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A Revisit And Correction // regarding A Serious Question For Anita Sarkeesian
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Angriff auf die Jungskultur
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On The Power And The Diminishing Returns Of “Indie”
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A Revisit And Correction // regarding A Serious Question For Anita Sarkeesian

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A Revisit And Correction // regarding: A Serious Question For Anita Sarkeesian

This article was originally published on monday, march 11th. Since then I had a couple of very productive debates regarding this article, which kinda forced me to do some self-examination and revisit the article. ..and correct myself on a couple of things.

Here we go:

Okay, so the premise of my article was basically this:

1: Anita Sarkeesian published the first video of her Tropes Vs. Women series, in which she examines tropes in video games concerning women and the way they are used.

2: She points to tropes and the way they are used as contributing factors to sexist ideas in the gaming community, culture and society at large. And she advocates for not using the tropes, at least not as much as it currently is done.

3: I kinda got stuck on the point, that I consider those tropes – like the damsel in distress for example – to be valid story telling tools. I think that they have a strong appeal to certain audiences and that it is okay to enjoy them. But this is something I did not see mentioned strong enough in her videos.

So what did I do with that premise? I wrote a public letter addressed to her, where I basically called her out for sending “dangerous” and “harmful” messages in the subtext of her videos, when she focusses only on how bad and sexist the tropes are, while underplaying their narrative value.

And with “dangerous” and “harmful” I was referring to some sort censorship idea, as if those tropes are in danger of becoming a taboo and therefore becoming basically unavailable as storytelling tools for those who want to use them and the players who want to enjoy them.

Interestingly, I basically knew all along that those tropes weren’t in danger. Like at all. But I still got riled up enough to write this very very confrontational letter, in defense of my precious male centered tropes.

And then conversations started.

Some of my readers were outright angry with me. I understand how the confrontational tone of the article might have read, like I’m attacking Sarkeesian for a lot of stuff she didn’t say. But in fact these kind of attacks are not in the article (which is below this correction for reference). I made sure to not be presumptios about what she said or meant, but to focus my questions on how things could be interpreted by a portion of her viewers. So I was accused of putting words in her mouth, while with this very accusation people were putting words into mine. Funny how that goes.

Anyway… I had a lot of very very helpful responses. Helpful in the sense, that they were written in a thoughtful manner, directly challenged what I wrote, not attacked my person or motives and actually made me rethink a lot of what I wrote. Or maybe think through for the first time?

As much as I still think Sarkeesian could be more …uhm… appreciative of the narrative value the tropes in question have, I really don’t think she should.

When it comes to gaming culture, male centered tropes are really in no need of protection or explicit appreciation. And they wont be for the foreseeable future. Damsels wont go away any time soon.

But alternatives to them and awareness for their negative impact on women and games is very much something that needs to be appreciated and worked on.

This I knew already. Many of my articles on sexism in games stands on that basic premise. Still, I kinda got whipped up about what Sarkeesian was doing. Kinda irrational.

So I’d like to apologize to all the readers, who’s time I wasted. It happens. And I like to extend a big thanks to all readers who earnestly engaged me on this thing. You certainly have not wasted my time.

Below is the original article for reference:

After me sharing Anita Sarkeesian’s first video and me being someone speaking up about sexism issues in gaming, I had a few conversations about the issues of sexist content in games and Sarkeesian’s work and I was viewed as someone who approves of her in a way that did not made me comfortable. Something that happens in comments under my articles as well. So I think it is time for some clarifications. From me and from her.

Here is an open letter to Anita Sarkeesian:

EDIT: With the article being up just a bit over an hour, I already had quite a few interesting conversations about the article and will amend a few things tomorrow to reflect that. A few things I need to clarify myself and maybe correct one or two things. Please keep adding comments, it was very helpful so far. Thanks.

Hey Anita…

It would be great, if you could clarify something for me and your considerably large viewing audience. Actually, I think it’s quite important that you do.

Your videos are something everyone should see. You have a great way of treating content, collecting data and presenting it in a easy to grasp fashion. I think what you do enhances media literacy, which is a big important thing and one of my driving forces. I would love to just share your videos around and say “THIS!”.

But I can’t. Because what you actually advocate with your videos – explicitly and in subtext – is in my opinion harmful to progressive ideology, art and harmful to feminism… I realize that my understanding of what you advocate is just the way I read your videos and this might not be congruent with your intend. Still, it needs to be addressed, intentional harm or not.

What is my beef? In most of your videos you examine tropes, patterns of reoccurring similar depictions of women in pop culture media. You point to their characteristics, anecdotally point to where they can be found, sometimes show alternatives and explain the subtext or even explicit messaging of those tropes. So far so good.

But then you move on and condemn the use of the trope. You point to the trope itself as the source of a societal problem and leave it at that. And that is not okay. Not at all.

By saying “these tropes promote objectification”, you are directly linking the existence of those tropes with real life oppression of women. And then your video is over. The only thing left – after you ripped a trope to shreds – as a possible remedy is getting rid of the trope, stop using it. Is this really the line of argument you want to make? There is media content that promotes unhealthy behavior and now let’s get rid of it? Do you really want to use your significant media power for that kind of argument?

There are games, which promote gun use. Games promote violence. Games promote eating fast food. Games promote reckless driving. Games promote stealing. Games promote vandalism. Should all tropes in those cases be removed as well? If not, what makes sexism related societal problems “promoted in video games” so special, that they should get a special taboo-in-art treatment?

I apologize if I missed something here, but I watched all your vids and was actively looking for a clarification here. I was actively looking for you to explain what we should do about the problematic tropes. And all I found was various flavors of disapproval for those tropes and an explicit link to societal ills. Are you really arguing for making certain types of images and messages a taboo? Do you really think removing those images and messages is a proper remedy for the related problems?

Again, I understand that this is just how I read your videos and I’m not asserting any motives on your end. But I don’t think that my reading is an unreasonable one and you may want to do something to clear things up. You of all people should have an interest in getting your subtext straight, since that is exactly what you call the media industry to do in regards to sexism.

As a critic, I struggle to make a case against sexism without making a case against artistic freedom and sexual liberty myself. Sometimes I fail. But I try and I hope I improve over time. It is important to me that I clearly state in my articles, that the creation and consumption of sexist content itself is not the problem.

Imbalance, lack of media literacy and systemic sexism are the problem. They result in sexism to be viewed as a default, which makes sexism in media hard to spot, which demonizes critics of sexist content, which downplays the negative effects or even the existence of sexism and which leaves little room for alternative concepts and excludes people. The problem is not tropes promoting unhealthy ideas. It’s the unhealthy ideas themselves. It is that designers and audiences need to recognize the promoted ideas as unhealthy and then deal with the ideas accordingly.

It is my goal to give everyone access to a medium, which currently is dominated by a certain demographic. I want new ideas, concepts, people, fans and makers to join in on culture and make it bigger for everyone. To me then going out and saying “You like submissive sexy objectified girls in your game? Get out!” would be incredibly hypocritical. If I want a space for everyone to explore and express their interest, I cannot be picky about what interests I deem legit.

EDIT: This sentence originally stood here in big fat letters: “Simply put: You cannot fight marginalization by marginalizing the currently privileged party.” This sentence totally backfired by making it appear that I was somehow worrying about the privileged status of men in games culture. Which would be silly. But looking at it now I don’t know how you could read it differently and I actually struggle to find a way to say what I actually want to say. Kinda fucked this up. Maybe I get back to it later.

We cannot take part in creating a precedent for the suppression of ideas and expression because we disapprove of them. But that is what your videos are saying. “This trope hurts women… so stop it.”

Is this what you are advocating for? Marginalizing players for liking easy girls in their games as much as blowing heads off? Marginalizing designers for indulging male-centered power fantasies? Are the tropes themselves really the problem for you? You damn well make it appear so. You realize what the title of many of your previous and upcoming videos implies, right? Tropes versus women?

If you are advocating for limiting the use of the tropes instead of expanding the media savviness of audiences, we are in severe odds with each other and I can no longer support you. Because then you advocate for people to become dumber instead of making them smarter. I’m not naive, I understand that media influences how societies tick. Things that are represented as norms and values in pop culture media easily do their part in shaping the norms and values of the people who consume them. Helping people to understand the trope and the harmful ideas behind them (what you do quite well imho) does make people more capable in general to deal with unhealthy ideas. Kudos for that. But taking the trope away does not make anyone more equipped to do anything.

I really hope I’m making things out to be bigger than they actually are. But even if you don’t intend to basically promote censorship here, I have trouble supporting you as long as this dangerous message festers in your subtext without clarification. Why? Because I don’t believe in censorship and don’t want to promote it… even accidentally. Actually, I will look at my previous articles on that subject and see where I feel they need to be amended to avoid having this damaging subtext in my work.

So what do you want? Is it really “Tropes Versus Women” or “Lack-of-Understanding-of-Tropes Versus Women”? or “The-Lack-of-Female-Friendly-Tropes Versus Women”?

A quick written disclaimer at the beginning of a video would be enough. Or an acknowledgement, that everyone has the right to enjoy the very tropes you are dissecting, without being viewed as an asshole. Or making a explicit appell to designers to consider female friendly tropes, instead of guilting them into it?

I know it’s busywork, an act of courtesy maybe and often feels like a formality. But this stuff matters.

Thanks for the attention.

Cheers.

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Angriff auf die Jungskultur

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Jetzt ist es also so weit: Anita Sarkeesian hat Teil 1 ihrer geplanten Video-Dokuserie “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” zum Thema Sexismus in Spielen soeben veröffentlicht. Wir erinnern uns: Die “Causa Sarkeesian” war letztes Jahr eine jener Affären, die schmerzhaft eine traurige Tatsache unter Beweis gestellt haben: Sexismus ist nicht nur, wie Sarkeesian zeigen wollte, in den Spielen selbst selbstverständlicher und meist nicht einmal bemerkter, fixer Bestandteil der Gameskultur, sondern auch und besonders in großen Teilen der Spielerschaft mehr als salonfähig - ein Befund, der von den beispiellosen Angriffen, sexistischen Beschimpfungen, Gewaltandrohungen und von sexistischer Hetze gegen Sarkeesian selbst aufs Deprimierendste unter Beweis gestellt wurde.

Ironie des Schicksals: Sarkeesians bloße Ankündigung, Spiele auf Sexismus zu untersuchen, hat durch diese verstörend massive Kampagne schon Monate vor Erscheinen dazu beigetragen, das Dilemma des Sexismus im Gaming zu beleuchten und wurde so zum Beweis dafür, dass das Problemfeld noch weitaus größer ist, als sie selbst eigentlich angenommen hatte.

Die fehlende Sensibilität für das Problem Sexismus zeigt sich regelmäßig auch von Industrieseite

So betrachtet ist es also tatsächlich völlig irrelevant, zu welchen Schlüssen die amerikanische Bloggerin erwartbarerweise in Bezug auf das Medium selbst kommt. Denn dass, wie Sarkeesian mit unzähligen Beispielen akribisch dokumentiert, Spiele mit sexistischen Motiven operieren, ist nur ein winziges Mosaiksteinchen eines schwer zu leugnenden Befundes: Nicht nur in den Spielen selbst, sondern auch in der dazugehörigen Industrie und in einem selbstbewusst-lauten Anteil der Spielerschaft ist ein problematischer, oft aggressiver Sexismus die Norm, die zudem in einem falschen Verständnis von “Spielkultur” im Reflex verbissen verteidigt wird.

