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Die Mär vom Kopierschutz: Wie PC-Spieler für dumm verkauft werden - Games

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Neue DRM-Methoden sehen immer öfter die Ausbeutung der Kunden vor

Das Kürzel DRM begleitet Konsumenten, seit digitale Güter den Massenmarkt erreicht haben. Das Digital Rights Management lässt sich mit der deutschen Bezeichnung “digitales Rechtemanagement” allerdings nur wohlwollend übersetzen, denn tatsächlich geht mit DRM oft der Verlust angestammter Konsumentenrechte einher.

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Das Recht auf Privatkopie etwa besteht zwar nach wie vor und wird von den Rechteinhabern auch gern hervorgekramt, wenn es um die damit verbundene Besteuerung von Leerdatenträgern wie aktuell die Festplattenabgabe geht. De facto arbeitet die Unterhaltungs- und Rechteverwertungsindustrie aber seit Jahrzehnten daran, dieses unbequeme Recht zu beschneiden oder ganz auszulöschen: Denn die Umgehung von Kopierschutzmaßnahmen, die dieses Recht auf private Vervielfältigung behindern, ist verboten - ein Grund, weshalb das Kürzel DRM für Kritiker auch für “digitale Rechteminderung” steht.

Apokalypse seit Jahrzehnten

In der Unterhaltungsindustrie herrscht traditionell nackte Angst vor dem Wegbrechen ihrer Geschäftsmodelle durch neue Technologien. Schon das tendenziöse und zugleich eigentlich absurde Kunstwort “Raubkopie” spricht Bände. Der Tonfall der Branche ist traditionell apokalyptisch, die immer gleichen und nachweislich aus dem Hut gezauberten Zahlen der angeblich durch “Raubkopien” verursachten Schäden bedrohen angeblich nicht nur die jeweiligen Branchen, sondern immer das ganze Medium an sich.

Da steht schon mal die Kultur des Abendlandes auf dem Spiel: “Eine klanglose Zukunft ist das Menetekel. Wenn die Musikindustrie ihre wirtschaftlichen Probleme heute und morgen nicht zu lösen vermag, wird es übermorgen bei aller Super-Technik kaum mehr produzierte Musik geben, die überspielt werden kann”, berichtete zum Beispiel unheilschwanger der deutsche Spiegel - jedoch war im zitierten Artikel nicht von Filesharing die Rede. Es ging um die böse Musikkassette. Damals, 1977.

Floppys auf dem Schulhof

Spiele als digitales Produkt haben eine lange Geschichte des ganz eigenen Kampfes der Spielemacher gegen ihre nicht bezahlende Zielgruppe, und das schon lange vor dem Internet. Der Tausch von Floppys auf dem Schulhof ist so alt wie die Verbreitung des Computers im Privatbesitz. Der elektronische Diebstahlschutz steckte damals noch in den Kinderschuhen: Ältere Semester werden sich noch an die erfindungsreichen analogen Kopierschutzmaßnahmen erinnern, die dem hemmungslosen Kopieren oft auch durchaus originell entgegentraten. Unvergessen ist sicher das Code-Rad der ersten “Monkey Island”-Spiele, andere Titel verlangten später im Spiel die Eingabe einzelner Wörter aus den damals noch umfangreichen Handbüchern. Übrigens war “Raubkopieren” bis zum Aufkommen der CD-ROM ein reines Problem der Heimcomputerszene; durch ihre Cartridgestruktur waren Konsolenspiele lange Zeit praktisch kopiersicher.

Neue Wege im DRM

2012, so könnte man behaupten, war in der Spieleindustrie ein Jahr des Umdenkens in Sachen DRM. Seit Jahren schon protestieren User zu Recht gegen immer drakonischer werdende DRM-Systeme, die limitierte Installationen oder den Zwang zur ständigen Internetverbindung vorschreiben. Onlineproteste bei prominenten Titeln, vereinzelte Thematisierung durch die Games-Presse oder kritische User-Rezensionen etwa auf Amazon zum Thema DRM (Paradefall: “Spore”) waren allerdings die einzigen merkbaren Effekte der umstrittenen Kopierschutzmaßnahmen geblieben; die Raubkopierer selbst waren davon weniger beeindruckt. Es gibt kaum ein Spiel, das nicht trotz knebelhafter DRM-Maßnahmen innerhalb kurzer Zeit trotzdem als Raubkopie zum Download verfügbar gewesen wäre. Technisch betrachtet war jedes DRM abseits von MMOs oder - spielerisch umstrittenen - Online-only-Ansätzen à la “Diablo 3” bislang erfolglos.

Dennoch: Als Ubisoft im September des Jahres überraschend ankündigte, bei zukünftigen Titeln auf sein besonders unpopuläres DRM-System zu verzichten und es für bestehende Titel zu deaktivieren, war das Erstaunen groß: Noch wenige Wochen zuvor hatte Ubisoft-Boss Yves Guillemot die Hinwendung seines Konzerns zu Free2Play mit angeblichen 95 Prozent Piraterierate begründet - eine Fantasiezahl, die wenig später kleinlaut revidiert werden musste. Auch EA hatte in den letzten beiden Jahren seine drakonischen DRM-Systeme schrittweise gelockert.

Woher diese - scheinbare - Einsicht? Grund für das Umdenken war wohl weniger eine neugefundene Kundenorientierung, sondern eine Hinwendung zu “ganzheitlicheren” Schutzmaßnahmen: Der Trend zu Free2Play als angeblich heilsbringender Formel ist nur eine davon. Denn der PC-Spielemarkt wird inzwischen von großen Downloadplattformen regiert, die das “alte” Modell, das hauptsächlich für physische Datenträger konzipiert war, durch ein neues ersetzen.

Steam, der geheime Tyrann?

Im Sommer 2011 hatte sich Gabe Newell, Chef von Valve und des Quasimonopolisten Steam, in einem Interview anscheinend klar gegen DRM ausgesprochen: “Die beste Methode, Piraterie zu bekämpfen, ist ein Service, den die User benutzen wollen.” Dieser Service solle ein Online-Portal wie etwa Steam oder EAs Origin sein - ein bequemer One-Stop-Shop für Spielverwaltung, Updates, Onlinekomponenten und nicht zuletzt die immer populärer werdenden Abverkäufe, in denen Publisher bei breitem Publikum auch ihren alten Backkatalog noch einmal versilbern oder mit Preismodellen experimentieren können.

Was zu schön klingt, um wahr zu sein, hat einen gewaltigen Haken: Diese Vertriebsplattformen selbst sind umzäunte Gärten ähnlich Apples App-Store, in denen grundlegende Userrechte per AGB außer Kraft gesetzt werden. Die Spiele selbst brauchen kein DRM, da die Plattformsoftware selbst dessen Aufgaben übererfüllt. Zwar ist etwa bei Steam “nur” zum Einloggen eine Internetverbindung nötig und es können auch auf mehreren Rechnern Spiele installiert werden, doch werden im Vergleich zur klassischen Vertriebsform per Datenträger gleich einige Kundenrechte mit Füßen getreten - vom Recht auf Kopie bis zu jenem des Weiterverkaufs oder schlichtem Ausleihen an Freunde.

Wiederholt wurde deshalb Steam wie auch schon EA und Blizzard zuvor von der deutschen Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband (vzbv) abgemahnt. Hauptanlass waren die neuen Geschäftsbedingungen, die Valve seinen Nutzern diesen Sommer in einer beispiellosen “Friss oder stirb”-Aktion schlicht aufgezwungen hatte: Wer den neuen AGBs nicht zustimmen wollte, verlor den Zugang zu seinem Account und somit unter Umständen zu Dutzenden legal gekauften Spielen.

Rechtswidrig

Carola Elbrecht vom vzbv hat klare Worte für dieses Vorgehen: Diese Geschäftspraxis ist schlicht rechtswidrig. Valve wird in naher Zukunft sein klar europäischem Recht widersprechendes Geschäftsverhalten vor Gericht verteidigen müssen; eine Unterlassungserklärung wurde von Valve demonstrativ nicht unterzeichnet, ein Gang durch die Instanzen bis zum europäischen Gerichtshof scheint wahrscheinlich. Dort könnte sich der Spielegigant aber die Zähne ausbeißen: Erst im Juli wurde dort verfügt, dass der Handel mit gebrauchter Software legal ist und nicht eingeschränkt werden darf.

Denn hier ist der zweite, eigentlich essenziellere Schauplatz im Kampf um DRM, der eigentlich jener der Unterhaltungsindustrie gegen ihre Konsumenten ist; denn neben den bösen “Raubkopierern” ist den Konzernen auch der an sich völlig legale Handel mit gebrauchter Software ein Dorn im Auge. Wiederholt haben Entwickler und Publisher den vor allem im Konsolenbereich lebhaften Second-Hand-Handel als “schlimmer als Piraterie” bezeichnet und Umsatzentgänge beklagt. Diese Einstellung spiegelt sich auch in den diversen jüngeren DLC-Strategien und populären “Season Pass”-Geschäftsmodellen wider: Der Käufer des Spiels wird so an “sein” gekauftes Spiel gebunden, ein Weiterverkauf unattraktiv oder schlicht unmöglich. Auch hier könnte die Entscheidung des europäischen Gerichtshofs Interessantes bewirken.

Der Käufer ist der Dumme

Nach Jahren des erfolg- und aussichtslosen Kampfes gegen die Piraten - einem früheren Bonmot Gabe Newells zufolge eigentlich “underserved customers” und zugleich die eifrigste Käufergruppe stellen - zeigt sich eine bittere Wahrheit überdeutlich: DRM dient nicht nur zur Eindämmung von Piraterie - ein Ziel, das meist verfehlt wird -, sondern immer öfter zur besonders effizienten Ausbeutung ohnedies zahlungswilliger Kunden, denen sukzessive Rechte entzogen werden. Ein doppelter Tiefschlag für zahlungswillige Fans.

Geht’s auch ohne?

