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Small is beautiful

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Vor kurzem geisterte der Twitter-Hashtag #UnpopularGamingOpinions durch das, was dank 140-Zeichen-Diskussionen heutzutage so als Restblogosphäre durchgeht. Unter diesem Banner sammelten sich Meinungen, die nach Ansicht ihrer Verfasser unbequeme Wahrheiten in der Sphäre unseres Mediums darstellen. Die Einträge reichten von schier Blasphemischem wie “The ending to Mass Effect 3 wasn’t that bad” bis hin zu Esoterischem wie “Blowing on Nintendo games is like the unicorn memory thing in Blade Runner and we’re all androids” (was zum …).

Auch mir purzelte spontan ein Sager aus den Gehirnzellen, und je länger ich in der Zwischenzeit fernab jeder digitalen Unterhaltung  darüber nachgedacht habe, desto mehr stehe ich dazu: “As long as narrative games don’t get much shorter, they won’t really succeed for mature audiences.” 

Anders gesagt: Spiele sind zu lang, und bis sich das ändert, werden sie ein adoleszentes Nischenmedium bleiben.

Dass ich kein Fan der berühmten “120 Stunden Spielspaß!”-Versprechungen auf diversen Spielepackungen bin und derartige Warnungen lieber als Aufforderung lese, einen weiten Bogen um derartige Lebenszeitvernichter zu machen, ist kein Geheimnis. Der Grund ebensowenig: Als erwachsenem Menschen steht einem im Normalfall weniger an Freizeit zur Verfügung als denjenigen, die in der Regel de facto als Spielezielgruppe gesehen werden. Jugendliche als klassische Gameszielgruppe haben wenig Geld, aber in der Regel viel Zeit; es ist daher nur verständlich, dass aus jedem Taschengeld-Euro das Maximum an Freizeitspaß herausgequetscht werden soll. Wer 50 Prozent des Monatsbudgets für elektronische Unterhaltung auslegt, fühlt sich wohl zu Recht betrogen, wenn er nach drei Stunden vor dem “Game over” steht.

Es ist ein trauriges Faktum und Kuriosum, dass die meisten  Spiele nicht bis zum Ende gespielt werden.

Epische Spiele können fantastisch sein. Ich habe selber hunderte Stunden in Rollenspielen, Strategietiteln oder Sandkästen jeder Art verbracht. Dennoch passt sich die Wahl des Mediums primär den Anforderungen des täglichen Lebens an - und da finden hauptsächlich jene älteren Spieler, auf die immer wieder mit Stolz als statistische Durchschnittsgamer Mitte dreißig verwiesen wird, oft nur mehr schwierig die Zeit, auch nur durchschnittlich lange Kampagnen, wie sie viele narrative Singleplayerspiele bieten, bis zum Ende durchzuspielen. Es ist ein trauriges Faktum und Kuriosum des Mediums, dass die meisten Konsumenten die Spiele nicht bis zum Ende spielen - ein Schicksal, das im Film-, Literatur- oder Musikbusiness  nur die langweiligsten Vertreter ereilt.

In meinem eigenen Bekanntenkreis sind einige, die voll Wehmut an ihre eigene Zeit als Gamer zurückdenken. Sie haben gespielt, als Jugendliche sowieso und auch als Studenten - jetzt jedoch, so meinen sie zumindest zu glauben, fehlt ihnen dafür die Zeit. In Wahrheit fehlt etwas anderes: Ein kurzes Gamesformat, das nicht Casual ist, sondern diese ehemaligen begeisterten Spieler in ihrer erwachsenen Lebensrealität ernst nimmt und ihnen niederschwellig entgegenkommt.

Es gibt Titel, die mit diesen Formaten experimentieren - und bemerkenswerterweise zählen sie fast ausschließlich zu den großen Indie-Erfolgen des letzten Jahres. Das außergewöhnliche Journey etwa besticht auch durch seine Kürze, die einen entspannten Abend lang bezaubert; The Walking Dead erlaubt durch seine episodische Struktur ein Spielen, das perfekt zwischen Abendessen und Bettgehen stattfinden kann. Auch Dear Esther lässt sich so am Stück erleben, aber auch Slender, Year Walk, Botanicula und FTL brechen mit dem alten Missverständnis, das größer automatisch besser ist.

Klar ist die mit vergleichsweise geringen Budgets entwickelnde Indieszene auch inhaltlich und thematisch mutiger - immerhin hängen vom kommerziellen Erfolg oder Misserfolg eines Indietitels nicht hunderte Arbeitsplätze und absurde Millionenbeträge ab -, aber vielleicht sollte sich die klassische Spielebranche auch in Bezug auf das Format etwas vom flexiblen Untergrund abschauen. Es gibt einen Markt für kurze Spiele, es gibt eine Zielgruppe, die es begrüßt, wenn ein Spiel an einem Abend fertiggespielt ist - und diese Zielgruppe ist es auch gewohnt, für einen solchen Abend im Kino oder Restaurant gar nicht so wenig Geld auszugeben.

Warum nimmt sich die große Branche nicht der auf diese Weise seit Jahren unterversorgten potenziellen Spielerschaft an? Warum nicht episodische Hochglanzspiele entwickeln, die zum Preis einer Kinokarte, einer Cola und eines Kübels Popcorn zwei bis drei Stunden  Spaß bieten? Warum nicht dafür auf bereits entwickelte Engines, aber dafür verschiedene Settings, originelle Ansätze oder ein Serienformat setzen? Was spräche gegen thematische Serien analog zu Serienformaten wie Black Mirror oder Twilight Zone? Vielleicht würde es ja sogar funktionieren, kurze, originelle Spinoffs bereits bestehender Vollpreistitel als One-Shots von zwei bis drei Stunden Länge anzubieten - zwei Stunden knackiges Singleplayer-Abenteuer im CoD-Gewand, ein Abend Horrorerlebnis im Dead Space-Setting, ein Kurztrip ins Uncharted-Universum?

Wenn Spiele auch formal zur  erwachsenen Zielgruppe passen, tritt auch das Medium als Ganzes einen Schritt ins Erwachsenenleben.

Im Filmbereich ist aktuell ein Paradigmenwechsel im Gange, der entscheidend mit den Formatlängen zu tun hat: Dank Abo-TV und nicht zuletzt Downloads, legal oder illegal, läuft gerade das episch lange TV-Serienformat dem klassischen 90-Minutenformat des Spielfilms den Rang als avanciertestes Erzählmedium ab. Vielleicht wäre es umgekehrt im Medium Games an der Zeit, ebenso radikal in die andere Richtung zu gehen: Kürzere Spiele, die im Ausgleich dazu für ihr erwachseneres Publikum anspruchsvoller oder zumindest ohne Längen und damit spannender erzählen, mit einem radikal anderen Preissystem abseits des bisherigen Vollpreisparadigmas.

Wenn es dieses Angebot gibt, wird es vielleicht auch den jetzt immer wieder zu beklagenden Exodus erwachsener Spieler aus dem Medium nicht mehr geben; und möglicherweise lassen sich auch viele, die mit Bedauern wegen erwachsenem Zeitbudget irgendwann Games den Rücken gekehrt haben, so zu einer Rückkehr bewegen (ich weiß, dass es zumindest mir gelungen ist, ein paar Ex-Spieler wieder anzufixen). Damit wäre vielleicht auch der Fluch eines manchmal ewig pubertär erscheinenden Mediums zu brechen; wenn Spiele nicht nur thematisch und inhaltlich für Erwachsene gemacht werden, sondern auch formal, durch kürzere Formate, zur Lebensrealität einer erwachsenen Zielgruppe passen, tritt auch das Medium als Ganzes einen Schritt ins Erwachsenenleben.

Drum stehe ich dazu: Spiele sind zu lang. Und ja, bis sich das ändert, werden sie ein adoleszentes Nischenmedium bleiben. Das heißt nicht, dass das Langformat weg muss; doch ein besser an erwachsenes Zeitmanagement angepasstes Kurzformat könnte nicht nur neue, alte Spieler, sondern mit ihnen auch vielleicht erwachsenere Themen und experimentellere Formate ins Medium bringen. Bei den genannten Beispielen aus dem Indiebereich, aber auch im leider noch ans Vollpreismodell gekoppelten DLC-Modell zeigt sich bereits eine Hinwendung zu kürzeren Formaten; mit Sicherheit lassen sich aber auch bei Games wie im Medium Film durch Experimente mit anderen Größen noch spannende Entwicklungen beobachten. 

Small is beautiful! Und dass weniger oft mehr ist, spricht sich auch bei Games noch durch.