Kein Wunder, dass die “Fans”, als die sich die glühendsten Medienvertreter gebetsmühlenartig und distanzlos bezeichnen, wenig Unrechtsbewusstsein entwickeln und wehleidig aufjammern, dass von feministischen Inquisitionen ungerechterweise überall Sexismus hineininterpretiert würde, wo nur unschuldiger Spaß beabsichtigt sei. Denn die fehlende Sensibilität für das Problem zeigt sich regelmäßig auch von Industrieseite: Dass das soeben erschienene “Tomb Raider” schon letztes Jahr im Zentrum der Kritik stand, war vor allem den sehr blauäugigen Aussagen der Entwickler im Zusammenhang mit einer angeblichen Vergewaltigungsszene geschuldet.

Die gleichzeitige Ledernonnengewaltfantasie des “Hitman”-Trailers geht in diesem Umfeld ebenso mit Unschuldsmiene als harmloser Spaß durch wie die PR-Aktion von Deep Silver vor wenigen Wochen, in der das Zombiespektakel “Dead Island: Riptide” mit dem verstümmelten Torso einer vollbusigen Bikini-Leiche beworben werden sollte - sowohl manche Fans wie auch der Publisher selbst sahen sich angesichts des medial immerhin doch einsetzenden Kritikfeuerwerks ungerecht behandelt. Schlussendlich entschuldigte sich Deep Silver dann für das angeblich missverstandene “conversation piece”. Die Spielerschaft zuckte die Achseln. Eine halbnackte, verstümmelte Bikinimaus - what’s not to like? Wo ist da Sexismus? Alles halb so wild? Rape culture? Aber geh!

(Apropos “Dead Island”: Bevor in den Kommentaren die Diskussion ihren erwartbaren Verlauf nimmt, sei nochmal drauf hingewiesen, dass Techland schon im Vorgänger mit der charmanten “Feminist Whore”-Diskussion etwaigen Benefit of the Doubt stark beansprucht haben.)

Eigentlich sollte man annehmen dürfen, dass es immer schwieriger wird, den Balken im eigenen Auge wegzuerklären, vor allem, wenn die Frauen in der Industrie selbst das Wort ergreifen. Unter dem Twitter-Hashtag “#1reasonwhy” versammelten Mitte November Frauen, die in der Games-Industrie arbeiten, ihre alltäglichen Erfahrungen mit Sexismus in der Branche, die, wie viele in der Technik, sehr männerdominiert ist. Zusammen mit den Alltagssexismen auf Spielerseite, wie sie Seiten wie Fat, Ugly or Slutty dokumentieren, ergibt sich ein trauriges Bild des Mediums: Sowohl auf professioneller wie auch auf Spielerseite sind Frauen im Gaming regelmäßig und systematisch Diskriminierung aufgrund ihres Geschlechts ausgesetzt.

Da passt es auch selbstverständlich ins Bild, dass bei der Präsentation der neuen PlayStation 4 trotz hundertköpfiger Entwicklerteams keine einzige Frau auf der Bühne zu sehen war - und dass wütende Gamer die Autorin jenes (oben verlinkten) Kotaku-Artikels, die auf dieses Faktum hinwies, sofort in Hunderten Kommentaren dafür zu verreißen begannen, dass sie diese Abwesenheit überhaupt thematisiert hatte. “Congratulations, you are now a Kotaku Commenter” heißt denn auch ein minimalistisches Stück Interactive Fiction, das sich dieses Phänomens annimmt.

Warum verteidigt ein Teil der Spielerschaft - man kann getrost die Eckdaten “männlich, unter 25, hetero” unterstellen - derart vehement nicht nur “sein” Medium, sondern auch den eklatant offenbaren Sexismus, der sich darin breitgemacht hat? Warum reagieren derart viele Spieler mit so großem Hass und instinktivem Abwehrreflex auch nur auf die Feststellung, dass hier Sexismus herrscht - und dass man daran möglicherweise etwas ändern sollte?

Warum verteidigt ein Teil der Spielerschaft nicht nur “sein” Medium, sondern auch den eklatant offenbaren Sexismus?

Es ist eine Jungskultur, die sich hier weigert, an allgemein gesellschaftlich gültigen Normen gemessen zu werden; der englische Begriff “Lad Culture”, der eigentlich im Zusammenhang mit Britpop der 90er-Jahre geprägt wurde, kann durchaus auch hier Erhellendes beitragen. Die “Lad Culture”, mit ihrer demonstrativen Betonung maskuliner Stereotype und der Wichtigkeit von Saufen, Fußball und Misogynie, ist eine eigentlich defensive Reaktion auf die Zweite Welle des Feminismus, ein Backlash gegen die als restriktiv empfundene “Political Correctness” feministischer und gleichberechtigender Zugänge, in denen sich junge Männer oft als Verlierer sehen.

Lasst uns wenigstens unsere Computerspiele. Viele Männer stehen halt auf Action, Titten und Alkohol. So be it” - dieser weinerliche Kommentar eines Users zu einem Artikel zum Thema zeigt zugleich diesen Rückzug auf ein “klassisches” Männerbild als auch das Verständnis des Gamings als Fluchtort, als Boys’ Club, als augenzwinkernden Eskapismus, an dem zumindest noch jene Jungsregeln gelten sollen dürfen, die man außerhalb mit dem Erwachsenwerden meist freiwillig, zumindest aber wegen ansonsten folgender gesellschaftlicher Ächtung ablegt, wo man treuherzig Herrenwitze reißt und “zum Spaß” ein bisserl frauenfeindlich sein darf.

Fürs Protokoll: Solche Rückzugsorte gibt es, es wird sie weiterhin geben und keine feministische Internationale plant ihre Abschaffung. Nur: Über die Größe dieses Reservats sollte nachgedacht werden. Ein ganzes Medium samt seiner Kultur ist zu groß, um als Boys’ Club unter Naturschutz gestellt und vor ansonsten üblicher Kritik verschont zu werden.

Denn eigentlich ist im Gaming auch Platz für Frauen und Männer, nicht nur für prä- und postpubertäre Jungs. ”We are letting way too many boys get into adulthood without actually becoming men. We’re seeing more and more adult males around who are not men. They’re as old as men, but they have the mentality of nine-year-old boys. They’re causing a lot of trouble, both in general and for the game industry specifically. We need to deal with this”, rief Ernest Adams zum Thema alle “decent men” zu den Waffen.

“Let’s stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the women we love, and work with, and game with, and say, ‘We’re with you. And we’re going to win.‘“Dem ist nichts hinzuzufügen.

Dieser Text erschien zuerst für fm4.

Verfasst von rainer sigl am 11. März 2013 - 9:06

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On The Power And The Diminishing Returns Of “Indie”

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Indie Games Are Growing Up

By Lewie Procter on March 8th, 2013 at 12:00 pm.

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Something is happening. I’ve noticed it, you may have noticed it, and it’s probably no surprise to anyone who’s ever bought an “indie” record. The corporations with a finger in this delicious pie we call the games industry have been watching what’s happened, too. They’ve been watching the achievements of the likes of Jonathan Blow, 2Dboy, Notch/Mojang and other countless successful indie developers. Now, they’re changing the way the operate. And that is in turn changing how indies operate. Indie gaming will never be the same again. Is this a bad thing?

We talked to Double Fine, Positech, Klei and others to find out.

Consider the corporation. When its motivation is to maximise shareholder wealth, you’ll be watching what’s happening in the wider marketplace around you, and adapting your business to operate in whatever areas are likely to generate the significant income. For a long time in the games industry, this had been big games made by huge teams and backed up with a large marketing spend from publishers with cosy relationships with the various market gatekeepers, and everything else dwindled. That’s no longer the case. We can chalk it up to a trend towards democratising distribution, promotion, funding and tools of production, as well as, perhaps, broadening of approaches in attempting to meet customers tastes and expectations, as well as the natural maturing of a market over time. Now games made with an independent aesthetic, low budget, limited scope and esoteric attitudes are making big bucks, too.

This notion of what the indie aesthetic, budget, scope and attitudes is changing. And that has ramifications for the development industry as a whole.

We’ve already seen major publishers try to co-opt the term “indie” for marketing purposes. There’s EA’s infamous “Indie Bundle” (now renamed to “Niche Gamer Bundle” after the PR fallout), and recently launched “100% Indie” label (in partnership with Samsung). Microsoft, too, recently released an “Indie Pack” sold through Amazon, full of games they’d partially funded in exchange for, amongst other things, platform exclusivity.

But it’s not just about branding. We’ve also seen examples of larger developers empowering their staff to pursue passion projects internally, such as Bohemia allowing DayZ’s developer Rocket to switch his role from working on their other projects to working full time on what was simply a mod. Or there’s the success of Geometry Wars, which was born out of Stephen Cakebread toying around with the input test app originally built whilst developing Project Gotham Racing. Or Lionhead backing Mark Healey’s Rag Doll Kung Fu back in the early days of Steam.

2012 seems like a watershed year for these changes. It was the year of medium sized developers going publisher independent. It was the year of Kickstarter. It was the year when everyone took up arms with Unity, UDK and a range of other tools to make gaming independent.

This is all making it an interesting time for players, but it’s also led to some semantic blurring of the term “indie” in the context of game development. Could the end of the indie revolution simply be that the term ends up being meaningless? Could its success have destroyed it?

Let’s be in no doubt: indie has been a banner, a logo, a beacon of light. It has been the moniker of the most important movement in game development in two decades. But it seems the tsunami is losing moment, and blending with the development seas beyond. We are losing something.

Let’s take a recent example, Surgeon Simulator 2013. It’s an awesome game, made by some clearly talented individuals, but I can’t see any definition of “indie” that could possibly apply to it. Yes, it was made by a small team at a game jam. Yes, it’s clearly a creative and innovative smaller game, and not at all the kind of idea a marketing department would come up with. But it is a property of Bossa Studios, made by a team of Bossa employees, on company time. Bossa is owned by television production company Shine Group, which is in turn a division of News Corporation.

It’s not the case that Rupert Murdoch sent down a command to Bossa from his Iron Throne to say “Send a team of plucky designers to a game jam so they can come up with a whimsical game that will take the internet by storm, and we can market it as if it’s an indie game”. But the implication that this is far, far from what was meant by “indie” still remains. I asked Bossa’s Henrique Olifiers how come they ended up sending a team to the Global Game Jam. He said this:

Bossa Studios takes pride in maintaining a creative and open environment for everyone. We encourage all team members from every department to create concepts, put them forward and, for the winning concepts, the reward is to see them being prototyped. We’ve got new prototypes being created all the time. We all play the prototypes and then follow a simple rule: if they are fun, we continue working on them and see where it takes us. GGJ is really just an extension of this philosophy – but in a much wider scale.

Game Jams are one of the places where the lines blur. Anyone can partake in them – indie or AAA – and so it’s where the methodology of indie can bleed into the mainstream. Experimentalism. Rapid prototyping. Those in charge of Bossa decided that it’s effective management and use of their development resources to encourage and support a team of their staff to attend a game jam, knowing that at worse they’ll blow off some steam and make good contacts whilst publicly representing the company, and at best potentially come up with something that will directly generate wealth for their becowled corporate backers.

But does that make the resulting products “indie”? Not in my mind. Not when the result is produced and sold by a large company. This, however, hasn’t stopped the indie press from covering it, and doing so as an indie game. It’s got coverage from indiegames.com, indiegamemag, and yes even on this very website in Porpentine’s excellent Live Free, Play Hard column.