Kann es aber eine Welt ohne DRM geben? Die Musikindustrie geht diesen Weg. Seit mehreren Jahren wurden die desaströsen DRM-Strategien eingemottet und stattdessen - endlich - auf ein neues, kundenfreundlicheres und preiswerteres Vertriebsmodell umgesattelt. DRM-freie Musik, ohne Gängelung günstig zu kaufen, hat in jüngster Vergangenheit sogar zu einer leichten Trendwende geführt.

Die Spieleindustrie hat diese Lektion bislang ignoriert und setzt weiterhin entweder auf alte Preisstrategien bei verstärkter Nutzerkontrolle durch DRM oder gleich auf Umstrittenes wie F2P. Das Vertrauen in die Kunden, bei akzeptablem Preis-/Leistungsverhältnis und Abkehr von DRM freiwillig zu bezahlen, will sich trotz Pay-what-you-want-Modellen und dem Beispiel der Musikindustrie nicht recht einstellen.

Wer als Spieler damit unzufrieden ist, kann sich überlegen, ob er oder sie den Trend durch weiteres freiwilliges Konsumieren der Entmündigung durch DRM weiter unterstützen will - oder aber zu den existenten, aber noch kleinen Alternativen greifen, um so ihren Unmut auszudrücken. Eines ist klar: Wer kein DRM will, sollte dessen Proponenten zumindest nicht per Kauf belohnen. (Rainer Sigl, derStandard.at, 11.12.2012)

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notgames: notagoodidea

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Tale of Tales, the Belgian couple behind experimental games like Endless Forest, The Graveyard, The Path and now Bientôt l’été, are known for their artistic, dreamlike games. In August 2011, they helped curate a small exhibition accompanying the Cologne Games Lab. The show included games experiments like Dear Esther, Kairo, Trauma as well as Amnesia and Tale of Tales’ own titles and offered a unique glimpse into a creative games underground. 

The motto and title of the exhibition, and of the games shown in it, was “notgames”.  And that’s a problem.

“notgames” is a concept put forward by Tale of Tales’ Michaël Samyn in 2010. notgames.org was meant “as a gathering place for developers who wish to explore the potential of videogames as a creative medium, beyond the confines of conventional game design”. The sites’ tagline reads:

“This is an exploration of what’s moving and enchanting and fascinating in software applications, videogames and procedural arts, beyond the amusement offered by obeying rules and receiving rewards.”

The term “notgames” robs the whole medium of its avantgarde.

It’s an understandable notion: Games, in their audience’s minds as well as in those of the general public, are entertainment first and foremost. Their most important goal is in offering “fun” to their players, and the mainstream’s triple-A titles go to great lengths to provide that “fun” by creating enjoyable challenges, in recent years more and more often by opening up to casual gamers, by removing barriers, by concentrating on the tried and true formulas known to work and rake in the dollars.

By coining a definition like “notgames”, Tale of Tales - and many likeminded games creators - distanced themselves from this commercial, mainstream world of games as pure entertainment products. The games collected in the exhibition are different, that’s for sure: They concentrate on atmosphere, explore new areas in narration and gameplay and experiment with aesthetics rarely used in the rest of the medium. 

But - and that’s the reason for my rejection of the term - by claiming that these games, these bold experiments, are by their very definition not part of the medium games anymore, the proponents of the term “notgames” rob their whole medium of its avantgarde and effectively turn their backs in resignation. That’s a strange and premature surrender, given that the medium itself is young and in constant transformation, and, even worse, it doesn’t help in changing gaming’s struggle with adolescence.

Dear Esther

It’s easy to see where this resignation came from. Mainstream gamers and their notoriously vocal trolling community must surely have dismissed many of the games on the “notgames” list as just that: not games. No achievements, no multiplayer, no thrilling escapism and, most importantly, no “fun”, that basic ingredient all mainstream gamers feel entitled to in their games. If these people can’t be convinced to reconsider their set notions of what a game is allowed to be like, why not just defiantly accept their ignorance and stick with their judgment?

Of course, there’s another, completely different crowd involved in the self-inflicted exclusion of “notgames” from games in general, and it’s safe to say that their opinions mattered just as much in this regard: The art crowd - traditional and multimedia artists, art critics, academics, curators and art lovers - is still notoriously unconvinced of gaming’s potential to even be art, even if the MoMA’s recent inclusion of games into its collection should remedy some of that. By ostentatiously excluding themselves from games, “notgames’” creators can claim a respectable distance to a medium that’s generally perceived as inferior to most respected arts.

It’s a route that’s completely opposed to other great experimental artists’ approach to the exact same dilemma.

So there’s the two frontlines that experimental gamesmakers like Tale of Tales face: On the one hand, a mainstream audience familiar with the medium, but unconvinced of or unprepared to cope with these experiments’ merits; and an art crowd, unfamiliar with and sceptical of gaming but charmed by this “new” way of making interactive art.

Of course, it’s both these crowds that are addressed by calling these experimental, lovely games “notgames”. Unfortunately, it’s also a slightly cowardly route to take, and in addition: It’s a route that’s completely opposed to other great experimental artists’ approach to the exact same dilemma, who realized that inclusion, not exclusion, was the way to go forward.

Trauma

When John Cage confronted his audience with four and a half minutes of silence in his seminal piece “4.33”, he boldly challenged his contemporaries’ idea of music as a whole. Of course he didn’t claim to be making “notmusic”; it was the very inclusion of this experiment into contemporary music that made an impact.

When Marcel Duchamp insisted that his famous sculpture “Fountain” - a porcelain urinal hung upside down and signed with a mock name - be included in an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, he helped in revolutionizing modern art and art theory.

When James Joyce and William Burroughs, both experimental authors of exquisite boldness, published their revolutionary work, they matter-of-factly insisted that their works were “novels”, i.e. within the limits of literature, even though their work revolutionized and cannibalized most of the novels that had come before.

The titles collected under the term “notgames” are not “notgames”. They are games.

The list goes on. Experimental artists in every field were constantly challenged by conservative nay-sayers claiming that this or that piece of experimental art is “not music”, “not art”, “not literature”; by self-confidently claiming their spaces inside of their respective media, these artists helped expand the boundaries of their art and of art as a whole. 

In all of these cases, the creators defended their works’ obvious right to be part of their media, to be included, no matter how experimental their approach. By using the term “notgames” for an experimental avantgarde, the rest of games is automatically judged and damned to artistic stagnation. I don’t want that.

To be clear: I am in no way questioning these “notgames’” relevance, but an unfortunate, defensive and resignative terminology.  The titles collected under the term “notgames” are not “notgames”. They are games. I’d even say they are among the most important games, games that expand our understanding of what games can be, of what might be in store for gaming as an art and as an entertainment.

Games evolve, and that’s why they desperately need “notgames” to be games, as part of a rich and varied medium. It’s time to come out of the defense.

Verfasst von rainer sigl am 15. Dezember 2012 - 16:59

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The Making Of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City - Features

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The Making Of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

The Making Of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

Edge Staff at 02:35pm December 7 2012

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As Rockstar’s open-world classic arrives on iOS to mark its tenth anniversary, we look back to its creation with company president and GTA: Vice City executive producer Sam Houser. Here, he recalls the films, TV shows and music that inspired the game and the legacy it leaves behind – and why Ray Liotta thought he was a “fucking lunatic”.

What were the points of inspiration for Vice City?
When we were doing the London pack on the first GTA, the idea we had after that was to do Miami in the ’80s, but for one reason or another it didn’t come together. So you’ve got the idea and it’s about gangsters and the mobster underculture, and a celebration of all things along those lines, and you think, where do we take this now? With something like the GTA series there are a lot of options – you can have more fun in Liberty City, or you can do this or do that – but as we were all talking the idea that seemed to have the most meat on it, the one that had the most material that we could work with – in a lot of areas we’re interested in: the vibe, the storytelling, the culture, the fashion, the music and on and on and on – was Miami in the ’80s. To me, it’s still hands-down the grooviest era of crime because it didn’t even feel like it was crime. You had Cuban hitmen coming across and gunning people down in the street, but it was still celebrated in a sort of haze of cocaine and excess and Ferraris and Testarossas, and it was a totally topsy-turvy back-to-front period of time. It was everything that was crazy about the ’80s, and it was in America so it was crazier – and geographically it’s the gateway to the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean, and so everything floods in there.

It was a place that I had grown up loving. As kids, Scarface was one of our favourite films. That’s a totally played-out remark, and most people will try not to say that because they’ve seen things like Scent Of A Woman and some of Al Pacino’s other pieces of work that are a little bit more questionable, but with Scarface, we could put it on here now and you and I within five minutes would be saying, “Actually, let’s watch it – it’s great, isn’t it?” It’s an amazing film.

But the thing that was more of a direct influence was Miami Vice, because it’s a little bit later. Scarface is earlier, like ’83, and it kind of looks it, but Miami Vice was ’84 to ’89, about five seasons, 110 or so episodes, and I’ve seen them all many times. Before you could get them on DVD I bought them off eBay – the crappiest quality VHS copies you’ve ever seen, and I have them all. What blew me away about that series – and Michael Mann is, I think, a visionary film maker – is that each episode was 50 minutes long, and they sort of hit on all the bases in every episode. It was very adult – I remember at the time watching it and thinking that it was very risqué. But it was an incredibly slick show, and when we were first talking about it, everyone was kind of laughing, like: “What are you on about?” And I was like, “No, no, no – it’s so slick”. Just in terms of music alone, when you look at the tracks that Miami Vice used, it’s an amazing list, and Michael Mann would create these miniature pop videos in every show which would be montages. So his use of music in the show was remarkable. A dream of mine and Dan [Houser]’s is to have a montage in a game, actually. We’re on our way; we’ll get it one day – a montage of your experiences set to music. Come on, that’s going to be amazing, right?

Also, Michael Mann’s use of colour and light is wonderful. Miami is such a beautiful place anyway, so the light is gorgeous, but his use of night lighting made it so glossy and sexy. He’s also an expert in the use of weapons, and we met all of the weapons experts who worked on Miami Vice. We got into the details in a hardcore way.