Verfasst von Rainer Sigl am 14. Mai 2013 - 21:10

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All Games Equal, All Games Loathed

haywiremag.com

Recently the ever-brilliant Andrew Vanden Bossche wrote about his frustrations keeping up with, finding meaning in, and writing about triple A games, something that has led him to argue it might be wiser and altogether more worthwhile to focus entirely on smaller, personal games, the wonderful and rich output of what, for lack of a better term, we call the indie scene (for both his argument and mine, this simply refers to anything happening opposite the triple A space). Since I’m perpetually occupied with these kind of metajournalistic concerns anyway, his post presents a welcome opportunity to present my own views on the subject, even if Todd Harper has already covered much of what I’d like to say.

First of all, I definitely understand Andrew’s frustrations. There was a time when I eagerly sunk my claws into any new title I could get my hands on and promises of ever more content seemed delightful because of just how many slow summer days I had to fill, but the older I get, the less time I can afford such distractions, while simultaneously being bombarded with an ever-increasing variety of entertainment options. The words “60+ hours of gameplay” now sound like a threat, even the eight to ten hours most triple A games ask for are a sizeable commitment when you’re busy trying to keep up with college, friends and writing obligations.

It’s one of the reasons I keep going back to League of Legends even though my Steam library is full of titles I have yet to even boot once: I know that going for one match of the fast ARAM or Dominion game types will only take up about 20 minutes of my time. Some matches will be shorter than that, some will take longer or only get going after a few false starts, but by and large I know what I’m getting myself into, and I know that in just 20 minutes I can wrap up a game and return to business. Of course, I will then inevitably go for a second match, a third match and so on. Over the last two years I must have spent at least 250 hours playing League of Legends, more than enough time to get through a sizeable portion of my backlog, yet whenever I make plans to try to power through some of the unfinished games on my list,  or to read some of the novels that are piling up next to my bed, I’ll soon find myself taking 20 minute breaks with League of Legends again. Or FTL. Or Super Hexagon.

With such convenient, short distractions available, eight hours is a lot of time, not to mention 60 dollars a lot of money, to commit to any game, especially since you can never be sure if it will really do it for you, push your buttons, speak to you on some level. No matter how critically acclaimed the game might be, or even how much you’ve been enjoying it so far, you can never be quite sure if you’re not about to hit some stupid plot twist or difficulty spike. Maybe you’re playing Fahrenheit and think it’s just the darndest thing, and then the story goes entirely bananas. Maybe you’re playing Dark Souls and suddenly realize that you’re playing Dark Souls. Hell, maybe the game’s perfectly fine and you simply realize that you’re not in the mood for Shooty McGunpants right now, because you’d rather be playing some complex RPG malarkey, or vice versa. Now you’re stuck with this game you don’t want, but because you already invested precious time and money into it, you’re probably going to keep playing anyway.

I beat Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon this week, a game I had picked up not so much because I cared for its intentionally trashy trailers and neon aesthetic, but because I had hoped that this piece of intentional pulp and purposefully stupid satire would provide interesting material for discussing some of the points Yohalem made relating to the supposedly satirical Far Cry 3. To my great dismay I found that Blood Dragon did not manage to be stupid in any smart way, unwilling as it was to really explore the silliness of its own structures instead of merely commenting their existence every so often. It’s competently dumb, entertaining even, but also terribly bland, more of the same hidden under the veneer of self-awareness. Its shortcomings and triumphs as a nostalgia spoof, its role in today’s market as a dumb, low-price do-over of last year’s popular game; these are still interesting things to talk about. No part of the actual game tickled me in any way though. I spent six hours and 15 bucks to play something I ultimately found so entirely bland and uninteresting I can’t even be bothered to get mad at it. I just have absolutely nothing to say about it.

Compare this to Porpentine’s How to Speak Atlantean, which needed but 10 minutes to leave me speechless in a different sense. “Huh” was my immediate, audible reaction to finishing it. It’s still the only verdict I can confidently apply to the game. Huh. It stumped me, but not because I found it cryptic or hard to approach: Part of its beauty is how efficiently the game translates the transgender experience to fantastical body horror imagery, making it tangible for those who, like myself, have nothing to really compare it to. But there always seemed to be yet another level of meaning hidden beneath the readily apparent, the promise of glorious truths that could only be revealed after the current falsehoods and misunderstandings be destroyed, smashed by the stinging words thrown at me. Emerging from this erratic thrashing, I couldn’t help but wonder if I picked up on even half its lessons. Even those seemed to provide material for endless contemplation on societal structures, constructions of gendered bodies and spaces, etc.

Certainly, this is a very personal reaction, but do you know when I last struggled to make sense of the many rich layers of a triple A title? Never. That has never, ever happened. It’s rare enough to find one yielding more than one level of thoughtful analysis (and even those generally need to keep their message and intent obvious, lest they alienate part of their audience), but endless intricacies and textual richness? That seems to be the domain of small, personal games. And as Todd Harper notes, it can be pretty hard to understand and appreciate some of these pieces, but I find that their short nature makes that easily forgivable. Not every game of the Twine revolution will push your buttons, but they won’t ask for more than 20 minutes of your time either.  And if you find one that does speak to you personally, you might be surprised by just how much it has to say.

This is what Andrew and I seem to agree on, next to such snappy stories triple A narratives often feel lengthy and diluted, spoiled by too many cooks, spoiled by the demands of branding, polishing and mass marketing. Some titles manage to create surprisingly rich and coherent stories despite such corporate meddling, and I applaud these efforts, but they seem to be rare successes in an otherwise stale market. If what you’re interested in is games doing only one thing and doing it well, chances are the indies got something far more interesting for you than the homogenized mechanics and tired tales of the triple A space.

However, I don’t think this makes large games vying for mass market appeal any less interesting than their smaller, more focused counterparts, rather they can be interesting in different ways. Basically, the bigger a game is, the less it seems to be defined by artistic intent, being instead appropriated as common cultural property. League of Legends isn’t interesting because of its convoluted lore, but because of the rituals and intricacies of its competitive community and the interactions happening in it. Call of Duty could be read the same way: It has a story, but people seem to be more interested in its multiplayer capabilities. Sandbox games like GTA let you make your own fun should the main storyline disappoint. For the most extreme example of all, consider soccer. There’s not much to be said about the game itself, it’s 22 players trying to make sure one sphere goes through the right rectangle. But the (occasionally violent) fandom surrounding that game, and the industry built around it, are practically inexhaustible sources for cultural analysis.

Big name titles might not always be the best candidates for close readings, or feature the most innovative and narratively charged mechanics, but they absolutely are something we should talk about. Not exclusively or obsessively so, we certainly shouldn’t exhaust ourselves trying to cover today’s big thing exhaustively, and thus turn its grip on the public consciousness into a self-fulfilling prophecy (We must talk about it because it’s important and it’s important because we are talking about it), but the reception and cultural significance of such prominent titles is worthy of our consideration, well trodden as the ground around such games might generally be. So are the rituals surrounding more open forms of play in sandboxes or the communities built around competitive games. So are personal Twine games and niche titles. I’m of the opinion that there’s something interesting to be said about virtually any game, you just need to work out what that thing is.

Maybe I’ll even come up with something to say about Blood Dragon one day.

One day.

Cheers,

Johannes Köller

Editor-in-Chief

haywiremag.com

Playing the Piracy Card - Game Dev Tycoon

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Article

Playing the Piracy Card – Game Dev Tycoon

Author:

Adam Gulledge

Date Posted:

13 May 2013

Guten Tag, alle.

I won’t start off this article with a question related to the subjects of this piece, because I’m certain those of you reading this know what this will entail. And I’m also certain you’ve seen at least one version of the articles reporting on Greenheart Games’ Day-1 experiment with piracy as well. This article is not one of those, I assure you; I think this situation of marketing by piracy deserves a deeper look than what the media has given it, sans a couple of sites that have raised questions about it.

The anti-piracy trap message in Game Dev Tycoon.

As amusing as it may have looked for these two brothers to pull this marketing stunt, using bugged copies of their game to “hold a mirror up to the pirates”, there are several fallacies related to its execution and the response to it that made me question the legitimacy of this scenario.

To start, this game was, up until mid April this year, only available on the Windows 8 App Store and on their website for the Windows OS; the 29th was the release date of the Mac and Linux versions. The reason I knew about this game before then was thanks to my family purchasing a new computer with Windows 8, and then spending an hour after setting it up flipping through the App Store.

After poking around the game’s site, I saw no plans by the devs to post the game on Gamestop Impulse, Indie City, The Humble Store, Beamdog, GamersGate, or any other service that deals with indie titles. Only a few posts talking about getting the game onto Greenlight via Steam and a button to buy the game from their website. So right from the start, this game was not being advertised well, despite all the venues out there for distribution.

Desura, the king of indie game distributors.

