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Kickstarted & Overfunded - was nun?

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Der folgende Text ist der Einstieg von Joe Köller bei VGT. Mein Landsmann hat sich in jüngster Zeit als “foreign correspondent” von Critical Distance und vor allem als Herausgeber der famosen englischsprachigen Online-Publikation Haywire Magazine betätigt; ich freue mich, in Zukunft hier regelmäßiger von ihm zu lesen. Welcome!

Normalerweise hat das Internet es ja nicht so mit dem Bezahlen und möchte Inhalte lieber gratis und sofort. Aber manchmal, für den richtigen Zweck, sitzt die Brieftasche auch locker. Nach diesem Prinzip versuchen seit 2009 auf Kickstarter Leute guten Willen, Idealismus oder Nostalgie zu Geld zu machen um damit ihre interessanten oder auch kuriosen Projekte zu finanzieren. Bestimmt muss nicht erwähnt werden, dass auch die Spielebranche die Plattform mittlerweile für sich entdeckt hat. Diverse Veteranen sammeln dort mit Erfolg Geld für Neuauflagen oder Fortsetzungen beliebter Klassiker.

Dabei sind die Nutzer von Kickstarter mitunter so großzügig, dass Projekte weit über ihr ursprüngliches Ziel hinausschießen. Sehr weit. Das stellt nicht nur Entwickler und sonstige Kreative vor ein eher ungewöhnliches Problem (Wohin bloß mit dem ganzen Geld?), sondern ändert auch die Erwartungshaltung ihrer spendablen Unterstützer, die sich für den Überfluss an Mitteln ein entsprechend größeres und ambitionierteres Projekt erwarten. Wozu verpflichtet der unerwartete Geldsegen aber wirklich, und wozu eben nicht?

Kickstarter selbst widmet dem Thema “Overfunding” ein paar Worte in seinem FAQ - und stellt dabei zunächst fest, dass der vermeintliche Überschuss oft sowieso durch höhere Kosten aufgefressen wird: Wer mehr Spender hat, muss auch mehr Belohnungen verschicken. Natürlich sollten diese nicht so konzipiert sein, dass man bei großem Interesse Verluste macht, aber der eigentliche Gewinn dürfte niedriger ausfallen, als den wartenden Kunden klar ist, zumindest bei physischen Medien und Belohnungen.

Computerspiele und Videos haben den Vorteil, dass sie mit einer einzigen Version und digitalem Vertrieb theoretisch ein unbegrenztes Publikum bedienen können. Aus diesem Grund verdient sich Steam schon lange mit niedrigen Preisen eine goldene Nase. Aber egal, wie viel Geld nun genau übrig bleibt, die eigentliche Frage ist ja, was damit passieren sollte. Hier lässt Kickstarter den Machern freie Hand: Der Überschuss kann in das Projekt fließen, muss aber nicht. Im Prinzip handelt es sich dabei schlicht um Profit - und entgegen der allgemeinen Meinung darf man auch mit Projekten, die einem am Herzen liegen, Gewinn machen.

Was tun, wenn ein Kickstarter-

Projekt viel mehr

einnimmt, als verlangt wurde?

Grundsätzlich gibt Kickstarter in seinen Nutzungsbedingungen nur eine bindende Regel zu diesem Thema an: Alle versprochenen Belohnungen müssen bereitgestellt oder die entsprechende Summe zurückerstattet werden. Da sich dabei in der Regel um Exemplare des geplanten Spiels, Produkts oder Kunstwerks handelt, sollte es dem beworbenen Standard entsprechen. Darüber hinauszugehen ist lobenswerter, aber optionaler Ehrgeiz.

Mittlerweile umgehen viele Projekte auf Kickstarter diese Frage mithilfe von Stretch Goals, Bonuszielen, die genau angeben, was sich an dem Projekt noch ändern wird, wenn es bestimmte Summen erreicht. Dadurch liefern die Ersteller ihren Unterstützern nicht nur konkrete Gründe, warum sie sie auch nach erfolgreicher Finanzierung weiter mit Geld überschütten sollten; indem sie diese Ziele und Pläne ausformulieren, verpflichten sie sich auch, sie später zu erfüllen. Stretch Goals sind aber erst seit kurzem populär, die erste Welle an Projekten, die sich nun der Vollendung nähert, kam noch ohne sie aus und lässt damit Raum für Interpretation.

Overfunded: FTL

Im September letzten Jahres wurde FTL: Faster Than Light als einer der ersten Crowdfundingtitel kommerziell veröffentlicht, nachdem das Spiel sechs Monate zuvor rund 200.000$ auf Kickstarter erreicht hatte - 20 mal so viel wie ursprünglich geplant. Wie genau diese Menge an Sterntalern die Produktion des Raumschiff-Roguelikes verändert hat, lässt sich schwer sagen, trotzdem fiel die Rezeption des Titels durchgehend positiv aus. Die ursprüngliche Idee allein überzeugte, auch wenn das Spiel nicht zum Erfolg proportional vergrößert wurde.

Dass die Reaktionen auch anders ausfallen können, zeigt ein kontroverseres Projekt, Anita Sarkeesians “Tropes vs Women”-Videoserie, deren lang erwartete Ankunft derzeit im Netz für Furore sorgt. Die meisten Kommentare zu dem Thema kann man sich noch immer nicht guten Gewissens antun, aber auch durch vernünftige Beiträge zieht sich ein für mich beunruhigender Tenor: “Ganz nett, aber für 160.000$ wäre doch mehr drin gewesen, nicht?”

Zur Erinnerung: Auf Kickstarter verpflichten sich nicht etwa Kreative ihren Kunden, sondern das Publikum verpflichtet sich Projekten.

Ja, das wär es wohl. Aber mehr zu verlangen, kommt nicht nur dem sexistischen Gekreische, das Sarkeesian mit Vergnügen als Diebin oder Betrügerin hinstellt, gefährlich nahe - es bedeutet auch eine grundsätzliche Fehlinterpretation der Machtverhältnisse im Crowdfunding. Zur Erinnerung: Auf Kickstarter verpflichten sich nicht etwa Kreative ihren Kunden, sondern das Publikum verpflichtet sich Projekten. Man wird zum Backer, nicht zum Investor oder Teilhaber, sondern bloß zum Unterstützer, das Recht auf Mitsprache nicht zwangsläufig inbegriffen

Der finanzielle Erfolg von Tropes vs. Women basiert im Grunde weniger auf Anita Sarkeesians eigenem überbordendem Enthusiasmus, als dem Versuch ihrer Unterstützer, das Projekt in Beschlag zu nehmen, um mit barem Geld die sexistische Hetze, die ihr widerfahren ist auszugleichen und dann am besten auch noch zu bekämpfen und den  Sexismus in Spielerkreisen vielleicht gleich auszumerzen. Von Sarkeesian zu verlangen, dass sie diesen emotionalen Geldschwall in ein sinnvolles Projekt entsprechender Größe verwandelt, dass sie ihren Ehrgeiz doch dem Gebrüll der Massen anpassen solle, ist bizarr. Wieso gilt es jetzt als entäuschend, lediglich das abzuliefern, was man von Anfang an versprochen hat?

Zumal auch keine Einigkeit darüber herrscht, wie denn nun dieses Mehr aussehen sollte. Mehr Dynamik, einen Gesprächspartner vielleicht oder doch gleich eine Interviewreihe? Ein Freund meinte kürzlich, sie hätte doch gleich eine ganze Dokumentation drehen können, und auch Kollisionsabfrage muss man unterstellen, dass der Budgetvergleich mit “Indie Game: The Movie” nicht zufällig gewählt ist. Eines haben die Vorschläge gemeinsam: Mehr bedeutet hier in der Regel “etwas anderes”. Aber etwas anderes als ursprünglich angekündigt zu produzieren, ist rechtlich fragwürdig und wohl auch angreifbar, selbst wenn die Alternative den Großteil der Unterstützer zufrieden stellt.

Auch wenn die meisten Nutzer von Kickstarter, in der Regel Überzeugungstäter, liebend gern mehr Zeit und Geld in ihre Projekte investieren würden, nicht alle Pläne lassen sich beliebig und sinnvoll erweitern. Mehr noch: Die Vorstellung, dass man sich jederzeit dem Druck des Kapitals fügen müsse, hieße ja auch, dass das Publikum mit genügend Geld jedes Projekt umkrempeln, verdrehen oder in eine Karikatur seiner selbst verwandeln kann. Wenn jemand für 10.000$ ein Brettspiel entwerfen will, muss er es dann für 100.000$ zum Computerspiel umbauen? Wenn ich anbiete, für 1.000$ einmal zu Fuß um die Welt zu gehen, muss ich es für 5.000$ fünfmal hintereinander machen?

