare that to Wizard the circ is almost the [sic] identical and we're on issue number 2!!!"

(One of the oldest tenets of magazine publishing: You can print as many magazines as you like, but that doesn't mean you can sell them. Look at incite, for example.)

Theglobe.com, distributor of CG and Now Playing, certainly had high hopes. NP, which debuted as a section within CG in 2004, was the company's shot at branching out from their flagship game publication and launching a similar title in the more general entertainment niche. Lots of publishers have tried this over the years, from EGM parent Sendai (Hero Illustrated) to Dave Halverson, who launched the very short-lived Rocket and later took over publication of Geek Monthly. The results have been mixed -- Hero Illustrated and Geek Monthly both lasted a few years, but Rocket and Now Playing both faded away after only a very small amount of issues.

But those days were far in the future when theglobe did up this media kit in '04, bragging about the Now Playing staff's "ability to identify the next 'big' thing before it breaks into mainstream acceptance" and touting the "Generation Now" audience they've brilliantly captured. Every magazine like this, including Wizard and my very own PiQ, claims something along these lines to their potential advertisers -- we're special, dammit, because our readership is hip and with it in ways that the readers of those other mags aren't. It's one of those statements that sounds plausibly impressive and doesn't require many stats or facts or anything to back it up.

I also like how they tout Computer Games' having "the industry's highest percentage of female readers" -- which, it turns out, was a purported 11 percent. I suppose that says something about the usual audience for magazines like these.

Over on Sodapop Journal, a pop-culture site run by my old co-worker Robert Cortez, there'll be a podcast coming up very soon where we talk about the present and future of "nerd media" mags -- everything from game titles to the formerly packed anime-mag market, now pared down to only one regular publication in the US. Check it out once it comes up, but in the meantime, if you're a publisher looking to advertise your products somewhere, remember this: don't trust media kits too much.

[Kevin Gifford used to breed ferrets, but now he's busy running 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 of publishers and game companies.]

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

[The Gaming Doctrine is a monthly GameSetWatch column by Richard Clark about the intersection of gaming, religion, spirituality, and morality. This month - how a better portrayal of enemies and evil within the game world can improve the overall quality of a game.]

You've got to fight someone. That's been the de facto mantra of console-dominant video game scene since the days of Mario, and it speaks volumes about the nature of games and their focus. They are just as much about their enemies as they are about their heroes, and they give us opportunities to think through one profound question: what would a person have to do to become my enemy? In other words, what makes me need to kill, hurt, maim, or attack a person or thing? What makes them evil, and is it enough?

The uncomfortable undercurrent of that line of questioning is the assumption that fighting something inevitably solves the problem. It's a claim that few of us would be comfortable with when made explicit, though our culture makes it implicitly on a constant, unrelenting basis. Political campaign speeches, action film climaxes, television season finales, and video game combat systems all exist primarily because of this assertion.

We know better. We know that violence often begets violence, that revenge is often empty, that killing a human being should be a last resort rather than one option among many. And yet, these things resonate with us because we want to believe that solving our problems could be that simple.

We want to convince ourselves that some binary solution, however unpleasant and destructive, might solve our problems, the problems of our loved ones, and even the problems of the entire world. It's a foolish desire, but it's the reason these games resonate so much with us. When we are presented with people to kill or dispatch in some way, we frolic in a playground of combat possibilities.

Combat Needs an Enemy

This all sounds perfectly horrid, and anyone with an axe to grind can (and does) use the above case as an argument against the medium. Video games thrive on conflict and violence is simply a mechanic to make a game fun. Still, Mario demonstrated that this doesn't have to be an inherently bad thing: we are seeing now that the kids who grew up shooting fireballs at turtles were not mentally affected in any real way by inundating themselves with constant violent images and mechanics.

A more interesting question, though, once we accept the inevitability of violent gameplay, is the question of who our struggle should be against. While jumping on the heads of turtles seems harmless enough, the stakes seem to rise significantly when games become more realistic and as they seek to make themselves more and more relevant to modern day concerns such as war, poverty, and abuse of power. We've heard the claim over and over again, but it is both true and germane to this discussion: video games are growing up. As games and their players mature, so must our enemies and our concept of video game evil.

Many games are content to remain merely games, a goal which may not be particularly ambitious in its’ own right, but does result in some marvelous results. Play in and of itself can be an honorable and noble end, and games like Super Mario Galaxy and Little Big Planet demonstrate the necessity of keeping them around. In these games, the opposing figures are purposely otherworldly and impossible to relate to our own lives.

This world and its enemies bear no resemblance to our own world. They are merely pawns in a chess game, meant to represent obstacles rather than sentient beings that wish us actual harm. They are in on the game as much as anyone else. They play by the rules. Bowser is merely a jovial bully. He steals the princess because he knows he’s supposed to, and when Mario and friends are playing baseball, he lets his kids go play as well.