I left a post asking the devs if they had plans to use any other digital distribution system to get the word out about their game. Their answer? “We will look into other forms of distribution too.” This was back in late March I should point out. Since then, I have not seen it go up anywhere else. Not even on Desura, the largest indie distribution client in existence right now, and one which offers alpha funding pay options if the devs choose that.

And then on the 29th of April, the news broke about the 93.6% piracy rate of the game, the bugged copies on The Pirate Bay, and the expected storm of responses ranging all over the map about what this meant for indie developers. It means a lot of things, but a high rate of piracy of a single indie title it certainly doesn’t. Why? Because these two brothers willingly uploaded their game to The Pirate Bay, just with a few lines of code that make the game unwinnable as time passed. In essence, they gave away software that had a DRM system akin to FADE, a system that drew a number of folks into the limelight to be laughed at.

The ironic thing is you CAN research DRM in this game. And sue thieves.

So I have to ask: Why was this called ‘piracy’ by the Greenheart devs and those who have since reported on this news? It was offered willingly, albeit with faked posts saying the game wasn’t bugged, and rigged to be unwinnable if it was played long enough. I refer you also to the fact that these two brothers, despite admitting to having code in both versions that tracks the number of copies being played and distributed, have not released any new numbers or metrics to back up this 93.6% piracy number after the media frenzy last week. Ubisoft has done the same thing as well, claiming their games had a 95% piracy rate but not releasing any metrics to back up those claims after the media covered their story.

So, why was Greenheart’s case called “piracy?” It was called piracy because this experiment was not about teaching pirates a lesson, as the devs mentioned in their post-experiment press release. It was called piracy because that word sparks sympathy and drives belief that an act of theft was committed; in this case, the implied loss of over three thousands possible sales. If you see an article showing the word “piracy” and then read a number like 93.6% percent, that is going to catch your eyes first and influence you more than any details related to the experiment itself.

And then we have the article they wrote about the experiment itself. Keep in mind that they did not, and have not, offered the game to any distributors outside of the Windows 8 app store before going to The Pirate Bay, and the game has been available since December 2012. (August 2012 if you’re talking about the preview build.) In the article about the piracy experiment, Patrick Klug, after saying he wasn’t mad at the people who pirated the game, said this in relation to the folks who could have given them $8 for a working copy: “We are not wealthy and it’s unlikely that we will be any time soon, so stop pretending like we don’t need your 8 dollars!”

While this experiment may have shown a high “piracy” rate for one day, it does not give the Greenheart devs a right to act as though they are owed for their work. Or the right to strawman every person who torrented, and still is torrenting, the bugged version with a possible spare $8. If anything, they angered the ‘pirate’ community by setting them up to be laughed at if they questioned the version they got.

If they chose to use pirates as their biggest marketing vehicle instead of submitting their work to more publishing clients, then as far as I’m concerned, they had no right to mention the 93.6% piracy rate of their game; it comes with the venue they chose to use. Trying to prop up the results as newsworthy is hypocritical, and should call into question if their experiment was actually for the purpose they stated.

Now, these two brothers are far from the first indie team to use The Pirate Bay as a way to promote their game. For those of you who do not recall this news from Feburary, the two person team behind Anodyne, a Zelda-styled adventure game, also put their game up on The Pirate Bay. It was part of a three day promotion linked to the Humble Store, which was a “pay what you want” promotion.

From Anodyne’s The Promo Bay post.

According to the sound programmer Sean Hogan, because of the Pirate Bay promotion, their site traffic skyrocketed into the hundred thousands, sales of the game reached around $12,000 during the PWYW Humble sale, and the torrenters on TPB, among many others, submitted bug reports and helped promote their game via Twitter, Reddit and many other social networks. Certainly not a bad outcome from a website that is perceived so negatively, and how the Anodyne devs responded to this was far more positive than Greenheart. They thanked the many people who played their game, whether they bought it or not, and the game is now on multiple distributors, including Good Old Games.

Of course, what I’ve said so far is only half of the story regarding Game Dev Tycoon. After the news broke, I noticed a trend in the comments section of every website that was reporting the news: People were talking about the similarities between it and Game Dev Story. A title that, up until then, I didn’t know existed. I should point out however that, even before this piracy news broke, players of Game Dev Story who then played Game Dev Tycoon were drawing comparisons between the two and questioning how similar they were to each other.

Game Dev Story, as it appeared on PCs in Japan.

Released 16 years ago on the PC in Japan, Game Dev Story was ported to the iOS and Android in 2010 by Kairosoft, a company that specializes in strategy and management games and has almost two dozen titles on both portable OS’s. From what I’ve played of both titles, Game Dev Tycoon is close enough in mechanical design to be called a rip-off, though not so much to be called a clone. While it does change a few things, those changes are not enough to call it a new product. In fact, they draw attention to the rest of the game and how much this title took from its inspiration.

While the Greenheart devs have admitted GDS did heavily influence GDT, as they are quick to remind those who draw criticism to their design decision, “the game was built from scratch.”

I beg to differ in this regard. The HD looking character and environment graphics may indeed be new, and the code for the game may be new, but this is hardly enough to qualify for “from scratch.” Those words in conjunction mean you have put something together with little or no blueprint from which to follow, meaning the game should not look nor function so similarly to the title it was influenced by.

In fact, what wasn’t made from scratch are the things listed below that I’ve observed from my time playing these two games.

The title of the game, sans the use of Tycoon versus Story.

The period you start the game, which is the early 80′s before the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System. (GDS’s time-line is ten years shorter in this respect, ending around 2005-2007.)

The yearly/monthly/weekly countdown system, as well as the moving dot to count down days as the week passes.

The use of K to mark the thousands of dollars you make and units you sell.

The Theme/Genre mapping system for making a new game, just with far less variety in Genre and more in Theme.

The four different reviews of each game release. (Metacritic asks for four reviews for a game to be rated there.)

Many of the parodied systems and years of release.

The option to take contract work between games that require a set amount of points to complete.

The ability to assign staff to certain tasks throughout the three stages of development.

The three varieties of office space that allow 4, 6, and 8 total employees after the initial garage setting.

The processes of training employees, including the player character.

The process of game building; there are still three steps and then the bug-testing at the end, both of which yield research points in both games.

The E3-like event every year in June, as well as the game awards show in December later on.

The ability to create a new console with enough staff experience and capital.

I’m aware of the argument that GDT is an iteration of this kind of sim rather than a rip-off, but that argument is not valid in this case. Although Game Dev Tycoon offers more options of customization than Game Dev Story does in some ways, it is working from the same design principle, shares many of the same formulas of judging and progression, and shares a lot of aesthetic similarities with Game Dev Story.

To further illustrate my point here, and because we’re talking about tycoon games, I’d like to take a minute to bring up some older management games for comparison: Chris Sawyer’s Rollercoaster Tycoon, Bullfrog’s Theme Park, and VelosiGames GameBiz series.

Bullfrog’s Theme Park

Let’s start with RCT and Theme Park first. You can easily glance at both of these games and notice immediate similarities. They both have you operating and managing an amusement park, they both let you design your park layout, certain rides, and set the prices of condiments/games, and they both involve the hiring of workers to maintain your park.

Chris Sawyer’s Rollercoaster Tycoon

However, what sets Rollercoaster Tycoon apart from Theme Park was RCT had a more robust rollercoaster designer system, and removed many of the systems related to finance in the game. The latter was a large part of the capitalist and world economies Bullfrog had set up to give players the ability to make money outside of running the park alone; your Theme Park would only generate revenue for you from entrance ticket sales, games of chance/skill, and food/drink vendors.

As such, in RCT you didn’t have to worry about the inflation rates and land taxes of the nations you built in, you had no options to buy and sell the stock of your company or others, you had no competitors to encourage competitive pricing or to buy-out, your workers would not go on strike if their pay wasn’t properly negotiated, and your food stall stocks would never run dry and make you buy more.

If RCT had been Theme Park 2, it would have been a clear case of bad streamlining; it would be too different from the original game and too many steps backwards in terms of what was offered to you. Because this was Chris Sawyer’s take on the park management idea however, it was working from a new standard; what he took away from Bullfrog’s game design in terms of playing the bank was replaced by a tighter focus on managing a single park and its immediate finances and concerns. This left you more time to watch your park as a functioning system and more time to create interesting rollercoasters.

This is not what Game Dev Tycoon does. It does not remove or replace the systems from GDS to form its own identity. It simply offers more options to play around with on top of ones that Game Dev Story created and adds a new coat of paint to the mix. As such, how you go about running a game studio, building these games, and managing your staff and finances does not vary much from what Game Dev Story offered.