As far as I can see, the SS2k13 developers never misrepresented themselves, or made false claims about their ties to the Lizard King, but they don’t appear to have stepped in to correct any of the journalists writing about their game either. Of course, if you’re making a game, it’s your job to get people to hear about it so they can maybe play it, and if you’re writing about games it’s your job to give your readers interesting and relevant information, not necessarily to investigate all the corporate ties of everyone involved in a game. So it’s understandable.

But…

I asked Henrique whether he thinks Surgeon Simulator 2013 is an indie game, and if not, whether they considered correcting media that referred to it as such, he said:

That the guys decided to brand it Bossa was their call, not a studio directive. They made the game in 48 hours over a weekend and put it up on a website for people to enjoy and comment on – and we are happy to see the team members getting credit for it. Bossa Studios exists because of the incredible talent we have here and our mission is to nurture that talent.

Surgeon Simulator 2013 was recently successfully Greenlit on Steam, and Bossa tell me that they’re going to be making a formal announcement for their future plans for it very soon. It sounds like the devs who worked on it have been able to turn a project they initiated because they thought it would be fun into their day job. And can we really begrudge that? Even if it does seem to blur the “indie” label beyond recognition?

Another studio that’s spawned new ideas under game jam conditions is Double Fine, arguably the poster-child for transitioning from a publisher dependant model to self-publishing. When asked to what extent their shift in strategy was inspired by emerging trends in independent development, Double Fine’s Greg Rice said this:

A lot actually! We’ve been really inspired by the way smaller studios have been able self-publish their own games and deliver on a unique vision because of that. That’s something we are really excited about with our Kickstarter funded game, and hopefully with even more Double Fine published titles in the future.

And he went to to talk about empowering the Double Fine staff to pitch their passion projects, and to see how it benefits the studio as a whole:

That’s one of the really exciting things about Amnesia Fortnight. It gives people at the studio a chance to make the games they’ve always been dreaming of, and also allows people to try out new positions in the company. It’s a really creatively energizing time at the company that always results in interesting new ideas. I’d definitely recommend it for other studios!

We then, of course, asked about whether Mr Rice thought the blurring between “indie” and “not indie” was problematic.

Yeah, those kind of semantics are always weird. I think it’s just a spirit that certain studios embody, but ultimately I’m not sure it really matters. Cool games are cool games regardless of the classification they get.

There’s a precedent for the term “indie” being diluted over time, of course. The music industry isn’t entirely like the games industry in its relationship with “indie”, but there are similarities. Way back when, before my time, an indie band was one signed to an independent record label, or one that eschewed record labels altogether. These days, many of the most successful “indie bands” are on labels like Sony, EMI, Universal and Warner, with releases accompanied by huge marketing campaigns, payola arrangements with music channels and radio stations, and international stadium tours. If you enter a highstreet music retailer, they’ll try to tell you that “independent” is a narrowly defined collections of sounds produced by narrowly defined groups of people.

But guess what? The highstreet music retailers are dying. Dying because they’ve allowed themselves to become irrelevant in the eyes of many of their consumers and many of the creators they need to matter to. The labels are going to have to fight to survive too, if they want to keep their heads above water. The challenge of selling music without any record label contract was hard in the past, but it’s pretty damn easy today, and it’s only going to get easier.

Thrift Shop is the second ever independently released song to hit number one on the US singles chart, and it’s charted all around the globe. We’ve come a long way since Radiohead’s self released In Rainbows, in a relatively short time. Sure, we’re not going to see a situation where there are no record labels any more, but musicians around the world are surely going to be wondering if they could pull off a successful self-releasing career. Record labels are going to have to do more and more to justify their fees and complicated contracts, perhaps even reducing their fees and simplifying their contracts. Shifting infrastructures are putting more power into the hands of the creators, and the users stand to benefit too. Creators get to release their work on their terms, with complete creative control, and users get a more direct connection to the artists, and a far greater proportion of their money goes to the creators, instead of the suits.

Just as music pre-dated the record industry, video games pre-date game publishers. In both fields, there’s been long periods where the major corporations had near-absolute controls of the market for creators output, but creators and consumers seem to only tolerate that for so long. We’re way past the point where you need someone else’s permission to make a game, or even to buy a game, and the barriers to market are getting lower each day.

Publishers might be only truly interested in making money, but if that means they are willing to take risks funding development of games that they expect people will want to buy, why would developers turn that down? And why would any gamers begrudge developers taking their money? I asked Klei Entertainment’s Jamie Cheng whether the games they’ve made would have been possible without their partnerships with the EA (Shank) and Microsoft (Mark of the Ninja):

I’m certain Shank would’ve made it’s way out one way or another, but I’m not so sure about Mark of Ninja. We have tons of prototypes or ideas that we’ve shelved over the years. The scope of Ninja was probably too big for us to self-publish at the time. I like to think that we’re strong enough creatively that we don’t sacrifice the quality whether we self-publish or partner.

He went on to talk about how control of a project is shared between a small developer like Klei and their monolithic corporate partners:

While we’re always happy to listen to input, both from our partners and our fans, we make absolutely certain that we have control over the direction and the IP of the games we make. I think that’s crucial when a developer is trying to break new ground. Being strong in your conviction of what the game should be as the developer is a necessary (but not sufficient!) condition to creating a compelling experience. There was one project where we didn’t do this, and allowed ourselves to bend to the wind of criticism. The result was a bland game that thankfully eventually got cancelled.

In terms of pricing and marketing, in general that’s a collaborative effort, but more and more we are handling community management and marketing internally.

My question, then is whether this relationship disqualifies Klei from being an indie studio? Are their games they’ve partnered with publishers on not “indie” games? Should they get to attach their work to that banner?

It’s a semantic minefield, but here’s Cheng’s take on it:

We absolutely identify ourselves as independent. We choose which games we decide to make, with whom, and on which platform. In terms of how to classify the games, however you would like to semantically define an “independent game”, I can say we made the creative and implementation decisions independently, and work in that spirit from start to finish.

Tere is less ambiguity with latest title, Don’t Starve, which they are self-publishing. I asked him why they decided to self-publish Don’t Starve, and how that’s impacted the game:

Don’t Starve is our own little pet project that we wanted to experiment with, and self-publishing made the most sense for that purpose. Self-publishing allowed us to do basically whatever we felt was the right thing to do, at any moment, without worrying whether it would cause pain to our partners. I think the result is that the game is doing all sorts of things we’d never do traditionally — early access, constant updates, extremely open development, etc. We love it, though we also think this sort of development works especially well with a procedural survival game like Don’t Starve. I’m not sure early access would have worked nearly as well for a game like Ninja.

That seems smart to say that the correct strategy is going to depend largely on the game, and the circumstances of the developers making them. Independent developers self-publishing their own games can spawn creative and disruptive ways of developing and releasing games, that savvy publishers will react to. Indie, then, might simply be a matter of context.

But what might a genuine indie old-timer make of all this? Positech Games’s Cliff ‘Cliffski’ Harris has been releasing games independently since way back in the 20th century. Asked whether he thought the independent scene is growing up now that successful devs are making megabucks, and corporations are trying to get involved, he said:

It is growing up in the sense that it is seen as legitimate now, both by corporations and by customers. Gamers are prepared to give indie games a go now, without being dismissive of them, and also portals and publishers can no longer afford to look down their noses at indies, offer them bad terms or refuse to deal with them. That has shifted power slightly towards the indie developers. I think, With a few exceptions the money flowing into some parts of indie gaming hasn’t really changed the people who do it. The same people are still just as passionate and the games are just as cool, the only change is the more successful developers drive nicer cars now.

So have things actually changed much for independent developers over the last decade?

Definitely, in that the ceiling for potential success as an indie is now much higher, mainly due to minecraft, plus it’s now a viable career path, rather than before when it was mostly hobbyists, or people who had fled the AAA industry, Many devs now have never known anything but indie life, which is very new.

But it’s not all roses, as Harris explained:

One not so good change is that the extent to which an indie could be self sufficient outside of sales through the big portals has actually decreased. Indie gaming is only indie now in that it is free from publisher control, but the independence of large corporations has not really changed. Very few indies now actually sell their own product, it’s now the norm to give a cut to someone else to do that for you. Even Kickstarter takes a cut. Another big change is just the sheer number of developers, and platforms. It used to be a tiny niche thing done mostly on PC, where everybody knew each other. Not any more.

Asked whether there’s a risk that things like EA’s “Indie Bundle” have a diluting effect on the indie label, he said:

Not at all. That was widely laughed at. People know the difference between a developer like me, and EA. No amount of ‘indiewashing’ will ever stick for companies that have corporate jets. Indie is like pornography, it’s hard to specify what it is, but you know it when you see it.

And finally, does he still identify as indie?

Yes! More so than most. I work alone, from home, and am 100% self-funded. I make exactly the games I want to make, and say exactly what I like. I’m not as financially independent of third parties as I would like, but I can’t complain. I’ve always disliked the way ‘indie’ was assumed to be ‘starving-indie’ or ‘hobbyist’. That was never the case, and I’m glad everyone realises that now.

My take away from all this? Mega-corporations have learned from the indie revolution. Indies are now learning from the mega-corporations. This is a victory, not something to be upset about, even if it does mean the era of “indie” as we knew it might be disappearing. We’ve gone from EA telling Edmund McMillen to come work for them when he wants to get “serious” about games in 2004, to EA asking Edmund McMillen to please come and be a consultant for them in 2011. That’s an improvement.

If I were running a large studio, I’d want a policy for handling interesting side-projects created by staff, dedicating company resources to any promising looking projects, with a fair revenue share model to reward the individual putting the hard work in. I’d be encouraging staff to attend Game Jams whilst on the payroll. Some of the most successful indie games have been from teams that quit day jobs at big studios to make their dream game. Why not make keeping the day job and making the dream game the more attractive option.

If I were in charge of deciding which games to fund at any publisher, I’d want to be looking at pitches from Dennaton, Klei Entertainment and thatgamecompany, and I’d always be on the lookout for the rising stars of tomorrow, ready to offer them support on their terms, not mine. Anything else is at best going to result in missed opportunities, and at worst be part of a gradual decline into irrelevancy.

If I were a gamer, firstly I’d rejoice that we’re living in a time with such a rich array of games of all shapes and sizes available to me. Then I’d be glad I don’t need a publisher to be on board to be able to be a patron to developers working on projects that are interesting to me, but publishing powerhouses are there to share resources with talented indie developers. Should we begrudge talented developers from not wanting to starve whilst making what they love if there is a funding deal on the table?

As for “indie”? Well, it’ll stick around. I think we should find an unambiguous definition of it and stick to it. But maybe Cliff is right. Maybe it is like defining pornography, or – less salaciously – like defining games generally: we know it when we see it.

__________________

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Would the real Ken Levine kindly stand up? • Interviews • Eurogamer.net

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BioShock Infinite’s creative director talks to Eurogamer about games, politics and throwing himself on the fire.

“Propaganda shields ideas from danger, and I think I’d rather expose ideas to danger.”

By Rich Stanton Published Monday, 11 March 2013

To reach the Boston HQ of Irrational Games, you walk from a subway station through a small park. At the far end is a bronze statue of John Adams, one of America’s founding fathers, and halfway to it you pass a small Vietnam memorial. The juxtaposition catches something permanent in America’s character: the intellectual and humanistic vision of the ideals it was born with, matched forever to enormous, bloody folly. It seems an apposite setting for Irrational Games, the developer of BioShock Infinite, to create Columbia.