Natürlich soll niemandem verboten werden, von “Tropes vs. Women” oder anderen Crowdfundingprojekten enttäuscht zu sein - nur gehört das eben zum Risiko des Geschäftsmodells und sollte schon bedacht werden, bevor man die jeweilige Katze im Sack kauft. Genau wie die Möglichkeit, dass das Projekt scheitern könnte, oder auch die Frage ob der eigene Beitrag noch sinnvoll ist, wenn es doch ohnehin schon finanziert ist. Die Macht, die Kickstarter uns, den zahlenden Massen, verleiht, bringt eben auch Verantwortung mit sich.

Vor allem aber sollte man mit derartigen Überlegungen vorsichtig sein, wenn man sich - wie wohl die meisten Diskutanten - am jeweiligen Projekt ohnehin nie beteiligt hat. Denn sich als “Nutznießer” zu fragen, ob dem zahlenden Publikum hier für sein Geld denn auch genug geboten wird, ist irgendwie zynisch.

Verfasst von rainer sigl am 21. März 2013 - 9:39

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Ridiculous Fishing, Byrdr and Vlambeer's creative approach to indie marketing - feature

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PG.BIZ FEATURE

Ridiculous Fishing, Byrdr and Vlambeer’s creative approach to indie marketing

‘We had no clue what we were doing’
Product:  Ridiculous Fishing   Developer:  aeiowu   Publisher:  Vlambeer   Genre:  Action, Arcade  by Lee Bradley
“We literally had no clue what we were doing.”
For many independent developers raising awareness and generating buzz around a game is a tricky proposition, especially in the increasingly crowded mobile marketplace.

For Dutch indie studio Vlambeer the solution to this problem was a hastily cobbled together Alternate Reality Game (ARG), designed to promote its upcoming title, Ridiculous Fishing.

Built around Ridiculous Fishing’s in-game social network - and the misadventures of its fictional CEO James Eagler- the ARG managed to propel Vlambeer’s title beyond its core market and into the Twitter feeds and forum threads of thousands of potential new players.

Here, Vlambeer’s head of business and development Rami Ismail and Byrdr ARG creator Davey Wreden share their thoughts on the makings of a mini Twitter phenomenon and the marketing of an indie smash.

#Byrdr

Ridiculous Fishing’s marketing campaign began nine days before the launch of the game, with a micro-trailer published on Vine, the Twitter-owned service that allows users to upload six second videos.

Ridiculous Fishing

The first of its kind, the novelty of Ridiculous Fishing’s Vine trailer saw it explode over social networks, gaining extensive coverage from major gaming blogs and websites.

But with that out of the way, there was a problem.

“We only had enough content for four of the nine days before launch and we were like, ‘We need something substantial to fill up this last stretch,’” says Ismail.

Rami Ismail

Thoughts quickly turned to Byrdr, Ridiculous Fishing’s in-game social network.

The team had already bought the Byrdr.com domain and encouraged fans to sign up, with the intention of creating an actual working network to mirror that of the game itself.

But they abandoned the idea when they realised it was too ambitious.

“All of a sudden we thought, what if instead of launching a social network, we fake fake launched a social network?,” says Ismail.

Immediately the team contacted indie developer Davey Wreden, largely due to their admiration for his The Stanley Parables dev blog. “We all agreed that we needed him,” says Ismail.

“I think the pitch was, ‘We need the world’s shorted ARG.’”

@JamesEagler

Despite the daunting nature of the task, Wreden’s reply was immediate.

“When Rami calls you and asks if you want to spend the next five days working in a blur of insanity,” says Wreden, “you don’t ask silly questions like what you’ll be working on or if it’s possible or will we all be alive after this. You say yes.”

Initially, however, Wreden and the team didn’t know what form the ARG should take.

Davey Wreden

“We thought if we made it mainly text-based that would be like the easiest way to be able to manage it,” offers Wreden.

“And then we realised we could do a phone line, we could use the email addresses of the people that signed up to Byrdr, we could use the Twilio service somehow - and oh it records voice messages, what could we do with that?

“It just started with these options and went from there. Ultimately, we decided that something really effective could be done by offering a peek into the bureaucracy of Byrdr and there was a really genuine way to tie that into the narrative of the game.”

So Wreden began five days of feverish work.

#Byrdrwillsolveit

The ARG began with an email sent to every Byrdr subscriber from CEO James Eagler, encouraging users to show their enthusiasm for the new social network.

“Why don’t you spread the word by tweeting some of the roadblocks in your own life that you look forward to Byrdr resolving!,” wrote Eagler.

“Like ‘video rental stores don’t seem to exist any more #ByrdrWillSolveIt’ or ‘Ouch! Just impaled myself on my own elbows! #ByrdrWillSolveIt’.”

Arguably one of the most successful aspects of the ARG, the hashtag grew beyond those on the mailing list as Twitter users began tweeting their own amusing problems for Byrdr to solve.

But then Eagler’s messages took a strange turn, as the fictional CEO accidentally emailed the entire mailing list with a memo intended for his secretary. Byrdr was a scam, and it was about to unravel in an increasingly bizarre and amusing way.

“When considering whether or not Byrdr is real, Byrdr advises that you first ask whether you yourself are real, and work backward from there,” said one of the emails.

It was here that the ARG itself properly took off, as players attempted to find Eagler’s telephone extension number by scrutinizing website backends and cryptic images, emailing the Eagler and the “Internal Investigations Department,” and following character Twitter accounts.

The Maelstrom

As the Twitter discussions expanded and the forum posts piled up, Wreden sat and watched it all unfold.

“It was terrifying!,” he says. “As a writer I often become pretty attached to my work, if I think it’s great I’ll want everyone to see it, but that’s not how ARGs work.

“You have to deal with players searching down avenues that lead nowhere and accept that certain bits of content will only ever be seen by a few people. It actually made me really anxious to watch, I had to step away from the computer for most of it.

“But it felt like whenever players did put in the effort to read all the emails, dig a little bit for details, and really engage with the game, they got a lot out of it!”

“I had more than a few people tell me that just watching the emails come in was a blast and that the whole thing felt really fresh and fun. Of course we also had people complaining about the number of emails we were sending them, but I guess you have to be cool with not pleasing everyone.”

@OG_RodAndGun

Those that did track down Eagler’s extension number were treated to a phone-based mini-game in which listeners were offered various choices as the prelude to a number of gags.

At one point callers were also encouraged to leave voice messages for Eagler’s son, who had been left at school, alone, waiting. And while many stayed silent, over 100 did just that, from locations are far flung as Lesotho, South Africa.

Ismail played me a recording of one enthusiastic caller bellowing, “You hang in there, son!”

But among the laughs, sprinkled throughout every one of the ARG’s voice messages, emails and Twitter accounts were some revelatory details about Ridiculous Fishing’s story - details that many players would never understand.

“I don’t know how many people realised how integrated it all was,” Wreden says. “I think some people got it, it’s all there. We knew that it was all meant to convey a story, at the end of the day.”

Pleasingly, just like Ridiculous Fishing itself, the Byrdr ARG rewarded players according to how deep they were willing to look. Some secrets remain uncovered.

Thoughts

The Byrdr ARG was an unconventional campaign, in may ways.

Ridiculous Fishing itself was never directly mentioned and the allusions to the game’s narrative would only become apparent to those that beat the game.

However, with popularity of the #ByrdrWillSolveIt hashtag, the forum discussion that sprang up around Byrdr and the ARG fans that were drawn in without prior knowledge of the game, it did enjoy some measure of success.

“I think the ARG definitely helped us reach people that we wouldn’t have usually,” says Ismail. “Usually people that appear in our feed on Twitter, people that discuss our games, they have the word ‘games’ somewhere in their profile. They’re often developers or journalists.

“But so many more people were discussing Byrdr and what I meant. I think it helped a lot.”

Just how much the Byrdr ARG contributed to Ridiculous Fishing’s success is unquantifiable.

But with the game currently sitting in top five Paid App Store charts in countries across the world, it would be nice to think that Vlambeer and Davey Wreden’s feverishly assembled, creative approach to indie marketing is at least partly responsible.

What’s this?

Lee Bradley  20/3/2013

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Entitled Gamers, Corrupt Press, and Greedy Publishers

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By Brendan Sinclair

Thu 21 Mar 2013 1:44pm GMT / 9:44am EDT / 6:44am PDT
Media

Something’s broken in the way we deal with each other, but there are understandable reasons why

The Game Developers Conference kicks off next week, and lately when I haven’t been busy planning coverage for the 2013 show, I’ve often found myself thinking back to GDC 2012. Specifically, I’ve been reconsidering a Chris Hecker mini-rant titled “The Dysfunctional Three-Way” in reference to gamers, developers, and the press. But where Hecker focused on a symptom of the dysfunction—an “appetite for sameness” in content the industry creates, covers, and consumes—I’ve been pondering the root cause. The problem between players, developers, and the press is partly that they just don’t respect one another, and partly that they have justifiable reasons not to.

