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The PA Report - Reviewers can’t figure out SimCity, but neither can EA: This is why we’re all screwed

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Reviewers can’t figure out SimCity, but neither can EA: This is why we’re all screwed

Ben Kuchera / Wed, Mar 6, 2013

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Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine a bunch of critics go into a movie theater and watch The Big Lebowski. They all agree that it was a pretty good movie. That night, the theater burns down. The critics come back, but now they are surrounded by other people.

“I bet you think that movie is pretty shitty now, huh?” one of the bystanders says to the critic. The film hasn’t changed, has it? Do the critics need to go back and change their review of the movie? What if the bystanders had already bought tickets, and now they can’t see the film they paid for?

Welcome to the state of modern game criticism. If you thought scored reviews were a pain in the ass before, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

It’s only going to get worse

The tricky thing about modern games, and our movement towards experiences that are always online, is that you can’t separate the metaphorical theater from the film. If the SimCity servers aren’t operational, no one can play the game.

If those same servers are operating under a heavy load, you may be stuck replaying that lengthy tutorial section without being able to create your own city. It’s possible that you’ll be asked to wait in a server queue to play what you wanted to be a single-player game.

“Some players may currently be experiencing issues or delays when attempting to join a game server or region - or may be unable to create a city at this time,” EA explained. “Additionally, there are intermittent reports of friends list, invite, and tutorial delays and errors. We are working to clear traffic from the roads and hope to have all players managing their cities as soon as possible.”

These experiences are, to put it bluntly, not optimal. It’s tempting to simply say that one should wait at least two days before trying to purchase and play a game that requires an always-on Internet connection, a move that would give the publisher time to manage server load and get everything running. That’s a rational move but, dammit, we shouldn’t have to wait to play games we want to buy now. Maybe it would be better if reviews got rid of the numbered score, at least for a bit, just to say “not yet.”

When the consumer’s best move is to wait to buy a game they’ve already decided to spend money on rather than purchasing the game at release, something very wrong has occurred. This shouldn’t just concern gamers, as the publishers would probably love to have your money as much as you’d like to give it to them. Perhaps more so.

The question is whether our complaints, the forum posts, and the bitching on Twitter mean anything. If we say we’re not going to put up with this, but still buy these games in large numbers, EA is going to listen to the sales numbers instead of your words. What we do is more important than what we say, and most of us knew that buying SimCity would be a risk for the first few days, just as we know that the launch of every Battlefield game is going to be an unholy mess.

It’s sad that EA couldn’t launch an online game this large smoothly, but when have they ever done so? It would have been news if they had gotten it right, not the other way around. This sort of situation makes reviewing SimCity nearly impossible.

Polygon is updating their score as the servers go up and down, and that’s one way to handle it. We’ll be following the game with ongoing coverage, and that’s another. Both approaches have their flaws, and it may be that SimCity is simply immune to the idea of a classical “review.”

My rational brain thinks that anyone who bought the game at launch should have expected this rocky road, but having our expectations lowered to the extent that we browbeat gamers for having the audacity of thinking their games should work on release date is a depressing state of affairs.

We don’t have an easy answer for what EA could have done to manage their servers better, and it’s definitely a complex problem, but we’re also not asking $60 for a product that gamers can’t use reliably. I want to say that we should rise up, and cast off these brutal shackles. I wish I could say that we should never give EA another dime of our money, and they brought their financial hardship on themselves with invasive DRM and poor planning for game launches. I want to march with you down the street, throwing bricks through the windows of the publishers who have brought us to this place.

I can’t do that, however. I was invited in before the theater burnt down. I know how good this movie is, and I think you’ll like it. In a few days. Once everything works.

I just don’t know how to translate that into a score. No one does.

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Editorial: SimCity, Diablo 3 and a review of customer service

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Editorial: SimCity, Diablo 3 and a review of customer service

by Alexander Sliwinski on Mar 6th 2013 4:00PM

I don’t like writing game reviews. I’m a news guy, comfortable moving within and reporting on the binary conclusions of business in the video game industry. Reviews are emotional. Always have been. With SimCity and Diablo 3, I think the already tempestuous machine of game reviews in this industry has changed forever, and as a collective we haven’t yet determined how to proceed. SimCity and Diablo 3 aren’t just games, they are also services. The question: Should these games be reviewed separately from their service elements or should they be reviewed in combination?

Comparing this to the restaurant industry, the game is the food and the internet-required connection is the table service. Back of the house and front of the house. What we’ve seen following the launches of Diablo 3 and SimCity are people paying money to walk into the restaurant on opening day and not being served a meal. In a restaurant there would be immediate and dire consequences for such poor customer service. In the video game industry, there’s no shortage of apologists justifying the outcome. Nobody genuflects to poor customer service excuses in a restaurant. Any restaurant review would treat the meal and service as one singular expression of the experience.

Massively Multiplayer Online games have been judged for years by critics separately from the state of their servers and customer service experience. Top tier multiplayer shooters also suffer from server issues at launch, like EA’s Battlefield franchise and Activision’s Call of Duty. Popular games often have issues carrying the load of a massive launch. Of course, in the case of those shooters, there’s still the chips and salsa of the offline single-player experience. In fact, for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 we separated our single-player and multiplayer reviews because we were concerned – given Battlefield’s service history – about the quality of the consumer experience at launch. In our conversations about always-on internet connections we keep getting caught up in debates about digital rights management (DRM), the idea that people should “just get over it” and similar capitulations that the system can’t be beat so we might as well give in. I want to remove all of that from the equation and let’s focus on service. Why is the customer service experience not part of the review equation? I believe we treat developers (the chefs) and the service experience we receive from publishers as two different concepts. We’d never do that for a restaurant, but we do it for the games industry, an industry that will – make no mistake about this – become more and more about service.

I can already imagine the cries against reviews placing the quality of the game and its service to customers together. If reviews for SimCity were posted today, based on the ability to play, we’d easily see an aggregate Metacritic review score well below the average. We can talk about sliding review scores all we want, but the first review score a site posts is the one that aggregate sites, like Metacritic, pick up. Review scores determine bonuses and, no matter what our personal feelings about aggregate sites, they directly impact the wallets of industry players.

If SimCity had a review average of 30 right now, one hopes EA would take a hard look at its customer service. A publisher going forward wouldn’t just be worried about the quality of their game, but the quality of their service in the marketplace. An anticipated server-reliant game would very likely never launch again without proper server support.

I now go back to waiting for the SimCity servers to work so I can get started on my review for the game. I do wonder how long as a collective we can keep arguing about how unfair it is to judge a game by how it treats paying customers, especially as we keep being told that games are now a service.

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SimCity review: engineering addiction

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SimCity (2013)

By Russ Pitts @russpitts
on March 04, 2013 at 10:00a

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Game Info Platform Win, Mac Publisher Electronic Arts Developer Maxis Release Date 03/05/2013

If addiction is a freight train, then SimCity is the roaring locomotive pulling you into the night.

You may play a hundred hours of this game without noticing, but behind the curtain, SimCity is working furiously to hook you — and keep you hooked. And in my case, it was enormously successful at both.

It started with the best of intentions. I’m old enough to have played and remember all of the various iterations of this franchise. I’ve built (and destroyed) countless sim cities. I’ve perfectly zoned my little towns, entered cheat codes, then left them to bake over night and returned, triumphant, to a pile of “simoleons,” ready to reap the whirlwind.

I’ve been there, is my point.

So when I received the latest, I thought that I could ride that lightning and “quit any time.” I was wrong.

From the pleasing sounds of every various button press, to the satisfying way various parts of your city connect, then come to life (then die and come back from the dead), every element of this game has been perfectly and patiently engineered to engender an endorphin rush of accomplishment. Even the soundtrack, which can soothe or encourage, feels painstakingly crafted to tune your emotions with what’s happening on screen.

Once I saw under the hood of all that SimCity allows you to do, it was hard to restrain the urge to become a mad dictator
SimCity is more-or-less the same game it has always been. And it is, at the same time, radically new. In a nutshell, it is the heart and mind of the SimCity games of days gone by, but more beautiful, ready to seduce away your hours until you are a rotted husk of the person you used to be. If it charged by the hour, you’d sell a kidney. I wish I was joking.

What Maxis and EA have learned over the course of a long decade of experimentation with The Sims and social gaming is exactly how (and why) to push a gamer’s buttons and make them click … and click and click and click. It’s “one more turn” taken to the most obsessive extreme. And it is ungodly fun.

SimCity is an exercise in providing unlimited options through limiting choice. And if that sounds like an oxymoron, then welcome to the science of engineering addiction. At the outset, you are given a tantalizingly slim number of options. You may choose what sort of generic region you would like to play in, and then, where on that pleasingly blank map space to “plop” your city. Next up, you must build a road, which will become the backbone of that city. Zone part of that road as either residential, commercial or industrial and the little sims in the machine will do the rest, building buildings with gusto — and then demanding things. This is where the mania starts.

Your sim citizens want power, water, sewage and basic social services like fire and police. Health care. How religiously you provide these things is up to you, but the more deftly you are able to satisfy the needs of your sims, the more successful your city will become and the more fun you will have.

Sims pay you in tax money (simoleons) for the space they occupy in your city, and you then use those simoleons to pay for roads and services, or more fun things like a rocket-ship themed casino, or a streetcar line that does circles around your mayoral mansion. Once I saw under the hood of all that SimCity allows you to do, it was hard to restrain the urge to become a mad dictator, flogging my sims to produce more simoleons so that I could construct edifices to my own brilliance.

In comparing my experiences in SimCity to those of my colleagues, I noticed a strange thing: The cities we’d constructed (and ruined) sounded remarkably like cities in our real world. One of my first constructions was the town of West Pittssex, which had come blessed with a preponderance of underground oil. I drilled and used the proceeds to provide my sims with every conceivable luxury, thinking, foolishly, that the boom times would never end. They did of course, and what happened to West Pittssex afterward was horrifying (and fascinating) to observe.

Rampant industrialization led to unchecked disease. Sims died in droves, then the buildings they’d inhabited became abandoned. Raising taxes caused a collapse of the housing market and created a horde of wandering homeless sims. Parks became unusable. Abandoned dwellings caught fire. Entire neighborhoods crumbled. My dwindling police and fire services couldn’t keep up. My initial stimulus efforts failed. What had started as a monument to capitalism became a textbook example of urban apocalypse; a ruined shell of burned-out high-rises surrounding a hastily-constructed and un-used Expo Center, built with bond money that might never be repaid.

SimCity itself is deceptively easy to use. The user interface is intuitive enough to make finding what you need amidst a potentially complex array of options easy even at the most frenetic of times. I only very rarely felt lost for what button to press or which menu to find what service under. And while you can access fairly detailed tabulations of how much various things are costing versus how much benefit they are providing, if you don’t ever want to see those things, you’ll never need to. SimCity (at times annoyingly) holds your hand quite efficiently and provides alerts and advice whenever dire trouble looms. You can get into as much long-term trouble as you want - take out a bond to build a nuclear power plant in a town without an education system? OK, pal, it’s your nightmare - but try to plop a road in a way that won’t actually work, and the game will tell you why that can’t happen.

I was eventually able to revive West Pittssex, but only after founding a new city nearby and sharing resources, then methodically rebuilding, this time more carefully minding the budget. My two connected cities (and those of my nearby neighbors) now form a region. Some cities focus on industrial efforts, others on tourism, still others on other things. And the combined efforts of these disparate towns form an interconnected whole that is stronger than its parts.

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This is where SimCity’s “always on” connected play shows its strength. Cities in the same region can share services like police and dump trucks back and forth and even gift resources and simoleons. These connections are even more powerful between cities that share major roadways. The fun of cooperation will, of course, vary depending on with whom you are attempting to cooperate, but at first blush the amount of benefit versus potential mischief you will be able to inflict on your neighbors appears to be slanted towards beneficence. And the ability to create near-perfect simulations of existing small cities and towns (right down to traffic patterns) is truly amazing. Even thinking about the possibilities for applying this type of simulation to solving real world problems makes my head hurt. It is as much an education in miniature on the vast interconnectedness of every facet of our modern lives as it is a game.
Later, when the zombies came, I wished they’d done more damage
It is just a game, however, and so allowances are made for simplification and fun. You can, for example, experience the thrill of alien invasion, zombie apocalypse or meteor strike. Late into the evening / early morning during one play session, I watched as fiery streaks of death slashed across my screen and flaming space rocks obliterated my city. Panic. After scrambling to dispatch fire crews and hustling to demolish the rubble and rebuild, I realized I’d never had so much fun. Then later, when the zombies came, I wished they’d done more damage.

As for how satisfying the experience is as a whole, take this example: I missed a meeting. And it was my meeting. During the course of one play session, I literally became so absorbed in the experience that I lost all track of time and played through an entire afternoon, oblivious to the fact that a meeting I had scheduled approached and then passed. When I returned to my work station many, many hours later, I greeted my overflowing email inbox and the raft of polite (but concerned) inquiries as to my whereabouts with a serene, self-possessed calm. As if, whatever troubles the world might throw at me would be of little concern next to the travails I had experienced in West Pittssex.

Then, after a brief, but furiously energized bout of desk work, I went back to SimCity and did it all over again.

On “Always Online”

SimCity demands a constant connection to the EA servers, through Origin, in order to play. This can be problematic at times, but in my experience with SimCity, it was also (when it worked) seamless.

We reviewed SimCity with pre-release code provided by EA, and played on one of their reserved servers. Server inavailability was a minor issue, at first, but after a handful of false starts over the course of an afternoon I experienced no problems.

More problematic (for me) was my home network set-up and a wi-fi router that has taken to dropping connections of late. If you lose an internet connection while playing SimCity will most likely stop and you will be forced back to the loading screen. Sucks to be whatever sims you may have been trying to help or rescue. If you do not have a connection when you try to start playing, the game will not start.

While I did have one brief experience of being able to continue playing the game offline in a private server environment with no other invited players, in all other cases (about 8 separate times, over the course of three days) the game simply halted and waited, politely, for connectivity to be restored.

While an impromptu (but costly) router upgrade solved my wi-fi problem, the server issues were beyond my control, and the lesson lingered. It remains to be seen if EA’s servers will be up to the task of hosting however many simultaneous SimCity games will be played post-release. And those with unreliable internet connections may need to consider if the ability to play SimCity is worth an upgrade of either your service provider or equipment, which may be a cost too high to bear.

Wrap Up:

SimCity seems engineered to deliver maximum fun as efficiently as possible

SimCity is a near-perfect fusion of the classic simulation game with modern social and online play elements. It is in every way the fully realized evolution of the franchise and a much welcome iteration, perfectly engineered to dispense the maximum amount of fun in the most efficient way possible. It is highly addicting, but there are worse things to be addicted to. Just be sure to set an alarm.

SimCity was reviewed using pre-release code provided by Electronic Arts and Maxis on development servers. You can read more about the conditions of our SimCity review on our forums, and you can find additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.
About Polygon’s Reviews
Score History

4.0 Win

NEW! Update: 03/07/2013
SimCity review update 2

The question of whether or not EA would be able to support a large, enthusiastic audience for SimCity with a robust server system has been answered with a resounding “no,” at least for the time being.

Since the official release of SimCity I have repeatedly tried to replicate the experiences I had reviewing the game with pre-release code on EA’s development servers, and repeatedly I have not been able to — not entirely.

The server issues have been more troublesome, and have prevented me (and many players, we learned anecdotally) from connecting to the game at all. On launch day, during a period of roughly five hours, I experienced the same number of server-related game failures as in my entire 50 hours of review the game pre-release. That the experience of connecting to the game was, effectively, 10 times worse contributed to Polygon’s decision to lower the score for SimCity (from 9.5 to 8).

In all other respects, however, when I have been able to access the servers to play SimCity, the experience I have had with it post-launch has been the same as it was pre-launch.

Until today.

EA’s decision to remove certain features of the game in order to attempt to stabilize server performance has resulted in a dramatic change to the way SimCity is played and, in my experience, has not stabilized the server situation.

In attempting to play SimCity today, it took me over half an hour to load a game, during which time my connection to the servers dropped repeatedly, multiple attempts to load the city were aborted, and I finally had to “trick” the game into showing me (and then, finally, loading) my city by accessing the list of games present in the drop-down Origin profile menu. The main “Resume Game” button and the list of games in progress both would not show or load a city.

Even then, immediately after finally managing to load my city (New Pittssex), I received a notice that connection to the servers had dropped, suggesting my ability to actually load a game had been blind luck. Had the process taken a second or two longer, it would most likely not have loaded at all, as happened in approximately ten tries previously.

That said, the experience of connecting to a game and loading a city can not be said to be measurably worse (or better) than it has been since launch. Merely bad in a slightly different way. These same issues (and more) have been present since the game was released. What has changed is the experience of playing.

One of EA’s major changes to the game has been the removal of “Cheetah” mode. SimCity allows you to alter the speed at which time passes so that you can make changes to your city and then see the results more quickly, or slow things down to address problems in “slower than normal” time. There are three speed settings, and they are “Turtle,” “Llama” and “Cheetah.” Corresponding roughly to slow, normal and fast.

With the removal of Cheetah mode, SimCity is now stuck with merely slow and normal, which would at first not seem to be too great an imposition, but in reality has drastically changed the manner in which the game can be played. The short version of which is: It’s less fun.

EA has also (temporarily, they say) disabled SimCity’s leaderboards, which allow players to see how well they are doing against other players worldwide, and the achievements system. I was able to access the achievements I had unlocked previously, but I will not accrue any new ones with this feature turned off. That’s not a huge issue for me overall, but as a feature that was once present, but now is not, it’s a big deal.

More problematic are the leaderboards. For a game advertised to be connected and social experience, the loss of the ability to see how you rank against other players is devastating. And, more troubling, accessing neighboring cities and finding the cities of my friends, using the Origin Friends service, has taken a dramatic stability hit. Even attempting to load a neighboring city causes my game to crash.

Given this currently horrendous state of both accessibility and playability, and acknowledging the fact that even the drastic changes EA has made to the game in its attempts to address them haven’t worked, it is hard to continue to recommend SimCity. The experience currently on offer is now significantly altered from what was reviewed, and there is simply no guarantee that the existing server issues will go away, nor what further changes may be made to the game in order to address them. - Russ Pitts, Polygon Features Editor and SimCity reviewer

8.0 Win

Update: 03/05/2013
Simcity Review Update 1

As many worried, today’s launch of SimCity has brought a number of server woes and instability with it. Some players are unable to connect to EA’s servers to download the game. Others are unable to sign into SimCity’s always-online service to start a game. Others are suffering from disconnections while in-game, which often results in lost progress and bizarre glitches. Our own reviewer, Russ Pitts, has suffered disconnected sessions this afternoon that resulted in lost progress, corrupted avenue placement, and twin monster attacks.

After speaking with Russ and Polygon Managing Editor Justin McElroy, we are in agreement that the current state of SimCity merits an update to the game’s score on Polygon, per our reviews policy. While not every player is experiencing these problems, members of our staff, other members of the press, and an anecdotally large portion of our readership are having moderate to severe difficulty playing the game. This likely-temporary scenario nonetheless affects our recommendation of SimCity, and we advise caution for the time being before diving headfirst into the game. - Arthur Gies, Polygon Reviews Editor

9.5 Win

Initial Review: 03/04/2013
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Dark and Gritty, Dark and Gritty, Gark and Dritty

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Dark and Gritty, Dark and Gritty, Gark and Dritty

Dark and Gritty, dark and gritty, dark and gritty. Wenn man die Schlagworte oft genug wiederholt, bekommen sie in etwa dieselbe Bedeutungstiefe, die ihnen derzeit sowieso überall zukommt.

Dark and gritty, dark and gritty, gark and dritty. Dreieinhalb Millionen Suchergebnisse für die Phrase bei Google. Dark and gritty, wie meinen, überhaupt? Oder passender: Hä? “Dunkel und sandig-dreckig” - das perfekt passende schöne österreichische Wort “grindig” steht ja leider nicht allen Deutschsprechenden zur Verfügung -, mit diesem schönen Begriffspaar, das so perfekt als Schlagwort in jede PR-Aussendung passt, kann man in der Welt des Pop-Post-Zynismus so irgendwie alles beschreiben, was sich abgeklärt gegen den verächtlichen Feelgood-Popkonsum für Kinder positionieren will. Weil: Wir sind erwachsen! Doch, echt!

Dark and gritty ist in, weil - so raunt man - “realistisch” und in seiner Härte besonders unmittelbar. Das hat man heute so. (Wäre Nintendo nicht der stur japanische Monolith, der es ist, müsste man sich eventuell sogar vor einer düster-erwachsenen Super Mario-Iteration fürchten, in der Luigi als psychopathischer Pilz-Süchtiger mutierten Goombas per QTE den Schädel eintritt. ) Tatsächlich ist aber im derzeit überall hochschicken Dark-n-Gritty-Trallala eine so gewaltige Dosis Kitsch versteckt, dass man ob so viel vorgetäuschter Realität die Augen verdrehen muss. Hier wird das Leid mit der doppelten Kelle ausgeschenkt, Blut, Schweiß und Tränen mischen sich in immer gern gesehenen aparten Drecksfarbtönen zur Motivationspampe, aus der wir den Stoff, aus dem die Helden sind, wie aus gammeligem Plastillin herbeimodellieren können. Dark and gritty, dark and gritty - bei all der Härte ergibt sich die Motivation für die Gamescharaktere quasi von selbst!

Der Produzent von Tomb Raider, Ron Rosenberg, erklärte das, was man in der Gamesbranche wohl für subtile Charakterzeichnung hält, so:

The idea is to take a human character, this very vulnerable young girl, and put her through immense suffering in order for her to come out the other end of the experience as a hero. … It was important to show her as an innocent, vulnerable character at the beginning of the game. “People really identify with that,” Rosenberg said.

Und Darrell Gallagher erklärt weiters treuherzig:

“A big part of that journey is seeing some of the hits she’s taken along the way and why she had to get that inner strength and the inner core to become the woman that we all know. There is that sense of seeing it and being explicit about that. It’s part of the narrative.”