GameBiz 2 – Main Management Screen

Now I’d like to mention the GameBiz series from VelosiGames. If you have not heard of this series before, I don’t blame you. I didn’t either until a poster over on Ars Technica mentioned the name, although it is well worth a look. However, what I found when I looked on the website and played the first game was a development sim with so many numbers and figures to watch that, for a moment, you could suspend disbelief and believe you were in charge of a development firm for games that was working in the real world. This was helped by the lists of actual consoles, major game releases, and companies in the game. The option to play in real-time or by turns was another nice touch.

In the case of GameBiz, the first two games came out in 2004 and 2008, long before Kairosoft made Game Dev Story available for English speakers. If you compare these three games side-by-side, it becomes clear that while all they all have the same idea, and unfold in much the same way, only one of them is copying so wholly from another.

If Tycoon was built from scratch, why do two of these look so similar?

This is why a segment of gamers are suspicious of the design of Greenheart’s title; I do not blame them for thinking this way either. As far as I’m concerned, their criticisms are valid given the lack of real changes to the Game Dev Story design.

To those of you who have criticisms along these lines, I will leave you with this: Do not listen to the people who suggest playing GDT before expressing your opinions, or those who simply state that Game Dev Tycoon is the better or more involved game. It sounds obvious, I understand, but keep in mind that both of those statements are meant to distract from criticisms being raised or raise false doubt about dissent.

Instead, ask those people to back up their opinions and elaborate on them. If they truly believe that Game Dev Tycoon is not a rip-off of Game Dev Story then, like any college English or Business professor will tell you, they should be able to explain why and how.

I however will remain one of those people who, having collected my own thoughts on this subject, feel this game was a rip-off. One which I don’t intend to support.

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The PA Report - Pulling up the ladder: how indie developers are losing the ability to help each other

penny-arcade.com

Dabe Alan

Pulling up the ladder: how indie developers are losing the ability to help each other

Ben’s note: This is post from Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail is an interesting look at what happens when indie devs have a relationship with the platform holders that sell their games, and how having something to lose makes it harder to help out other developers.

Back in the early days of our medium, games were made by enthusiasts and small groups of people with the technical expertise required to program complex machinery. Over time, the medium started expanding its reach and these small groups of enthusiasts organized into small companies. Gaming went through its arcade and shareware eras – a time in which games started to gain a more mainstream appeal. It wasn’t long before some of the companies started growing beyond just creating games – some of them started buying other studios or projects. The amount of money to be made in games skyrocketed and games were suddenly available in retail stores. The age of ‘AAA’ games had begun.

With that, the ability of small groups of programming enthusiasts to distribute games fell away. There was no efficient way to create a game, print it to a physical medium, create the manual and the games packaging – let alone handle the logistics of distribution to retail stores. What remained were studios that made ‘AAA’ games and somewhat smaller studios that created ‘budget’ titles. These budget titles were made by medium-sized studios and although many amazing games were made by studios like these, the majority of their output were clones of the larger popular games, but with lower quality and a lower price.

The internet brought digital distribution and changed everything. In this new world, logistics were no longer a problem and the new big players were online stores such as Steam, platform-specific console stores, and app stores. Suddenly, small enthusiasts had a viable model to reach an audience again. As that group slowly grew out of their garages, the indie scene as we know it started to form. These ‘indies’ were small, agile, flexible and rapidly stormed every new opportunity, releasing games in a matter of months instead of years. They made games from their heart with little compromise. Their leanness allowed them to adapt to the rapidly changing landscape without dealing with layer upon layer of bureaucracy.

Squeezing out the middle

In time, the middle-sized studios started to disappear. They could not compete any longer as they did not have the flexibility of the indies nor the quality and budgets of the AAA studios. Indies started growing in size and relevancy, with titles such as Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Castle Crashers leading this new time in gaming. In the last few years, dozens upon dozens of individuals and small teams achieved success – whether it is Minecraft’s Markus Persson or games such as Faster Than Light, Fez or Antichamber. Indie gaming had become a thing that your average gamer has heard of.

Digital distribution was perfect for these indies – and thus indies and digital distribution started working together more closely. The App Store offered an equalized environment, Steam offered a tightly curated ecosystem and Android was completely open. Everyone could make a game and release it on any of these platforms, given that they could prove they could deliver.

As things progressed, the amount of indie games vying for these positions started to increase. Apple’s elusive Editors Pick Feature became an important part of a successful launch on iPhone and iPad, while online store Steam implemented a democratic system named Greenlight for its consumers to pick what game they’d want to see on the platform. Sony started proactively reaching out to interesting developers, quickly amassing a lot of credibility in the indie scene and a massive network of indies.

There has never been a better time to be an indie. Practically every indie you know of has in some way benefited from these systems and support structures. There are conventions, events, specialized press, initiatives like Indie Fund and Indie MEGABOOTH, forum and, mailing lists. The scene has become a tight-knit network of aspiring developers, dreamers, artists, zinesters, thought leaders and influencers willing to help out wherever they can, whether it is in terms of game design, theory, business, ethics or diversity.

A few months ago I played an early build of Lucas Pope’s upcoming immigration officer simulation game Papers, Please. Recognizing the prototype as a clever, charismatic game filled with little touches, interesting moral questions and an honest-to-god narrative, I was absolutely certain that if people got to play the game, they’d like it. Thus, as me and many indies along with me often do when we run across something wonderful, I started writing an e-mail to Pope, introducing myself and asking him if there was anything I could help out with in my field of expertise or through my network.

Pulling up the ladder

But suddenly, I realized that there wasn’t much I could do for Pope - and it took me a while to realize why: successful indie studios have unintentionally been pulling up the ladder behind them leaving little way for others to follow them. Now that digital distribution platforms cater to indies better than ever, its effect has been tremendously positive on the indies we know of – but what about the indies we don’t know yet?

The App Store is so saturated with great releases that a new game by an unknown developer won’t get the attention it needs, while Steam’s Greenlight is a mess due to it simply being a popularity contest that barely any new developer can challenge. Sony is doing amazing work with their network, but they have thousands of high-quality, dependable and known indie titles available to them before even having to look beyond those.

The increased cooperation between platform holders and indie developers allows platforms to tap into a network of specialized curators – the indie developers themselves. The unseen problem is that such curation is performed by people that have a stake in the platform they curate for. If an indie developer sends two or three games of lesser quality or lesser interest to a platform, chances are that it will impact their ability to recommend new games as well as their standing relationship with the platform. Suddenly the successful indie developers have something to lose, and business relationships to consider. It has become harder to stick one’s neck out for something new and original.

In other words, risky titles by new or relatively unknown developers have very few viable ways to get on platforms anymore, unless someone with reach is willing to take the risk to champion the game online or within the structures of a platform. The assigned curators tend to be other developers, who now have stakes in curating and thus can’t properly fulfill their role.

This is something I’ve personally struggled with. Even though I’d love to suggest risky games to Apple, Sony or Steam, I am reluctant to. This is a task that was thrust upon me, a task I happily fulfill, but also a problematic one. Indies should not co-curate other indies on digital distribution platforms they work with.

This sounds like a typical discoverability problem, but the stakes here are higher. The indie scene relies on a support network of big and small studios, of successes and failures, of personal and commercial, of experimental and to-the-point. The inherent diversity in the perspectives of people in the scene is what makes the scene capable of existing at all. We risk splitting the scene in two – a ‘new indie’ of small developers without a proper fighting chance and a new, more adaptable version of a ‘middle ground’ in the successful indie studios.

People respond with the idea that every medium goes through this phase – yet I claim we are in a unique position where we are already fighting this development. We have a global, worldwide reach through the internet, videogames are still less than a century old and we have knowledge of how other mediums evolved. Websites like Terry Cavanagh’s freeindiegam.es or Dom2D’s weekly TIGSource roundup on Venus Patrol allow interested parties to find some of the games that might otherwise be unnoticed.

Personally, I have been working with Indie MEGABOOTH overlord Kelly Wallick to bring a curated area to the MEGABOOTH to show games of developers that wouldn’t be able to or wouldn’t consider showcasing at the Penny Arcade Expo.

This problem of outsourcing curation to indies is a larger, structural problem that cannot simply be ‘solved’. But there must be ways to improve upon the result in which the scene splits in two separate fields, in which case we would also lose half of the perspectives available. If anything, we should try and enrich the diversity in our scene.

So this is our challenge – or our responsibility: to force opportunities across the board for both large and small indies and sustain and promote the diversity of indie games in a meaningful way. I don’t know what the solution is, but if we could pull the ladder up, we can also let it back down.