Then the other thing I loved – and we all loved, actually, although initially there was a lot of arm twisting that had to go on in order to make people watch it – was that each show was kind of like a mission. It may have had a few cool little action sequences in it which were novel, but the overarching story was like a mission, so there was so much cool stuff to take in, whether it was the vehicles they used – incredible cars, incredible helicopters, incredible boats – or whatever. While we were finishing GTAIII I would even go home at lunchtimes and watch episodes, and I did that for about a year – it was all I watched. You could sit there and watch it and get stills of so many moments in the show from just one episode and I’d think: “If we can just get that or this or that…” I remember Aaron [Garbut, GTA series art director] working so hard just to get the neon the way he wanted it. He’d been to Miami and he’d seen it in the show, and he knew exactly what he was looking for but it was so difficult [to achieve]. But when he got it right, you were just like [snaps fingers]: “That’s it!”

So there were plenty of other things that influenced us but I would have to say the strongest influence of all became Miami Vice – more so than Scarface, even though the story is more of a Scarfacey story. You can’t beat Miami Vice’s style, its production values, and its focus on details. Michael Mann went on to be one of the best film makers around, but Miami Vice just resonated with us. So hard.

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The Making Of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

The Making Of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

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Edge Staff at 02:35pm December 7 2012

What were the difficulties you faced in following up GTAIII?
We were following up a game that had surprised us all. We started the game immediately after we’d finished GTAIII and as the months rolled on GTAIII became more and more well known and was winning a lot more awards, so the pressure on Vice City went up and up and up, along with the expectation. So that definitely made things harder. The other thing is that we effectively made Vice City in nine months, start to finish. If you think about it, it came out in October [2002], and although the team were creating 3D models for it at the end of the previous year, it really kicked off at the beginning of 2002. So if you think about what was made in nine months, and then commercially what it went on to be, it was a pretty amazing thing. It was a very fast, aggressive development process. It was so fast that it was nerve-wracking, and we were also in a situation where we were still a small company and [parent company] Take-Two was very reliant on the game, so it kind of had to be out when it was needed. But at the same time we wouldn’t be able to release it if it wasn’t good enough.

I remember being in a very dark place towards the end of the production. I was punishing to live with. I was murder because we all felt the expectation and the pressure of the audience so much, and I was like: “I never want to let those people down. I’d rather they didn’t buy it than let them down”. I don’t mean to sound pompous or anything but it’s a real responsibility and it’s something that we take really seriously. Making something good and people liking it is ultimately all that matters. All the other stuff, quite fucking honestly, is fluff and interference. There are plenty of things that try to pull you away from those things, but those are the things that matter: you doing your best to make something good and sticking it on the screen, and someone liking it. That relationship between them and your game and you, it’s like the special magic bit that we don’t let anyone get near, because that’s where it all happens. So we were really feeling the pain of that exploitation as we got closer and closer to the release date, and someone would play it internally and would say something that would put me into the darkness for two weeks, but every time that happened it was happening for a good reason, and we would come out of it stronger.

How big a challenge was it to create the soundtrack?
GTAIII had less well-known music in it. There was some real-world music and there was some fictional music that was made internally. It was a really cool mixture of stuff, but suddenly we’d gone from our in-house music – which was so high-quality but was clearly satirical and its own thing – to drum’n’bass and Moving Shadow and all those guys, and the classical music, and the Scarface soundtrack, to Hall and Oates and 99 Luftballons and so on. The first time I played the game with the music, when I was over at [Rockstar] North, I was like, “Whoah”. I had a weird reaction. It felt like crossing a line between the reality and the fiction and all this sort of stuff, and I was like, “I don’t quite know how this is going to work out”. And that span me out for months. Fortunately there was the strength of some of my colleagues, who were like, “It’s hot as hell – what are you talking about? It’s amazing”. Because I was the one who dragged everybody down that path, I had a tremendous feeling that my neck was on the line with all the people I looked up to. I mean, initially some of the guys on the team were like, “The ’80s, man? That’s a rough one, isn’t it?” And I was like, “Yeah, of course it is. But that’s all the more reason to do it”.

You make these elements sound difficult, but weren’t there even bigger challenges? Putting in proper air travel for the first time, for example.
With helicopters, yes. And it had motorbikes as well.

How was it possible to do it all in nine months?
Nowadays, with the complexity of games as they right now, you couldn’t do it, but it was a bunch of people who had proved something pretty good with GTAIII and didn’t want to labelled as one-hit wonders. And I’m a driven guy, and all of the key members of the crew are very ambitious, driven people. These are people who, if you give them a shot, they are going to take it, and they just went at it. We all did.

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The Making Of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

The Making Of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

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Edge Staff at 02:35pm December 7 2012

How did you go about signing up the voice talent?
One of the people I met because I had to meet him was Ray Liotta because he was going to be Tommy Vercetti and I remember he demanded to meet me. And so Dan [Houser], a couple of the other guys and I went out for dinner with him and he took us to Peter Luger’s, which is like an olde worlde steakhouse in Brooklyn, just the other side of the Williamsburg Bridge. Now I don’t know if you go to these places in New York but they are always packed and even if you have a table booked for 8:30 you’re going to be sitting down for 9:45 – that’s sort of how it goes. And they’re kind of slightly rude, and people buy into that. So we were in there on our own, and it was packed, and we were like four little kids – the waiters were just walking over us. Then Ray Liotta waltzed in and took us all straight to the best table, and I was so energised that I just flew in on him, explaining what we were about and what the game was about. I remember him saying to Dan the next day, “God, your brother’s a fucking lunatic”.

Did he really get what you were doing? His performance was good, obviously.
Yeah, his performance was very good. He was a very interesting guy to work with because we had to have him in for quite a long time – it was the most time we’ve ever had someone like that around, actually – and in some sessions he was so fired up and he was so into it, but then sometimes it’d be like he was in some kind of a hole, and he was very dark and couldn’t work. He’s a pretty amazing guy, kind of an amazing actor. He’s not been in as many good things as he should have been, I think. He is so good in Goodfellas that he kind of doesn’t need to do anything else, but whatever he’s in he always catches your eye because he’s got something about him, and in the flesh he’s definitely got that about him, too. I think he did get it, to be fair. But he made some comments later on through his agent, something like, “Hey, that game was so big I should have charged them more money”, and I hate that kind of chat. It’s like, be cool. You know? I hate that – it’s so cheesy. Like he’s saying, “Next time I’m really going to pin it to them”. Well, how about we just killed off your character? So he doesn’t exist – there is no next time. That’s how we handle that.

How did your experiences with Vice City affect how you approached San Andreas?
Obviously landing Ray Liotta for Tommy Vercetti was a massive project for us, because at the time actors weren’t doing things like that, and I think we did a lot to introduce actors being involved in games. And I remember playing Vice City and thinking his performance was fantastic, but something in the months afterwards when I was playing it was conflicting in my brain: was I playing Tommy Vercetti or was I playing Ray Liotta? Who was I, what was going on here, what was happening on the screen? And it really sort of caught me off guard, and it kept happening to me. It didn’t happen to me so much with the other characters but it happened to me with my character because he’s an extension of me on the screen. To some extent it left me a bit confused, and it certainly made us resolve for future iterations to dial down the use of famous actors. So if you look at San Andreas, there weren’t as many in that game. I think that Samuel L Jackson gave an absolutely incredible performance as Tenpenny, but he’s the biggest star in that game by a long, long way.

So something happened there and, you know, it’s not something that I say is a final decision forever, but certainly I think with Young Maylay, what he did with CJ [in San Andreas] made him very, very human to me… It’s weird to talk about relationships with videogame characters, but I have them. It wouldn’t be right to say there was doubt between Tommy Vercetti and me, or whatever, it’s just that it sowed a seed, and I think we’ve evolved from that now, and I actually think what we’ve ended up with is stronger. And also, I’ll be honest, it’s easier to work with someone who’s keen and enthusiastic, and not been in hundreds of films. It’s much easier to work with them.

To get good performances in games is very difficult. You know, sometimes you get a famous person in and they literally just read off the script, they want the cheque, and they want to go. I find that insulting and depressing.

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The Making Of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

The Making Of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

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Edge Staff at 02:35pm December 7 2012

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In terms of vehicle design in Vice City, how close could you get to the cars that provided the inspiration?
You have to be pretty far away. Really, the idea was that they would evoke the feelings of cars of that era rather than being specifically those cars. The best example of that would be the Porsche. The guy who was modelling the cars at the time created an absolutely perfect Porsche, like an ’85 Carrera, and Tommy had an animation to get in and open the top, and you just looked at it and it was like, “That is never going to get through”. When the artist had to change that it was probably one of the sadder moments involved in the project. But no, listen, if we could license the real cars for these games, I think we would, but no car company is coming near us.

Can you pick your personal favourite moment from Vice City?
It would have to be sitting on a PCJ600, driving down the main strip listening to Out Of Touch by Hall and Oates. I always liked Hall and Oates but that was the track that I wasn’t familiar with. A lot of the music we put in that game was stuff that we kind of re-researched and rediscovered, so it was either kind of newish to us or it felt very fresh. So, going over the issues I had initially with the real-life music, by the time the actual game was finished I was so connected with it that I thought it was just stunning.

In terms of other moments, what also worked for me was Lance Vance, played by Philip Michael Thomas, who is actually one of the nicest people you could ever meet, a seriously cool bloke. I thought some of the interplay between him and Tommy Vercetti was awesome. It really captured the Crockett and Tubbs vibe that we wanted – I thought the fact that we could get that from a game was incredible. The game as a whole package captured and evoked that era of Miami in the ’80s, and it was made by a bunch of British people – even though obviously there was the crew here in New York, too. The guys up in Edinburgh only went to Miami once, and it was quite a piss-up when they did. They obviously did a lot of work but it was straight after GTAIII, and we all went to Miami, the whole crew, and from the first day to what Vice City ended up being, it was a mental feeling. And we were making it very much for ourselves, because after the previous game we’d gone from having no expectation to maximum expectation, but internally we were still feeling that whether we sold ten copies or 1,000 copies, we’d be doing well. You can’t say, “Well, the previous game’s sold ten million and counting – this game has to do that as well.” You can’t live like that.

