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Critics Ruin Video Games… …Good!

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As much as I photoshopped in here, like the proud sandwichmaker shirt or the straw… The mountain Dew print already was on that Westboro Baptist Church kid, I swear.

Why? Because what currently goes as “video games” – meaning the games themselves and the culture around them – is actually a system of marginalization and encouraged resentful behavior and memes. Actually I still have other more design oriented articles in the pipeline, but there was already so much shit going down in just one month, I kinda can’t let that just pass by. It’s not okay and it needs to addressed. Hard.

Today I would like to walk you through that system and would kindly ask you to either help break that thing or step the fuck aside. Please. Thank you.

+++ TRIGGER WARNING!: Even though this article aims to be sound and thoughtful, it’s also emotionally honest. So you can expect some harsch language and seriously triggery images (including actual real world violence).+++

It’s Not Even February, Dammit!

2012 was a year when the tolerance of many regarding sexism in games boiled over. We had many rather big so called “controversies” – fake geek girls bullshit, sexual assault surviver Lara, Hitman ninja nuns and way more. I put “controversies” in quotation marks, because I find this label very unfitting for most incidents. The controversy was about, if it’s legit to complain, to be outraged, offended and to voice your feelings or if those incidents were all non-issues and video games were just suffering an unjustified attack.

The overwhelming negative reactions to this totem of sexualized violence against women made Deepsilver apologize and throw one of their own marketing departments under the bus. Progress in the eyes of critics and feminists, another unwarranted outcry and attack on games in the eyes of loyalists.

Because the inexperience in debating sexism for example and lack of understanding what those isms are and when they apply is one of the big problems we have here. The other one is the fact that – independent from the subject – it is in dispute if one should be allowed to criticize games at all for anything regarding social or political issues.

Most of those …uhm.. “controversies” were less of a debate on the subject matter and rather were an effort to quickly silence critical voices.

Anyway, publishers, devs, many writers and other game related outlets had to deal with quite some backlash for many of their releases, especially after the attacks (no, not just words, literal attacks) on Sarkeesian made the systemic sexism in games so drastically visible. And what did they learn? How did they decide to go out and confront the sexism charges in 2013? They fucking doubled down.

Z Game Network felt the need to not only take this supposed “game review” video down after it was confronted with ridicule and protest, they completely deleted their youtube account. The crass conflation of games and porn, this offensive conflation of gamer girl with sex object, actually managed to go away without any noteworthy controversy. A good sign.

They tried to tease a future noir RPG with the image of a female prostitute about to be executed, they segregated same-sex players of Star Wars Old Republic away on their own gay-ghetto planet, they tried to push the sales of a zombie game with a mutilated bikini model statue, posted a tits and ass focused game review to increase visits of their game hub site and launched an ad where a guy offers to replace you in all sorts of pesky social interactions with women, so you can finally play more Call of Duty. (I’m pretty sure, I’m missing something) And it’s not even one month in.

And of course those incidents started so called “controversies” again, where people who actually care about this stuff voiced their concerns and a big chunk of the gaming public did not just disagree, but doubled down on their bigoted behavior as well.

Systemic Marginalization

When critics publicly call out sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism or any other form of discrimination and hateful messaging in the games culture sphere, there are many – dare I say most – gamers and game professionals who are quick to react as if they are unfairly attacked, as if they are discriminated against or even going as far as feeling their rights threatened.

They don’t see the resentment in their culture. They don’t feel angry or hate filled, so how could their behavior be resentful, right? They surely would recognize if they would have any sort of internalized resentment, right? And to accuse games to suffer from systemic hate would be a bit far fetched, right?

To them the hateful content is either not there or caused by invisible hand of the market, a result simply of the interplay of supply and demand. Nobody is at fault here, it’s just how it goes, right? And since non of the hateful content is there on purpose, nobody actually wants to say or do something hateful, it is unfair to call it hate, right? If everyone considers themselves to be respectful towards women, how could there be sexism? If every white guy has a couple of black friends, there cannot possibly be racism, right?

Well, it’s not that easy. Unfortunately behavior speaks louder than thoughts and nobody can define their own internalized isms out of existence and expect the offended groups to play along.

First let’s look at a simplified market system, where supply and demand influence each other:

And here is the actual fuck pool we are swimming in:

You see those two extra bubble spot things? Yeah, that’s something really special to game culture. But nothing to be proud of. This is where the shit hits the fan.

When industry output gets criticized for hateful content (mostly sexist, racist or generally exclusionary stuff), gamers get defensive. But only very few objections to the criticism are actually aimed at whatever the critical person has said. The strongest and most commonly used rebuttals are kitchen sink attacks aimed at the critical persons themselves. The games culture deals with criticism by discrediting the person who uttered it.

Instead of going after the substance of the critique – “I don’t think it’s sexist because it does not meet any criteria of sexism.” or “I see how this appears sexist to you, but there is more to this picture, here is a link for context.” – , most rebuttals go like this:

“It’s not sexist. You just say it is because you don’t understand games.” “It’s not sexist. You just say it is because you are oversensitive.” “It’s not sexist. You just say it is because you just want clicks for your blog.” “It’s not sexist. You just say it is because you want to find something to complain about.” “It’s not sexist. You just say it is because you don’t like games.” “It’s not sexist. You just say it is because you hate men.” “It’s not sexist. You just say it is because you only want games to be how you would like them.” “It’s not sexist. You just say it is because you are stupid.”
“It’s not sexist. You just say it is because you are sex negative.”
“It’s not sexist. You just say it is because you want some pussy, white knight.”

Don’t tell me you have not read this shit a thousand times already. This is what happens to people who voice criticism, they get marginalized. They get labelled as either mentally incapable, as emotionally unstable, as being an outsider or as having an evil agenda. “You say this game is sexist? Sure, honey, GTFO, you don’t belong here.”

The discriminatory self-selection process leaves over a rather uncritical and predictable core of players.
A core which is a super easy and super low-risk target to market to.

And how does the industry get you there? They confirm the discrimination, glorify the dominant demographic while actively devaluing all others. They feed their audience narratives of how games are under siege by feminists, forge superoffensive content only to then demand that players pick a side and foster an environment, where disagreeing with them means you are an enemy.

The problem is not, that the industry is mostly tailoring their output for white able heterosexual men and boys. The problem is that they are specifically crafting messages to resonate with their favorite audience’s internalized or expressed resentment for all otherness. They sell male on female violence. They sell sexual dominance over women, ranging from omnisexual irresistibility fantasies to worlds populated by hookers to rape fantasies. They sell homophobia. They sell stupid girlfriend can’t game memes. They sell white guys are the hero and have black friends memes. They sell foreigners are the enemy memes.

The industry puts out all this vile messages and when someone points at this shit and sais “Uhm, that’s some vile shit!”, this someone can expect to have even more vile shit piled onto him or her for daring to speak up.

Any business model which is based on the progressive exclusion of audience members, will eventually run out of customers.

Even from a business standpoint it’s super stupid. Every now and then the industry will put out vile shit, where even the easy-going loyalists can’t go along with and then those people get pushed aside as well. Every now and then, a loyalists core player will no longer marvel at boob physics. And every now and then a member of the core will get what a feminists is arguing and recognize how fucked up everything is. This former customer will be lost, because he wont be able to voice his demands, wont be able to say what he would be willing spend money on without becoming a target for ridicule, insults and ignorance. The self-selecting process also makes sure that the hard core slowly but surely erodes.

Yeah, that’s the loyal bro-verload demographic, an eroding lump of super easy low-risk marketing targets, bound by groupthink and peer pressure to buy and defend whatever appalling crap the industry puts out as long as it confirms their internalized resentment, devoid of any agency as a consumer.

Core Concerns

Now in discussions with loyalists many legitimate concerns come up, which I’d like to adress here one by one. I understand how you can feel threatened/attacked by having games you like getting accused of containing sexism, problematic violence, racism, homophobia and whatnot and then to top it all of have people demand changing this stuff. But I hope that with time you will understand how completely unnecessary that reaction is and stop being a pawn of the games industry.

Concern 1: Criticism is an attack on video games.

This depends who launches that criticism, who is addressed and why? We all know that games as a medium are easily scapegoated for societal ills mainly surrounding misbehaving youth and or violence. What are games teaching our kids? Do they train us to be killers? These accusations even lead to legislative actions in many countries, law suits and all that jazz. In 2012 accusations of rape culture and misogyny also drew a connection between societal ills and games and what can we now expect to come out of this? Does this not confirm the Jack Thompson’s of the world?

No. And here is why:

An attack on games goes as follows: You have someone who is not into games trying to convince other people who are not into games that games have a negative impact. A politician is stirring up the votes of concerned parents. A lawyer is trying to convince a judge to decide in his favor. A conservative TV show host is trying to increase his ratings by appealing to gun owners. You see the pattern here?

A man in combat gear executing a kneeling female sex bot in lingerie with a bullet to the back of the head. How is this not misogyny? From let to right: An original concept drawing for the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, a still of the key image from the actual video and what impromptu executions in Afghanistan look like. Edit: It was brought to my attention, that the female cop in the end of the trailer video is supposed to be the fem bot character here. I kinda missed that. So eventually she does not get killed, but joins the police forces. This of course offsets a lot of the still very disturbing key image of the trailer.

Sarkeesian for example, who is targeted by loyalists because she is thought of as having her own agenda (getting money, getting attention, feminist coup d’état or something) and abusing video games to reach her sinister goals. Now, why is that bullshit? Because she is involved in games and other popculture media and is addressing an audience who is involved in games and other popculture media. Even if you don’t accept the premis of her being a game fan (she must be one of those fake geek girls, right fellas?), she is still addressing us. She is addressing the community.

To say that criticism coming from the community addressed at the community is hurting the community, is like saying your doctor telling you to work out more and change your diet is hurting your health.

Not addressing the shit that is going on allows it to fester unchallenged and untreated and eventually collapse without any of us knowing what to do then. Congratulations, you defender of games, you.

Concern 2: I don’t want certain content censored or my games taken away.

Yeah, that would be fucked up, wouldn’t it?. I’m so against any form of censorship, you have no idea. Here in germany we have the USK, which is similar to the Comics Code Authority in the US. They check games for content that might get rejected by the BPjM (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons), which has the power to simply take products down.

The recent Mortal Kombat is one of those products. It practically impossible to get the game here in germany. Publicly displaying the game or parts of it is basically a felony (with a few exceptions). The game disappeared. I was lucky enough to be an early buyer and got my copy before the BPjM took the game down. Still, none of the DLCs are available to me, only multiplayer is now available either and I as a public game critic researcher teacher whatever am not allowed to show any content of the game here on my site. And the list is long. But even longer is the list of changes to games before release in germany, so they would not be taken down for “youth protection reasons”. Blood gets deleted out of games, game features get cut, sometimes full missions get barred to make sure a game is legally allowed to be advertised and publicly sold here in ye olde germany.

This sucks. And is in my opinion an unconscionable infringement of freedoms. But censorship does not come from parts of the community demanding to be treated with respect and be recognized. Nobody is going to take your guns away, you know. Even if you just fear that what you like will dwindle in popularity and you will therefor be left in the dust with your desires, don’t worry. There will always be a market for sex and violence and even celebration of masculinity… always.

The advent of the Sundance Festival or the fact that Catherine Bigelow gets award nominations will not make Michael Bay go away. You will get your fix of whatever content you crave, you just have to be vocal about what you want. And NO, being vocal about your demands is not the same as discrediting anyone who has different demands from your’s.

The worst thing that will happen? Diversification. If that scares you, I cannot help you.

The Replacer informs the Call of Duty player: “It’s just a matter of time before the responsibilities of life – jobs, lady friends,. whatnots – will interfere with your responsibility to kicks ass.” He then offers to help you out and proceeds to deal with 7 women for you (including indulging a sexually aggressive overweight women and hitting on the female coworker for you), 1 man from an ethnic minority and one pooping monkey.
The sexism and racism in this otherwise well made spot is really a shame, because I so dig Peter Stormare and the mail box in the shredder shot is such nice throwback to his part in Fargo.

Concern 3: I don’t want to be shamed for what I like.

Batman – Arkham City is a game with a lot of sexist content. In two of my most prominent articles on the subject I added screenshots of the game to illustrate how crass and widespread sexism is in games. And lookie here; I accused the game to have sexism in it again!

This 3 times example of sexism is my publicly praised game of the year 2011. And Gears Of War 3, a game I harshly criticized for glorifying genocide managed to get on the number 5 spot. Even Mortal Kombat which is sexist as hell landed in the top 3.

Now how the fuck does this work? Don’t I hate the games? Don’t I want them to go away? Well, no. In contrast to the dogma-bound loyalist core, I am able to have a nuanced opinion about something as massive, complex, multilayered and interdisciplinary as an AAA game. Maybe you should look into that too.

A few aspects of a game don’t necessarily ruin the whole game for me. And even just looking a the sexist aspect, you can be nuanced. I appreciate a well sculpted and animated female character model in a game. Sexy ladies appeal to me. Still, I’m conscious about the fact, that the sexy characters presented to me, as much as I enjoy the visuals, might be offensive, might be instances of sexualization and objectification of women. There are many ways to present sexuality in games, sexy people, without being disrespectful towards women and without feeding into harmful narratives. Chill out.

Your fear of losing your games and your shame of enjoying something that contains offensive content makes you an asshole. Grow some fucking backbone, bro!

Don’t you realize how weak it looks when you need to resort to Ad Hominem attacks when someone criticizes an aspect of a game you enjoy? If you don’t want to be viewed as a sexist for enjoying Arkham City for example, do you really think saying women who care are stupid or oversensitive or “the enemy” will create the right impression?

Admitting that you enjoy sexist content from time to time, does not make you an asshole. But pretending that the sexist scenarios in your games are not sexist, pretending that they are in fact acceptable to everyone except to people who are inferior to you, DOES!

Maybe you as a gamer don’t want to think about what you consume and what it does to the community. Maybe you are comfortably ignorant. Maybe you want games to be predominantly sexist, but just don’t want people to bitch about it. Maybe you want to go to conventions and shamelessly stare at booth babe asses and take photos of their tits without having to go through the motions of asking her first. Maybe you want games to go all out with the girlfriend memes, because you have a girlfriend and the jokes about her make her know her place. And maybe you enjoy that XBOX Live is a place where you can ask female players to suck your dick without feeling out of place. Boys will be boys, right? And where when not in games culture can we be boys and not feel ashamed for it, right? Right, fellas?

And maybe you as a publisher, marketer, outlet or journalist don’t care about who you throw under the bus, as long as your risk-aversion calculations add up. Maybe you are comfortably fine with not having to address female players, do more for ethnic minority players, because that shit is hard. Maybe you appreciate that for every female job applicant there are 9 male ones you can hire instead, so you can ensure your development teams and editorial staff understand your carefully filtered loyalist core audience.

If this is what video games are to you. Yes, then I’m afraid I’m here to ruin that. You will be kicking and screaming, but video game criticism will drag your precious video games into the fucking 21st century. Maybe not this year, maybe next year. But eventually, you will have to make some fucking room for other demographics, for other ideas. You are welcome.

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Sexismus in Videospielen – auf Zehenspitzen durch das Minenfeld - bricks of videogame culture

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Sexismus in Videospielen – auf Zehenspitzen durch das Minenfeld

Micha, 24. Juni 2012

“Die Frauen haben nicht Unrecht, wenn sie sich den Vorschriften nicht fügen wollen, welche in der Welt eingeführt sind: weil die Männer sie verfaßt haben, ohne die Frauen zu fragen.”
Michel de Montaigne, (1533 - 1592), eigentlich Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, französischer Philosoph und Essayist
Quelle : Essais: 3,5, »Sur des Vers de Virgile«

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Lange Zeit habe ich mich aus der Sexismus- und Gewaltdebatte der letzten Wochen herausgehalten. Das hatte verschiedene Gründe und einer von ihnen ist relativ profan: Für mich persönlich fühlt sie sich wie die vielleicht hundertste an. Seit über 20 Jahren spiele ich nun und an die Debatten, die ich damals als Kind oder Jugendlicher nicht wirklich begriffen habe, kann ich mich heute noch erinnern. Die Aufreger fingen mit dem Cover von California Games an, gingen über erotische Puzzlespiele auf dem Amiga weiter und mündeten vorläufig bei dem ersten Mortal Kombat. Irgendwo dazwischen gab es immer wieder neue Gründe für Diskussionen; die Suche nach Aufreger-Inseln führt sich bis heute fort. Die letzte große Debatte, gerade in Bezug auf Sexismus, wurde zu Metroid Other M geführt, da Samus mit großen Brüsten und einem Vaterkomplex ausgestattet, als auch einer militärischen Befehlskette unterworfen wurde. Das war mir persönlich ziemlich egal. Vor dem Erscheinen des Spiels hatte ich ein paar Metroid-Spiele nachgeholt und bis dato nicht einmal eine Ahnung, dass überhaupt eine Frau die Hauptperson ist. Für viele Videospieler war es allerdings nicht nur ein Vergehen an einem Nintendo-Klassiker, sondern auch eine Frechheit an der Darstellung einer Frau in einem Videospiel. Dass das Entwicklerteam ausgerechnet Team Ninja war, die sich in entsprechenden Kreisen schon mit den Dead or Alive-Mädchen keine Freunde gemacht haben, dürfte das Feuer sicher zusätzlich geschürt haben.

Jubelschreie bei Kopfschüssen

Dass die Gewaltdebatte sich derzeit mit der Sexismusdebatte vermengt, ist sowohl in Sachen Timing, als auch in ihrer daraus resultierenden gegenseitigen Anstachelung eine unglückliche Angelegenheit. Zum Thema Gewalt in Videospielen, und ich betone: nur zum Thema Gewalt, ist meine Einstellung wenig aufgeregt, da ich diesbezüglich seit einigen Jahren relativ entspannt bin. Ja, auch ich fand die jubelnden Reaktionen in der Pressekonferenz von Sony zu “The Last of Us” äußerst befremdlich, da Naughty Dog – gemessen an den bisherigen Eindrücken und Informationen – Gewalt als etwas Schlimmes mit Konsequenzen darstellen wollte. Ich für meinen Teil war sprachlos, weil der Tod von Gegnern vergleichsweise realistisch wirkte. Das Bedürfnis vor Belustigung in die Hände zu klatschen hatte ich nicht. Was Naughty Dog aus diesen Darstellungen macht und ob sie dem ein dramaturgisches Gewicht verleihen, steht selbstverständlich noch in den Sternen. Die Differenz zu den allseits bekannten überzeichneten Gewaltdarstellungen war jedenfalls unübersehbar.
Ich finde es schade, dass Publisher vorwiegend gewalttätige Inhalte als erwachsen darstellen, finde aber ebenso Wortmeldungen hinterfotzig, die darin den Untergang des Abendlandes propagieren und dabei eigentlich nur ihr eigenes Spiel bewerben wollen, wie es beispielsweise Warren Spector mit Epic Mickey 2 getan hat. Ja, auch Kriegsverherrlichung finde ich problematisch; vor allem, weil die Kinder vielerorts die Tode ihrer Großväter nachspielen. Das sind Probleme, über die man sprechen sollte, um das unbestreitbare, aber auch allgemein überzogen dargestellte Ungleichgewicht zwischen gewaltfreien und gewalthaltigen Spielen auszugleichen. Aber das war es auch schon. In gewisser Weise vertrete ich eine ähnliche Einstellung wie Iwinski von CD-Projekt, der Gewalt in Spielen angebracht findet, wenn sie zur Welt passt. Damit wäre das zumindest für mich im Rahmen einer ganz persönlichen Stellungnahme innerhalb dieses Artikels vom Tisch.

Der eigene Sichtwinkel

Kommen wir zum Sexismus. Ein anderer Grund für meine bisherige Enthaltung ist viel wichtiger: Es scheint völlig unmöglich zu sein über das Thema zu sprechen, ohne dabei jemanden zu verletzen. Es ist schwer distanziert und sachlich darüber zu debattieren, weil es ganz bestimmt auf einer gewissen Ebene auch ein sehr persönliches und emotionales Thema ist. Der gute Manu sagte einmal in einem Gespräch, dass diese ganze Diskussion ein Minenfeld sei. Diese Bezeichnung trifft es auf den Punkt: Ein Minenfeld aus eigenen Erfahrungen, individuellen Wahrnehmungen, ja, sogar Vorlieben, Geschmäckern, sowie Gewohnheiten und nicht zuletzt: gesellschaftlichen und religiösen Einflüssen. Jeder Mensch hat seine eigene Perspektive und bringt durch das Thema bedingt auch viel seiner eigenen Identität mit in den Disput hinein. Eine unglückliche Formulierung, und du hast dir vielleicht neue Feinde gemacht. Eine grundlegende Einstellung zu Sexismus wird gleichzeitig als grundlegende Einstellung zu deinen Mitmenschen interpretiert.

Allein schon der Wortbegriff des Sexismus’ kann da Hürden bergen. Selbstverständlich ist die Bedeutung klar definiert, aber ab welchem Grad es für einen persönlich sexistisch wird, ist schwieriger einzugrenzen. Manche empfinden bereits jegliche Aufopferungsgabe eines Mannes, die eher romantische Beweggründe hat, als hochgradig sexistisch, während für andere Personen dieser Begriff vor allem bei der körperlichen Darstellung eines weiblichen Charakters greift. Für mich persönlich beginnt Sexismus dort, wo einem Menschen ein Recht aufgrund seines Geschlechts abgesprochen wird. Konkrete Beispiele für diese Definition in Mainstream-Spielen wollen mir partout “nur” eine Handvoll einfallen, wogegen es Personen gibt, die vermutlich durch die aktuelle Übersensibilisierung für das Thema quasi überall Beispiele dafür sehen. Spiele mit heiklen Darstellungen, wie beispielsweise das tumbe Duke Nukem Forever, ein paar Dating-Sims oder die sprichwörtlich auf den Sex Sells-Slogan konzentrierte Wirtschaftssimulation Hot Dogs Hot Girls bedürfen auch aus meiner Sicht einer differenzierten Auseinandersetzung. Bei diesen drei Beispielen, und es wird auch ein paar weitere geben, findet eine sexuelle Objektifizierung statt. Aber ein ganz globales, massiv überkochendes Sexismus-Problem, welches im Begriff ist die Spielkultur aus dem Innersten zu zerfressen, sehe ich hingegen nicht.

Dabei kann ich mich in vielen genannten Kritikpunkten selbst wieder finden. Meiner Meinung nach könnte es auch mehr ernstzunehmende weibliche Protagonisten in Spielen geben; solche die deutlich mehr Handlungsspielraum als der sexy Sidekick oder die zu rettende Frau in Not haben. Auch die Anfeindungen gegenüber Anita Sarkeesian und Aisha Tyler bestürzen mich. Bei letzterer bin ich eher irritiert, weil mir die Moderatorin auf der E3 Pressekonferenz unglaublich sympathisch war und auf mich von Grund auf ehrlich wirkte, während ich im Falle von der Feministin Anita regelrecht erschrocken über die gigantische Ansammlung von Hass bin, die ihr entgegen geworfen wird. Ein Teil dieser Triaden wird sicherlich durch die Anonymität des Internets gefördert, dessen Effekte außerhalb der Sexismus-Debatte Phil Fish auf seiner Webseite und im März diesen Jahres auch Bioware durch das Mass Effect-Ende erfahren haben. Die Reaktionen auf die beiden Damen Aisha und Anita sind jedenfalls völlig inakzeptabel und weisen ernstzunehmende Probleme bei der Sichtweise junger männlicher Jugendlicher, Kinder oder sogar Erwachsener auf Frauen im Allgemeinen auf. Sehr viel mehr glaube ich sogar, dass es Reaktionen aus Angst sind. Angst, dass vor allem die gebildete Anita den Hatern geistig einige Spuren voraus ist. Angst, dass man ihre Argumente nicht einfach von der Hand weisen kann. Es sind viele Trotzreaktionen, geboren aus Dummheit, genährt durch Minderwertigkeitsgefühle, hervorgerufen durch Bedrängnis, die eigentlich keine ist. Die bisherigen Videos habe ich jedenfalls nicht als Angriff empfunden und ich bin mir ziemlich sicher, dass viele Vandalisten sich nicht einmal auch nur einen Teil davon angesehen haben.