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penny-arcade.com

Mighty Vision: Re pulling up the ladder

mightyvision.blogspot.co.uk

response to by Rami Ismail Rami makes a good point that it’s not necessarily healthy for successful “indie” developers to be curating newcomers, because there’s a problem of self-interest, they’re putting their own hard-earned reputations on the line, making them less likely to recommend risky new things. I’m not sure how large a problem this is - though I’m not personally in such a position, I’ll happily recommend anything I like any time regardless of weirdness or inaccessibility. ..which reveals another problem with this: it’s based on what the people doing the recommending like, so it tends to reinforce the same set of tastes. I’ve made things in a bunch of different genres and styles so I may be better positioned to see this than most. It’s very clear to me that whenever I make a new game, those who are keenest to pick up on it are those who make similar games themselves. When I make a roguelike, it’s lifted up by the roguelike crowd. When I make a fairly conventional puzzle game with a cute twist, people who make puzzle-games-with-twists talk about it. When I make a slow ambient exploration thing without much conventional “gameplay”, it’s those who make that kind of thing who promote it. But when I make something that doesn’t already have a strong presence in the indie games scene, it fizzles. And I get the reverse effect sometimes too - people say things like “why are you wasting your time making [style of thing I don’t like] when you’re good at making [style of thing I do]?”. So here’s the deeper problem with putting the responsibility of lifting up newcomers on those who are already successful in the field: even if they’re completely willing to take risks on things that might not pay off, they’re only interested in things that interest them. The gaps where things are really getting missed you don’t even see, because they’re not things you personally care about. There’s been more discussion recently of the “just make a great game and the rest will magically work out” fallacy. The thing is - this might work when what you want to make lines up with a wave that’s there to catch, but not otherwise. The “indie games scene” acts as a filter; it’s very hard for a game to reach the outside world without passing through it, the larger videogame community and the world as a whole trust small cliques to curate what might be of interest to them from the masses of stuff that gets made. But the games that might appeal to people out there but don’t conform to the tastes of the successful “indie game” clique just get lost. There’s no room for anything truly new if for anything to succeed it has to be liked by someone who likes the old things best.

A challenge for everyone : try to perceive the value in something that’s not the kind of thing you usually like, and that also hasn’t been authorised as “good” by a friend or public figure.

mightyvision.blogspot.co.uk

Fallout : Even Further Down the Curation Rabbithole

blog.adamatomic.com

Fallout

Adam Atomic’s blog

Archive / RSS

2013-05-16

Even Further Down the Curation Rabbithole

Rami Ismail and Michael Brough wrote some super interesting and insightful things about indies and curation and (i’m gonna say it even though they didn’t) virality this morning. I really like where they’re going, and I wanted to point out what I think is at least the next (if not final) step in this logical chain.

To (badly?) summarize their arguments, Rami points out that there is a kind of inherent conflict of interest when indie game makers help to curate for services that they themselves depend on for commercial viability. I have definitely felt this myself, and am hesitate to push projects toward Apple that don’t mean some weird fuzzy “standard” that I made up.

Michael continued this thread, pointing out that even if there wasn’t a financial conflict of interest, the basic human fact that people tend to only promote things that they’re personally interested in can have a chilling effect on the propagation of new or otherwise innovative works. We all have our pet interests, and we tend to get excited about, and thus accidentally promote, specifically those things. And of course these things tend to be based on pre-existing notions and so on.

I know this is a thing that happens a lot, but I also think that there are people out there who are desperate for something new, no matter what it is, and will champion it for the sake of pushing boundaries. Those people are, understandably, in the minority, and I think Michael is right that we would all be better served in the long term if we were more willing to push hard on games that we don’t personally enjoy but that we can still somehow understand our worthwhile and positive contributions.

The thing I wanted to add to this, that I think is very important to mention, is that this idea exposes the cyclical nature of curators and fans and platforms and this whole system. This gets kind of hard to write about so I wanted to give an example:

Earlier this year Emily Short and her compatriots at Linden Labs released a super amazing interactive fiction platform called VERSU for iPad. It’s a flawed app, and the pioneering sample pieces that come with it do not fully explore the potential of the platform (which is of course completely natural and expected). VERSU was one of the only major “game” launches this year that I actually cared about, and I talked about it on Twitter pretty regularly for a while.

The thing is, nobody who follows me on Twitter really seemed to care. I remember one or two people latching on to it and getting interested (Bennett Foddy among them I think?). Otherwise, dead air. For a platform that I think is essential to the maturation and growth of the medium! That’s crazy.

On Twitter, more people retweeted and favorited a joke about wolverines that I wrote last night than all of my VERSU tweets combined.

From this, I draw two more insights, in addition to Rami’s financial conflict-of-interest concerns, and Michael’s worries about our own sort of preference-driven quasi-censorship. I think there is a design problem - things designed for mass appeal spread more easily, and mass appeal is partly based on familiarity. Social media platforms are a part of this issue; if you can’t ascertain the value of a thing in 10 seconds your window for virality closes fast. And piling the pressure of instant mass appeal onto a crazy new thing is an enormous burden for people already boldly pioneering unexplored territory.

But there is also a fan problem. Even when I do find something special and unique and new and weird that resonates with me, and I can see why it matters both in the short and long term, and I climb up on my soapbox and shout about it to anyone nearby… if nobody is willing to listen, then to me it feels like it was a waste of time, why bother?

To end on a hopeful note, I wanted to present the idea that it might be ok if weird new things aren’t universally championed and pushed to the front of the line. It might be ok for some games to really be for other game makers, or only for literature buffs, and not the general public. It’s ok for some things to spread slowly, to wait for the moment when suddenly we are ready for them to amaze us.

blog.adamatomic.com

FEMICOM, the feminine computer museum

femicom.org

the feminine computer museum

Articles & Downloads » NES ROM Hacks and Discourses on Gender Anxieties

Donkey Kong hack by Mike Mika (2013)

Peach and Daisy: The Ultimate Quest (1999)
This game doesn’t just feature modified graphics; it also contains all-new levels.

Peach and Daisy: The Ultimate Quest (1999)
In the first level of the game, Peach gets a special power-up that transforms her into a mermaid.

Mega Girl, ca. 2000
Mega Girl, sporting a tiny, blue ponytail, must defend herself against baddies who shoot hearts at her.

Hello Kitty Land (2003)

This article was originally posted at Wordpress. It is reproduced here with permission.

Earlier this month, Mike Mika made headlines for hacking the classic 8-bit game Donkey Kong so that the roles of Mario, the hero, and Pauline, the damsel-in-distress, were swapped. Mika implemented the game hack to allow his 3-year-old daughter to play the game as Pauline. Much of the media coverage compared this touching story to a similar one that circulated last year about another daddy-daughter team: “Super Dad” Mike Hoye, who edited The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker to cast Link as a female rather than as a male, and his three-year-old daughter Maya.

I am very happy to see classic game hacking alive and well, and I am very happy to see these interesting projects getting widespread coverage. I think these dads’ projects are great. However, I find the some of the news media’s coverage and the corresponding online discourse problematic.

A new trend? NPR stated that Mika’s hack of Donkey Kong is not “the first time someone has done something like this, though the first time with such a classic game.” If NPR means that this is the first time someone has hacked a classic game, then this, of course, is entirely false. NES ROM hacking—including the methods employed by Mika—are easily more than a decade old. And hundreds upon hundreds, if not thousands, of NES game hacks have been made in that time by both hobbyists and game piraters. But assuming that NPR meant that this was the first time that the gender of characters had been switched, or the first time that the rescuer had been replaced with the rescued, that too is false. How about the gender-hack of Paperboy to Papergirl, released ca. 2000? Or the incredibly unique damsel-turned-hero ROM Peach and Daisy: The Ultimate Quest, a Super Mario Bros. 3 hack released in 1999?

NBC, like NPR, seems to suggest that creating gender-bending ROM hacks is a new and exciting trend. “This may be just the beginning,” they report, “A few dedicated hackers is all it would take and soon we could have ‘Mega-Woman,’ ‘Blaster Mistress,’ or maybe even ‘Super Mario Sisters.’” Yet many of these games, too, have already been addressed by hackers. There was the ca. 2000 NES hack Mega Girl, for example. And prolific gender-hacker “Mr. Dude” made a staggering number of ROM hacks between 2005 and 2006, including Mega Girl 2, Mega Girl 3, Mega Girl 4, Mega Girl 5, Mega Girl 6, Super Momo Bros. 2, and Super Peach.

I myself have done similar hacks. In 2002-2003, I created a hack of the NES game Super Mario Bros. called Hello Kitty Land. The ROM features revised graphics, palettes, game physics, and levels to situate the Mushroom Kingdom within the Sanrio universe. I also presented a gender-bending NES hack of Mega Man 2 called Mega Mam 2 as part of a live hacking demo in a conference in April 2012.