A lot of people still talk about Vice City as their favourite game in the series. Do you think that’s related to the music, or the atmosphere, or something else?
I think it’s because of what we would call the vibe. I think it’s the combination of the music, the clothing, the vehicles and other things. The way I look at is that suddenly your PS2 had become like a little time machine, and it could take you anywhere, and this was just the first place that it happened to take you. If you could have made time stand still then, and made a hundred things in the mould of Vice City, there were so many things you could create, whether it was a fantasy-themed thing or something else entirely. It just made a lot of things make sense, and when it connected with the audience in a meaningful way it proved a lot about what we’d been thinking and hoping about people feeling about games. You know, you’re shooting in the dark and speculating, but when people get it you’re like, “Wow, that’s fucking cool. It’s not just us tossing our own selves off – people actually get it”. And with that game all of the things we set out to do with it, and all the little details, everyone picked up on everything, and I think that’s awesome.

Some of this material originally appeared in E187′s The Making Of: Grand Theft Auto.

Tags: featured, GTA: Vice City, The Making Of

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My Mother, Commander Shepard

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Daniel Starkey writes about how he modeled Commander Shepard on his mom, who inspired him to love scifi.

by Daniel C. Starkey on 2nd Dec, 2012

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The female version of Mass Effect’s protagonist Commander Shepard, colloquially referred to as “FemShep”, has become something of a rallying figure for gamers starved for strong female characters in an age of dudebro mainstream protagonists. For me, FemShep has become more than that; it has become something personal, something deeply affecting. For me, it has become an eerie parallel to my mother’s life throughout the series—both Shepard’s triumphs, and her failures. 

Now that the Commander Shepard arc has ended with Mass Effect 3, I’ve set out to try and understand why it’s been so difficult for me to say goodbye to the series, and to learn how FemShep succeeds where so many other female video game characters have failed.

I was raised in a single-parent household by a woman who had—let’s go with an “unhealthy fixation” with science fiction. We watched Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate and various other star-themed bits while I was growing up. For her, I think, science fiction provided both a realm in which to escape and a hope for a better future. That vision became a mentality that she not only passed on to me, but one that she carried with her and made every attempt to embody in her job as a social worker.

I noticed early in life that my mom dedicated herself to helping others. She helped rehabilitate kids in juvenile hall and she helped people who were disabled and unable to work find the programs they needed to get by. For several years, my mom would organize toy and food drives and then we would deliver what we could on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to local shelters.

She told me that as much as she wanted the world of Star Trek to exist now, we would never get there if there weren’t people in the trenches making it happen. She made me listen to voicemails from people she had helped. “This. This is what it’s about,” she would say. “This is why it’s important. This means something to someone. It may seem small, but everything you do, every single thing can be used to help real people.” 

As a kid it was hard for me to understand what all of that really meant. It was hard for me to grasp why someone would take time to help others. I knew what she was saying, and what she was trying to do, but it took me a long time to really internalize those messages.

Most of you probably remember Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic as one of the better titles the original Xbox. I, however, saw it as the natural extrapolation of my mom’s obsession into the realm of interactive entertainment. After I got her started on the game, she got a second TV and Xbox just so she could play while watching the SciFi Channel. I think all-told, she put more than 1,000 hours into the game.

When Mass Effect was first announced, just two years later, my mom and I started talking about possibly going half-in on an Xbox 360. In some developer diaries which, to this day I haven’t been able to find again, the dev team said that they wanted to create a modern reinterpretation of a classic 1970s and 80s science fiction film. Naturally she and I both flipped our shit and the deal was sealed. 

After almost two years of delays, Mass Effect finally arrived in November of 2007. I sold a stack of games and some Pokémon cards to put forth my portion, and my mom cut me a check so we could drop down the $350 for a Premium Xbox 360 and the $60 for the game itself. 

That was two days before Thanksgiving and one week before she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disorder that steadily begins reducing functionality of the joints—a big problem for a gamer.

Her condition had actually progressed pretty far by that time, and was paired with another autoimmune disorder—Lupus. She had been able to play Knights of the Old Republic and a few other Bioware games specifically because they were turn-based and slow-paced. Mass Effect, however, was a shooter. It required much faster reactions, as well as precise aiming.

After waiting for two years, she simply couldn’t play it.

Despite her diagnosis, I wanted to have my mom with me, even if she couldn’t experience the game in quite the same way. Instead, I began modeling my version of Commander Shepard after my mother. I gave her the same sense of altruism, of dedication and of hope for a better future. She gave second chances and she was uncompromising in her pursuit of her pro-social ideals, in spite of her sordid past. 

When given the option, I chose to give her a rebellious streak, one marred with “bad” decisions while recalling tales of my mom’s alleged party prowess.  I thought an altruistic background would also be a good fit given my mom’s nature. I made her an Adept class, because I think if asked the quintessential late-night nerd question regarding what super power she would pick, she’d opt for whatever got her closest to being a Jedi. 

Naming her wasn’t too difficult either. Ever since I was about six years old my mom and I had been watching the Stargate series and its two spin-offs, Atlantis and Universe. Of those, Mom identified with Elizabeth Weir—a civilian commanding officer in the Atlantis series. It fit pretty well too, because she still ships Weir and John Shepard—another character from Atlantis.

Elizabeth Shepard. Adept. Earthborn War Hero.

Yeah, that fits.

Shepard is, in a sense, a “walled garden” character. Players are given a framework within which they can craft any number of diverse characters. She can be a Mary Sue, she can be petty or she can represent someone we love. BioWare backed the Mass Effect protagonist with strong writing and an even stronger voice actress regardless of the choices made by the player. 

The beauty of the character as an idea and why she has so many rabid fans is specifically because we are free to construct our version of FemShep, complete with all the flaws and facets that real people have. If your Shepard is boring and flat as a character in her development and motivations, you have no one to blame but yourself. If she’s complex and consistent, then it is because BioWare has facilitated that construction.

In time, they became intrinsically linked, across all three titles, as I carried Shepard through her journey; my FemShep was a digital representation of my mom. Every major decision helped me empathize with her and understand how her background influenced her values and ultimately her own real-world choices.

The issue with female characters in gaming rarely has anything to do with their “strength” in the traditional sense. Bayonetta is no more a “strong” character than Alyx Vance. No, it’s about authenticity. It’s about relatability. I’ve been starved for decently written women in games. Growing up with a single mother, much of my life is informed by that perspective. I’ve had many women in my life that I’ve cared for but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve felt anything for a female character in interactive media.

The characters in media which resonate with us the most will always be those that represent our own personal struggles, our demons. Through media we can challenge and begin to face our own problems and experiences. The vast majority of games, right now, only offer those opportunities to a minority of people: straight white males. That shouldn’t be news to anyone who even casually follows the gaming industry. The fanatical devotion to FemShep, however, is.

I know that, for my part, I made fun of my (mostly guy) friends when, out of some arbitrary desire to be as masculine as possible, they went straight for the male Shepard. I’d ask silly things like “When did they add BroShep? That’s new…”, always suggesting that not only were they making the wrong choice, but expressing surprise that it even existed (sorry Mark Meer!).  

“It’s a boring choice, though. Everyone’s a grizzled space marine these days.”

What made Star Trek—especially the first television series—so incredible was its vision of the future. In it they showed people of various races and national origins as well as men and women getting along, treating one another as equals. It was a stark contrast to every other film and show that was available at the time.

In this century however, our society was still struggling. It took my mom far longer to receive disability than she expected. In my senior year of high school, we had no money coming in. Initially, many of her coworkers donated their sick days. They kept it up for as long as they had days left to donate, but those ran out eventually. We were still more or less okay though. Some family and friends donated what they could to help us along and, in the meantime, I got the financial aid I needed to move a thousand miles away and go to college in Minneapolis.

It is around this time that I started noticing some more parallels between my mom and Lizzy (sometimes she likes to cut loose) Shepard. She couldn’t work, at least not in the traditional sense, anymore. That didn’t mean, however, that she didn’t still have people to help. I still needed her.

That August something happened. I learned that someone else very important to me had stage 4 cancer. My mom told me that morning, and she thought I was going to be okay. I was—for the most part. I went to work and then I went out to dinner with friends. After they’d all left and gone to sleep though, the weight of it hit me. I fell apart like a child learning for the first time that the world isn’t really fair. I texted her, told her that I wasn’t okay. In the next 30 seconds she called me.

Throughout Mass Effect 2 I was asked to gather, steadily, a team that would support Shepard and help her carry out her mission. Ostensibly, the mission was suicidal—something that no one had ever done or could ever be expected survive. Until the end, what exactly the mission entails wasn’t known. How your choices might affect the outcome of the mission wasn’t clearly stated either. I was blind, to a degree, having only my understanding of how my mom would carry herself. That proved to be more than enough.

As I mentioned before, when mom was having trouble getting her application for social security disability approved, about two dozen friends and family members helped us out. At the time I had a weird existential crisis of sorts. I came to realize that there are very, very few who had the same kind of support network that she did. I wondered how our lives might have been different if she hadn’t been as kind and as dedicated and as assiduous as she was. 

I was visiting my home state of Oklahoma during the semester break. It was the first time I’d seen my mom in almost a year. She was tired. She wore her stress and anxiety well, but it was still there. Carved into her face, echoed in her voice.

She’d been helping out some of the people that had helped us four years prior. Returning the favor, as these things go. Still she was undergoing chemo treatments, and was on steroids to suppress her immune system. They’d certainly taken their toll. She was okay though. She was making it. Pulling through like she always had.

Then, a couple of days after Christmas, a cat that we rescued from a negligent acquaintance eight years ago stopped eating. We had to force feed the cat, Patch, and dribble water in her mouth to keep her going. My mom was taking it really hard. The straw that broke the camel’s back as it were. We took Patch to a vet at the next opportunity. Her liver and kidneys were shutting down. There wasn’t anything they could do. 

Two months later Mass Effect 3, the final chapter in Elizabeth Shepard’s story, was released. I was in San Francisco for the Game Developer’s Conference the day it dropped, but at home I had everything set up and ready to go for an epic marathon as soon as I got back, because after GDC I had a week off for spring break.