Die Kirche im Dorf lassen

Allerdings ist es nicht so trivial diese Frauenfeindlichkeit zu begründen, als manch ein Blogger es gerne darstellen würde. Ein weiterer, wichtiger Grund meiner bisherigen Enthaltung ist: Ich bin kein Experte. Ich habe den Themenkomplex weder wissenschaftlich studiert, noch habe ich die intellektuellen Voraussetzungen dafür, mich fachgerecht damit auseinandersetzen zu können. Hauptbetreiber der Debatte der letzten Wochen sind allerdings hauptsächlich Personen, die sich ebenso wie ich in einer ähnlichen Position befinden. In mangelndem Bewusstsein über die eigene Wut wird die Kirche dabei manchmal aus dem Dorf getragen. Selbst Personen, die ich sehr gerne lese und die teils auch stärker in der Spieleproduktion drin stecken, wie beispielsweise Anjin Anhut, scheinen sich daran die Finger zu verbrennen. In einem sichtbar in Rage verfassten Blogeintrag gibt der Art Director und Game Designer einige Beispiele an, die stellenweise wie aus der Luft gegriffen zu sein scheinen. Ein Konzeptbild aus dem aktuellem Mortal Kombat von einem weiblichen Charakter einzubetten und auf die Wunden und die abblätternde Kleidung hinzuweisen, erscheint gerade in einem Prügelspiel ungeschickt, wo sich doch alle Beteiligten – ob Mann oder Frau – ordentlich aufs Maul geben und jeder prinzipiell den gleichen Ausmaß an sichtbarem Schaden nehmen kann. Schlecht recherchiert ist vor allem das Beispiel aus “Shadows of the Damned“, wo ein Screenshot von der Figur Paula gezeigt wird, die mit gebrochenem Genick von der Decke hängt. Als seelenlose Raumdekoration bezeichnet Anjin sie und lässt völlig außer Acht, dass in dem Spiel der erste Teil von Aligiehri´s Göttlicher Komödie anzitiert wird und Paula stellvertretend für die geheimnisvolle Beatrice steht. Die Hauptfigur Garcia geht für sie in die Hölle und erzählt seinem Begleiter Johnson auf seiner Reise, warum er die Frau so sehr liebt. Als er erfährt, dass Paula ursprünglich die Gespielin des Dämonen Fleming war, der sie gefangen hält, ist er sogar umso überzeugter um ihre Freiheit zu kämpfen, weil er “immer noch Liebe in ihren Augen sieht”. Es ist leicht Shadows of the Damned Sexismus zu unterstellen, da es voller sexueller Untertöne steckt, aber sie stehen nicht in dem plumpen Kontext wie etwa bei Duke Nukem Forever, welches zu Recht für einen Teil der Restbeispiele herangezogen wird.

Meiner Meinung im ausufernden Maß vergriffen hat sich Brendan Keogh in seiner wutschnaubenden Reaktion auf den Grindhouse-Hitman-Trailer, in dem er die Verbindung zu Rape Culture herstellt. Über den Trailer kann man selbstredend geteilter Meinung sein, vor allem da er ganz offensichtlich auf seine polarisierende Wirkung hin konzipiert wurde. Die Assoziation aber mit einem Begriff herzustellen, der die schockierende Situation in einigen Schwellen- und Kriesenländern und so gut wie jedem Krieg zumindest laut Theorie auf unterschwellige Weise in die westliche Medienlandschaft integriert, ist nicht etwa gefährlich, weil sie bei genauerer Untersuchung per se nicht existiert, sondern weil sie gerade Außenstehenden Zündstoff bietet, die mit dem Material nicht wirklich vertraut sind. Spiele kommen nicht nur ausschließlich über gewaltverherrlichende Inhalte zum schlechten Ruf, sondern auch durch unüberlegte Äußerungen. Vor einigen Jahren hat so ein Fall sogar den Release des Survival Horror-Spiels “Rule of Rose” verhindert, als Franco Frattini, europäischer Kommissar für Justiz, Freiheit und Sicherheit, öffentlich das angebliche primäre Spielziel, vorwiegend an schwachen Kindern grösste Gewalt auszuüben, beklagte. Dies löste in Europa und auch teilweise in den USA eine Welle der Empörung aus, die von weitestgehend ahnungslosen Publikationen weitergetragen wurde, welche mangels Release nicht einmal im Besitz des Spiels waren. Dass kinder-, jugend- und sozialpsychologische Hintergründe bei vorpubertierenden Mädchen mit den zentralen Themen “Vertrauen und Treue” im düster-märchenhaften Gewand behandelt werden, schien niemanden zu interessieren[]. Die ausufernde Gewalt suchten Spielekritiker später jedenfalls vergeblich. Aufgrund der Kontroverse wurde das Spiel neben vielen europäischen Ländern auch in Australien und Neuseeland nicht veröffentlicht.

Obwohl Hitman: Absolution den Spieler in die Rolle eines Autragskillers steckt, wird das Spiel ironischerweise diese Veröffentlichungshürden aufgrund eines finanzstarken Publishers sehr wahrscheinlich nicht haben. Probleme mit dem Begriff hat allerdings auch Michael Thomsen, der sich in seinem Artikel leider stellenweise schlecht ausgedrückt hat. In Kombination mit einer abweichenden Meinung ist die Empörung übergekocht. So sehr, dass Kill Screen sich öffentlich entschuldigen musste, um die Besucher wieder zu beruhigen. Man warf ihm vor, er hätte die Unfassbarkeit einer Vergewaltigung untergraben und verharmlost. In meiner Verwandtschaft, sowie im engen Bekanntenkreis kenne ich leider Opfer von Missbrauch und bin bei dem Thema sehr sensibel; habe sogar viel Angst um meine Liebsten. Beim Betrachten des Trailers kamen mir aber keinerlei Assoziationen zu Vergewaltigungen, gar einer Botschaft zur Unterdrückung von Frauen auf. Bei Artikeln wie denen von Keogh werde ich das Gefühl nicht los, dass in den Autoren ein Zwang herrscht sich um jeden Preis möglichst akademisch wirkend äußern zu müssen. Ich weise damit auf die bereits erwähnte Problematik hin, die mich lange davon abgehalten hat mich zur Debatte zu äußern. Dank Google und Wikipedia sind Begriffe schnell gefunden, mit etwas Interpretationsspielraum und einer progressiven Interpretationskette lassen sich Zusammenhänge zumindest in der ersten Impression einleuchtend “beweisen”. Fundiert sind diese Ausführungen aber ebenso wenig wie meine – was freilich niemanden daran hindert die Argumente aufzugreifen und in verschönernden Variationen zu verbreiten. In den genannten Beispielen wie Rule of Rose und Shadows of the Damned geschieht dies zudem ohne den jeweiligen Zusammenhang; reduziert auf einige Eindrücke, die mehr oder weniger unabsichtlich zum Äquivalent für eine tendenziell eher mannigfaltige, ganze Spielkultur erhoben wird.

Eine breitere Palette

Bei all dieser Aufregung ändert sich mein Wunsch für die Zukunft nur wenig: Ich möchte ebenso, dass Stereotypen in Spielen reduziert werden, damit dieser Begriff prinzipiell überflüssig wird. Und das ganz allgemein auf alle Geschlechter bezogen, ohne dass ich aber auf die Nathan Drakes, Lara Crofts, Bayonettas oder Marcus Phoenix´ verzichten möchte. Ich möchte diese Figuren, die körperlich übermäßig attraktiv gestaltet sind – AUCH haben, neben vielen verschiedenen Charakteren mit mannigfaltigen Stärken und Schwächen, die mal mehr, mal weniger aus dem Leben gegriffen sind. Ich möchte, dass es neben reinen Fantasiefiguren auch gleichwertig viele Menschen wie Du und ich gibt. Dieser Variantenreichtum existiert in anderen Medien und um diesen zu erreichen müssten Spiele ihre große Stärke Fantasiewelten darzustellen AUCH in authentische Geschichten und Szenarien leiten. Schön also, dass Anita ihre Kickstarter-Kampagne mit großem Überschuss finanzieren konnte. Selbst wenn ich bei der kommenden Videoreihe möglicherweise nicht bei allen Aspekten mit ihr einer Meinung sein würde: Dass sie die Aufmerksamkeit auf diese Themen lenkt, kann meinem Wunsch nur ein Stück greifbarer machen.

1. [1] Ein Filmpendant wäre beispielsweise “Pan´s Labyrinth”. ↩

1. 1

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A Beginner's Guide To Making Your First Video Game

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A Beginner’s Guide To Making Your First Video Game

Zoe Quinn

Game development has exploded over the last few years, and now it seems like everyone is making a video game. You’ve got big studios full of hundreds of people. You’ve got small teams making incredible games. There are more people in independent game development than ever. This is an amazing thing, because everyone brings their unique experience and sensibilities to game design.

The more people who we can get making games and sharing their individual voices, the more we will see games evolve in new and exciting directions.

Believe it or not, this can involve you.

Do you have an idea for a game you wish you could play rolling around in your head? And no one is making it? I’ve got good news for you: there are more tools and support than ever to help people who have no experience with coding or development start to learn how to create the games of their dreams. If no one is making what you want to play, why not learn how to make it yourself?

Start small, and be ready to fail.

Before you get too excited, please realize that, as with any other skill, learning how to design and develop games takes time and practice. Your first game won’t look like the polished games you’re used to playing, much like your first drawing won’t come out looking like Monet. This is absolutely fine. My first game has a huge bug in it that causes it to break for about half of its users. I was unable to figure out how to fix it.

You should shoot for what developers call a prototype: a smaller version of your idea with a few working mechanics, a prototype that lets you see how your game plays, allows you to improve the design, and forms the foundation that you can later build upon to make a full game.

As you make your first game, you will also experience the same thing every other developer has: “feature creep” or issues with scope. You will likely want to put too much into your first game—too many mechanics, too much content. Your ambition will push your toward any number of traps. This is okay, as long as you fix it or “scope down”.

For your first game, distill what you’d like to see into a single mechanic and try to create that one thing. Go with a simple mechanic like “navigate a story by selecting your actions from a menu” or “keep an object from dropping”. Think Pong, not Call of Duty. It likely won’t be the next big thing, but it will be a prototype, and it will be something you can build on in the future, if you desire. Some specific things you may want to avoid putting in to your first game include multiplayer functions, online scoreboards, or working in 3D.

Choose your tools.

So you have your idea, distilled down into a manageable, simple game. Now what? This is where those tools I mentioned come into play. There are an enormous variety of them, and more are being created all the time. This guide is primarily for those who have absolutely no computer science skills, have never programmed anything in their life and think that it’s beyond their ability to do so.

The following tools will help you go from no coding or development experience to having finished your first prototype. Most of them come prepackaged with sample games, and one of the best ways to learn a new game development tool is to muck around with them, take them apart, and see how they work.

I’ve chosen to focus on these three tools because they’ve got the least-steep learning curve, they can produce a wide variety of games, and they can produce a prototype fairly quickly (so you can have the satisfaction of having something playable sooner). They’re all either free or have free versions, meaning you won’t have to drop a couple hundred dollars to figure out if this is something you want to pursue.

1. Twine

Twine is a fairly new and free program that allows you to make choose-your-own-adventure style games and spit them out into an html file that you can easily share with the world. It uses a visual editor with easy-to-grasp codes and syntax. You enter your story text and commands into a series of linked nodes.

If you have absolutely no experience with coding or any sort of programming, Twine might be an excellent place to start. Not only is it very easy to pick up and use, but it will also teach you the basic principles of programming: if-then statements, variable manipulation, and other concepts that form the core of understanding how to do things with code.

If you have experience with coding or web development, you can easily scale Twine games into more complex programs. The fact that Twine outputs html files means you can embed anything you would into any web page, including photos, music, and even other flash games.

Twine has already been used for a variety of purposes—games, poetry, and even interviews with game developers. The main weakness of it is that, if you’re looking to do anything more complex than if-then statements—say, random or timed events—you’ll have to write your own code. That kind of thing isn’t natively supported by Twine. Also, if you’re looking to make anything action-based (such as a platformer or shooter), you will want to choose a different engine.

Games made in Twine: Howling Dogs, Afterward

This tutorial by Anna Anthropy will have you up and running with Twine in as little as half an hour. I definitely suggest starting here. If you want to go further, Porpentine has a list of amazing resources including code snippets, documentation, and other useful links here.

2. Stencyl

Another recently-created tool, Stencyl has a very user-friendly graphical interface that will help you make a wide variety of games. Stencyl uses a Lego-like approach to coding, where you arrange code “blocks” and snap them into logic statements. If you’re starting to get the hang of coding, you can switch to a mode that will let you view and edit the code in these “blocks,” allowing you to tweak or even create code from scratch that will work with everything else in the program.

The tool also comes pre-packaged with several sample games, which you can modify to your heart’s content. Viewing and editing the code in these blocks is also a way to begin to understand Actionscript3, which you can then apply to making flash games and apps without the aid of Stencyl.

Since Stencyl games are output to a .swf (flash) file, this makes it easy to share your games with others. If you don’t have web hosting of your own, you can upload your game to Stencyl’s site and share the link from there.

Another advantage of Stencyl is its in-program asset server, which allows you to download and share art assets, code blocks, and even entire games right in Stencyl.

Stencyl does have a few drawbacks. Since the program is relatively new, it’s still got a few bugs. A bug I’ve encountered has erased most of my work, so if you’re going to use this tool I highly recommend saving multiple copies of what you’re making. Save often. The base program comes free, but the pro version (which offers more customizations and access to private forums) is $79 dollars a year. If you want to port your games to iOS it’s another $149 a year.

Games made in Stencyl: Handheld Video Game, The Brim

You can see a handy video tutorial on making Stencyl games here, though the program has a very good crash course built into it. Additional info is available on their fairly-comprehensive site, Stencylpedia.

3. GameMaker

GameMaker is very similar to Stencyl, but has some key differences. GameMaker’s free version only exports to executable files (.exes or .dmgs) with watermarks on them. It offers more formats and features if you purchase one of the paid versions (Standard for $49.99, Professional for $99.99, and Master for $499.99). GameMaker uses a similar drag-and-drop interface approach to code, but uses its own language that only works in GameMaker. However, GameMaker has been used to produce high-profile indie games such as the original versions of Spelunky and Stealth Bastard.

GameMaker, like Stencyl, has a very useful tutorial that comes packaged with the program. I highly suggest running through it on your first time to get a feel for how things work and how to navigate the interface. Once you’ve done that, YoYo Games has a ton of tutorials that might help you make the specific kind of game you’re hoping for. GMLscripts is a wonderful site full of free scripts you can use in your game, and TIGsource has a thread for tutorials and open-source GameMaker games.

Those are the three tools that I would suggest to total beginners who have little to no coding experience. They are far from the only ones available. There are more advanced and powerful development environments such as Unity, code frameworks such as Flixel and Flashpunk, and highly-specialized tools for making a specific kind of game. Two of those are Adventure Game Studio and Inform7. This is just the tip of the iceberg—if you can think of a specific sort of game you’d like to make, you can likely find a code library or program that will help you make it.

Get some graphics. Get some sounds.

If you’re worried about coming up with art assets, music, sound, and other things that make your game more polished, don’t worry. Freesound.org has tons of open-source sounds, OpenGameArt.org can cover your art, and you can search music sites like SoundCloud for open-source music.

If you use anything that was created by someone else, be sure you’re using something under Creative Commons, and do credit them in your game. Supporting other artists is what keeps things like this happening.

Find an honest person to play your game. Observe this brave individual.

So you’ve prototyped your first game—now what? Share it! You can learn so much about the design of your game by sitting down someone who hasn’t played it—and ideally isn’t a relative or significant other—and having them play your game. See what they instinctively do, what they understand and what they don’t. Get as many people to play your game as you can, and try to find out what worked and what didn’t. Then, iterate on your design as much as possible.

So much of making a game is iteration. Don’t be afraid to try things and be wrong. No game is ever perfect, and nothing ever feels completely finished. But don’t let this stop you from ever declaring your game is done and moving on to the next one.

You need to iterate on yourself as a game designer as much as you need to iterate your individual games. Don’t fuss with a single prototype forever. Don’t try to force a design that just isn’t working. Don’t be afraid to move on.

Do all of this again, and you’ll probably do it better.

Finish your game, then make another.

The most important thing you can do after making your first game, playtesting it, refining it, and releasing it is to make another one. Getting involved with other game developers is a great way to do this. Our numbers are growing every day. You can get help on specific issues or just gain inspiration from working with your peers. Game Jams are an especially-wonderful aspect of this. Jams are frenzied game development events where you have to make a prototype in a limited amount of time, sometimes with the constraints of a common theme or specific toolset. These Jams are a great way to hone your skills, forge new ones, and work with interesting people who you might not have the chance to otherwise.

Once you’ve made your first game, the next goal should be to make a good game.

Do some research. That doesn’t just mean “Playing games.”

Studying game design is something I’d suggest for anyone who loves games, not just those who want to make them. It’s a complex skill with many aspects, and thankfully there is a lot of material you can check out on the matter. The GDC Vault has a lot of free talks on myriad subjects. There are tutorials on how to make physical prototypes of games using paper, and even lists of things you should NOT do as a game designer.

Plenty of individual developers offer talks on aspects of game design on their sites. Check out the contributions from Anna Anthropy, Chris Hecker, and Steve Swink, to name a few.

If you prefer to study things in dead-tree format, check out books like “How To Do Things With Videogames” and “Extra Lives.”
***

With these tools and resources—plus thousands more available with a bit of Googling—anyone can start making and sharing games. Hopefully this guide will get you to turn an idea into a prototype.

Game development doesn’t have to be an insurmountable task only accomplished by experienced programmers or teams of hundreds.

Everyone brings something uniquely “them” to game development—what kinds of things will you make?

Zoe Quinn is an independent game developer, co-founder of Dames Making Games, fire performer, and future skeleton. She has 99 problems and being a decaying organism aware of it’s own mortality in a society run by money that she can’t escape from is one.

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Football: The Kotaku Review

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Feb 1, 2013 1:00 PM 43,408

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Tim Rogers

If Football—that is, the American National Football League football—used the same naming scheme as “Dungeons & Dragons,” we’d call it “Beer Commercials & Cheerleaders.”

Like dungeons and dragons, beer commercials and cheerleaders are two things that not everyone likes. They are also, however, not The Point of their respective games: they are simply nouns which evoke an atmosphere. You either buy into that atmosphere body and soul—or you don’t.

I’m going to need you to forget about beer commercials. I’m going to need you to forget about cheerleaders. Don’t worry—you’re free to remember them when we’re done, if you absolutely must.

I’m here to tell you that Football is, beneath its blaring American pop-culture facade, a turn-based / real-time action collectible trading card game of fine, minute mathematical depth, with just the right pinch of procedural randomness, and character / plot development unparalleled in any other role-playing game released yet in the history of games. You might not believe at first that Football is a deeper, harder, more interesting game than Advance Wars, though once you give it a chance and look past the boring graphical presentation, its math will blow your mind and you will be a convert for life.

A Game of Dueling Wizards (Generals) (Kings) (Emperors)

Football would perhaps better be titled “Battleball,” “Warball,” or “Wizardball.” The “foot” in “football” only applies to the notion that the ball is most often carried by someone who is “on foot,” and places the brunt of the glory on the idea that the game is about mastering terrain and fighting for progress one inch at a time.

Yet the name “football” maybe doesn’t give enough credit to the masterminds who have continued to devise new creative strategies inside the framework of the game’s rules for well over eight decades.

In Football, the two “coaches” each start the game with a deck of forty-five players. At any given time, they can use eleven of these players. During the turn-based phase, coaches can substitute any player if they see fit, for one they deem more suited to a situation.

The team controlling the ball is called the “offense.” The team trying to regain control of the ball is called the “defense.” Like Pac-Man, yes—this is a game of duality, where the hunter can become the hunted on a microsecond’s notice.

The offensive team’s goal is to move the ball forward, over the “goal line.” Doing so gets them a “touchdown,” which is worth six points.

Each attempt of the offense to move the ball forward is called a “play.” Every time the ball touches the ground, that’s a “down.”

“Downs” are “lives” in Football’s battle system. If the offense can move the ball ten yards toward their goal within four downs, they get a “First Down”—a “continue.” Depending on the strength of the offensive team and their ability to navigate the other team’s defense, players might experience a thrilling sensation of scoring multiple first downs in a row, without ever seeing a second, third, or the dreaded “Fourth Down.”

The defense’s goal is to keep the offense from moving forward. If they’re especially tough, they’ll even manage to push the offense backward.

First down is always “1st and 10,” meaning the offense has ten yards to go for a 1up, though if a defense’s strategy is solid second down can be “2nd and 11.” Third down can be “3rd and 3” or “3rd and 25,” depending on the impregnability of the defense.

The toughness of the defense clashes with the strategy of the offense in a battle of strength versus wits, versus wits versus strength.

The coach playing defense at the time places his eleven players (units) nearly anywhere he sees fit—on his team’s side of the line of scrimmage. The line of scrimmage is what they call the imaginary line spanning the width of the field, radiating outward from the exact spot where the ball last touched the ground.

The defense is the “level design” that the offense has to navigate. So here’s the interesting part—unlike a first-person shooter where players’ main goal is to always shoot at the other guys, or to get the flag to their base, always in ready-made level designs, in Football the players (by which I mean coaches) are navigating the levels in one phase, and designing the levels in the other phase.

This streamlining of a complex duality penetrates other aspects of Football, as well: “damage” in Football is measured in “yards.” The further a team is from their target goal line, the more “damaged” they are. The offense “heals” itself by moving forward toward the target goal line. If they heal themselves up to 100 yards, that’s a six-point “touchdown.” If you can’t get the full touchdown, on the fourth down, you’re free to kick a “field goal” through the goalpost in the endzone for three points—if you’re close enough to not fail.

Meanwhile, as the offense heals themselves, they’re damaging the defense—moving them further away from their goal line. So it is that, in Football, healing and attacking happen at the same time. Literally every gain or loss of yards heals one team and damages the other. You’d think this might dumb the game down, though as with many time-honored games such as chess, this is a restriction that only deepens the experience.

For example, if a defense manage to push an offensive team backward into the goal behind them, that’s a two-point score called a “safety.” This is rare, though you’ll see it happen every now and again.

Fusion of Turn-Based and Real-Time

Football has been in open beta for 144 years. The original goal of the developers was to create a game that roped together more than five centuries of rugby history into a more spectator-friendly, strategically deeper game.

Rugby is a fascinating game, if considerably less polished than American Football. Rugby is a sport that the very idea of folklore itself designed. As such, it’s not good for newcomers to the sports strategy genre. Give it time. You’ll soon find it’s easily one of the top three best ways to legally hurt other people.

This hip guy invented The Snap, the mechanic that turned rugby into football

Where Football excels over its spiritual predecessors is the implementation of the “system of downs” feature—which we touched on briefly above. Breaking up a “drive” toward a “touchdown” into four-part mini-battles, adding chances for continues and resets to “first down” for highly successful plays really helps funnel the juice of the strategy into a meatier game.

Football goes one magnitude deeper by implementing elements of a turn-based rugbylike with “the huddle”: between downs, the coach relays play formations to the quarterback, who then takes the play to the rest of the team. In a secret on-field meeting called a “huddle,” the quarterback communicates the play to the rest of the team. They have forty seconds to decide their play, line up, and prepare for “the snap.” (Taking longer than forty seconds earns a “delay of game” penalty.)

One player on the offense, known as the “center,” is in control of the start of the play. When he shouts “set,” all players on the field must stand still for one second. When one second—or more, if the offense wants to hammer in suspense—has passed, the center “snaps” the ball to the player behind him. Now the game is officially being played: the center class-changes in an instant, and is now a blocker.

The game has switched from turn-based mode to real-time mode in a heartbeat.

In real-time mode—while the game is in play—it all comes down to whether or not the players on the field can live up to the coaches’ expectations, and perform their heroic physical duties under intense pressure. This is where the first layer of psychological randomness falls into place.

After the snap, the quarterback—or “QB”—has the ball. He can hand it to one of his runningbacks, or he can pass it to a wide receiver. Or he can run it himself.

Almost every play formation gives the quarterback options, because the heavy tome of Football play formation history has taught coaches and players that sometimes, anything can happen.

The QB has to think quickly: ahead of him the center, two guards, and two tackles—the biggest, toughest players on the offensive team—are pushing back with all their might against the defensive linemen—the biggest, toughest players on the defensive team. Whose “tanks” are tougher than whose? That’s a question that a game of Football asks dozens of times in its course, and the answer is never always the same.

Depending on success or failure of his blockers, the quarterback might have two seconds to get rid of the ball. Or he might have six. He might be about to get tackled by a successful defensive player. Or he might just have enough time to get the ball to one of his receivers.

Wide receivers generally start on the farthest sides of the line. When the ball is snapped, they run forward, ready to receive a pass. Since the team knows the play, the wide receivers know what destination they’re supposed to stop at. Meanwhile, cornerbacks and/or linebackers—the “fast” and “smart” defense units, respectively—will home in on them, either trying to keep them from reaching their destination, or intercepting a pass (immediately turning over the game so that the defense is now the offense).

After many decades of strategic iteration, coaches have arrived at this right here as the generic play formations.

In the case of a forward pass play, the quarterback is under severe pressure. Maybe the linebackers and/or a cornerback and/or a safety (another defensive unit) are attempting a “blitz”: that’s the Football equivalent of “suppressing fire” in a first-person shooter. In a “blitz,” the defense tries to psych out—or even take down the quarterback. If the defense tackles the quarterback while he’s still holding the ball, that’s called a “sack,” and it is the Football equivalent of most first-person shooters’ “shotgunned in the side of the neck at close range.”