My intent in providing some of this historical background is not simply to call out some small error in an article as attempt to tear down an entire argument, author, or subject. Again, I think what these hackers did is great, both in terms of the ideas and execution. But when news outlets like NPR and NBC paint gender-hacking as a brand-new endeavor, it reframes much of the important context: the when, the who, and the why. I think, in fact, there is a specific reason that these stories made the news, and it has to do with anxieties centered on gender, inclusion, and harassment.

Reframing gender-hacking Because gender-hacking has been presented as a new phenomenon, the stories of Mika and Hoye seem to suggest that this activity is primarily done by dads for their daughters. “Daddy’s little girlism” aside, I believe these stories have been made into popular news in order to create a narrative about men’s role in reshaping hegemonic video-game culture. 2012 was a big year for “women and gaming and harassment” stories: those of Anita Sarkeesian, Jennifer Hepler, and Miranda Pakozdi come to mind. I would suggest that the recent popularization of these harassment stories has created a sort of anxiety around men’s culpability in these scenarios, and that these pieces on “daddy hackers” aim to relieve this anxiety. They are heartwarming stories that present men as problem solvers rather than problem creators. These men use the technical knowledge that only they seem to possess in order to, as PC Mag reports, “empower female gamers.”

One aspect of this kind of anxiety-soothing frame is a distancing from feminists and feminism, terms that many have been forced to grapple with or reject with respect to gaming. This quote from PC Mag’s article about Mika’s Donkey Kong hack illustrates this:

“By the time I started to catch up with all my social feeds, something insane had happened. This little mod exploded,” he said, citing the feminist/anti-feminist comments made in response to his hack. “In my wildest dreams, I just expected a bunch of fellow coders to chat about the merits of the mod. I never expected it to ignite a gender role debate.”

Mika promised it wasn’t his intention to kick up women’s lib dust; he just wanted to make his daughter happy. “I didn’t set out to push a feminist agenda, or try to make a statement. I just wanted to keep that little grin lit up on my daughter’s face every time we sit down to play games together,” he wrote on Wired.

PC Mag emphasizes that Mika didn’t want to “ignite a gender role debate,” “kick up women’s lib dust” or “push a feminist agenda,” suggesting that women’s rights issues are radical or extremist. (Note the choice of the verbs “ignite,” “kick,” and “push,” casting feminism as aggressive or violent.) The notion that gender-hacking could “kick up women’s lib dust” is a postfeminist suggestion that such dust has already settled and that to kick it up is to create a dirty mess of a debate that is already “over.” A commenter on Slashdot posted an interesting comment in response to Mika’s Donkey Kong hack: “This dad did what feminists can’t be arsed to do, he worked long hours past midnight to change a game so it was more of her daughter’s liking, instead of bitching about it for years without doing anything.” This statement, too, pointedly situates the hacker dad in opposition to the “bitching” feminists, also serving to separate Mika’s act from feminism.

The discourse centering on Mike Mika’s Donkey Kong hack aims to present men as positive forces for gender equality in gaming while distancing them from feminism. These strategies help to relieve anxieties that might implicate men in the shaming and rejection of girls from gaming cultures. Additionally, the suggestion that this kind of ROM hacking is new and limited to loving fathers obscures a long and rich history of ROM hacking that includes women hacking games for their own ends.

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femicom.org

Why we need to kill gameplay to make better games

theastronauts.com

We love video games for being video games, right? At least that’s what I thought all my life. But after a reboot of my designer brain happened, I was stunned with the discovery that it might not necessarily be true.

I mean, I still like video games when they are video games. It’s just that I love them when they are not.

Let’s do a little experiment.

Here is five well known action-adventure games. BIOSHOCK. MODERN WARFARE 2. GRAND THEFT AUTO 3+. RED DEAD REDEMPTION. UNCHARTED 3.

Think about your favorite, most memorable moments from the single player part of each, then read below if I have managed to guess any of these moments.

…

Ready? Let’s see..

BIOSHOCK: First ten minutes. Entering Rapture.

MODERN WARFARE 2: No Russian. You take part in an airport massacre of hundreds of civilians.

GRAND THEFT AUTO 3+: Driving around, listening to the radio.

RED DEAD REDEMPTION: Riding into Mexico, accompanied by a moody song.

UNCHARTED 3: The desert section. Dehydrated, tired Drake walks in circles in the desert’s heat and cold for two days.

What do all these moments have in common?

They are game-free. They are gameplay-less.

That’s right. You heard me.

If we understand gameplay as something that a challenge is a crucial part of, then none of these moments features any gameplay. You just walk, or swim, or ride a horse, but that’s it. You cannot die. You don’t make choices that have any long term consequences. No skill is involved.

There is no gameplay.

In other words, certain things worth remembering from certain video games are not what these video games are all about.

That’s fucked up.

But also great.

Because it means we still don’t understand video games. And if love them so much already, imagine what will happen when one day we will actually understand them.

There’s more.

If you read discussions like Most Jaw-dropping Scenery or Sequence in a Game you can see that the things that people remember from their favorite games are:

+ Beautiful places
+ One off events like a helicopter boss fight or escaping a house on fire
+ Gameplay-less experiences like exploration or short interactive dramas

And, on the other hand, in threads like that no one ever talks about the regular gameplay. No one mentions combat zones, jumping sequences, or enemy variety.

In other words, game experiences we love to share with others are usually not about the regular second to second gameplay. Our brains don’t consider it worth remembering, and the only thing we usually have to say for it – especially months or years after we finish the game – is that “the gameplay was cool”.

Is there an explanation?

I think so, and I also think you’ve heard that one before. It’s just weird that not many people do anything with it.

I think than when we’re focused on overcoming a challenge – we try to kill an attacker or win a race – we go into savage beast’s survival mode and shut ourselves down for any “higher class” emotions. Our vision gets extremely narrow, and we’re no longer multi-tasking. Beating the challenge becomes the only thing that matters.

The best example is QTEs. You either engage in them emotionally or win them, but you cannot do both at the same time.

Does it mean that if you want a deeply emotional game, you should drop regular gameplay, with all its core combat loops, gameplay mechanics and other voodoo?

Yes.

Any proof for that hypothesis?

The Walking Dead, for example.

Yeah, sure, it features “real gameplay” in the form of “survival moments” (fire a gun at a zombie) or light puzzle solving (pick up a key lying next to a chest to open the chest), but we all know these are just a fig leaf. Remove them and you would still get goose bumps just the same.

But if we remove the challenge and trial and error gameplay from video games, can we even still call them video games?

Who cares? Do you play games to pass the time or to create memories?

—

P.S. There will be a follow up post. Meanwhile, please read this on NeoGAF.

P.P.S. And here’s the follow up post!

theastronauts.com

Born Unequal: The Story of Incredipede

polygon.com

By Tracey Lien @traceylien
on May 16, 2013 at 12:02p

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How a world traveling game design duo plans to change the world with a video game.

Colin Northway and his wife Sarah dump their heavy backpacks on the floor of a modest-looking house in the Philippines. This will be their home for the next few months. There’s a kitchen and a bathroom, windows to let in the dense tropical air, a few more mosquitoes than they’re used to clinging to the ceiling, a choppy internet connection and space for them to set up their laptops and make video games. The house also comes with what the Northways describe as one of the weirdest and most intolerable situations they’ve encountered: a housekeeper.

The couple is by no means rich. They’re independent game developers who spent years working in web development jobs to save money so they could travel. And now they’re traveling. They don’t stay in hotels. They don’t rent cars. They’ve never been waited on by anyone. They’re thrifty and self-sufficient, choosing to stay in countries for months at a time to keep living costs low. If they can only afford instant ramen, they’ll only eat instant ramen.

The housekeeper situation makes them uncomfortable. She does everything for them: she cooks, she cleans, she folds their laundry, she does their grocery shopping.

“It’s profoundly weird that your life as one human being can support another human being who does nothing but the things you don’t want to do,” Colin Northway says. “We’re all born equal. How does it happen that one person ends up in the situation where, if you take me, why do I get to travel around the world making games, and this person has to cook and clean all day?”

The Northways are stumped. Two computer science degrees between them and they can’t figure out what to do. If they fire the housekeeper, they might feel less confronted by the disparity of wealth and power in the world, but she’ll also be worse off and out of a job. If they keep her, she’ll be able to continue supporting herself and her family, and the Northways, to their own discomfort, will have someone doing their laundry.

It bothers them. They understand the problem goes beyond being waited on by someone less privileged than they are. It’s about wealth disparities. It’s about quality of life. It’s about the systems society has embraced that reinforce inequality.

They’re not sure what to do, so they do the one thing they do know how to do: they make a game about it.