I kept myself on full black-out for Mass Effect the week of GDC. If someone mentioned it, I walked off. I refused to read anything on the internet. I stopped checking Facebook and Twitter. I was not going to be spoiled. I had no idea the ending was causing as much controversy as it was, and I was able to go in with a more or less clean slate. 

I didn’t get what I expected. I won’t let this turn into another Mass Effect 3 ending rant (I already wrote one), but the entire experience left me with a lot of complex thoughts that have taken me a few months to work out. 

When I finished the final game, I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t really want to talk about it much. I needed time to figure out why I felt the way I did and why this ending in particular was so hard for me to really understand. I think I got it now, though. Finally. 

See, as positive as I tend to be, I’m also very realistic. Through my experiences at college (yay graduating with a liberal arts degree!), I came to realize that as much weight as our society puts on altruistic behavior, it can be destructive. Shepard was, after all, only a person; an incredibly tenacious woman that rose to meet every challenge with full force, but a person nonetheless. 

There was a lot of debate as to the significance of one scene in particular in the Mass Effect 3 opening. Shepard is forced to leave Earth behind, forced to accept that there will be some loss in her journey while also realizing that as painful as that loss is, she needs to fulfill her ultimate goal. She needs to finish the mission.

As Shepard is seen leaving Earth, she turns back to see a child killed by a Reaper weapon and the subsequent explosion. In itself, the scene isn’t really that powerful. The child is given no emotional connection to the audience. We have no reason to care about his death versus the countless millions across the globe. It’s just one small voice in a sea of tragedy. Shepard knows this. She acknowledges it. She understands that its war, the ultimate war, and that people will naturally die.

Still, that child begins to represent all of her failures up to that point. Her complete lack of agency in that moment in spite of all the work that she’s done and all of the sacrifices she has made. She could do so much good, but she was powerless to save one, small child. 

Remind you of someone?

My mom too, was no stranger to death. She was an emotional rock. I’ve known her to personally comfort and stay with several people on their deathbeds. Making sure they were in a good place when they went. As much as we loved Patch, as long as we had her in the family, she was still a cat. Not even my mom’s cat really (she had another named Sheba). Still, I’d never seen her react to a death—any death—in quite the same way. 

Mom felt helpless, utterly helpless in that situation. All that she’d done before had no value right there. Patch was not a person that could understand mortality. Patch had no way to come to terms with it. No way to accept it. Patch just suffered, needlessly. And my mom couldn’t do anything.

The child’s death becomes a key plot point in the game. Shepard has nightmares about it, and for the first time since Mass Effect I see her shaken – truly shaken – by events outside of my own control. Shepard pushes on though, because that’s who she is, and that’s what she does.

Throughout the rest of the game, several party members from previous titles die in rather dramatic fashion. Each of their circumstances is built up around the consequences of all of the choices I had made up to that point. Not everything Elizabeth Shepard sacrifices is worth it though; some of them result in complex scenarios with subtle and not necessarily complete resolutions. The various branches and paths taken over the course of the trilogy begin to come together, steadily to form a coherent idea – Shepard will have to give up everything to succeed and in the end Shepard may only have a Pyrrhic victory.

As great as my mom is, she’s not perfect. Not by a long shot. She has flaws, just like everyone else. When I tried to model her example perfectly in my own life, I lost track of my own personality. I lost myself. I learned that when you spend all of your time living for others, when you dedicate everything you have to those around you, when you fill yourself with the selfless, agapic love of an altruist, some element of your being has to suffer.

My mom tried to never show weakness. She tried to suppress her own humanity so that she could be an unflinching symbol of perfection. I didn’t figure this out until I was past 20. I didn’t understand how little of herself she still had until I tried to live that life—however briefly – and burned myself out in a matter of months.

Shepard was burning out too. She’d been resolute and she’d been unyielding, but you can only wear that mask for so long. The game was drawing to a close, and I knew how it was going to end. I knew what was going to happen. 

With the remnants of the galactic military and a weapon of unknown origin, she prepares for the final assault. It is the final attempt to reclaim Earth and save whoever is left. 

The battle – a grand, bombastic conclusion to an epic space opera—is fought to a stalemate. Shepard and the rest of her crew land on the Earth’s surface to complete a final ground push – the kind that tells you it is an excuse for the writers to include one last human-scale dramatic arc.

Again, Shepard pushes on, against insurmountable odds and, as she does, succeeds. She’s wounded, though, and she summons the last of her strength to stand.  Over the course of the next few minutes, I watch her limp forwards.

After some trouble and a few more dramatic scenes, she arrives at the end – both figuratively and metaphorically. She meets an ethereal manifestation of the child that died in the first scene. The child tells her that she can make one of three choices. 

She can choose to kill the Reapers, destroying them and every other synthetic life form in the galaxy, she can choose to try and control them and risk losing that command, restarting the war all over again or she can choose to fuse the two—synthetic and organic – into a new kind of life.

At this point, I began thinking of Contact, another sci-fi adventure I had taken with my mom as a child. There too an alien chose to appear before a woman in a form that she’d recognize, and there too that woman was told that humans were too immature to fully understand the forces at play. The difference here is that the child gives Shepard a choice; one choice and one chance to try and end the conflict.

Tired and weakened, she chooses to create a new kind of life. A new beginning for the people and the artificial intelligences that are left. In so doing, she had to sacrifice herself.

It was here that I think the potential implications of the manner in which I’d been playing affected me the most. In a sense, I’d just watched my mom, the most important person in the world to me, die to achieve her goal. That reality is disturbingly poignant now.

A few weeks ago, I called one of her best friends and asked if there was anything my mom had been doing that would fall within the realm of “self-destructive behavior”. 

“Yeah. She has. She’s been running herself ragged.”

Somehow I thought that’d be the case. She’s been taking care of several people and helping them out when and where she can. A few members of our family have been in out of hospitals recently, and she, as she does, has taken it upon herself to make sure that everyone has the care and the support they need. She makes one hell of a mother, but she’s awful at being a person. So was Elizabeth. 

I see now why it was so hard for me to understand why I felt the way I did after Mass Effect 3. I still haven’t played the extra ending DLC and I haven’t touched it all since the first week or so after its release. BioWare’s recent proclamations about the fourth installment have brought a lot of the issues back to the forefront for me.

They gave me one of the most poignant experiences of my life. I’ve used the series to explore my own real-world problems, understand them and come to terms with them. It has given me so much, and helped me understand both myself and my mother so well. And all it took was one decently written female character. Just one. She wasn’t emotionally distant, she wasn’t overly sexualized and she wasn’t either totally helpless or completely invulnerable. 

While I’d rather not see another installment in the Mass Effect universe, if there is one, I’d like to see them make the lightning strike twice. Let’s see them devote their energy to creating a range of characters that will allow people to explore the range of sexual, racial, and gender identities. This time though, I want them to drop the grizzled space marine. If one character, if one well written female character can gave me that, I can only imagine what BioWare could potentially give everyone else.

I don’t know where the current real-world situation is headed. There’s a lot of chaos in our lives right now. I don’t think my mom has learned her lesson though. And I don’t think I can convince her. We’ll see. Hopefully our story will have a better ending.

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On Faith

unwinnable.com

Months ago, I received an email from Gus Mastrapa introducing me to Stu Horvath. I hadn’t met Stu before, but Gus said Stu was cranking the engine of a new website called “Unwinnable.” Stu was looking for someone on the industry side of games to write for the site occasionally, and in a compliment I still find myself staggered by, that’s why Gus was putting us in touch.

I told Stu that I was indeed very much interested, but that I was currently up to my nipples in work trying to finish our latest game (more on that soon). I promised that when I reached the other side though, I’d be happy to contribute. I did have the pleasure of meeting Stu a month or so after that first contact at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. When he somehow managed to transform a grubby dive bar on the edge of the Tenderloin into probably the best party at GDC (and likely secure that place its most profitable Monday night in its lifetime), I knew I had to find a place on the good ship Unwinnable.

I play games to suffer, or at least live the safe simulacra of suffering.

Now, Mark of the Ninja, the game I was the lead designer on, has been released and I finally have enough cycles to devote to monthly pieces here – but I wasn’t sure what subject to actually begin this foray with. I thought about some things a bit crunchier and more design centric, but ultimately settled on something more unusual. I’m going to talk about faith.

Faith is a weird thing. I’m not a pious person. I don’t seek out comfort or a promise of something better, including in the games I play. As I related to a friend, I play games that provide profoundly negative experiences. I crave games that make me feel suspicious, oppressed, hopeless. Games that involve paranoia, deception, betrayal? The best. I’ve never played games to escape. I play games to suffer, or at least live the safe simulacra of suffering.

I find it weird then that my thoughts have been turning to faith as of late. But I’m finding it unavoidable. I recently watched the first game I designed launch. And not only launch, but launch to basically universal critical acclaim. It was the highest-rated XBLA game of the last two years. I don’t say that to boast. I say that because had you asked me before it launched if it was good, the best I could have mustered was, “I hope so.”

As a creator, you end up having to bank on faith. We don’t have a calculus to predict success, just gut instinct and hope. Design is a wholly intangible domain. You can’t touch a rule. You like to think you’re working from well-grounded principles that will lead to success, but it never actually feels that way. You just have to keep going and have faith that you’re headed in some interesting direction.

The alternative to faith is an almost cynical empiricism. Instead of trusting in your principles, audience and team, you measure every single thing you can to make sure you’re on the right path. Which interface change is better? No need to think about it, just give half of people one version, half the other and see which one they like more. While empiricism is certainly valuable, it’s also very easy to forget that all it can do is find local maxima. It’s not possible to measure what’s good, just what’s better.

It’s probably more than a bit strange for a game designer to make entry to the house of Unwinnable with a harbinger like this. But the truth is, even penning this involves me leaning on, well, hope. Hope that whatever scribblings I render here will be of interest. And more so, that it’ll even merit a place alongside folks like Gus, Jenn Frank, Chris Dahlen, Captain Stu himself and everyone else here. As I’m sure it was the caliber of these folks that drew you here in the first place, it’s a god damned intimidating gallery.

I’m generally quite humble. Someone compliments Ninja and I can usually murmur a “heh, thanks” and a goofy, awkward grin and that’s about it. Hubris ain’t attractive on anyone, but humility in excess isn’t either. And much to the chagrin of my friends and wife, my humility persists still.