Completing a pass is a genuinely heroic action. One might even call it “magical,” and one might call the quarterback a wizard. (Uh-oh—didn’t I say the coach was a wizard? Hmm. The coach is a Level-100 Wizard, then. Or a general. Got to think fast, metaphors falling apart—)

A crude passing play. I drew this with a mouse and am not, for the record, a professional offensive coordinator.

By way of the “magic” of a “pass,” the quarterback teleports the ball many yards. If the wide receiver is in position, and able to outwit his defenders, he catches it, earning multiple yards—healing his team, and damaging the other.

In the real world, the physical act of completing a pass is about as easy as playing a full round of Halo 4 multiplayer viewing the game through a sniper scope—and winning.

Sacking the quarterback is about as easy for a defense as scoring a tetris in Gameboy Tetris while someone chases you around with a baseball bat.

Then, of course, there’s the act of running the ball. At the beginning of a play, with faith in the ingenuity and strength of his blockers, the quarterback might hand the ball to the halfback or fullback, his two “warriors,” in charge of fighting most non-magically for every inch of progress: they run the ball. That means they carry the ball in their hands and they gun it. They are melee fighters. With speed, smarts, and instinct, they dodge attackers, ideally homing in on a touchdown.

Though maybe it’s not always a touchdown you want—not right away, anyway. Maybe you’re just looking to make progress. Maybe you just want a first down. This is where the game becomes even more about psychology: consider briefly that every “down” is a reset; every play is a full-featured game within a game, and the number of ways to play that microcosm game are frighteningly infinite.

Strategic Depth

In its many years of professional and collegiate play, Football, despite its many freedoms, has been home to a general condensation of strategic maneuvers. For example, though the offense needs to have seven players on the line of scrimmage at all times, and though the players don’t need to be standing shoulder-to-shoulder, the offense almost always lines up five players in front of the quarterback. Why is this? Because sometimes “common sense” and “tradition” fall in love and get married.

Yet, heavy as the Football history books are with hundreds of winning plays that look, uh, exactly like most other plays, every once in a while you find a whole chapter devoted to the One Minorly Different Thing That Worked.

The shotgun formation, for example: in the shotgun formation, you put the quarterback back several yards from the center, instead of making him stand right behind the center. You can put him back as many yards as you want—there’s no rule on where the quarterback has to stand, though of course it’d be suicide to put him twenty yards back. For one thing, the biology of the human arm and the gravity of planet Earth conspire such that the quarterback can only throw so far.

Football only offers one multiplayer map. This isn’t exactly a complaint: it affords immense room for creative strategic freedom.

The reward of the shotgun formation is that the quarterback is possibly going to have two or even three extra whole seconds to think, and the receivers will be able to use those seconds to more reliably get into position.

The risk of a shotgun formation is that if the quarterback gets sacked by some wily, adrenalin-jacked linebacker, that’s extra yards lost.

On paper, it sounds smart; in practice, heroic quarterbacks like Joe Namath and Joe Montana have wielded it as a weapon of genius.

Meanwhile, the strategic pantheon of football is lined with tales of fake field goals, rule-bending moves like onside kicks (kick the ball the minimum distance on the kickoff, and recover it before the other team), and psychology-twisting moments like that team that Went For It (running or passing the ball on Fourth Down, just as the other team was expecting them to punt, gracefully surrendering, and turning the game over). Between two experienced coaches, the very act of play selection is psychological paper-rock-scissors and poker, hugging as though super-glued together.

The Story

Everyone knows by now about that Notre Dame player whose fake girlfriend died. The internet is aflame with the rumors—did he think she was real? Was “she” an internet troll? Or was he just nuts? Also, lots of people (and puppy-lovers) know that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Michael Vick participated in illegal underground dog-fighting events.

WHY: It’s a real-time/turn-based hybrid strategy game that tests learning and knowledge, miraculously of unparalleled complexity and elegance in either of its genres.
Football

Developer: The United States of America
Platforms: High school, college (NCAA), professional (NFL), amateur
Released: November 6th, 1869

Type of game: Turn-based strategy / real-time strategy / deck-building / unit placement / shooting / melee combat / board game

What I played: Watched NFL football on television for ~20 years. Impartially observed teams. Sat in a “Thinker” pose. Rarely cheered or emoted. Once scored 35 points in one minute in John Madden Football ‘94. Twice made both brothers break their controllers during games of Tecmo Bowl. Watched the film “Leatherheads” (starring George Clooney) twice. Tested Canadian rules frequently; admire them a lot. This review is based on the NFL rules.

Two Things I Loved

- Staggering mechanical depth: It’s a game with decades of lore behind its rules, where innovation regularly happens despite negligible fundamental variance, and the players are all superhumans.

- The voice-acting: Announcers and commentators are silk- or velvet-voiced, well-spoken, worldly, educated people. I’ve heard stellar performances by such superstars as John Madden, whose concise explanations of strategies taught me to understand the core components of game design.

My Two Things I Hated

- The Graphics: The curious intrusions of commercials for beer and frequent imagery of plastic-faced, scantily clad women distract me from the mindset that this is a game about grizzled old men sending soldiers into battle. And, like, why are the fields always green? Green is gross. Most fields aren’t even grass anymore. They need to innovate. Let’s see a lavender field, guys.

- My friends who make fun of football/sports: Tweets like, “Oh, I hear a sports guy did a sports thing with the sports! Go team!” Copious links on Facebook to videos of the Puppy Bowl. What are you trying to say? Y’all need to get over yourselves and come watch the Super Bowl at my house next week.

Made-to-Order-Back-of-Box-Quotes

- “I am literally a MENSA member, and this game has been blowing my mind for a lifetime.” —Tim Rogers, Kotaku.com

- “It’s like playing Advance Wars on a Nintendo DS in one hand, while simultaneously trying to score a tetris in Tetris on a Gameboy in the other hand, while someone chases you with a baseball bat.” —Tim Rogers, Kotaku.com

I have to admit that I find this element of the Football “story” not very interesting. It’s full of trite plot twists and boldly, dumbly stereotypical characterization—like Tim Tebow, the devout Christian quarterback who prays frequently on the field. That’s just lazy writing.

One of the innovations legendary boxing promoter Don King brought to the sports genre is the concept of rivalry—of a game being more than a game: it’s a bloody, personal, bitter battle. In boxing, a one-on-one sport, this feature devolved into interviews which bait boxers to verbally abuse their opponents, and appear unintelligent. American television networks have iterated and reiterated upon this concept, however, and summarized it nicely with phrases such as “The Best Offense in the NFL faces The Best Defense in the NFL—This Monday Night.” They’re making it about the math; they’re encouraging you to think about the math. That’s right up my alley—and probably the alley of any Magic: The Gathering player.

My favorite characters in stories like “Game of Thrones” are always the old people, so naturally I enjoy the coaches’ story arcs more. They’re the level-100 wizards—or they’re the kings, or the generals. Can such-and-such coach have as much luck with such-and-such running formation as he did last year, or has the rest of the conference caught up, watched all the tapes from all the angles, and theoretically outwitted his secret weapon?

The structure of the season lends itself to great long-term plot arcs: Teams play just one game per week during the season, which keeps the game personal: Team A lost to Team B last year. Last year, Team B lost to Team C. Team A also lost to Team C last year. Now, a year later, Team A just beat Team C. Does this mean they’re going to beat Team B? Team D also lost to Team C two weeks ago, and this week Team D beat Team E—and Team E made it into the Super Bowl last year. Whoa—is Team A an underdog Super Bowl contender all of a sudden? Creative, statistics-based speculation will drive you insane. The overarching game design of the season structure deepens that insanity.

And the icing on that narrative cake is the league structure: two conferences of sixteen teams each. Teams don’t always play teams in other conferences, meaning that many possible match-ups don’t occur during regular season play. Sometimes the only way for two teams from different conferences to face one another is in the Super Bowl. And getting to the Super Bowl is a matter of winning multiple games—can the team master long-term goals like single-game victories, medium-term goals like touchdowns or first downs, and immediate-term goals like “dodge that guy, quick” with enough success to accomplish the super-long-term goal of “Win enough games to get into the Super Bowl”?

All throughout the season, you’ll be eyeing teams in both leagues, wondering which of them will win in a game, and never really knowing, because they might never get to have a faceoff. At the end of the season, there can be only one team from each conference, leading viewers to speculate forever on a robust catalog of delicious “What if?” scenarios.

Then there’s the preseason, during which the coaching staffs devise new plays, revise old plays, and train the players to acquire new skills or polish old ones. You know Football has got its hooks in you if you’re talking about the preseason—or the draft, during which teams acquire hot new players for big money.

How Interactive Is It?

Televised Football’s biggest competitor, the Madden franchise of Football-inspired video games, flaunts direct interactivity: using a controller, you can become the quarterback, passing to a receiver, and then you can become the receiver and run the ball to a touchdown.

Many game-players say that playing Madden will teach you an appreciation of Football—John Madden himself has pointed out that Football coaches are getting younger, citing the Madden video games as a valuable tool for learning the ways of the game.

Though after spending more than twenty years carefully studying Football, I have to put my foot down: I enjoy the open-endedness of the Televised Football Viewing Experience—it’s like Skyrim to Madden’s Zelda.

With Televised Football, I’m my own taskmaster. I can think, “I bet they’re going to run the ball the next play,” and there it is. They run the ball, and I’m right—or they don’t, and I’m surprised. That’s interesting either way. Or I can think, three games into the season, “The 49ers are definitely going to be in the Super Bowl,” and then, when it turns out I was right, there’s an enormous headshot feeling, like I just sniper-shot a head the size of a dime from a mile away. No “Achievement Unlocked” pops up on the screen, though I’m fine with that. I enjoy setting my own achievements.

The character creation process of Televised American Football Viewing offers incredible freedom of classes: you can be a Barbarian (the beer-drinking, “WE WON!”-screaming happy and/or violent psycho), a Dungeon Master (pick a roster of currently active players and play “fantasy football” with a group of friends), a Calculator / Mathemagician (turn your near-psychic brain encyclopedia of Football strategy and creative statistics-reading ability into an airtight plan for betting and winning), or a Necromancer, like me (watch games usually with the sound off, and loud music playing, sitting motionless and speechless in a meditation posture, your internal monologue consisting of the word “interesting” repeated).

I know that many of you out there have the impression of Football as a game for big dumb knuckle-dragging, beer-guzzling brutes. I understand that whenever a sports championship ends, fans light a car on fire in the winners’ hometown and the losers’ hometown. However, if you look beyond the microscopically car-arson-decriminalizing, drunken-idiocy-enabling graphical facade, you’ll find a game as strategically rich as Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem’s Ivy-League-educated firebaby, with action as mechanically ferocious as an entire Street Fighter III: Third Strike tournament.

And that, my friends, is why Gears of War is better than Halo.

Unit Classes

OFFENSE

Center

Center of the line. Starts each play. Becomes a blocker once play has started.

Agility: 1 Dexterity: 2
Intelligence: 3
Power: 4

Guards / Tackles

Positioned to the center’s flanks. When the play starts, they push against the defensive line to protect the quarterback. Typically coaches use four of them—five linemen, counting the center.

Agility: 1 Dexterity: 1
Intelligence: 3
Power: 5

Tight End

Specialty unit: powerful defensive lineman in his own right, though is also trained to be able to catch passes. A rare talent (“an expensive unit”). Typically just one per formation.

Agility: 3 Dexterity: 3
Intelligence: 2
Power: 4

Quarterback

The “Wizard.” Can “magically” “transport” the ball long distances by passing to wide receivers. Not as physically adept as his supporters.

Agility: 2 Dexterity: 5
Intelligence: 5
Power: 1

Wide Receiver

“Rangers”: skilled in evading the defense’s human obstacle gauntlet (“level design”), can run great distances quickly enough to be ready to receive quarterback’s passes, and gloriously run for the touchdown.

Agility: 5 Dexterity: 4
Intelligence: 3
Power: 2

Halfback

A sort of “Paladin”—the quarterback’s most trusted defender/blocker, and carrier of the ball in most running plays. Also trained to occasionally receive short passes.

Agility: 5 Dexterity: 5
Intelligence: 3
Power: 3

Fullback

A “Warrior”: the quarterback gives him the ball, and he runs it. More of a “power runner” than the Halfback—more muscularly built, adept at berserkering his way through dense crowds.

Agility: 4 Dexterity: 4
Intelligence: 2
Power: 4

DEFENSE

Defensive Lineman

An “Aggro”: wants to break through the offensive line. Ideally they are evenly matched physically and technically with the offensive lineman.

Agility: 1 Dexterity: 1
Intelligence: 1
Power: 5

Linebackers

They are “Clerics.” Though yardage in Football = “damage” for one team and “healing” for another, we’ll call these guys “Clerics” because they are “defensive.” The Middle Linebacker is often called “The Defensive Quarterback.” They make intelligent, fast defensive decisions—not always brute force.

Agility: 2 Dexterity: 2
Intelligence: 3
Power: 5

Cornerbacks

“Rogues”: they cover receivers, to keep them from completing successful attacks using either distractions or physical takedowns.

Agility: 4 Dexterity: 3
Intelligence: 2
Power: 3

Safety

The last line of defense: damage control. The ultimate healer. They stay back a bit, in case a receiver breaks away. When they tackle, they mean it.

Agility: 3 Dexterity: 5
Intelligence: 2
Power: 4

Coach

The mastermind of strategy. The Level-100 Wizard. The general. The king. The emperor.

Agility: N/A Dexterity: N/A
Intelligence: ∞
Power: N/A

Scout

The grizzled old guy who goes from high school to high school with a clipboard, passing judgment on which kids are going to stand a chance in the NFL. If quarterbacks are wizards and coaches are level 100 wizards, this guy is god darn Gandalf.

Agility: N/A Dexterity: N/A
Intelligence: ∞+1
Power: N/A

Tim Rogers is someone you can follow on twitter. He is the founder and director of Action Button Entertainment, makers of ZiGGURAT for iOS. He is currently directing development of ViDEOBALL, a next-level electronic sport that might be deeper than football and soccer combined.

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Untitled — X-Surface: Don't believe everything you read.

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I am a gamer. I don’t work for Microsoft.

I, like most other gamers, am sick of seeing endless rumours and speculation citing “anonymous sources” or “insiders” with no evidence, no proof, no guarantee that they’ve been fact-checked or can be relied on.

The games industry is the only one I can think of that will quite happily publish guesswork as news. So-called ‘analysts’ are no different - they make money by guessing. They’re about as much use as a ‘source’ as I am.

So let’s see how easy it is to be a ‘source’.

At 1:41am GMT today I sent out an email to a bunch of gaming sites claiming to be a Microsoft employee working on the new Xbox.

I made up every single word of it along with a couple of specs copied from other rumours that have been appearing on the Internet.

This was a bit of an experiment to see just how easy it is to get a fake story taken seriously. And it is shockingly easy in the games industry.

The outbox of my anonymous email account:

The full email:

By 9:58am GMT, it was already ‘in the news’.

Pocket-Lint.com were the first to run with the news, almost exactly one hour after saying “we have to make an effort to validate”; two hours before I got the chance to reply. It was posted with zero validation, no fact-checking, no source information. Just a simple email basically saying “I work for Microsoft - believe me?”.

I feel bad for lying, but it proves the point very well.

The spread begins.

And this is where we come to the most important part: it’s not just that it was easy to get a site to publish the non-news… it’s also the fact that every other site will then leech the information. As if linking to the original site absolves them of the need to check up on the sources.

Not to mention the Chinese whisper effect. I have listed below many different links to sites that took this news from Pocket-Lint.com: have a read through each one and play spot the difference. There is always at least one bit of information that was changed, mistranslated (even on English sites) or not mentioned at all.

This is no way to run a ‘news’ website. How would people react if they found out the BBC got all their news third-hand from a copied article that had been changed twice along the way? It is not reliable. No other industry works like this. Why do we accept it on gaming sites?

At the time of writing, my fake news is appearing on major sites such as:

Yahoo

CNET

Gizmodo

Venturebeat

Tech Digest

VG247

NowGamer

And many more. This Google search shows the global reach this non-news has been getting over the past 6 hours (at the time of writing).

This is not journalism.

Many games ‘journalists’ have no right calling themselves such things. The vast majority do nothing but copy & paste from other sites, and will willingly publish information without fact checking a single thing or attempting to verify the source.

It’s all about being first. To get such news out (whether you believe it or not) before any other publication does, will guarantee you page impressions, and that all-important advertising revenue. Gaming ‘journalism’ is completely broken.

By tagging a post with ‘rumour’, most writers/editors believe they can get away with spreading false information for their own benefits. They are the only ones to gain from such practices, whilst the gaming fans end up with speculation and, sometimes, outright lies.

TL;DR - Until Microsoft/Sony announce something: don’t believe even the most reputable gaming sites.

Just a small update: I would like to add that although everyone I emailed had a professional manner about them (even after finding out that it was fake), there is one person who, even upon receiving the original “rumour” email, was completely unprofessional, childish, insulting and downright ugly in his comments.

Whether he believed the story or not, his angry and egotistical response was absolutely shocking. That person is Rob Crossley, the associate editor for CVG - and he has shown himself to be the most repugnant person I’ve ever known in the gaming world.

I would hope he doesn’t speak to every tipster like that - he accused me of being 18 years old with no job, right off the bat (oh how wrong he was).

I didn’t want to call anybody out by name, but as I have received multiple insulting emails since the truth came out, I felt I should do so with him.

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News - Opinion: It's totally OK to not like 'anti-games'

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February 1, 2013   |   By Mike Rose
49 comments
More:

Proteus was released earlier this week, and has caused quite a ruckus online, as players argue over its video game merits versus its lack of traditional gameplay. Here, UK editor Mike Rose discusses why there’s perhaps a little too much snobbery going on.
It’s an awkward point to have to make, but here goes: Enjoying recently released “anti-game” Proteus does not make you a better, or a more refined player, than anyone else.

It’s currently not cool at all to say that you didn’t enjoy Proteus, or to even hint at the idea that this isn’t one of the most important video game releases of the here and now. This is an experience that is pushing the medium of what video games can offer us, and speaking out against it means that you clearly just don’t like video games, period.

For those who have somehow missed it, Proteus presents you with a randomly generated, pixelated island to roam around, with animals to chase, rainclouds to walk under, and a night and day cycle which forms the basis of a vague sort of narrative.

I personally enjoyed my time with the game. It was a relaxing half an hour succeeding a bustling day of work, and it allowed my curiosity to wander off with a mind of its own.

That being said, I’m 99 percent sure that I’ll never go back to it ever again. In my eyes, it’s an experience worth having that truly did make me question what a “game” can be — but I don’t particularly feel the need to experience it again. Once was all the fill I needed.

My girlfriend had an entirely different experience. She sat down to play for five minutes, after which she took the headphones off and said “I don’t get it.”

I forced her to play a bit more, so as to experience the night-time in all its glory. But another five minutes, and the headphones were off again. “This is really boring,” she said. “There’s nothing to do, and the world is dull.”

“No it’s not,” I replied… but then I sort of ran out of words. I mean, how was I meant to make her see what she was missing? If she wasn’t “feeling it” emotionally — which, let’s be honest, is the essence of the experience — then what else was there for her in Proteus?

And in turn, this made me consider the following: What if it was me that was trying so hard to get something out of this walking simulator, that I had lost sight of the fact that it literally is a game about prancing around a lo-fi island for half an hour?

Here’s a comparison that will make monocles drop to the ground, and make me very unpopular: I’ve just spend the last three weeks gunning it around Far Cry 3’s massive, gorgeous, detailed, incredible playground, with a brilliant soundtrack to boot. If Ubisoft had removed all the gameplay, all the characters, all the interactivity, and instead created an experience that was based solely on exploring the island while the music willed you on, would it be worth playing?

Probably not — if anything, it would then be seen as a tech demo to showcase how beautiful Far Cry 3 looks. That’s not to say that Proteus is a tech demo, but rather, that when someone complains that Proteus is boring because it has “no gameplay,” should we really be so harsh as to snap at them for not being “clever” enough to understand it?

It’s pretty easy to gush about Proteus and sound intellectual — the imagery, the integration of sound and exploration, the sheer bliss of it all! — and, in turn, dismissing the “I found it boring” argument is a piece of cake too. “You just don’t get video games like I do!”

I’ve personally been on the other end of this argument before — I didn’t enjoy last year’s Dear Esther at all (and that feels like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders to say out loud).

While I appreciated the game for what it was attempting to do, and I’m definitely glad that it exists, I just didn’t “get it.” I walked along a beach for a while, up a tight hilly path, through some fields, and into a cave before I decided that I was far too bored for my own good. I tried as hard as I could to engage with the spoken story, but it didn’t grip me at all.

I remember mentioning the fact that I didn’t really like the game to someone at a conference last year, and instantly wished I hadn’t. As it turns out, you’re simply not allowed to say bad things about these sorts of video game experiences! I learned my lesson.

And this is what I’m driving at: I am all about pushing the video game medium forward, and for that reason I see games like Proteus and Dear Esther as a huge step in the right direction. I’m hugely glad they exist, I’m happy to have experienced them, and I hope Proteus sells by the bucketload so the developer can continue to make his mark on the industry.

But what right do I, or does anyone else, have to tell someone who doesn’t like it, or doesn’t want to play it, that they are wrong and/or stupid?

Here are the facts about Proteus: It is very different from the norm. It has no real (or perhaps atypical) “gameplay” as such. It’s clearly not for everyone. Part of pushing the medium is being open to ideas and opinions of others, so when someone is being mocked for not enjoying themselves “as they should be,” who really has the higher ground here?

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WHAT ARE GAME « Proteus

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WHAT ARE GAME

by Ed

I find this rather burdensome to write, but it feels necessary to set out my thoughts given recent rumblings, and specifically to respond to this article and its comments.

I don’t call Proteus an antigame* or a notgame. I call it a game, but obviously I am at pains to make it clear that it doesn’t have explicit challenge or “winning.”

I’m also absolutely not against game mechanics or traditional schools of design.

If you want to narrow your definition of “game” for purposes of academic study or personal taste, then that’s fine, but the vagueness of the term itself has been around as long as things that we call games. “Snakes and Ladders” is my favourite example of this inconsistency: it involves no decision making and therefore is well outside of many of the stricter definitions, but clearly is a boardgame as far as society is concerned. More recently, videogames like The Sims and SimCity are also “not games” according to some.

The stricter the definition of an inherently nebulous concept, the more absurd the implications. Should Dear Esther and Proteus be excluded from stores that sell games? Not covered in the games press? Since Sim City is either a toy or a simulation, that should be excluded too, along with flight simulators.

Are all comics “comical?” Meanings are fluid. Most of the words we use don’t mean what they originally meant – that’s just how everyday language works.

If you are a game designer and you are focusing on a particular formal definition or have a guiding principle to your work, like Sid Meier’s famous motto “A game is a series of interesting decisions” then go ahead. Insisting that your definition is the definition is a foolish obsession.

Proteus doesn’t have or even aspire to the same systemic complexity as SimCity, but it does have systems. It’s just 95% optional whether you engage with them and it generally doesn’t give you any confirmation when you do. There’s a design reason for this. But, as the other headline went: Who cares? Would adding more game-like elements improve it? Or would it just be a box-ticking exercise that would harm** what it’s designed to express?

Outside of academic discussions, encouraging a strict definition of “game” does nothing but foster conservatism and defensiveness in a culture already notorious for both. Witness the raging threads on the Proteus Steam forum, most of which are posted (and re-posted and re-posted) by people who don’t own the game. There’s a huge difference between this kind of “activism” or claiming something is the Emperor’s New Clothes and individual people trying something and deciding it’s not for them.

Proteus was certainly made by a game developer (and a musician), working in the context of videogames, using game design and development techniques to express a particular set of things. None of that is really important, because the proof is in the playing.

(* I’m not accusing Mike of misquoting me here, as that part of our conversation was fairly ambiguous and more about my insistence that I don’t subscribe to the term “notgame” rather than signing up to a new term)

(** The emperor of the South Sea was called Shu [Brief], the emperor of the North Sea was called Hu [Sudden], and the emperor of the central region was called Hun-tun [Chaos]. Shu and Hu from time to time came together for a meeting in the territory of Hun-tun, and Hun-tun treated them very generously. Shu and Hu discussed how they could repay his kindness. “All men,” they said, “have seven openings so they can see, hear, eat, and breathe. But Hun-tun alone doesn’t have any. Let’s trying boring him some!” Every day they bored another hole, and on the seventh day Hun-tun died. – Zhuangzi)

Addendum:

Thanks for the comments. It’s worth reiterating that the looseness of the word “game” is actually the original state rather than some limited formalistic definition, which perhaps originates in the “game theory” of the 20th century. I had forgotten about Wittgenstein’s classic use of “game” as an example of the concept of family resemblances – thanks Lana Polansky and Chris McDowall.

Despite not subscribing to the term “notgame”, Michaël Samyn’s manifesto is a good, provocative read.

Old friend Simon Brislin pointed out something I should have made a bigger deal of in linking to the Gamasutra post: Who on the internet needs reassurance that it’s ok to share their dislike of something?