Soso. Die narrative verlangt’s, und als Gameskenner wissen wir: Wenn die Erzählung was erfordert, dann darf dem nichts im Wege stehen. Hier haben wir also eine Prequel-Lara, zart und unschuldig, noch weit entfernt vom - Jungs, geben wir’s zu: bedrohlich selbstbewussten - Sexgöttinnen-Image einer knarrenschwingenden Angelina Jolie, und die, sagen wir’s mal schnörkellos, kriegt jetzt so lange in die Fresse, bis sie durch dieses Stahlbad gegangen und auf der anderen Seite als jene Frau herausgekommen ist, die wir 1996 das erste Mal durch Pixelruinen geschickt haben.

Dark and gritty ist nicht gleich “realistisch” - es ist nur die Farbe, in der man diese Saison aktuell seine Polygone bemalt.

Liebe Gamesbranche, es gibt da ein Missverständnis: Nein, eine Story wird nicht dadurch “erwachsener” - was immer man sich darunter auch vorstellen mag -, wenn sie gewalttätiger, rauer oder in diesem schnöden Sinn “realistischer” verpackt ist. Dark and gritty ist nicht gleich “realistisch” - es ist nur die Farbe, in der man diese Saison aktuell seine Polygone bemalt. Seine Heldin, wie im neuen Tomb Raider, besonders demonstrativ leiden zu lassen, sie von einem schmerzhaften Schockmoment zum nächsten zu prügeln und so zur Leidensfrau zu machen, die sich, der Gameslogik1 zufolge, gerade durch diese Passion retroaktiv zu jener toughen Leitfigur der “Girl Power”-Konsumgemeinschaft des ausgehenden 20. Jahrhunderts mausert, ist jetzt nicht realistischer als oder auch nur nachvollziehbarer als die Motivation anderer Videospielhelden, sagen wir mal etwa jene des Frosches aus Frogger.

Aber klar, ein Popprodukt wie Lara Croft muss sich, wie ein James Bond, halt den Modeströmungen immer aufs Neue anpassen. Dark and gritty ist das neue Schwarz. Man müsste jedoch die grad aktuelle Mode nicht als narrativ notwendige Pseudopsychologie verkaufen. Denn dass diese doch leicht krude Variante der Charakterzeichnung wohl nicht unbedingt zu jener selbstbewussten Popcorn-Göttin, sondern realistischerweise zu einer vor lauter dark and gritty Erfahrungen leicht irritierbaren Traumatisierten führen würde, ist dann wohl schon etwas zu viel Realismus.

Denn logisch: Dark and gritty soll’s sein, aber es muss ja immerhin Spaß machen. Moment mal: Könnte da aber nicht eventuell irgendwo ein Widerspruch in sich …? Hinter dir, ein zweiköpfiger Affe!

Verfasst von rainer sigl am 7. März 2013 - 16:53

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Wot I Think: Tomb Raider

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By John Walker on March 6th, 2013 at 5:00 pm.

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Tomb Raider is out, and I’ve played the single player to the very end. How does Lara fare in this reboot of one of gaming’s most famous series? Here’s wot I think:

I don’t think there could be a more emblematic game of the divide gaming has taken in the last few years. In the blue corner are the traditionalists, the old-school, they who see gaming as something they control. In the red corner, the new-school, the neophites, they who see gaming as an experience to be guided through. Tomb Raider, a series traditionally set in the old, in this reboot of the franchise firmly enters the new. It’s got something it wants to show you, so could you please follow this way.

But let’s be clear – this isn’t Medal Of Honor. While Crystal Dynamics have created a game that frankly seems to resent letting you be in control every now and then, those moments do happen, there are extended sections where you can explore, challenge yourself, and most of all, play. And I think that’s the word that divides these two branches of gaming – play. It’s where Tomb Raider is at its absolute strongest, where it feels like something classic, yet technologically modern, free and explorable. It’s also what the game seems to be constantly fighting against letting you do.

So we’re meeting Lara for the first time, all over again. In the hands of the team who created the last superb trilogy, but with a fresh start, a new approach to the British heroine. Stranded on an island with a group of her explorer colleagues, quickly it becomes apparent that a small army of crazed shipwreckees are intent on killing anyone they see as an “outsider”. There’s something about some goddess, weird weather meaning anything that flies or floats nearby gets wrecked, and a clutter of other mumbojumbo that demands we run about climbing and shooting. Lara begins as a young, innocent girl, horrified at being forced to kill to save her own life, and then begins her inevitable journey into a grunting killing machine. (Although it’s a little more nuanced than that.)

It’s become quite well known that the first hour is notoriously filled with quick-time events (QTEs), button mashing, and a strict, linear path. CD themselves explained that we should not worry, that the previews of this portion were not representative of the full game, and it all opens out soon enough. Well, that’s only partially true. Yes, you absolutely can revisit previous areas of the island (using a fast travel option, should you wish), to scoop up any of the seventy trillion secret items scattered about, locate any “Optional Tombs” (puzzle-based vaults where you must manipulate the scenery to reach a treasure), and climb to the top of things to say that you did. But the game really doesn’t want you to. It wants you to keep going, to rescue the next person, to keep saving the day. The urgency with which you’re pressed to carry on means that to go off and explore is to shatter the thin veneer of a narrative it so desperately wants to have.

This narrative, which offers not a single twist, surprise, or even interesting notion, is shoved down your throat at every opportunity, the controls constantly wrestled from your hands as it crucially needs to take over to stop you from doing something it might not like. This is so deeply at the core of every element of the game that you can’t even shimmy along a ledge without the game doing the bits where you go past a pillar for you. Run toward a building and scoooop, control is stolen, the camera jerked upward, because you might not have looked up at the pretty thing they drew. It feels like a combination of arrogance and deep paranoia. “You might play the game wrong! Let me do it!”

For the first hour or so, I don’t remember being in complete control for more than about 30 seconds at a time. This certainly slows down later on, but never so I didn’t feel endlessly exasperated. Sometimes it’s so it can cram the next story element in – a room in which you think, “Okay, I’ll shoot him with an arrow, and then take them out with the rifle” suddenly becomes a cutscene in which Lara stands uselessly still while someone gets killed or captured. Other times, most of the time, it’s for no discernible reason whatsoever.

This scripting also means that Lara is repeatedly put in situations where she must run/slide/fall away from everything exploding and collapsing. (Never has one person fallen so far, so often. The brutality with which Croft is ceaselessly met is astonishing.) And during these sections your job is to move left or right to avoid obstacles, and sometimes jump. It’s enormously impressive, the scenery blowing up and tearing away, the fantastic physics very well shown off. But are you playing? Barely.

This all really cannot be emphasised enough, and I think perhaps is best captured by the following: The game decides when you run, walk, sprint, crawl, get weapons out, put them away, light torches, put them out… There literally isn’t a crawl button in the game, because it’s going to do that for you. And most peculiar of all, there’s no indication from the game when it’s in control or you are. On some occasions I’ve found myself embarrassed to realise I’ve not been controlling things for a while, like a kid in a service station, thinking they’re steering the arcade car while “INSERT COIN” flashes on the screen. On many others I was killed because I wasn’t aware it had stopped playing for me, and didn’t know it was my turn to press forward again. Games do that widescreen borders thing for a reason, Crystal.

And this is such a massive shame, because when you are playing, damn, it’s great. Despite the addition of upgradeable weapons, and some RPG-ish XP-based stats for Lara, it’s actually remarkably similar to the previous Tomb Raiders from the developer. There are puzzle-climbing sections, and there are shooty-bang sections. No one ever wanted the latter in any of the previous eight hundred Tomb Raider games, but they were darned well included anyway. This time, while I’m pretty sure no one on Earth would have cared if they were ditched entirely, instead they’ve had the rather bright idea to make them actually decent. Yes, it becomes yet another cover shooter, but the bow and arrow is great fun to use, and the rest of the weapons are ludicrously powerful. I think there’s too much of it, where more tombs and exploring would always have been preferable, but at least this time out it’s not an absolute chore.

But what’s really great is still the exploring. Crystal Dynamics have proved a number of times just how smart they are at creating challenges, setting up location-based puzzles and letting you explore to solve them. Here Tomb Raider shines. Yes, it’s still entirely artificial, with ledges and beams you can use ludicrously painted white (thanks helpful locals!), and the rope-able sections all mysteriously perfectly placed to allow progress. When something is wrecked, it just so happens to be wrecked in a way that creates a new path! But none of that really matters, because it’s about offering a playground. When the first game that offers truly free climbing and exploring appears it’ll be the greatest day in history, but in the meantime, no one does it as slickly as CD.

So I’m left utterly bemused why they seemed to want to bury it so deeply.

Something should be said for the portrayal of Lara. Yes, obviously things go from her being terrified to have killed a guy, to killing them in their dozens. But it’s not deserving of the scorn some have offered. Lara is portrayed as suffering throughout. It’s seriously gruesome what she’s subjected to, endlessly smashing through roofs and walls, gashed, punched, and bruised. And it feels like it too. She’s never happy (apart from when opening boxes containing relics, when she creepily breaks from whatever horrors she’s facing and excitedly describes a coin to you), always hurting, and never confident. And that makes an important difference. While she’s surrounded by dreadful stereotypes and pantomime villains, her state of mind is gently portrayed. And the interesting effect of this is, no matter how many you kill, she never seems to like it. It always feels regrettable, like it’s eating at her soul. Of everything this game does well, this is its highest achievement.

Things are pretty unrelentingly bleak, too. While the dipshit friends offer nothing but glib nonsense (albeit well acted in the main), the grim weather, sparse lands, and phenomenal amount of gore-strewn corpses certainly set a tone. In fact, there are so many dead bodies that I’m pretty sure this remote island must once have been the most populated place on Earth.

The upgrade system is fairly pointless. It may as well have been just added skills as you progress, since it’s pretty difficult not to have enough XP and salvage to grab everything on offer as you play. But still, you get to choose the order in which you add them, so if you’re especially keen on being able to beat a man to death with an axe, you can opt for that before you improve how long you can hold an arrow in a bow. Really, nothing makes a dramatic difference to the game itself, not least because what you actually do to progress is so heavily scripted that it couldn’t allow it to.

I’m left just bewildered that the most fun I’ve had with the game is going back to sections I’ve already played. This time I’m actually allowed to enjoy them properly, without characters screaming at me to go a certain way, do a certain thing, and the controls endlessly taken from me. Sure, to do so is to abandon what a character has just screamed at you that you need to do, but it’s worth it just to enjoy the game that’s buried beneath the noise. And crucially, once the game’s over you can go back to any area to do so, meaning you can allow the nose-dragging to pull you past without worrying you’re going to miss out.

It looks stunning for a game designed for current-gen tech, and it’s important to note that Nixxes have done another great job for Square, ensuring the game takes advantage of what a PC can do over a console. Although the much trumpeted “TressFX” designed to give Lara realistic hair is absolutely crippling on powerful NVidia cards. Created by AMD, it really seems to only be an option for their own cards. (And it looks epically silly, too.) Also, despite a pretty powerful rig, putting things above the “quite good” details saw things really struggle. Turn things up to the max and I wasn’t offered a slideshow, so much as received a single postcard. I think things could have been better optimised, and perhaps the next set of graphics drivers will see to that.

It creates such an odd space. Tomb Raider is a theme park ride, but one where you can get off and go back to look around the ghost towns you’ve left behind. It’s a game for the new crowd, but clearly with hankerings to be part of the old. When you first see that island map, and the quick travel points, it’s hard not to think you’ve got yourself a Far Cry 3-style thing here, something that will let you encounter the game in your own way, with a main story running through. But that certainly isn’t the case. The story, which you could predict in its entirety from the opening cutscene (let’s just say that of the collection of stereotypes you have with you, none deviates from their inevitable path), doesn’t offer any reward for this obsessive control-freakery.

With the game making every decision for you – and I feel the need to stress this again – even deciding when you run, walk or crawl, some will argue it all allows this rollercoaster ride to be as smooth as possible. It all allows you to be swept along by the experience, to be wowed by the epic scenery and breathtaking destruction. But me – I want to play.

When it let me, I had a really good time. When it didn’t, well, I sat back in my chair and wondered what I was doing here.

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Tomb Raider Review

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Lara Croft Is Dead, Long Live Lara Croft: Reflections On Tomb Raider

by Becky Chambers | 12:27 pm, March 8th, 2013

On Tuesday, I sat in front of my computer, not playing the new Tomb Raider. I had preloaded the game on Steam days before. I was wearing comfy pants. I had prepared some snacks. I was alone in my apartment. Nothing was preventing me from clicking “Play.” Yet my attention was focused away from the screen, just a few inches from my keyboard. You see, on my desk, I have five small pieces of artwork, each featuring a game character that serves as a touchstone for my personal history. The second of these is Lara Croft.

I was eleven years old when my grandma handed me the PlayStation she’d won in a raffle. It came with two games — some sports game I never played, and Tomb Raider, which I devoured. I had been raised on point-and-clicks and early ‘90s edutainment games. None of those had thrown snarling wolves and fast-moving death traps at me, or punished my mistakes with the sound of crunching bones. No game had given me such a visceral sense of adventure and danger. And no story I had seen — movies, books, or otherwise — had ever told me that a woman was allowed to be cast in such a role. She was Indiana Jones, but witty, measured, sophisticated. She shot first and asked questions later. She screamed only when seconds from death. She never, ever needed saving.

She could do anything.

But something had changed by the time I got my hands on Tomb Raider 2. I had changed. Two things had come into my life in between those games — the internet, and puberty. My knowledge of sexuality was flimsy, but I had come to understand that a woman with large breasts and skimpy clothing meant something. I vividly remember digging through Tomb Raider fansites, trying to find help for a puzzle I was stuck on, when all of a sudden, there was Lara, sprawled naked and winking at me. In that moment, my hero transformed. The feeling that I was treading into forbidden territory grew as I continued through the game, and in that final scene, with Lara poised to take a shower, saying “Don’t you think you’ve seen enough?” — I understood.

Lara Croft was not meant for me.

As I grew older and her name became synonymous with video game cheesecake, my admiration for Lara faded into conflicted nostalgia. I loved how I had first seen her. I did not love what she had become. But in late 2010, a friend sent me a piece of concept art from a new game by Crystal Dynamics, still in early development. It showed a young woman, reasonably dressed and realistically proportioned, wielding a bow and arrow. Her skin was covered in dirt, blood, bandages. She looked back at me with gritty conviction. I stared at the screen for a long time, a smile spreading across my face. She did not look like the Lara I knew. She looked like me. The Lara I had imagined, the Lara I had always wanted — she was going to happen.

That was the belief I was holding onto when controversy hit E3 last year. I read the offending remarks, and watched the corresponding trailer. Though I couldn’t pass judgment on a game I hadn’t played, I was deeply concerned. That concern grew when I saw the gameplay trailers of a screaming, struggling woman tossed unceremoniously through gloomy passageways. What about that was heroic? And where were the puzzles, the pistols, the places to explore? With a sense of resigned disappointment, I became convinced that the game would probably suck.

I preordered it anyway, partly out of stubborn curiosity, mainly because I knew I’d be writing about it one way or the other. Some extended gameplay footage and promising interviews with lead writer Rhianna Pratchett encouraged me, but I remained dubious, afraid of getting my hopes up. In the run-up to release, I played Tomb Raider: Anniversary, a polished repackaging of the original game. It took no time for me to remember why my younger self had adored Lara. She’s cool and cocky, fearless to a fault. But it was clear, too, that I had filled in a lot of blanks on my own. The original incarnation of Lara Croft is not a layered one. There’s no backstory, no real motivation beyond thrill seeking. I didn’t need anything more than that at the age of eleven, but nowadays, I am not so easily satisfied. And so, with equal parts hope and dread, I held my breath, and finally clicked “Play.” Having long since exhaled, I can now say this with certainty:

The new Tomb Raider is absolutely fantastic.

Forget everything you’ve read about Lara needing your protection. Forget about her needing to be “broken down.” It’s nonsense, all of it, the remnants of some truly misguided remarks about a character who is, without a doubt, one of the best action heroes I’ve ever seen. Not female action heroes — action heroes, period, full stop.

This is not the Lara Croft of old. That Lara was a treasure hunter, a bored rich girl who saw archaeology as a sport, who reacted to charging monsters with a raised eyebrow. Her successor is a devoted scholar — a history geek if ever there was one — resourceful, empathetic, and yes, very much afraid. But worry not, this is Tomb Raider’s masterful trick: It manages to show Lara as frightened and vulnerable without ever taking away her power. Her fear is not weakness. It’s humanity. It’s what makes you cheer her on all the more as she fights ever onward, as she yells, “I’m still alive, you bastards!” Giving up never crosses her mind, not once. She didn’t need me to push her along. She was the one pulling me.

As for Lara being “broken,” what I saw was quite the opposite. This isn’t a story about a person coming undone. This is a story about a person discovering the strengths she’s had all along. By contrast, there are broken people in this game — the island’s inhabitants, who responded to adversity by becoming less than human. Lara, on the other hand, chooses to become something more. I mentioned this to a friend after we both finished playing. “If she had broke,” he said, “the game would’ve ended.”

The interplay between Lara and her crewmates further cements her place as a laudable female protagonist. Not only does the game pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors, but it does so with a multiracial cast. Her friends respect her, but they also question her, for they, too, are human. When they doubt her, it is not for her gender, but for her inexperience. No one hits on her, or comments on her appearance. When they admire her, they speak of her instincts and intellect. They are the final brick in the old Lara’s tomb.

Yes, the game is violent, and yes, Lara gets the living daylights kicked out of her, again, and again, and again. Bear with me, here — I saw that as a good thing. Put a male character in Lara’s blood-spattered shoes, and no one would so much as blink. Have you seen what Issac Clarke has been through lately? (Don’t click that link if you’ve got a weak stomach.) And for every injury Lara suffers, she returns the favor tenfold. During a fight, I heard an NPC yell, “Is it her?” Another replied: “I’m not going out there!” Lara’s badassery cannot be called into question. The violence in Tomb Raider is on par with what you’ll see in Dishonored, or Assassin’s Creed, or any other mature action game (not to mention that the gameplay mechanics are smooth as butter, and exactly my cup of tea). By putting Lara in an environment every bit as brutal as those of her contemporaries, she can stand proudly as one of them.

That is not to imply that Lara is a male character placed in a woman’s body. I believed Lara as a human being, but I also believed her as a woman. Something within me related to her almost right off the bat. This is a character who manages to retain her femininity — oh my god, I can’t believe I’m about to write this about Lara Croft — without becoming objectified. There are times when the camera frames her differently than it might a male character, but in a broad sense, I felt that Tomb Raider lets its players decide whether or not to sexualize its protagonist. Unlike its predecessors, it does not make that decision for us.

As for that scene, it is true that last year, the game’s executive producer stated plainly that Lara faces characters who “try to rape her,” implying that it was a defining moment in her character development. I don’t have room here to explain the plethora of things that are wrong and insulting about that (and if you really don’t understand, I’d suggest starting here). Thing is, nothing of the sort happens in this game. There is no rape, attempted or otherwise, in Tomb Raider. What does happen is the clip everyone has seen, in which a man strokes Lara’s side and a struggle breaks out. That raised some major red flags for me when I first saw it, but having played the scene in full (several times)…honestly, in a world where those comments had never been made, I doubt I would be writing about it now at all. For those who don’t mind some light spoilers, here’s how it goes down (highlight to read):

The island Lara and her comrades are shipwrecked on is home to a bloody, murderous cult, whose handiwork Lara has been crawling through from the first playable moments of the game. These people don’t just enjoy killing — they revel in it. Pools bobbing with corpses, bone-stacked altars littered with gore, the whole nine yards. Shortly after Lara finally catches up with members of her crew, they’re rounded up by the cultists. And then the killing begins. In what was one of the most harrowing stealth sequences I have ever played, Lara has to get out of the camp without being seen — hands bound, no weapons, people dying in the background. It is a tense, terrifying experience, made all the worse by having seen firsthand what these people will do to Lara if they find her. And one of them does. He briefly runs his hand down her side and whispers in her ear. If you do nothing, this sharply transitions into him strangling her. If you fight back, and fail, he shoots her in the head. If you succeed, Lara gains control of the gun, and kills him. The only reactionary thought I had during the scene, even having seen it before, even with months of controversy and concern rattling around in my head, was “Oh shit, get away, he’s going to kill you.”

The impression I was left with was not of a rapist, but of a madman savoring a kill. This is a type of scene I’ve seen in many movies and TV shows — a villain caressing a victim right before murdering them (interestingly, I think you’d be more likely to see that with a female villain). That’s a trope we could pick apart at length, but in terms of this story, I found the scene inconsequential alongside everything else that happens. It does not define Lara, it is not what makes her a hero, and it is not what drives her. Without the hullabaloo, it would not have made much of an impact on me (the creepy guy, that is; the stealth sequence was brilliant).

Now, I’m sure there are others who may see it differently, and some who won’t want to play through that scene no matter what the context. That’s okay. To argue against someone’s personal comfort zone would be grossly unfair. At the same time, I strongly feel that the comments made at E3 did not accurately reflect the content of the game, nor the narrative effect of that scene. As far as I’m concerned, the controversy can be filed away under misrepresentation and bad PR. (Oh, how I wish this trailer had come out sooner than a week ago. Freaking chills.)

Returning to the game as a whole, I must point out that there are indeed a number of ways in which Lara is portrayed differently than a man would be. You’d be hard-pressed to find a male action hero shown panting with fear, shaking with cold, holding his best friend’s hand reassuringly, or any of the many other emotive things we see Lara do. That’s not a mark against Tomb Raider. That’s a mark against how other heroes are written. What I found here was a character far more believable than all of the gravely-voiced, iron-jawed, emotionless dudes out there. Lara felt flawed and mortal, and for that, I admired her perseverance all the more. After the countless times I’ve wished to see a leading lady given the same chance as the gents, now the shoe’s on the other foot. I’d love to see a fixed-gender male protagonist portrayed with as much honesty and depth as Lara Croft.

There’s a glorious moment near the end (which I will not spoil) where it’s made clear that this Lara has fully taken up the mantle of the one who came before. I realized then that this game had given me more than I could’ve hoped for — not redemption for the girl I was, but resonance with the woman I am now. As the credits rolled, I thought back to an earlier scene, in which one of her crewmates laughs triumphantly and says, “Lara Croft, you’re my hero.”