You might have noticed things in the world of core gaming have changed as this generation has dragged on. They’re a little more tense, a little more antagonistic than in the past. The relationships between the people who make the games, the people who play the games, and the people who write about the games are increasingly strained, and the general attitude each group has toward the others creates a caustic, almost toxic atmosphere. This is an industry traditionally defined by its single-minded pursuit of fun, but these days it seems content to sit back and wallow in acrimony.

SimCity: Because the suckers already bought it, so **** ‘em.

Gamers are mad because they’re treated with naked contempt by the people who count them as customers. They’re angry when their media outlets serve the interests of their advertisers instead of the interests of their readers. Or when the long-standing practice of buying and selling used games is suddenly tantamount to thievery just because technology has given content creators a way to throttle it. And who wouldn’t be upset after paying $60 for a brand new game only to find out it isn’t actually playable because the publisher imposed a needless DRM scheme even though they were woefully, incompetently unprepared to fulfill their obligation of providing servers for it? Should we even begin to get into increasingly exploitive business models that are driven by nothing but a remorseless push to separate gamers from their money?

“When even the best work brings with it a measure of abuse, it becomes difficult to filter out the unreasonable complaints from the ones that actually have a really good point.”

That said, players don’t have a monopoly on righteous indignation; press, developers, and publishers have a few reasons for resenting their audiences right back. The gaming public is a bottomless well of wanting, and whatever they are given, a not insignificant number of them will be vocally unhappy. They are upset that not enough was changed for the sequel. They are upset that too much was changed. All post-release content should be free. It’s okay to vote with your wallet by pirating a game, because the company who made it is evil and what else are you expected to do? Not play it? This review score was too high; they must have been bought off. That review score was too low; I bet the incompetent and/or lazy reviewer didn’t even beat the game on Master Ninja difficulty. “These websites have no standards and post sensationalist click-baiting tripe,” they yell before clicking on the headline screaming “BREAKING: Miyamoto BLASTS rumored Xbox 720 specs!”

When people squat on absolutely everything, when even the best work brings with it a measure of abuse, it becomes difficult to filter out the unreasonable complaints from the ones that actually have a really good point. That becomes even harder when the wonder of Internet anonymity empowers them to abandon all pretense of civility, and so much of the gaming world seems primed to give voice to the nastiest aspects of their personalities. Remember the unconscionable bullying BioWare’s Jennifer Hepler faced when she dared to suggest story-driven games could let players skip through combat sequence? How about when high-level Street Fighter x Tekken player Aris Bakhtanians defended sexual harassment in the fighting game community as “part of the culture” (and had more than a handful of people coming to his defense)?

Gaming: Where sexual harassment can be defended as ‘part of the culture.’

The game makers and the press haven’t had a great relationship of late, either. Some of the problems are the same as ever, but both the gaming industry and the press that covers it are going through some pretty lean times, and the pervasive sense that there’s a hair’s breadth between treading water and sinking like a stone is only heightening the tension. When coverage drifts away from what the publisher considers “on message,” access can disappear. People lie about what problems will be fixed for launch, or whether so-and-so is doing interviews at an upcoming event. They complain when comment is not sought, but routinely ignore requests or stall for days when it is. Of course, those requests might be made a minute before the story goes live anyway, not exactly providing anyone with a fair opportunity to respond. And there’s no shortage of writers willing to view every action in the worst possible light, to make out-of-context remarks into headlines or run with scintillating scuttlebutt, no matter how flimsy or far removed from reality it actually is.

“We have three groups of people, each of which has entirely legitimate reasons to show distrust and disdain toward the other two.”

The sum of all this is that we have three groups of people, each of which has entirely legitimate reasons to show distrust and disdain toward the other two. And the state of the industry at this particular point in time is only making the situation worse.

The Internet has matured to the point where everybody has a voice, and the barriers separating the voice of the well-informed from the probably insane have never been lower. The media and the industry have no choice but to filter out a certain amount of the criticism as online background noise. And when we can point to hard numbers like “unique visitors” or “average revenue per user” as evidence that people actually like what we’re doing, it’s no wonder that the actual, legitimate complaints about our behavior fall on deaf ears. If we’re running businesses, the complaints have to be ignored, at a point.

Meanwhile, the players are losing control of their hobby in new and frightening ways. “Games as a service” means no more “games as a tangible product,” which means no more owning games as a finished thing that they can slot into a collection and preserve for all time. Now games are only as good as the servers they run on (the less said about that, the better), and the idea of a complete, cohesive gaming experience seems to be losing ground to the notion of a virtual treadmill which requires constant investment—or at least constant engagement—to maintain. Games are becoming less a hobby than a second job.

People were skeptical of the gaming press well before Gerstmann-gate. That incident did not improve the situation, to put it mildly.

And the press is caught in the middle. As has been the case for centuries, focusing on that which will be read is more lucrative than focusing on that which will best serve or inform readers. But the margins for error are slimmer than ever before. Just ask anyone who has worked for and been laid off by Ziff Davis before (and let’s jokingly assume that’s a majority of the game journo population at this point). This is an insecure profession, and today’s Internet darling could be today’s unemployed writer, never mind tomorrow. The pressure to make sure that every story gets hits, that every feature goes viral, has never been higher. If it reflects poorly on something with a well-established fanbase that will protest in abundance, it leads.

“As has been the case for centuries, focusing on that which will be read is more lucrative than focusing on that which will best serve or inform readers. But the margins for error are slimmer than ever before.”

There are exceptions to every one of these rules. Obviously, there are plenty of reasonable gamers who ask for entirely achievable things that the press and game makers should provide as a matter of principle, or at least policy. And there are a number of developers and publishers who do treat their fans with respect, who provide a fair exchange of content for currency, and take user feedback to heart. And hopefully everyone involved has a handful of favorites on the journalism side, people they trust to give them an honest opinion or an even-handed report instead of pandering to the interests of others. But these are still exceptions because we treat praise as a finite resource, doling it out in miserly fashion to a single person here or a rare company there. On the other hand, we have scorn in abundance, and we direct it at even deserving targets with all the careful precision of a carpet bombing. Whoever gets caught up in the collateral damage probably deserved it anyway, right?

For each of these groups, the default state toward the others is almost necessarily distrust. We cannot extend each other the basic respect we should, simply because the negative consequences of doing so in those cases when we shouldn’t are too high, and those cases are too common.

Because getting back to Hecker’s GDC speech, the traditional gaming industry as it currently operates is dysfunctional. And if we’re going to change that, we have two options. The first is to wait until the industry’s financial fortunes improve, alleviating the pressures on the press and the game makers and (hopefully) giving people the luxury of breathing room. (Given the number of AAA-naysayers, let’s assume this improvement is not imminent.) The other option is to empathize with each other, to assume people are deserving of respect, to give someone the benefit of the doubt. I can’t say which party should extend that courtesy first, and I can’t fault those who wait for someone else to make the first move, but it must happen at some point if we want to fix the problem.

About the author

Brendan Sinclair
Brendan joined GamesIndustry International in 2012. Based in Toronto, Ontario, he was previously a long-time news editor at CBS-owned GameSpot in the US, and joins up with the US editorial team led by James Brightman.

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Architects and Gaming | Archi-Ninja

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Architects and Gaming

By Linda ⋅ March 14, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment

We spend a collective 7 billion hours a week playing games. Why? Because gaming fulfills the innate human need to overcome obstacles. I have always wondered why architects are so into gaming. When playing a game we spend 80% of our time failing and facing the fear of loss and death. Sounds a little like a standard workday, yet unlike the real time situation we approach gaming with greater optimism and curiosity; there is a framework of resilience and that we can learn from gaming.

David Fletcher is a landscape architect and urban designer. For the past two years, Fletcher Studio has been designing the virtual island for the video game, Witness, a first-person game of cerebral puzzles. Jonathan Blow, game industry misfit and Witness creator explains, “It’s a game about epiphany, that leap your mind makes when you instantly go from confusion to understanding.” Source. Sound familiar?

Fletcher was brought on board by the game developers Thekla, Inc., along with architect Deanna VanBuren of FOURM Design, to help synthesize what was, at the time, a remote, anonymous island setting without much context. The task was to flesh out the visual and functional details of a site that was essentially a-geographical, a-historical, and a-cultural. For a firm whose practice is embedded in site-specificity, Witness required the landscape architects to reverse engineer a site from ruins to birth. Fletcher determined early on, ‘We cannot design this space.’ Instead, we can design its history and allow entropy to suggest how things might evolve.”