Finally, I’m not feeling brought down by this whole argument, though it’s regrettable to me that Proteus is being used as such a prominent example. We’ve had such an amazing wave of nice messages and good write-ups that the number of people who dislike it feels irrelevant. From a practical point of view, it looks like it should make enough in sales to pay for development time on a new project. After a long and uncertain development, and a very stressful January, it feels amazingly freeing.

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Where I'm @: A Brief Look At The Resurgence of Roguelikes

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By Dan Pearson

Thu 31 Jan 2013 10:00am GMT / 5:00am EST / 2:00am PST
GamesDevelopment

How a single ASCII RPG spawned a generation of brutal classics

I hate roguelikes. They crush me, burn me, drop me in acid and sneak up to stab me in the back. They curse me, break me and mock the very concept of fairness. They kill me. Every. Single. Time.

I’ve been playing them for years, and there are some, like ADOM, which I’ve dedicated hundreds of hours to, but I’ve only beaten one: Fusion Reactions’ 100 Rogues - a neat and streamlined graphical roguelike on iOS. Because I never finish any of them in anything even approaching a satisfying manner, I’ve always got at least two or three on the go - disparate dungeoneers linked only by the origins of their digital diaspora.

“Part of the reason Dwarf Fortress can include a breadth of mechanics unseen in other games is because complex mechanics are expressed in the most simple of visual forms.”

Justin Ma, FTL developer, on ascii graphics.

Their shared parentage fascinates me. That single game, Rogue itself, has spawned so much - a genre of its own - that it should be venerated as one of gaming’s pantheon. Yet, it remains a curiosity to most, its depths unplumbed and mysteries unsolved - a weird smattering of ascii characters moving at a snail’s pace. As I’ve discovered at other jobs where I wasn’t allowed to play games, a classic roguelike can even pass as a spreadsheet when viewed over your shoulder at a distance by an uneducated superior.

Of course, Rogue itself owes a debt to its ancestors, notably the D&D ruleset which so closely informed its bestiary and inventory, but also other digital pioneers like the gloriously naively named Adventure and Dungeon. However, whilst they laid foundations, it’s Rogue which formed the first fruiting bud on this venerable branch of videogames - it’s Rogue’s name which is still the identifier for this curiously diverse yet contained set of parameters.

The last few years have been something of an Indian summer for the genre. There have been Roguelikes in various states of development since day one, of course, but until recently mainstream success was elusive, and even now the more recognisable examples are still distinctly niche. But they’re putting their heads increasingly further above the parapet.

Take Dungeons of Dredmor, for example, a graphical (as opposed to ascii-based) dungeon delver - full of humour and blessed with a usable UI - which nonetheless manages to engage with the core tenets of the genre most successfully. It’s nowhere near as complex as some of the more obscure offerings, but retains a depth which many RPGs choose to eschew. It’s a fine balance between authenticity and approachability, but why did developer Gaslamp Games choose to take aim at such a core target?

“The key elements of roguelikes are so enduring because it feels good to explore and invest in a character that grows and progresses,” Gaslamp Games’ CCO David Baumgart tells me. “The deadly precariousness inherent to the unknown environments of roguelikes gives that investment a great deal of meaning. A small risk of losing everything makes every move exciting.”

It’s a good point, and exactly the sort of risk/reward ratio which gives rise to the sort of love/hate concomitance which pervades my experience with the genre. Roguelikes thrive on a certain level of unpredictability and brutality, throwing in the sort of “out of depth” enemies or sudden and unpredictably massive explosions which mean that countless hours of meticulous planning can be scuppered by the slightest error.

Justin Ma is one of the lead developers of FTL, a sci-fi ship combat simulator which defies categorisation but can loosely be folded in with ‘roguelike-likes’. FTL is very much pivoted around this ever-increasing sense of panic and desperation, this awareness of impending and unavoidable doom - largely fuelled by a permadeath mechanic and random encounters which leave you constantly in trepidation.

ToME’s graphical interface can still be a slightly confusing mass of stats and effects, but it offers a very efficient representation of the data underneath.

“I think at heart they force you to care about your character,” Ma offers, when I ask him about the appeal of the genre. “Maybe not the same way one would care about Nathan Drake, but you definitely feel responsible for well-being of the person (or in our case, ship). This makes your successes and failures all the more compelling.”

For some, the appeal is more practical. Joshua Day, who works on the traditional but accessible Brogue, sees it as a chance to create a game with a scope well beyond what you might expect from a smaller team.

“These games create compelling experiences without demanding large teams and complex coordination. Roguelikes are constrained by the need to present the player with everything they have to offer at all times - if you really want to improve a roguelike in one particular situation, you’re going to end up making it better generally.  Non-modal, non-narrative play sounds kind of weird when you first come into it, but as a hairshirt exercise it works brilliantly for keeping the focus on the here and now.”

ADOM’s Thomas Biskup, who like many roguelike developers, works pretty much alone on his project, agrees that the genre enables more ambitious development, arguing that opting for an ascii interface brings a focus to gameplay over graphics.

“I can only offer my personal opinion,” he half-jokes: “Lack of graphical talent combined with the huge amount of satisfaction gained by creating an immersive and intense game world - in contrast to the tedium of fiddling with pixels!

“It’s so much fun not having to worry about pixels and instead being able to focus on the game, content and story that ASCII is a natural for me. Combined with the fact that ASCII graphics do not really seem to lessen the enjoyment of the game in any way compared to commercial graphics-intense games (probably due to the fact that the human mind is the most capable image processor out there and your imagination turns ASCII into whatever imagery you need) there is no real incentive to spend months and years on graphics when you instead can work on the story and content.”

“I guess that many people interested in compelling game concepts are getting more and more tired of the shallow and boring commercial games that get put on the shelf by the big commercial companies. I could count at least a dozen fantastic game concepts from C64 times that lack any challenger in modern times…which really is tragic. Game companies usually seem to be so focused on 3D graphics these days that the most basic rules of enjoyable game design get totally ignored. I find it really tragic that modern computing power does not get used a lot more on complex and interesting game worlds instead getting kind of wasted on graphical effects that bore you after a couple of hours. There are so few brilliant exceptions that it really drives me crazy.”

“There are as many reasons as there are developers,” says Brogue’s Joshua Day, “but I think most of them amount to a renunciation of the marketing message that what we couldn’t do last year is the only thing worth doing. ASCII games were fun when people first made them and they’re still fun now.

Brogue’s use of subtle animations and soft colour palette set it apart from other ascii games.

“Nothing changes but expectations, and expectations are just prejudice. The experience can be more cerebral, more refined, more imaginative, more dynamic, and what have you, but with good art direction you can capture any one of those with graphics. The one thing you can’t capture with graphics is the ambivalence about having graphics at all.”

The bare-bones approach of the traditional roguelike certainly does focus the experience. Most don’t feature much of a narrative beyond a flimsy excuse to keep heading downwards, and there’s very rarely any sort of motivation other than trying not to chalk up YASD (Yet Another Stupid Death). Instead, they tend to be about the constant granular challenge of knowing how to manage that all important risk reward. When 45 hours of gameplay can rest on whether or not an unidentified potion will kill or cure, you tend to find yourself pondering every single decision quite closely.

“Difficulty and randomness are, in my opinion, necessary to roguelikes,” says Gaslamp’s CCO, incidentally raising a far thornier issue which I’ll come back to in a moment. “Our approach to design has been to allow people to choose their own level of difficulty because even if not given an in-game option to change difficulty, players will manipulate save files or mod the game to make it easier if they really want to. Why get in the way of that? There’s no ‘wrong fun’, though we do suggest that playing with permadeath is the intended game experience by having it be set on by default.”

Tales of Maj’Eyal, better known as ToME, is actually a little more lenient than most roguelikes, offering players the chance to earn extra lives through levelling up or achieving certain goals. When you die in ToME you can, assuming you’ve got a life left, resurrect where you died or back at a safe location. However, developer Nicolas Casalini still sees the toughness as a vital part of the appeal, and knows that a lot of players feel the same way.

“I yet have to see a playable roguelike on a mobile…I have yet to find one that I’d be willing to play for more than five minutes.”

Dr Thomas Biskup, ADOM

“Yeah I think so,” Casalini tells me. “Difficulty is always hard to judge though; it really depends on the player and since roguelikes are usually turn-based there is a fine line between hard and boring. It is, in my opinion, important to try to avoid situations where the safest thing to do is to grind/wait/search every possible spot every turn. It’s not easy to do, probably impossible to completely remove: but it is a goal to strive to.”

Striking that balance can be incredibly hard. I’m not overly given to fits of fury when gaming, but I’ve rage quit dozens of games of FTL when things have been stacking up against me, or suicide a Slash’em character when a mystery scroll turned out to be “destroy armour”. Often, quite frankly, it feels like you’re being cheated, even though you logically know that you’re not. Joshua Day is of the opinion that if you can’t take the heat, don’t play near the procedurally generated lava. I asked him if he thought that the genre thrived on a macho sort of toughness, eliciting a fairly voluble reply.

“I think that most of the apparent ‘elitists’ are just people who love what they do and don’t want to be told that it’s not ok, who love a challenge, who loved it even when they were new to the game themselves, and don’t want to hear that the game is too ‘hard’ for new players,” he explained.

“It used to be that if you were playing a roguelike you had already been sold on the principle of roguelike difficulty.  These days, more people are finding them who expect to beat the game in a few weeks, and to get half way through after ten tries, and that just doesn’t track with the experience that people who’ve already been there know is more fun.  It’s more fun (really!) to struggle for each new dungeon level, to achieve a victory over yourself, instead of over a computer, because who cares what a computer thinks of you?”

All this is perfectly encapsulated by “losing is fun!” the community motto of Dwarf Fortress - a game of such Byzantine complexity that whole suites of attendant support software have been published by third parties to help players combat the mysteries of the UI and mechanics. DF, produced by brothers Tarn and Zach Adams, has a weird mystique about it. It’s largely scoffed at by gamers, but it has an infamy which has lead to coverage as far reaching as the New York Times. It’s impossible to win, infuriatingly obtuse and completely free. It’s also totally brilliant.

Dwarf Fortress in vanilla mode, using the Mayday Tileset, the Phoebus Tileset and the Stonesense viewer.

The thing is, for a lot of people - it’s not a roguelike. It’s an (optionally) turn-based, top-down viewed ascii-game (at least in its default build) which wipes your save when you die and treats you like a fly at a spider party. However, you control a whole colony of dwarves in an indirect management style, ordering them to build and fight rather than assuming direct control. In truth, it’s not actually much like Rogue at all. Exactly what does constitute a roguelike is something of a hot topic.

“The notion that there’s any actually definitive set of mechanics is absurd to me,” says Baumgart. “The only definitive rules I can see are the broad definitions of the genre: permadeath and nonlinear elements, though even these rules can be bent to varying and interesting ends.”

Casalini warns me that I’m likely to ” find pain and death by old age,” before I find any two people who will agree on a definition but argues that randomisation of maps, items and enemies is key - also going on to exclude something like Dwarf Fortress by suggesting that control should be direct and limited to “‘One against all’; or maybe a small party. But it has to have a ‘physical’ representation of the player in the game; as opposed to RTS and such where the player is immaterial.”

Dr Biskup is also keen to avoid being tied down to any particular set of factors, but identifies replayability, permadeath and content over cosmetics. Justin Ma opts for a similar set of permadeath, high difficulty and skill cap, and procedural generation. However, it’s perhaps Joshua Day who encapsulates it best for me.

“The community is awesome; their enthusiasm is infectious and occasionally scary. We’ve been particularly blown away by the work that modders have done; they’ve discovered many scripting tricks that we never imagined were possible.”

David Baumgart, CCO Gaslamp Games

“The unspoken definition looks a little more like this: Roguelikes are games about decision making and risk taking under the influence of hidden information.  Exploration, item identification, random combat rolls, even permadeath, all serve that goal.  You explore so that more that was once hidden will no longer be, and you take risks to push the frontier back.

“You find unknown items so that you have to deduce information about them and relate that to your position in the dungeon (and even in the absence of item identification, there are still random item drops, which serve the same purpose).  Random combat means that you have to plan for the unexpected even when you have good information about your surroundings.

“Permadeath means that the risks you’re taking really feel like risks and that you can’t keep information that you’ve gained when you do fail.  Exploration and item identification always start back at zero.”

If the people making them can barely agree on what they are, and they are surrounded by layer upon layer of obfuscation and intentional mystery - how are roguelikes still being trotted out so regularly? How do they snare people like me, who normally has the attention span and patience of a tired toddler trapped in a fishbowl at Disneyland, into devoting countless hours to delving their depths, suffering defeat after ignominious defeat?

“We are digging ourselves out of a period where game development has been focused on streamlining the gameplay experience, perhaps at the cost of both challenge and a diversity and richness of experience that emerge from complexity,” Baumgart tells me. “This is especially true in the AAA market where you have a lot of, in the words of Nicholas (Vining, Gaslamp’s CTO), ‘Press the Square Button to Leap Behind The Rock! Press the Triangle Button to Operate The Cyclops-Killing Catapult!, Press the Circle Button to shun your eldest son!’, that sort of thing.

FTL’s adventures are confined to the interior of a spaceship, albeit with the freedom of interstellar travel.

“A streamlined, linear experience is a perfectly legitimate way to make games and the advances made in user interface driven by this design sense have over the past decade lead to enormous and necessary advances which have been hugely beneficial to gameplay across the board. But there has been a growing reaction against relatively unchallenging, extremely forgiving ‘media experience’ style games and this is especially apparent in the indie game space which has the freedom to experiment with ideas that go against conservative, mainstream design principles - like permadeath.”

Justin Ma agrees with the aversion to dumbing down, citing Spelunky as an example of a commercially successful indie title which adopted heavily from roguelike mechanics, reasoning that “There could be an increased desire for punishing games because players are fed up with with the hand-holding.” For Casalini, it’s been a process of reducing the barriers to player entry, improving UI (a major bugbear for the ToME creator) and making them easier to enjoy without just making them easier.

Something which does ease the suffering of learning the ropes of a new roguelike are the attendant wikis, guides and exploit lists which invariably blossom around them - usually maintained by the community of players. For all the supposed elitism of roguelikes, I’ve never encountered communities which are more welcoming, sharing and friendly than those surrounding these most opaque of games.

ToME is a particularly apt example - even though it’s a purely single-player game, it has a running chat channel open to players around the world. You can ask stupid questions there, ask for hints rather than spoilers and even link enemies or items to the window with a neat, single-click mechanic which lets everyone see what particular shiny you just acquired or which massive slab of scaly doom just smeared you across the walls.

It works brilliantly, assuaging the frustrations and resentments which these games can quickly accrue by simply sharing your pain. It’s amazing how much better you’ll feel when a total stranger tells you that the beserker troll who just picked you up and smashed you into jelly was “a nasty piece of work.” It’s comforting, a pat on the back from the ether which lets you pick up and start again.

“I can see the appeal in hidden things but I do not believe in it,” Casalini tells me when I ask about ToME’s community. “This worked in the past because it was harder to find spoilers; but in this day and age if a game is big enough there will be a wiki, spoiler or forum about it and it will list every little detail.

“Communities around RLs are important because it lets the developer(s) know their game is liked. Games are like art; to improve at it we need critics. Players are those critics. It feels good when a player tells you your game is fun, but it also feels good when a player tells you ‘oh this could be improved’ because it means they care. I urge all developers to care to their community, be nice to them and they’ll be nice to you!”

Thomas Biskup is even more ebullient in his feelings on roguelike communities.

“As far as ADOM and ADOM II go, the community probably is the most important factor out there. Roguelike gamers usually are highly creative, imaginative and intelligent people (from my experience) with tons of fantastic ideas. Growing such a community, listening to their ideas, filtering those ideas and hammering them into a shape that fits your personal vision for the development of your game probably is the most important non-technical ability for a roguelike developer. I immensely enjoy that process and am highly indebted and grateful to the ADOM community for so many years of great feedback. Without them neither ADOM nor ADOM II would be what they are.

Spelunky, Dark Souls, ZombiU and DayZ have all adopted mechanics traditionally associated with roguelikes.

“Whether the mechanics of a specific game are mostly hidden (as for ADOM and ADOM II) or a lot more obvious and open (as for many other rogue likes) does not seem to matter much in the long run according to my experience. I even would go so far to say that hiding some of the mechanics actually helps as folks tend to focus a lot more on how well an implementation plays and feels instead of the nitpicky details of the technical implementation.”

The influence of roguelikes and their mechanics is undoubtedly spreading, reflecting the growing need for games which punish mercilessly. Look at the success of Dredmor, FTL and Spelunky for a start, but also cast your eye over Dark Souls, DayZ, X-Com, Diablo’s hardcore mode and even ZombiU. Commercial success is finally coming around for a genre which has, for most of its history, largely been given away for free. But does it have a future, in its purest form, away from the PC?

Doubtless, the complexity makes it difficult. Not having a keyboard either vastly reduces your control options or forces unwieldy UI - just take a look at any of the iOS versions of Nethack, Rogue or their tougher cousin Slash’em for evidence of that. It’s unlikely that we’re ever going to see a game which successfully incorporates the sort of command list which includes separate buttons to clean your ears and face, scratch words into the dust with wands, rub objects against each other or dip things into potions without the faithful keyboard.

But perhaps this is no bad thing. Let the commercially successful games keep coming, streamlining the core experience and bringing the concepts to a wider audience - there will still always be the darker depths of Dwarf Fortress and ADOM to retreat to if you’re allergic to popularity.

I will keep going back to them, these ancient and intermittently maintained hobby projects with their wilful middle finger to the casual passer by. I will continue to be crushed, burned, cursed, exploded and ganked by invisible stalkers. I will still run around the nearest corner at the mere sight of a capital D - just in case it’s a massively out-of-depth ancient chromatic dragon. I’ll keep suffering. I’ll keep dying. Because I love roguelikes. It’s where I’m @.

About the author

Dan Pearson
Dan Pearson joined Eurogamer in 2006 before moving over to GamesIndustry in 2010. He covers all areas of the business and spends much of the rest of his time shouting at his cat and killing dwarves in poorly constructed fortresses.

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From marketing guns to young people to selling lucrative licenses, Simon Parkin examines the virtual weapons trade.

By Simon Parkin Published Thursday, 31 January 2013

The American confectionery company Victoria Sweets claims to have invented the candy cigarette. A thin stick of chocolate, wrapped in edible paper and designed to impersonate a roll-up, it debuted in 1915 and soon became the accessory of choice for children keen to play grown-up. Hollywood star, GI Joe, team captain: the sweet gave kids the chance try out one of the vogue props of adulthood.

Within 20 years it was so popular that cigarette companies began to take notice. Leading brands such as Marlboro, Winston and Salem authorised their packaging designs for use on millions of candy cigarette boxes. One confectioner of the period touted the sweet’s “tremendous advertising factor to coming-up cigaret smokers.”[1]

The marketing of imitation adult products to children in the hope they will blossom into customers of the genuine article is widespread. The video game presents further opportunities for manufacturers to target young people. Toyota and Nissan work with racing game developers to show off their vehicles as pristinely desirable. Nike and Adidas position their logo on virtual boots. Gibson licenses plastic versions of its guitars in the hope players will progress from the coloured buttons of the peripheral to the nickel-wound strings of a Les Paul.

And Barrett, creator of the M82, a shoulder-fired, .50-caliber semi-automatic sniper rifle, hopes that the appearance of its weapon in a video game will, in time, turn young players into gun owners.

“It is hard to qualify to what extent rifle sales have increased as a result of being in games,” says Ralph Vaughn, the man who negotiates deals with game developers for Barrett. “But video games expose our brand to a young audience who are considered possible future owners.”

For many Americans it is a time of unprecedented introspection on the issue of personal gun ownership. A spate of deadly incidents in 2012 culminated with the December shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, when 20 children and six adults were killed. The incident propelled firearms to the centre of the public conversation, polarising many American citizens. Vice president Joe Biden, commissioned to lead a task force exploring the issue, said there was no “silver bullet” to solve America’s gun problem. Instead, he presented a range of recommendations designed to prevent further tragedy without compromising citizens’ Second Amendment right to bear arms.

The video game industry has been drawn into the conversation by parties on both sides. In December 2012 Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, delivered a speech in response to the Sandy Hook tragedy. He accused games companies of being the seeders of school shooting nightmares, calling out “a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people”. Then, in January 2013, representatives from Electronic Arts and Activision - the publishers behind the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor series - were called into a conference with Biden to discuss the relationship between games and real-life violence.

Whether causal links between the two exist is a question for the researchers. Their work will continue with renewed vigour in the coming months, potentially supported by funding from Congress at President Obama’s behest. But there’s another question, one hidden in plain sight, concerning the link between games and guns: how do real life weapons make their way into video games?

A well-placed round fired from a Barrett M82 will bring a truck to a shuddering, roadkill standstill. A deer too - after all, this sniper rifle was originally designed for hunting. In fact, its bullets are propelled with enough force to kill a deer standing behind a concrete wall 2000 metres away. The gun retails for $10,000. Barrett proudly advertises that celebrities hang the weapon above their fireplaces, a sort of inverse trophy. But before its release in 1982 nobody had heard of the gun, or of its inventor, professional photographer Ronnie Barrett. “Nothing like this weapon existed at the time,” says Barrett. “So I drew my ideas on paper in three dimensions to show how the rifle would function.” He is an unlikely firearms inventor; photographers are usually found documenting battlefields, not supplying them. But Barrett had spent his life squinting down the barrel of a lens, so when the design for a shoulder-mounted semi-automatic rifle came to mind, the switch from camera to gun felt natural.

Ronnie Barrett, creator of the M82 and founder of Barrett Rifles.

Barrett approached a number of local machine shops seeking help to turn his design into a prototype, but all declined. One shopkeeper was actively discouraging, telling Barrett that if his idea was any good, the gun “would have been designed by someone smarter already”. Eventually a toolmaker friend relented and the pair built the first rifle in a garage. “It was to be a toy for my recreational shooting pleasure, not a commercial product,” Barrett says today.

But this toy fired the powerful 12.7×99mm NATO (.50 BMG) ammunition used in M2 Browning machine guns. The M82 holds the record for the longest confirmed sniper kill, at 2815 metres. This deadly exuberance drew the attention of locals in Barrett’s hometown of Smyrna, Tennessee. He set up shop in the garage, hand-building 30 rifles - one for each slot in his father’s gun cabinet. The M82 sold out immediately.

The business grew and a few years later, the CIA registered its interest. The plan was to send a small number of rifles to the Afghan Mujahideen for use in its war against the Soviet Union. This commercial success boosted the weapon’s profile and in 1991, Barrett was approached by the US military. Embroiled in the Desert Storm campaign, the army wanted to buy a shipment of guns for troops to use in the field.

The rifle was officially adopted by the military nine years later where it became known by its non-commercial model delineation, M107. “I was so pleased,” says Barrett. “A company creates a product or service in the civilian market and maybe it will someday have an application for government or military use. But that’s the sort of thing that could never happen.” Indeed, the US government has brought the firearm designs of seven individuals into service. Barrett is the only one to create, manufacture, market and mass-produce his gun.

This wasn’t the rifle’s only commercial triumph; in 2006, after winning fame and notoriety on the battlefield, Barrett’s firearm was to join a new type of force. “Yes, we’ve worked with companies to send our sniper rifles into video games,” says Vaughn. “Which ones? Our licence agreement prohibits us from mentioning a company by name.” However, he says, “You are welcome to check out the Call of Duty series.”

One wonders if video games could get along without guns. The rifle is a crucial tool for exerting power in competitive games, from Battleships on the board to Cops and Robbers in the playground and Call of Duty on the screen. Then there is the medium’s ongoing fascination with the adolescent, the desire to upgrade the toy soldiers and Airfix fighter planes of boyhood, to render the miniature wars of the carpet in almost-life on screen.

But if shooting was simply an immature obsession in games we would have grown out of all that stuff by now. The gun’s persistence and centrality in the video game is down to more practical considerations. It is one of few inventions that, when rendered in a game, can affect objects both near and far with the squeeze of a trigger (or press of a button), extending the player’s reach into the television screen. With a bullet we can take out an enemy standing directly in front of us or just as easily shoot a wall-mounted switch a hundred metres into the distance. Few other tools offer the player such scope, flexibility and utility.

The virtual gun has long been an indispensable item in the game designer’s toolkit, then. But as weapons popped into 3D, developers began to set their games against the backdrop of real-world conflicts, and to hanker for brand-name firearms. A real-life weapon could lend a sheen of authenticity to a game. The gun’s role in the video game was expanding.

This shift was experienced first-hand by Martin Hollis, the creator of GoldenEye. Released in 1997 for the Nintendo 64, it was one of the first console games to feature 3D firearms. “Most of the guns in the game were modelled on real weapons,” he says today. “The Walther PPK, Kalashnikov AK47, FN P90 and so on.”

The Klobb, named after GoldenEye’s producer Ken Lobb, is based on the on the real-world Skorpion VZ/61.