The benefit to all of this is pure, unadulterated fun. They present us with no real moral qualms, because they avoid loaded images and controversial hot topics. We would be rightly criticized for reading too much into a Mario game if we claimed that it was actually meant to be a case for some political or cultural perspective (though it could be a fun thought experiment, and it’s certainly worth looking at the cultural assumptions within the game).

First and foremost, Mario is a video game character. Plumbing is very much a secondary part of his life. Peach is primarily a goal to reach and secondarily a love interest for Mario. Bowser doesn’t really try too hard to accomplish his goal of taking over Mario’s world, and he and his minions do not even consider themselves to be much more than worthy obstacles for Mario’s journey.

Realistic Enemies Lacking Realism

Recently though, as games have given more leeway to realism as a factor, they have sought to include more realistic and, as a result, more recognizable and culturally loaded enemies in games. As first-person war games led the charge, we began to fight against enemies who we were told were simply evil humans. Like a summer blockbuster, games gave us permission to root for their demise because it told us they were bad.

This suspicion was confirmed when they shot at us. Modern Warfare 2 drew attention to the importance of this form of confirmation when it refused to offer it to us. In the now infamous airport scene, the people we were meant to shoot at didn’t shoot back. They ran away, begged for their lives, and helped one another. It was clear: these were not enemies. And yet, at the very moment armed forces arrived to take us out, we felt infinitely more comfortable killing them: they had signed up for this.

What became clear was that games like Modern Warfare and its ilk had trained us to take out everyone who stood in our way, no matter if our purpose was noble. Just as was often the case in the popular action film, the ends justified the means. Anyone who didn’t understand that was merely a coward who would very quickly find themselves staring at a “Game Over” screen.

The concern isn’t that video games will make us worse people as a result of this dynamic. After all, we understand that for the most part it’s a result of the perceived necessity to keep a game fun and simple at all costs. Most gamers are at least smart enough to recognize that this is how the game world works, but that the actual world differs greatly. Nonetheless, the onslaught of games with this perspective seemed constant, and until recently it didn’t seem like games would ever move beyond the simple black and white posturing of the summer action film.

A More Thoughtful Treatment of Evil

A far more interesting and helpful alternative is a more involved consideration of the nature of evil: games can provide us with obstacles, enemies and goals while also confronting us with the complexities of evil. The games that have done this already are all the more memorable because of it. Far Cry 2 starts off like a standard first-person shooter with open world elements, until you progress through the story and realize that the guys you are shooting only differ from you in strength and power, not ethical viability. You are, and are becoming, just as bad as the guys you are meant to kill.

Alan Wake pulls off a frightening and personally arresting atmosphere in which we relate to and fear for Alan (despite his supremely unlikable characteristics) because of the enemies, which are actually projections of his own self-doubts and limitations. In Limbo, the boy comes across people who appear to be just like him, and they are. They fear the unknown and use one another to accomplish their objectives.

A thoughtful approach to the opposing forces in a game doesn’t dilute the experience, as some may argue. It merely enriches it, providing the player with food for thought and an opportunity to become even more immersed within a world that seems more like our own. It creates opportunities for players to discuss the questions that are implicit within the game world. In short, it gives games staying power, on the store shelf, on the shelf at home, and within the minds and hearts of the player.

[Richard Clark is the editor-in-chief of Christ and Pop Culture, where he often writes about video games. He and his wife live in Louisville, KY. He can be reached at deadyetliving at gmail dot com or followed on twitter (@christandpc).]

Posted by Richard Clark at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Our own Brandon Sheffield talks with Nexon America's Min Kim to discuss the MapleStory creators continued success in Western markets, how to create hardcore players from a casual audience, and free-to-play's rise in North America.]

South Korean-headquartered MMO developer and publisher Nexon is best known for its Eastern-developed free-to-play online games, such as the popular RPG MapleStory and the action-based Dungeon Fighter Online.

Recently, Nexon has broadened its development efforts in Asian markets, and has acquired several Korean development studios including NDoors and GameHi. The company’s U.S. branch, Nexon America, localizes and publishes Nexon’s games, bringing the free-to-play model that was popularized in Asian markets into the West.

Despite Nexon’s push to release games in the North America, where it grossed $45.5 million in 2009, the company no longer develops games in the West -- though expanding into new markets is clearly one of the company’s primary goals.

We had the chance to sit down with Nexon America’s vice president, Min Kim, to discuss the company’s expansion into Western markets, creating a core audience out of casual players, the difficulties of bringing online games to North America, and Nexon’s future plans for stateside development.

Nexon's been growing and making more acquisitions as of late. How big do you want to grow?

Min Kim: A lot. (Laughs) It’s all a bit about growth. I think right now we have a pretty established level of dominance in the Asian market with our games, but in the Western markets, it's still pretty nascent. We represent probably about less than ten percent of what we do over in Asia.

But even when you look at the Korean revenue, international is getting bigger and bigger. I want the North American office to do hopefully thirty percent of global revenue. That's where we'd like to be; hopefully we'll get there.

By when?