There were architectural ruins scattered throughout the minimalist terrain, which Fletcher knew were somehow connected to the game’s puzzle narrative, though the specifics were not revealed.  Fletcher employed studio designers Nicolaus Wright and Beth Bokulich to help design the history of the terrain, layer it with the rise and fall of civilizations, and determine a pre-human logic to the terrain’s physical formation.

Fletcher’s past conceptual and exhibition work largely deals with alternative futures. In the 2009 project, Infrastructural Armature, Fletcher speculated on the fate of Los Angeles in the year 2125, visualizing a dystopic city confronted with resource scarcity, global warming, sea level rise, and economic destabilization. The narrative was broken down into episodes and then into a list of assumptions about how present-day Los Angeles could have evolved to this state.

Using a similar approach with Witness, Fletcher and VanBuren broke down the island-ruin scenario and asked “How might things have evolved politically or structurally? How did materials evolve? What about food and sustenance? How was water formalized from ponds and ditches to canals and wells to water towers and plumbing?”

The design team amassed a plethora of research about island ecosystems and topography, notably, from knowledge they gleaned about the Portuguese Azores. Collected visuals were compiled in a 2D collage that represented the Witness island in plan, embellished with new geologic and ecological details, and with a greater understanding of the landscape’s underlying mechanics.

Virtual scale presented a challenge.  The island is less than a mile wide, and its microclimates range from rainforest to mangrove, a transition that in reality would cover several hundred, if not thousands of miles. Yet, in the service of the narrative, these microclimates had to be condensed, and the thresholds that separated them into distinct biomes had to be articulated so that the player could roam relatively free. The design team became familiar with various gaming tropes–the unsurpassable chest-high wall, the inaccessible incline–that would help guide the player through the site, ultimately aiding them in solving the puzzles. “It’s a psychogeography of the gameplay, an exploration in the vein of an open world where you can go anywhere you want,” Wright explains, “However, there is an order and a narrative structure to moving through the island.”

As with design in real space and time, site lines were, perhaps, the single most essential tool in organizing the virtual space. Creating focal points that guide the viewer towards other zones, screening the superfluous, establishing a hierarchy of visual characteristics–the choreography of these elements influence the player’s spatial perception, just as it would in reality. The “picturesque” in historic landscape architecture is highly contingent on the treatment of views: the foreground, middle ground, and background are all treated for the utility of specific visual effects–from habitable geometries to the serpentine meander, and eventually diminishing into the untouched wild. From Repton’s Blaise Castle to Olmstead’s Central Park, the picturesque landscape follows a painterly composition, framed, narrative, and perspectival.  The grounds in Witness, by the nature the virtual medium, is an illustrated space, flattened by the screen view and removed from multi-sensory experience. To achieve a spatial understanding of the island (and to generate the narrative), the viewer must be coaxed through visual exploration.

While Fletcher Studio is designing the Witness island for the experience of a single person (the player), the potential reach is far greater. Blow’s previous game, Braid, sold more than 2 million copies. Witness is expected to receive as much, if not more, attention. It will likely be available on mobile devices, as well as its debut on Playstation 4. The puzzles, the narrative, and the island landscape, therefore, could support hundreds of thousands of solitary experiences, all at once. Wright describes the educational value of the game’s landscape:

Its interesting to think that there is a didactic component to introducing people to the potentials of landscape experience and environmental design. We, as landscape designers, think about the theory of the built environment and know it very intimately, immediately able to recognize built natures and artificial ecologies. Most people do not recognize that going to Yosemite is an entirely constructed experience. Witness, which is a total simulacra of nature, is perhaps even more explicit about it’s designed character.

David Fletcher asserts that there is no ultimate “revelatory or ecological agenda” in designing the landscape for Witness.  “The take away for landscape architecture is the notion of time,” he says, “Landscape architects are able to think across scales, about temporal evolution.” In Witness, physical scale is often condensed and the present moment is haunted by the island’s rich, fabricated history. The player is able to explore the landscape in way that feels plausible and intellectually stimulating.  Andrew Lackey, the game’s sound designer elaborates:

We’re not just talking aesthetics…Noticing, is key to discovering solutions and even finding the puzzles themselves. Nothing in the Witness is superfluous. Source

Images provided by Jonathan Blow. I would love to hear your feedback in the comment section below. Thanks for reading!

An online project founded in ‘08 by Sydney based Architecture student Linda Bennett, Archi-Ninja is the discussion and critique of current Architectural projects and ideas… Ninja style!
Virtual Architectural Exhibition

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Sweatshop HD is the latest victim in Apple's war on serious games - Sweatshop HD news

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IPAD NEWS

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Sweatshop HD is the latest victim in Apple’s war on serious games

Satirical iPad game is removed from the App Store

Summary News Review Screens Videos Articles Tips

Product: Sweatshop HD | Developer: Littleloud | Publisher: Channel 4 | Genre: Strategy, Tower defence

For: iPad

by Mark Brown

Image gallery »

According to UK developer Littleloud, Sweatshop HD is an iPad game that “challenged people to think about the origin of the clothes we buy”.
But it has now been removed from Apple’s online marketplace. Why? Well, because the App Store gatekeeper was “uncomfortable selling a game based around the theme of running a sweatshop”.

Littleloud’s game was a skewed spin on tower defence games, where you put together a production line to churn out designer shoes and baseball caps for brands like “CryMark”.

But to keep costs down, it paid to ignore a few basic human rights, hire cheap labourers, and treat your underage workforce with only a modicum of respect.

If you can stomach the paralysing guilt of mistreating your virtual workers, you’ll bring in cash and ace the level.

Sweatshop HD

We called it a “superbly crafted combination of tower defence game and management sim that’s consistently thought-provoking, yet never heavy-handed” in our PG Silver Award review.

The game was released in November 2012, but it was removed earlier this year.

Littleloud’s head of games, Simon Parkin, told Pocket Gamer that “Apple removed Sweatshop from the App Store last month stating that it was uncomfortable selling a game based around the theme of running a sweatshop.”

“Apple specifically cited references in the game to clothing factory managers ‘blocking fire escapes’, ‘increasing work hours for labour’, and issues around the child labour as reasons why the game was unsuitable for sale.”

“Littleloud amended the app to clarify that Sweatshop is a work of fiction and was created with the fact-checking input of charity Labor Behind the Label, and to emphasise that the game doesn’t force players to play the game in one way or another. Rather, Sweatshop is a sympathetic examination of the pressures that all participants in the sweatshop system endure.”

“Sadly, these clarifications and changes weren’t enough to see the game reinstated for sale.”

So, if you want to experience it, you’ll have to play the free Flash version.

Apple declined our offer to comment on the story.

Phone Story

Sweatshop HD wasn’t the first game to feature virtual production lines, and it’s not the first game of its kind to be removed by Apple, either.

In Phone Story, Molleindustria depicted the seedy side of smartphone manufacturing, including sweatshop suicides and the harvesting of rare minerals in the war-torn Congo.

Apple pulled the game, saying it violated a number of App Store rules, most noteworthily clause 16.1 - “Apps that present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected.”

There’s also the case of In a Permanent Save State, an artistic game centred on “the spiritual afterlife” of overworked electronics labourers who had committed suicide.

It was removed by Apple for being in violation of that all-important clause 16.1.

Smuggle Truck

Other high-profile apps that have been removed or rejected by The Big A for promoting a controversial cause or highlighting a particularly sensitive issue include satirical border crossing game Smuggle Truck and civil war strategy game Endgame: Syria.

Apple actually speaks about this very issue in the App Store developer guidelines, where it says “we view apps different [sic] than books or songs, which we do not curate.”

So, “if you want to criticise a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical app.”

Games, Apple says, are not the place for social commentary or criticism.

What’s this?

Mark Brown 21 March 2013

Have your say!

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Nikita Dudnik | 10:49 - 22 March 2013

Desktop version please.

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Pieter Pan | 06:13 - 22 March 2013

Meanwhile back in China Apples products are being produced in a sweatshop. And why does Apple get to enforce these arbitrary standards?

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@csmemarketing | 04:35 - 22 March 2013

Apple needs to stop with the hypocrisy! At least this is a game. The content of the game applies to Apple because they have done it in real life. using Child Labour to make all their i-devices. maybe that’s why apple finds it offensive. Why you think apple is the richest company in the world? with trillions of dollars. they paid like 5 cents to assemble each iphone.

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@ZenMagnets | 01:44 - 22 March 2013

Dude. Please make an Android version. We’ll buy it. And I want the original version, not the already censored to make apple happy version.