But at a late stage in development Ken Lobb, the game’s producer, called Hollis to say they could not use the genuine brand names. “I was not pleased because it would decrease the realism, or at least verisimilitude,” he recalls. “I assumed novelists and filmmakers have no compulsion to license. We removed the real gun names, replacing them with fictional ones - sometimes based on team members’ initials and sometimes on a sense of authenticity. So we have the DD44 Dostovei named after [GoldenEye designer] David Doak, the Klobb after Ken Lobb and the PP7 because… It just sounds good.”

The use of fabricated gun names was acceptable in the fictional universe of James Bond, where a licence to kill did not rely upon licensing. But for those games based around real armed forces, the inclusion of brand names was necessary to remain faithful to the source material.

Today licensed weapons are commonplace in video games, but the deals between game makers and gun-manufacturer are shrouded. Not one of the publishers contacted for this article was willing to discuss the practice. (EA: “I’m afraid we can’t progress this.” Activision: “Not something we can assist with at present… My hands are tied.” Codemasters: “We’re focused on our racing titles these days.” Crytek: “We can’t help you with that request.” Sega: “[This] doesn’t sit comfortably.” Sony: “I can’t help with this I’m afraid.”)

However, the gun makers are more forthcoming. “[It’s] absolutely the same as with cars in games,” says Barrett’s Vaughn. “We must be paid a royalty fee - either a one-time payment or a percentage of sales, all negotiable. Typically, a licensee pays between 5 per cent to 10 per cent retail price for the agreement. But we could negotiate on that.”

According to Vaughn, the cost of the license fee depends on the reputation and achievements of the developer in question. “It could be a few thousand dollars or many thousands, based on past projects and projected sales,” he explains. The way in which the weapon is presented in the game is important too. “We must give prior approval to the image or logo in order to protect the brand’s integrity.”

Some game makers have found ways to include real-life guns in their games while avoiding licensing costs. One ex-Codemasters employee, who asked to remain anonymous, described his experience of working on Operation Flashpoint, a franchise featuring the US Marines. “We didn’t license weapons in the Flashpoint series,” he says. “We covered ourselves from a legal angle [by not using any] names or manufacturers. The general rule is that you can use the model delineation but you can’t use its proper name manufacturer name without prior permission.

“For example, we used ‘M4A1 Carbine’ which is the weapon’s military code. Carbine means it’s a shorter version for use in Close Quarters Battle. I forget if we refer to the weapons by name in the script but we were being so careful that we checked, double-checked and in many cases triple-checked with legal that we could use the weapon model numbers.”

The South Armagh Brigade of the IRA used Barrett rifles against the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary police in the 1990s.

Another benefit of eschewing brand names is that developers can ignore the additional stipulations laid down by gun manufacturers. “We want to know explicitly how the rifle is to be used, ensuring that we are shown in a positive light… Such as the ‘good guys’ using the rifle,” says Vaughn. His company insists that its gun isn’t “used by individuals, organisations, countries or companies that would be shown as enemies of the United States or its citizens.” Ideally, Vaughn says, Barrett’s gun will only be used “by US law enforcement or US military”.

Another key concern is that the weapon functions in a realistic manner. Barrett insists the game developer purchases one of the company’s guns to aid the 3D modellers in their work. “[The gun must] perform to the standards that our rifles do in the real world,” Vaughn says. “Barrett firearms is known for its quality and the brand must always be placed on that foundation.”

While the benefits of using licensed weaponry are clear for the game maker, the benefits to the gun maker - aside from the licence fee - are less obvious. However, just as cigarette companies used confectionery to market their products to children, so gun makers can use video games to increase awareness of their products amongst those too young to buy them. As Vaughn puts it: “Video games expose our brand to a young audience who are considered possible future owners.”

But does it work?

“I have six pellet and BB guns,” says Aidin Smith, a 13 year-old resident of Springfield, Illinois. “These include two BB guns, modelled on the M14 rifle and M1911 pistol, and two pellet guns, modelled on the AK-47 and M16. I also own an M14 BB rifle M1911 BB pistol. And I got an AK-47 rifle, M16 rifle.

“My favorite is the M1911. I shot a real M1911 when I lived in the country. I shot with my Grandpa. I love the action on it, it is like a real M1911, it recoils and springs back like a real gun. All of them are ones that are in Call of Duty. I like guns more because of Call of Duty. The M1911 is a pistol in almost in every Call of Duty.”

Last year Smith took one of his BB guns to school. A teacher discovered it in his rucksack, along with a bag of ammunition and a folding knife.

“It was a Monday and I was coming [to school] from my grandpa’s,” Smith says. “We had gone to the target range. I accidentally left a gun in my book bag. I forgot about it and took it to school. I don’t know how they found it.”

But not everyone buys the story. Some believe he took the weapon in to show off to another classmate, who alerted a teacher. Aidin was suspended from school for 30 days and transferred elsewhere after the summer.

“He had been exposed to Call of Duty through church friends of his,” says his grandfather, Mark Smith. “We gave into that because he was always playing at a friend’s house. It was peer pressure. I’ve talked to Aidin about what’s real and what’s not. Plus, I took him to a gun range and showed him what the real thing can do. I told him never to point a gun at a real person and that no one gets an extra life if you shoot them.”

But Aidin’s enthusiasm for firearms has not been dulled by the experience. “The M16 has been in several Call of Duties,” he says. “I got more interested in these guns from playing Call of Duty, it’s fun to play them in a game… It’s a lot easier to shoot in a game than in real life. My favourite gun is the MSR. It’s a modified sniper rifle made by Remington firearms and it shoots a 338 Lapua round. It’s a really nice, accurate, sniper rifle. It rarely misses a shot.

“I think once I get old enough, I’d like to own the real things.”

The relationship between video games, BB guns and small arms manufacturers is clear in Aidin’s story. Here is a child who encountered guns in a video game, found a family member willing to buy him BB replicas of his favourite weapons, and now intends to buy the real versions when he is old enough.

Further evidence is provided by French company Cybergun, one of the most successful BB gun manufacturers in the world. It acts as an intermediary between gun and game makers, negotiating the licensing of weapons in games on behalf of brands including Uzi, Kalashnikov, Colt, FAMAS, FN Herstal, Sig Sauer, Mauser and Taurus.

Here’s an example of the sort of master licence agreement held by Cybergun.

Anthony Toutain brokers these deals for Cybergun. He also hunts down game developers who use weapons without permission. The Call of Duty titles feature FN rifles, for example, and yet, Toutain alleges, Activision does not own the necessary paperwork. “They use the FN brand without licence,” he says. “We plan to contact them for licensing. At the moment it’s like a no-man’s land out there.”

The costs of the licences Cybergun sell vary. “It may be a one-off fee, a royalty or revenue share, or simply promotion and endorsement,” says Toutain. “It totally depends on the product and how it fits our own product strategy. It will not be the same price for an independent studio that launches a free-to-play game and a blockbuster like Call of Duty or Battlefield that earn millions of dollars. But always our first objective for any gun is to increase [its] fame around the world.”

“We definitely see sales of particular [BB] guns increase when they are featured in popular video games, such as Call of Duty,” he says. “For example, sales of the FAMAS [used by the French army] exploded in the US when Call of Duty decided to use it as one of the best weapons in their game.

“Before then children in America [didn’t] want to buy the FAMAS airsoft gun, simply because they don’t know this brand. But when they play every day with a new brand in a video game, finally they want to buy it in reality. The sales increase can be enormously significant.”

There are, of course, perennial favourites. “It’s like in a bar where you always need to have Coca-Cola or Pepsi available,” says Toutain. “In video game shooters the Colt M4 and Kalashnikov AK-47 are the must-haves.” According to Toutain, the video game and the gun are inseparable.

The NRA’s official statement on the Sandy Hook tragedy was delivered by Wayne LaPierre on 21 December, 2012. “Here’s another dirty little truth that the media try their best to conceal,” he said. “There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people through vicious, violent video games with names like Bullet Storm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse.”

Referring to the consumption of games and movies, he continued: “A child growing up in America today witnesses 16,000 murders, and 200,000 acts of violence by the time he or she reaches the ripe old age of 18. And, throughout it all, too many in the national media, their corporate owners, and their stockholders act as silent enablers - if not complicit co-conspirators.”

This full-throated criticism of the games industry by the NRA rings hollow in the context of weapon licensing in video games. Many of the manufacturers that license their weapons to developers also provide financial backing to the NRA. The organisation explicitly lists Glock, Browning, McMillan and Remington as corporate sponsors.

At the time LaPierre delivered his statement, Ronnie Barrett - ex-photographer and sniper rifle inventor - was completing his third and final year serving on the Board of Directors of the NRA.

“What is your take on the use of Barrett guns in video games?” I asked him, a few weeks before the Sandy Hook shooting.

The NRA has lent its name to numerous games - 2006’s NRA Gun Club is just one example.

“I’m perfectly fine with the idea,” he said. “All American citizens should have an appreciation for the US Constitution with its Second Amendment that ensures the right for all citizens to own and bear arms. In my opinion, the fact America has thousands, maybe millions of firearms owners helps to protect us from those who would want to destroy freedom and our way of life.”

The inconsistency between the NRA’s ferociously anti-game statement and Barrett’s pro-game comments is clear. However, there are many in America who would echo his sentiments and who would find the idea of marketing assault weapons to young video game players acceptable. At the same time, while America’s gun ownership laws remain lax, to others this particular brand of marketing seems pernicious and frightening.

Senator Ginny Burdick is a Democratic politician serving her third term in the Oregon Senate. In early December a gunman killed two people and wounded a third at a Clackamas mall in her state. She’s a moderate who plans to introduce legislation limiting the sale of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. We spoke a few hours after the NRA press conference.

“I know there’s a lot of concern about violence and I have the same concerns that anybody would have about the sustained use of guns and violence in video games,” she said. “But with regard to the use of licensed weapons in games? It looks to me like this is part of a much larger pattern to increase guns sales in any way possible.

“Gun companies use the NRA as their main vehicle for doing that. I hadn’t been aware that they were also using video games as a way to sell guns, but this doesn’t surprise me in any way. These manufacturers have blood on their hands. And the NRA has blood on its hands for being their tool.

“I hope that press conference was the last gasp of a dying organisation,” she continued. “I’ve been looking at some of the comments around the press conference from gun owners who are outraged by the NRA. The NRA speaks for the most extreme because if they can raise enough fear, they will sell more guns. You wouldn’t believe it; the gun stores are absolutely inundated with people out there this week buying guns.”

It’s understandable that video game publishers are unwilling to discuss the question of gun licensing against this volatile backdrop. In 2012, EA created a website promoting the manufacturers of the guns, knives and combat gear depicted in the game Medal of Honor Warfighter. The move attracted widespread criticism. After decades of unsubstantiated claims that media affects behaviour, the industry is sensitive to implied links between real-world violence and game violence.

But today we know that a portion of every dollar spent on triple-A military-themed video games flows into the pockets of small arms manufacturers, either directly through licence payments, or indirectly through advertising. These beneficiaries include Barrett in the US and FN in Belgium. They may include other controversial arms dealers, such as Israel Weapon Industries, creator of the TAR-21, which appears in Call of Duty. Such deals politicise video games in tangible yet hidden ways. Consumers have, for the past few years, unwittingly funded arms companies that often have their own military agendas.

The system raises complicated questions. No subject is taboo for a mature artistic medium and brand name weapons indisputably add verisimilitude. Their absence would be creatively damaging.

In 2005, the United States Army hailed the Barrett M107 as one of the ‘Top Ten Greatest Inventions’.

Likewise, game age ratings exist to protect children from exposure to certain types of game. More stringent enforcement of these protections is necessary. But without a basic understanding of the system there can be no debate, and consumers remain unable to make informed buying choices. To date it’s a subject that has remained hidden at the behest of game publishers, who have gagged arms makers with non-disclosure agreements to protect the relationships from scrutiny.

Many of those working on games featuring real-life weapons continue to wrestle with the issue. Only one member of a team working on a blockbuster American war game series agreed to comment, and even then only under condition of anonymity. “I don’t have an issue with licensed weapons specifically,” he said. “I think there is a bigger problem, which is just that shooting enemies is the core element of a large portion of games. Whether or not the guns are made up or real changes very little about that fact.

“To harp on about gun manufacturers making money off these licences is inconsequential when it comes to the influence that games have on people’s purchasing behaviors. There are plenty of games with realistic but not licensed guns that still glamourise the usage of that gun. I’m sure the revenue generated from a culture that glamourises violence in general in all forms of media, including games, out-earns the actual monetary gains from the licensing of the products directly.”

Likewise, for this designer, the fact that gun companies use video games to market their products to young people isn’t the primary issue. “This is what marketing does and this is a function of our current culture,” he says. “This is a problem with how we make products appeal to people, including products that can lead to death.

“Gun companies marketing to young players is a symptom, not the problem. It’s more systemically ingrained in our culture. I think to only worry about guns’ effects on people is to ignore the real problems, because these are just far more difficult to solve. They involve more than just getting rid of the gun culture in America.”

For Martin Hollis, who turned his back on developing violent video games following his departure from Rare in 1998, it’s more straightforward. “My moral position is that you are partially complicit with violence as soon as you have a violent narrative,” he says.

“The stories we tell and the games we play have an effect, otherwise people would not bother with the whole undertaking. Licensing gun names is a darker point on a spectrum that begins with the act of playing Cops and Robbers. But putting money in the palm of arms dealers can only help them make tools to kill.”

Special thanks to Ryan Smith for his assistance in interviewing Aidin Smith. The NRA did not respond to any requests for comment in this article.

1. [1] As recorded by the Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository

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Boob Sliders, Or How Role-Playing Games Helped Me Transition

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The following is a guest post from Samantha Allen:

Samantha Allen is a transgender woman and an ex-Mormon. She is also a third-year PhD student in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University writing a dissertation on practices of sexual fetishism. In her leisure time, Samantha plays video games, writes music and dreams of inhabiting the universe of Twin Peaks. For more on Samantha’s PhD research, please visit her website.

“If I’m going to look at somebody’s ass for twelve hours, I want it to be a girl’s ass.”

I’ve heard countless straight male video game podcasters, journalists and message board commenters supply this as their rationale for playing as female characters in games when presented with the option. I’m willing to believe that, for some of them, the reasoning behind selecting a female avatar truly is this superficial. But it also saddens me to think that other straight men, the ones who might actually enjoy some sort of cross-gender
identification in their role-playing, nonetheless supply this as their reason so that they can
keep up heteronormative appearances amongst their peers.

I have always rolled Lady Shepards in the Mass Effect games and, recently, a Lady
Hawke in Dragon Age II. And, when I find out a game has a character creator full of sliders for every conceivable bodily dimension—everything from boob size to brow depth—my interest is instantly piqued, even if I never end up playing the game itself (I’m looking at you, Demon’s Souls). I’ve been known to spend a full hour on the character creation screen finetuning the appearance of my avatar, making sure that the forehead is the right height and that the eye shadow isn’t too garish.

At the time I played the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, I would have admitted, however reluctantly, to being a straight man. But I wasn’t laboring over these elaborate female creations so I could have a hot piece of tail on my screen. The key to this mystery is that I have struggled with gender all my life and, for me, these practices of character creation were a way of idealizing, visualizing, and imagining myself as female. We had a lot of shared traits, my Lady Hawke and I: blond hair, brown eyes and a big forehead. This verisimilitude was intentional. I wanted her to look just like me (with different secondary sex characteristics, of course) so that she could live out a life I couldn’t, enjoying a public career as a woman and wearing dresses when she went home to Hawke Manor. Video game commentators often refer to games as a form of escapism but, for me, I wasn’t just escaping a humdrum life, I was escaping a physical body that didn’t feel quite right.
It takes a lot of courage and the right life circumstances to be able to transition (to
change genders socially and, if desired, to change the sex characteristics of one’s own body).

Many beautiful transgender women I know have struggled their whole lives with the
decision, only taking the plunge in middle or late life. I, too, had my own set of circumstances that made the proposition of transitioning a difficult one to swallow until I was twenty five years old. Most pragmatically, it took me that long to become financially independent. Transitioning is expensive business: I’ve had to shell out hundreds upon hundreds of dollars for a new wardrobe, laser facial hair removal, reproductive cryopreservation, blood tests and court fees. And there’s always the ever-looming expense of vaginoplasty on the horizon.

Personal circumstances within my own family also made it difficult for me to imagine
ever being able to transition. I’ve been wearing women’s clothing as long as I can remember but, because I grew up in a Mormon family, I hid this sartorial choice for my entire life until last year. For a time as a teenager, I too became deeply involved in the Mormon Church.

When this happened, I threw out all my clothing (trans- people call this “purging”) and
vowed to be a boy forever. That lasted long enough for me to spend two years as a selfrighteous teenager and six months as a hotheaded Mormon missionary before the bubble finally burst and I left the Church in 2008. The night I decided I didn’t want to believe anymore, I drove straight to the pharmacy and re-stocked on my makeup.

After my mission, though, I still had roommates and sometimes lived in the basements
of family homes. Co-habitating with others as a young adult did not leave me with a lot of
room to explore my gender presentation. I would count down the days until the family I was staying with was scheduled to leave town and then I’d slide my Rubbermaid Bins of Shame out of the closet and get down to business.

But, despite all of these obstacles preventing me from coming to terms with my gender
identity in real life, I always found a way to access a game console and move sliders around
on those detailed character creation screens. This form of fantasy—this role-playing that, for me, would eventually become more than just play—helped to sustain me while I waited to figure out my gender on my own terms. I could scroll through all those luxuriant hairstyles and dream of having long hair myself. I could play with my makeup without alarming my family. And, yes, I could turn up the boob slider and dream of having my own someday.

I’m happy to share that I now identify as a transgender woman. I started my transition
socially in August 2012 and I’ve been on hormones since November. Funny thing about
hormones: they don’t work as immediately as those sliders on the character creation screen. I’m still waiting for certain things to grow in but, now that I’m on the right path, I can be patient.

I still play games when I’m not busy writing papers or teaching Introduction to Women’s Studies at Emory but I don’t need them for the same kind of wish-fulfillment that I used to. Now I get to wake up every morning and look how I want to look. But when I look in
the mirror, I’ll always see a little bit of Lady Hawke looking back.

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'Hundreds' Is the Haute Couture of Video Games - Ian Bogost

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A new multi-touch puzzle game for the iPad and iPhone is about form, not function—and it’s about to become a status symbol.
Hundreds (created by Adam Saltsman and Greg Wohlwend)

Some media exists for you to “consume”: to read, to watch, to play. Even though a book, television show, or video game isn’t destroyed by this encounter like a cheesesteak or a firework might be, the creative work is meant to be made a part of ourselves. To transform us in some way.

But other forms of media don’t aspire to become incorporated. They skate along the surfaces of our lives rather than penetrating them. Fashion is a literal example, covering our skin rather than our centers. Much of today’s modern fine arts are this way too; the gallery and the museum are places to be a certain kind of person, to perform an identity, much like certain clubs or restaurants are places to be seen. And some media work both on the surface and when incorporated. Carrying a copy of Mark Z. Danielewski’s experimental novel House of Leaves has for one crowd much the same effect as wearing Christian Louboutin shoes for another, but the novel can be read for its content in addition to being displayed for its cultural cachet.

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How Does a Video-Game End Up in the MoMA?

Design is one overly simplified name for the surfaces of media. Despite the legacy of the Bauhaus in today’s Apple electronics and their knock-offs, and even despite the oppressive functionalism of fields like interaction design, design really embodies what we don’t use, what doesn’t get transferred from an object to its reader, viewer, player, or user. This is also why design is the register on which things become cool. Coolness isn’t consumable. Cool isn’t what something is about, but just what it is, all at once.

Hundreds, a new, well-reviewed, physics-based puzzle game for iPhones and iPads, is cool. Like all cool things, it makes you cool by being near it, by operating it. It’s a game for men with blonde stubble and square chins and herringbone trousers. It’s a game for women with perfect skin and long, thin fingers.

If that’s not you, Hundreds is for you, too, in the same way a boutique hotel lobby peppered with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe leather lounge chairs is for you. Part of what makes a thing cool is having you near them taking note of it.

For a video game, this is nearly unprecedented—and a more complex accomplishment than it seems. Hundreds creators Adam Saltsman and Greg Wohlwend have made popular web- and iOS titles before, including having established the now-ubiquitous “jump and run” genre with Canabalt and Solipskier. Wohlwend has a penchant for baroque genre mash-ups like Gasketball (H.O.R.S.E meets The Incredible Machine) and Puzzlejuice (Tetris meets Boggle). And recently, Saltsman has experimented with sponsored projects, including the refreshingly modest film tie-in The Hunger Games: Girl on Fire and the surreal Old Spice deodorant advergame Dikembe Mutombo’s 4 1/2 Weeks to Save the World. While their previous, individual work is dorky and wacky and charming and fun, Hundreds is something else entirely.

The game itself is simple. Black and grey circles appear on a white screen. Touching one or more causes them to grow, their sizes measured numerically within each circle. When any circle is touched and therefore inflating, it turns red. Red circles must not make contact with another circle, or the game ends. To complete a puzzle, the circles’ total must reach 100 (thus the game’s title). There are 100 levels, and each is more challenging than the last, featuring new kinds of interaction and obstacles: poppable bubbles get in the way, movable bumpers deflect other circles, spinning gears deflate circles they contact, ice discs freeze circles they touch, circles shrink over time, growth totals cease to be displayed, and so forth.

It sounds like just another physics puzzler, good for wasting time in a waiting room or on a conference call. But unlike Angry Birds or Cut the Rope, Hundreds can’t really be played insouciantly. It requires full attention, often two hands, and sometimes a table or a lap.

In part, this is because many of Hundreds’ puzzles recommend or require multi-touch interaction for completion—a rare feature for iOS games, despite the fact that the device itself built its reputation on multi-touch actions and gestures. Fruit Ninja may seem like it’s best played with several fingers, but such tactics are excessive in practice; just scrub oafishly with an index finger and avoid the bombs. What a mess.

By contrast, Hundreds levels feel like real-world puzzles rather than virtual ones. Take level 89, for example, which scatters five stationary, shrinking circles on the screen. Completing this puzzle required carefully orienting my iPad while applying rehearsed pressures with multiple fingers on both hands. It’s multi-touch ballet.

So it’s not accurate to call Hundreds a casual game. It demands deep attention and almost perverse devotion to play well let alone to complete (I’ll admit, I still have yet to best level 100). Luckily, completion isn’t really the point. It may not even be desirable.

Saltsman and Wohlwend market Hundreds as “a puzzle game about space, the space between you and the serene.” But as with most puzzle games, there’s nothing serene about playing Hundreds. It’s infuriating, punctuated by small moments of pride that are quickly deflated upon realizing that they lead only to yet another screen of grey circles.

If there is serenity to be found in Hundreds, it lives less in the game’s depths than at its surface, in its design. I don’t mean its game design (the way its elements behave and respond), nor its visual design (the simple geometry and colors that form its appearance), nor its interaction design (the use of one type of touch as a way of playing). True, all three embody an elegant minimalism reminiscent of the Bauhaus aesthetic that Apple itself has popularized for contemporary computing culture. But those flavors of design are too ordinary and too antiseptic to capture the game’s manner.

With Hundreds, the iPhone or iPad finally has its proverbial pair of sunglasses. It’s a video game that you can imagine James Bond playing.
Rather, I mean the status of the entire game as a whole, as one complete surface over and above its parts. And as a design object, Hundreds operates far more like Prada than it does like Angry Birds.
Like all cool things, Hundreds isn’t really that compelling for what it attempts to deliver, for the “content” of its puzzles, whatever that might mean. Ray-Ban Wayfarers and art-deco leather club chairs don’t have any meaning to relay in the first place, save the history of their own use. Even the iPhone doesn’t “mean” anything other than the fact of its existence, even if it can display and distribute media that can be consumed. The iPhone is about having an iPhone, about holding it and touching it and putting it down on the table nonchalantly.

With Hundreds, the iPhone or iPad finally has its proverbial pair of sunglasses. It’s a game that allows an iDevice to function as an active rather than a passive design object. Hundreds is perhaps the only game you might look good playing perched on the leather hassock of a chichi bar that advertises mixologists instead of bartenders, you expanding circles while waiting for your friends to arrive. In fact, Hundreds feels more like the lobby bar itself than it does like a video game. The game’s music was created by Loscil, a Canadian artist whose electronic ambient sound is chill-lounge friendly. It’s a video game that you can imagine James Bond playing.

Unlike most games, Hundreds will make you want to be cooler in order to do its presence justice. Halfway through, making progress on the iPhone becomes difficult. Switching to your iPad might make things easier (you do have an iPad, don’t you?). But then again, the iPad is an embarrassing accessory to carry in public. Given that Hundreds is a game you might like to be seen playing, it’s better to break down and buy an iPad Mini. Large enough to facilitate better play, but small enough to slip into the pocket of your jacket when the cocktails arrive.