A good friend of mine, a voice actor who has done a few small game projects but is otherwise uninvolved with the industry, was kind enough to help out Klei at PAX Prime this past August. We needed more hands, and he hadn’t secured a pass in the scant few hours before they sold out, so he spent most of the weekend at our booth, shilling Mark of the Ninja. And he god damned rocked it. He was utterly indistinguishable from a dev team member and hilariously ended up doing an on-camera interview because no one else was around.

He’d seen tons of people playing Ninja over the weekend, reacting positively to it almost universally. But whenever someone turned to me and asked how I thought the game was doing, all I could do was shrug and hesitantly say, “Well, people seem to like it.” By the weekend, I think he was just about ready to punch me in the crotch for the excess of humility. Maybe it was just because he had appropriate distance from the game, but he gauged everyone’s reactions to be that they loved it. I guess he was right.

I wonder if some of this comes from understanding just how often our minds conspire against us. The problem with gaining greater understanding of how your brain works is that it ruins your ability to be confident in just about anything. Discover confirmation bias? Awesome, enjoy never trusting any opinion you have ever again. Learn about imposter syndrome? Now you can’t even be confident in the fact that you don’t feel confident!

Making games, at least good ones, is an almost total act of faith. Faith in yourself, faith in your team, faith in the audience, faith in your collective ability to transform the barely-playable, wholly uninteresting mess you’re currently looking at into something that will engage people. (I don’t think many folks admit it, but during creation basically all games are really shitty for a really long time. It’s just that the good ones get better.) Frankly, it’s pretty fucking terrifying.

I hope this doesn’t sound dour and anxious, because that’s certainly not how I feel. In some ways, having to rely on faith this way is liberating. Knowing that you can’t be sure means you just have to do your damn best and hope.

If you want to make something new, you can’t rely on past successes to infer the future. You just have to walk up to the precipice, take a deep breath and step off. The act of creation is free fall, wind whipping past your face, seeing the ground rushing to meet you. Thankfully, with Mark of the Ninja, folks caught us.

I’ve found a new precipice here at Unwinnable. At least monthly I’ll be writing about game design, the industry, the true horror of how the sausage is actually made and whatever else might be of interest. It’s an intimidating precipice, but I couldn’t be more excited to step off. I hope I’ll give you all reason to catch me.

———

Follow Nels Anderson on Twitter @Nelsormensch.

unwinnable.com

Who Cares Who Makes Games?

unwinnable.com

When my kid plays games, I can’t help but jump in and lecture him about something. He knows that every time he grabs the controller, I’m going to point out some mechanic, or talk about a franchise’s history, or tell him why some other game was oh so much better. Lately, I’ve been bugging him about names. The other day, after a long break, he told me he wanted to play Plants vs. Zombies. I said, “Sure.  But on one condition. Do you remember the name of the designer?”

He didn’t, so I reminded him: “It was George Fan.” And then I told him to play something else.

This week we finally dug into Quantum Conundrum, the platform puzzler designed by the project lead from Portal. My kid is finally starting to remember that her name is Kim Swift. But that’s easy; her name is catchy.  How long will it take him to recognize Shigeru Miyamoto?  Miyamoto is only the guy who made Mario and Zelda. But how many of his youngest fans know his name?

Now, you may ask why I care whether my kid can name this or that game designer. You probably think I’m forcing him into what we call “hipster homeschool”: that I’m dragging him into my own pop culture obsessions, just like the dads who make their kids listen to the Clash instead of the Wiggles, or watch old clips of David Sanborn’s Night Music instead of Sesame Street. And yes, that’s probably part of the problem. I have an excess of knowledge about a topic that very few people around me care to discuss. Every day I see people at lunch, I hang out at the coffee shop and I sit down to dinner with my wife – and nobody at any of those places cares what happened at the experimental gameplay session at GDC 2009. So when I finally have a captive audience, can you blame me for going on a little?

Don’t forget that there’s only one person in my life who loves videogames more than I do. That’s my kid. I think it’s fair to teach him something about them along the way.

When I was his age, I didn’t know anything about videogames. I may have heard of Nolan Bushnell of Atari, but I couldn’t have named a single person who worked on an Atari game. Back in the day, their names were actually hidden.  In the game Adventure, the programmers snuck their credits into an easter egg. You had to jump through hoops just to find them – and you know, now that I think about it, I don’t even remember what their names actually were.

The one game designer that I could name as a kid was Richard Garriott. But that’s only because he actually put himself into the games, as Lord British, a character that you meet in each of the Ultima titles. You could talk to him, get help from him, and even try to kill him – and I did, in every single game. He was interesting not because I had any idea who the guy was or how he did his work. I knew about him because he was a character and that’s all that most kids care about.

But I guess that for my kid, I want something more. I bug him about George Fan because I think it’s odd that he can name every single type of plant and zombie and even recite some of their backstories, and yet he doesn’t remember the two-syllable name of the guy who set the whole thing in motion. I guess I also want him to understand what it takes for a lone creator, or a team of people or a giant corporate empire like Nintendo to produce the games we all love. I want him to appreciate the industry even a little bit so that he’ll appreciate the time he spends with it.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve started working on games as a writer. My latest project, Klei’s Mark of the Ninja, shipped this September. While I was working on it, I shared some of the early builds with my kid, explained how the work was going, and even let him listen to the auditions of some of the voice talent that we hired. I’m proud to say that he took a real interest in the game – mostly because he could play it – and that he came away with some little idea of how this process actually works. He may never go into the games industry, and in fact, last I checked, his dream was to run a Pokemon ranch, but he still gets a chance to understand all of the steps and setbacks and sweat that go into making a thing, and by that I mean anything.  To appreciate that it takes a lot of work and risk and luck, but that when we stick with it, we can succeed.

So while I want him to respect the work of Fan, Miyamoto, Swift and the rest of the gang, I also want him to watch the credits for the most basic reason of all: because someday, he might be in them.

———

Everything is a teaching moment for Chris Dahlen. Learn more by following him on Twitter @SavetheRobot.

unwinnable.com

Interacting With Fictions: Guilded Youth

rockpapershotgun.com

The Sound Of One Modem Dialling

By RPS on December 13th, 2012 at 9:00 pm.

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RPS friend and ally Leigh Alexander writes a short series about Interactive Fiction. This is part two.

Oh my god, the sound of a modem dialing.

I’m thirteen years old. I’m running home from the bus. I mean running, the snap of wet late winter unkind to my ragged breath – I never did sports, of course. The soundtrack is the rhythmic swish of the black and white Adidas parka I begged my mother to buy me because everyone else had one.

That sound, and the tinny din of cassette music ripped from the radio and spun from the chunky Walkman covered in Sailor Moon stickers that weighed, stuffed deep in my pocket like a secret, against my hip like a weapon. It had, as usual, not been a good day at school.

It hadn’t been a bad day, either, just another terminal march among a numb progression of lockers, oblique ballpoint notes wedged into impossible shapes, stinking gym equipment and the thin red line of the second circling the hour of escape with agonizing slowness. The bus trudges loyally, stop after stop, a march of children bundling home. I get off and I run, desperate as if on fire to slough off the shell of inoffensive fashion and the ghost-scent of illicit bathroom cigarettes.

Up the stairs in the sanctum of home, hurtling to the office, soft with the white noise of breathing machines. Waking the computer up, impatient fingers, black-chipped nails, starving for that particular sound: The scream of a dinosaur choking on static, rattling a cage. Some nights I’ll smother it fruitlessly with a pillow, crouching in the dark among red and green eyes winking, my eyes closed. Today I’m alone in the house and no one but I can hear this ugly, beautiful sound.

It ticks, skips, grates in rhythm with my clenched teeth. And then things blink and light, and finally I breathe easy.

I am just a bit too young to’ve been part of the BBS age, but I can relate: Nothing more complicated nor more basic than a human lifeline. The implicit understanding that you’re probably someone or other outside of your loosely-rulebound little world of second selves and typed actions, but you’d just mostly rather not talk about it; the awkward junction. Sometimes someone has to stop roleplaying and you later find out that their parents took the internet away for reasons your crew can only rumour.

That sort of gaming – such as it was, that inhabiting choice-driven fictions with virtual strangers – wasn’t about escapism as much as it was about exploring the friction between who you were and who you wanted to be. Jim Munroe’s Guilded Youth took third place in the 2012 Interactive Fiction Competition, and earned the authors’-choice “Miss Congeniality” award for its portrayal of uneasy and painfully-beautiful coming of age alongside BBS culture – sparse and direct in a way that feels universal.

The common complaint about IF is that those new to the form struggle to make games limited to text commands grasp what it wants you to do. As more an illustrated, interactive story than a game, Guilded Youth understands and uses so few actions that it’s navigable by basically anyone who’s ever used a computer before, and its limitations feel intentional, even charming in the context of its visual interface, which lends itself to thinking in the language of a clumsier age.

You’re Tony, who in his aspirational life is the thief in an online guild that also includes a flirtatious mage; a barbarian sort who has trouble suspending his disbelief; a bard concerned with appearing cool in his real life, a mysterious paladin, and a righteous wizard perhaps overly-concerned with enforcing the fantasy rules.

The fascinating identity friction of the BBS age came in part from the fact that you’d be dialing in with people from your own local radius – if you didn’t know them IRL already, the possibility (or threat, depending on your motives) of encountering them someplace in your little town was always very real. As Tony the Thief, you and Ryan the Bard are implied to be already fairly well-acquainted classmates, for example.

Guilded Youth presents an interesting catalyst for the offlining of these dial-up relationships: A deserted manor in town, an object of forbidden fantasy exploration for the younger teens and a rebel haunt for the older ones, is soon to be demolished, giving Tony one last chance to salve his complicated curiosity. The story is simple: Several trips to the manor will yield objects that compel the interests of guild-mates who’ll join up to help. The subtext – adolescence and the boundaries of self-identification at this inimitable point in time for these young people – is more interesting.