Mine too, buddy. Mine too.

Becky Chambers is a freelance writer and a full-time geek. Like most internet people, she has a website. She can also always be found on Twitter.

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The PA Report - Tomb Raider’s writer discusses the press, gender, and Lara Croft’s body count

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Tomb Raider’s writer discusses the press, gender, and Lara Croft’s body count

Ben Kuchera / Tue, Mar 5, 2013

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Rhianna Pratchett wrote Mirror’s Edge, Heavenly Sword, and Overlord, but her biggest project may be the just-released Tomb Raider reboot. We loved the game, and couldn’t wait to pick her brain about the character, the press’ reaction to preview footage, and how gender has informed coverage of the game.

Ben Kuchera: What was your relationship with Lara Croft before you started writing this game?

Rhianna Pratchett: It was a checkered history, I guess. I loved the first game, I played the second, the Tomb Raider 3 launch was my first ever industry event, but I sort of lost interest in the franchise. I objected to the way she had sort of become oversexualized by the wider media. Not necessarily the games, but everything else around them.

For example, in the Prima Strategy Guide it’s got old Lara in sexy positions on every other page. She became a sort of pinup, and that overshadowed the games for me. She became a victim of her own success in some ways. The mythology goes that the size of the boob was a pixel slip, and she wasn’t designed to be hugely sexualized, she just became that way.

And that kind of put me off as a younger female gamer. I’m not saying that I didn’t miss out on some great stuff, but you find other games, you try other things. I was aware of her, you’re always aware of Lara Croft, but I hadn’t played one in a long time.

When I was first contacted by Crystal Dynamics I thought I would have to play everything, but they actually preferred it like this. I had knowledge of Lara Croft, I had some idea of her background, but I wasn’t burdened down by feeling that I had to adhere to everything that came before. They wanted to start again, they wanted a blank slate, and they wanted a writer who could deliver that.

So after the last blowup, have you been instructed not to use the word “rape” in interviews?

No. No. No one has ever actually told me what to say or not to say. I don’t think it’s an appropriate word to use for that scene. That was part of the problem. It was genuinely never meant to be talked about in that way. There was a lot of speculation about how this was just cynical PR and was deliberately described that way to create news and hits, absolutely not.

No one wanted it described like that, at all. Since I hadn’t been announced as the writer there was literally nothing I could do apart from watch people, like your good self, be very annoyed about it, and actually understand, as I was a former journalist and kept asking myself what I would be upset about and what would I be angry about what would I have questions about. I had to watch people trashing my work, assuming I was a white, male, American straight man. There was a lot of assumptions about who had put it in and why, that were wrong, really. Absolutely wrong.

I understand why people were upset about it, and frustrated, but I think it was more about the sentiments expressed suggesting that players couldn’t empathize with Lara, or they wanted to protect her. I know from working in games for such a long time that the players’ relationship with the player character is fairly unique. I’m not going to say that no player is going to be protective towards Lara, but certainly some players, myself included, I feel like I am Lara. I am Raz in Psychonauts. I am a Tauren Druid in World of Warcraft.

There’s no one way of summing up the relationship between players and player characters, so I can see why some people would have problems with words like “protect,” even though that was never linked to that one scene in the interview. People did link it, and I think players do, both male and female, do empathize as Lara and see themselves as Lara. No one has instructed to say or not say anything about that scene. So I’m allowed to talk about it.
It has to be frustrating though. When it was announced that you were writing the game, there was almost relief, like ‘we’re fine because a woman is writing a game’. It instantly became non-problematic because of that.

It’s not fine because I’m a woman. It’s fine because we approached it with the right creative sentiments. It was an honest scene for those characters and that moment. It wasn’t done for titillation. It wasn’t prolonged. It was uncomfortable because it should be uncomfortable. Killing someone and being put in that situation and having to kill someone should be uncomfortable. Now that I’ve had the chance to talk about it and where we’re coming from… lots of journalists haven’t played that scene in context.

They hadn’t seen the reactions of Lara, which were cut down in that trailer, and so few people could understand that scene in context, so there was a lot of assumptions and a lot of finger-pointing in the industry press, and I thought, ‘Good people, this is what we accuse the wider media of doing to us all the time!’ Assumptions without context, and you’re doing exactly the same.

But it’s been a valuable debate. It’s been interesting topic, the way we talk about players and player characters, and the way we talk about female characters. No one has been happy with how it was described, and how it came out but there was value in it.

It seems like there’s a double standard here. We write endless articles about how we want to see more female heroes, and then when we do we’re never willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. We nit pick them in a way we don’t male heroes.

I think it’s expected in some ways. I think Lara gets the kind of scrutiny Nathan Drake doesn’t go through, for example. And she’s precious to a lot of people, as well as being such a famous action hero, she’s been a big part of a lot of people’s lives, the franchise has been going on for 17 years now. They’re attached to her, and the character as they see her, and obviously we’re doing some things differently.

There was a lot of picking things apart, and I do understand that, but it became so much about gender so quickly. In some ways it was unavoidable, you can’t avoid that with Lara Croft, and obviously with a female writer behind her.

I saw blog posts speculating that I was a man hater, I saw blog posts speculating that I was a woman hater, it was just… it was crazy watching it from this side, and not being able to go, ‘hey look, can we calm down and talk about this’? By the time I was announced as the writer a lot of people had made up their mind, as people tend to believe the first thing they hear.

There was a very real fear we were going to play this Hostel-style game where we just see Lara being victimized for ten hours. Especially with the way it was described to us in interviews, we were told they were going to broke the character, and she would be reborn, and we would want to protect her. I think a lot of people were scared that we had lost this very able, confident character, and we’d see someone be brutalized, and at the end out pops a hero. We never see the rest of the story, where she comes into her own power.

Right, and I always steered away from using the words “breaking down,” because it has very negative connotations. I described it by saying we rewound her. We didn’t take away the traits everyone associates with Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, we just wound her back when those traits were beneath the surface.

She was not quite aware of what she was capable of, and that comes out during the game. I don’t think we’ve taken things away, we’ve just taken her back further than we’ve seen her before. The first few hours of the game, particularly the starting hour, is quite dark and desperate. She doesn’t have any weapons, she’s completely out of her depth, we go a long time without actually giving the player a gun.

That’s the other thing people remarked on in our review, and Uncharted struggles with this immensely. The line between having a vulnerable character coming to grips with the situation, and her taking on platoons of characters is very short. Is there a way to handle that dissonance in what almost becomes an action game?

I think it’s hard. There’s always a balancing act. I think the narrative team would have liked to see that as a slower ramp up. That time between the first kill and lots of kills, I think we would have liked to see that slower paced. But, this isn’t always about narrative.

It’s not a narrative-led game or a game play-led game. Crystal Dynamics always talks about it being a journey-led game. We found through play testing that as soon as you gave players a gun, they wanted to use it. It was very difficult to let Lara have a gun and then go for fifteen minutes without letting her use it properly.

The first hour you go without a gun, the bow is very cool, and many players just stuck to the bow and got a lot of enjoyment out of that. But going for that length of time without weapons, in the cave section there are no weapons at all, and solving puzzles, and getting to know the environment, and then you get a bow. I think that was quite impressive, we got a long way without a gun, and then you let loose with the gun. We found once the player got a gun the players wanted to use it.

I’m not going to pretend that we solved the problems. We took a few steps in the right direction. We showed what happened with the character before hand, and that’s all important to the character. She has been through a lot by the time she gets a gun, she has been through quite a few challenges against the environment and other humans. She’s building up to this kind of point anyway.

It’s so hard to do, and somewhat out of my jurisdiction to a degree. I think we’ll look at it more closely in the future. Baby steps.

We’ll have more from this interview in the coming days.

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On Lara Croft

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Tomb Raider has been marketed shamefully. From trailers that focused on Lara being battered and broken, to hands-on features full of sexual gags on Conan O’Brien (http://youtu.be/xCe8-1dbXZc), it’s clear that the marketing team behind this new game are well versed in what works for an audience of thrill-killing sexists. And let’s be frank – that audience is responsible for a large percentage of video game sales.

But this game deserved better. It’s a triumph.

I almost passed on Tomb Raider, because I found the pre-release hoopla so vile. It was only when some trusted friends told me how good it was, and how wrong my preconceptions of it were, that I decided to try it. I’m glad I did, because it’s an important chapter in the history of one of the most well-known videogame characters. The first genuinely meaningful chapter, if we’re at all interested in characterisation within videogames.

Lara Croft meant different things to different people. To some women, she represented a turning point. She was a positive force. Cara Ellison illustrated this beautifully recently - http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12/19/gaming-made-me-tomb-raider/ To many men she was a pair of tits in a cave. An arse crawling through the dark. A thing to giggle over and abuse.

To me, she was nothing. Not really. I liked her for being a female character, at least there was that, but she was a ridiculously proportioned thing. A cartoon. I couldn’t relate to her at all, because she was like no woman I knew. Tomb Raider, for me, was about the tombs. The atmosphere of the caves. The world. I couldn’t find my way in to Lara Croft. I just didn’t buy that character at all. A gaming icon? Really?

I can tell you that this new game has given me exactly what I wanted from Tomb Raider. An incredible world, with every location feeling real and heavy with threat and history. A place to get lost in. Playing on PC, my finger’s always moving to that screenshot key. The people who made this game understood Tomb Raider, and cared deeply about the project. I see that now.

But what about Lara?

This Lara Croft is different. She’s terrified. She’s cold, shivering in the rain. She can barely balance as she walks over a narrow beam. She constantly tells herself “You can do this. You can do this.” She looks towards her mission objectives and her brow furrows and her eyes fill with dread. She kills a deer for food and then apologises to it. She kills maybe a hundred men, and you never feel like she enjoys it. You feel like she had to do it, and that you are her, and that you are scared, and that you had to do it.

She is a hero with vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability in video games usually comes in the form of a big red flashing weak point in an enemy robot’s armour. Character vulnerability is a no-no. The audience, that audience, doesn’t want it. Look at Raiden, from Metal Gear Solid 2. I can remember the response to this character at the time. Gamers on internet forums called him a “pussy” and a “faggot” because he expressed his insecurities and doubted himself. He was “whiny” and a “girl”. The audience, that audience, likes its heroes strong and sure. And male.

Playing this new Tomb Raider, I stopped thinking about the whole LARA IS A WOMAN thing about an hour in. Her gender looms too large in the discussion of this game. I was thrilled purely by the fact that I was playing as a character who expected to fail, and wasn’t sure they could survive. A character who felt real. Sure, she gets beaten and battered as she moves through the story of the game, but seen in context there is no controversy here. If this was a male character, we’d just be watching our hero in a desperate position, in a terrible place, surviving terrible people.

But it wouldn’t be a man, would it? That’s the thing. And it’s nothing to do with the sexualisation of violence against females (we’ll come to that shortly). It wouldn’t be a man because the audience isn’t mature enough for that yet. I think a large portion of the gaming audience would entirely reject a male hero suffering as Lara does in this Tomb Raider. This Tomb Raider guy, let’s call him Larry, would be another internet pussy. He’d have to be completely changed up in the sequel. He’d need to be given cyborg arms and sent back to that island with a rocket launcher and a cute female assistant flirting on the radio.

This brilliantly written game (and I never expected to write those words) has given gaming one of its most grown-up characters, but it had to do it by stealth. Rhianna Pratchett sneaked something important past the industry’s dinosaur gatekeepers.

The brilliance of this new Tomb Raider is that it kills the whole gender debate over Lara Croft stone dead. I said that she once meant different things to different people. Now I think she might represent one thing to everyone – a step forward in characterisation within videogames. She’s not a female icon. Not a male pin-up. She’s an evolutionary milestone. Lara Croft genuinely matters now.

So why did the marketing team so completely undercut that message? And why are they still doing it?

When I saw that first footage, with Lara yelping and groaning and falling and being flung through everything in sight, I was horrified. TORTURE PORN, I said. SEXUALISED VIOLENCE, I said. Within the game, it’s all presented beautifully. Nothing exploitative. It’s a story, in actual fact, about inner strength.

I could bang on about the people who edited those trailers together, and what it says about them that they presented this great story in such a manner. But I think it’s more helpful that I ask what it says about me. Why do I associate a woman being battered and beaten into submission with porn? Why do I see a woman being tied up and dragged around as sexualised imagery?

I’m a man. And to be a man is to understand that you’ve been brainwashed from birth. The default sexual role for a man, we’re instructed, is to be sexually dominant. As a teenager, I remember us all talking about the things we would do to “THAT”. Women referred to as objects. “I’d split that wide open.” I remember saying that when I was fourteen, before I’d ever even kissed a girl. Those words actually came out of my mouth, when I was a child. Even now, as a 35 year old man, there is that side to me – thrilled by dominance and total power. I think it’s important to recognise it.

If you remove those scenes of Lara Croft tied up, battered, and crawling through the dirt from all context? Well, that part of me that is sexually unmoderated responds to that. My more complete whole rejects it, but that part still responds. It still lights up. And those marketing people get that. They understand it completely.

It is wrong serving wrong. And it has to change.

Game creators, like all creators in every field, can play a part in questioning the perceived wants and needs of their audience. The people who made this new Tomb Raider have done their part. I’m sure they didn’t choose how it was marketed. I hope that with the inevitable sequel the publisher lets the game, and the writing, speak for itself.

Lara Croft. Gaming icon. For real this time.

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» Verstummter #Aufschrei 99leben

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Verstummter #Aufschrei

Veröffentlicht: 28.02.2013 | von: loess | Rubrik: Diskurs, Diversity

Wer hätte gedacht, dass ausgerechnet eine plumpe Bemerkung von FDP-Schnarchnase Rainer Brüderle für das erste richtige deutsche Twitter-Phänomen sorgen würde? Ein Mann, der wohl so schnell keine Frau mehr für ihren wohlgeformten Oberkörper komplimentieren wird, zu heftig und überbordend gestaltete sich im Anschluss schließlich eine neue, wie aus dem Nichts entstandene Sexismus-Debatte, die vom Online-Kurznachrichtendienst aus auch in die etablierten Massenmedien Einzug hielt. Nicht nur hierzulande scheint man allgemein sensibler zu reagieren, wenn es um dieses zu lange vernachlässigte Thema geht. Im Zuge von Abtreibungsdebatten und schier unfassbaren Äußerungen zu Vergewaltigungsfolgen aus dem republikanischen Lager hat sich Sexismus auch in den USA von einer Randdebatte zu einem Mainstreamdiskurs entwickelt. Bill Gardner, Design Director für das kommende Bioshock Infinite, hat davon scheinbar nicht so viel mitbekommen und macht sich unbewusst zu einem Brüderle der Gamesindustrie, der Dekolleté vor Design setzt, ohne dass es bisher jemanden großartig zu kümmern scheint. Bevor es völlig unterzugehen droht, fange ich dann mal an zu schreien.

Zum Design von Elizabeth, der weiblichen Hauptperson des dritten Bioshock-Teils, erleuchtet uns der wandelnde Altherrenwitz Gardner mit folgender Charakterdesignweisheit, die schon Baywatch zu internationalem Prestige verholfen hat:

“Originally we had a very different outfit for her, and it was a little bit more true to the period. And I thought, ‘a user is going to look at this and be like, why the hell would I want to hang around with her?’ She wasn’t attractive at all. Revisiting that to keep it true to the time, but also so it has a little bit of appeal to the modern eye.”  - Bill Gardner

Ein Satz, wie ein Schlag mit der flachen Hand in Alice Schwarzers Gesicht. Es sei laut Gardner also sehr schwer vorstellbar, dass ein Spieler sich für die weibliche Hauptfigur seines Spiels interessiert, wenn diese im historischen Kontext authentische Kleidung trägt, da diese nicht “attraktiv” genug auf moderne Augen wirke. Oder wie man im Internet zu sagen pflegt: Tits or gtfo! Der Chefdesigner eines solch großen Titels geht also nach wie vor davon aus, dass der durchschnittliche Spieler pubertär, männlich und absolut oberflächlich ist, weshalb dieses zugeknöpfte Outfit doch besser durch dieses offenherzige Schmuckstück komplettiert wird. Mensch, die Elizabeth, die könnte aber auch wirklich guat a Dirndl ausfüllen!

Der oben zitierte Satz zeigt aber auch eine in Schieflage geratene Prioritätensetzung bei der Erschaffung eines Spiels, denen Gamedesigner immer wieder zu erliegen scheinen. Statt glaubhafte Charaktere zu kreieren, die sich nahtlos in das gegebene Setting einfügen, werden stilistische Ungereimtheiten, wie in dem Fall ein nicht wirklich angebrachter Ausschnitt, in Kauf genommen, damit ein Spiel zugänglicher für eine überholte Vorstellung der Kernzielgruppe wird. Es scheint in den Köpfen der immer noch größtenteils männlichen Entwicklerriege eine undenkbare Vorstellung zu sein, dass Gamer nicht zwangsläufig einen Penis haben und sich dieser auch nicht wie selbstverständlich über Pixeltitten freut. Gerade ein atmosphärisch so eindrucksvolles Universum wie das von Bioshock leidet unter solch antiquierten Klienteleinschätzungen und verliert so schnell an Glaubwürdigkeit und Immersion. Sicher, noch ist es nicht erschienen und wer weiß schon, wie sehr ein solches Detail die Atmosphäre wirklich in Mitleidenschaft zieht, doch kann man wohl durchaus davon ausgehen, dass der virtuelle Kleiderschrank von Elizabeth nicht die einzige Designentscheidung gewesen ist, die aufgrund von möglichem Zielgruppenappeal getätigt wurde.

AK statt Armenspeisung

Spielend abnehmen!

Hupen gegen Sexismus!

Head Shot von Heidi

Bill Gardner ist leider aber nur eines von vielen Irrlichtern in der Spielebranche, das die zunehmende Pluralisierung der Spielerdemographien verschlafen hat und das narrative Potenzial des Mediums durch derlei oberflächliche Reizüberflutung zu verwässern droht. In Max Payne 3 sind Frauen nicht viel mehr als hirnamputierte Partymäuschen, deren Leben hauptsächlich aus Shoppen gehen und entführt oder bedroht werden besteht, während beim männlichen Protagonisten des Spiels immerhin noch versucht wird, eine etwas tiefergehende Charakterisierung zu erzielen. In Hitman: Absolution sind Frauen überwiegend hintergrundlose Prostituierte oder ketzerische, waffenschwingende Dominas in heißen Nonnenkostümen,  die dem feuchten Traum eines 14-jährigen Messdieners entsprungen sein könnten. Die Liste lässt sich beliebig fortführen, aber ich denke es ist klar, worauf ich hinaus will. Dabei ist gar nicht mal alles so schlecht, wenn man einfach nur die Entwicklung der männlichen Figuren in den Spielen der letzten Jahre betrachtet. Mit Alan Wake, Max Payne 3 und allen voran dem verzweifelten Dreiergespann aus Spec Ops: The Line gibt es immer mehr Titel, die einen nicht einfach nur in die Rolle des muskelbepackten, emotionslosen Rambos schlüpfen lassen, sondern ein deutlich vielschichtigeres Charakterdesign präsentieren, das persönliche Fehlschläge, körperlichen und psychischen Verfall und große Schuld als nachspielbare Attribute zulassen. Es zeigt auch einen gewissen Reifeprozess im Bezug auf die männliche Selbstwahrnehmung in Spielen und bietet eine sinnvolle Ergänzung zu den nach wie vor auch durchaus daseinsberechtigten Badass-Action-Böllern wie Doom, Medal of Honor oder Crysis. Fragt sich nur, warum eine ähnlich abwechslungsreiche Präsentation des weiblichen Geschlechts bisher kaum stattgefunden hat.

Eine gute Gelegenheit daran etwas zu ändern böte eigentlich der Reboot des 90er-Jahre-Atombusen-Abenteuers Tomb Raider, so recht dran glauben mag man nach den ersten Trailern und Walkthroughs allerdings nicht so recht. Mal ist Lara ein wimmerndes Häufchen Elend, welches dringend eine feste Umarmung braucht, in der nächsten Situation knallt sie dann eiskalt einem Widersacher im Nahkampf die Rübe mit einer Schrotflinte weg und setzt drei weitere Gegner bei lebendigem Leibe in Brand, ohne die kleinste Rührung zu zeigen. Aber wenn die Freundin durchs Funkgerät schreit, da kullern dann die Tränchen und die Verzweiflung ist groß. Ja, gut, im vorigen Absatz habe ich vielschichtigere weibliche Charaktere gefordert, und Junge, ist das hier mal eine so richtig kontrastreiche Charakterzeichnung für ein und dieselbe Person. Nur wie um alles in der Welt soll das eine glaubwürdige Figur sein? Außer mit einer bipolaren Störung kann ich mir ein solches Verhalten nicht erklären, aber da ich auch dieses Spiel erst noch spielen muss, will ich nicht zu vorschnell urteilen. Fakt ist aber, dass auch die neue Lara sich wieder am gängigen Schönheitsideal orientiert und die Jammersequenzen sicherlich auch den Beschützerinstinkt beim männlichen Spieler wecken sollen, während er dennoch in gewohnter Hirn-Aus-Manier die Headshots verteilt, wie sonst nur Heidi Klum bei Germany’s next Topmodel. Über die Sendung habe ich mal einen kritischen Bericht auf Arte gesehen, daher weiß ich das!

Es bleibt also nur zu hoffen, dass endlich frisches Blut in die Entwicklerstudios einzieht und die eindimensionale Darstellung von Frauen nicht zum Running Gag der Videospielgeschichte mutiert. Man muss allerdings befürchten, dass Spiele, die ja nach wie vor hauptsächlich ein jugendliches, männliches Publikum ansprechen, auch der heranwachsenden Generation von zukünftigen Entwicklern ziemlich wenig Inspiration mitgeben, wie man Frauen in Spielen als mehr als pubertäre Fantasieobjekte einbinden kann. Lediglich American McGees Alice: Madness Returns fällt mir als positives Gegenbeispiel ein, wobei das eher mäßige Gameplay sicherlich seinen Teil dazu beigetragen hat, dass der Geschichte drumherum so wenig Beachtung geschenkt wurde. Läuft alles immer so weiter wie bisher, werden jedenfalls auch in Zukunft die Brüderles der Spielebranche das Frauenbild von es nicht besser wissenden Jungs mitbestimmen und weibliche Spielerinnen mit Zumba Fitness und Let’s Dance abgespeist, weil niemand so recht ihren Wert erkennen will. Es wäre ein unheimlicher Verlust für dieses Medium, den man nicht einfach stumm hinnehmen sollte.