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Konstantin Mitk | 19:19 - 21 March 2013

This is terrible! Sweatshop is one of the best serious games that hase been developed in the last years. I even dedicated a whole paper on how the game provides a novel take on educational game design (http://gambit.mit.edu/readme/academic_papers/fdg2012_submission_82-1.pdf). Apple not just “censoring” content, it is also preventing education.

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@TheAngryDM | 18:47 - 21 March 2013

Considering how quickly the online community lambasts any content provider for providing any content that morally offends them (how DARE Amazon sell whatever?! http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/11/10/amazon.pedophile.guide/index.html?hpt=T2 ), I am not surprised.
Look, we need to make a decision, people: do we want to create storms when distributors DO ACT as moral guardians or when they DON’T ACT as moral guardians. We have to pick one. If we’re all going to scream bloody murder every time they don’t censor something morally offensive, we have to expect them to censor everything someone might deem morally offensive.

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@bryan_gb | 16:57 - 21 March 2013

Easy solution - forget Apple, develop for an _open_ platform instead.

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kristan.reed | 14:18 - 21 March 2013

This moral gatekeeping is essentially Apple ensuring that no serious issues can ever make it into iOS games. That’s a pretty depressing censorial mandate right there.

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The Ancient Roots of Role-Playing: Edward III’s Medieval LARP

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The Ancient Roots of Role-Playing: Edward III’s Medieval LARP

by Jillian Scharr

Today, everyone knows someone who’s played Humans versus Zombies. You, dear reader, have probably played it yourself. But did you know that when you run around your college campus with a yellow bandana and a Nerf gun, you are participating in a centuries-old tradition that an English king once used to start a war?

The term “Live-Action Role-Play,” or LARP, was coined some time in the 20th century to describe a form of play that combines childlike make-believe with increasingly rigid and stylized rules. Alongside tabletop games, LARPs are considered the analogue predecessors of the first rudimentary videogames, and were also heavily influenced by the concurrent popularity of Lord of the Rings and other contemporary medieval-themed fantasy. Hence LARP participants’ proclivity for incorporating foam swords and cardboard armor into their play.

In 1344, King Edward III of England held an event that a 21st-century LARPer would find more than a little familiar.  He held a tournament, a common enough event in the later years of the Middle Ages. But at this one, the participating knights and ladies all role played as characters from the stories of King Arthur.

Edward surely grew up listening to the ever-growing canon of stories surrounding King Arthur. Evidence suggests that he was literate, as was expected of kings by then, and according to the royal library’s records he had a thick tome full of Arthur and his knights’ chivalrous exploits. Edward III’s love of jousting is also well-documented; apparently there was no occasion too small to commemorate with a tournament, because in February 1342 he held one for betrothal of his three-year-old son.

Edward surely wasn’t the first to fit the trappings of the King Arthur stories over a war game; he’s just the best recorded. But Edward was doing more than playing a boyish fantasy when he commissioned the Round Table at Windsor and held his joust in 1344. He was also making a calculated political move. In their scrupulously researched book Edward III’s Round Table at Windsor by Julian Munby, Richard Barber and Richard Brown, the authors write:

Enthusiast for chivalry though he was, [Edward III’s] enjoyment of jousting was subordinated to much more ambitious schemes. It is the mixture of high politics and personal relationships that makes the event with which Edward brought his series of tournaments to a climax, the Round Table festival of January 1344, such a fascinating moment in his career. (37)

Let’s look at the game itself. As with most of medieval storytelling, it was almost entirely performative, so what records we have of it were made after the fact, probably by scribes or historians who didn’t participate in the festivities themselves, who may not even have witnessed them. Surely the players and designers had little to no thought of recording their rules and deeds, as oral storytelling and memory was the popular mode of communication. Besides, the rules of one game didn’t have to hold for the next, so long as the basic idea held,  just as Lancelot could go on nearly any adventure in any story so long as he always made it back in time to rescue Guinevere from the fire.

That’s what made medieval conceptions of narrative and storytelling so easily adaptable into games: just as with today’s RPGs, there was no single fixed storyline. Instead, stories passed from person to person in the form of character archetypes, chivalrous codes, themes and places. There was always a man named Arthur, and he always became a king, but the manner of his ascent, his personality and his friends changed with each retelling, just as every playthrough of Mass Effect will see Commander Shepard saving the galaxy in a different way.

In other words, the medieval conception of storytelling was not unlike playing a game, or at least an interactive narrative. Just take away the virtual interface and replace it with the slower but just as powerful network called collective memory and word-of-mouth.

The narratives were unfixed, often literally unwritten (for a few decades more, at least), and that left the possibility for play. The imagery of Johan Huizinga’s “Magic Circle” of gamespace is rarely more apt than in Edward III’s grand LARP about the Arthurian Round Table. By combining story and sport into the image of the legendary Round Table, Edward inscribed a literal Magic Circle in which he and his knights could play. But Edward didn’t want the game to end with the joust. To borrow Johan Huizinga’s term again, the King needed an imperfect magic circle to make a real one: a real-life Round Table.

What makes Edward’s round table at Windsor so interesting isn’t just that it’s the best-recorded instance of medieval LARPing. Edward’s purpose in holding it was more than just to have fun. The king wanted to recommence that favorite royal pastime: war with France.  But after several years of unsuccessful conflict–a period that would later be known as the start of the Hundred Years’ War–Edward III didn’t have the money or the support of Parliament. So he decided to appeal to the people. The Windsor festivities were intended to inspire the kingdom’s would-be knights.  In 1344, the concepts of nationalism or patriotism were still half-formed or nonexistent, but the identity of the British isles as “England,” as one country and one people with a shared history and a shared pride, was beginning to emerge over the old medieval loyalties to fief and tribe. By evoking King Arthur,  a figure that every inhabitant of the British Isles had claimed as a predecessor since the Dark Ages, Edward III was trying to appeal to a national English identity.

You’ve probably heard of the Knights of the Garter. The order was born from Edward III’s King Arthur games in 1344. Edward was trying to cultivate a community, a medieval “it-crowd” that would attract foreign knights as well as British ones to his banner and his battles. And it worked. In 1346 Edward invaded France again. In what is considered the greatest offensive of the Hundred Years’ War, his troops landed in Normandy and marched across France to take the cities of Caen, Crécy and Calais.

Using games to stir patriotic fervor, to recruit for a war…It sounds so medieval, doesn’t it? We like to think of games as separate from reality, as a means of escaping the ambiguous rules and goals of “real life” for the ordered and tangible ones of a play-space. But modern parallels to Edward III’s game are not impossible to find. In 2002 the U.S. government released an online FPS called America’s Army, a game that they hoped would increase recruitment levels as well as general enthusiasm for American military exploits.

Live Action Role Play is not a twentieth century invention. And games are rarely just games–fiction and shared play have a powerful effect on players’ real world identities. The Magic Circle is never leak-proof, and some people have taken advantage of its porousness to effect political and social change. In 1344, Edward III of England took the story of King Arthur and fashioned rules from it. From those rules, he then created a space for play. And in that play-space, he cultivated a movement that resulted in a war, and stoked the flames of a national British identity.

Sources:

Edward III’s Round Table at Windsor by Julian Munby, Richard Barber and Richard Brown. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007.

Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga. London: Roy Publishers, 1950.

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Game Jams and the Romance of the Last Minute - Ben Serviss

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Game Jams and the Romance of the Last Minute

Deadlines. Fire-breathing, gold-hoarding deadlines. Screenshot from Dragon Age: Origins.

If creative work of any kind is an epic adventure, then the deadline is the dragon guarding the treasure at the end. No matter how disciplined your approach, there’s always that rush to get the last details just right before the final countdown. In games, this can be exceptionally problematic due to all the multidisciplinary integrations that need to come together in a final package, and crunch is an unfortunate reality of the industry.

But what if there was a way to harness the chaotic power of the last minute? There is. But it might not be what you think.

During development, constraints are a blessing and a curse. In exchange for conceding potential freedoms – tying a title to a certain platform or demographic, or having to use a licensed IP – you gain some explicit instructions on what kind of game to make. Working within imposed constraints can produce some truly amazing works of art that never would have been created otherwise. Can you think of any sonnets that would be improved by removing the strict rhyming scheme?

Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Sonnet 18)”

Deadlines, by definition, are a type of constraint. The problem with deadlines, though, is that they are by and large artificial constraints, imposed by an outside force as opposed to a necessary function of the work process (e.g. the sonnet’s iambic pentameter).

They are also malleable constraints, and this is where they lose their power. For example, GTA 5 recently slipped from a spring 2013 launch to September. This isn’t unusual for Rockstar, who nevertheless manages to consistently ship great games.