You wouldn’t know where the studio is - after BioShock’s success, so many fans were pestering for studio tours and keepsakes that the name was taken off the building’s front. Even inside there’s no hint of the wonders behind these walls - until you walk through a door and into a ‘lifesize’ Big Daddy. From one to another, I’m soon waiting in a room for Ken Levine; co-founder of Irrational Games, creator of BioShock, and creative director of BioShock Infinite. The most ridiculous gimmick in the world rests on the table - a Magic 8-Ball, in the shape of a D-20 die. Is this geek chic? I shake it up: “Run Away.” Levine enters.

Some interviews make Levine seem like a ginger Tom Cruise, while many just awe at his intellect, so to be clear, he’s one of the healthiest-looking 46-year-olds I’ve met, with an eloquence about and understanding of video games that few developers can match. He’s clearly got a real engine too, filled with nervous energy, tapping away when confined to a chair or walking in a slight hurry. No ‘off’ switch. His eyes light up when we’re talking games, his hands wring when talking crunch, and to steal one of Levine’s favourite terms, he’s a complex character.

Perhaps that why Levine inspires extreme reactions - whether that’s deferential paeans or the Twitter vitriol he bats away with good humour. “Whenever you become a semi-public figure you sort of realise people, whether they’re overly deferential or overly hostile, aren’t actually reacting to you or to the person you are,” says Levine. “They’re reacting to your body of work and your public persona.”

“Game development’s like… you have all these ideas, and they sound great in your head, and then you go off and try to make them, and everyone, the world, the universe has its say, and you struggle and you struggle and you compromise, and that’s really challenging.”

Which would be? “I think it varies - I mean, some people it’s ‘that jerk Levine’, and some people I guess that persona is he’s a talented game developer who’s tried to do something different. It’s hard to say, because the person who would understand it least is me, right? How could I have any perspective on that?”

This is the first time Ken Levine flips a question around, but not the last. Turning the tables is one of the distinctive movements in Levine’s conversation, which is careful and deep thought occasionally marshalled by a few pet phrases (“there’s no value in enemies”), and filled with irreconcilable details. There’s a tiny dash of condescension in the way Levine talks about being a gamer with catholic tastes, then later circles back to explain he means that with a small ‘c’, but then seconds afterwards he’s chuckling amiably about getting old: “Old-er, you mean.” You never quite know where you are, especially when he throws curveballs like the third-person: “I’m just speaking for Ken, not anyone else.” But you’d forgive Ken most anything.

I’ve been playing BioShock Infinite, so I wade in with something that bothers me about leading man Booker. He’s a character that has serious psychological issues relating to the Wounded Knee massacre and yet, by the game’s end, will probably have topped the bodycount of that entire event. “Look,” says Levine. “You’re tuning into an inherent tension, and I call it the ‘beg the question’ tension.”

Levine’s games are restrained in that, while they often hinge on a moment of player realisation, they never break the fourth wall directly, and probably never will. “There’s a meta-commentary in BioShock in a sense that, I think some people felt that just kind of talking about what you do in games, how you do that and how you follow directions, how you have no agency in games was enough.”

“But we never broke the fourth wall. It’s hard because once you break the fourth wall it’s very hard to un-break it. For me it’s about bringing the player into the space and not pushing them away and breaking that fourth wall pushes you back - and that’s not to say it’s bad, I’m a gamer with pretty catholic tastes in terms of the stuff I enjoy, and certainly stuff like Kojima’s games, things like Bastion and so on. But the stuff I’m making I want to work on its own terms entirely, I guess.”

“When you’re making Doom, and there’s no intention to make anything but a fantastical OTT environment - that’s not a criticism - you don’t worry about that because there’s nothing there for it to fight against. Once you start getting characters like Elizabeth, with Booker’s violence the first time she sees it she reacts to it. So you’re stuck as a writer and there’s no excuse here, there’s no - I’m being honest, portraying my struggles as a writer, if she didn’t react to that scene you’d be like, ‘Alright, well you rolled with that pretty easily!’”

As it is, Elizabeth is pretty horrified the first time she sees Booker in action - though of course she soon enough reconciles herself to it. “But if she reacts to it realistically,” says Levine, “the reaction actually would probably be so long-lasting and so profound that the game would come to a screeching halt. So you try to walk this fine line, and movies do it too where you have a Die Hard movie - the guy’s a mass mass mass murderer, and he finishes up and reunites with his wife and they share a few jokes. He would have PTSD for the rest of his life! But he goes along with it like there’s a problem with the plumbing in his house and is all ‘f***ing plumbing!’ There is an aspect with the suspension of disbelief, you can make the issues less abstract like with Elizabeth’s dialogue… But I don’t have all the answers to that question, and it’s something I struggle with all the time.”

The ‘beg the question’ tension begs its own question - how does it feel to not have all the answers in charge of a project on this scale, where there’s no safety net for failure? “This whole project is us coming to grips with fear,” says Levine. “In some ways System Shock 2 is more similar to BioShock than BioShock is to Infinite, in the sense that the first two both had silent protagonists, the humans behind glass essentially, people talking over radios and giving you missions. One by one we started tossing those things away, and the reason we were so nervous about that is that all those things make your life so much easier. What happens if a player starts shooting? You start thinking do the cops come, when do they come, does the whole level clear out? Because that might be no fun either, so what’s the right amount of the level to clear out so it feels like the player’s made an impact but it doesn’t ruin every other interactive experience in the level? Let alone Elizabeth, I mean Jesus Christ.”

Levine collects his thoughts for a split-second. You could not visit Irrational Games without coming away clear about Elizabeth; she has been one monumental heave for this studio, and her components are pure blood, sweat and tears. One of BioShock Infinite’s prototypes had a mute companion, and the inevitable switch from this to a speaking part was the point of no return.

“Slowly you start coming up, you put one foot on the dock first, you get comfortable then you might bring up the other foot - you keep doing these things slowly and you know, Ì think deep down there’s a voice telling you in those periods that what you’re doing is not gonna be enough, and you want to believe it because you’re so nervous about what the implications are if you don’t. What it meant is that if Elizabeth talks and Booker talks then my script for one level - that chapter after they first meet is longer than the entire BioShock script. And that was the first draft! There was so much writing and so much recording, and all that stuff just got so complicated.”

“BioShock games are somewhat more novelistic than filmmic in their approach, I’d say, which is weird because they’re very visual, but the amount of data in and about that world is huge, you know? And where I’m coming from, I could sit forever and come up with more - I always want more.”

While talking about Elizabeth we move briefly onto one of the other ladies in Levine’s life, though rather more of a background presence. With hindsight Ayn Rand seems like an extraordinarily timely subject - in the sense that her name has become a rallying flag for elements of right-wing America, almost to the point of caricature. “A lot of people point out that Rand took government money you know, and to me that’s what makes for interesting people, interesting characters. Like Curt Schilling, who supported Palin and McCain and Romney, very anti-government, and yet worked with the government to make a big games studio and left them with a rather large bill - so you have these sort of living contradictions and for me they’re the interesting ones, that’s what Andrew Ryan is right?”

Right. But what’s cool about BioShock is that it uses interaction to make a critique - or present a situation, if you prefer - of an idea that depends for its power on never being touched. Atlas Shrugged is social philosophy, and a weakness particular to this genre is that every person behaves as the philosopher-author believes they should. “Exactly. There are these ideals, and that’s not just a left-wing or a right-wing thing but both - and I think that to me is what propaganda is, right, the difference between propaganda and thought. Propaganda shields ideas from danger, and I think I’d rather expose ideas to danger. I think that’s what I like to make in these games, is to take ideas and say, well, let’s see what happens when these aren’t protected.”

Levine and Irrational in general are keen not to ascribe meaning to the games’ ideas - god forbid - and insist it’s all up to individual players. I understand where that’s coming from, but Infinite also seems a much richer space for real-world parallels than its predecessor. More than anything, it’s a game about a seceded American state ruled by religious fundamentalists, created in a modern America where religion stills play a major role in social politics - abortion, evolution, gay rights, take your pick. “I think it comes and goes in waves,” says Levine. “You had it as a much more powerful force politically a few years ago, and certainly from the time of Reagan I think it’s waned.”

Yet the US passion for God is more enduring than that - it’s as American as apple pie. And surely these waves, these cycles of awakening and fervour, must make an impression on a good East Coast liberal? “[Martin Luther] King said, I’m kinda paraphrasing here, that the arc of history curves towards the good,” says Levine. “Science has a lot of things in its corner that are towards the good - evolution in this country is from an empirical standpoint difficult to argue with. The thing about science is that, unlike religion, it opens itself up to fallibility - it says well we could be wrong. It’s designed to be wrong and testable and that’s what makes it so powerful - the problem is that when there’s any hole in a theory people do this thing called God in the Gaps. Which is that any time there’s a gap you plug in what you believe, as if that… Well, two problems there. One is that people’s beliefs are different, and two is that there’s no evidence there so the holes still need filling.”

God in the Gaps gets to the real heart of this - an idea summed up beautifully by none other than Benjamin Franklin: “That people believe they are right is no proof that they are.” Viewed like this the BioShock games seem less about Rand and religion, the ideas themselves, than the confidence of their espousers. “I think in these games we deal with certainty a lot,” says Levine. “The thing Ryan and Comstock [leader of The Founders in Infinite] have in common is their absolute certainty. As different as they are philosophically, night and day - one is an atheist capitalist empiricist, the other is nationalist and religious - they’re so similar in the sense that they have certainty. I think that once you start having certainty, once you think you have infallibility, I think that’s when things get really dangerous.”

Why make games like this? Irrational and Levine have worked in other genres, perhaps most notably with Freedom Force, but the oeuvre is particularly weighted towards narrative-driven FPS games. “Look, there’s no book I read somewhere that said, ‘The way you’re going to be successful is to make these games in which you embrace narrative heavily but not cut-scenes.’ That was a choice that at some point I made - that the company made that, that that would be sort of our identity, a part of our identity, and I still don’t actually know - maybe we would’ve been more successful if we hadn’t bothered with that. I thought it was important, I think it’s important for games as a gamer, and so I figured when I was working on something I might as well be working on something important for games - to push on narrative, but push on it in a way that’s interactive as possible.”

Which makes you think about pushing beyond Infinite. Is the future still, for Levine and Irrational at least, a narrative one? What about the shooter side, which may offer bankability but severely limits the types of games and concept you can work with? Levine pauses. “I like making… to me the FP is more important than the S, right? The first-person is very powerful. It is at the end of the day where interactive experiences, where the ultimate goals, lie, because that’s what our experience is.”

At one point I mention Fox News and manufactured controversies. “Yeah but I don’t worry about… Look dude, our first game involved infanticide,” says Levine. “I don’t, we can’t work from a place of fear, because otherwise you start censoring yourself. And the only censoring I do is I say is this going to make a better game or worse game?”

“And it allows us, in the kind of detail we put in the world, to get close to it in a way you can’t otherwise and most importantly it’s not a ‘him’, it’s a ‘you’. Booker is not forming a relationship with Elizabeth, some weird hybrid of you and Booker is forming a relationship. That’s incredibly powerful. If Infinite was third-person Elizabeth would not be the same. The shooter part is more tricky because like you say it is kind of an odd thing, where all of a sudden all this combat’s going on. I think of it sort of like musicals, you know - like you have this story and then all of a sudden everyone bursts out into song.”