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Half of Destructoid's readers block our ads. Now what? - Destructoid

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Half of Destructoid’s readers block our ads. Now what?

20 hours ago - 2:45 AM on 03.09.2013

Hug it out

[Webmaster Dojo is a column where I share my experiences running Destructoid, one of the last sites not owned by a media conglomerate or venture capital velociraptor. I’ll sling exotic coffee bean water to keep servers on.]

Relax. We’re still friends.

Last month, I learned that the primary way we support Destructoid was quickly shrinking due to a browser plug-in: the ad-blocker. On the bright side, it brought some closure on why our ad checks never quite kept up with perky site traffic or growing bandwidth bills.

No, I’m not going to chainsaw your face for installing an ad-blocker. Chances are, though, you understand that blocking ads denies us some coffers and you probably feel a little bad about it, but all ads intrinsically annoy you. That’s okay. Still, it is enough for me to say that it’s a problem facing my site and other sites like it, and a few weeks ago, I started to appeal to readers to whitelist us — that mostly failed.

Is asking for nickels the best way to future-proof a gaming site?

“Almost half of your readers block your ads. We don’t think we’re mistaken.”

BlockMetrics was easy enough to set up and monitor. At first, it was about 10%, then 20-something. When I dared to blink it just increased faster. Over a few days it never got better, averaging at an ominous 42-46% block rate. I thought their tech might have been flawed, so I performed my own tests and contacted another company who returned a similar result.

This means that we’re working twice as hard as other sites to sustain our company, as if keeping a group of game writers fed isn’t difficult enough. We see gaming sites shut down or selling out so often these days. Feeling my pain yet?

So, what would you do, standing in my one shoe remaining? I took these sobering stats to Twitter, and this is what people close to me said:

Nobody wants ads in the way while they’re trying to read something

I know there’s a fine line a publisher must walk when inviting ads in. We work with a very reputable outside company that respects our readers and is quick to ban ads we don’t like.

Destructoid does not allow ads that play automatic audio, and also doesn’t allow ads that automatically expand without your interaction. If you ever see any of those, please report them. Also, if you stay logged in on our existing free accounts, you’ll never see a full-page interstitial advertisement (the skip to continue kind). We’ve also moved most of our new videos to YouTube, which allows ad skipping in most circumstances.

Despite adhering to what I believe are best practices for all parties involved, we’re having this conversation. Still, I assume most of you haven’t singled out blocking Dtoid for malicious reasons, so I went onward with my appeals.

Would you kindly un-block Destructoid?

BlockMetrics’ technology allowed me to overlay a special message to those who have Ad-Blocker installed. I didn’t mince words: My appeal read something to the effect that ad blockers primarily hurt our writers, and if you are reading our site, we’d like your support.

Indeed, our ad rate dropped slightly overnight. I didn’t like guilt-tripping our readers, but it seemed like a better option than hijacking the site away from them. Ultimately, the best feedback came from one reader who, despite willingly denying our passive revenue, thought I was being too bold.

A frank letter to the editors:

Dear Destructiod,

Just a quick feedback. Today I found a message in red on top of my browser window telling me not to block ads on your site. I have an ad blocking software installed my my browser, as many of the more tech savvy users who are often gamers, do. I understand that you need to make money off the site traffic through ads. For a moment, I considered making an exception rule in my ad blocking software. However, there was no way to turn off the intrusive red message until I ‘do what I was told’. I was intending to have a quick read of an article you have posted before proceeding to ‘support your writers’. This made me uncomfortable, and alienated. Your site was no longer welcoming.

I have therefore decided not to visit your site or any of your affiliates. I can get my gaming news from similar sites that do not ‘dictate’ my actions, such as Kotaku, Eurogamer, vg247, Gamespot, Joystick, IGN, Giantbomb, Edge-online, Polygon - the list goes on. In this day and age, you might want to rethink the way you make money against the way you treat your readers because your competition is way too varied and strong to pull sustainable readership. I’m sure many others felt the same way as I did and a handful might actually give a damn to give feedback as I have. Just something to consider.

(Name Withheld)

What was most annoying about the letter is that he was right, and I knew it.

When I first read the letter, I felt like I was reading those kinds of hippie stories on the news where the guy comes into your house to rob someone; then when he gets beat up, he wins a lawsuit for aggravated assault. The principles of the matter don’t matter — you’re just wrong and you can’t punch your way out of it. It didn’t help that my appeal was presented in a red floating box, and my tone was all wrong. Dating site OKC had the right idea. (Thanks, Chris) Still, I had to say something to this person that I’ve offended. Deep breath:

First of all, thanks so much for your candid letter and caring enough to write. May I ask why you use an ad-blocker on Destructoid? I’m also taken back that, despite learning that you had the option to indirectly help us fund the site by doing almost nothing, you found this request to be offensive. Was it what we said, and/or how we said it?

I know you have many options in gaming sites, but I urge you to notice that gaming magazines and blogs are increasingly shrinking and ad-blockers are not helping. Every website relies on ad revenue. Sure, some new ones will pop up with funding but once they get running they’ll rely on ads, too. While others may be less forthcoming about it we’re all in the same boat, and that’s not an easy boat to keep afloat. Even IGN, who arguably has the most successful ad-free subscription model, was sold last week. If I can’t appeal to people to at least passively support it with ads I’m not convinced you’d be willing to reach into your pocket and help us either, because there are and always will be free options that come and go. Am I correct in that assumption?

As a personal note, I love that we give everything away for free. If I can continue to do that without silly things like pay walls or begging for donations then my company will face no uncertain future. That’s all we’re asking for here. We could offer twice the coverage, a bigger travel budget, better computers, and have more well-fed team running the show if everyone just passively allowed the ads. That’s not reality, and I get that.

The results so far are not good, but show promise. Since we put up the message only 3% of people have accepted our appeal, so you’re correct in stating that others do feel the same way. Since I received your letter I’ve revised the alert from red to a soft blue so it isn’t so jarring. What else might you do if you were in my shoes?

Re: “I certainly was not expecting a reply.”

Thank you for respond to my feedback. I am aware that the competition is tough and downsizing/ bankruptcy is rampant in gaming industry as well as game-related media. Moreover, journalism itself is under immense pressure - I should know because I, myself is in the news business (editorial design, not a reporter).

I did not activate ad blocker only on your site - the plugin blocks almost all ads automatically and I can tell it not to block anything on certain sites. So it is only a few clicks away to disable that if anyone really wanted to help out. I think you missed my point on why I was not willing to do it. It is a question of choice. If I was given a choice to unblock the ads out of good will, I would have done it. but the pop up doesn’t seem to go away UNTIL I unblock. So there wasn’t any choice to keep viewing without having it ‘nagging’ me all the time whenever I visit your site, and covering search fields etc. I think that is what put me off primarily.

Maybe a gentle reminder that runs across the banner (there is plenty of space between the search field and sign up/ login buttons) or even posting an article about all the facts you’ve sent me will further enlighten the community and even shed light on the innerrworkings of your site might help. I find that 98% of the rolling news and pictures are repeated in most of the gaming sites and I’m sure you are aware there are reposts for exclusives (albeit with a credit and link to the owner) plus twitter etc so the only reason to check a certain site is for reviews and original content. Therefore, when reading itself becomes a hassle, the battle is already lost. I hope somehow this shed some light to the matter. This is of course, an opinion one one person but I have a feeling I’m not the only one that thinks so. As for my support, your sincere reply has made me unblock the ads on the site without a second thought and I will be visiting often.

I wish you and your team well and the best of luck in your future endeavours.

If this were a movie, I’d dramatically turn to the camera with puppy eyes and blurt a dramatic call to arms: “Where were you when your favorite gaming site died?”

Maybe I’ve won this battle, but I’ve lost a war I wasn’t even aware I was fighting. I’m not alone — ArsTechnica once fought back by limiting access to those running the plug-in and saw an immediate backlash. Clearly, fighting your readers head-on is not the right solution.

Ad-blockers have gone mainstream. Actually, it probably hit gaming sites the hardest because gamers are some of the most savvy computer geeks. We’re tinkerers and tweekers, so what’s a simple browser plug-in? Only 4% of our Internet Explorer users block our ads, which the tech elite have written off years ago. Another citing: When GameSpot’s Total Access program ended three months ago, the news was met with the most ghastly of comments. It’s one thing to see it on a spreadsheet but when you see your readers bragging about it, it’s pretty fucked up:

The solution must be weirder, more creative. No wonder Valve is selling hats

If left unchecked, small publishers like me may face an ad block rate of 75% or higher with no way to pay my bills. I’m not going to lobby congress to make ad-blocking illegal. That ad block percentage is not really negotiable, and is only going to go up. Other technology trends are also closing in on independent publishers: ad rates are dropping, mobile adoption is booming and dragging old ad models that don’t work into them, and (let’s be honest) my Internet generation expects everything to be free, cheap, and plentiful.

As a pro-consumer site operator, I’ll be the first to admit none of that sounds unreasonable, so it’s on me to figure it out. Yes, I can raise capital and wait for the market to evolve. I’m not going to do that. Everyone that’s raised capital gets sold to someone they will later wish hadn’t bought them. To quote a founding editor of a recent downsized publication: “Never lose control.” Larger websites with massive inventories with in-house control of their ad supply chain can appeal Ad-Blockers to whitelist them, but unless you’re at the massive scale of Reddit I don’t see this happening. This isn’t feasible for small publishers relying on the wild west of ad networks, whose ads are made by horny Flash designers trying to win design awards. This also seems idealistic: the savvy user will eventually just use a different ad-blocker that blocks all.

I needn’t point out to anyone that the videogames press has shrunk at record speed this year. Whether you’re a freelancer for an established site or well-fed at a temporarily funded business that relies on ads, this ad-block trend will eventually take a slice from your livelihood. Take stock, do your diligence, and have a quiet conversation with your staff and readers about it. Yes, it is a business issue, but it also a matter of the viability of the independent press.

Destructoid will somehow offer you an awesome membership program this year

If you had to choose one single editorial or swag perk, ad-free browsing aside, what would make an annual membership on Destructoid worth your while?  That’s the magic question.

To offset ad-blocking or advertising altogether some top bloggers are trying the unspeakable: asking their readers to become the customer. Giant Bomb, ScrewAttack, and Penny-Arcade have all famously made this work. From the research I’ve done, the perks that these programs offer seems like the most respectful alternative to slinging the advertising hustle. We’ll follow suit, and aspire to do the right thing. I certainly wouldn’t put up the sites you know today behind a paywall. Instead, I’d challenge my teams to justify a network-wide membership with a bunch of bonus stuff, and the money we earn would go towards making even more perks. We’re having those conversations internally right now, so we’re open to ideas. Speak up.

This is an interesting time to arrive at these crossroads, as our company turns seven years old next week. Thanks for sticking with us, blocked ads or not. We’ll make it our way.

[sad keanu by implyingrope]

Just off the home page:

Artists Wanted: ‘Winter’ recap and your next topic!

4:00 PM on 03.09.2013   //   Mr Andy Dixon

[Every month or so we post a new art assignment for the Dtoid community. Fun! Here’s a recap of the latest. You have until Friday, March 15th to finish your next project, which is detailed at the end of the post!] Welcome bac…   more

Artists Wanted

Bloggers Wanted: What’s your favorite Destructoid memory?

2:30 PM on 03.09.2013   //   Mr Andy Dixon

[When we’re looking for blogs on a specific topic, we’ll put out a Bloggers Wanted call. Check out the blog prompt, write a response, and you may see your blog promoted to the front page! —Mr Andy Dixon] Did you know that Ma…   more

Bloggers Wanted

Communitoid 009, featuring special guest digtastik!

10:00 AM on 03.09.2013   //   Mr Andy Dixon

In this extra juicy episode of Communitoid, we’re joined by Dtoid Forums all-star and southern bell digtastik! On the show, Conor laments how his Halo 4 clan sucks, Jo brags once again about her team of science experts, dig i…   more

Communitoid 009

Community poll: What would you like from ‘Dtoid Premium’?

3:30 AM on 03.09.2013   //   Mr Andy Dixon

As our esteemed leader just told you, Destructoid is currently toying with the idea of adding an optional “premium” membership to its tool belt. In addition to the obvious ad-free browsing, we’d be offering up exclusive new* …   more

Dtoid Premium

If you found pizza on the ground, would you eat it?

1:00 AM on 03.09.2013   //   Hamza CTZ Aziz

Well, would you? That’s what our newest shirt in the Destructoid store is asking, and if you’ve ever played a beat’em up before then you know the answer is giant yes! The new design was created by Josh Grilli, and features a tasty 8-bit pizza. As always, each shirt goes for $19.95, and you’ll receive free shipping worldwide when you spend over $60 on anything in our store!   more

Dtoid store

Deadpool, Dead Space & Dead Tired Of SimCity’s BS

9:30 PM on 03.08.2013   //   Max Scoville

Hey everybody! Here’s today’s Destructoid Show! I’m guessing you guys have heard about all the nonsense going on with SimCity, so if you’re sick of it by this point, I apologize. There’s a new trailer for Deadpool, which I’m …   more

video

Friday Night Fights: SimSh*tty

3:30 PM on 03.08.2013   //   Mr Andy Dixon

Welcome to another edition of Destructoid’s Friday Night Fights! So… anybody wanna play SimCity tonight? No? Too soon? OK then! Hit the jump to see all the stuff we will be playing!   more

Friday Night Fights

Podtoid 243: Do I Wanna Defend Balls?

11:00 AM on 03.08.2013   //   Jim Sterling

It’s a laid back episode this week. People are tired, stressed, but keen to talk shop! SimCity gets the savaging it deserves, while Trent Reznor’s up to his ol’ texting tricks. Elsewhere, Jim’s ludicrous PC problems are fully…   more

PODTOID

The Call of Sarkeesian

9:30 AM on 03.08.2013   //   Jim Sterling

I have of late been subject to some strange occurrences. Some may even say … frightening … circumstances. Indeed, the things I have seen make me so very grateful for the inability of the human mind to truly understan…   more

Call of Sarkeesian

Ranked: The five best city builders

6:00 PM on 03.07.2013   //   Fraser Brown

I’m a bit of a mess, to be honest. A disheveled, disorganized, forgetful mess. Yet somehow, this all evaporates when I fire up a city builder. Obsessive? Definitely. Compulsive? Without a doubt. Everything needs to …   more

City builders ranked

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patrick miller writes about videogames — Ads, adblock, and Destructoid

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Just popping in here to point out something that showed up on Reddit earlier. Destructoid EIC put up a post about how half its readers use adblock. The post itself isn’t anything new (it’s not the first time that D-toid has engaged with this issue, either, I don’t think). But read the Reddit comments thread for stuff like this:

Sorry guys, people are willing to do your job for free. Maybe not to the same standard but they’ll always be free press and accountability on the internet regardless of whether people are paid to do it.

My hobby is video gaming, reading about them on sites is a nice extra but nothing that I couldn’t do without.

I might seem like an arsehole but it’s the truth.

Or these:

There are people willing to write articles, post content and the like which adds to the hobby without being paid. Many even pay their own hosting site fees for the privelege. It isn’t to say that there’s no place for professional game sites, but in an age where gaming has never had more hobbyists and everyone has access to the internet, do we really need RPS, GiantBomb, Destructoid, Kotaku, IGN, GameSpot, Polygon, the Escapist and god only knows how many other sites to all basically either regurgitate the same news stories or provide reviews on games? The willingness to make a professional site does not entitle a company to the right to succeed. Not in this field.

I could quite happily make do with community-based discussion and reviews as you might find on Reddit (outside of r/gaming, naturally). In fact, many times I get a more accurate impression of a game this way than via professional games journalists - e.g. Skyrim (the fact that that game was universally praised just baffles me).

I don’t adblock this website or that website. I am not a “reader” for a specific website. I browse the web. I read from aggregate and crowd-source curated internet. I adblock the entire internet, because it’s not one segregated website anymore, its one giant mess of information, and you can’t trust any of it. I think publishers trying to make money on the internet are fighting a losing battle against people who are willing to do it for free. If Destructoid can’t afford to pay its writers what they deserve, then the writers should leave, Destuctoid should shrink and become a smaller more focused entity, or make way for Joe Blow in his basement doing it for free after his 9-5 job. After he quits his job, grows his website, sells it to a conglomerate and then complains that it doesn’t make enough money, he can do the same and John Doe can start his turn at the wheel.

The thing is, none of the gaming websites need to exist. We have intelligent redditors and bloggers in the wild that are passionate about talking about video games that don’t need ad revenue; since they write about games as a hobby.
Some of the gaming journalists do a decent job, but I’m not going to lament their extinction either. There will always be passionate fans that will fill the gaming discussion void for free.

Folks, this is your readership (or the readership you’re trying to get). And this is how they think about your work. Ten more years of the same stuff isn’t going to cut it.

—patrick miller

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Make Games - Making it in Indie Games: Starter Guide

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Feb 27

Making it in Indie Games: Starter Guide

Every now and then someone will ask me for advice on making it as a professional indie game developer. First, it’s a huge honor to be asked that. So I want to say “Thank you!” Second… damn, if I really want to help out it’s a serious endeavor. Of course, I could always say “Give it your best! Work hard! Be true to yourself!” and it wouldn’t be a terrible reply… just not a terribly useful one, either.

So here it is. Here is what I’m going to link when that rare situation arises again, because it’s too much work to write it up more than once! This is advice that I feel may actually be practical to someone who is just starting out as an indie game developer. Hope it helps!

INDIEPENDENT

So yeah, what does being “indie” even mean? Is “indie” short for independent? Is this game “indie”? Is “indie” a genre? IT’S CONFUSING - WHY DO WE NEED THE WORD “INDIE” AT ALL.

To answer the last question, I offer the following scenarios. Scenario 1: a person is looking to make games, and perhaps start their own studio. They type “game development” into a search engine. The results, to say the least, are underwhelming. Dry. Academic. Programming-centric. (Try it yourself and see.)

Scenario 2: the person instead types “indie games” into a search engine. Instead of pages upon pages of conferences, bachelor’s degrees, and programming tools, that person is met instead with pages upon pages of games to play and vibrant communities filled with people who are doing exactly what he or she wants to be doing. Some of them went to school, but many did not. A wealth of different ideas and tools are used. There are even documentaries about making games! It’s not just something where you get a degree and wait in line for a job. You can start making games RIGHT NOW.

The word “indie” is more than just a way to describe a type of developmental process… like any label, it actually provides an avenue for people to explore that process and then flourish within it. It has a real purpose. It serves real lessons on game creation and entrepreneurialism. It offers real motivation!

Of course, it can be irritating to see the term misused, or become a vehicle for pretentiousness and arrogance. Like any label, “indie” also breeds a certain amount dogmatism, croneyism, and other -isms. But the net result is really worth something. As someone who once gave up on professional game-making because I thought it meant a 9-to-5, I can tell you that it’s genuinely valuable.

As for what games are “truly” indie, we’ll never fully agree, and that’s probably for the best. But I can tell you the criteria I’ve devised for The Independent Gaming Source to determine whether a game is fit for coverage:

1. “Independent”, as in no publisher.

2. Small studio (roughly 20 members or less).

I choose that definition because it’s the most useful one. Someone who is looking to become an “indie” game developer is interested in what is possible under those constraints and how those types of studios operate. It excludes companies like Valve and Double Fine, which are certainly independent but too large to be “indie”. It also excludes “feels indie”-type games that are not self-published.

Under that definition you still run into gray areas, but hey, just because we don’t know when “red” turns into “purple” doesn’t mean the words aren’t useful. Just think about someone who wants to make a game with a small team and self-publish it… what should they type into Google for inspiration, advice, community, etc.? “Indie” is still as good a word as any, in my opinion.

So, should I go to school to learn how to make games?

The most important thing to know about video game development and schooling is that no one, whether it’s an indie studio or big company, cares about degrees. How could it, when some of its most prominent members are drop-outs or never-beens? John Carmack, Cliff Bleszinski, Jonathan Blow, and Team Meat are all prominent members of this club.

A degree is a piece of paper that says you can do something in theory - game developers want to know that you have enough passion to do real work, regardless of whether you’re being graded on it. And if you’re thinking of going indie, it won’t matter what other people think - you’ll simply need that passion to succeed or else you won’t. You’re the only one holding the door open in that case.

This isn’t to dissuade you from going to college, per se (I studied computer science in college, and while it was far from a perfect experience, I also gained a lot from both the curriculum and the friends I made there). The point is make something - games, mods, art, and music. If school helps you with that, great. If it doesn’t, then you need to rethink how you’re spending your most valuable resources: time and money (both of which can be exorbitant costs for schooling).

If I go to school, what should I study?

At a regular university, I would suggest majoring in computer science, even if you “just want to be a designer”. The design of games is very much tied to how they are made.

At an art school, illustration, concept art, and 3d modeling courses are probably the most useful for games.

At a game school, they will hopefully try to involve you in all aspects of game creation, from programming to design. I would stay far away from design-only schools or curricula - those are either scams or are better suited to academia than actual game-making. Also, it’s worth finding out whether or not the school owns what you make while you’re a student there.

See also: Jonathan Blow - How to Program Independent Games (read the comments as well as watch the video)

Okay, you say make something. How do I start?

My best advice for those starting out is not to get ahead of themselves. It’s easy to start worrying about tools, teams, platforms, deals, marketing, awards, and whatever else before you’ve even gotten a sprite moving around the screen. Those stars in your eyes will blind you. They’ll freeze you up. You need to be actively making games all the time.

If we were talking about painting, I’d tell you to pick up a painting kit and a sketchpad at your local art store ASAP and just have at it. You’d proceed to put absolute crap down on the pad and get frustrated. But it’d also be kind of fun - so you’d keep doing it. Along the way you’d read some theory and study other people’s work. With good taste and under a critical eye, you would keep doing that until the day you painted something good.