The interactive story is brief and linear, taking only 20 or 30 minutes to complete, but touching, aided in no small measure by the art of Matt Hammill, which employs distinct greenish ASCII art whenever Tony’s online and a muted, illustrated style whenever he’s not. These visual choices enforce the unique conflict we endured back in the days when meeting someone we’d only known as a screen name, an avatar, in the real world was a more complex proposition. Subtle animations, like the character portraits’ blinking eyes, add lovely, finished touches.

Guilded Youth, as something of a darling among well-liked Jim Munroe’s fellow creators, has already received a lot of feedback from the likes of IF empress Emily Short (on whom, incidentally, I frequently effuse online and then feel scared to talk to in person) and Brandon Boyer (who is my guild paladin, and doesn’t scare me at all). Munroe himself felt disappointed in the story’s linearity, if not its abrupt ending, and was motivated to add a variety of endings that provide a stronger epilogue on the player’s experience and identify it more strongly as the protagonist’s life-defining story. So if you’ve seen Guilded Youth already, it’s worth revisiting the latest version.

There are sound effects, too, occasionally. An alarm that evokes the guilt and confusion inherent in one’s first childish brush with authority – and the scent of illicit smoke. And that modem sound. That modem sound.

An embrace of retro aesthetics is far from new among small indie games, but this goes beyond that – we don’t just want to play like we used to. We need to feel like we used to. I fantasize about some third game that sings the strangled and discordant dial-up song so that Guilded Youth could form some kind of glory trilogy of our lost, poignant disenfranchisement alongside Christine Love’s Digital: A Love Story.

Someone get on that. Enter command, run.

Play Guilded Youth online for free here.

__________________

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Are strategy games and horror compatible?

nightmaremode.net

Tom Auxier

There’s a moment in the first tutorial of XCOM: Enemy Unknown that felt like a revelation. Skip past the languid tutorial pacing, the stilted voice actor telling you what to do, and instead focus on the structure of the mission. Your team enters a building, meets with the unknown, and is summarily slaughtered by beings you can barely comprehend.

Simply put, it’s terrifying in a way that the rest of the game decidedly isn’t. Walking into a room with an alien staring off into space—the situation the mission offers—is a situation you can plan for; when enemies pop up at all the exits, then the game goes full-on horror. Your squad is not getting out alive. Plan to call their families.

The rest of the game, though, doesn’t build on this capital. Missions become standard strategy fare: there are enemies, of whom you know the basic number and power, and who you can force to meet on your terms. Once you’ve played five missions or so, you know how the enemies are going to behave, and you can plan for that. You understand the unknowable.

Horror boils down to a lack of information, by my definition. It is a Lovecraftian definition, not a modern one. Jump scares, the bread of modern horror (gore being the butter), are a cheap version of this: you don’t know the killer is hiding under the bed and then oh there he is. The best horror, though, is deeper, more psychological: you know something is there, but you cannot define what it is. Even when you see it, it defies logical explanation.

What matters isn’t that the killer is under the bed, but that she’s formless, unidentifiable, and isn’t going to come out unless we go looking for her. This was kind of the original X-Com’s playbook: you’d land in a dark cornfield, meekly edge your soldiers through it, and eventually someone would take a sniper’s bullet to the head, leaving you scrambling to figure out not only where the enemy was that did it but what that enemy was.

Still, combining horror with strategy has long been a challenge. With some exceptions—the not phenomenally successful RUSE chief among them—video games haven’t been good at combining limited knowledge with strategy. The reason is blatant: 95% of mainstream games work as power fantasies. Resident Evil, once one of horror’s standards, became a third person cover shooter this year. Why should strategy, a genre without much horror history, deserve a different fate?

I expected more horror than I got from the XCOM remake. For the first dozen missions, I expected the parameters to shift dramatically midstream, for the game to test my plans. I was waiting for enemies to appear behind me, to lock me in, to force me to push the plans I’d made to the limit. I expected the aliens to outsmart me, to push and prod until my squad cracked. The game itself even has a “breaking under pressure” mechanic, where stressed soldiers would go nuts. Perfect!

The problem was, that moment never came. Instead of mining the fears of the unknown, XCOM: Enemy Unknown mined our fears of the random, of the absurd. In short: it mined the random number generator. The aliens aren’t dangerous because they’re worthy opponents: they’re dangerous because an invisible die roll says they are.

There are two random events that occur in any XCOM mission—when someone shoots, and when enemies “break” (a technical term) after you spot them—and these represent all of the tension in the game. After a couple missions you know exactly what enemies you’re going to fight thanks to improving satellite coverage and your knowledge of the enemy, so while the level’s dark you know what’s coming. What you can’t predict is where enemies will go when you see them, however, or how well you’ll shoot each other.

The “breaks” in the game are possibly the antithesis of horror. What happens is this: the enemies spot you, then they move in random directions, towards some sort of cover. Where the horror comes in is when your last soldier manages to spot an enemy, and the enemy decides to break towards you, settling into cover, magically, a hundred feet from where he started, in a position that flanks half your team and renders him unassailable.

It puts the weight of the game on the random number generator. Suspense comes from the fact that now, when that Muton (because it’s always a Muton) gets to shoot at you, there’s a 63% chance that he’ll hit. If he hits, he kills one of your soldiers. Sometimes you’ll get through it all right, and other times you’ll lose a guy. Either way, it’s suspenseful.

But it left me with a sort of hollow taste in my mouth. XCOM was making suspense from random numbers and cheap-feeling occurences, yet it was dropping the horror veneer it had in its abbreviated first mission. It opened with horror, and all was a lousy set of shots my sniper missed with a 95% probability.

XCOM made me ask the question: can strategy and horror be combined? Are they peanut butter and jelly, or are they the more perplexing peanut butter and pickle sandwich, which has devoted followers but doesn’t make a lick of sense?

The game that made me believe in the horror of strategy wasn’t a video game, but instead a board game: Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space. It is a game about ignorance.

The concept is simple: the players are astronauts. Half the squad has been infect by a terrible, Alien-esque parasite, rendering them cannibalistic horrors. The other half are humans, who can’t fight back. They’re on a spaceship with absolutely no power.

What this means is you all have your own delightful little boards, pock-marked with hexes. You record your movements in absolute secrecy. Humans are slow, and squishy: they can only move to adjacent hexes. Aliens are fast, lithe, and hungry: they can move two spaces (three if they actually eat someone) and choose to chow down on any space they land on. Of course, doing that involves publicly announcing where you are.

The other way to announce where you are: by landing on a gray tile. There are two types of tiles in the game: white tiles, which do nothing, and gray ones, where you have to draw a card. These cards come in three varieties: blank cards, which tell you to tell the team the ship is silent; red cards, which tell you to announce your location to everyone; and green cards, which let you tell everyone a noise occurred anywhere on the ship. No one knows which kind of card you drew, so they’re never sure if you’re lying or not.

In practice, this makes for an incredibly tense, tactical game of cat and mouse. In the beginning, no one knows who’s a human and who’s an alien. The threats are left completely ambiguous. As the aliens begin to munch, you begin to understand, slowly, just how doomed you are: there’s nowhere to go, the aliens are everywhere, and you have to get the hell out of there, now. You’re running for the escape pods, but the aliens can almost definitely get there first.

What it reduces to is a very tense, human game of horror. You have a lot of information, but it’s never quite enough to know anything for sure. There’s absolutely nothing random about it: the aliens are going to win a straight fight, so a human has to be flexible. They have to lie, they have to deceive, and they have to win with head games.

Horror isn’t about the atmosphere, or the jump scares, or the tension; these are all just symptoms of a fundamental lack of information. In my book, Dark Souls was great horror: the smoky white walls which delineated the levels presented us with a fundamental lack of information, allowing the game to confront us with the terrifying unknown. On the other side could be quick death—Ornstein and Smaugh, the most difficult boss fight in modern video games—or it could just be a placid countryside. Or maybe Havel the Rock will hit you with his weird bone club before you even walk through the door, reducing you to a paste. You have no idea, though, and that’s what’s frightening.

Escape grasps the best thing that horror can offer—the unpredictable, the unknown—but could it work in a video game? Who knows? Few have tried. Frozen Synapse captured some of the building blocks with its denial of knowledge and sudden violence, but it obviously wasn’t going for the genre like XCOM attempted. XCOM had all the atmosphere of a horror game, but it gave you all the rules, all the information, up front. You ran into increasingly difficult new challenges, but none of them were truly different: Elite Mutons died like the regular kind. As the game progressed, tension melted into more bullets, more guns, more random number generator panic, and more knowledge.

And knowledge, after all, is the enemy of horror. Once you understand something, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Once you can see all the pieces, nothing can be truly scary.

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Why BioShock Infinite's Creator Won't Settle for Success - Game

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BioShock Infinite might be the most ambitious videogame ever.
Screenshot: Courtesy Irrational Games

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In 2007, Irrational Games released BioShock, a videogame that took the first-person perspective and remorseless slaughter of blockbusters like Halo and Call of Duty and set fire to the medium’s narrative conventions and audience expectations. The result may have been gaming’s first work of art. As protagonist Jack, the player explored a city called Rapture, an undersea metropolis built in the 1940s. The game actually took place in 1960, by which time Rapture’s gorgeous Art Deco architecture had become dilapidated and the residents feral.

BioShock teemed with monsters out of Jules Verne’s nightmares. Giant creatures called Big Daddies lumbered around in archaic diving suits with spherical helmets, emitting unintelligible whalelike moans and skewering players with enormous drills while their doll-like child companions, the Little Sisters, harvested genetic material from the corpses. The player, using cryptic audio recordings and graffiti, could gradually piece together Rapture’s history: a catastrophically failed experiment in libertarianism built by an Ayn Rand-like character. At its core, BioShock functioned as an unmistakable critique of Objectivism, Rand’s laissez-faire philosophy. As such, it was the first political manifesto that allowed you to kill people with swarms of bees emitted from your genetically modified hands.