12 countries

12 countries

Three years ago, Colin and Sarah Northway set out to travel the world to experience what they couldn’t find in their home of Canada. Heading to warm places in the winter and cities in the summer seemed like a good idea, and after the initial investment of paying for plane tickets, the cost of living in the countries they went to was a fraction of what it cost to live in North America. They’d done the math: the amount they’d spent on flights in a year was less than what their friends in the San Francisco Bay Area paid to travel on the local train service to get to and from work.

Their plan was to travel and make their own games. It didn’t really matter where their travels took them, and there was no grand plan for making any particular kind of games. Before leaving Canada, Colin had released a Flash-based physics game called Fantastic Contraption. In the game, players build machines to move an object through a goal. Northway was a mechanics-oriented developer. He figured he’d make more games like that while in Thailand or the Philippines or Central America. That seemed about as good a plan as any. He’d originally been content playing around with game mechanics and making them feel satisfying. But with every country he visited, it felt like the world was demanding a little more from him.

“Incredipede is definitely a response to our time in Honduras,” Northway says. “So in Honduras, we were living in the jungle at the end of this terrible dirt road. We had to take kayaks to go to the little store to get groceries, or buy fish off the fishermen who came by.”

Colin and Sarah stayed in a small house slung over the water. Fish swam underneath the dock, hummingbirds flew outside their windows, ants invaded their kitchen, and when they went snorkeling in the reefs, they could find baby boa constrictors climbing up mangroves.

“We had to take kayaks to go to the little store to get groceries, or buy fish off the fishermen who came by.”

“There was life absolutely everywhere,” Colin Northway says. “So I felt like I had to make Incredipede, which is all about life.”

Incredipede’s own life began as a mechanics-oriented puzzle game. Colin coded a character that consisted of three sticks in the shape of a Z. Two red lines between them in the corners acted as muscles. Using the keyboard, he could make them jump up and down. On its own, Northway says it could have been a delightful platformer about getting from A to B. Honduras demanded that it be something more.

“Quozzle [Incredipede’s main character] stands for all life,” he says of the round, green creature with an eye at her center. “She’s a way to explore the different forms that life takes. In the way she can change shape, she can swim like an otter, she can fly like a bird when there are updrafts and wind, she can swing through the trees like a monkey, she can run like a dog or walk like a human.

“Incredipede is a way of exploring all of the richness and vibrancy of the life in Honduras.”

The Northways’ time in Honduras and later in Central America would help determine the look and feel of the game. Clicking on Quozzle, players can drag limbs out of her round body. They can make her walk, they can make her roll and, rather than be a mechanical object, she is an organic creature born from the rich, natural environments the Northways visited. The game could have stopped there: a vibrant little puzzle game that reflected the beauty of nature. But as the Northways continued with their travels, it would be the less beautiful things they encountered that continued to shape Incredipede.

Quozzle’s story

Quozzle’s story

Quozzle starts the game living in a subsistence farming village with other Incredipedes. Coming from a hunter-gatherer tribe, she collects fruit like cherries, watermelons and apples. Early in the game, invaders arrive at her village and truck her parents away. Terrified, she runs off into the woods to seek safety. The story from here is the result of the Northways’ experience in Southeast Asia. It’s their attempt to highlight the severity of the disparity of wealth in the world.

Quozzle knows that to get to safety, she has to travel from one side of the island to another to gain access to another world. At the end of each world is a gatekeeper. Every gatekeeper she encounters demands something of her. The first gatekeeper demands all the fruit she has collected and at least 12 cherries. The player — in their role as Quozzle — undergoes a tremendous amount of work to gather all the fruit. Quozzle shape-shifts to run and climb and crawl and fly, just to collect every piece of fruit she can to gain access to a better world. In exchange, the gatekeeper gives her one religious headdress, which lets her enter the second world.

“So Quozzle undergoes all of this work and effort to collect all these things, and then she has to trade it to this guy who has power over her, based not on what he’s accomplished in life or what she’s accomplished in life, but where they’re born,” Colin Northway says. “She was born into a tribe where cherries were very valuable, and he was born into a society where cherries were almost worthless.

Each world she enters gets harder and harder, each demanding more and more of her. As she moves up from one world to another, her quality of life is meant to improve.

“She trades a lot of cherries for a headdress, and after making the trade, she is allowed to move onto the next role of society.”

In the second world, she discovers that the headdresses like the one she worked hard to obtain are everywhere. The fruit she worked so hard to gather is worthless in this world. The gatekeeper guarding the gate to the third world demands 12 headdresses. She does the same thing she did with the cherries: she chases the artifacts of this age, gets the headdresses and trades them to the gatekeeper for one coin.

Each world she enters gets harder and harder, each demanding more and more of her. As she moves up from one world to another, her quality of life is meant to improve. Eventually she arrives at an impersonal vending machine that demands everything she has collected for entrance into what has grown to be a massive city.

“The idea is: To gain entrance to a city and to be successful in a place like San Francisco, you need maybe 12 coins; each coin is worth 12 headdresses, each headdress is worth 12 cherries,” he says. “And so that city that Quozzle now enters, the disparity between that city and the village she left is supposed to be clear. When she finally gets to the city, there are heaps of cherries and apples being sold in the market by people who are trying to scrape by. So the idea is you really live through that wealth disparity.”

Seeing the people

Seeing the people

Colin Northway is clearly frustrated about what he’s seen on his travels, and it’s a frustration shared by some of the world’s biggest NGOs. In an Oxfam briefing published earlier this year, the charity organization details the severity of wealth inequality around the world and how it “hurts us all.” Among its findings were that in the U.S. alone, the share of income going to the country’s top 1 percent has doubled in the last 20 years. In. the U.K., wealth inequality is “returning to levels not seen since the time of Charles Dickens.” At a global level, this wealth inequality is amplified, with Chinese inequality levels seeing 60 percent of the nation’s income going to the top 10 percent. This is pushing more and more people into extreme poverty on a level that most developed countries have never seen. Oxfam reports that extreme wealth and inequality undermine societies. They lead to far less social mobility. If you are born poor in a very unequal society, you are much more likely to end your life in poverty. This, Northway says, is what he tried to capture in Quozzle.

Wealth disparity exists in the Western world, but Colin Northway believes most people are so far removed from the severity of the disparities in developing countries that it’s an abstract concept for them. We take for granted the functional middle class of modern, Western societies, so much so that we romanticize the wealth disparities of the past.

“It’s a romantic idea until you think about what life was like. They had to sleep sitting up because they would die if they stretched out.”

“When traveling in Scotland, we visited a village that was a reproduction of a village in Scotland in the 1700s,” Northway says. “You look at it and it’s like hopelessly romantic thatched huts made of heather with rock foundations. They would have had one cow that they brought into the house in the winter to keep the cow warm and to keep the house warm, and it’s a romantic idea until you think about what life was like.

“They had to sleep sitting up because the peat they burned to keep warm smoked the house up so much that liquid would pool in their lungs and they would die if they stretched out.”

He says what we look at today as romantic villages would have been very difficult places to live. Infant mortality rates were high, there was little access to medicine and the disparity of wealth between the aristocracy and the everyday people was enormous.

“It’s weird that we romanticize the lords and ladies of the past when if we actually went back in time and realistically thought about who we would be, we’re the 99 percent. We are sleeping sitting up so we don’t die in our sleep.”

This is the wealth disparity Northway wants to communicate through Incredipede. The difference between the second and fourth worlds in the game is meant to be stark and disturbing, just as it is in the real world.

Sarah Northway says Incredipede is all from their travels. It’s from everything they’ve seen: the environments of Honduras, the housekeeper in the Philippines, the thatched huts of Scotland and the poor people living in shantytowns and by railway tracks in Thailand.

“I definitely feel pretty uncomfortable seeing that kind of stuff, but I feel like to pretend that it’s not there is kind of wrong, too,” she says. “A lot of people will go on holiday to the same kind of places that we go to, but they’ll end up in a hotel or a resort. It’s like an enclave. They’re not really seeing the truth of the whole country.

“They’re seeing the nature, but not the people.”

The world awaits

The world awaits

Incredipede was made over the course of three years as the Northways traveled through 12 countries. Every place they visited gave them something and, in return, every country they visited asked a little more of them and their games.

“Games are fundamentally a series of mechanics, but those mechanics can say something about the real world,” Colin Northway says. “They can say something about the real world in a way that books and movies can’t. In a game, you’re putting yourself into it in a way you’re not putting yourself into movies and books.

“I guess I wish I was less subtle with the story now because I don’t think anyone got it.”

“So in Incredipede, the idea is you’re inside this world of inequality; you’re not following a character around that’s inside it, you are actually inside it. The labor you do is being valued by the system in a way that the labor real people do is valued by the systems in the real world.”

Colin Northway isn’t sure if every player of Incredipede will get the message. He’s a mechanics man, and the game has mostly been getting attention for its art, sound and game design. It was even nominated for an Independent Games Festival award for Excellence in Visual Arts. But no one has noticed the theme that played such a crucial role in defining the game.