We’re talking about games, though. I recommend Game Maker and Unity as two all-purpose game-making suites. They both have a good balance of power versus ease-of-use; they’re both affordable or have free demos, and they both have a wealth of tutorials and plug-ins online. Both are used by professional developers (Unity in particular). Grab one of those and start running through the tutorials. When you run into trouble, ask for help. Give help back when you begin figuring things out. Get active in a game-making community.

But above all else, keep making games. It’s the only way to truly answer all of those questions in your head right now.

Also, watch this:

LASTLY, MY TOP 10 TIPS

1. Finish your games.

2. Don’t skimp on artwork. It’s easy to underestimate the importance of artwork to a game. And even if you don’t, it’s easy to underestimate the importance of having a unique style of artwork. The result is that there are many ugly or generic-looking (i.e. “clip-arty”) games failing to capture people’s attention.

If you have no artistic talent, go for style and coherency as many successful indie developers do. And even ugly is probably better than generic, all told. Remember: this is most people’s first impression of your game.

3. Don’t blame marketing (too much). In the indie community it’s become popular to write “how I failed” articles where the screenshots and comments tell the story of an ugly, boring game and yet the article itself tells the story of bad marketing decisions. Let’s face it, no one wants to admit that they lacked any amount of creativity, vision, or talent. It’s much easier to put the blame on release dates, trailers, websites, and whatever else.

This is the internet, though. A good game will make its way out there. Marketing will certainly help, and hype may get you quite far in the short term, but it’s not going to make or break you - it’s only a multiplier of however good your game is. Saying otherwise is only hurting your ability to self-criticize and therefore improve your craft. It’s also encouraging others to do the same.

4. Indie is not a genre or aesthetic. Make the game you want to make, not what you think an indie game “should be”. Recently, the very small and very independent team behind The Legend of Grimrock announced that their very traditional first-person dungeon crawler sold over 600,000 copies. Don’t feel pressured to be dishonest about what you’d like to do - after all, what is independence if not freedom from such pressures?

5. Build yourself a working environment that’s healthy for you. Are you introverted and lose energy around other people or are you extroverted and gain energy that way? Or something in-between? What do you want your average working day to be like?

You’ll want to focus all of the energy available to you toward creating, and it’s amazing how much of it can be lost to seemingly mundane things. Figuring out your physical working space as well as your personal support system is a key part of the solution to this problem, and its vitally important to you as an independent creator.

6. Stay independent! To be sure, going indie can be daunting. There is always going to be the temptation of selling yourself or your ideas to someone else for a bit of a feeling of security. But honestly, once you go down that road it’s hard to come back - every moment you’re simply securing may not be a moment you’re progressing. I’m not recommending recklessness, but it’s important to stay committed and focused on the task at hand. Life is short.

Also, don’t give up your IP or in any way limit your opportunities long term. Keep exclusivity timed. When Aquaria released we weren’t aware of Steam. The Humble Bundle did not yet exist. iPad did not exist. Being on all of those platforms has been great for us. You need to keep your hands untied to take advantage of what future will bring.

7. Create your own luck. As an artist, I owe a lot to the people around me - my family, friends, peers, and idols. I accept that a lot of my success was simply the luck of being born with these people in my life.

But it’s important to realize that you create many of your own opportunities, too. For example, I met Alec (my friend and Aquaria co-creator) because he offered to help work on I’m O.K. I’m O.K. was a game started on the Pix Fu forums. The Pix Fu forums were part of my personal website and its members were friends of mine I’d made much earlier during my Blackeye Software/Klik n’ Play days.

You could trace a similar path from the XBLA version of Spelunky to the original PC version and the TIGSource forums.

The point is - put yourself out there. Make things (I can’t stress that enough!). You never know when serendipity will strike, but when it does it will likely be related to situations in your past when you chose to actively engage someone or some idea.

8. Avoid “business as war”. As a professional you’ll need to do business and make business-related decisions at least occasionally, and as a creative type you might not be that interested in that stuff. Hell, you might even be downright scared of it.

Well, I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to be Gordon Gekko to make it as an indie. And please, don’t try to be. In fact, avoid the Gordon Gekkos. Avoid the people who try to confuse you. Avoid the ones who try and nitpick. Avoid the ones who try and rush you.

If you have a great game, there is no distributor you will absolutely have to work with, platform you have to be on, or person you will have to team up with. Always be willing to walk away from a bad deal, especially if it’s to maintain your independence as a creator. In turn, be a direct and generous person yourself.

People get defensive when they’re scared. Don’t sit at the table with someone like that or as someone like that and doing business should be fairly pleasant! This isn’t Wall Street!

9. No gimmicks. Simply put, focus on making a good game - a deep, interesting, unique game - rather than devising cheap tricks to grab people’s attention. Whether we’re talking about clever-sounding-but-ultimately-shallow game systems or off-the-wall marketing ideas, a gimmick is a gimmick. And you should stay away from them because they’re short-term, high-risk solutions that ultimately cheapen you as an artist, perhaps literally as well as metaphorically.

Certainly, one should take risks in game design as well as in life. My point is that they should be honest, worthwhile ones - those tend to be less risky in the long run.

10. You are your game - understand and develop yourself. As an indie game developer your game will likely be more “you” than a game made by hundreds or thousands of people. You have to understand yourself quite well in order to make a truly successful game. Fortunately, the unraveling of what makes you “you” - your taste, what you care about, your abilities - is one of the great pleasures in life and goes hand in hand with your goal of being an independent creator. Treasure it!

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Anger Management: Tropes vs Women in Video Games (part 1) - bricks of videogame culture

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Anger Management: Tropes vs Women in Video Games (part 1)

Micha, 10. März 2013

“Die meisten Märtyrer sterben aus Selbstmitleid.”
© Prof. Dr. med. Gerhard Uhlenbruck (*1929), deutscher Immunbiologe und Aphoristiker
Quelle: »Kaffeesätze«

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Manchmal ist das Internet ein Arschloch. Ein fieses dazu. In Spielerkreisen hat dies leider letztes Jahr wohl keine andere stärker am eigenen Leib erfahren müssen als Anita Sarkeesian, die auf Kickstarter eine Aufklärungsreihe über die Rolle der Frau in Videospielen ankündigte – und auf´s Äußerste angegriffen wurde. Die wüsten Beschimpfungen und das generelle Verhalten jener Angreifer wären sicher eine eigene Studie wert. Fakt ist aber: Sarkeesian hat mit ihrem Vorschlag einen wunden Punkt getroffen und sie ist mitverantwortlich dafür, dass eine Erschütterung durch die Community ging. Vielerorts wurde der Sexismus in Spielen diskutiert. Mit mannigfaltigen, größtenteils unbefriedigenden Ergebnissen. Zwischenzeitlich ist der Disput stagniert; die Fronten auf allen Seiten verhärtet. Die Veröffentlichung der ersten von insgesamt zwölf Episoden von “Tropes vs Women in Videogames” erschien mir daher wie der erhoffte Lichtblick für weiteren Ansporn.

Mitnichten.

Ich halte Anita Sarkeesian für mutig und gewieft. Als ich ihre Serie über Tropes auf Youtube gesehen hatte, war ich überzeugt davon, dass sie in der Lage ist Fakten in komprimierter Form auf den Tisch zu legen; den Status Quo aufzuweisen und Bezüge zu Popkultur und Kulturhistorik herzustellen. Man muss nicht mit ihrer feministischen Einstellung einverstanden sein, um dieses Potential zu erkennen. Mit mehr als 120.000 Euro im Gepäck, mit voller Konzentration auf die Sache ohne persönliche Nebenkommentare: Sarkeesian würde ihre Kritiker mit links liegen lassen und eine neue Grundlage für zukünftige Diskussionen über Sexismus in Games schaffen können.

Eigentlich. Denn den Auftakt habe ich als sehr enttäuschend empfunden und es sollte sich für die restlichen elf Episoden dringend etwas tun. Dabei startet die Episode durchaus kompetent: Sie beginnt mit einem herausragenden Beispiel eines RARE-Spiels für den Nintendo 64, in der ein weibliches Geschöpf die Heldin sein sollte, das Projekt aber auf einen männlichen Charakter umgemünzt wurde: Star Fox Adventures. Die ursprüngliche Protagonistin wird zur Jungfrau in der Not degradiert, was sinnbildlich für viele andere Spiele ist. Als Sarkeesian etwas später den historischen Kontext erläutert, wollte ich in die Hände klatschen: Genau DAS habe ich mir von der Reihe gewünscht. Das viele Spiele sexistisch sind weiß ich. Aber des Pudels Kern ist doch: Warum?

Ab dieser Stelle wird es zunehmend ärgerlich. Wohlgemerkt habe ich zunächst das Script auf dem Blogeintrag gelesen und schon bei den Abschnitten zu Zelda die Augenbraue gehoben: Die Beschreibungen werden zunehmend subjektiver, der Ton verärgerter, ja, fast schon reißerisch, bis Sarkeesian bei Double Dragon platzt und enorm unsachlich wird. Anschließend habe ich das Video selbst gesehen und die Mimik wirkte gerade im letzten Drittel auf mich, als müsste Anita teils ihre Wut unterdrücken. Keine Frage: Bei diesem Thema reagiert man emotional. Aber wer sich vor eine Kamera setzt und Aufklärungsarbeit versucht, sich vielleicht sogar indirekt einen Bildungsauftrag auf die Fahne geschrieben hat, sollte sich zusammenreißen können. Sarkeesian`s Auseinandersetzung mit Zelda hat Delja in ihrem Blog gut zusammengefasst und kritisiert.

Grundsätzlich, also die Darbietungsform mal ganz außen vor gelassen, finde ich es inhaltlich aber gut und wichtig. Auf diese Weise aufgezeigt zu bekommen, wie die harte Linie von Nintendo bei der Verwendung von Peach in den Mariospielen aussieht, ist sehr aufschlussreich und ein gerechtfertigter Tritt gegen das Schienbein des ach-so-familienfreundlichen Großkonzerns. Meine grösste Kritik gilt daher dem Format, das in Verbindung mit Sarkeesian´s Charakter problematisch ist: Ich bin mir sicher das die Form des trockenen Vortrages ist bewusst gewählt worden, um Gedankengänge ohne Ablenkung referieren zu können (wie auch auf Superlevel angemerkt). In dieser Ausführung ist sie aber ein einziges Ärgernis: Die flotten Einspieler und Schnitte bzw. unterschiedlichen Kadrierungen kompromittieren die Vortragsform. Auf die ich an dieser Stelle offen gestanden jedoch nicht bestehen würde.
Wichtiger ist aber: Für 120.000 Euro wäre eine Alternative und vor allem wesentlich mehr drin gewesen. Selbst wenn man Lebenserhaltungskosten und die Anschaffung von Equipment, als auch Arbeitsmaterial davon abzieht, bleiben mit großer Sicherheit über 100.000 Euro für die eigentliche Produktion “übrig”. Das entspricht etwa dem Budget von Indie Game – The Movie. Für die ursprünglich angepeilten 6.000 Dollar wären fünf Episoden in dieser Form eine große Leistung, bei der letztendlich eingenommen Summe muss aber mehr drin sein als eine aufgewärmte Variante ihrer alten Folgen. Von diesem Budget könnte man viele Reisen zu potentiellen Interviewpartnern finanzieren. Entwickler, Frauenrechtler, Medienwissenschafter. Gerade in Bezug auf die kulturgeschichtlichen Verweise wäre das ein echter Gewinn gewesen, da es aus unterschiedlichen Quellen Fakten untermauen, ja, sogar die Glaubwürdigkeit erheblich steigern würde. Aber nein, stattdessen hockt Sarkeesian mit feministischen Scheuklappenblick allein vor der Kamera und versucht all die Recherche und Wissensvermittlung auf eigene Faust darzubieten.

Solange Sarkeesian allerdings nicht einen Gang zurückschaltet und weiterhin so sehr auf die Kacke haut, tut sie sich und der gesamten Diskussion keinen Gefallen. Es ist fast so, als wolle sie unbedingt die Martyrerin sein. Nach all den Anfeindungen ist das durchaus als Trotzreaktion nachvollziehbar, aber nicht erstrebenswert.

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German Indies, where are you?

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Because of the fact that most of us smaller developers face the problem of not getting enough attention I would like to take a closer look at my own country and its even more unknown indie game scene - Germany.
When it comes to games, Germany is foremost known for simulations (Demolition Simulator by Giants Software), engines (Cry Engine by Crytek) and board games (The Settlers of Catan by Klaus Teuber). In fact, we seem to consume more video games then we actually produce or sell outside of Germany.

Besides Crysis 1, 2 and 3, have you ever heard of the building game series Anno by Related Design, The Settlers series by Blue Byte, the beloved adventures from Daedalic Entertainment like Deponia or the RPG series Gothic and Risen by Piranha Bytes?
If none of the mentioned titles - which are known by every German interested in games - rings a bell you might get an idea of what kind of problems the German indie game scene must be facing. The purpose of this article is to introduce some of their specimen, to define some typical German qualities and their problems.

Education in Germany

To start with the German indie scene means to begin with the Indies’ education and where they come from.

There are several possibilities to start your path to the German game industry. I suppose in most European countries and the U.S. it’s also like this: you can study computer science to be a programmer or design to be an artist.
In Germany we have several private schools that educate students to perfectly fit in certain jobs like 3D modeling or character artist. Most famous representatives are the Games Academy, SAE, Quantm Institute and Media Design Hochschule, to mention just some of them.

Nowadays, even more public schools climb onto the bandwagon with their own programs. For instance, I studied “Multimedia Virtual Reality Design” at the University of Arts and Design in Halle.
According to the B.I.U. (Association For Interactive Entertainment Software) we have more than 144 schools and universities where designers, programmers and musicians can get their education or further training from. Not to forget a classic start as an trainee or intern in a games company!

But there is another scene, much older than the new generation of game students from any private or public school - the hobbyist scene.
When I did my research back in 2009 for my diploma about Indie Games, I had a hard time to find teams that work in a way that I would call indie today: independent, creative young start-ups that took the risk to work full time and not just for free, but to make a living from the things they love. According to my own definition of ‘indie’ there were just very few of them in Germany. I had to look under every rock to find them.
But to be fair, the indie scene as a whole became first popular to a broader audience with World of Goo by 2DBoy and Braid by Jonathan Blow in 2008.

Compared to indies, the hobbyist or amateur game developer scene was rich of examples. There were many people that teamed up to make the next Gothic or Command&Conquer, like Verbotene Welt by sechsta sinn (after 12 years they still meet up to work on their game from time to time), Dreamworlds with their RPG Splitterwelten (they are fully indie now with a different project) or Elite Software with Out Of This World (turned the project down). This scene flourished with the help of many huge forums (ZFX, Developia and its predecessor Deutsche Untergrundspiele, Softgames.de for different projects, specific websites for game engines like Blitzbasic and 3D Game Studio, etc.), their own festivals/gatherings like the Dusmania/Devmania and a booth at the Games Convention in Leipzig called IndiGo.

The characteristics of the German hobby scene

Typical for most hobby game projects isn’t the experimentation with game design, but to emulate the idols whose games the makers adored. The teams often worked hard and passionate to assemble perfect copies with their own added features, ideas and stories. But projects like RPGs, MMOs or strategy games were often doomed from the beginning. It turned out that most of the projects from this time were too huge and ambitious to be finished. In most cases, the teams dissolved because of academic studies or to earn money with more ‘serious’ work than games. In some rare cases they still try to finish a game they started many years ago - still as a hobby while having a day job.

Another attribute that sticks out from this time is the overwhelming amount of programmers in the scene. This resulted in technology-driven games and the development of a lot of smaller engines the creators proudly presented at bigger scene events like Dusmania/Devmania.
I missed a more artistic standpoint or discussions about graphics beyond shader programming, sometimes. Although most hobby teams had their graphic artists, they seldom tried to create a new look which often resulted in beautiful and polished, but uninspired graphics.

In the last years the hobbyist scene became somewhat stuck. Many of the old forums are closed or merged together. Maybe the notion of the indie scene reached German developers and they tried to get more attention in international forums. Even pupils - the biggest part of the German hobby scene - want to be professional and sell their games. For many of them, ‘Indie’ might be a new prospect of getting into the industry like their idols did before.

But this is pure speculation. Today, most German indies I know since 2010 are graduated students from game schools.

The new generation of young game designers

And their number is growing every day! It is much easier to be aware of these teams, thanks to festivals like Amaze Indie Connect, Play, Next Level Conference or the increasing attention of the German media blogs like Superlevel. And their presence on Twitter and Facebook in combination with their own development blog.

Many German indies I can think of can be characterized by a certain professionalism. As much as they like to create fun games, they also want to secure their new business. And of course make money with it.
After graduation you have two chances to get money: First - check out the possibility of a design or start-up funding and apply for it. Second, search a publisher or investor to back you.

Here comes the first point where many of us had to think about business economics. To get any kind of funding (EXIST is the most common one or federal state specific funds like FFF Bayern for Bavaria) you need to write a business plan, calculate your future income/cost/investment and give a prognosis about your sales.
It is not typical for Germans to take high risks, planning is everything! And to be honest, it helps a lot to make yourself clear about what awaits you outside in the games market.

I often hear that many of the better known indies, like Phil Fish or Edmund McMillen, had debts to finish the game they wanted to make. I can’t say if it’s just lesser common or outright impossible for a young German start-up to get credits or be in someones debts. That’s why most of us are looking for a publisher or investor to fund the project at first.
That’s why I often tend to say that there are no ‘real’ German indies in the independent-from-publisher meaning of the word ‘indie’. But whatever the clear definition of indie might mean to someone, it is more important to make interesting games!

Games that matter or games that sell?

German developers often tend to have the opinion that you are just able to produce good games with a high budget.
This attitude affects not only the games, but the style and design, too. Ingredients like technology, quality and perfection are very important to many designers I know.
On the other hand, there are very few games from Germany that I would describe as crazy, artsy, over-the-top manic. Games that often happen to be the opposite of quality and technology, but with a great emphasis on creativity.

Why is that so? The answer might be as easy as that: If you want to sell games, you need to look for certain trends in design and what players are looking for, in order to sell as many games as possible. Challenging your own future by taking too much risks with innovation or experimentation might be too dangerous in the beginning of a young studio.

But this is not the reason there are still German studios missing on awards or shopping wish lists. The mere reason for them to be totally unknown is that most of the studios I listed below are just at the beginning of their journey. There are very few studios that developed more than one game yet!
So, if you are interested in (German) indie games, look out for the upcoming generation of German designers.

German Indies

Andreas Illiger from Kiel, Tiny Wings (iOS)

Daedalic Entertainment from Hamburg, Edna breaks out (PC/Mac), Harvey’s New Eyes (PC/Mac), Deponia (PC/Mac)

Knut Müller, the Rhem series (PC)

Dreamworlds, Splatter - Just Harder Times (t.b.a.)

Black Pants Game Studio from Kassel; Tiny&Big (PC/Mac), About Love, Hate and the other ones (iOS)

Mimimi Productions from Munich, DaWindci (iOS), Tink (t.b.a.)

Silent Dreams from Mühlheim an der Ruhr, Grotesque Tactics, Holy Avatar vs. Maidens of the Dead

Joyride Labs from Berlin, Nikki and the Robots (PC/Mac/Linux)

Jonas und Verena Kyratzes from Frankfurt, The Sea will claim everything (PC), Ithaka of the Clouds (t.b.a.)

Spaces of Play from Berlin, Spirits (iOS/PC/Mac/Linux)

Threaks from Hamburg, Beatbuddy (t.b.a.)

Brightside Games from Berlin, Zeit² (PC), Spin Wars (iOS)

Bit Barons from Munich, Astroslugs (iOS/PC/Mac), Tridek (t.b.a.)

Candygun Games from Hamburg, Dead Block (XBLA/PSN, PC), Dollar Dash (XBLA/PSN, PC)

Z-Software from Dortmund, Solar Struggle (XBLA, PC), Ambulance Simulator 2012 (PC), Rush on Rome (PC, iOS)

Wolfram von Funck, Cube World (t.b.a.)

Krystian Majewski from Cologne, Trauma (PC/Mac/iOS)

Bumblebee, Days of Dawn (t.b.a.)

kunst-stoff from Berlin, The Great Jitters - Pudding Panic (iOS)

Tinnitus Games from Hannover, Reperfection (PC)

Hammerlabs, Farm for your Life (PC/MAC/Linux)

VisionaryX, A Knight’s Dawn (iOS)

Wolpertinger Games from Munich

Mediaguild from Kassel, Little Indie (Indie publishing platform), Spyaction (t.b.a.)

Media Seasons from Leipzig, Driving Simulator (PC), Pingvinas (PC, XBox)

and us, RAT KING ENTERTAINMENT, Pitman (iOS/PC/MAC), TRI (PC/MAC/Linux)

Edit 13.0305, more devs added

Matthias Zarzecki, Unstoppaball DX

Frame6, Crysis Borad Game

Layered Mind, Colour Souls (Win,iOS)

Duangle, Nowhere

Tinytouchtales, Super Zombie Tennis (iOS), Muffin Munch (iOS)

Slip Shift, Reborn Horizon (Browser)

Decane from Hamburg, RC Mini Racers

Damian Thater, Argh! Earthlings!

Uniworlds, Caravan

Klonk Games, Mercury Shift

Golden Trycicle, Clark

Virtual Cosmonauts from Karlsruhe, Kraut Attack

Vidiludi Games from Munich, Highway Run

Elcoino

The Grey Studios, Pixel Towers

Black Goat

…and a lot more? Feel free to add your own studio in the comments! A discussion about the perception of the German indie scene is appreciated as well!

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The PA Report - How five men are changing the business, and size, of game publishing

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How five men are changing the business, and size, of game publishing

Ben Kuchera / Mon, Mar 4, 2013

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The publishers used to be the gatekeepers of the realm. You needed to speak with a publisher before you could get your game on a major platform, creating and releasing games was an expensive, highly technical endeavor, and developer kits were both expensive and hard to come by. This has all changed in the past decade, and small teams have never had it better when it comes to releasing their own games, or finding their way onto services like Steam. So why do you need a publisher?