Now take any small-time iOS developer. They might not have the reputation and cash that Rockstar has, but should they stumble upon an amazing mechanic during development that didn’t fit the project, wouldn’t it make sense for them to retool the game to incorporate their stroke of brilliance? The point is that the example of delaying for quality exists in all of our minds, even if we aren’t able to indulge in every whim to do so. This universally understood sentiment – a deadline is a deadline is a deadline, except when excessive quality is in reach – nearly undermines the concept altogether.

Concepts like Agile methodology and Scrum attempt to mitigate the damage of succumbing to the romance of the last minute by imposing even more artificial constraints. Now deadlines are every two weeks! Surely the rhythm of regular sprints will help the team coordinate efforts better to avoid the nasty pileup of crunch at the end of production, right? The fact is while Agile can certainly help, it’s simply a facet of human nature to try to do the best you can, even right up to the wire.

So instead of trying to squash this tendency with even stricter deadlines and processes, studios are finally starting to look for answers in the opposite direction. If the run-up to finishing a game is fraught with uncertainty, last-minute creative breakthroughs and integration miracles, wouldn’t it make sense to practice these skills as often as possible? Scrum sprints only account for completing tasks, not shipping projects. Wouldn’t iterating the process of actually shipping games gain your team much-needed experience in perfecting the ‘last minute’ cycle as a team?

The answer, of course, is the internal game jam.

Deceptively simple, the game jam’s deadline is arguably more powerful than a sprint deadline or build milestone. If you don’t think you’ll have something to present at the end of the jam, the prospect of a public shaming by your peers can be a purer motivation to finish strong than a soul-draining months-long crunch cycle.

Tim Schafer and the Amnesia Fortnight box.

Because the stakes are low, expectations are adjusted, and the freedom to be creative is immense. Because the atmosphere is informal, a sense of fun pervades the process, even though you and your peers are technically still on the job. This combo of real pressure, creative freedom and a relaxed atmosphere can do wonders for team dynamics, and for gaining the immensely valuable experience of taking a project to completion.

There’s a reason why Double Fine, Epic, Mojang, Bethesda and Media Molecule have all ran internal game jams within the past year. The fruits of these exercises have gone on to become released games, or planted seeds for new directions for old properties. In the case of Double Fine, their inaugural Amnesia Fortnight jam is even credited with saving the company.

Humanity at its core is a curious, creative entity. Instead of trying to stem the tide of chaos that creative work unleashes, maybe the answer lies in embracing uncertainty – on our own terms – to better prepare for the wonderful things we’ve yet to create.

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News - Diagnosing Liberty City's crime problems using SimCity

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March 19, 2013   |   By Mike Rose
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After previously modelling my home town in the new SimCity, as a means of diagnosing the town’s traffic problems, I was hugely keen to get back into the game on launch day and try some extra experiments.
A quick recap: the new SimCity is a city-building game that has a semi-casual exterior very much in the same vein as The Sims, yet underneath houses city-planning tools that have the potential to do a remarkable job of modelling real-life situations, as my Northenden experiment hinted at.

For my next analysis, I wanted to think a little outside the box. Modelling real-life scenarios is great, but what about modelling the infrastructure of virtual cities?

The virtual city in question is Liberty City, the real star of Grand Theft Auto IV. It’s offers a real sense of bustling city-life as you bomb around, aimlessly running pedestrians over and gunning down cops.

The real question, of course, is how the police force of Liberty City allows all of this crime to happen. It’s not just Niko Bellic, Johnny Klebitz and Luis Fernando Lopez who are allowed to run rampant with hardly any backlash from the law — the city is overrun by various mobs, and it makes you wonder whether Liberty City could do with an extra police station or five.
GTA IV’s Liberty City

With this in mind, I decided to find out the answer by modelling Liberty City in SimCity, and then monitoring the crime in the city to see if there’s enough police on the beat. And while I’m at it, I might as well see how the rest of Liberty City’s utilities fare as well.
Due to the maximum size of cities in SimCity, I obviously wasn’t able to model the entirety of Liberty City. Instead, I chose to model the bottom half of Algonquin, the central island in the city. This includes Castle Garden City, Star Junction, Lower Easton, Chinatown and City Hall. What you see below is my attempt to model Algonquin as closely as possible, with roads, police stations, fire stations et al all placed in exactly the formation found in GTA IV.
My version of Liberty City - click to expand

It turns out that — surprise surprise! — Liberty City does not have a large enough police presence. OK, so criminals aren’t able to go on rampages like in GTA, but crime was a constant issue throughout my play with Liberty City, and my crime advisor kept telling me to build more police stations.
It appears to boil down to two issues: First, the police stations present in Liberty City aren’t spread wide enough, and the southern docks in particular have next-to-no police presence at all. Crimes are being committed and reported, but there’s not enough police officers available to stop them happening. Essentially, the positioning of the police stations in Liberty City is patchy at best.

And then there’s the issue that there’s currently not enough space to even hold criminals in Liberty City. People are being thrown into jail cells in the four separate police stations until they’re all full up, and subsequent perpetrators are simply given a telling off and allowed to walk.

Interestingly, solving the problem didn’t actually take all that much effort. By simply placing a fifth police station towards the south of Algonquin, this allowed officers from the other stations in that area to spread themselves a little better, causing crime figures to be greatly reduced, and my advisor to stop nagging me.

But this isn’t really the full picture. The population of GTA IV’s Liberty City is 8 million. Split that into 10 parts, and count the area that I am modelling as a single part, and we’re looking at a total of 800,000 people.

However, the population of my Liberty City peaked at 200,000 before grinding to a near-halt — it would have taken me many, many hours to coax it much further, it was never going to reach 800,000. This means that the population of GTA’s Liberty City is far denser than mine — we’re talking a ridiculous amount denser — and of course, where they’re people packed into tiny apartments and poorer living conditions, there’s always going to be more crime.

This would explain why the crime levels in GTA IV are so high. The number of people living in Liberty City is simply too much for its infrastructure to bear, and you’d no doubt be hard-pushed to keep on lid on all the wrong-doings going on.

Also of note, and perhaps the real cause of crime in Liberty City, is the fact that there simply aren’t enough jobs to go around. I modelled all commercial and industrial areas in Liberty City based on where shops are found in the real version, and as it turns out, there aren’t enough places to work.

Joblessness is a key issue, and one of the main reasons why my population growth slowed so suddenly. Jumping in to get thoughts from my residents shows that many are thinking of leaving (and a number have already left) the city as they aren’t making any money, and therefore can’t pay rent. I can’t even begin to imagine how bad it would be if I actually had 800,000 people packed in there.

And where there’s people with no jobs and no money, there’s always going to be a higher number of people who decide that the only way forward is to challenge the law. Liberty City’s police force never stood a chance, truth be told.

So that explains Liberty City’s crime issues then, but what else is wrong in Rockstar’s city of dreams? Well, quite a lot actually, as it turns out.

Pollution is actually a bigger issue than crime. I was forced to big a large sewage treatment plant with the maximum number of treatment tanks before the city’s sewage problems were only just solved. No doubt if the number of people living in Liberty City was multiplied by four, as per GTA IV’s vision, then there would be a rather interesting smell in the air.

The air pollution is really awful too, and was the number one issue that the people of Liberty City would complain about constantly during my playtime, going as far as to protest outside city hall. The parks provided in Liberty City did little to quell the angry voices, nor hold back the coughing and spluttering.

As a result, health care in Liberty City was a big issue with my residents. Although deaths was kept to a minimum (I’m guess they don’t have a mad man driving along the sidewalks and shooting places up for the hell of it a la the “real life” Liberty City, then), there was always a heavy stream of sick people pouring into Algonquin’s single hospital, and I had to upgrade it to its full capacity to even begin tackling the issues.

My advisors for both health and crime tell me that high traffic levels play a part in how quickly their respective forces are able to deal with calls too. Traffic definitely begins to build up during rush hour in Liberty City, although at more relaxed times it’s not such a huge problem in most places.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to see whether traffic buildup is actually a real issue, as SimCity drivers tend to use the shortest route to a destination by road, rather than perhaps the more desirable. This means that the wide, high density roads circling around the border of Liberty City are barely utilized, and instead you get clusters of standstill traffic randomly popping up around the center.

So Liberty City isn’t as glorious a city as it seems in Grand Theft Auto — not for its residents anyway. Crime is rampant for a reason, and pollution and poor health care are performing a doubleteam on the population. Will GTA V’s Los Santos fare any better? We’ll have to wait and see.