I had the opportunity to play through a good chunk of Infinite before meeting Levine and, touch wood, it looks like it could be a corker. But even from the outside it’s clear games like this don’t come easy. It’s no secret that much talent has left Irrational in recent times, with something of a minor exodus in autumn 2012. Who knows what went on behind closed doors, but Irrational’s style of working can’t be easy at times; constant iteration and scrapping of earlier work, basically, and sometimes huge amounts of it.

Then there are the hours. You need only look at Levine’s Twitter feed in recent months to see that Irrational has also been crunching to complete the game - that is, working every hour god sends. Can you make a game without crunch? “Yeah you could, absolutely. I don’t think it’s unique to the games industry in the sense that if you work in theatre, you work in film, that’s exactly what it is - they’re doing 12 to 14 hour days, but it’s for a period of time.”

“This is a bit off the beaten path from games but the whole notion of the embrace of Rand by very religious people like Paul Ryan [Republican VP candidate in 2012] is extremely bizarre to me, because she was not just objectivist, but claims to be empiricist at heart - where she had nothing but venom for religion,” says Levine. “To embrace a philosophy that… The reason it’s called objectivism is because there’s no subjectivity in it and therefore it has no room for faith, has no room for any aspect of anything that can’t be demonstrated. So it’s interesting to see these people essentially embrace something where the philosophy has such hatred for what they believe in.”

That Levine admits crunch is avoidable nevertheless leads to an overwhelming question - why not with Infinite? “Crunch shows the difficulty of planning. But even so if I was working on a game, let’s say you had planned it all perfectly, and it was two months before it was coming out. Personally? I know that if I don’t work on it, if I’m not spending time on it, it doesn’t go in the game. And I’m gonna look back on that - I look back on every single game I’ve ever worked on - and I think wow do I wish I’d spent more time or less on that game? And I can tell you in every single case it’s more - and I’m just speaking for Ken, not for anybody else.

“I know, I can tell you what this game would be like if we - just do the math, if we’d worked less on the game, it would be that much less good. I throw myself on the fire here as much as anybody, and it really is to some degree that if I’m going to spend my life on something that makes a better game for the gamer, then I’m gonna do that. Because I want to be proud of it. I want to be proud of it.”

I’ll call that dedication, because that’s what it is, but it’s hard to ignore the obsession at the edges. Levine is obviously a driven man, with an intensity to match his intelligence, and a side effect of that combination is being an obvious workaholic. In fact, I wonder whether that’s an understatement. Levine talking about throwing himself on the fire is an uncomfortably close reminder of Dr David Doak’s damning summation of how the industry treats developers: “It’s just this big furnace that burns people.” The question of whether that human cost is worth it, even for something like Infinite, bothers me.

“It bothers me, yeah, it does bother me for myself - because there’s a cost,” says Levine. “Absolutely there’s a cost. How could there not be? Everything in life has a cost and a reward. I think Irrational is not a place where… There are plenty of companies that churn out products. They turn out products that take minimal risks, they turn out products that are good, and there are plenty of products that can do things by a formula every year, and they know exactly how to do it, and they’ve got really good at it. Boy, I wish I had one of those f***ing formulas but I don’t - BioShock Infinite is not a formula game.”

“I wish it was simpler,” ends Levine, “but I’m not going to kid you - it’s not awesome, it’s not like people love seeing their families less often, or that that doesn’t cause problems. It causes problems for me, it causes problems for everyone. My wife when she married me knew who I was, and said that, ‘As much as I hate being apart from you, I understand that if you didn’t do that, it’s a different person from the one I married.’ It’s not for everybody.”

With that our time is up, and after a few pleasant words Levine is off - driving out and forwards, onto the next thing. His closing remarks are a sobering reminder of the price that developers at the sharp end of the industry pay in order to create exceptional games. But what can ever be done about that? The brightest stars burn fiercest, always, and Ken Levine is one of those.

The price of creating a game like Infinite is you pay with a piece of yourself. I tidy away my stuff, notice that Magic D20, and give it a final shake on the way out. Is there another way? “No (Home Rules)” stares back.

This interview is based on a trip to Irrational’s offices in Boston. Irrational paid for travel and accommodation.

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Features - Roundtable: The Interactive Fiction Renaissance

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By Leigh Alexander
A reprint from the March 2013 issue of Gamasutra’s sister publication Game Developer magazine, this article explores the world of cutting-edge interactive fiction. You can subscribe to the print or digital edition at GDMag’s subscription page, download the Game Developer iOS app to subscribe or buy individual issues from your iOS device, or purchase individual digital issues from our store.

Text games have come a long way from Zork. Thanks to new tools, new authors, and ubiquitous mobile devices enabling new players, the interactive fiction genre is enjoying a revival of sorts.

Game Developer spoke with Inklewriter dev Jon Ingold, longtime author Andrew Plotkin, indie dev and advocate Anna Anthropy, Failbetter Games CEO Alexis Kennedy, and interactive-fiction pioneer Emily Short about how (and why) the IF scene is expanding.

Jon Ingold, longtime text-game author (Fail-Safe, All Roads), now spearheads interactive fiction innovations at Cambridge, UK-based Inkle. Notably, Inkle’s new choice-oriented IF tool, Inklewriter, is one of the more prominent new tools designed for the kind of accessibility needed to democratize a once-niche art form.

Leigh Alexander: Why do you think there seems to be so much new interest in making and playing text games?

Jon Ingold: I think it’s pretty unsurprising, given the amount of writing and reading we’re all doing on the internet these days. That’s why Inklewriter is pitched the way it is: clean, simple, Twitter-like for sharing, Tumblr-like for creation.

Inklewriter lends itself to making chatty, conversational pieces, and we’ve seen a lot of that — people using interactivity not to make a game, but to play out an argument they might have otherwise been written up on a blog (like Emily Gera’s recent thing on Kotaku comments).

I think people get puzzled by the difference between interactivity and games: Games are hard things to make, with fiddly rules and balancing, and most games you invent tend to fall apart because there’s an easy way to win, or not enough choice. Inklewriter doesn’t really support game-making, exactly: You can’t make any rules. But it’s uniquely good at exploring cause and effect — which is to say, telling stories. And everybody loves stories.

LA: How does the mobile and tablet space contribute?

JI: I think the key thing is that mobiles and tablets mean we’re all using computers more often, and more casually. Remember when it used to be rude to check your texts during a meal? Now it’s normal to tweet, and not just amongst the computer-savvy crowd. Portable computing means we’re all chilling out around technology a bit more, and trying things we maybe otherwise wouldn’t have tried.

I saw a real example of this over the holiday season, when my mother sat down and read one of my interactive stories. She’s never been able to before, because anything done on a computer is terrifying to her. But on an iPad, she felt totally safe. So there’s tablet computing, expanding the size of the audience by one, at least.

LA: The accessibility of creation tools like Inklewriter helps democratize the craft of interactive fiction. What challenges does the tools space need to overcome to keep reaching more people?

JI: I think the biggest challenge with developing a tool is resisting the urge to get all baroque on its ass. There’s always that extra niche feature that would be so cool if it were there — but every feature you add to a tool changes the way the tool presents itself to new users, and changes a user’s perception of what the tool is for. So add five cool niche features and your tool might start to look like it’s for making fiddly, avant-garde things only. On the flip side, make it too simple and straightforward looking, and no one will imagine it’s capable of anything more.

So as tool creators we have to keep returning to our users and saying, what are these people like? What do these people care about, and what don’t they care about? What message do we want to send them about what they should be doing?

LA: In terms of Inklewriter’s potential, what are some things you hope to see people start doing with it?

JI: The question floored me for a moment, and then I realized that we think about Inklewriter’s potential more in terms of who the people are than what the people do. Interactive stories have been boxed in, forever really, by the constraints that the form puts on who can do the actual writing, but I think Inklewriter can change that, at least a little, and let completely untechnical people come in and write something excellent. For us, the goal is about getting writers with unusual, rich, and diverse perspectives to invite us into their worlds.

LA: Why is it a good time for people to develop or renew an interest in text games?

JI: When I started writing IF, a few hundred people on the internet cared: A few hundred would play your game, and would discuss the ideas of game, puzzle, and story design, and maybe 10 of those were clever — or loud — enough to set the prevailing wind.

Now, if you write a piece of IF, you can get thousands of readers. You can get all sorts of feedback and discussion. You can choose between five or six ways of writing stories, all with different affordances and paradigms, and have big arguments over which is best. You don’t need to learn too much that’s technical (except for writing, I suppose).

But more than that: There’s an optimism and a curiosity around interactive text. When I wrote my first game, I’d try to explain the merits of interactive stories to people and heads would shake. Now, they turn.

Andrew “Zarf” Plotkin is among the most beloved and longest-serving authors in the IF community, creator of popular titles like Spider and Web and Shade, among numerous others, in addition to his many contributions to the community’s tools and infrastructure. In 2010 he made headlines when he raised over $31,000 via Kickstarter for the creation of his next game, Hadean Lands, an impressive demonstration of the strength of the IF community and of the gratitude for his work.

LA: You’ve been making acclaimed text games for as long as I can remember, but from where I sit there’s an explosion of interest in making and playing them that seems new. What factors do you think create this resurgence?

Andrew Plotkin: We have a big recent interest in “indie games” and “art games” — which can each mean several things, but text games and narrative-focused games play well under either banner.

Within that, or maybe next to it, we have a lot of designers trying small experimental games. Text is great for solo work; it’s great for rapid production of tiny games. If you’re working in a well-understood interface model, there is probably an off-the-shelf tool for you — as you note — so you can skip building a framework and go straight into your content. That’s very attractive, and game designers are realizing it.

We have a gigantic wave of nostalgia for anything 15 or 20 years old. (Seriously, the last three iOS games I installed were Karateka, Riven, and Lost Treasures of Infocom. Okay, three of the last four, anyhow.)

Also, there’s just momentum in tools and communities. If a bunch of people start trying a particular kind of game, it gets attention, and more people start both playing and creating in that genre. This has been building in slow motion in the IF world for several years — Inform 7 was a big boost — but it applies equally, and I think more rapidly, in other kinds of choice-based and text-based games.

LA: You were able to fund Hadean Lands via Kickstarter, are a believer in open-source tools, and will launch on iPhone; meanwhile crowdfunding, openness, and mobile opportunities are some of the most relevant trends to indie game creation in general right now. What should other creators of interactive text learn from you?

AP: Oh, geez. I don’t know if I can answer that. None of those trends are simple answers, and I don’t know if I’ve found the right path through any of them.

LA: Was your fundraising lightning in a bottle, or do you see a wider commercial opportunity for creators of interactive text on mobile?

AP: My Kickstarter project was definitely a thing of its moment — in relation to Kickstarter’s history and mine. It got attention for being notably successful, but the stakes for “notably successful Kickstarter” have moved way, way up. And I deliberately offered a wider range of work than just “IF on mobile.”

Really, Kickstarter successes don’t signpost commercial opportunities — commercial successes do that. It’s the new games and the interest in new games which should be drawing everybody’s attention.

LA: There are an increasing number of uniquely accessible tools arriving to help new developers make choice-oriented or hypertext-style games. This brings more creators to the medium, but also seems to suggest a shift away from the traditional text parser and its associated strengths and challenges. What are your thoughts on that?

AP: My thoughts are ambivalent, as you might expect!

On the one hand, people tend to lump the games together. More interest in any of these forms is more interest in all of them, and that’s good for me.