President Evil, Inside Out

1. Concept art for the Motorized Patriot’s clockwork skeleton.

2. A sketch exploring the look and feel of the relentless animatronic George Washington.

3. The finished Motorized Patriot, in all its gun-toting glory.

Images courtesy of Irrational Games

BioShock may be the most critically celebrated game ever produced. Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for The Washington Post, said that BioShock demonstrated that videogames “obviously have artistic value.” Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro called it “one of the most fully realized world creations in any medium.” But this wasn’t some cult sensation. It was a mainstream commercial success, selling a surprising 5 million-plus copies and turning Ken Levine, the game’s creative director as well as the president and cofounder of Irrational Games, into a videogame celebrity—along with the Big Daddies, one of which made an appearance on The Simpsons.

For Levine, who spent his youth marinating in comics and obsessing over Dungeons & Dragons, the level of popularity induced by what he calls “our weird little game” was a novel experience. “When I was growing up, I was incredibly lonely,” he says. “Nobody liked the things I liked.” He’s 46 now, a Jersey kid with a nasal voice and a Sawyer-on-Lost beard. But whereas he was once an exile on the far-nerd end of childhood’s continuum, BioShock‘s reception brought him acceptance—even an interview request from a sports-talk radio station.

Yet when given the chance to make a straightforward sequel to BioShock, Levine declined. “Usually a sequel is 10 new levels, five new monsters, a few new weapons,” he says. “It’s more corporate- driven than creatively driven.” Instead he and his team got busy plotting a complete reinvention of the game. Irrational’s parent company, Take-Two Interactive, wasn’t about to pass on the opportunity to milk a little more money out of BioShock, so different developers made 2010′s BioShock 2 (which contained nine new levels and fewer than five new monsters in its single-player campaign). The sequel scored decent reviews, but it failed to penetrate the wider culture in the way that Levine hungers to do.

In fact, even the original BioShock failed to match his ambitions. “Culturally we’re in a relatively weird place right now,” Levine says. “You haven’t had that thing that communicates to everybody the promise of what a videogame can be.” Music and movies are almost universal, he notes. For instance, Cliff Bleszinski, cocreator of the blockbuster Gears of War game franchise and one of the most visible figures in the gaming industry, has just 175,000 followers on Twitter, while Justin Bieber’s manager has 2 million. “There’s nothing in the language of gameplay that speaks to such a broad audience,” Levine says. “OK, Angry Birds. But that’s not really, to me, the full expression of what games can be about, in terms of narrative, in terms of immersion.”

Which raises a thorny question: Can a videogame become an influential cultural artifact in these days of disposable 99-cent iPhone titles? Even Call of Duty, with its tens of millions of copies sold, is not that game, Levine feels. “Its penetration is very narrow but deep,” he says. On the other hand: “Everybody saw Avatar, but they’re kind of done with it. It’s wide but shallow. I think you want to be wide and deep.” What would represent Levine and Irrational’s dream for the new incarnation of BioShock? “Harry Potter,” he says, “is pretty wide and deep.”

The fact that BioShock Infinite was originally codenamed Project Icarus is lost on nobody.

When Levine’s attempt at a wide and deep game—BioShock Infinite —comes out in late February, it will be the first title from Irrational in five years. By the standards of videogame developers, many of whom pump out sequels every year, that’s a hiatus akin to the two-decade gap between Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. And like a Malick movie, BioShock Infinite is jam-packed with its creator’s obsessions and flights of fancy. The opening sequence is drenched in biblical imagery, with an American prophet leading his followers to a city in the sky, where Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington are revered as quasi deities and racial purity is imposed by force. The game’s backdrop is an imagined clash 100 years ago between theocratic white supremacists and violent collectivists.

Whether Levine and Irrational can realize this vision is an open question. Last May, Levine announced that the game, which had been slated for an October release, would be delayed until February 2013. Since then, Irrational has seen several high-profile departures, including the art director and the director of product development, both core members of the creative team. Rumors have churned around BioShock Infinite: blown deadlines, scrapped gameplay elements, an idea doomed by its own grandeur. The fact that the game was originally known within Irrational as Project Icarus is lost on nobody.

Bioshock Infinite’s Sky-Line rain system in action

One thing is sure: The struggle to make a product that meets Levine’s oceanic definition of artistic success has changed the company fundamentally. Irrational has grown from three cofounders to 115 employees; Levine says he no longer knows everyone who works for him. He has to be brutally blunt when their work does not meet his expectations. And as the deadline looms for Irrational to lock in and ship the final version of BioShock Infinite, the forums and blogs where videogame fans congregate reflect concern that it may well be a troubled game—one that instead of showing a way forward for the medium will be remembered forever as an example of What Not to Do.

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Screenshot: Courtesy Irrational Games

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In 2007, Irrational Games released BioShock, a videogame that took the first-person perspective and remorseless slaughter of blockbusters like Halo and Call of Duty and set fire to the medium’s narrative conventions and audience expectations. The result may have been gaming’s first work of art. As protagonist Jack, the player explored a city called Rapture, an undersea metropolis built in the 1940s. The game actually took place in 1960, by which time Rapture’s gorgeous Art Deco architecture had become dilapidated and the residents feral.

BioShock teemed with monsters out of Jules Verne’s nightmares. Giant creatures called Big Daddies lumbered around in archaic diving suits with spherical helmets, emitting unintelligible whalelike moans and skewering players with enormous drills while their doll-like child companions, the Little Sisters, harvested genetic material from the corpses. The player, using cryptic audio recordings and graffiti, could gradually piece together Rapture’s history: a catastrophically failed experiment in libertarianism built by an Ayn Rand-like character. At its core, BioShock functioned as an unmistakable critique of Objectivism, Rand’s laissez-faire philosophy. As such, it was the first political manifesto that allowed you to kill people with swarms of bees emitted from your genetically modified hands.

President Evil, Inside Out

1. Concept art for the Motorized Patriot’s clockwork skeleton.

2. A sketch exploring the look and feel of the relentless animatronic George Washington.

3. The finished Motorized Patriot, in all its gun-toting glory.

Images courtesy of Irrational Games

BioShock may be the most critically celebrated game ever produced. Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for The Washington Post, said that BioShock demonstrated that videogames “obviously have artistic value.” Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro called it “one of the most fully realized world creations in any medium.” But this wasn’t some cult sensation. It was a mainstream commercial success, selling a surprising 5 million-plus copies and turning Ken Levine, the game’s creative director as well as the president and cofounder of Irrational Games, into a videogame celebrity—along with the Big Daddies, one of which made an appearance on The Simpsons.

For Levine, who spent his youth marinating in comics and obsessing over Dungeons & Dragons, the level of popularity induced by what he calls “our weird little game” was a novel experience. “When I was growing up, I was incredibly lonely,” he says. “Nobody liked the things I liked.” He’s 46 now, a Jersey kid with a nasal voice and a Sawyer-on-Lost beard. But whereas he was once an exile on the far-nerd end of childhood’s continuum, BioShock‘s reception brought him acceptance—even an interview request from a sports-talk radio station.

Yet when given the chance to make a straightforward sequel to BioShock, Levine declined. “Usually a sequel is 10 new levels, five new monsters, a few new weapons,” he says. “It’s more corporate- driven than creatively driven.” Instead he and his team got busy plotting a complete reinvention of the game. Irrational’s parent company, Take-Two Interactive, wasn’t about to pass on the opportunity to milk a little more money out of BioShock, so different developers made 2010′s BioShock 2 (which contained nine new levels and fewer than five new monsters in its single-player campaign). The sequel scored decent reviews, but it failed to penetrate the wider culture in the way that Levine hungers to do.

In fact, even the original BioShock failed to match his ambitions. “Culturally we’re in a relatively weird place right now,” Levine says. “You haven’t had that thing that communicates to everybody the promise of what a videogame can be.” Music and movies are almost universal, he notes. For instance, Cliff Bleszinski, cocreator of the blockbuster Gears of War game franchise and one of the most visible figures in the gaming industry, has just 175,000 followers on Twitter, while Justin Bieber’s manager has 2 million. “There’s nothing in the language of gameplay that speaks to such a broad audience,” Levine says. “OK, Angry Birds. But that’s not really, to me, the full expression of what games can be about, in terms of narrative, in terms of immersion.”

Which raises a thorny question: Can a videogame become an influential cultural artifact in these days of disposable 99-cent iPhone titles? Even Call of Duty, with its tens of millions of copies sold, is not that game, Levine feels. “Its penetration is very narrow but deep,” he says. On the other hand: “Everybody saw Avatar, but they’re kind of done with it. It’s wide but shallow. I think you want to be wide and deep.” What would represent Levine and Irrational’s dream for the new incarnation of BioShock? “Harry Potter,” he says, “is pretty wide and deep.”

The fact that BioShock Infinite was originally codenamed Project Icarus is lost on nobody.

When Levine’s attempt at a wide and deep game—BioShock Infinite —comes out in late February, it will be the first title from Irrational in five years. By the standards of videogame developers, many of whom pump out sequels every year, that’s a hiatus akin to the two-decade gap between Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. And like a Malick movie, BioShock Infinite is jam-packed with its creator’s obsessions and flights of fancy. The opening sequence is drenched in biblical imagery, with an American prophet leading his followers to a city in the sky, where Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington are revered as quasi deities and racial purity is imposed by force. The game’s backdrop is an imagined clash 100 years ago between theocratic white supremacists and violent collectivists.

Whether Levine and Irrational can realize this vision is an open question. Last May, Levine announced that the game, which had been slated for an October release, would be delayed until February 2013. Since then, Irrational has seen several high-profile departures, including the art director and the director of product development, both core members of the creative team. Rumors have churned around BioShock Infinite: blown deadlines, scrapped gameplay elements, an idea doomed by its own grandeur. The fact that the game was originally known within Irrational as Project Icarus is lost on nobody.

Bioshock Infinite’s Sky-Line rain system in action

One thing is sure: The struggle to make a product that meets Levine’s oceanic definition of artistic success has changed the company fundamentally. Irrational has grown from three cofounders to 115 employees; Levine says he no longer knows everyone who works for him. He has to be brutally blunt when their work does not meet his expectations. And as the deadline looms for Irrational to lock in and ship the final version of BioShock Infinite, the forums and blogs where videogame fans congregate reflect concern that it may well be a troubled game—one that instead of showing a way forward for the medium will be remembered forever as an example of What Not to Do.

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