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Pure Folly, Miss Poly(gon)

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There’s a draft sitting on my hard drive* of a thing I wrote almost two weeks ago regarding Polygon’s review of SimCity, probably the most disastrously-launched PC game in history. How disastrous? So utterly, unremittingly disastrous that some people received refunds without even looking for one, while others asked for refunds and were denied and threatened with being locked out of their Origin accounts if they kept being so annoying about it. People were unable to play a needlessly always-online game because EA’s servers couldn’t bear the brunt of people trying to play a needlessly always-online game. Those who eventually managed to work their way through the EA Server bossfight only noticed all the problems the actual game itself had.

The Challenger had a more successful launch than SimCity.

Anyway, that draft. It contained a lot of words about how that pre-release review of an always-online game, played on bespoke servers and thus bearing no resemblance to the conditions in which readers would eventually play the game, was at best misguided, at worst a betrayal, and above all else, just factually wrong.

Polygon’s exclusive review (that they’d promised not to do) awarded a 9.5 to a game that didn’t work. (Some panicked lowering of that score in the face of a suitably testy audience some hours later did little to remedy that. Especially since everyone had already bought the game, natch). To use an analogy that’s been floating around in the interim, it’s sort of like a food critic giving a restaurant a glowing review four weeks before opening night, only to find out the restaurant is actually just a rusting caravan filled with discarded hospital sharps and Nickelback albums.

Predictably, hot angry tears erupted from the internet’s every duct, and justifiably so. The question was posed: how could Polygon betray its readers, and plant its flag so firmly in the publishers’ territory? Did they think we wouldn’t notice we were eating syringes off jewel cases?

It seems like people—for some reason—were waiting on Polygon to call the industry out on its crap. Polygon, that Microsoft-sponsored, humourless, 70s prog rock supergroup of games journalism. Expecting any kind of populist uproar from Polygon is like expecting One Direction to vilify the X Factor culture that spawned them – they’re entirely within the system, with no interest in existing outside of it. Probably the only thing you needed to know in order to be sure that Polygon was never going to change the world of games journalism was that they could afford to make a multi-part documentary trumpeting all the ways they were going to change the world of games journalism.

And that was the story as my draft told it. Since then, some interesting interesting happened. Hero of the hour, sidebar-linked since this blog’s messy birth, John Walker of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, led something of a one-man crusade, revealing that a) the always-online game worked offline, to some extent; b) the game didn’t really do anything important with the connection even when it is online, besides functioning as some suspiciously-convenient DRM; and c) some of the writers at Polygon are big silly idiots.

As the fine folks at NeoGaf tirelessly collated, Polygon’s reviews editor Arthur Gies scoffed at Walker’s inside source, insisting that the always-online battle was one the publishers had already won, and pooh-poohing the suggestion that the game could be workable offline. Until—no! But yes!—Polygon newsy guy Brian Crecente threw up an interview with the modder who’d tweaked the game to work offline, neglecting to mention that his mag had loudly refused to believe anything about such a tweak despite John’s publishing a very similar interview with that selfsame modder days previously. Crecente even went so far as to deny seeing that interview, which was fine until it was awkwardly pointed out that he’d actually tweeted about seeing it shortly after it was lobbed online. In essence he went back in time to shoot himself in the foot, somehow managing to be impressively unimpressive.

And, y’know, in spite of all of that backstory, the problem isn’t that Polygon are even more rubbish than we thought. Because we knew they were going to be awful from the very second their website’s trailer hit Youtube. Because their website had a trailer on Youtube. COME ON GUYS WE SAW THIS COMING**

The problem is that people are looking to the “big” websites to fight their corner, when really, any truly worthwhile games journalism will be punk rock. It will be anarchic. It will be outside, and it will look weird and misshapen and different. It’ll be fantastic.

It will come from the likes of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, who set themselves outside the mainstream by default, simply by being a PC-only site back when PC gaming was still considered as dead as Jimmy Saville and just as popular. Discouragingly few websites are as independent or opinionated, as their near-solitary determination to bore into the SimCity debacle freshly proves. (And really, it’s worth arching a wry eyebrow at Polygon being granted early access to hip new PC-exclusive SimCity review code instead of the world’s foremost PC gaming website, I reckon.)

It will come from people young and interesting and absurd enough to not care about being mature and responsible and robotic: wonderful people like Cara Ellison, Brendan Caldwell, Steve Hogarty, Quintin Smith when he remembers to write about games sometimes, or Grant Howitt. It’s perhaps not coincidental that three of these have been regular contributors to RPS.

It will come from people who remember that games writing used to be chiefly about finding funny ways to say whether games were good or bad for not much money, where avoiding any kind of PR-pleasing frippery was a sure sign you were doing it right, and any paragraph that didn’t elicit a giggle was a sure sign you were a miserable failure and probably ill. It will share a metaphorical gin den with Amiga Power, Digitiser, and the confusingly-American Old Man Murray, and it will have concept reviews.

It will come from people who remember that their loyalty is to their readers, not their PR reps, and who value honesty and integrity over exclusives and page views.

It is again probably not coincidental that the most important piece of games journalism in an unlucky dog’s lifetime came from the Lost Humanity series by Robert Florence, who pointedly notes within that piece that he is “not a games journalist”, rather “a writer who regularly writes about games”, and who unflinchingly walked away from that high-profile gig once his outsider’s voice was stifled.

Notice that, besides being responsible for the wondrous Consolevania and VideoGaiden, he’s also a regular RPS contributor.

So: Polygon and their ilk will continue with their nonsense, proudly accepting always-on DRM, or microtransactions, or day-one DLC, or whatever new and harmful gimmick the increasingly obsolete publishers wheel out, as the inevitable industry norm. They will continue to award 9.5 to broken or unworthy games, and then point out the fact that people buy those games as an infallible sign that they were right, as if completely oblivious to the part their exclusive reviews play in that. Because they don’t have the will or the courage or the drunken recklessness to opt out of the loop.

I’ll continue to prefer a different kind of nonsense: one where games journalism is a good-natured laugh; a laugh at the industry’s expense, rather than the reader’s. To paraphrase Amiga Power’s mission statement: always funny, never joking.

*This is perhaps notable for being the first time I’ve ever written a draft of anything, including college essays and award-winning plays and such. I toil FOR YOU, my pretty no readers.

**We doubly saw this coming when they started running features about the palaces in which they doth game, as if anybody cared what chair you sat in whilst playing 50 Cent: Blood in the Sand, but that’s already been beautifully skewered by Alec Meer.

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This Isn’t the Article I Wanted to Write About Tomb Raider

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This Isn’t the Article I Wanted to Write About Tomb Raider

Written by Ashelia | March 21st, 2013 |

This isn’t the article I wanted to write about Tomb Raider. In fact, I had an article that was a lot more poetic; there were lines about agency, the environment becoming a character, and how Tomb Raider truly was a next gen title that was my game of the year.

Instead this is an article about Lara Croft being choked to death.

There’s a scene fairly early on in the game where our young, intrepid heroine is being stalked through the forest. Her innocence is shattered; her friends are being brutally shot around her, their screams echoing in the distance as they’re murdered. She crouches against some old ruins at one point, finding a brief reprieve from the horrors she’s witnessing unfold. Suddenly a man surprises her, grabbing her and lifting her up by her throat. His hand clamps over her throat and he begins to choke the life out of her. She starts struggling. She has seconds to live.

If you don’t hit the right series of buttons, she’s choked to death in front of you. Her body goes limp in his hands, her face goes blank, and he laughs the cruelest of laughs.

If you don’t hit the right series of keys, she dies a horrible death. He lives. They never escape the island and Lara never becomes the heroine she was destined to be.

I hit the keys wrong at first. I was so taken aback by the scene that I just stared at it, my mouth slightly open. A video game had never made me feel this way in my entire life—and I wasn’t sure what I thought about that.

You see, it shocked me so much because twelve years ago, my father choked me in that manner. He lifted me up by my neck and he wrapped his hands around my throat and he choked me until I fought back. I don’t tell a lot of people this because it’s one of those things I never talk about. It was one of the last interactions we ever had before the police got involved, before the detectives talked to me during sixth period, and before I never saw him again in my life.

So as I watched Lara die, I tried to stomach it. It was, after all, just a video game. It wasn’t real life, no matter how similar that exact moment seemed to me. I reloaded the game and tried again. This time I got further: she successfully fought back for a second, before another quick time event cropped up. I failed it.

And she died again.

For the next ten minutes, I kept repeating the scene—failing at different arcs, making the same mistakes, fighting against Lara’s attacker and letting her die each time through my own emotions and inability as a gamer.

Eventually I beat it. I mashed the keys at the exact right time and watched as it was the man who died rather than Lara Croft. But I felt nothing; I didn’t feel like I beat the scene, I didn’t feel a sense of accomplishment. Horrified, I realized I was crying silently as I finished. The tears were hitting my keyboard.

The game had terrorized me. The game had violated me.