“We’re starting to feel like we’ve found our spot in the world of games, and what we’re good at, and where we can be of service to gamers, where we can be of service to developers, and run a success business,” Nigel Lowrie, a partner at the five-person Devolver Digital, told me when I asked how business was going. That’s the long answer. The short answer is that business is very, very good.

In fact, Devolver Digital may be the future of games publishing. Small teams, personal connections, and end-to-end support while developers create the game. In an industry where publishers are hurting, developers are getting shut down left and right, and your reward for shipping a game is often being laid off, keeping things small and personal is a sane reaction to what can often seem like an irrational business.

Bringing the hits

“Our first big game was Serious Sam 3. From there we looked at what company we wanted to be and what kind of space can we operate in. Indie games, and our love of indie games, really pulled us in that direction,” Lowrie explained.

Serious Sam is a well-known name in first-person shooters, and Devolver used that leverage for an interesting experiment. They worked with a variety of indie developers to create side-games in the Serious Sam world. Publishing smaller, high-concept games around the Serious Sam property was not only good business, but it allowed Devolver to strengthen relationships with many developers in the indie space.

I asked for pictures of the team. I received a cartoon man surrounded by nachos

These relationships paid off in more ways than expected. When Dennaton was thinking about a publisher for what would later become Hotline Miami, it was Vlambeer that pointed the two-man team to Devolver Digital. The game went on to sell over 300,000 copies on the PC, and is now coming to the PS3 and Vita.

Dennaton’s Jonatan Söderström had, according to Lowrie, turned down any personal payment for the work until the game was released. Lowrie remembers seeing the royalty report from Devolver’s CFO, and he immediate jumped on Skype to share the good news with Dennaton.

“Speaking for the last year, it was a really happy moment for me. I got a little choked up,” he said. While Lowrie brushed aside questions on the size of that check, he stated that the game sold at between $5 to $10 per copy, it has moved over 300,000 units, and the deal is structured so that Dennaton receives the majority of the game’s profits. You can do the math for yourself. Hotline Miami 2 is now in production.

The financial success of these games is important, but there is also a PR benefit to publishing games as weird as Hotline Miami and Vlambeer’s upcoming Luftrausers.

“We want to be known for these neat games,” Lowrie said. “The best PR we can do as a company is to back, sign, produce, release interesting games, fun games, unique games. We can do stunts and whatever, but if we consistently release good games that’s what you’ll be known for.”

The last stunt was a bus that drove around the Game Developers Conference last year, taking pitches from interested developers. Chris Pavia’s Dungeon Hearts was signed during that promotion, and the game is expected to launch this year. I was in the bus during Pavia’s pitch, and the members of Developer crowded around to see the game in action. The five men behind the company were there when the game was signed, and they were there through the game’s development, its promotion, and they will be there for its launch.

This is what sets Devolver apart, especially for indie developers who are used to working under trying limitations without much help. There is no fat in the organization; everyone is intimately involved with each game.

The Devolver Digital team gets very interested in a game being demoed

“The people you pitched your game to are the people who sign your game, they’re going to playtest your game, market your game, and they’re going to be at Gamescom, standing with you, demoing your game, or getting you a cheeseburger and beer while you demo your game,” Lowrie explained.

That’s not easy with the publisher’s small size, but that’s half the point. “That’s tiring for us, but it’s a good relationship. The studios we work with range from 1 to 30 people. The intimacy we can have is working very well for us right now… I’d rather work harder on the games we sign than try to sign twice as many games,” Lowrie said.

Flexibility, the PC, and Sony

The company is focused on PC and, oddly enough, Sony systems. Both the PlayStation 3 and Vita are incredibly welcoming to independent developers, and Lowrie explained how aggressive Sony has been about getting smaller, interesting games on its platforms. Devolver was even invited to check out the PlayStation 4, a rare honor for such a small publisher.

The company is also flexible in what it can offer to help developers, during my time on the bus last year they simply asked what prospective partners needs: A new laptop to work on? Money to pay rent while they work on the game? Licensed music? A professional-looking trailer?

Devolver brings that hunger and guerrilla tactics to dealing with the press as well; The first time I saw Hotline Miami was at a bar during a larger event. Lowrie simply grabbed a laptop with the game and said he’d meet me wherever I wanted to chat. He also sent over an early build of the game for me to try to prove its quality.

The results speak for themselves: When Devolver contacts a member of the press to say they have something interesting to show them, it’s very likely that call will be taken. That relationship with the press, and track record for quality, is a major competitive advantage.

This is the future

Overhead is non-existent with only five people in the company. Everyone at Devolver can speak at length about the games they’re publishing, and the services they can offer indies make it easier for the creative minds behind the games to do their jobs. This is a publisher built from the ground up to take advantage of the state of the business now, whereas companies like EA are being weighed down by their shrinking packaged goods divisions.

This approach makes every game more important, but that’s not a bad deal if Devolver is publishing your game. You want to work with companies that have something to lose if your game is ignored.

Gamers may also be hungry for this sort of company. Record geeks are used to certain labels offering a seal of quality due to strong curation and choice of products. Devolver is hoping to build that brand in games: If gamers begin to get excited for each new Devolver release due to its stable of off-beat, high-quality games, promotion becomes much easier. That assumes they’re able to keep up the flow of hits, however, and quality.

“Entering a relationship with a developer is the most crucial part of any of this,” Lowrie explained. “We don’t want to make one game with you, we want to make all your games with you.”

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I'd Like Fewer Addictive Games, Thanks

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I’d Like Fewer Addictive Games, Thanks

Patricia Hernandez

Describing something as “addictive” is often innocuous, even if the word can have wildly different meanings. Saying that nutella is addictive is not the same thing as saying that a drug is addictive, for example. One of those is meant as a compliment, the other…not so much.

When we’re talking about games, describing them as addictive is how many of us laud compelling design decisions that make it difficult to stop playing.

When I say that Call of Duty is addictive, for example, what I’m really talking about is how thrilling twitch-based shooting is, and how remarkable the game is at providing constant adrenaline rushes. That also explains why it often sounds like we’re describing a drug: you can’t get enough of it, and in some way, that feels seductive.

The most recent example of our obsession with the word would have to be SimCity, a franchise that is known for being addictive.

“I’ve been playing SimCity since late last week, and, like every previous version, I’ve found it to be unyieldingly addictive,” writes Slate.

“If addiction is a freight train, then SimCity is the roaring locomotive pulling you into the night,” writes Polygon.

We know what they mean, right? “Addictive” means it’s a good game—because that’s what we mean when we say something makes us lose track of time, when something refuses to let us go.

I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that conflation. For one, we are celebrating compulsion. Sorry, that’s gross.

Addictive is a business imperative more than anything now, and it’s one that we’ve embraced with open arms.

Furthermore, defaulting to the word is too easy. What about not being able to put a game down is good, exactly? The clincher isn’t that you weren’t able to put the game down. That’s merely the effect of a worthwhile design choice.

Something isn’t worthwhile because you can’t stop doing it, after all. What’s good about Hotline Miami for example is that the levels resemble short puzzles, the music puts you in the zone and, similarly to Call of Duty, the quick pace is invigorating. You might die in a few seconds. Or, you might kill everything in your path. You play to find out.

The inability to put the game down? Hardly the thing that makes Hotline Miami worth playing. Though in this specific case, if we did talk about the game in the context of it feeling like a drug, that would be thematically congruent with the game as a whole.

Further, knowing that games are often engineered with the explicit purpose of being “addictive” feels uncomfortable. Because let’s not mince words here, game developers like it when we can’t put their games down—and that’s not just limited to developers who make Skinner-box-like social games.

The more you play, the more you might buy. Welcome to the world of games-as-services, DLC and microtransactions. Addictive is a business imperative more than anything now, and it’s one that we’ve embraced with open arms.

When we like to measure a game’s worth in relation to how many hours of playtime it can give us, our approval isn’t surprising. The more hours a game allows us to sink into it, the better. That hour-to-dollar ratio has got to be just right, else it’s easier to feel that a game has cheated you. Which is stupid, because time and time again short games prove they can be worth your money.

And what of the ethics of an addictive game? I suspect most people would, without hesitation, say that a developer should not be held accountable for the unhealthy habits a player forms…while ignoring that it’s likely a game was built with the explicit purpose of being too compelling to put down. To what degree can we absolve developers of their own potential responsibility over the works that they create? I don’t think the answer is as clear-cut as some would assume.

Regardless, something curious happens now that I’ve realized too many games try to dominate my time. I play lots of multiplayer games, and these are titles that I’ve put in an absurd number of hours into—often, because they’re designed so that that happens.

Endless levels—everything has an effing level. You have a level. Sometimes your gun has a level. There are typically weekly/daily challenges, and sometimes even those challenges have levels. There’s also always a new map pack on the horizon. Double/Triple XP weekends. Cosmetic unlocks.

Let’s not forget the most absurd part of this all: sometimes, we’ll willingly erase all of that progress with “prestiging.” All of these come together as if to say, “Play some more, why don’t you?”

No, I think not. More and more often, likely in the wee hours of the night after a gaming binge, I’ll look up in a daze from my screen. I’ll put my controller down.

Play some more, why don’t you?

I’ll look at whatever game I’m playing and go, you know what? I’m not interested in a game that wants to monopolize my time. I don’t want a game that is equally as enjoyable on the thousandth hour as it is in the hundredth.

Screw the addictive games. Note that I’m not saying “screw the good games;” of course I want good games. But I think I’d rather play a game that is okay with letting me play other games, a game that feels enough confidence in itself and respects me enough let me have a life outside of that specific game.

We should want more games that know how to package what they need to communicate to us in a sensible number of hours, not games that make it hard to ever let go.

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If These Pixels Could Talk

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by Patrick Klepek on March 6, 2013

Nothing happens in Proteus. Everything happens in Proteus. Co-designer Ed Key on the development of his trippy island experience, the world’s response, and the language we use to talk about games.

Proteus, an experimental first-person musical adventure set on an island with psychedelic pixels everywhere, was nearing the finish line in early January. Now, the hard part: it was time to sell it.
Proteus generates a world just for you every time it boots up, but there are common moments and seasons in every one.
It’s one thing to build a genre-bending experience and show it off to friends and like-minded individuals, folks interested in stuff that’s purposely different. It’s another to drum up a pitch that describes the game in understandable terms to a larger audience and not confuse them.

That was the conundrum for Proteus co-designer Ed Key, and one I struggled with myself. When I’ve mentioned the game to other people, I found myself using some similar phrases: “It’s an art game.” “It’s an experience.” “It’s like exploring a painting in a museum.” This all felt like a disservice to an experience—see, there I go again—that I very much enjoyed, and struggled to find ways to express what Proteus was in context of what’s come before.

Having to be so reductionist about the game seemed troubling, and it’s left me wondering why.

“It’s a linguistic problem and ‘game’ perhaps doesn’t really cut it as it stands, but if you move away from ‘games’ there is no neat single noun that will cover it, really,” said Key. “You start saying ‘it’s like an ambient experience,’ or ‘interactive art’ or something, and anything you say like that always has…it’s kind of annoying to say from the fact that it’s got two words and lots of syllables. It always sounds much more pretentious than I want it to be. I tend to call it a game but I’ll qualify that as carefully as I can afterwards.”

Proteus doesn’t have a traditional skill-based arc to its gameplay. It’s about the journey.

As our definition a game expands, we’ll have circular debates about the semantics. The larger problem is our inability to crystallize and explain non-traditional experiences that aren’t easily defined by what’s come before it. We can’t properly articulate what these new games are doing. The term “art game” has negative implications for some people. Maybe they hated Flower but loved Journey, and while both would fall under a similar umbrella, Journey’s easier to explain because of its platformer trappings.

Proteus didn’t start from such a different place. It had much more traditional ambitions years ago.

“It always sounds much more pretentious than I want it to be. I tend to call it a game but I’ll qualify that as carefully as I can afterwards.”

Ambition made steps toward reality when Key emailed musical collaborator David Kanaga on February 17, 2010. (The full emails are on the game’s website.)

“I just read your post ‘Scenes from Arcturus’ (and listened to several of the mini-albums) and wondered if you might be interested in a project,” wrote Key to Kanaga just over three years ago now. “It’s a kind of ambient exploration game, perhaps with some survival mechanics. […] Also, I felt I should qualify it with “slow-burn” as it’s not really progressing much at the moment (injured my wrist so can’t do a lot of computer work) but it is definitely alive and well, just hibernating…hopefully it will be back on track in a few months. Regarding money, my plan was to make it freeware. If it seems to have the potential maybe it could be sold at some point, but that’s some way in the future, it’s too much of an experiment at the moment.”

(Obviously, those survival mechanics never actually surfaced in the game, and Proteus would go on to become an experience worth asking people to pay money for.)

“I’d definitely be interested in doing some gentle reactive ambient music for this,” wrote Kanaga in response. “You said ‘I don’t have any clear idea for [developing player motivation], but maybe the music could be a part of it?’ — I definitely think that if the music is reactive enough to give the player a sense of “performing the landscape,” that it could provide a good deal of motivation for play. For instance, when I see all the different types of vegetation in your game world, right away I imagine them having (subtle) musical tracks which get louder as the player approaches them; flowers could produce some sort of soft chimes, the yellow trees could have a different sort of musical character, etc.”

Sounds a bit like…Proteus!

Some of the original ideas that inspired Proteus were more game-like. Key had prototypes riffing on a procedural world with adventure and RPG elements. There was nothing about player-driven music. Unfortunately, to make what Key wanted was impossible for a one-man show, especially since Proteus development was largely happening on the side. (It wasn’t until roughly a year ago that Key quit his full-time job as a way to push Proteus along). Key has a love for the worlds lovingly crafted for RPGs like The Elder Scrolls. Key wouldn’t be able to build layers of mechanics into his: it would be all world.

Key remembers the moment he started giving up on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

“I’ve got three quests that start in that town or I’ve got a quest that starts here and has got to go over there and then that town has three quests in it,” he said. “It was like I just spent half a day playing—just tackling my inbox of quests. By the time I’d done that, I was pretty much done with it. Fuck it. It killed it for me. Glitchily climbing up mountains in Skyrim was one of my favorite things to do.”

Largely by necessity, Proteus would focus in on those moments.

Seasons defining a loose narrative arc came relatively early, but wasn’t cemented until it was shown to people at festivals. No one was telling Key and Kanaga when Proteus had to be finished, but when he’d committed to showing it off, those deadlines became moments where Proteus was forced to take shape.

“I was thinking about what kind of stuff can we do to tie this together?” he said. “Make it a more neatly encapsulated experience for submission to this thing. Obviously, competition submissions are really good deadlines for thinking about this stuff, and thinking about how it’s going to be experienced by someone else who’s looking at it quite critically. So it really pushes you into thinking…how can you get something else out of it? How can you present it in a neater way? The linear thing came out of that, along with the ending sequence that there is now.”

When you play Proteus, it might not seem like a game with an ending, but it’s there. Keep going.

Slow but steady work on Proteus continued throughout 2010, 2011, and 2012. When Key quit his job in 2012, he was relying on his girlfriend’s salary to keep going. This was a planned move, and had a useful caveat: a deadline. Key and Kanaga decided on a release date for the end of 2012. That didn’t happen.

As simple as the game might look, the interactions between the music, world, and creatures means it’s not an easy task to continue adding bits and pieces to the landscape.

“There’s lot of things we could do with this, we could just keeping doing stuff with it,” said Key. “It’s that cut-off point. You could just keep adding to it because the type of game it is, the type of world it is. It constantly suggests more things you could add. You could have lots of different kinds of creatures and you could have different ruins and this and that. But they’ve all got to fit in neatly together.”

“I had a whole slew of ‘how to subvert achievement’ system ideas. Like you had just a button on the front end that said ‘I renounce achievements’ and you click it. Or you have achievements for standing still for five minutes or so.”

The game slipped to January, at which point the two decided it was truly time to “beat it into shape.”

Besides locking down content and erasing bugs, this provoked logistical questions. Should there be achievements? It’s expected your game will have achievements these days, and Key spent time talking to friends about what might make sense for Proteus.

“I had a whole slew of ‘how to subvert achievement’ system ideas,” he said. “Like you had just a button on the front end that says ‘I renounce achievements’ and you click it and it’s an achievement. Or you have achievements for ‘you stood still for five minutes.’ […] That’s this weird thing about Proteus, as well. It doesn’t give you any validation about when you’ve seen something new or how much there is left to see.”

Key felt achievements, even subversive ones, would turn the game into a checklist experience, rather than encouraging players to swap stories about what each of them had seen—and didn’t see. Since it turned out Steam achievements weren’t mandatory, he ultimately tossed them out.

With some help from a group of dedicated beta testers, Proteus was released on January 30. As part of that, Key created a description of the game for the masses. Here’s what he came up with:

“Proteus is a game about exploration and immersion in a dream-like island world where the soundtrack to your play is created by your surroundings. Played in first-person, the primary means of interaction is simply your presence in the world and how you observe it.”

That’s pretty good, actually. Descriptive and accurate.

Steam is home to plenty of esoteric experiences like Proteus, including Bientôt l’Été, Dear Esther, Kentucky Route Zero, and others. Stuff that doesn’t adhere to genre conventions. But by and large, Steam is populated with tons of software that falls into established game categories. If you were to purchase the latest indie game promoted by Steam, you’d be pretty safe.

“The weird thing about Steam is that because it was on the front page, you get a lot of impulse buys or people who see a new indie game come up and buy that,” said Key. “So it’s that mismatch between how much promotion and advertising it’s getting—which is just down to Steam, really—compared with people who are finding it because they’ve sought it out or read something about it. People are buying it because it’s been advertised and it looks nice on the banner and has nice screen shots.”
I captured this meteor shower on my second time through. It never happened the first time. Some stuff is truly random.
A not insignificant number of people ended up purchasing Proteus this way—at least, that’s what Key suspects. Upon playing the game, though, everyone wasn’t happy.

“I think a percentage of those people were annoyed with it,” said Key, “but it’s really hard to tell whether it’s the people that are complaining who have actually played it or whether it’s people complaining because they feel it shouldn’t be on Steam.”

Key noticed something interesting in the feedback, too. Some felt Proteus didn’t deserve a spot, and wondered how this game got there in the first place. Greenlight is Valve’s recently launched player-driven service to upvote new games into Steam. Any developer or publisher who does not already have a relationship with Valve have to go through Greenlight. Proteus did not go through this process. Proteus was recommended to Valve some time ago, and Valve extended a spot on the service for when the game was done. The users had no say.

“Obviously it’s generalizing, but some proportion of Steam fans or community feel like they’re gatekeepers of the service now,” he said. “ […] There’s been people complaining about it that haven’t played it, which is kind of weird.”

The relationship between creator and player has evolved greatly in recent years. It will only get weirder.

So far, Key and Kanaga consider Proteus a huge success. 5,200 copies were sold during the game’s closed beta, but it’s sold over 23,000 copies now. There are plans for a summer update, but what exactly it contains has yet to be determined. Key is working on a modding system, and is receptive to the idea of introducing a screensaver-like mode where the game runs through the world automatically.

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Posted by PassiveKaerenai - March 06, 2013 at 9:46 AM

the future of gaming is…conceptual.

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Posted by OllyOxenFree - March 06, 2013 at 9:54 AM

@passivekaerenai said:

the future of gaming is…conceptual.

My God, it’s full of pixels!

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Posted by Perilion - March 06, 2013 at 9:59 AM

For me I think if the art style was closer to Dear Esther I would be more interested. I’m a bit sick of the retro look.

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Posted by ReCkLeSs_X - March 06, 2013 at 10:01 AM

I actually adored the aesthetic and the induced meditation this put me into.

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Posted by Thoseposers - March 06, 2013 at 10:04 AM

I stopped thinking about the game the second i finished it because there was just nothing to it. I did enjoy the look though.

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Posted by fiberpay - March 06, 2013 at 10:11 AM

For me it wasn’t so much like exploring a painting, more like watching paint dry.

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Posted by Scarabus - March 06, 2013 at 10:15 AM

I’m so sick of indie pixels..

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Posted by MrCaptain - March 06, 2013 at 10:18 AM

I enjoy when the graphics are retro styled.

I just wanted to write it because everybody seems to whine about this for some reason

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Posted by heatDrive88 - March 06, 2013 at 10:22 AM

@perilion said:

For me I think if the art style was closer to Dear Esther I would be more interested. I’m a bit sick of the retro look.

As much as I can agree with you that the retro look can be a bit overly used (and in some cases abused) these days, it’s also important to realize why the art style is the way it is due to things like actual development challenges like running in smaller teams, budget/time/resource constraints, etc.

What really matters is if the art style that was chosen is able to do what the developers intended, and to what effect can it leverage that style in the interests of the game.

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Posted by mrfluke - March 06, 2013 at 10:22 AM

i appreciate that these types of interactive things exist.

still feel this game is very similar to lsd for the ps1

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Posted by PurpleMoustache - March 06, 2013 at 10:36 AM

I personally really, really enjoyed Proteus. I was one of those 5,000 odd beta testers, and I found that testing it was WAY more fun than playing the game, as Ed was very easily reachable, and a guy you could have conversations with.

Proteus for me is a means of escape. I have to juggle schoolwork, learning to make games for my future, decide what college to go to in a few months, deal with parents and expectations, and I can choose to leave all that, at a moments notice for 45 minutes and go to a magical island where there is nothing to do but explore.

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Posted by MaxOpower - March 06, 2013 at 10:39 AM

Such a fantastic GAME. I don’t really get all the complaining. This is a game, with a beginning, a middle, an objectivity, and a final goal. This is as much a game as Journey or Anitichamber was. What a “game” really is, is an interesting debate. But I don’t really get why this is the game that has fueled this debate.

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Posted by Nardak - March 06, 2013 at 11:09 AM

I dislike the attitude of some of the indy developers. Just watch the movie “indie game:the movie”.

There a developer of either fez or meatballs says that games like call of duty are “shit” and people playing them are “shit”.

Just because one is developing an indie game doesnt mean that the game is automatically better than a normal AAA release.