But on the other hand, people tend to lump the games together — and parser IF does have its own strengths! You can do a lot of things with a menu system, but you can’t graft it onto a game like Zork — or Shade, or Spider and Web — and expect it to play out the same way. You need to design your game to fit the model. So I have to worry about whether players are going to wind up just not very interested in the games I want to make.

The sensible answer is “Make the games first, then decide.” I realize this. But I indulge in a little worry anyhow.

LA: Would you agree that IF is less “niche” than it was 10, even five years ago? How has the community changed?

AP: IF is still “niche,” but niche-ness is much less niche these days! Niche is practically mainstream. Or at least, people are much more willing to poke their noses in.

Indie powerhouse Anna Anthropy’s recently published book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, is something of a manifesto for game creation as individual self-expression, and the accessibility and flexibility of choice-based text-game creation tool Twine makes her a big fan.

Since she started encouraging friends and allies in the indie community to try making Twine games, a vibrant homebrew community has sprung up — notably, there’s a passionate and powerful vein of expression focused on the experiences of people who might not have felt welcome or outspoken in the game community thus far.

LA: You’ve become a big advocate for Twine because of its accessibility. How do tools like that help you in your mission to help motivate new voices in game development?

Anna Anthropy: Twine works for three big reasons: It’s free, it’s not programming, and finished stories are webpages you can plunk onto the internet. That solves the three big historical barriers to nonprofessionals who want to get involved in game-making: the cost, the skill barrier, and distribution. All of these are huge deterrents.

In our society it’s middle-class men who are given the most opportunities in tech fields — who can afford to go to college, who aren’t weeded out by a famously sexist culture — and ultimately those are the people who end up best-equipped to deal with the barriers to game-making in the traditional way.

LA: What does it mean that there’s now a community for individually voiced outsider art?

AA: It means amazing art all the time. This morning I played a game about wandering a surreal psychosexual dream world while taking a nap next to a hot older man on an airplane. There’s a game like this every week. Last week it was someone’s interactive memorial for his brother who had just died, and a game about someone’s experience as a bisexual woman being shamed by an online lesbian community. It’s hard for even me to keep up with. I’ve thought about retiring my blog; the video game community I’ve always wanted is blossoming around me, and it looks so different from the mainstream. Here’s a face of video games whose architects are women and queer people, speaking in a thousand voices.

LA: How have you seen the audience and opportunity for interactive text evolve in recent years?

AA: A few years ago “interactive fiction” was an insular group of (highly literate) nerds sitting around and making games about each other. That interactive fiction scene was very inward-looking: It was all about parser-based stories — you type what you want to do, the game responds — which meant that huge barriers to accessibility still existed, both for creators (making a game for a parser is programming) and for players (the language that the game understands is hidden, and has to be learned, presumably from other players).

Interactive fiction now, with hypertext at its center, is outward-looking and outward-expanding. Hypertext is immediately accessible to people who haven’t spent the time to learn the vocabulary of the games status quo.

LA: Do you think increasing interest in making text games (presuming you agree such a thing exists!) reflects more audience appetite for storytelling and more sophisticated themes?

AA: Hypertext retains the purposeful, deliberate ambiguity that makes text games a place suited toward exploring themes like social interaction, identity, sex, feelings — all the stuff mainstream games seem so poorly equipped to tell us about. Twine’s explosion was a sure sign that people have been wanting to find ways to interrogate these themes through games, but they weren’t able to find a means.

LA: What do text games do that other games can’t, and what do you think traditional developers should learn from the current IF community?

AA: How about: Don’t be such fucking cowards. While mainstream games like Spec Ops: The Line and Hotline Miami are tiptoeing up to the idea that maybe violence is something we should be worrying about while continuing to let the player inhabit the role of an armed dude acting out fantasies of violence, Twine games are talking about identity, alienation, abuse, sexuality, dysphoria, sexual assault, depression, self-discovery, loss, and D/s dynamics in the cyber-future. Look at these games and be ashamed of how small you’ve allowed your world to become.

LA: Who are some IF makers you are excited about these days?

AA: porpentine ~ merritt kopas ~ maddox pratt ~ kim moss ~ j chastain ~ madamluna ~ lydia neon ~ kitty horrorshow ~ christine love ~ jonas kyratzes

Failbetter Games is founded on a legacy of passion for interactive stories; the studio is best known for its massive choice-driven online role-playing story Fallen London, but it also plays host to the StoryNexus platform, a browser-based story-game creation tool that even enables writers to monetize their work and build community around it. CEO Alexis Kennedy has long been attracted to the junction of game design and writing.

LA: Why do you think there seems to be so much new interest in making and playing text games, and how does the mobile and tablet space contribute?

Alexis Kennedy: Technologically, there have been attempts in the past to extend literature — hypertext, interactive fiction — but the gap between the page and the screen was just too wide for mass adoption.

Now readers are accustomed to text on a screen, thanks to mobile devices and e-readers, and to the degree of interactivity that comes with it. Even if you’re just reading a Kindle book, you can share or search for phrases from right there in the interface, and that comes to seem natural. So it’s easier to extend or colonize the borders of fiction.

Culturally, it’s the mainstreaming of geek. The success of big fantasy and SF franchises, and the tsunami of casual gaming, means that acceptance of game-like activities is filtering out through the demographics.

LA: The accessibility of creation tools like StoryNexus helps democratize the craft of interactive fiction. What challenges need to be overcome in the tools space to keep reaching more people?

AK: The big barriers are “how the hell do I get started?” and “what in the name of God have I done?” Choose Your Own Adventure-esque branching path narrative is great for the first, but deadly for the second: It’s easy to get started, but it’s also very easy to write yourself into a thousand-branch hole. Programming languages (e.g., ChoiceScript or Inform) are the opposite — a big initial learning curve, but a saner experience once you get started. Tools like StoryNexus find a safe route between the two.

A secondary issue — but one that’s important as the space grows commercially — is distribution. You need some sort of mediating technology to read an interactive story. The web is good for this, but finding a way to earn revenue from interactive writing can be hard, compared to the well-established channels for content publishing elsewhere. StoryNexus is trying to bridge this gap, too.

LA: It seems the text space these days is geared largely at moving away from the parser — and the accessibility barriers associated with it — and toward interactive reading and choice-based interfaces. What opportunities might this present for designers and game developers?

AK: The traditional text-game approach is a question-and-answer dialogue — “OK, what do you do now?” — and largely a synchronous one. We haven’t seen much of what happens with asynchronous and out-of-band gaming. On the StoryNexus front, this could mean characters who occasionally email you and ask for a response, or a virtual life where you experience weekly events, or a serialized story. Above all, it means digestible games that can be consumed in small chunks — that occupy the same niche as web comics, perhaps. In turn, this means wider audiences and more room for experimentation.

LA: It seems you’ve focused for some time on the social experience around interactive storytelling. Who do you see as the audience for gaming in this way, and what does the community element add to what a lot of people view as a solitary pursuit?

AK: The immediate act of reading is a solitary one, but the context of reading is a shared one, especially when we’re reading about imagined worlds. Doyle, Tolkien, Pratchett, Rowling — all of these attracted passionate fans who wanted to revel in the shared world together, solving the mysteries, arguing over the characters, or just being in the space. That’s what community gives a text game — other people to energize and validate your own experience.

LA: Why is it a good time for people to develop or renew an interest in text games?

AK: The technological and cultural changes I mentioned above have led to an upsurge in text games — particularly in creative toolsets, which in turn means the range of titles is expanding beyond SF, fantasy, and horror. It’s the indie-gaming revolution in miniature.

But in some ways, literature is more like gaming than most other creative forms. Through an accident of technology, games have a strong family resemblance to film, but film is a much more passive medium than literature. The plot in a book doesn’t advance until you turn the page. Books and games are both demanding, participatory forms.

The work of renowned IF pioneer Emily Short has tended to focus on plausible interaction with artificial characters; her company, Little Text People, was acquired in recent years by Linden Lab in part because of her leading work in the field of social simulation.

LA: What does the IF space have to teach other developers?

Emily Short: A vocabulary of interactive narrative. Authors in this space have spent a lot of time, experimentation, and virtual ink on the topic of what player participation does to a story.

We have a lot of examples, and a lot of conversations about, games that convey their meaning through mechanics; environmental storytelling, and stories that are partly about how the reader chooses to discover them; complicity, ethically challenging choices, expressive choices, choices that turn out to be meaningless in retrospect, choices that don’t change the events of the story but revolutionize the way you understand that story. Being steeped in all those techniques is a great craft advantage, whether you’re writing something text-based or not.

This is not to say that there’s no sophisticated thinking about narrative in triple-A games — of course there is. But IF has been a very productive venue for experimentation. I recommend the Failbetter blog and the Inkle studio blog, as well as the IF Theory Reader, as sources.

LA: Have you seen the opportunity and audience for interactive text evolving in recent years?

ES: Absolutely. We’re seeing traditional publishers becoming interested in interactive ePubs and interactive narrative that goes beyond just adding some footnotes or multimedia features to a traditional text, transmedia projects that incorporate several different kinds of production and might include an interactive text component, and Twine and other text games produced by indie communities who never considered themselves part of the “interactive fiction” community.

Several things have happened: One, the barrier to entry of writing some kind of interactive story is as low as it’s ever been, and it’s easier than ever to make those stories available to readers. It sounds ridiculous now, but 10 years ago we used to have despairing conversations about how we’d never reach a bigger audience because it was economically infeasible to put interactive fiction in a box at a store.

Two, IF has benefited a bit from the rising visibility of indie games in general, which means we have more contact with adjacent but not identical genres and it’s easier to get people who might not be longtime text-adventure devotees to play text work. And that also makes a difference to what IF authors think of writing, not for technological reasons but for cultural ones.

LA: The accessibility of new creation tools helps democratize the craft of interactive fiction. What challenges need to be overcome in the tools space to keep reaching more people?

ES: Communication about what tools already exist, and better development into spaces that are genuinely unexplored, instead of recreating the same old thing. I regularly get email and messages from people saying something like “Oh, hey, I’m making a CYOA tool. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to write your own choice-based games?” and I feel a little bit guilty writing back with a list of all the tools that I know are already in that space. (And I’m sure I don’t know every single thing in the field.)

Polish and style. A creative tool is this incredibly intimate thing. It becomes an extension of the creator, almost an extra limb. As important as any technical capacity is how much the tool appeals to the user, how naturally it fits. Not every interactive narrative tool is going to appeal to every user, which is a strong reason to have a rich ecology of tools. But a lot of creators are put off by form-factor issues that the tool creators might not have considered at all.

Community. Any kind of sophisticated tool needs a support community, people to give advice to novices and help them over the hills.

Good examples. Any new interactive storytelling platform or tool badly needs at least one cool, compelling work to help new users understand what that platform is capable of. Launch without that, and it’s a lot harder for people to understand why they should care or what the affordances of the tool will be.

Publicity. Some of these tools are marketed as game-creation tools exclusively, even though they’d be interesting to people who don’t think of themselves as traditional gamers at all, much less traditional game designers. There are lots and lots of applications for interactive narrative — educational, literary, journalistic, or nonfictional — and continued growth requires that we reach across cultural divides.

LA: Do you think other companies will start consulting or looking to hire text and conversation game writers?

ES: That’s already happening. I get asked on a fairly regular basis for referrals to people with interactive text experience.

LA: What are your thoughts on the current state of the IF community?