Against my will, at a complete surprise, it made me relive something that I had spent most of my teenage years forcing out of my head; the smell of the shed, the way the air was so cold, and the way my throat burned for hours after the attack as I sat in the street afraid to move—afraid for my life.

Earlier today someone asked on Twitter if they were the only person triggered by Tomb Raider. The answer is no, but it’s more than that.

Tomb Raider triggered me, sure. For the next hour, I sullenly picked at the game. I moved forward reluctantly. I killed enemies with the pistol slowly, with great calculation and terror. I never saw the bigger picture, I just killed and Lara killed with me. I watched as Lara learned how to kill—how to survive at all costs. I watched as she learned the evils of the world. I watched as they broke her, repeatedly, in the most atrocious of ways.

But more than that, I watched her survive. By the end of the game, she’s screaming at her attackers. She’s daring them to fight her. She’s telling them they will never break her and that she will make it off the island. Her attacks change as well; as she gains more experience, she goes from distant kills to intensely personal and violent ones. She buries her climbing axe into their heads, she throws her whole weight into their bodies, and she fights with every fiber of her being.

I used to play Tomb Raider 2at my dad’s house. He bought it for me. I remember jumping through the canals of Venice. I remember killing enemies, dodging bullets—finding artifacts.

But I don’t remember why I did it in particular. It was just a game and I went through the motions to play a game. It was meaningless. Lara Croft could have been anybody and in a sense she was. She was pretty, she was skilled, but she wasn’t real.

She never made me feel anything.

This version of Lara Croft, though, bruised and broken—surviving against all odds, living out the ultimate revenge fantasy—she made me feel a lot. She made me cry. She was the version I wish I had known growing up.

Tomb Raider triggered me, sure. But it didn’t do it needlessly. It didn’t do it tactlessly. It didn’t do it for a cheap rise. It instead captured a real emotion and a real experience millions of women will encounter in their life. Some of them won’t be as lucky as I was. Some of them won’t be as lucky as Lara Croft was, either. Some of them won’t survive. Some of them will be silenced forever.

Some of them will die and some of their attackers will live.

Tomb Raider triggered me and that’s ok. Maybe that’s even good. I think it is because it means it’s the first realistic, non-gratifying portrayal of violence against women that I’ve seen in video games. It’s the first one I’ve seen that wasn’t exploitive. It didn’t hold any punches, but it didn’t need to. It was raw. It was accurate. And it affected me in a way years of therapy never did. It healed me in a way that no one’s physical comfort, words, and condolences could ever do. It made me realize that, much like Lara Croft, I survived as well—and that I had my own path to walk. That my experiences were real and tangible and yes, they defined me, but that I’d have it no other way. I am a survivor and I am alive. And so is Lara Croft.

She’s no longer the woman who stared into the mirror on the ship before her journey. Pristine and then unscarred, she didn’t know what people were capable of; she just wanted to be an archaeologist. Standing on the rescue ship at the end, bruised and scarred, she looks at her journal and the sea surrounding her.

In that moment, she’s reborn.

Like I said, this isn’t the article I wanted to write about Tomb Raider. I wanted to tell you about how beautiful it was, how good the combat felt, and how it’s my game of the year.

But maybe it was the article I needed to write. For Lara. For me. For the other women.

For people who think games can’t be art, can’t be experiences, can’t be ugly and beautiful and raw. For people who think games can’t have good gameplay and good storylines.

For people who think games can’t have a female protagonist.

Yeah, I think it was.

Ashelia

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Saturday Soapbox: Christopher Nolan has ruined video games • Opinions • Eurogamer.net

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The Dark Knight director’s cast a long shadow over this generation - but has it been for better or for worse?

By Martin Robinson Published Saturday, 16 March 2013

Go to enough video game presentations and you’ll soon start to hear the same hollow mantras dizzily ringing round again and again. Promises of more authenticity clang dully alongside promises of more immersion, more scale and more scope - and there’s been a new addition to the thin lexicon of video game marketing in recent years. Games are getting more Nolan, and it’s a trend I’m not entirely comfortable with.

I can’t put my finger on exactly when the phenomenon started, but I’ve lost count of the number of times Christopher Nolan’s been name-checked as a developer outlines their vision for a new game. At first, it was hard to bat an eyelid: games have always, for better and for worse, leant on Hollywood’s most cherished, whether it’s Call of Duty’s keen attendance of the Bruckheimer and Bay school of shallow action or the pervasive influence of Scott and Cameron.

So there’s nothing particularly wrong, or unprecedented, about Nolan being a certain strand of gaming’s new cinematic love, and its new favoured crutch. If anything, he’s the right man for games to turn to, his films literate in games to the point where it’s hard not to see the influence of malleable digital worlds in cinematic labyrinths so dependent on systems and rules.

Inception’s got the makings of a great video game - and indeed there was one in the works, though nothing’s been heard about it since Nolan first mentioned it in 2010.

As someone much smarter than me pointed out in The New Yorker last year, it’s so easy - and enriching - to read Nolan’s films as games themselves. Memento with its swirling amnesiac trick played like a million JRPGs twisting back on themselves, The Prestige is like Spy vs. Spy with added theatrics and funnier hats, while The Dark Knight’s so full of devious little puzzles and conundrums it feels like what could have been had Hershel Layton been born in Gotham and witnessed his parent’s cold-blooded murder as a child. And Inception doesn’t even require a leap of the imagination to see it as a cinematic game, its world a modder’s paradise with a rule-set grounded in deliciously loose video game logic.

I’m not sure how much of that was going through the minds of the developers of Ridge Racer Unbounded when they blithely spoke of their love of Nolan’s cinema at preview events a couple of years back, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t much at all. And as much as I loved ploughing through the concrete of Shatter Bay I couldn’t help but feel that Bugbear was being hamstrung by a misappropriation somewhere along the line.

There have been more fitting carriers of Nolan’s flame, but they’re all just as wrong-headed in what they choose to plunder. I think, at some point a few years ago, a bunch of executives must have sat in some multiplex and paid dim attention to The Dark Knight, and then paid greater attention to the box office returns that followed - and we’ve been stuck with a wayward interpretation of a potentially great cinematic source ever since.

Video games seem to have Nolan’s films pinned down as more gritty and more human, and while they’re certainly the former, I’m not so sure about the latter part of the equation - it’s a cold cinema that Nolan peddles, and there’s never much room between the male posturing and twisting rules for much in the way of humanity. Regardless, there’s much more to him than being the master of the gritty reboot.

You can see the appeal in that reading, though, especially in the case of long-standing franchises such as DmC and Tomb Raider that were in desperate need of a refresh. And it’s easy to have sympathy for Crystal Dynamics, faced with the challenge of making one of gaming’s elder icons relevant. It’s a challenge, as studio head Darrel Gallagher’s pointed out, that’s been faced repeatedly by the likes of Batman and Bond, both of which are no stranger to the reboot process - some of which have worked,some of which haven’t.

Ridge Racer Unbounded, while a great game, is a perfect example of the needlessly earnest reboot.

So it makes sense for Lara’s new adventure to look towards the archetypal reboot success, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, but I think it’s pilfered the wrong parts. Nolan’s films, while inherently playful in structure and theme, are relentlessly serious, and it’s a seriousness that’s hardly their most endearing trait. It’s also the one element perhaps most ill suited for many games.

Gritty’s an adjective I’d rather keep well away from video game icons, characters we rely on for their playfulness and sense of fun. Who wants to play a Mario where we return to the plumber’s roots, joining him as he’s elbow deep in feces in some Brooklyn bedsit before he’s forced to tearily stomp on his first goomba after it touches him somewhere it shouldn’t? Actually, I think I kind of do, but that’s beside the point.

And the Tomb Raider reboot’s not a bad game at all, really, its tearing down and subsequent reconstruction of Lara being one of its finer elements. I don’t think the writing, padded out with a flat and meaningless supporting cast and bizarrely pivoting on a damsel in distress, is any better than that of Underworld, though, and I certainly don’t think it’s any better for having taken the gritty route. Tomb Raider’s endlessly and needlessly bleak, and after 12 hours I was just desperate for Lara to crack a smile. Come the climax you can’t help but ask: why so serious?

It seems to have mistaken the croaky dryness of Nolan’s films for something more profound, and ignored some of the more fruitful avenues his worlds suggest. It’s like deciding that what you really want to take from a Michael Bay film is its human drama, sparkling dialogue and Shia La-bloody-Beouf. The triumph of Nolan’s cinema is its intellectualisation of the fanboy film, and how its found broader audiences through plain smarts. It’s a lesson that many video games would still do well to learn from - and if they’re so keen to lean on his cinema, it’d be great if they could start paying a little more attention.

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