Design is no stranger to the tension between form and function. The Bauhaus style purports to privilege the latter, removing anything unnecessary to the operation of a lamp, radio, or, eventually, a mobile phone. But inevitably, “form following function” became its own form. The Herman Miller Aeron chair may have promised ergonomic efficiency, but don’t we really love it for its surfaces, for its design instead? The same is true of the iPhone, whose one-button interface hardly makes the most functional mobile device. But who cares when it feels so good to hold, to touch, and to display?

I’m not sure even Saltsman and Wohlwend have grasped the implications of their creation, despite knowing full well that the game exudes more design than it does game design. Still, the game’s website seems to mistake the title for a Bejeweled-style zen time-waster. “You have millions of things on your mind,” reads the page, surrounded by the game’s circles filled with icons representing life’s demands. “Just take it 100 at a time,” it continues as you scroll down through trailers and accolades before concluding, “Let Hundreds unwind your mind.”

But this is like mistaking Hermès for Land’s End, or Philippe Starck for Cuisinart. Hundreds is not a time-waster for the unwashed masses, not a refreshing distraction to quell the stress of overdue bills or unexpected veterinary visits. It is not a game for the supermarket or DMV. It is not a game that distracts from boredom, because players of Hundreds are above ennui, just like Aeron-cradled authors are above writer’s block. The iPhone might be a device one can use on the toilet, but Hundreds certainly isn’t a game one would play there. Do players of Hundreds even need to use the toilet?

Hidden within Hundreds we find the surest clue that it is a design object and not a consumable media experience. Occasionally, completing a level unlocks a cipher, a secret message encoded in letters or in symbols. Each uses a different type of encryption, and when decoded they collectively unlock a special power within the game.

Some games get used up because we grow bored of them. Others can be completed or “won.” Hundreds may seem like a candidate for both boredom and resolution, but really it’s neither, so long as you use it right.

A web search will reveal that, yes, there are some players who have gone to the trouble of identifying each cipher encryption method and then decoded each cipher by means of a laborious data-entry interface the game provides. But no true player of Hundreds would bother. This busywork is beneath them. Yet without it, there would be nothing to disdain, no dumb misuse for the rabble to mistake for depth, for a consumable experience. For despite its claims to inclusiveness, modern design works best when it’s exclusionary and pretentious, when it speaks without saying anything but just by being there. Realizing such a feat for video games, a medium so much more popular than it is cool, is an accomplishment. That the creators of Hundreds may not know they did it is a secret that you and I can smirk about silently while we play it.

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Cart Life: "The only thing that changed was me" • Articles • PC • Eurogamer.net

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Richard Hofmeier revisits his three year journey to create the most realistic - and “repulsive” - game ever made.

By Christian Donlan Published Friday, 25 January 2013

Richard Hofmeier is about to go on a rant. A very polite rant, as it happens. A rant so polite, in fact, that he starts - as all good rants don’t - with an apology. “Bear with me, this is going to be a rant,” he announces, “so I’m sorry.”

“This IGF nomination has made me real snooty,” Hofmeier continues. “It’s going to get bad here for a second. The idea of Cart Life and the reason I wanted to use the pixel aesthetic is not arbitrary and it’s not entirely nostalgic. Pixels - the large, rectangular hallmark of pixel art - do something that parallels what the rest of the game does in its gesture.

“You have the human eye, infinitely complex and mysterious and beautiful, represented by a single black dot. That simplification, as profane as it is, taking all that nuance and beauty and summating it with a single black rectangle, and then getting entire expressions for these characters this way? The difference between the human face and this pixel grid is infinite, but we can bridge the gap. We can fill in their details with our own lives. This is why I wanted to use pixels for the game.

“What Cart Life does with the human face, it does for the whole human experience, hopefully. That’s the intention. Even though you get really clumsy, overt, roughly cut-corners standing in for drinking coffee, falling asleep, having a dream - these single evidence hallmarks of these characters’ day-to-day lives - hopefully you can fill them in with your own experiences. Everybody knows what it’s like to be hungry or exhausted or worried about money. Everybody I know anyways. Filling in those blanks is just the same as what you’re doing with the pixel faces. It’s an invitation. In a way it’s asking the player to do even more work with me, so together between the two of us we can observe something more true than would have been possible otherwise.”

Interestingly, I hadn’t actually asked Hofmeier why he chose a pixelly 8-bit aesthetic for Cart Life, but that’s the joy of interviewing someone with such a fidgety, wide-ranging mind. He’s like a fruit machine for insights and asides, spilling out cogent little chunks of thought on everything from polyphasic sleeping (he’s tried it, on the backseat of a 1991 Toyota Camry) to Tristram Shandy (a fan, inevitably) and the best approach to folding advertising mail-outs. One thing remains consistent throughout, though: Hofmeier stresses the word work whenever he says it. By this point in our conversation, work has come up quite a bit.

If you’re contemplating a first playthrough of Cart Life, think about picking Andrus. He has an easier time getting his cart together, for starters.

Hofmeier’s an illustrator and first-time game designer, and he’s the creator of Cart Life, which is extremely agitated about work. It’s “a retail simulation for Windows” to use the advertising line’s jokey anti-slogan sloganeering: a sprawling indie anxiety dream about the men and women who toil on the mean streets, touting your papers, serving your bagels, brewing your coffee. My playthrough left me with the feeling that it’s a kind of empathy generator, encouraging you to think about things - and people - who can often, rather worryingly, blur out, trapped in your peripheral vision. It’s also, according to Hofmeier, who is fond of food metaphors, “a poor hors d’oeuvre,” and “more of a pot roast or a big piece of meatloaf.”

That’s when he’s being nice about it. That’s the sales pitch. Over the hour of our conversation, Hofmeier’s highly-regarded debut is variously described as being, “so juvenile”, “evidence of how I’ve failed to grow up” and - my favourite - “sad, boring, depressing.” Seriously? “It’s time-consuming,” he laughs cheerily. “And awful.”

So meet Andrus, Melanie, and Vinny, each of whom represents a separate campaign playthrough of Cart Life, even if “campaign playthrough” is exactly the kind of terminology that won’t seem appropriate once you get stuck in. All three have jobs working street carts in a small US city, and all three have stories behind those jobs: Andrus is a recent immigrant selling papers so as to secure rent money for himself and his cat, for example, while Melanie, who has the most affecting and often disturbing story if you ask me, is running her own coffee stand in the hope of proving herself worthy - in the eyes of the law - of looking after her daughter.

These stories are complex and possessed with a powerful dramatic force that comes, in part, due to the game’s studied avoidance of the normal things that usually count for drama in games. It’s a world in which a trip to the council building where your counter ticket has yet to be called while an appointment to collect your daughter from school inches ever closer can be a devastating experience.

It’s all oddly lavish, too: in Cart Life you get the panoramic view - even though the panorama is delivered in grayscale pixels. Flitting between keyboard and mouse, you start each day with a character’s dreams, then guide them through getting up, brushing their teeth - spit - and heading to work. At night, you’ll probably take them home, explore their domestic lives, maybe get dinner somewhere, and put them to bed again, after you’ve pored through an end-of-day breakdown sheet that plays out next to an unflinchingly realistic rendering of their tired, sagging bodies soaking in the shower - a rendering that has a peculiar intimate poignancy after all that abstraction. You manage their hunger meters and keep them fed, and you make time for their little compulsions and idiosyncrasies - Andrus has to smoke every so often, say, while Melanie’s crippled by headaches and needs to see her daughter each day.

There’s a real focus on performance during the sales sections. ‘Anything is more fun when you have an audience,’ says Hofmeier.

It’s in between all this where the game gets really audacious, though. When the characters in Cart Life go to work so do you, manning their stands, serving their customers, buying in stock, and making sure you have all the permits necessary to keep yourself in business. It’s a peculiarly coherent conflation of Sim City and WarioWare: you get to set prices and manage inventory, but you also play choppy little mini-games to perform the necessary tasks of your vending job, just as you have to make change for customers, while a meter indicates how happy they are with the transaction.

Time is accelerated, tasks are abstracted, but a working day can still be fairly exhausting. What drives you on, though, is something very strange that starts to happen as you lose yourself in the simulated toil: without doing anything elaborate or patronising or untruthful, Cart Life starts to elevate these acts, and to find a scrappy kind of honour and integrity within them.

“That’s really it,” agrees Hofmeier. “It’s kind of a lot of dog and pony show for one trick, and that’s the trick: whether you’re making espresso or folding newspapers, do that thing with care and attention repeatedly, and you become very good at it. I thought video games could do this for everything - everything! - that people do. If you could take the entire spectrum of human toil, all the boring stuff, and then make it effectively in the way that movies or books or poetry summate human experience in broader terms or more specific ones, if you could do that for work, and make it interactive in the way that work is interactive, you can actually get the same satisfaction from perfecting a mundane skill. Then, factoring that into a character’s larger life I think makes it even more satisfying. Hopefully.”

The skills you’re learning are not quite the skills that your on-screen avatar is displaying, of course. Andrus cuts his packing bindings and arranges his papers while you play a sort of typing-tutor mini-game, for example: the two acts apparently have little in common, and yet they both invoke the same blend of pedantic rigour and mindless dexterity. Did Hofmeier spend a lot of time finding the right mechanical analogies for each task?

“I threw a lot away in that regard,” he says. “I wanted to communicate, say, that - this is something newspaper vendors do specifically - they will make small talk as they track down the article in question to facilitate the sale and to keep it smooth and happy. The small talk in order to expedite the sale seemed essential, and it’s also working, a form of toil in itself. The typing of those mantras: because you’re moving your hand from keyboard to mouse and back, it seemed to mirror the physical act, and the conversational act too. I don’t know if it works for everybody, but a lot of people seem to get the intangible spirit I was going for, even if it’s not as explicit as games tend to be.”

Cart Life’s town simulation is surprisingly complex - play the game through with different characters and you’ll see the same faces cropping up in different situations.

It’s a real balancing task for a designer, I suspect. Movie directors can call in a montage to suggest the passage of time spent in repetitive labour. Hofmeier absolutely didn’t want to do that, but he also didn’t want to haemorrhage too many players as they got stuck in, right? Break down a lot of what even mainstream games get you to do moment-to-moment and it can seem uncomfortably close to work, perhaps, but did Hofmeier have to pick a careful path through these sequences regardless? When driving home the boredom of vending, is there such a thing as good boredom and bad boredom from a design perspective?

“I don’t think there’s any degree of polish I could have put on these things that would have won people over straight away,” he argues. “You have to be disgusted, or turned off, or really disheartened. That’s all part of the cocktail. You have to have that angst or distaste for it, because we’re all averse to work - I think everyone is. But you’ve still got to do it. It’s real delicate. The idea is that you see what’s at stake for the characters, and you feel enough about what’s at stake to do that work at first. Then, as the work becomes more satisfying the personal stuff that’s at risk for the characters starts to harmonise.

“Generally film and books and the way they deal with mundanity and tedium is that they steer clear of it. I don’t have a great cultural vocabulary, but there’s this great French movie called Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, and there’s this scene in it that hit me pretty hard. It’s a woman preparing food for someone she loves. Normally this would be a montage or a series of jump cuts, or they’d only show the initial gestures being made and then the user - ha ha! I mean the viewer - would fill in these points on their own.

“Instead we watch her. She’s pretty much bored. She’s daydreaming, as we do a little, but then it becomes captivating and we’re in there with her. This is the negative space around which all narrative is cut, and yet this is the stuff that makes us and the character the same. In a way, this is the thing that this film-maker finds most interesting to remark on. It’s never remarked on generally and yet it’s more interesting than many typical fictional devices are.

“Then there’s something like Wit, this stage play about chemotherapy,” Hofmeier continues. “There’s a moment where the character turns to the audience and says, ‘You must be bored by this by now, but think how much worse it is for me who has to sit here for hours, bored and horrified.’ For me this one doesn’t work, because there’s not enough negative space and we’re still being spoken to across the division of the fourth wall. There’s still something special and magical here, and it’s not boring at all, even though it intends to be, and it regards this content as boring, this confession as mundane. These things are rare in art but they’re unifying - I wanted to make a game that does that.”

Each character has their own quirks, many of which feed into actual mechanics.

For the very reason that this stuff is so rare, there was a risk that Cart Life could have accidentally ended up fetishizing real life, as with the opening scenes of Heavy Rain, in which a character’s process of waking up and messing around in his home strikes a rather odd note. A large part of the narrative intention, I suspect, was to draw players into the game’s supposed ordinary world, but the designers’ delight in how marvellously ordinary their world was turned it into a kind of domestic fun house. The taps! The towels!

“It’s tough,” agrees Hofmeier. “The medium of interactivity necessitates this weird form of puppetry. In film you can have documentary film as well as narrative film and so the material of a movie doesn’t dictate its relationship with the truth. The puppetry of film still has to take place for the lens. But the lens of games kills everything on the other side. The closest you get to something genuine or real in material terms happens in an MMO or something like that. Maybe board games have a little of it. What I’m trying to say is that it’s always going to fail to some degree whenever you try to portray truth and reality through games. It’s always going to only get halfway there. That’s the best it can do.”

It should be clear by now that beneath the studied simplicity of the aesthetic, Cart Life can be powerfully complex. It’s so complex that it’s hard to play the game without wondering about its creation - particularly when you learn that Cart Life is essentially Hofmeier’s debut as a designer. What was it like to make? Where did the initial idea come from?

“Exploration happens unbidden,” says Hofmeier. “In the case of Cart Life, it was this: I do love video games, I’ve played much more than my fair share in my life, but it’s always bothered me that they use the term realistic in their marketing and in their self-identity. The most realistic space alien combat system ever made.

“Games have the capacity. There’s nothing within the basic material fact of games themselves that makes them poorly suited to do something realistically or portray reality in some way, so I felt that had to be done. I made the most realistic game I could in the most boring way. I think there’s something transcendent about boring entertainment. I think there’s something really tender and unifying in eliminating the vibrant outer-coat candy shell of games themselves and looking at their ability to do something more inclusive or that’s more of an invitation, instead of just being fun or sensational, as they do really well. They don’t need me for that, certainly.

“Before too many people had played the game, it was easy to lie about Cart Life,” he muses. “Which I did all the time with gusto. I would say, “It’s like Farmville. It’s like following your Sims character to your job - what are you going to charge for lattes and what would you paint your stand? It’s fun.” And that was the proposition. People would then play it and see it for what it was, and it seemed like it was easier for them under those circumstances to be compelled by the tender parts and to feel as though these things were really at stake. Then they could take part in these characters’ lives, spend a week together. But when you see it as a piece of work up front, it becomes like a piece of health food.

“At Netflix, the most commonly added movies to peoples’ queues are the documentaries and the high-art inspirational movies. But they’re not the ones that most frequently get watched - those are action movies and Adam Sandler and TV shows. Not to say there’s anything wrong with any of that. I love pop music and chocolate and disco and I’ll play the hell out of mass market triple-A games. But when Cart Life then gets relegated to the province of the documentary movie? I mean, it doesn’t sound great: it’s boring on purpose. Do I need to play it to get the nutrients from it? Maybe just reading about it from other people who have played it, maybe that’s enough. I kind of feel that’s where Cart Life is these days.”

I ask Hofmeier whether he in some way benefited from the isolated position he found himself in when designing the game, outside of the wider indie scene, coming from a career in illustration. “I’m troubled it’s so obvious,” he laughs. “It’s true. I was real audacious. I thought I was the first person who ever thought of doing something artistic with a game and not just creating a commercial product. Then, in the course of designing the game, especially towards the end, I saw this amazing groundswell of weird, beautiful, very human, earnest content being made. It was incredibly encouraging, but at the same time it dampened my confidence that I could make a contribution. I felt like I was slipping on all the oldest banana peels while the luminaries of this great medium were performing grand bravuras. There’s amazing food on the table these days, so Cart Life being as time-consumptive as it was, I was glad to wash my hands and join the party a little bit.”

Time-consumptive is right, incidentally. Cart Life was conceived as a month-long project. Instead, it took three years. “I suppose the game itself was the same in the initial conception,” Hofmeier explains. “It didn’t change that much over time. All the essential characteristics of Cart Life were right there in the first gestures. The only thing that changed was me. If I was to make the game now from scratch, there’s lot of stuff I’d emphasise with more care: permits, fines, disputing fines, food handling, sanitation, but that’s only because having released it, the people who seem to categorically respond the least to Cart Life are actual food vendors. It doesn’t tell half the story. It’s a lot harder in real life than it is in the game, of course - but it’s actually a lot more fulfilling. It’s their lives, it’s their actual existence. I’ve talked to ballet dancers about Black Swan, and they hate it. Any time an entertainment medium tries to portray a vocation it’s going to fail, by having to emphasise sex or tragedy or the danger.”

Hofmeier’s not a method designer, somewhat disappointingly: his research into street vending didn’t include running his own cart. “I’d always wanted to, but making the game convinced me otherwise,” he admits. “I did talk with a lot of vendors in the different towns I lived in during the time I was making it. You know what talking to people about money is like, but the proposition of the game invited them to talk about things they might not have done otherwise. Some of the vendor stuff is watered down, but hopefully that means it can relate to other parts of life. Whatever you do for a living, hopefully there’s something you can get out of this game. That’s why there’s the slight de-emphasis of cart specifics, why the research was mainly on things like what people are willing to pay for a hot dog, the circumstances in which people are willing to tip, when do people work and stuff like that.”

At the core of the game, though, buried beneath the dollars and cents, it’s all about the characters - Andrus with his awkward verbal ticks, Melanie with her headaches. These are the people who keep you working, and they’re the people who truly make the game stand out, through their range, the casual complexity of their construction, the fact that they’re consistently less stagey than you expect them to be. They’re wry studies in frailty, drawn with an awareness of the power of subtext.

They’re also the part of the game that Hofmeier finds it hardest to address. “I feel that in order for this thing to happen, I have to forfeit ownership of these characters to the people that have spent time with them as players,” he says. “I feel that anything I say about them will do damage to their authenticity, their humanness, even though it’s all just make-believe anyway. Maybe they’re just puppets on a script, just blinking lights and little scratchy sounds.

Deciding how to get around is a tricky proposition in a town where time is money. Walk and waste precious minutes, or fork out for a bus or taxi?

“Here’s something, though. I went to UCLA last year to speak. It was really interesting to be around young artists who have chosen the medium of games. As you might guess, Cart Life doesn’t play real well at games festivals. As people mill through, they quickly appraise the artistic merit of something that is deliberately repulsive and they move away. So over time this happens and, say, Andrus gets picked: his day starts, then somebody plays him for a bit and moves on, and then he stands alone for five or six minutes of real time - a long time in the game. Then somebody else comes along and they screw around for a little bit. Removed from the initial introduction to the character, they are even more confused than the first person. It goes on and on. After a while, Andrus gets really dark. He hasn’t eaten in a really long time, his cat is hungry, maybe starving, he’s completely broke - it’s the middle of the night - and he’s standing on the street in a town he knows nothing about.

“I hate saying so, but I’m compelled to be honest: in my heart, deep down, in my most childish little way, I feel awful for bringing Andrus to the UCLA Games Art Festival. Because I should have known that it wouldn’t go well for him. He’s standing there wondering if he has lung cancer. He’s wondering if anyone would miss him if he died, or whether anyone would notice. He’s wondering what they do with bodies that they find on the street. He’s getting really dark. I’m staring at him and I want to go over there and feed him and give him a cigarette and feed his cat - because I’m a child. It’s just a script and blinking lights. I know better, and I shouldn’t have tenderness for these characters, and part of the game is making it possible to inflict as much pain as possible on these characters. When things go poorly for Melanie or Andrus or Vinny, it can get a little dark and there’s pain there. It’s necessary for this to be realistic, for them to be alive - seemingly alive. They have to experience pain. Players’ decisions have to have consequences. You can play the game and damage these characters - maybe even by accident. I feel like I’m killing my babies, but over and over again, infinitely and into eternity.”

Weren’t they damaged the moment Hofmeier gave them desire? Like Sims, they are creatures of compulsion: Andrus needs to smoke, needs to feed his cat, wants to get out of the motel he’s living in. Cart Life’s cast are defined by the thing they want, the things they’re working for.

“That’s right, but I guess at that point I just hadn’t grown tender,” Hofmeier says. “They were just tools. Just a means by which I could hopefully screw with the internal organs of a playing audience. But then over time, I fell victim to the material device of the pixel face. I filled in the blanks. I think about them as more than what they actually are. I know it’s not healthy and I don’t like that I’ve made that mistake. Given that capacity, and their ability to feel pain when they’re denied their desires, infinitely, on all these computers across the globe, maybe they’re living well and maybe they’re not. It’s real strange.”

Hofmeier thinks for a few seconds, presumably casting an inward eye over all the bright cities of the world where Cart Life flickers and buzzes on flat screen monitors, where virtual food is consumed, where virtual sales are made, and where Andrus stands on virtual sidewalks, smoking and worrying and “getting really dark”. “I hope this doesn’t sound cheesy or insincere,” Hofmeier says at last, “but I had no idea people would feel this way about this game. I thought it would just be me and my friends playing it. I didn’t expect to be able to continue making games at all. But now I think maybe there are more games to be made.

“If people are willing to put up with Cart Life, I guess I should just push them a bit harder.”

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Photo Bomb

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Jan 28 2013 Articles By Rainer Sigl

Photo Bomb

The rising popularity of Instagram demonstrates how we all want to be photographers in the real world. But what about our virtual lives? We take a look inside the budding community of in-game photography and what it means for the future of digital art.

For once, all is quiet. The long grasses rustle as we make our way through the hollow, toward the ruins of a Soviet facility nobody remembers. The corroded pillars of a long gone building frame our approach, like the skeleton of a leviathan long dead. In the distance, an AK-47 barks. It’s a quiet moment in the world of  S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. Time, then, for a photo. With the rise of mobile devices, we are used to carrying powerful cameras literally in our pockets, at any time, anywhere - and so we take pictures. With the ease and cheapness of digital photography, and the ability to share these pictures with the click of a button, our motives have changed: Now, we take pictures of ordinary things, funny things, of shopping lists, clouds, everyday occurrences.

Of course, we also like to immortalize the special moments in our lives - the grand vistas, the momentous occasions, the triumphs and memorable achievements. And as with many other things, these moments have also drifted into the virtual spaces we inhabit.

It shouldn’t surprise us that the photographic gaze, that eye for composition and purely visual aesthetic, finds ample opportunity for snapshots in these virtual spaces. But typically, we document to record our triumphs and victories or perhaps to add wallpaper to our desktop. In fact, it’s surprising that in-game-photography — art for art’s sake — is still as unexplored a country as it seems to be.

For the first time, a new crop of in-game-photographers are travelling  these gaming spaces to hunt for pictures. And just like their real-world counterparts, these photographers bring their own tastes and their own unique viewpoint to their art: Some of these pictures remind us of Ansel Adams’ majestic portraits of nature, others turn architecture into abstract collages, reminiscent of the works of Ernst Haas and Andreas Gursky. A few even pay homage to Robert Capa’s iconic war photography with their screenshots.

The best-known and most widely publicized of these pioneers is Duncan Harris of deadendthrills. The English games journalist compares his ultra-stylish, high-gloss pictures of games tweaked to look their very best to still photography in movie production, and like movie stills, his work is increasingly professionally used by game companies to promote their products. Last year, Harris was even given an advance build of Dishonored, Arkane’s steampunk-thriller, to fuel anticipation and provide an advance glimpse into the game’s stunning visual world.

Others are following Harris’ lead. James Pollock, graphic design student in Bath, England, collects his in-game-photography on his blog Virtual Geographic. He says he was originally inspired by Harris, but ultimately opted for a completely different approach: Instead of emulating Harris’s high-end, tweaked-up high-gloss technique, he took a comparably low-tech route and started to take pictures of his TV-set with his iPod. He then  used Instagram and Hipstamatic for added effect - a clever workaround to most consoles’ restricted - or non-existent - screenshot-capabilities. Pollock‘s black and white pictures of Skyrim’s majestic nature and Red Dead Redemption’s deserts evoke memories of Anselm Adams and the classics of nature photography, while his Polaroid-framed images of the blocky worlds of Minecraft and Jet Set Radio Future create a different scene entirely. They show that photo-realistic graphics are not prerequisites for impressive pictures.

While related projects by Robert Overweg, Kent Sheely and John Paul Bichard are grounded in the context of experimental media art, Pollock sees no difference from “real life photography.” “Treating virtual realities as real in this way is one of the things that makes it an interesting experience for me,” he says.

It’s the variety of approaches to their photographic hunting grounds that hints at the potential artistic richness of this niche – a niche which, as LA-artist and writer Eron Rauch argued in an essay on in-game-photography, finds itself faced with the same prejudice and scepticism as real photography in its infancy.

How can a “mere depiction”, a “mechanical reproduction” of nature or architecture - real or virtual - claim to be art? Traditional photography’s long struggle with recognition as an art in and of itself took 140 years, and, as Rauch points out, the distinction between banal depiction, professional use, aesthetic “amateur” photography and artistic experiments is also useful in regard to virtual photography.