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Posted by mancopter - March 06, 2013 at 11:10 AM

Excellent read, thanks @patrickklepek

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Posted by HappyCheeze - March 06, 2013 at 11:12 AM

I enjoyed Proteus a lot. Its relaxing and I’ve never really played anything like it

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Posted by Gold_Skulltulla - March 06, 2013 at 11:14 AM

Proteus is a really wonderful game, and feels like one of those rare titles that I’ll be able to return to years from now.

“Art game” only has negative connotations for people who don’t appreciate art.

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Posted by MonkfishEsq - March 06, 2013 at 11:25 AM

Yeah it’s not a game.

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mbr2

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Posted by mbr2 - March 06, 2013 at 11:30 AM

OH GOD WHY!? WHY DID I READ THE COMMENTS!?!?!? MY EYES!! No wonder parents think only kids play video games.

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Posted by prestonhedges - March 06, 2013 at 11:40 AM

We used to have these in the old days. It’s called a “screen saver.”

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Posted by melodiousj - March 06, 2013 at 11:50 AM

You know, I enjoyed Proteus for what it is. It’s pleasant and chill. I’d consider playing it again for sure.

But it’s altogether not all that profound or anything. Some of this game’s proponents, I’d have to assume, are playing it under the influence of amazingly fantastic drugs.

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Posted by Pudge - March 06, 2013 at 11:53 AM

@patrickklepek Says:

Nothing happens in Proteus.

And then I stopped reading the article. Thanks Patrick!

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Posted by TomA - March 06, 2013 at 11:53 AM

I really hope this isn’t the future of gaming……..

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Posted by Pudge - March 06, 2013 at 12:23 PM

@gold_skulltulla said:

Proteus is a really wonderful game, and feels like one of those rare titles that I’ll be able to return to years from now.

“Art game” only has negative connotations for people who don’t appreciate art.

I may not know art, but I know what I like. And I don’t like spending 10 dollars on pretty graphics with barely any interaction and no story. I enjoy spending 10 dollars on games.

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Posted by Video_Game_King - March 06, 2013 at 12:24 PM

@mrfluke said:

still feel this game is very similar to lsd for the ps1

Come on, man! You want to sell people off Proteus?

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Posted by Video_Game_King - March 06, 2013 at 12:28 PM

Also:
“It’s whatever you want it to be, man.”
I was going to Photoshop one up, but this is hipster enough. I hope we can get a lot of love out of Hipster Brad.

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Posted by dr_mantas - March 06, 2013 at 12:34 PM

Proteus is pretty neat… Had a good time but it wasn’t anything too special.

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Posted by bybeach - March 06, 2013 at 1:09 PM

I kind of agree with some of the mild negative comments, and yet at the end of the day will tell Dear Esther here, I got you a friend. And like dear Esther, will play Proteus and probably enjoy it. This kind of stuff..interactive Art, or whatever you want to term it, is not I think Gaming, but rather Gaming’s first cousin. And it seems also again at the same end of the day, many gamers as myself do not have the heart to segregate away this kind of material. In fact the inclination is to, albeit with a qualified interest, still embrace it on Steam and such, where it can have exposure and make hard sales..

Kentucky Ground Zero has more my interest (more a game?)… though I’m also a bit tired of the Pixel approach. Dear Esther sure rocked in it;s own hi-res scenery and such.

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Posted by megalowho - March 06, 2013 at 1:43 PM

Nice quotes from the dev on Proteus. I enjoyed the game for what it was. But even if it’s more of an artistic piece than a traditional one and outright dismissal is unwarranted, I feel criticism still is, especially because it’s gonna cost 10 bones to take the ride.

The musical elements, for one thing, could stand to be expanded upon. The randomness of the island feels fairly meaningless, played through twice and had near identical experiences. Perhaps most importantly, the lack of interactivity in a world I want to interact with is frustrating. I do hope they continue adding to the game over time and I’m glad it exists, but as it stands Proteus leaves me wanting in a few key ways.

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Posted by klinkcow - March 06, 2013 at 2:17 PM

Great job. It’s good to hear that side of indie game development. Proteus was a unique and interesting experience, and I’d gladly welcome something else from the creator!

It’s good that the baseless comments, in general, don’t seem to get under his skin.

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Posted by CH3BURASHKA - March 06, 2013 at 2:36 PM

*mandatory SHOULD PIXELS TALK query*

And now, to actually read the article…

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Posted by ahaisthisourchance - March 06, 2013 at 2:37 PM

Indie “Games”?

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Posted by InternetDetective - March 06, 2013 at 3:17 PM

I bought and played through Proteus twice. Two times. All done. It should cost about $4.

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Posted by Avanzato - March 06, 2013 at 3:31 PM

Buying this was probably the first time in 40+ years of gaming that I felt I completely wasted my money.

If it had been freeware or 99p I would have thought it an OK but ultimately tedious experiment but it was £6, at which price I expected more. It is of course my own fault for not knowing what the game was but I can’t stop feeling annoyed about it. Unless the intent of the game was to annoy me in which case it’s grand success.

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Posted by YummyTreeSap - March 06, 2013 at 5:05 PM

I wish more games had no goals.

As far as the whinging about retro-styled graphics go, meh. It’s an aesthetic choice that some people like, myself included. I don’t think Proteus looks a whole lot like anything else, anyway.

Also, I quite love all of the totally arbitrary working out of what things should cost. “Yeah man, I mean, $10?! This “game” is worth $5.82 MAX.” [This is me farting all over the place, now]. Ten bucks isn’t a lot. I know it’s awfully easy to start comparing values with the games you’ve spent loose change on during Humble Bundles or Steam sales, but that’s pretty disingenuous. And let’s face it: You’d probably be complaining about the game no matter what you paid for it (see: Thirty Flights of Loving).

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Posted by daltonrowe - March 06, 2013 at 7:00 PM

I just bought this game because of this article, and other Giant Bomb coverage.

There’s one more in the “people who are finding it because they’ve sought it out or read something about it” camp.

Thanks for covering these new kinds of games.

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Posted by CptMorganCA - March 06, 2013 at 7:58 PM

@avanzato said:

Buying this was probably the first time in 40+ years of gaming that I felt I completely wasted my money.

If it had been freeware or 99p I would have thought it an OK but ultimately tedious experiment but it was £6, at which price I expected more. It is of course my own fault for not knowing what the game was but I can’t stop feeling annoyed about it. Unless the intent of the game was to annoy me in which case it’s grand success.

You sorta contradicted your complaint when you said you didn’t do research before buying it. But I get it, feels good to let out frustrations like that.

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Posted by BL1TZKRI3G - March 06, 2013 at 8:22 PM

@thoseposers: See, for me that game was everything other games had failed to achieve. The part I played in it, the finality of it. To me, it’s like it was as big a deal as the culmination of my Mass Effect story (regardless of how good or bad the endings were) or any other game I had invested time in. But then again, we all react in a different way.

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Posted by jynxdaddy - March 07, 2013 at 12:56 AM

@gold_skulltulla said:

“Art game” only has negative connotations for people who don’t appreciate art.

This is why “art game” has negative connotations.

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Posted by Avanzato - March 07, 2013 at 3:08 AM

@cptmorganca: Yes I think it is time for me to move on now and forget about Proteus.

The lasting consequence of the game is that I am one of the front page of Steam, Indie game buying people and it has made me cautious of just buying those games in the future, which is a little bit depressing.

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Posted by gokumane - March 07, 2013 at 8:43 AM

proteus isn’t like “being inside a painting” it is like wandering around a map on a empty fps server

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Posted by tourgen - March 07, 2013 at 3:40 PM

interactive screensaver sums it up pretty well

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Posted by Corvak - March 08, 2013 at 8:40 AM

Complaining about retro style is all well and good, but dont expect it to change greatly. HD gaming involves a significantly bigger outlay of funding for art, and many small projects can’t afford to bring on enough artists to complete such an undertaking in a reasonable amount of time.

So it’s fine to be tired of the retro style, but I wouldnt expect indies to part ways with it for some time - itll be the full time development teams moving away from it, not five person teams on their first couple projects. The furthest theyll go, is something like Dust: An Elysian Tail, with prerendered backgrounds, or Team Meat and their hand drawn stuff.

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Posted by sickVisionz - March 08, 2013 at 8:52 AM

I think we need new ways and terms for describing electronic entertainment that is interactive. The only word we have right now is game and the definition is getting stretched thin. I think calling anything digital and interactive a game is akin to using movie to describe anything that’s filmed or recorded, including commercials, tv shows, movie trailers, reality TV, talk shows, YouTube content, news programs, etc.

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The Little Fighting Game That Could

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by Patrick Klepek on February 27, 2013

Lab Zero asked for $150,000 to make a new Skullgirls character, and fans said “hell yeah!” In the process, it exposed a growing disparity between what people think games cost and the truth.

It’s been a bumpy road for Skullgirls, but just one day into its Indiegogo campaign, the game has raised the necessary $150,000—it’s at $218,000 and counting—to start adding new characters to its brawler. It’s also the biggest gaming campaign the rival crowdfunding service has ever seen.

The animation-happy 2D fighter, the debut release from Reverge Labs, was already asking for trouble by trying to be a brand-new fighting game. It’s an intensely competitive genre with few newcomers. Most fighting games these days are built on established franchises with known characters. Then, much of the team was laid off, prompting a bunch of employees to rebrand under Lab Zero Games last November. As if that weren’t enough, the owner of Skullgirls, Autumn Games, remains in litigation over Def Jam Rapstar, which has complicated efforts to continue work on the game or move it to another company.

Through it all, there’s been one constant keeping the developers motivated.

“We have the best fucking fans in the world,” said Lab Zero Games CEO Peter Bartholow.
Squigly is the first of three characters Lab Zero Games is hoping to produce for Skullgirls, depending on its total funding.
This connection motivated the idea of picking up where it’d left off. Previous plans were brought back to the table, and the team opened its pitch with Squigly, a ranged stance character that leverages singing in her rather unique moveset.

“We were at lunch at Curry House [in Los Angeles],” said Bartholow, “and people were like ‘I think we ought to try it because…I don’t know, why not?’”

It’s not as easy as flicking a switch, though. While Autumn Games was supportive of Lab Zero Games’ desire to expand Skullgirls, due to the continued litigation, providing the financial backing to do so was out of the question. Big problem. The concept of pitching the idea to fans came up, but the studio was forced to back off for a few weeks, following the explosive response to the game’s chance to be included in the EVO 2013 fighting game tournament. To secure a spot at EVO, fans raised money for breast cancer research. Skullgirls fans raised an incredible $78,000, but it wasn’t enough to topple the dedicated fans of Super Smash Bros. Melee, who raised a massive $92,000. It didn’t seem right to ask the community for more money just after it had given so much to a great cause.

The Indiegogo campaign went live on Monday morning, but articles were up on websites ahead of time. This included a Joystiq story with the headline “Skullgirls dev wants $150,000 in crowdfunding for new character,” which prompted a series of comments from users shocked at the sticker price.

“$150k Christ on a bike. I’ve overseen whole projects that cost less than that,” said one commenter.

“Its just a character……..” said one reader. “how the fuck can making a character for a video game cost more then my house??? 0_o”

“Building is what they can jump off of,” said another commenter. “For one character? Even CAPCOM isn’t that greedy, they only sell you the same game 3x”

Trying to raise at least $150,000 was picked for a very specific reason: it was the money Lab Zero Games needed. Often, crowdfunding projects will ask for roughly half of what it actually needs to complete what it’s really promising. There is a psychological effect to crowdfunding, and people want to back a winner. A winner is likely to exceed its funding goal, and get closer to its real goal. The Skullgirls developers actually broke down development costs, hoping to persuade people this was reality:

- $48,000: Staff Salaries - 8 people for 10 weeks

- $30,000: Animation and Clean-up Contracting

- $4,000: Voice recording

- $2,000: Hit-box Contracting

- $5,000: Audio Implementation Contracting

- $20,000: QA Testing

- $10,000: 1st Party Certification

- $10,500: IndieGoGo and Payment Processing Fees

- $20,500: Manufacturing and Shipping Physical Rewards

“We’ve always tried to be really transparent,” said Bartholow. “ […] We’ve always taken a kind of Game Dev 101 approach to all of this. People don’t know anything about game development, and the people that you think might know something, know shockingly little.”

Other developers I’ve talked to back up Lab Zero Games’ claims.

“We’ve always taken a kind of Game Dev 101 approach to all of this. People don’t know anything about game development, and the people that you think might know something, know shockingly little.”
—Lab Zero Games CEO Peter Bartholow

“I think a lot of things in game production tend to be a lot more expensive than many people realize,” said former Capcom special advisor Seth Killian, now lead game designer at Sony Santa Monica. “The Skullgirls team has done a great job breaking out some of their costs, and I can certainly attest that a good fighting game character costs a lot more to develop and implement than developing virtually any other similar asset in games. […] The characters are the game in fighters, and adding more involves a huge amount of intricate assets and one of the most difficult ‘but how does it fit into the rest of the game’ challenges anywhere in development.”

Iron Galaxy Studios has worked closely with Capcom, and is responsible for the upcoming Darkstalkers Resurrection, Marvel vs. Capcom Origins, and others. It knows fighting games. Additionally, the company is building a proper version of the cult hit, Divekick. When I tossed the $150,000 number at Iron Galaxy CEO Dave Lang, here’s what he told me:

“I don’t have any particular insights as to how the Skullgirls team works, but I can tell you if we were doing a similar game there would be two major time sinks: new frames of animation and time required to balance the game.

The frames of animation are very expensive for a couple reasons, but at the end of the day it gets down to volume. Say you need 500 frames of animation per character (arbitrary number, I don’t know what Skullgirls frame count per character is), you actually should budget for 1,000 frames of animation in time and materials because for a 2D fighter the animation is the gameplay, and you will need to rework a lot of the sprites to have the game play the way you want. If you were to outsource that many frames of animation you’d pay $20-$30/hour for that, and at that resolution/complexity each person working on them would get around 4 frames of animation done per day (these are highly involved sprites). That puts the cost of just getting the sprites done anywhere from 40k-60k USD. Keep in mind this will take time, and while you’re waiting for the art to get back from the outsourcer you’re still paying salaries, rent, internet, insurance, etc., so sunk cost for just the art itself is probably gonna net out to 90k USD.

Once you get everything in the game, now you need to balance it. And balancing a fighting game is a “n-squared” problem, meaning each additional fighter you add makes balancing the game much more difficult (and therefore take more time/people) to balance. This takes a long time, even with Skullgirls (now) 9 characters. Every studio has their own cost structure but you can safely assume each individual game developer costs their studio around 10k per month (including rent, insurance, etc.). This number will vary wildly for any given dev, but in the US it’s as good a rule of thumb as you can hope for. Sounds like the Skullgirls crew runs a pretty lean ship so let’s chop that to 7,500k/month for them. If there are 5 people on the team (not sure if this is right, but I can’t imagine doing this with less people so let’s call it 5), that’s 37.5k/month for them. If your budget is 150k, that gives them about 2 months to balance the game, which isn’t really a lot of time.

We haven’t even touched on audio, UI, etc. All that stuff adds up. This is why I think 150k is a bargain.”

That’s a lengthy explanation related to a minimal amount of ignorant complaining about content that was funded almost immediately. Still, crowdfunding has created a fundamental misunderstanding about how much it costs to make games. Skullgirls ultimately cost about $2 million, and $2 million is not that much money, especially when you’re paying a number of salaries and running a company.

The $150,000 for creating Squiggly, for example, already takes into account reduced salaries for everybody involved. Most of the staff is going to be making roughly the equivalent of $600 per week. That’s unlikely to change. That isn’t much in the city of Los Angeles, where most of the staff is located.

“Our guys are pretty close to the edge financially,” said Bartholow.

One way Lab Zero Games hoped to curb its monetary stress in the days ahead was launching through Indiegogo, not Kickstarter. On Kickstarter, projects have to wait weeks after funding closes before it actually shows up in a bank account. Indiegogo also takes less of a cut. On Indiegogo, that money starts coming in after hitting the goal. When I spoke to Bartholow yesterday, it had collected about $34,000.

Fortunately for the company, the money keeps coming in, too.

“We put the stretch goals on there because it’s…a thing that you do?” he said. “We tried to design the stretch goals in ways that would be appealing to our fans.”

It’s already past the first stretch goal of $175,000, meaning it’ll get to create a specific stage and story section for Squigly. The next stretch goal is much further off. At $375,000, it will introduce the first male character into the game’s lineup, Big Band. Additional stretch goals include a stage and story for Big Band, fans voting on yet another character, and more. Fans are loudly asking for a Vita port, which the studio is considering, but that specific demand depends on how much ultimately comes in by the end.

And even if you don’t contribute to the total, you’ll reap the rewards. For the first three months, each funded character won’t cost a penny. Microsoft and Sony charge for download codes, not to mention the logistical nightmare associated with distributing the codes to backers. Zero Lab Games figures the promotion will drive people to pick up the original game, in case they missed it the first time around.

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Posted by CountYourBlessings - February 27, 2013 at 1:16 PM

Beautiful.

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Posted by Shinryu - February 27, 2013 at 1:16 PM

Wow 150k for 1 character thats ridiculous

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Posted by shintsurugi - February 27, 2013 at 1:21 PM

We need more stories like this. Things that show exactly why games cost so much. Education, people!

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Posted by KogX - February 27, 2013 at 1:21 PM

Not my type of game but great that they are successful.

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Posted by Overbite - February 27, 2013 at 1:21 PM

Good on them, this game is amazing and more people need to play it.

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Posted by boylie - February 27, 2013 at 1:24 PM

And the award for “Person who skipped over the contents of the article in order to comment on the headline” goes to —

@shinryu said:

Wow 150k for 1 character thats ridiculous

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Posted by ahaisthisourchance - February 27, 2013 at 1:27 PM

Kickstarter themesong:

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Posted by m3ds334 - February 27, 2013 at 1:28 PM

@shinryu: Did you read the article?

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Posted by KelpPlankton - February 27, 2013 at 1:28 PM

The cost breakdown really illuminates a lot of what I don’t know about games in terms of money. It’s kind of surprising- and it certainly explains why it’s not a trivial matter at all for Capcom to add new characters to their own games via DLC.

It’s a shame, though, that this game can meet it’s goal within 24 hours for a single character, and yet Project Awakening hasn’t even hit the halfway mark of their kickstarter, when they’ve got an amazing looking game and modding toolkit in the works. Oh well, that’s how the market sways I guess.

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Posted by videogamesarenotart - February 27, 2013 at 1:28 PM

did this article just try to say the entire thing was nonprofit, because if so thats hilarious

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Posted by Dtat - February 27, 2013 at 1:29 PM

@boylie said:

And the award for “Person who skipped over the contents of the article in order to comment on the headline” goes to —

@shinryu said:

Wow 150k for 1 character thats ridiculous

HAHAHAHAHA!

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Posted by Zaccheus - February 27, 2013 at 1:31 PM

That’s amazing. There are 24 people who paid 1000$ for that character. The best fucking fans indeed.

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Posted by Kerned - February 27, 2013 at 1:34 PM

@shinryu: The article was really interesting, you probably should have bothered reading it.

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Posted by Monkeyman04 - February 27, 2013 at 1:35 PM

@shinryu: There’s this thing called reading, maybe you should try it.

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Posted by MindChamber - February 27, 2013 at 1:35 PM

@shinryu: wow some who didnt read the article, thats typical.

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Posted by JJOR64 - February 27, 2013 at 1:35 PM

Really glad this is working out for them.

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Posted by Imsorrymsjackson - February 27, 2013 at 1:36 PM

@shinryu: Articles motherfucker, do you read them?

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Posted by Sargus - February 27, 2013 at 1:36 PM

@videogamesarenotart said:

did this article just try to say the entire thing was nonprofit, because if so thats hilarious

Um… No?

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Posted by FLYmeatwad - February 27, 2013 at 1:38 PM

I guess this means people are still actively playing Skullgirls. Maybe I’ll pick it up finally. Did they ever end up adding a moves list in the game? That was what kept me from getting it at launch.

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Posted by skrutop - February 27, 2013 at 1:39 PM

BTW, Indiegogo would be an awesome name for a Skullgirls character.

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Posted by Benny - February 27, 2013 at 1:39 PM

@boylie said:

And the award for “Person who skipped over the contents of the article in order to comment on the headline” goes to —

@shinryu said:

Wow 150k for 1 character thats ridiculous

I hope it was a joke comment but if not, way to basically be the guy who sings “In Bloom” without knowing what it means.

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Posted by FrostedMiniWheats - February 27, 2013 at 1:40 PM

This is a really great article! That block quote from Dave Lang was solid gold in how it broke down costs specific to the genre from a perspective other than the Skullgirls team themselves. This does lead to a followup question though… why do so many things in games need to be outsourced? It makes a certain amount of sense in something like Assassin’s Creed where Ubisoft is trying to create one of the biggest games of the year every single year, but why can’t the Skullgirls developers draw and animate their own art? How big does a studio need to be before they can support their own dedicated artists?

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Posted by captainanderson - February 27, 2013 at 1:41 PM

Awesome, Patrick has started writing good articles again. He should become a cyborg more often. (I’m only half joking). It’s amazing how many people still don’t even have a general sense of how much money even relatively small games take to develop.

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Posted by DolphinButter - February 27, 2013 at 1:41 PM

Unless I’m wrong, I don’t think SSBM raised that much money for Evo and that the $228,000 is the total for what all fighting games raised.

Anyway, great article. Nice to see a happy ending come out of both indie development and the fighting game community.

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Posted by BuddhasEarlobe - February 27, 2013 at 1:44 PM

Just got the game yesterday and it’s pretty dope!

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Posted by Mesoian - February 27, 2013 at 1:45 PM

Keep donating money people! I want BigBand in that game!

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Posted by vinster345 - February 27, 2013 at 1:46 PM

Loved this article and hope to see more like it. Revealing the actual costs and workings behind games makes us understand why the industry is going in certain directions

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Posted by patrickklepek - February 27, 2013 at 1:46 PM

@dolphinbutter said:

Unless I’m wrong, I don’t think SSBM raised that much money for Evo and that the $228,000 is the total for what all fighting games raised.