MK: That is a really good question. It will be in the next couple of years. We showed three titles at E3: Dungeon Fighter, Dragon Nest, and Vindictus. The reception and the change in perception of free-to-play games have been pretty good.

I've noticed that you didn’t show every game you had at E3 or Comic Con this year, just specific, targeted stuff. It gives the impression that your games are mostly core-oriented. Why are you keeping your games so core-focused right now?

MK: The core market represents a lot of potential for us. People ask us, “Oh, I thought you came out with really light games like Maple Story. Isn't this a step in a different direction?” Aesthetically, the games' playstyles are different, but for our games, we want to get a casual user and turn them into a hardcore user. We start making money when they actually become hardcore.

We think we have games that gamers really want. The reason why we brought these three games out specifically is that we're looking at them as cousins. Dungeon Fighter has a retro arcade style, Vindictus is made with Valve's Source Engine and is a really beautiful looking game, and Dragon Nest is really charming.

But all three games are action games, and Dungeon Fighter, because it's pretty much the biggest game in the world, gave us a lot of confidence that gamers actually want instant gratification in an online action game; these games are actually going to provide that.

How about the media perception? Most of the time, traditional game press think free-to-play models and monetization are bad. How has it been working against that perception in the media?

MK: It's hard to do it with one company. (Laughs) Perceptions have been kind of hard because, again, our business is something that's not easily describable. People don't really understand it. But you look at companies like Turbine, and they turned Dungeons and Dragons Online into a free-to-play game; now people are scratching their heads saying, “Why is Lord of the Rings Online turning into a free-to-play game?”

It's obvious. What matters is that it makes more money. On the business side, people are starting to understand that. But the press doesn’t cover us. The gaming press doesn't really cover us because we don't play in the area that they play in.

How has the reaction been to your core games at these shows?

MK: Pretty awesome! Everybody's loving it; we got nominated for best MMO of E3. It’s like everything that's going on these days; you don't want to have a walled garden. You want to play where the people are, and so we brought it to them.

With Dungeon Fighter, others have said there were some potential issues with speed and lag in North America. Have these issues been overcome yet?

MK: Yeah, everybody knows that we've been working on it for a really long time, but we don’t want to make certain things official until we've addressed them. We've addressed a lot of it, so our user numbers have been pretty good for its official launch. We addressed that, plus a couple other things, and I think the game is looking really good right now.

When you've got a game that's already successful elsewhere, how well does it have to perform in the U.S. to be considered a success?

MK: There's the other question that people have been asking me: “What games do you bring over here?” Generally, we want to bring the games that have low levels of beta, so we bring all the big games like Dungeon Fighter, Vindictus, and Dragon Nest over here. But in terms of user figures, Maple Story's been a huge success; our revenues last year were forty-something million dollars. If I really had to peg a number to it, an online game would be a success if it generated over a million dollars a month at least, and had the potential for way more.

If you're doing something to test the market, does it actually have to be financially successful, or can it be an experiment? Dungeon Fighter is so popular everywhere else that if it doesn't do amazingly well here, it's not going to kill anybody. I'm talking about cost of operating in another territory versus what you're getting back.

MK: At the end of the day, it's all about numbers; so the game has to be profitable. If it's creating a big loss, then we'll probably shut down that game. But there is room for experimentation. There are no guarantees, especially with this market over here; just because it works there, it's not necessarily going to work over here.

Every launch we do is really an experiment. When we come out with Vindictus, that's going to be an experiment because the game will be awesome, but there are probably going to be challenges when launching that game here in terms of network infrastructure and all of that. Everything that we bring out is really a challenge, but you have to hope for the best, work your ass off, and hopefully it works out right.

Do you find local American content like Dungeon and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online to be major competition for you?

MK: This is definitely not a cop-out answer at all: Anybody that's jumping into this space really helps us. It's hard to build a whole market with just one company, unless you're Apple. (Laughs) But every company that comes in and develops for this market we feel is growing the market; we're not really fighting over players at this point.

All those companies coming in, and it probably means that developers are going to shift focus and actually create an industry and not just one or two games that do really well. Right now, we don't see anything as really competitive; everything that is being made specifically for free-to-play and microtransactions just helps grow the business as a whole.

Do you foresee any reason in the future to develop in North America again?

MK: Yeah. I think we probably made a pretty bad impression with the Vancouver studio shutting down, but when that happened, the market influences were pretty bad for the whole world. (Laughs) Ultimately, we do really feel that domestic development is where it's going to be at once people understand what we do. Our team has also done the Nexon Initiative where we've called for submissions.

At the end of the day, the aesthetic and the cultural influence is everywhere. Developers are going to know what people want here, and at the end of the day, that's what we'd like to do. That's the publishing model we'd like to be in. Right now, we're just taking games from Asia, localizing them, and popping them out here; we'd actually like to look for developers to invest in.

Do you think that will be the next acquisition spree for Nexon?

MK: North American developers? Yeah, we'd love to find some guys with the right DNA, whether it's through acquisition or investment. We're looking for them, and if they're interested, they should call us!

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