Far removed from the banality of mere screenshots, accomplished in-game-photographers, after all, need all the skills of real photographers – an eye for composition, angles and timing, and, above all, a personal approach to the game spaces they prowl for picture opportunities. Like urban spaces and architecture, game environments, especially those in open-world-games with freely explorable, three-dimensional playing grounds, are wholly man-made and constructed. It’s not surprising that architecture, especially an architecture unbound by reality’s constraints, is a favourite theme of in-game-photographers.

The pictures of Australian gamer Iain Andrews, collected on Steam Postcards, concentrate on the details of these environments, the back alleys, corners and decor of these virtual spaces made for navigating through them. Like Joshua Taylor’s pictures, collected on his blog NOTRL, Andrews’ work documents the lovingly crafted worlds and details  that are destined to be overlooked by most gamers.

Contrary to Harris and Pollock, Andrews as well as Taylor retouch their pictures only sparingly and mostly settle for unmodified screen captures, without tweaking or modding the basic games (another advantage of PC-gaming in comparison to consoles). Still others painstakingly tweak their games to spectacular effect: The Dutch in-game-photographer Midhras uses mods like ENB to experiment with the parameters of his images.

Photographing the unreal, sprawling architectures of gaming’s SF and Fantasy worlds is a challenge, but there’s also another opportunity to juxtapose reality and games: São Paulo-based photographer and graphic designer Leonardo Sang’s “virtual reality photography”-project uses games as a platform for what he calls “everyday photography”, and his pictures of Max Payne 3’s Sao Paulo have their place beside his real world photography of his city.

A legitimate movement has started. The pictures Joanne Harper, aka Pixiegirl4, takes of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations show a fascination with geometry and abstract shapes, while Karam Dawood’s sweeping vistas concentrate on landscapes and atmospheres. Kodama_SS, one of the few Japanese contributors to Duncan Harris’s Flickr-pool, uses post-processing and rendering-tools to present a surprising look at some of Japanese gaming’s greatest icons.

Right now, Harris‘s Flickr-community is the main rallying point for this particular sub-culture which is still fragmented and just below the public’s radar - although that may change: The Swedish Östergötlands Museum recently hosted an exhibition that showcased some of the most prolific in-game-photographers‘ works in a gallery setting. With growing recognition, an inherent dilemma of in-game-photography becomes relevant: What about the copyright? Duncan Harris’s stance on these issues is clear: “I don’t and never have claimed any form of copyright over screenshots - it belongs squarely to publishers and developers.”

James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at New York Law School and copyright expert, agrees. ”The art assets in games are original works of authorship, typically owned by the companies.  So in-game photographs do implicate copyright. But if a company did want to make an issue out of in-game pictures, the user could raise a fair use defense in the United States.  Fair use is an open-ended context-specific defense that has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.”

Until now, the developers have taken kindly to the underground of in-game-photography. Martin Lorber, Head of PR Electronic Arts Germany, confirmed his company’s current laissez-faire attitude towards his customers‘ artistic experiments with EA’s games – as long as these experiments are not commercial. Although in the end, Lorber muses, the question of ownership of these works could well be decided by the level of creativity and a certain threshold of originality of the in-game-photographers‘ work – a dilemma that, in the future, might someday have to be decided by the courts.   Grimmelmann confirms that the in-game photographers‘ creativity in taking their pictures is the key argument here: ”It helps the user a lot if the use is transformative: when the user adds creativity of her own to the picture.” The art of in-game-photography is still in its infancy, but it seems obvious that, with constantly increasing photo-realism and the popularity of open-world-games, more and more photographers will also look for inspiration and picture opportunities in virtual worlds. Kent Sheely, media artist and pioneer of experimental in-game-photography, sees in-game-photography as a perfectly valid form of photography.

For him, games are something more than entertainment: “Games are perfect art-making tools, because like art, they already abstract the real world and can provide new perspectives on it. They’re also a window into both current and nostalgic pop culture, since they have grown up alongside our current generation. It’s an ever-evolving medium. ”

A shorter version of this article first appeared on the author’s blog, http://videogametourism.at/

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Features - Focusing Creativity: RPG Genres

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By Jordane Thiboust
Designer Jordane Thiboust, who deeply investigated the RPG genre while in preproduction for a next generation title, shares his hard won insight — mainly, that mix and match genre-bending isn’t the best way to deliver a polished core experience.

The RPG genre is a complex one. I’ve always known this, but I never realized just how much until recently. Beyond the complexity of the mechanics, the multiple systems, and the narrative, I noticed that what makes the RPG genre complex is focusing on, and nailing, the player experience.

I really started noticing this during the pre-production of a project I was working on. A lot of feedback or suggestions would be misguided because of the misconception that whatever was brought to our my attention was “RPG stuff.”

The reason behind this is that the term “RPG” is used to describe lots of games, and it is easy to overlook the fact that some of those games have a completely different goal for their player experience. That’s the hardest part; narrowing down that experience, asking yourself “What will drive the player for 30-plus hours?” and sticking to it… Instead of simply adding every RPG feature that you can think of.

For that reason, I found out that it is extremely important to subdivide the RPG genre by the experience of each subgenre and focus on, and then clearly decide, which of those subgenres you are aiming for.

This will drive both your production and the player who buys your games; this will help you focus on what type of features matter and might even be mandatory, and what features have no place in your game and might even have a detrimental impact on it.

Since the term “RPG” is used so loosely, for most people, every RPG game just belongs to the same big pool. They are all simply “RPGs.” This is both true and false at the same time; while they are indeed all RPGs, two RPG games can sometimes have a completely different drive for the player.

Using a food analogy, if RPG were cakes, you could indeed say that they are all cakes, but still, there is a pretty big difference in taste between a chocolate cake and a lemon cake, and that’s exactly why it is important to know what kind of RPG you are making — because, as in cooking, this will determine the list of ingredients that you must use and the ones that you probably shouldn’t.

So let’s start by listing the different RPG subgenres, as well as their main ingredients.

The Narrative RPG

The narrative RPG, the most common type — games like The Witcher, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age are all part of that subtype. In that genre, the player is driven almost completely by the narration; he wants to enjoy the story, the setting, and the characters. Even for his own character, it is important that he evolves narratively (even more so than mechanically).

What that means is that most of your production effort and features should be focusing on supporting this — especially for what is usually called the “critical path.” That’s your main quest, campaign, or whatever you call it, the thing that the player will focus on and will want to finish.

In a Narrative RPG, immersion is critical; everything from combat to navigation, level design, and art direction, should always keep that word in mind: Immersion.

Some of the most critical ingredients for narrative RPGs are as follows:

- Characters should be three dimensional; you should feel like they all have a story to tell and that they are unique in some way — even if that’s simply because they talk in a weird way or have a huge scar on the face.

- Every location should tell a story; this should be a strong focus on the level design side. Why are those monsters here? Why is it shaped like this? Why is it decorated like this? Ask yourself plenty of questions. Even if you don’t always give the answer to the player, just defining those answers will help you create immersion.

- Even itemization should help immersion — Why does that guy drop that sword? Where does it come from?

- Your combat mechanics and the powers displayed should feel coherent with your universe. Ideally, make use of some of the character’s powers in dialog and cutscenes. Yes, your healer character can and should be able to heal a wounded NPC in a cutscene.

- Almost everything should feel like it is evolving narratively: the main character, the sidekick characters (if any), the areas the player travels through, the secondary character, and even the “bad guys.”

- Your dialog must have multiple answers; avoid doing too much linear dialog, leave the opportunity to the player to create the personality and morality of his character. There is one exception to this, though, and that’s if you create a narrative RPG based on a predefined character. The Witcher is one of those, for example; in that case, your goal is to create a portrayal of that character, to let the player become intimate with who that character is. This prevents you from having extremely contrasted choices in terms of personality or morality, as you have to stay close to the original character. But if it’s done well, it’s also extremely rewarding for the player.

The Witcher 2

There are a few ingredients that should be either avoided, or limited in their complexity, as they could actually dilute your main experience and lose your player’s focus on the story. For example:

- Enemies should not respawn, or only do so if it makes sense narratively. Indeed, enemies respawning just for the sake of it, serves only one goal: grinding. You want to avoid this in a good narrative RPG, since if the player starts to grind, that means he is not following your story anymore, and in turn that your narrative has failed to keep him going.

- You don’t need a crafting system, but if you really want one or can’t avoid having one due to the story — as in The Witcher — avoid making it complex, or grinding-oriented. Dragon Age II is a good example of this; its resource nodes only need to be harvested once and that’s it, thus completely avoiding the grind, and instead simply giving an incentive for exploration.

- You don’t need a very complex character evolution and itemization; you are not Diablo. Even though it is important for your player to feel that he can customize his characters and make them evolve more or less as he wishes, the system should not be too deep or complex. Remember, you want your player to feel driven by your story, not by comparing a new sword every 10 seconds or by thinking for 30 minutes about where to put that next talent point. As for itemization, it is way more important for it to make sense narratively, to have lore attached to it, than to be extremely flexible. Basically, it’s better for the player to acquire Excalibur, rather than for the game to drop 20 longswords, all with slightly different stats.

Narrative and immersion are your keywords; never forget them.

The Sandbox RPG

One of the most complex and costly subtypes, and thus pretty rare — is the sandbox RPG, which includes games like Fallout 3 and the Elder Scrolls series. Here, the player is driven by the fact that she can do what she wants, kill what she wants, be what she wants — and do it all when she wants.

That being said, there is a bit of paradox here; in order to obtain that freedom, and be able to create her own story, the player is willing to tolerate a lot of things that she would absolutely not tolerate in any other subgenre of RPG: immersion breaking bugs, average narrative, a simple combat system, etc.

For that reason, the focus of the production and features are clearly not on the critical path, as in a Narrative RPG, but on everything surrounding it: massive numbers of secondary quests, NPCs, places to visit, dungeons to explore, etc. And almost every single feature needs to support that freedom; some of the most important ingredients of the Sandbox RPG are:

- Deep character creation, customization and evolution; remember, the player wants to be what she wants. If she decides she wants to be a thief-mage fighting with a two-handed axe, she should be able to do so (even if that might not be optimal). That’s why good sandbox RPGs don’t lock themselves in a rigid class system. At worst, the class system is simply a guideline for the player.

- Almost everything that the player would like to do should be doable, even if it is useless or potentially detrimental to her (like picking up brooms in Skyrim, or killing a quest giver). The player wants to do whatever she wants.

- Navigation should not feel restricted; yes, that means jumping, and no invisible walls. The player experience is freedom-based; not allowing her to jump would more or less consciously reduce that feeling massively. You will notice that almost only sandbox RPGs have a jump button — that’s the reason.

- A vast world to explore. The strength is in the details. Your world should feel alive; it should feel like it lived before and will live after the player’s arrival.

- Non-linear progression. This should be obvious, but the player should feel free at all times to go where she wants, and never feel restricted by the story.

As for the ingredients that should be avoided, or be more limited, here they are:

- As with the Narrative RPG, your itemization should feel “real”, so avoid a random loot generator that could give “exotic” results, for example.

- Your narration needs to find a fine line between involving the player in your world and her story, and not being too big of a focus, so that she simply follows this and loses the “freedom” experience. Skyrim did a way better job than Oblivion in this area; the developers managed this by making you feel special — you are The Dragonborn, ensuring that you feel important to the world, and thus the world to you, without making it the only thing that matters.

- Avoid a contrasted morality system (like Paragon/Renegade in Mass Effect). The only thing it will achieve is to make the player feel like she should follow one path over the other, and thus decrease the feeling of freedom.

Freedom is your keyword; never forget it.

The Dungeon Crawler

That subtype is one of the most easily recognizable; games like Torchlight, Dungeon Siege, Diablo, and even Dark Souls are part of it. Once upon a time they were clearly defined as “hack ‘n slash,” but recently they joined the ever-growing group of RPGs called “action RPGs” (this is an issue; more on this later.)

The main thing driving the player here is, by far, character progression (through statistics, new abilities, or loot). Evolving your character from level 1 to, well, a lot, finding always more powerful loot, acquiring more and more powerful powers — to kill stronger monsters that will drop better loot, and so on.

They trace their roots in your typical old school Dungeons & Dragons game, where the plot was simply a pretext and context to kill monsters and loot their stuff. Decent graphics and immersion is expected, but above all, the main focus of the production and features should be: loot, combat, a statistics system, an evolution system, a class system, etc. Anything that can make the evolution of the character more thrilling and granular should be considered a priority.

Diablo III

Some essential ingredients to focus on:

- Complex loot system. Your random loot generator will be generating most of your “breadcrumbs” (more on this later); it should be your top priority.

- Customizing this loot is also important — slots for runes, gems, enchanting, and those kinds of things are always nice to have.

- Deep character evolution. A class system, stats system, skills, feats. That’s the main reason the player is playing; don’t let him down.

- Deep and detailed lore and universe — that’s your context, not your narrative itself. Having interesting lore, remarkable characters (who doesn’t know Deckard Cain or Tyrael?), and varied environments will go a long way into creating a comfortable place for your player to grind through all those monsters.

- Your enemies must respawn, even the bosses! That’s critical. Your player will want to keep farming those guys for more loot, experience points, runes, gold, or whatever. That’s the whole point of the thing, and while it is detrimental to a narrative RPG, it is completely mandatory for a good dungeon crawler. Do you think Diablo would be as fun if you couldn’t farm the hell (literally!) out of Diablo himself?

A few things to avoid, in my opinion:

- Narrative is secondary, and could actually hinder your main experience if it’s too present. Typically, you should avoid complex dialog systems with multiple choices; while they are a must in a narrative RPG, they are just a loss of time for most players playing a Dungeon Crawler; they want to kill, bash, loot, level up — not make complex morality choices or define their character’s personality. They are also not looking to be emotionally engaged by the story.

- Avoid open worlds; for some reason, that’s something that a lot of hack ‘n slash games tried, and it never worked very well. Sacred is an example. The main reason is most certainly that the player doesn’t want to lose time running around, and also wants to have an easy way to simply restart a dungeon in order to go farm that boss again and again. I know it sounds cool to say “We have an open world hack ‘n slash”, but in reality, the only thing it will do is make you lose a massive amount of time and resources production-wise, and dilute the main foci of your game: character evolution. In any case, you will never be a Skyrim or Fallout, so you will never satisfy the players looking for freedom. Trust me — don’t do it.

Character Progression is your keyword; never forget it.

The Action RPG Problem

The “Action RPG” genre is the current trend in the RPG industry; the issue with it is that contrary to its name, it is not representative of the main experience of the game. Consequently, it can be confusing both for developers and consumers to simply describe an RPG as an “action RPG.” Let’s take a few games that have all been described as action RPGs as examples:

- The Witcher 2. The main experience is Narrative.

- Skyrim. The main experience is Sandbox.

- Dark Souls. The main experience is hardcore Dungeon Crawler.

- Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. The main experience seems to not be properly defined.

So all those games have completely different goals for their main experience, and as such would appeal to different type of players, but still they all have been described as action RPGs. That’s an issue because action RPG is not a real subgenre; instead, it’s simply the current marketing slang for “it is cool to play it on consoles.”

In term of mechanics, it usually comes down to one of two things (and sometimes both!):

- Pressing a button triggers a “basic” attack; there is no such thing as “auto-attack.”

- Pressing a button triggers a dodge or parry.

And that’s usually it, which is far from being “experience defining,” and that’s the risk:

- For the developers to simply describe their game as an action RPG, and as a result maybe mix multiple experiences without realizing it, and end up with a diluted/undefined experience.

- For the consumer to buy a game simply because it’s called an action RPG and end up with an experience that he might not enjoy.

Ever heard someone say, “I bought The Witcher, but it’s boring — there’s too much dialog!” or “I bought Diablo, but the story sucks!” or “Damn, why is the main campaign in Skyrim so lackluster?” Well, the reason for this is simple: the people who bought those games didn’t realize they were buying a subgenre of RPG that focuses on an experience they don’t like. They wanted awesome narration, deep character evolution, and pure action, or maybe more freedom.

And marketing doesn’t help with that, as every RPG released nowadays is described as an action RPG.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Of course, there is no doubt that this trend started because marketing needed a way to market “RPGs that are cool to play with a pad.” The thing is, in the end, it simply roughly describes what kind of combat you might expect, but not the core experience of the game. And as the trend grows, we can safely expect that in a couple years (if that’s not the case already) every RPG will be an action RPG, making the label basically useless.

In the end, it is understandable that marketing a game as an action RPG is sexier than as a “Narrative RPG” or “Sandbox RPG” — but it’s still confusing nonetheless. If you are a developer, don’t simply describe your game as an “action RPG,” and if you are a consumer, don’t simply buy a game because it is called an action RPG; try to understand what the core experience in it is, and see if that’s what you want.

The type of combat you have in an RPG does not define your core experience; combat is only a support for that core experience, which is either: story, sandbox, or character evolution.

The Breadcrumbs Technique

So now you have your main experience nailed. You know what you are aiming for. Now what? Here is what I suggest:

- Define your experience in detail. What I described above are only high level guidelines, but there are multiple variations. For example, like I said above, the narrative RPG genre can be sub-divided again between the games where you can create your character (Mass Effect) and the others where you cannot (The Witcher). This typically will have a huge impact on how your narrative works, the first one being aimed at the player “being” the character and forging it, while the second is aimed at showing a portrayal of a character, allowing the player to get intimate with his/her personality. When you finish Mass Effect, you created your Shepard, but when you finish The Witcher, you know who Geralt is.

- Make sure that everyone in the team is clear about the type of RPG you are making and what the main experience is; this will put everyone on the same page, and ensure that you get feedback and suggestions that are aimed toward that experience. For example this should avoid suggestions like, “What about adding this and this from Diablo?” when these are clearly features aimed toward the character evolution experience, while you are making a narrative RPG, and thus focusing on creating an immersive character and story experience.

When you’re ready, use the breadcrumbs technique.

What I call the “breadcrumbs technique” is basically representing your main experience, as a trail that the player will want to follow — like a trail of pebbles or breadcrumbs. If we take the example of a narrative RPG that means that you narrative never stops. Party chatter, cutscenes, dialog, events, etc. The player should be following your narration continually, never giving him a rest.

One of the best and recent examples of this is Mass Effect 3; in that game, there is always something happening, narrative-wise. If you are on a mission, every single room of an area will have something to keep you interested: a console with some info, a quick party chat, a point of view, an event like something exploding, or a ship landing, a cutscene, etc. You go from narrative breadcrumb to narrative breadcrumb, then to a big breadcrumb — a milestone, like the end of a mission, or a huge event in the story. It is a narrative rollercoaster, and when it stops, that’s only because you finished the game.

In a Dungeon Crawler that means ensuring that your character and loot progression is permanent, that there is always something to upgrade, often. New shoes, new pants, slightly better shoes — wow, a massive upgrade for my sword! — and so on. Your loot system and random number generator needs most of your attention; they generate a big part of your breadcrumbs and should be carefully tweaked, and that’s far from simple to do.

Of course the character evolution itself — levels, skills, feats, attributes, stats, etc. — needs attention, too. The more ways for the player to enhance his character, the better, and of course with carefully placed milestones, that generates a bigger feeling of progression for the player once in a while, like a level up. This is without forgetting new challenges to put those hard-earned improvements to the test.

It basically comes down to this: divide your experience in small breadcrumbs and big breadcrumbs, and ensure a constant flow of them for the player to follow, with big breadcrumbs (milestones) appearing once in a while to refresh his focus, and make sure that even secondary things bring him back to the main path.

BioWare and Blizzard typically are very good at this, and if we take the Mass Effect series as an example, it even got better at it with each game:

- In Mass Effect, the secondary quests felt out of synch with the main story. A lot of people said they were boring, and quite a few people actually never finished the game because they got “lost” in the secondary quests.

- Mass Effect 2 brought that back to being tied to the main experience, by focusing on Loyalty Quests that are tied to the characters and which have an impact on the ending. But there were still a few secondary quests that had no link whatsoever with the grand scheme of things.

- Mass Effect 3 pushes that even further by using the War Assets system — yes, it had its downsides, but it had one big thing for it, though, and that’s making it so that even the smallest secondary quest is tied to the main experience — your main path — by adding to those War Assets, always making sure that you, as a player, never forget your main objective. That way, you never lose your focus; the quests always bring you back to following the breadcrumbs. For that reason, I am pretty sure that Mass Effect 3 had a higher completion ratio per user than most RPGs.

The Temptation of Mixing Experiences

Be careful to not be tempted to add features from other types of experiences just to “please more people.” This most certainly won’t work.

Most, if not all, RPGs that have attempted this have been received with mild success, whereas RPGs that solely focused on their main experience and making it the best possible have been very successful.

Trying to add a bit of another type of experience brings a lot of chances to simply damage the coherence of your design and experience, dilute it, and scatter the focus of both your production and your player — and in every case most certainly won’t be enough to satisfy the people who like that type of experience, since there won’t be any of the depth and ancillary features needed to support it.

I don’t know the secret of success, but the secret of failure is certainly trying to please everyone.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Here are a couple of games which tried to mix and match with mild success.

- Dungeon Siege III mixed storytelling and dungeon crawling, giving something diluted; the end result being not a good enough narrative game, and not a good enough dungeon crawler either, since the depth and granularity of its character evolution was not pushed far enough.

- Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning mixed and matched basically everything, resulting in an unfocused experience that had most people stop playing the game quite fast. Is it Sandbox? Not really — you are not so free. Is it a hack ‘n lash? Not really, either, even though there is a lot of loot; the random loot generator and its variety are not mastered as well as in a good Dungeon Crawler. It was simply too much of everything, and not any clear drive for the player.

Don’t get me wrong, though; there are great things to take or adapt from every kind of RPG. Every time you do so, however, you have to make sure that what you take is going to support your main experience, and not create the tip of a new one which won’t be properly supported, feels incomplete, and thus disappointing — and risks losing your player’s attention and interest in the game.

Do you want to make the best chocolate cake, or the best lemon cake?

Trying to make a cake mixing lemon and chocolate might just end being something that pleases neither the people who like chocolate nor those who like lemon. But maybe there are some ingredients from that lemon cake that could enhance the flavor of your chocolate in your chocolate cake? Then by all means, go for it!

In every case, though, be aware that if you start mixing genres this will require an even stronger, innovative and carefully considered design.

So in conclusion, always clearly define your main experience, never lose it from sight, and ask yourself: Are my breadcrumbs clearly defined? Where are they? Do they appear often enough? Do they stop sometimes? Where are my milestones? If you have secondary quests, objectives or features, are they somehow tied to the main path, bringing the player back to it gently?

We’ve all had those moments where you start an RPG and, after a while, you stop playing it and never finish it, and you can’t really put your finger on the exact reason. You are just “not into it anymore.”

Usually the reason is that the breadcrumbs stopped, or that the experience as a whole was not focused enough. Ensuring that your main experience, what drives your player, never stops and that they go from a series of small tastes of that experience, to big dishes regularly until they are satiated, will go a long way to help you create a successful RPG of any kind. That being said, you will quickly notice that it is easier said than done, so good luck!

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Jason Rohrer Reveals The Castle Doctrine, Part 1

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Love, theft, home and beating dogs with batons

By Alec Meer on January 30th, 2013 at 9:00 pm.

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Indie dev Jason Rohrer, creator of Passage, Sleep Is Death, Inside A Star-Filled Sky, The Diamond Trust of London and the near-mythical Chain World is a divisive game designer, because reasons. I personally reckon his stuff is reliably fascinating, bold and often important (including on those occasions that I’ve rather bounced off it), so I’ve been very keen to find out more about his upcoming game The Castle Doctrine. An MMO based around the concept of home invasion and home defence, the nature of the Rohrer’s tenth game has remained cryptic since a guarded reveal last October.

In this first of a two-part interview, Rohrer explains just what this dark multiplayer game of strategy, construction, burglary and cold-blooded murder is, how it works, its amorality and politics, the unenviable living situation and fear of vicious dogs which inspired it, and why the late-in-the-day addition of a wife and kids changed the nature of the whole affair.

RPS: Can you tell us more about the Castle Doctrine? All I really know is that initial mysterious reveal in October.

Jason Rohrer: In that reveal, I talked about how it’s a massively multiplayer game, which I guess is something people are wondering about. I’m doing it by keeping it simple, and keeping it asynchronous. You don’t ever see other characters running about in the game. Because it’s a game about home defence, and robbery, and burglarising other people’s houses, obviously that only happens when you’re not at home. So it works really well thematically to have these houses that you’re working on and editing while you’re home, then when you leave your home, when you go to sleep at night, log out of the game, or you go out of your house to go and rob somebody else’s house, then your house is open to being robbed by somebody else while you’re not there. Then you return to your house to see the results of that robbery.

RPS: That’s kind of the true terror of burglary, isn’t it? It’s less about what’s actually lost, but that moment where you come home and the door’s kicked down and everything’s wrecked… I’ve been through that myself and it’s terrifying.