Anyway, great article. Nice to see a happy ending come out of both indie development and the fighting game community.

Good catch.

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Posted by ectoplasma - February 27, 2013 at 1:47 PM

I like the topic but… maximum verbosity!

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Posted by medacris - February 27, 2013 at 1:48 PM

@skrutop said:

BTW, Indiegogo would be an awesome name for a Skullgirls character.

The first thing that came to mind was a girl with either a stereotypical hipster/indie music musician or gogo dancer costume, who just so happens to like violently eviscerating other fighters for some reason. We should send this idea to the devs, see what they think.

I’m all for this. I know it’s expensive, but a lot of hard work goes into the music, voice acting, and animation, and the backstories of each character look awesome. I wish Lab Zero best of luck with Big Band and Squigly.

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Posted by chiablo - February 27, 2013 at 1:48 PM

“Contracting, contracting, contracting”… Aren’t you a development studio? Hitbox contracting? This isn’t speedtree, this is your engine that you developed (I hope) and it would be much cheaper to have your in-house developers do this.

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Posted by MMann - February 27, 2013 at 1:49 PM

@frostedminiwheats said:

This is a really great article! That block quote from Dave Lang was solid gold in how it broke down costs specific to the genre from a perspective other than the Skullgirls team themselves. This does lead to a followup question though… why do so many things in games need to be outsourced? It makes a certain amount of sense in something like Assassin’s Creed where Ubisoft is trying to create one of the biggest games of the year every single year, but why can’t the Skullgirls developers draw and animate their own art? How big does a studio need to be before they can support their own dedicated artists?

Pretty big.

Art isn’t cheap and artists, unless they can also program, aren’t - for lack of a better word - extremely useful in every step of the game development process. Artists are absolutely critical to making a game but there will come a point in the dev process when all the art assets are in and final, but the code and QA is far from over; and unless the studio is big enough to always have a second or third game in the works that means they’ll have a paid employee with no work to do. That isn’t sustainable.

Outsourcing art isn’t cheap, but it’s more economical than having a staff artist on at all times.

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Posted by DennisTM - February 27, 2013 at 1:49 PM

Am I wrong or does 48k sound really low for 8 people for 10 weeks? Technical staff no less.

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Posted by Myau - February 27, 2013 at 1:49 PM

@shinryu said:

Wow 150k for 1 character thats ridiculous

Reading comprehension: Bottom tier.

Great fucking article Patrick!

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Posted by TheGlitchmaster - February 27, 2013 at 1:50 PM

WOO YEAH SKULLGIRLS

One of my favorite games of last year. I wanna see tons of people playing on that PC version. This game is great.

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Posted by lokilaufey - February 27, 2013 at 1:51 PM

@videogamesarenotart: Did we read completely different articles? Skullgirls raised money FOR a nonprofit, the character crowdfunding ISN’T nonprofit. It’ll just be free for 3 months after going live.

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Posted by Krakn3Dfx - February 27, 2013 at 1:52 PM

I have zero interest in fighting games, but seeing a developer actively give customers the option to pitch in for more content and having it work out is awesome. I would love to see more of it.

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Posted by HellknightLeon - February 27, 2013 at 1:53 PM

Awesome article Patrick. This is the kinda new I want. It shines some light on the game dev and also shows how much people care and are willing to back the games they make and play. Awesome. 150k for one character seems like a lot but after the read… I get it. Takes money and making games is not cheap.

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Posted by Demoskinos - February 27, 2013 at 1:53 PM

This is a good lesson for people to realize how much this stuff costs. Seriously I think some people think DLC just falls out of the sky.

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Posted by big_jon - February 27, 2013 at 1:54 PM

@shinryu said:

Wow 150k for 1 character thats ridiculous

That’s what I was thinking…

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Posted by w1n5t0n - February 27, 2013 at 1:55 PM

In the latest episode of the Double Fine documentary, they had a similar problem either start cutting the scope of the game or find another million dollars.

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Posted by Phished0ne - February 27, 2013 at 1:56 PM

I was wondering if an article was going to be written about this, great read. Its really a shame what happened to Reverge/Lab Zero. Autumn’s hand really got forced with that lawsuit, and its a shame that a game that had such big plans in store for it had to get dropped like a bad habit. Its great to see the community stepping up and getting behind Lab Zero to help Skullgirls grow.

@kelpplankton said:

It’s a shame, though, that this game can meet it’s goal within 24 hours for a single character, and yet Project Awakening hasn’t even hit the halfway mark of their kickstarter, when they’ve got an amazing looking game and modding toolkit in the works. Oh well, that’s how the market sways I guess.

There are numerous reasons for this:

1) Skullgirls has a pre-existing community. Specifically for their game. They get *Decent* tournament turn-outs for a game a lot people said would be dead on arrival. There are still people that want and hope this game will do better in the future in the competitive scene.

2) Skullgirls can also tap into the FGC as a whole. Contrary to popular belief, the FGC is pretty positive when it comes to things like this. Donation drives for good/noble causes centered around the FGC usually raise a fair amount of money. FGC members want to see another fighting game succeed, even if they aren’t necessarily interested in playing the game. The idea that they can tap into the resources of the FGC is really important, there are whole websites dedicated to fighting games, that lends a lot of help to Lab Zero because they can get more coverage than the average crowdfunding project.

3) Project Awakened is wayyyyyy too “pipe-dreamy” to seem true to a lot of people. Plus they are asking for 500,000 dollars, that’s a lot of fucking money. I understand the scale of what they are making is huge, but the claims they make about what that game will do are nuts.

4) Lab Zero is being SUPER transparent about exactly what their money is going to and why they need what a lot of people think is a lot for “just one character”.

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Posted by Dinosaurs - February 27, 2013 at 1:56 PM

I haven’t been paying too much attention to Skull Girls so to me this is good news they’ve got enough support to add to their game. And with a recent publisher agreement for a PC release SG is on the up and up. I wish them much success.

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Posted by happymeowmeow - February 27, 2013 at 1:57 PM

Nice article. Was a little confused if the four paragraphs quoting Dave Lang are just one long quote or separate ones or possibly you interjecting for a second because there’s a quotation mark at the end of the first paragraph.

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Posted by l3illyl3ob - February 27, 2013 at 1:58 PM

@chiablo: This is not really true. They obviously know the person they’re going with, know their price, and know the amount of time it would take themselves to do it. You’d be really surprised just how much game development work is contracted out. Almost every game developer big and small constantly contract out small jobs like this. It’s a very regular thing and is actually done to keep costs down.

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Posted by Albedo12 - February 27, 2013 at 2:00 PM

I think it’s a truism that in general, nobody has any proper understanding of the time, work and cost of any job other than their own. As a result people have an unrealistic view of how much money is needed to make anything, including video games.

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Posted by galloughs - February 27, 2013 at 2:01 PM

Weird this much money was raised for such a mediocre game. Ah well, that’s capitalism!

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Posted by Morbid_Coffee - February 27, 2013 at 2:01 PM

The skullgirls guys are cool people. Knew this ever since MikeZ kicked my ass in the game during PAX East 2011, and was super humble about it because he wanted people to enjoy the game. Really glad things are working out for them, even if I haven’t actually touched the game since launch.

If they release a Steam port though I’m all over that shit.

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Features - Ridiculous Fishing: The Game that Nearly Ended Vlambeer

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By Mike Rose
This is the story of how Dutch indie developer Vlambeer (Super Crate Box) almost lost its way entirely after its game was cloned, and that clone became a big hit on the App Store — and how it found its way to work again with the help of some notable collaborators.

Whether Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail was attempting to hide the deep anguish he was feeling or not, it was pretty obvious that he was bummed out during GDC Europe back in 2011.

We laughed and joked about various silly means by which Gamenauts’ Ninja Fishing, a clone of Vlambeer’s own Radical Fishing that was being downloaded by the millions, could be used to the Dutch studio’s advantage. Perhaps the tables could be turned, and Vlambeer could pretend that Ridiculous Fishing was in fact a sequel to Ninja Fishing. How could Gamenauts really complain about that line of fire?

Through all the smiles, it was obvious that day-to-day life at Vlambeer wasn’t so chirpy following the cloning outbreak. But while the entire ordeal has been well documented in the past, what hasn’t been explored in great detail is just how deep it had all affected Ismail and his partner Jan Willem “JW” Nijman.

But let’s start on a positive note. Ridiculous Fishing is finally getting a release on March 14. It’s the iOS version of Radical Fishing that was started on December 7, 2010 — the same year that the original iPad came out, and iOS had really begun to gain traction.

Ismail’s demeanor has changed dramatically since 2011. “It’s a weight off of our shoulders,” he says. “It’s been such a long time coming, the whole game. It’s been in the back of our heads, this lingering desire to show the world we have a great game.”

As Ismail and collaborator Zach Gage hit the App Store submission button just weeks ago, there was a pure 10 minutes of dancing, celebrating, and shouting “Hell yeah!” — followed by a Skype call to other coconspirator Greg Wohlwend, which was followed by even more celebrating.

“It’s just such a relief to be done with it,” Ismail adds.

Back to the start

Ridiculous Fishing, for those who have missed the drama, is a stylish mobile game all about catching as many fish as possible, then flicking them up into the sky and blasting them with your shotgun. It’s a project that has tormented the team since the day it was casually cloned by another studio, and one that very nearly brought about the end of Vlambeer.

To really gauge the rollercoaster that Ismail, Nijman, and co. went on over the last couple of years, it’s necessary to go back to the start. The beginning of 2011 saw huge strides in getting the game up and running, and for four to six months it came along in leaps and bounds. Then the clone hit, and it all went to pot.

“We were working on Serious Sam: The Random Encounter at the same time, and when the clone hit, my main job at the time was Serious Sam,” explains Ismail. “What ended up happening was, my full-time job became just handling the fallout from the clone, so JW had to take over Serious Sam.”

“Everything just started falling apart. We didn’t work on Ridiculous Fishing for about a year — maybe a few days every now and then — and then we had another short stretch of work on it just before IGF. And then we didn’t work on it for another year!”

From an outside perspective, it seems like the answer was obvious: Drop Ridiculous Fishing, try to put the painful memories to the backs of their minds, and get on with doing what they did best — make games. But it wasn’t that simple, and this project lingering on the backburner preoccupied both Ismail and Nijman.

“We couldn’t kill Ridiculous Fishing. We just couldn’t,” says Ismail. “We just really liked the game, and we knew that we could make it a good game, but we knew that if we tried to make it during that demotivated period, we’d just end up getting really depressed. That ended up being a weird sort of constant tension between me and JW.”

This led to a prolonged period of discontent within the duo’s working relationship. “Everything was stressful for a really long time,” admits Ismail. “You want to be happy working, and for a while we weren’t. For a while we were just constantly worrying about everything we did, about whether we were going to be able to continue doing Vlambeer, to be able to continue making a living.”

Not that Vlambeer has ever been a simple coming together of two friends — far from it. Ismail and Nijman spend a good portion of their time arguing with each other on everything from visual design to gameplay, and worrying about stuff is just their way of dealing with life.

Notes Ismail, “We know that if we want to be an indie developer, we’re going to have to worry about stuff. We want to worry about making the best games we can. We want to worry about building an indie scene in the Netherlands. We want to worry about organizing events.

“But the one thing we don’t want to worry about is the idea that when we release a game, people will realize that it’s a Vlambeer game, and that our work gets acknowledged,” he adds. “That’s the one thing that we don’t want to worry about.”

Seeing people discussing his games, whether it’s in a positive or not-so-positive light, is a large part of why Ismail makes games in the first place. He loves watching people pick apart his work, and that acknowledgement that he’s made something worth picking apart is rewarding enough to keep his desire to make games alive.

But there’s a flipside to creativity. “What the clone did was make us realize that someone else could just come in, take our stuff, release a highly similar game…” he trails off, the memory of it all clearly catching up with him.

“With Ridiculous Fishing, we were set up to have people credit another company for our ideas,” he continues. “And when we started worrying about that, that was sort of this abyss of ‘I don’t give a shit anymore.’ It turns out that creativity is not a solid something. It’s pretty fragile. It’s not an infinite resource that you can just tap into.”

Anyone who knows Vlambeer, and Nijman’s past endeavors in particular, will know that feeling of demiurgic bliss. As it turns out, having your ideas ripped off doesn’t exactly do wonders for your creativity.

“We had this period where JW had a really tough time with ideas, and I had a rough time working on the execution of ideas,” Ismail says. “JW is normally extremely prolific, making games in 15 minutes, or in a few hours — and then suddenly we weren’t quite doing that. We skipped the Global Game Jam, and we’d normally always do that.”

“And that’s what nearly ended Vlambeer — we realized that we weren’t able to be Vlambeer,” he adds. “Vlambeer is prolific, Vlambeer makes lots of games, Vlambeer releases prototypes and weird experiments. That’s what we do. Sort of like between the big indies who only make really polished stuff, and then the extremely prolific part of the indie scene. We’re between that.”

Suddenly, the Vlambeer pair found themselves sat at their computers, staring at blank screens, wondering why they were even there at all. They weren’t making anything, and they’d lost the motivation to care — and all because of one incident that, to the eyes of an outsider, had come and gone many months before.

“We found ourselves at a bar, at a meetup that we organized ourselves, questioning, ‘Can we still do this?’” says Ismail. “We canceled one really big project that we were planning to do, because we realized we weren’t doing it because we wanted to, but rather because we just wanted a project to be working on. Cancelling that project was a big step. I think if we hadn’t done that… We just weren’t making anything, and we weren’t being productive. We just needed something at that point.”

Finding Vlambeer all over again

That’s when things finally started to turn around. The pair began participating in game jams again, and using that experience to figure out what Vlambeer would have to be. Ismail went travelling, and JW spent some time away from his work relaxing. Soon afterwards, they decided to revisit an old Vlambeer classic Luftrauser, and later still a commercial version called Luftrausers was born.

Says Ismail, “When Luftrausers started coming together, we realized that Vlambeer wasn’t necessarily gone. We had just been having a really tough time from dealing with the fallout of the cloning stuff. It took way longer than I care to admit for us to figure out what was wrong. But when we did, everything just sort of started working again.”

“That’s what’s been happening the past year — it hasn’t been Vlambeer. We’ve been working on all this stuff that isn’t making games. We’ve been organizing lots of events and giving all sorts of talks and going to all sorts of places, and making sure we stayed in touch with all sorts of business people. But we didn’t make new games, because we couldn’t.”

Slowly but surely, Vlambeer’s original goals and values started to come back into play, to the point where the pair were finally able to get on with life properly again.

“We think now that everything is sort of resolved, we can move on and do new and interesting stuff,” says Ismail. “That thing in the back of our heads that was keeping us tied to the past — that has gone. We’ve already been talking about two more projects that we really want to work on. We’ve got a lot of little jam projects that we really want to see if we can do more with.”

“I told my mom this just last week: It just feels like Vlambeer again. When I go to the office, it doesn’t feel like going to work. It feels like doing the thing that I dropped out of college for.”

But before we jump to the present, and the impending release of Ridiculous Fishing — due March 14 — it’s well worth digging into the moment that led up to the final resurrection of the game. Ridiculous Fishing was always an annoying, nagging feeling in the backs of their minds, and a constant source of anxiety for the team. So when Ismail met up with Zach Gage and Greg Wohlwend at PAX Prime last year, it was a definite fork in the road.

“We said, ‘You know what? We should find an opportunity to breathe new life into Ridiculous Fishing.’ So we took a road trip from Seattle to New York. It was called ‘The Week of Hatred.’ We got a car and drove for five days with Mike Boxleiter (the other half of Mikengreg with Wohlwend), Zach and Greg, with the idea that we might have a good time, or we might end up hating each other forever.”

Upon arriving in New York, the team set about gutting Ridiculous Fishing to within an inch of its life. “At that point, the fishing felt great, but the shooting didn’t feel so right,” says Ismail. “We had a store that worked, but it wasn’t great, and people didn’t know they had to go there. Everything was there, but it was all convoluted, mixed up, disjointed…”

And with that, it was time to throw out the trash. Adds Ismail, “We decided that the shop was garbage, the interface was garbage, the endgame was garbage… a lot of stuff was okay, but ‘okay’ wasn’t what we were aiming for, so we threw out 90 percent of what we’d done.”

Getting rid of so much of the game left the designers with a much clearer image of what Radical Fishing, and subsequently Ridiculous Fishing, is really all about.

This also gave them the chance to deliberate over every aspect of the game. “So the whole in-app purchase progression thing, right? Making sure the feedback loop is as tight as possible, making sure people are constantly rewarded for what they’re doing, without the evil in-app purchase stuff. We don’t want to do that; we don’t want to make that kind of game. We want to take the good things out of that — it’s like we’re making an IAP game without IAPs.”

It’s something that Vlambeer didn’t even realize it was doing when the game was pieced together.

“For Radical Fishing, our intention was to make a Flash game that took everything good from the addictive-type browser games, but didn’t stretch it out just to make it addictive,” explains Ismail. “So Ridiculous Fishing ended up being the 2012/2013 equivalent of that, where the Flash market is sort of weakening and iOS is sort of what Flash was — you know what I mean?”

Watching the design philosophy of Radical Fishing pour into Ridiculous Fishing with a modernized twist really gave the new game foundations built firmly in the mobile space.

“Radical Fishing was already about a tight feedback loop — that’s what made the game interesting for cloners,” he adds. “If you do well in the descent stage, you’ll do better in the reeling-in stage; if you do better in the reeling-in stage, you’ll do better in the shooting stage; if you do better in the shooting stage, you’ll be able to buy more stuff — and then you’ll be better at the descent stage. Thus it goes round and round. It’s one giant feedback loop.”

The project was nearly derailed again by Ninja Fishing at one point - after revealing the various locations and the way in which they were to be presented in Ridiculous Fishing, a locations screen was added to Ninja Fishing with a simple image that read “Coming Soon”.

Soon afterwards, Ridiculous Fishing died off again, although the team didn’t stop emailing each other this time around. “Before, we just wouldn’t discuss the game at all,” notes Ismail. “We didn’t really talk about the game because we didn’t want to. We weren’t motivated. So suddenly we’re mailing again, and we’re throwing around these weird ideas.”

It was when Wohlwend finished up with Gasketball and flew out to stay with Gage that the real development got underway.

“He decided to fly over to New York to Zach’s place, and basically not leave until the game was done,” Ismail recalls. “Me and JW were working on Luftrausers, so when we heard of that plan, we decided ‘Okay, we’re going to drop everything and focus on Ridiculous Fishing.’”

It wasn’t smooth sailing from the get-go — although, would you expect less from this long and winding story? As it turns out, success can be a wonderful thing, but it can also change the playing field rather a lot.

“We had to figure out how to work with each other again,” says Ismail. “If you look at who we were when we started this project, Vlambeer had just released Super Crate Box and Radical Fishing, Greg had released Solipskier, and Zach hadn’t yet released anything that a lot of people knew about except for maybe Lose/Lose. That’s what we were all known for.”

“Since then, Vlambeer has released like 10 other games, and Greg worked on Gasketball and Hundreds, and Zach released SpellTower, which became this absurd success. So when we started working together again, we had this problem that we were four people who were all doing something else. It took us a while to work out how to work together again.”

Describing it as “a luxury problem,” Ismail notes that having four different teammates, each with their own great success and their own strong opinions about what would make the game click, means that moving forward can be rather tricky.

“If you have to dive into hardcore philosophy every time you want to make a decision, that’s not how you make video games!” he laughs. “Maybe some people do, but that’s not how we make video games. We just try to see what works. But we didn’t do that — we had this problem where we were just talking about stuff.”

It’s not something that Ismail, or indeed any of the team, had really considered. Who would have thought that bringing together an indie dream team could create its own problems?

“I’ve been extremely honored working with these guys, but it’s interesting that it doesn’t only bring positives,” he adds. “You don’t really think about that when you put a team together, I suppose. You end up over-discussing and overanalyzing everything, instead of actually trying. That was unexpected, but sort of cool.”

An example of this over-analysis: The team had a four hour long heated debate about adding a single name to the end game credits.

“We were moving again, but we needed to figure out how to work,” says Ismail. And figure it out they did — in a few short weeks the foursome had locked down everything from the visuals to the gameplay, and things rapidly escalated from there.

Just weeks later, the game was suddenly finished, and the team was staring at the App Store submission screen. “We couldn’t really believe it,” adds Ismail. “That was amazing. It was such a weird rush.”

The aftermath

Video games releases are always a savaged bundle of emotions for their respective developers. On the one hand, there’s huge elation at getting your work out to the public. On the other, there’s the worry of how people will receive it, and whether anyone will actually care.

For Ismail and co., there’s the added worry that the average iOS gamer will believe Ridiculous Fishing is a clone of a game they played a while back.

“Ridiculous Fishing is in this weird situation where a lot of people know about it, and they know it’s related in some way to cloning, but they don’t necessarily know how,” he says. “So I am a bit worried about the public reception of the game. I’m not quite sure that everybody will understand that Ridiculous Fishing is the original.”

But surely people will have forgotten about it by now anyway, I remark.

“We really hope that’s true, but yesterday we had our first mention on Touch Arcade,” Ismail responds. “The article even mentioned the clone, but there was a comment on the article that said, ‘If Vlambeer gets cloned, it’s the biggest news story — but if they clone another game, it’s suddenly like, whatever?’”

I flinched at this. The Rami Ismail from GDCE 2011 may well have fallen into a deep, long coma if he was able to read these sorts of comments now.

“So that is sort of worrying to me, and I don’t know what we’re going to do about that, except sort of explain it to everybody until they understand,” he says.

In the meantime, Ismail is just happy to be making games again, and he’s determined that nothing is going to shake him from that path again.

“I playtest Ridiculous Fishing every time I travel,” he notes. “I’m on the train, and I find someone to playtest the game. These are people who might not know about gaming at all, or people who don’t play video games, or people who are really good gamers. One time I even ran into someone who had played the clone, which was sort of painful… But you know, it’s such a wide demography, and just seeing their responses… Whoever we give it to, they play, and they’re having fun.”

“That’s so exciting,” he says. “It’s just so nice to be making games again.”

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Copyright © 2012 UBM Techweb

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