ES: The biggest point is that there is no longer “an” IF community. In the early 2000s, that phrase mostly referred to the set of folks writing and playing parser-based text adventures and talking about them on Usenet. Now there are a lot more folks involved, and they’re not all talking through the same venues. There are Twine authors and ChoiceScript authors who are coming from a different background and social community than a lot of the Inform and TADS, Hugo, ADRIFT, or Quest authors.

Another point is that IF doesn’t all look the same any more. I used to hear a lot of complaints about how IF in, say, 2008 looked the same as it did in 1982 — blocky text in a little console window — and that conveyed all kinds of negative things about production quality. No matter how much narrative sophistication or improved programming there might be under the hood, that little window of blocky text was suggesting to potential players that they were still looking at Zork.

Now, though, we’re seeing IF that looks like Guilded Youth, like Living Will, like howling dogs, like maybe make some change, or Ex Nihilo, inkle’s Frankenstein novel, or StoryNexus’s Zero Summer. Some of those are beautiful, some are provocatively frenetic or disturbing, but they’re not identical.

LA: Why is it a good time for people to develop or renew an interest in text games?

ES: There’s so much good material out there to read and play right now — short, long, fun, serious, retro, or entirely modern, in just about any genre and for any computing device you might own.

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[Rant] "Depression Quest Isn't a Game": A Shocking Tale of People Being Angry on the Internet

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[Rant] “Depression Quest Isn’t a Game”: A Shocking Tale of People Being Angry on the Internet

How much blood, sweat, and tears does it take to make a game? This is a question that can’t be answered; the only true answer being that it differs from team to team. But the follow-up question I ask has a definitive, simple answer. How much effort does it take to belittle or otherwise threaten the creators? Practically none. Yet for every two hard-fought steps forward this continually more complex and confusing industry takes, we take one step backwards and, more often than not, that step backward doesn’t fall on the shoulders of industry giants, it falls on us: the masses.

Several years ago, upon finding out what a strange library of shock imagery and strange, unexplainable pornography the Internet is, I told myself I’d reached the bottom — I’d never be shocked by the Internet again. It seems I was wrong. As it further expands, it remains Anansi-esque, never running of new tricks or traps. The newest being the game Depression Quest and its recent addition to Steam Greenlight.

The game, developed by Zöe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, and Isaac Shankler, is an inner look at the mentality of the depressed. Its primary goal is to spread awareness of depression and its symptoms and, as such, is available for free on the Depression Quest website. There’s also a pay-what-you-want option for those who would like to support the game and its developers. A portion of these proceeds go to the iFred charity, which is fighting back against depression and the taint associated with it.

I’d say that’s a fairly noble ambition. Now, don’t let me fool you, I have no dog in this fight, but I do consider Zöe and Patrick to be friends. And though maybe that adds a layer of bias to my feelings on the game, I should add that since playing the game and seeing their intentions of it, they’ve been elevated from “People I Like” to “People I Respect.” I think that speaks for itself.

Not every game is made to help someone.

But that’s not enough for the Steam community, apparently. “It isn’t a game.”

Since submitting the game to Greenlight, there have been several comments on the game’s page that range from simple Internet asshattery to actual anger.

That’s right. Depression is a “first world problem.” Supporting a tool to help the millions affected by it with all the effort of a simple click on a thumbs-up is directly harming worse-off countries even though that’s less effort than it takes to earn ten grains of rice! This is what the Internet has become: a means for all of us to overstate anything and everything while reveling in relative anonymity. To get our viewpoint out to whomever we want, quickly and effortlessly.

For the most part, I tend to avoid comments. The easy access makes it trivial to have your voice be heard, but apparently impossible to say anything of real worth. In this particular case, though, I took notice. These commenters are speaking directly to the developers here, seemingly punishing them for what they’ve done while at the same time proving that what they’ve created is necessary. Depression is obviously misunderstood.

Then there is the mentality that Steam “is a game platform.” I’m not sure if its own community knows it or not, but Steam has also branched out and begun selling applications and even movies.

The idea that games should be “fun” is brought up several times, as well. Though this is a mentality that is certainly changing with games like The Walking Dead and Spec Ops: The Line, it’s discouraging to see it here. I can see the argument that the aforementioned games have more gameplay and are easier to categorize as games, but that doesn’t make them “fun.” And yet, as successful as they are at making the player feel something, they’re ultimately made for entertainment.

In comes a game with aspirations of helping someone and suddenly it doesn’t belong on Steam.

And here’s another lovely idea: the idea that if this game is brought onto Steam, this commenter will stop buying products from it.

As a community, I’ve always expected better from Steam. Valve has brought an impressive service to all of us and I always assumed it was treated with a certain reverence and respect. As more of a friend-focused experience Steam works incredibly well, but by bringing content curation to everyone it’s brought up the rats from the cellars.

A quick perusal of the games on Greenlight has shown me that Depression Quest is not alone. It’s brought to my attention that these aren’t the people I want deciding what can and can’t be sold on Steam. And it’s let me know that you can curate the games, but you can’t curate the customers.

That isn’t the end, regretfully. Simply making comments on the game’s Steam page isn’t enough for some people. Since adding this game to Greenlight, Zöe has actually been threatened for the work she’s done on Depression Quest.

This is the lowest form of low and, quite simply, is disgusting. If this industry is ever going to grow, games like this are the way forward. Poignant and truthful, Depression Quest is a game that could only be made by someone who has experienced it themselves and anyone who will go out their way to exploit that is a scumbag of the lowest sort. Their mere existence almost validating the cynical worldview of the depressive.

And, quite simply, these same people are the ones keeping Depression Quest off of Steam.

Getting Depression Quest onto Steam isn’t about money or fame for the developers. It’s about exposure. Making sure that every eye that’s interested gets to take a look. Maybe you’re not interested in Depression Quest. And that’s fine. But please ask yourself: who is this game hurting by getting onto Steam. And ask yourself another question: who can this game help?

If seeing this game on Steam makes one person realize they need help or helps one person understand what a friend or loved one is going through, it’s worth every single click of that thumbs up button.

Tyler Humphrey

Tyler Humphrey is a bearded fan of all things video game, Tarantino films, comic books, and professional wrestling. Follow him on Twitter (@AlmostApollo) to keep up with his nonsense and misadventures. His favorite games include: Metal Gear Solid 2, Monkey Island, Saints Row: The Third, Dark Souls, and Jak II.

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The PA Report - Call of Duty is making us dumb: how modern shooters are robbing us of skill

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Call of Duty is making us dumb: how modern shooters are robbing us of skill

Ben Kuchera / Fri, Mar 15, 2013

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The problem with modern competitive first-person shooters, and I’m willing to accept debate about whether this is a problem, is that they’re aimed squarely at the mass market.

It can be difficult to jump into a game like Call of Duty or Halo and to enjoy yourself as a new player. If you’re one of the generation of gamers who grew up playing games like Quake or Unreal Tournament, that was part of the joy. Each level was a chess board, and we all began with the same skills. You could pick up power-ups, and find the best weapons, but those upgrades were available to everyone, and we all knew where they were located.

In fact, controlling those areas, and using them to predict the movements of your opponent, were incredibly important skills. You could get into their heads, know that they were going after the quad damage power up or the rocket launcher, and use that knowledge to move into position to take them out. The problem is that modern shooter design isn’t used to increase your skill, but to make it easier to draw in new players, and to keep them playing. That’s not a bad thing, but we’re all losing our mechanical edge these days.

How shooters used to be played

Watch this video of an old match between Rapha and Cooller, and start at 2:45 if you want to skip to the game play. Listen to the player explain what he’s doing and why, and pay attention to how well he understands the movements and reactions of his opponent. This isn’t the sort of first-person shooting we’re used to in modern days, it’s much closer to a duel, or a game of chess. The analysis of the play is amazing, and that sort of strategy simply isn’t possible in modern games to the extent that you saw in Quake.

These days, that ability to read a map and out-shoot other players has been consumed by perks, leveling systems, weapons with splash damage, air drops, loadouts, armor abilities, you name it. All of these systems are designed to keep the play fair, while smoothing out skill levels so that a wide variety of players can pick up the game and enjoy it. Everyone is made to feel powerful at all times. There is always a way to get a kill, and players grind out levels and perfect their loadouts.

“One of the things that Call of Duty does, and it’s smart business, to a degree, is they compress the skill gap. And the way you compress the skill gap as a designer is you add a whole bunch of randomness,” Tripwire President John Gibson said in an interview with PC Gamer.

“A whole bunch of weaponry that doesn’t require any skill to get kills. Random spawns, massive cone fire on your weapons. Lots of devices that can get kills with zero skill at all, and you know, it’s kind of smart to compress your skill gap to a degree,” he continued. “You don’t want the elite players to destroy the new players so bad that new players can never get into the game and enjoy it.”

Gibson brought up something that I’ve heard from many people in the industry: the way that newer games reward the clever use of abilities and the time spent earning them over pure skill. “These guys, when I actually watch them play, they’re actually very poor FPS players. And I don’t think it’s because they’re incapable of getting good, I think it’s because they never had to get good. They get enough kills in Call of Duty to feel like they’re awesome, but they never really had to develop their FPS skills beyond that,” he stated. The entire interview is worth reading, and is a fascinating look at someone who loves the classics, dealing with what people expect out of modern first-person shooters.

Quake would be rotten for microtransactions

As I said, this may not be a problem. More players than ever are buying first-person shooters, and they’re enjoying them. The Call of Duty series is filled with fun games, and the Halo series remains enjoyable. We’ve traded our skill away for this sort of level playing field, however, and that’s hard to take if you grew up valuing your abilities with a rail gun.

The other aspect of this shift in first-person shooters is that it would be very hard to monetize Quake and Unreal Tournament. The levels were designed to be fair, the weapons balanced, and the power-ups added strategy to play, and they always existed in the same amounts in the same places. The only thing you’d gain after playing for ten hours was skill due to your practice. There were no levels to gain or powers that gave you an inherent advantage over others.

This limits what you can sell a player. Publishers have long used bonus XP, weapons, abilities, and aesthetics to push more expensive collector’s editions of games, and of course microstransactions in free-to-play games allow you to unlock weapons and abilities instantly instead of earning them through player. Compressing the skill gap is enormously profitable, and it’s something we’ve come to expect. Anyone who designs a game like Quake is leaving money on the table.

What’s clear is that we’re losing much of our mechanical skill at shooters. You simply don’t have to be as quick, as precise, or as disciplined to excel at modern shooters. The best players are kept away from the new players anyway, and intricate matching systems make sure you’re always somewhere in the middle of the pack. I won’t even bring up the fact that most modern FPS titles are played on the console, with both a controller and varying amounts of aim assist so the player can hit their targets to begin at all. You still have to practice and learn the maps to excel, but the core skills are less important than they ever were. We’re not as good as we used to be.

This is something I hear from many in the competitive gaming world, and it’s one of the major reasons first-person shooters simply aren’t as interesting in a modern competitive setting. “Some people would argue that these games are twitch and not talent,” MLG CEO Sundance DiGiovanni told me as reminisced about classic shooters, “but I’d argue that twitch is talent.” I’d agree, and that talent is being eroded in the interests of a wider audience, more welcoming learning curve, and a bigger market.

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The Opposite of Fail: The story of FTL

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FTL: Faster Than Light

By Tracey Lien @traceylien
on March 12, 2013 at 12:00p

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The little game that could … raise more than 20 times what it asked for.
Justin Ma and Matthew Davis are glued to the computers in their Shanghai apartments. Sitting in dark rooms lit by the glow of their monitors, the game developers watch their screens in disbelief.