Jason Rohrer: Right, right, and that was the inspiration. When we were living in a somewhat rougher neighbourhood about a year and a half ago, if we’d go away on a trip every time we came back to the house it was always, like, being careful coming around the corner to see if any windows were broken, then going to the backdoor, looking around inside the house to make sure everything’s still there… Yep, it’s all still here! We never got robbed, fortunately. But yeah, this is a game about coming back to this home that you’ve worked so hard on, and your family’s in there as well, being protected by your defences, and coming back to find what somebody else has done to you, essentially. It’s a game about violation, but at the same time you’re also serving as the violator for everybody else. Because to get more resources for your house and your defences, and to protect your family better, you’ve gotta go and get through other people’s security and steal their stuff.

RPS: So it’s BurglarTown? Everyone in the game’s community is a dirty rotten crook?

Jason Rohrer: Right, right. You technically don’t have to be, but the game tempts you into being one, and as angry as you get about somebody breaking into your house and killing your pets and potentially family…

RPS: Pets too? Oh no.

Jason Rohrer: Well, pets, I mean pitbulls and other things that you put in your house for security reasons. So as angry as you get about that, you sort of realise that you’ve been doing exactly the same thing to everyone else.

Everyone’s anonymous in the game, it’s not like I’ll be playing along and I’ll say ‘I’m gonna go get Alec Meer’s house, hahaha’, because I don’t know who you are in the game. I just might know that you are playing. I’m breaking into somebody’s house and I don’t know if it’s a teenage kid, or an elderly woman or a little girl who owns the house in real life. So we kind of end up doing things to people that are actually… Someone’s put work into this house, y’know? Someone’s amassed this collection of stuff that they’ve spent a lot of time on, and when we violate it we’re actually doing harm to a person in a real way. We’re not doing physical harm, but yeah. The moral ambiguity of the whole thing is at the core of what the game is about.

RPS: How do you make people care about their virtual possessions, to the point that they’ll actually feel violated when it’s gone?

Jason Rohrer: You start the game with a relatively small amount of money, in terms of the scale of the economy of the game, so you use that money and think about the best possible security you can potentially build for that amount of money. Then you have a family that’s in the house as well, a wife and two children. You get to position them in the house, and think about how you’re going to protect them with security as well. So when you’ve run out of money and you’ve built the best security that you can, you go out into the world and you try to get through other people’s security. You can buy tools and so on to do that. Then you come back to your house, and if you’re lucky your security’s worked and kept people out while you were away. If it has, you can build up a little more security with the money that you’ve gotten, right. It takes some time, it takes some planning, it takes some thought to build up a house that actually has really good security that’s going to trick people and keep people out.

As people come to rob your house, and they fail because your security is good, then all the stuff they were carrying, all their tools and their guns and their saws, all the stuff that they didn’t use by the time they died in your house, gets put into a vault with all your other possessions. So over time stuff kind of accumulates in your house. You can see a list of houses in the game and see how many times… Like, 25 people have tried robbing this house and ten of them have died trying. So, over time you can see the wealth kind of accumulating in this house because so many people failed. So you’ve got all this stuff, stolen from other people’s houses, and you’ve got money and you’ve got all this valuable stuff from people failing at your security. Losing all that is a real dagger in the heart, right?

The other thing is that, right towards the end of the development, I was asleep at night and having some sort of dream. I can’t remember the details, but it was about somebody coming into our house and threatening me and my family. I have a wife and I do have three children, and this game was inspired in part by my feelings living in this rougher neighbourhood. I actually go to a gunstore once and almost buy a gun, I looked at them. And I did carry around a police baton to hit vicious dogs that came up to us on our bikes and did carry pepper spray. I had to think about defending my family, right?

RPS: You should never hold a press event at your house. I don’t think many people would want to come.

Jason Rohrer: [Laughing] You guys are in England, you don’t understand what it’s like here in America.

RPS: There are parts of it I’d be pretty scared in, but yeah, there don’t tend to be guns.

Jason Rohrer: Yeah, so I didn’t buy a gun. My wife actually ended up not letting me, but we did buy one of these extendable police batons for the dogs.

RPS: [Shocked pause, nervous laugh]

Jason Rohrer: [Also laughs] But that was after my wife was attacked by a vicious dog. So I had to say ‘what am I gonna do next time?’ You can’t beat away a dog with your hands, right?

RPS: Not if you want to keep your hands, I guess. I don’t think it’s legal here though. So, er, have you ever hit a dog with a baton? I kind of need to know even though I don’t want to.

Jason Rohrer: No, fortunately, we never needed to do that [laughs]. But we did carry it with us after that. I have sprayed dogs with pepper spray, and it doesn’t’ really do anything for them. They’re not as sensitive to it as us. And it always blows back in my face, like the wind is blowing when I go to spray it, so I’m trying to spray this dog then all of a sudden I’m laying on the ground, screaming and blind.

RPS: [Laughs] That sounds like a Naked Gun sketch.

Jason Rohrer: Yeah. Anyway, back to the point – I’d been working on this list for about a year, inspired by all this stuff, but it was always just a game where you were alone in your house, and you were building your security, trying to protect your physical possessions, and you’re going out and trying to steal the physical possessions of other people, breaking through their physical security… Then I had this dream in the middle of the night, and I realised that the core of this game is really about protecting a family, but there was nothing about it in this game. That was about a month and a half ago, actually, right towards the end of development of the game. I realised what was missing was a wife and kids mechanic.

RPS: Something that you really want to protect, rather than just collect.

Jason Rohrer: Yeah. They’re not player characters, they’re not controlled by anybody else. You get to place them in your house, it’s a wife and a girl and a boy, and they’re unique. There are different appearances that they can have that are assigned to you. You might get a wife with red hair and a green dress, or a little girl with blond braids, that sort of thing. And they have names, unique names. So you have this unique little family, and you want to protect them because they’re unique. If they get killed, they’re gone forever and you’ll miss them, right? But then I still felt like they weren’t hooked into the mechanics of the game enough.

You were asking before about how you make somebody care about these virtual possessions or virtual people, so I gave the wife a gameplay function. When someone breaks into your house she tries to leave the house through the front door, from wherever you’ve stuck her in the house. If she gets out of the house, she carries half of the money with her. So if somebody gets into your vault and steals all your stuff, when you get back to your house and you find it’s been robbed but your wife is standing by the front door, she’s still got half of the money left. But if somebody manages to find her as she’s making her way through the house trying to get to the front door, and then kill her, they can take that half of the money she’s carrying. Then they can also potentially get to your vault and take the other half too, and leave you with nothing.

So if you let somebody’s wife escape, which is sort of the altruistic thing to do, you’re not only doing this thing which is symbolic – I’m not going to kill your wife – you’re also leaving them with some sort of bootstrap to get back into the game after they come back and find their life destroyed. So the wife has both this thematic meaning and a very important gameplay meaning. The moral choice that you’re making when you decide to kill somebody’s wife, obviously has a lot of thematic weight behind it and you’ll probably feel kind of strange when you do it, also has this moral implication in the game. You’re basically scorching this person’s earth when you do this, taking everything that they’ve worked on, this house that they’ve built up, and leaving them with nothing to repair it.

RPS: And breaking their hearts to boot.

Jason Rohrer: Right, right, and doing this very immoral thing to them. I really wanted those two things to be so intimately linked that it’s not just a virtual moral question, about whether you want to kill this imaginary wife. It’s actually a real-world moral question. Which is strange, to try and build that into a game and… I guess I’m still grappling with this, with the moral implications of this game, what it means. It’s kind of an experiment. Some of my early testers – it just got launched into testing on Friday – and somebody just came into my house and killed my two children for no reason and left. They posted on my testers’ mailing list, “whoever’s kids I just killed, haha!”

RPS: God almighty.

Jason Rohrer: Yeah, and I was like “that’s not the reaction I was expecting.”

RPS: But people are going to do that. This is the internet.

Jason Rohrer: Of course. And the game does also provide you with security tapes, so you can watch someone who has robbed your house, see how they did it, and see every dastardly deed that they did when they were there. Then you can see their in-game name, their anonymous name, and you can go potentially after them for revenge, or to get your possessions back or whatever. So they might also want to scorch your earth in order to prevent you doing that, so you don’t have the resources to come back at them. But you can always come back at them in a second life, after you die or commit suicide you can start over from scratch.

There’s a potential for people to become kingpins in the game and rise to the top, have a little empire where thousands of people have tried to get into their house and all failed, but eventually everybody’s going to fall.

RPS: Going back to the wife and the fact she’s there to protect money, it almost seems as though you’ve taken the question of love out of it, and replaced it with money. The wife’s purpose becomes about money rather than your personal attachment to her. It almost seems like a statement.

Jason Rohrer: I’m not trying to make a particular statement with that, as much as I’m trying to get somebody to feel love, some sort of attachment, or feel like they want to protect this person. This is what the game is about, it’s about protecting these things which are vulnerable and important to you, trying to elicit that emotion even if it’s a false, indirect version of that emotion. It’s worth trying to do. I’m not trying to make a statement about [cackles] your spouse is only valuable to you because she has money. It’s just about trying to make you feel this profound sense of loss. And these family members are unique, they’re these sort of unique, collectable pets [laughs].

The game has permadeath, even in your own house – if you stumble into one of your own traps, you die permanently and lose everything. And if you make a mistake in somebody else’s house and die, you die permanently and lose everything. So, along with losing everything and starting over from scratch with an empty house and a new family, you can potentially have a few of your family members killed and they’ll be gone forever until you die. So you can go from having a wife and two kids to a wife and one kid, or one last orphan kid without a mother. That, I guess, has some emotional weight to it, because you grew attached to their names and how they looked, you’ve been protecting them for a while, so it’s a sort of pet owner-level attachment. They’re just little pixellated characters, they’re not like characters from Sleep Is Death that actually have conversations with you.

People are also, I’m sure, going to complain ‘how come it’s the man that’s going out robbing and the woman has to stay home.’ That’s the classic thing that people said about Passage – ‘why can’t you play as the girl?’

RPS: Could you not just add an option to nip that stuff in the bud?

Jason Rohrer: Well yeah, but then it wouldn’t be my personal art. It would just be this pandering product. This is a game that’s from my perspective, just like in Passage the main character is me. So you don’t get to play as the girl, because I’m not a girl. Just like if you go to see the movie Memento, no-one walks out of that saying ‘why isn’t there a version of this where there’s a girl with memory problems?’ It’s the personal statement of the director who is making this and telling the story, and you don’t even question it, but for some reason in games we question it, because we’re so much stuck into the role of this character.

RPS: Well yeah, because we’re involved, we’re active participants and not just watching a story.

Jason Rohrer: Yeah, but on the other hand, and maybe you don’t experience this in England, here in America when there’s a bump in the night and somebody has to get up to go and investigate it, who’s the one who’s handed the baseball bat and told to go and look down the hall to see if there’s a burglar. I was the one who, when my family was in danger in the last place that we lived, it was up to me to defend to them. That’s just expected, it’s just the way that it worked. It’s not like my wife ever said to me ‘oh, it’s up to you, you’re the man, you’re supposed to do this’, it was just unspoken. I’m taller, I’m stronger, I can aim a gun better, I know that from experience. [Laughs] And I imagine I can fight.

RPS: The autobiographical element becomes more complicated when it’s an MMO though – there are loads of players doing their own thing, not just one person playing as you. It’s very different to Passage.

Jason Rohrer: Right, yeah. I guess this is something that we, in the form of games, need to grapple with. It’s again the question of the balance between authorial control and abdication of authorship that Doug Church talks about. Obviously if you abdicate all authorship and hand someone a blank slate, like Infinite Blank or something, that kind of doesn’t really play the tug of war that’s as interesting as something like Far Cry 2, which has a very strong sense of authorship and also a very strong sense of abdication of authorship.

In part two: Far Cry 3, naturally. Also: gun control, whether Passage is a “game”, and Chainworld.

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The 27 Homages Of Thirty Flights Of Loving

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Blendo Games’ 15 Minutes of Hidden Movie & Game References

By David Valjalo on February 1st, 2013 at 3:00 pm.

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Scouse scoundrel David Valjalo gets taken on a tour of one of 2012′s indie highlights, Gravity Bone follow-up Thirty Flights Of Loving, by creator Brendon Chung. Together, they unravel the myriad movie and game references buried deep in this short, sharp burst of first-person, spy-themed adventure.

It was late last year my then-flatmate stopped me in our sparse, dusty hallway and said ‘come here, sit down for ten minutes and try this.’ He stood from the table that was temporarily hosting his newly built PC (a long story) and offered me the chair.

At the time I was working for a shadowy, mysterious game magazine and it was widely known that I liked to keep my time staring at virtual stuff to a minimum outside of the office, so I figured the man wouldn’t make such a request for nothing. And so I sat, I played and I loved. Thirty Flights Of Loving stayed with me more than any other game of 2012. Not least because of its filmic feel, it’s lack of traditional game-like flow and convention. Rather, it lingered long because, for me, Thirty Flights (along with its predecessor, Gravity Bone) is one of the most convincing arguments to date – alongside the likes of Rare’s Goldeneye or Hideo Kojima’s… anything – that the mediums of game and film can collide with one another to the benefit of the videogame form, delivering something unique and original even as it riffs on the iconography and ideas of another art-form.

Short as it may be (some five minutes of play time if you sprint your way through) Thirty Flights is a melting pot of influences and inspirations – the sources of which feel familiar (a dash of 60s European new wave here, a smattering of film noir there) yet just out of reach. Personally, during my first few playthroughs, I caught whiffs of everything from Sam Peckinpah to Francois Truffaut – and that’s part of the game’s beauty: it can be read, as with a film, in a variety of ways. The gameplay is linear, reduced to simple pacing back and forth, but the experience will conjure a range of emotions from players depending on the baggage – or lack thereof – that they bring to the keyboard.

As the game repeated on me in recent months, and the references I plucked out became more eccentric and extravagant, I couldn’t help reaching out to its creator Brendon Chung to find out exactly what the core inspirations and influences on the game where, and in the process coerce him into offering his own blow-by-blow, screenshot-by-screenshot account of where Thirty Flights’ hidden homages lie.

So here, in a sort of long-form variant on a director’s commentary, is the story of how Chung and I unpacked Thirty Flights Of Loving like a dynamic, film-obsessed duo on a road trip through his own creation. And, like any good road trip, we punctuated the journey with post cards of the key moments for you to enjoy. Consider it a sort of side-dish to the brief in-game, text-based commentary Chung offers in Thirty Flights which gives insight into his process and thinking as a developer and designer, as opposed to the out-and-out pop culture obsessive he here reveals himself to be.

And so we begin…

From the outset Chung makes it clear that I won’t be able to squeeze Thirty individual references out of him. My dream of titling this feature “Thirty Flights Of Homage” is just that, a dream (but I called it that anyway: take that, logic). Deflated but determined I watch Chung take his first couple of steps in the game before stopping, his voice shooting up an octave and his enthusiasm igniting as he recalls the inspirations behind the first few cap-doffs in the game. It’s here, staring at the plaque on the wall of the game’s very first corridor, I realise that even if we don’t get Thirty exact references out of this, we are probably going to get pretty damn close.

“There are a few different things on this first sign,” he explains.

First up, there’s a reference to Zork: “Frobvember! Zork has a bunch of fictional dates and this is a nod to that. Also ‘Quesomancy’ – in the Zork universe there’s a mysterious punishment called totemisation and it’s never explained. Quesomancy is my version. Then there’s ‘wheel of morality’, that’s a reference to a cartoon called Animaniacs.”

I can’t help wonder, with so many obscure references packed into this very first bit of text in the game, if Chung is at all wary of alienating players not in on his private, nostalgic jokes. “Some shows use pop culture references as the punchline,” he says. “I don’t find that to be very funny, I think it works for certain people but it doesn’t compute for me. It’s better, for me, when there’s a reference that isn’t the punchline to the joke, it just flavours the joke, adds an interesting dimension. If you want to dig into it, it’s there.”

Chung then takes another five or six paces into the game’s first room and we’re already straight into the next demonstration of his approach to “flavouring” his world with pop cultural nods.

“The line on this sign, Wilkommen Auf Zauberburg, is a reference to the old Sierra adventure game Hero’s Quest. There’s a wizard and when you reach his house that’s what it says. Adventure games are a huge influence on me, I grew up playing them. Space Quest, Hero’s Quest… all of those. And then the Lucasarts titles came out and it was a whole new breath of fresh air. My work’s greatly influenced by adventure games. It’s about soaking in the world, as opposed to what a first-person shooter traditionally is – let’s kill bad guys.”

With Thirty Flights’ restrained approach to action (there’s one short scene involving guns blazing and you’re not even the one pulling the triggers) I ask if Chung if he consciously avoided a full-blown shootout or more conventional set-piece. “Yeah, as I watched coders playing [an early build of] Gravity Bone, someone asked me why I let the player die. It struck a cord: why not just let the game do what it does well which is story, narrative. And that stayed with me for Thirty Flights Of Loving.”

The bar isn’t just a tribute to Hero’s Quest, Chung tells me. Hidden behind the bar is a machinegun, a reference to the classic Robert Redford thriller Three Days Of The Condor. “In the film he works in a CIA office and there’s a really brief scene that reveals the secretary is hiding a gun – it was a really brief moment and it really stayed with me, so I had to get that in.”

It’s here I realise the bar, with its hidden, knowing and very personal secrets is a neat representation of Thirty Flights Of Loving itself: a quirky, attractive veneer covering something deeper and more private.

The next room builds on my sense that Chung’s passion for film may rival my own. “This little hideout area is inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation. There’s an area in the movie where Gene Hackman has this private workshop, it’s drab and lived-in, I love the little details. This was their workshop, where they hung out and stored the goods for their operation.”

With two out of two rooms so far hosting a wealth of influences, I want to know how Chung constructs his games. Does he plan his story around specific locations, like this hideout, that he’s determined to include? “The way I work is backwards. I like to think of the ending to the story. A strong, juicy, satisfying ending and then move backwards – what preceded the events of the ending so we wrap around back to the start. It’s about not planning things out too carefully, letting it happen organically. It just reaches a point where things make themselves more obvious.”

In the same room Chung points out yet another reference, this time to one of his all time favourite films.

“With this mess of papers I was thinking of the movie Delicatessen.

“There’s this gorgeous credits sequence in the film. The camera roams around this table full of stuff and everything on it, detailing the cast and crew with names printed on each item. In the same room, a few steps away, this box of bullets is a nod the Japanese anime series Cowboy Bebop. There’s a really brief shot of this box of bullets and I was so taken with it, I needed to get it in [laughs].”

So far, so much film. As Chung ticks off some other stylistic influences such as Wong Kar Wai – he singles out Chungking Express, In The Mood For Love, As Tears Go By, Happy Together, 2046 as key inspirations for their “dreamlike quality and theme of unrequited love” – I learn that I’m dealing with a fellow film school graduate. With the majority of Chung’s geekery homed in on films, and Thirty Flights in defiance of the norms of a first-person game with an espionage/spy theme, I have to ask if he plays games at all these days. “Having 40 hours to play a single game is something I don’t have any more,” he says. “I do feel that if you want to write books you have to read books, if you want to make movies you have to watch movies and if you want to make games you have to play them. I’m a little more selective now. I’ll play things that aren’t always good but that try something interesting.”

I suggest, therefore, that Thirty Flights’ brevity may be down to Chung’s own preference for an experience he can fit around his day-to-day, family life. “Yeah so this is a game you can play and finish in one snack-sized go. When I was younger, game length was one of the criteria that attracted me, but as I’ve gotten older it’s become less important and workable. I really enjoy open-world games, that’s the most exciting genre for me right now. In terms of games that I think will be the future, roguelikes and things like Day Z are the shape of things to come. Games where the player generates their own unique narratives, that excites me so much.”

The next reference Chung points out is to a game with one such big open-world. “The sniper while somehow bungee jumping is from Saints Row 3. There’s one mission where, for some reason, you’re dangling outside a building with a sniper rifle – utterly ridiculous, but again, it struck me.”

What I love about Chung’s range of influences is how varied and far-reaching they are, delving deep into his childhood – the plane that pops up next is a nod to an old Disney TV series called TaleSpin (he refers to its “swashbuckling, pulp fiction inspired universe” as a major creative force at the time) – and scaling the heights of the most revered art house cinema of our generation (“I’m a big Woody Allen fan, his movies, books…”). As disparate as some of Chung’s name-dropping may seem, it is all tied together by a common thread: visual storytelling. Whether it’s the all-ages approach of Animaniacs and Tailspin or the more cerebral and emotive work of his favourite auteurs, it’s a body of inspiration that aims to hold your attention, like Thirty Flights, by telling a story powerfully. I prod Chung for his own views on storytelling in games to which he concisely explains that for him, “the most effective games are those that allow players to explore and discover on their own.”

With our shared passion for film now out in the open, it’s no surprise that our conversation wanders into game adaptations. “My opinion on adaptations is that videogames and movies are two extremely different products. I feel that if you want to adapt something, you kind of have to pretend that the original version didn’t ever exist. You have to make your project work for that specific medium. I know a lot of people are adamant that you have to get every single detail in a film right – it has to mirror the game – but for me that ends up making it no good at any one thing.”

After our brief detour, it’s back to Thirty Flights. “The tunnel where everything goes really fast is a reference to Chungking Express. There are many shots in the film where the character is still and everything else is speeding past.”

The use of time in the game, with clocks a recurring motif and jump-cuts, slow-motion and time-lapse all coming into play, is a nod to a trinity of connected film canons. “I’d say the French New Wave of the 60s, the work of directors like Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino, that all contributed [to the manipulation and use of time].”

The flight arrivals and departures board area lurking around the next corner, while itself being a reinforcement of the time theme in Thirty Flights, also builds on Chung’s layer of inter-textual references.

On the board there’s West Egg, a reference to The Great Gatsby, Vire River, a reference to a “stale-mate friendly” Company Of Heroes map – a game Chung played religiously for years – and, written on the luggage trolley of the gentleman nearby, Cugat Airfield, a reference to musician Xavier Cugat whose work appeared in Chung’s previous project, Gravity Bone.

The enigmatic scene that follows the airport, set in a green-hued apartment, is Chung’s salute to one of cinema’s greatest living cinematographers, Christopher Doyle, a frequent collaborator with Wong Kar Wai.

Doyle’s use of colour and filter to set mood is a primary influence on Thirty Flights’ look and feel and Chung is as passionate as a cinematographer in his belief that colour deserves more credit, and attention, in games. “I feel it’s easy for games to fall into a trap of being brown or grey… I make a very conscious effort to use colour very specifically.”

The rooftop party that takes place moments later is yet another Wong Kar Wai homage, this time it’s As Tears Go By. “There’s a scene in the film that’s just lit in a really gorgeous magenta hue,” says Chung.

This scene is my personal favourite, as jump-cuts narrate the increasingly drunken state of our hero/protagonist and the triangular relationship of the cast comes to the fore. I tell Chung I feel this mysterious menage a trois is a direct a reference to Francois Truffaut’s 1962 drama Jules Et Jim but he shoots down my grand claim with something much simpler. “I didn’t have a specific reference point, I just wanted a small cast of characters to keep it simple.”

When the partygoers ascend to the heavens from the dance-floor – one of Thirty Flights’ most strikingly artistic moments – Chung explains that, like a director happening upon an indispensible piece of improv as he shoots a film, this was a “happy accident. I was trying to make the people bob up and down to dance and they kept floating upwards unintentionally. But once I saw that, moving on screen, I realised that it was what I really wanted without even knowing it.”

As we move onto the next scene, a hallway dotted with original posters and adverts, I’m waiting for Chung to run out of steam but the references just keep coming. Here we find nods to Lone Wolf And Cub and then, on the “Wanted” poster we have a name ripped from Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi in Moco, and Woody Allen’s alias in Mo Golden.

Next up is the shootout without the player actually doing any shooting. It’s one of the game’s most original scenes and, yet again, we find it directly linked to a film. It’s the use of sound and poetic slow motion in 1982′s Koyaanisqatsi that left the biggest impression on Thirty Flights flashes of gun fire, lending it the air of a dream rather than bullet hell.

And here, finally, Chung does run out of references. We didn’t get to Thirty exact references, but we got pretty damn close.

In a wonderful twist in the tale, it’s the over-riding theme of flight, the motif of planes, that doesn’t have any direct link to any other property, film or game. The scene the game ends within, a sort of museum of aeronautics, is entirely Chung’s idea, ending the game, and our journey, on an original note rather a tributary one.

As for Chung’s next game, Quadrilateral Cowboy, it’s a work in progress that we will be seeing “soon… 2013 is still the aim” and he promises it’ll be all part of the connected universe he’s established with his work. Once again, Chung is chipping away at the game as a one-man studio and I ask if he intends to remain a lone wolf developer for the rest of his career. “There are limitations to working alone,” he admits. “And working with more people – that’s something I intend to grow towards [in the future]. I would love to work on an open-world game of some sort, but as a one-person developer it’s not really possible.”

It’s the current limitations on Chung as a developer that defines and determines the outcome of his work, he says, before we part ways. “One of the parts of the creative process is working within limitations and making something within those limitations. The original Star Wars trilogy was made on a limited budget and they made something really interesting.”

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