“I guess I wish I was less subtle with the story now because I don’t think anyone got it,” he says. “I’ve certainly never read any comment talking about that theme.”

The message was always clear to Northway because he experienced it himself. In hindsight, he says he should have pushed it harder and made it more obvious. “Maybe in the mobile version I’ll work harder at being less subtle with the story,” he says.

The Northways are currently back in Montreal, but they don’t plan on staying long. They’re planning a trip to New York, after which they’ll head south. Maybe they’ll go to Panama. There are plans to visit Brazil. They’d really like to live in Argentina, too. Wherever it is they go, they’re ready to meet demands.

Image credits: Northway Games
Editing: Russ Pitts, Matt Leone
Design / Layout: Warren Schultheis

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Jason Rubin: Metro: Last Light is the "triumph of an underdog"

gamesindustry.biz

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Jason Rubin: Metro: Last Light is the “triumph of an underdog”

By GamesIndustry International

Wed 15 May 2013 2:57pm GMT / 10:57am EDT / 7:57am PDT
GamesDevelopment

Former THQ exec details terrible working conditions for developer 4A Games and “irrational requirements” of THQ

Jason Rubin is best known as the co-founder of leading game developer Naughty Dog. More recently, however, he had the thankless task of trying to overhaul struggling publisher THQ. Rubin joined THQ in May 2012 and while he made a valiant effort to improve the company, the bad momentum was too much and he didn’t have enough time to steer the ship away from the iceberg.

As president of THQ, Rubin oversaw numerous studios, including the talented folks at 4A Games, known for the Metro franchise. THQ was to be the publisher for Metro: Last Light until its unfortunate demise. Instead, Koch Media picked up the rights for almost $6 million earlier this year. In this fascinating article from Rubin, the former THQ executive details the awful working conditions that the studio in the Ukraine had to face during the development of Last Light, and he argues that gamers and the industry at large should recognize what 4A was able to accomplish despite major hurdles and adversity.

Here’s Rubin’s story, submitted exclusively to GamesIndustry International

It is unfortunate that Prof [Creative Director Andrew Prokhorov], Dean Sharpe, and the rest of the team at 4A won’t receive appropriate credit for their achievement in releasing Metro: Last Light.

A combination of a complex and secretive industry, a press that lags the movie and music press in calling attention to the stories behind the games, a dysfunctional and ever-changing sequence of producers causing confusion, the inevitable anonymity that comes from being an Eastern European developer, and a new, last minute publisher that doesn’t see the upside in doing your team’s publicity, will conspire to keep an incredible story hidden.

I am going to try and change that.

To be clear, nothing in this missive should suggest that either 4A or I would like to see any change in the way the game itself has been received or reviewed by press or fans. I know 4A well enough to know that they demand to contest on a level playing field. This isn’t golf, and they don’t need or want a handicap. Their pride and skill demand that Last Light go head to head with competition on even terms, and I am sure they are happy with the response. 

But now that reviews are mainly behind us, I think it’s worth looking deeper.

“4A’s staff sat on folding wedding chairs, literally elbow to elbow at card tables in what looks more like a packed grade school cafeteria than a development studio”

Let’s be honest: 4A was never playing on a level field. The budget of Last Light is less than some of its competitors spend on cut scenes, a mere 10 percent of the budget of its biggest competitors. Yet it is lauded for its story and atmosphere.  It is built on a completely original and proprietary second-generation engine that competes with sequels that have stopped numbering themselves, with more engineers on their tech than 4A has on the entire project. Yet its tech chops are never in question. 

And all of this is compounded by the conditions this Ukrainian team works under in Kiev. The entire 4A studio would fit easily in the (underutilized) gym at EA Los Angeles’ offices. Yet Last Light’s Metacritic score blows away Medal of Honor Warfighter.  As undeniably fantastic as competitor BioShock Infinite may be, the team was given whatever resources they needed to make the title. At the same time, 4A’s staff sat on folding wedding chairs, literally elbow to elbow at card tables in what looks more like a packed grade school cafeteria than a development studio.

When 4A needed another dev kit, or high-end PC, or whatever, someone from 4A had to fly to the States and sneak it back to the Ukraine in a backpack lest it be “seized” at the border by thieving customs officials. After visiting the team I wanted to buy them Aeron office chairs, considered a fundamental human right in the west. There were no outlets in the Ukraine, and our only option was to pack a truck in Poland and try to find an “expediter” to help bribe its way down to Kiev. We gave up not because this tripled the cost, but because we realized that the wider Aeron chairs would require spreading out people and computers, which would lead to extra desks, and that ultimately would have required bigger offices. Yes, really. 

I truly enjoyed Far Cry 3, which deserved its great reviews.  But how many times did Ubisoft Montreal lose power for hours or days during development? Power outages are the norm for 4A. All developers have deadlines, but I know of few that had to bring in construction generators to be able to work the weekend before final submission because an extra day meant missing shelf dates by weeks. Montreal is cold, but when it gets cold in Kiev it’s different.  That’s because the government provides all of the heating through a central coal burning facility that pipes hot water to homes and offices. Unfortunately, it breaks down reliably a few times a year for a week at a time.  Then 4A works in their parkas and struggles to keep their fingers warm in temperatures well below freezing. That is unless it snows and they get stuck home for a few days at a time because snow clearing isn’t up to Western standards.

The only thing for which 4A is getting more credit than I think they deserve is the creativity behind the ever frightening, dark, post apocalyptic environment of the game. I’ve been in Kiev to visit the team, so I know they just stepped outside for reference.  

That last paragraph is a humorous exaggeration, of course, but there’s truth behind the lie. One evening when Dean Sharpe arrived at his apartment after a long day at the office a dangerous looking Georgian man and his three-car armed entourage greeted him.  Dean was told that, lease be damned, he had a day to clear out and find a new apartment. 

So there were challenges - why should we care?

“If 4A had been given a more competitive budget, in a saner environment, hadn’t wasted a year-plus chasing the irrational requirement of THQ’s original producers…what could 4A have created?”

Though any gamer can enjoy Last Light without the backstory, I think the backstory makes it that much sweeter.  It is interesting enough that Pele was perhaps the greatest football player of all time.  But it is even more interesting when we find out that he learned to play bare footed because he couldn’t afford to buy shoes.  The Jeremy Lin story was interesting, but so much more so when you find out that he received no scholarship offers out of high school, was undrafted, and played sparingly before he hit headlines. 

If you care about the art of making games then you have to care about more than the final product.  The struggle and the journey becomes part of the story. Like sport, you cheer when the underdog comes from behind, and triumphs in the face of incredible odds. 

That doesn’t always mean getting the gold. Sometimes when the underdog comes in second, third, or fourth, it is ultimately more impressive than the story of the inevitable number one. 4A is to developers what the Jamaican Bobsledding team is to Olympic sport. The Jamaicans may not have won the gold in 1994, but they beat the Americans who had far more going for them… like winter coats and bobsledding tracks to train on. 

According to professional third-party game rating estimation groups, this year titles will find themselves with a 3-5 point Metacritic deduction versus the same game two years ago due to the maturity and fatigue in the console cycle. But even without adding those points back in achieving an 80+ score this year for Last Light, accounting for the budget and adversity that the team faced, and considering the size and talent of the teams they are competing with, is a stunning achievement.  

It is a true testament to the raw skill and potential of the team. Ultimately, it is a desire for the recognition of 4A’s talent that drove me to write this. You may know that I have a history of talking about developer recognition. These guys need recognition.

If 4A had been given a more competitive budget, in a saner environment, hadn’t wasted a year-plus chasing the irrational requirement of THQ’s original producers to fit multiplayer and co-op into the same deadline and budget(!), hadn’t had to deal with the transition to a new publisher in the crucial few months before final, what could 4A have created?

I can only imagine, and I am looking forward to playing it.

You can follow Jason Rubin on Twitter @Jason_Rubin

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A mini-rant on Twitter

ramiismail.com

A mini-rant on Twitter

8 mei 2013

I went on a bit of a rant on Twitter today and people asked if I could put all of this together for my blog. It all started with an e-mail I received on my Vlambeer-mail in which someone inquired about some tips to start an indie ‘startup’ – from there it quickly turned into the following.

Here are a bunch of tweets in reply to replies I received that I think might be relevant.

Byron Atkinson-Jones asked about our goals / aspirations with Vlambeer:

Sony’s friendly giant Brian Silva jumped in and added:

Anyway, I just noticed that fellow Dutchman Bram Ruiter (who also worked on this super-nice A MAZE ‘What is good gamedesign?‘-video) compiled all of this into a lovely image – but I’ll post this regardless.

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