They’ve just launched a Kickstarter campaign for their game FTL: Faster Than Light. Having taken a year off from their studio jobs to work on independent projects, the two need help — just a little bit — to see their game through to the end. Their Kickstarter goal is $10,000, which they know is a big ask for two unknown developers who have never released games of their own. If they can get the $10,000, it will replenish some of their fast-dwindling funds and give them a few more months to finish FTL.

The number on their screens climbs. Every few minutes, the Kickstarter page automatically updates — a few dollars here, a few hundred there. At the end of 12 hours, they’ve met their goal. By the end of 24 hours, they’ve raised double what they asked for.

By the end of the Kickstarter campaign, FTL raises 20 times the funding goal.

“I was in disbelief for weeks,” Ma says. “I mean, everything logically seemed to check out and it seemed like, ‘Yes, this is technically what is happening in reality right now,’ but part of it didn’t feel that way. It just felt very surreal.”

In many ways the Kickstarter campaign should have failed. Its developers were unknown. The game had no existing fanbase. It didn’t have fancy graphics or promise a product so enormous that players would need to hook car engines to their computers to make it work. The developers didn’t set out to make a commercial product backed by tens of thousands of people.

The Kickstarter campaign did the opposite of fail. It was just the beginning of FTL.

Board games in Shanghai
Board games in Shanghai

Long before surreal fundraisers and the creation of a game that would be better known by its acronym, Ma and Davis admit they weren’t sure what they were doing. Davis had studied computer science at college but never thought game development was a viable career path; even if it was, he had no idea how to get in. Ma majored in Chinese language, history and culture. He loved games — he’d always dreamed of working with them — and both his father and older brother were game developers. But without a specialized skill or knowing exactly what he wanted to do, his path to game development was paved with question marks dotted with Pac-Men.

The two spent months after college looking for a way to break into the games industry. Davis could program, Ma was a Jack of all trades, but their dreams were nebulous — so much so that when Ma landed a job interview with 2K Games Shanghai, it was clear even to the studio that he didn’t know what he wanted to do.

Justin Ma and Matthew Davis

“China is a place where they basically hire someone for a specific purpose,” Ma says. “So if you’re a 3D artist, you only do 3D art. If you’re a 2D artist, that’s the only thing you do.”

Ma presented himself as someone who could do a bit of everything: He’d edited maps in Team Fortress 2, he’d done some 3D modeling, he’d designed games in his own time and he could program bits and bobs. But when asked what he wanted to do, even he couldn’t say. He just wanted to work with games. 2K turned him away.

A few months later, they asked him to come back. The studio found itself needing a designer who could do a bit of everything. Ma was brought on as a temporary junior game designer. He’d stay for the next two years.

2K Games was Davis’ and Ma’s break — the two packed their bags and moved from the U.S. to China for their first jobs in game development. Over two years they’d work on games like Top Spin 2 for Wii, help design 2K’s social games and, in the case of Ma, work on BioShock 2’s maps. “Not the level design or anything,” he says. “The actual cartography.”

The more time they spent at 2K, the more they realized what they wanted to do — or more specifically, what they didn’t want to do. After a full day of coding and designing massive projects — some that would see the light of day, some that 2K would cancel before announcing them — the two would play board games. Ma would go home and work on little projects in programs like GameMaker. The games themselves weren’t remarkable, but he found that he was getting a sense of satisfaction that he wasn’t getting working at a big studio.

Over the months the two developers would discover a love for board games and working on their own projects — it didn’t matter that the games were small and didn’t lead to anything bigger, or that few of their game development peers cared for board games. They felt like they were onto something, even if they weren’t yet sure what it was.

GDC
GDC

Two years into their careers, dozens of board games played and many more tiny games created in their bedrooms, Davis and Ma began talking about the possibility of doing something of their own — even if it meant leaving the security of a big studio and giving up health insurance. Neither were afraid to take a risk — they had, after all, moved all the way to China for jobs they knew little about. But neither knew if it was what they wanted, either.

FTL and the Indie Showcase

In Christmas of 2010, Ma’s brother and parents chipped in to buy him an all-access pass to the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. He’d spent the past two years developing games in China where, despite the rapidly growing local scene, it was still very much isolated from the global game development community. As a treat, his family thought he’d benefit from traveling to the source of the global game development pulse to be a part of something bigger.

Ma recalls being in awe of the event. It was his first time attending GDC. He attended talks and heard from his game development heroes. He looked at the Independent Game Festival showcase where developers who could do a bit of everything — developers just like him — created original little games that reminded him of why he had so desperately wanted to be involved in the first place.

“I got super psyched,” Ma says. “The significant thing that happened at GDC was the Indie Game Summit … just hearing about people’s experiences making the games and releasing them and coming up with ideas. I don’t know. I don’t know if it was the case that I wanted to be doing what they did, or I wanted to be in that community, but in terms of game development, I knew that was the type of space I wanted to be in.”

It took him several years in college and another two at 2K Games to not figure out what he wanted to do. After five days at GDC, there was not a shadow of a doubt he wanted to be an independent developer. He wanted to come up with his own ideas. He wanted to be responsible for his own games. He wanted to create something that would give him the satisfaction he got from his own small side projects. He returned to China. He quit his job. Davis — who had left 2K months earlier — agreed to work with Ma for the next 12 months to prototype games. If by the end of 12 months they couldn’t find a sustainable way to independently develop games, then both would move on and forget it ever happened. But if they could find a way … well, who knew what would happen? They sure didn’t.

Making a commander
Making a commander

“I think FTL was the kind of game I always wanted to make,” Davis says. “There were two or three [board games] that did the ship management system that FTL has, and we thought that was really cool, but we didn’t understand why other games in the video game world never did that.”

Davis says that in most video games, the player is always the pilot, never the commander, whereas in science fiction like Star Trek or Firefly, the fiction focuses on the commander. “It seemed strange that when people want to bring that world to life, they put you in the pilot’s shoes. We thought it would be fun to put players in the commander’s shoes for once.”

Davis and Ma wrote up a long list of one-paragraph game pitches to prototype. They would be small, manageable games that two people could complete on their own. The game they chose to go with would have to be finished within a year, because that was all they had budgeted for. Among the pitches inspired by board games, roguelikes and all the genres that excited them was a 2D, top-down management game called FTL.

Adam Saltsman (Canabalt, Hundreds) and Davis, playing FTL

The initial pitch said little of what the game would be like, but both Ma and Davis knew how they wanted players to feel. They wanted to recreate the atmosphere of being a captain of a spaceship in a hostile environment. They wanted players to feel the thrill of exploring the galaxy and conquering enemy ships, but also the sense of anxiety and panic of things going wrong.

“All we cared about was making the player feel like they were Captain Picard yelling at engineers to get the shields back online,” Ma says.

During the first few months, the game looked nothing like it does today. They’d designed systems and mechanics, but nothing fit together. “I didn’t think it was particularly fun for the first nine months,” Davis says. “Even when we started to gain some recognition at the IGF in China back in fall of 2011, I was still very unsure of the game being fun and entertaining.”

FTL’s early prototypes consisted of dots moving on a 2D ship. There were no visual crutches or distractions — Davis and Ma had to create their Picard experience using only lines and dots. One color of dots represented the crew, another color represented oxygen, another represented fire. The various colored dots moved around like peppercorns with feet. Doors were lines, rooms were boxes. Abstract as the game may have looked, it had to make people care.

“There are tons of games that are able to elicit those sorts of feelings without too much fancy hardware,” Ma says. “We could be playing Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game and it’s just a board and some pieces of cardboard, but it feels super intense and everyone is sweating and breathing quickly.

“Or playing XCOM! Man, the first time I played the original XCOM, it was 320 by 240 resolution, really blown up, pixelated and ugly, and I was sitting there in this turn-based game — it wasn’t even real-time — and my palms were sweating, my whole body was tense and I was shaking trying to figure out what to do. When you really use the player’s imagination, there’s a lot more you can play with than if you try to show everything that the player is experiencing visually. You use a bit of the player’s brain as your playground.”
“I felt bad for those 32 by 32 pixel dudes running around, and it was a legitimate emotion.”
Six months into development, the pieces started clicking together. The systems they’d built were simple, but could interact with each other in ways that would create a unique experience for the players. Oxygen — originally represented by little dots — moves from one area of the ship to another if a door is opened. Fire will spread unless it is brought under control. Crew will suffocate if oxygen vents out of one room into another.

Justin Ma’s older brother, Bryan, is also a game developer. He helped playtest FTL. He appreciates how elegantly the developers captured the special essence of complex board games, and brought it to life in such a simple video game.

“It’s pretty exceptional, actually,” he says. “Six months into development, I remember playing through and watching the little guys run around on the enemy ship. I was doing pretty well, and the enemy said, ‘I surrender! Please spare our lives!’ And I was like, ‘Man, I really need that scrap!’ So we go into the last stage of the battle and I’m about to destroy them — I see them frantically running around trying to put out fires and fix their ship, and I felt bad for them.

“I felt bad for those 32 by 32 pixel dudes running around, and it was a legitimate emotion. That was a big moment where I was like, ‘OK, something in here is really working.’”

Kickstarter success
Kickstarter success

Near the end of the year they’d set aside to make FTL, Davis and Ma put their game on Kickstarter with the hope of raising $10,000 to pay someone to make music for the game, and to afford them a few more months to finish what they’d started. Their campaign raised more than $200,000.

For the developers, their success seemed freakish and didn’t make a lot of sense, but Bryan Ma believes that some of the appeal lay in the fact that they were doing something no one else seemed to be doing well.

Ma and his father at the GDC

“A lot of archetypal genre conventions like sci-fi management, or the Admiral Ackbar ‘It’s a trap!’ and ‘Fix the transporter, oh no we’re all screwed!’ elements haven’t really been captured very well in games so far,” he says. “This is something we’ve been watching in popular media for so long — this idea that you’re on a ship and you’re totally exposed and fragile, and you can survive — you can — you just have to make the right decisions.”

He says that a game like FTL offers a shortform experience — the kind provided by casual games — but the kind of depth one might find in something with a big budget. This, he believes, is what catapulted FTL into the Kickstarter limelight.

But for the developers, Kickstarter success didn’t lead to a sense of relief or achievement. As the number on their fundraiser website ticked up, so did their sense of panic: How they would handle the thousand beta testers? How they would answer to the thousands of people that were now investors in their game?

“We basically entered the public sphere of game development,” Davis says. “Prior to that, we were sitting in a cave, if you will, developing the game without anyone watching. And once we had people watching, they had their emotional and financial stakes in it.”

When FTL began development, only two people cared about it: Davis and Ma. When the Kickstarter achieved its funding, more than 9,000 people cared.

“I think we were very unprepared for it,” Davis says. “We were unprepared for the publicity and the success of the game. We were stressing about it a lot at night. We set out without much in mind, and we were just surprised when we stumbled into this success.”

It’s been almost seven months since FTL released to its Kickstarter supporters and six months since they released it to the public. The developers are still working on the game, supporting it with updates and delivering the last of the Kickstarter rewards. FTL is a financial success. Critics love it. Fans adore it. New fans find it every day.

Davis says that the two developers approached FTL like a hobby, but it was also an experiment to see if they could create their own game, make careers from it and finally find out if this was what they wanted to do. “That was the main question to the experiment,” he says.

The answer? A resounding yes, echoing through the galaxy on a spaceship.

[Image credits: Justin Ma]

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