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Von kleinen Geeks zu großen Programmiererinnen – Coden für Mädchen

Von Lucie am 20. Juni 2013 

Foto, CC BY 2.0 , by itupictures

Bei Diskussionen zu verschiedenen Themen, von Fachkräftemangel bis zur Gender Pay Gap wird er oft schnell erreicht: der Punkt, an dem Mädchen und Frauen vorgeworfen wird, dass sie einfach nicht die richtigen Berufe, Studiengänge und Ausbildungen gewählt und besser Ingenieurswissenschaften, Programmieren oder Technik erlernt hätten. Wenn sie sich eben einfach nicht dafür interessieren würden – selbst Schuld! Sonst würde das auch klappen mit dem gleichen Gehalt (was so nicht unbedingt stimmt, im Ingenieursbereich – um nur einen zu nennen – gibt es bspw. noch deutliche Unterschiede) und der Wirtschaftsstandort Deutschlands ginge auch nicht zum Teufel.

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Das Bild im Kopf

Dass Menschen für ihre Berufswahl mitverantwortlich sind, das will ich ja auch gar nicht leugnen. Aber ich denke mir in diesen Momenten immer: seid ihr, die ihr den jungen Frauen diesen Vorwurf des Desinteresses macht, eigentlich ein bisschen blind? Von klein auf werden sie umgeben von Schminkköpfen, Anziehpuppen (mittlerweile auch virtuell als Videospiel), Schmuck-Bastel-Sets, Kinder-Make-Up, mit Bildern voller Klischees von Topmodels, Popsternchen oder Karrierefrauen im figurbetonten Kostüm und High Heels, von Film- und Serienfiguren, die zwar mittlerweile schon alles mögliche sind – Journalistin, Galeristin, Modedesignerin, Tierärztin – aber doch noch recht selten auch mal Ingenieurin oder Programmiererin. Und wenn, dann eher als Ausnahme denn als Normalfall (zum Bild, das Kinder von Wissenschaftler_innen haben, gab es ein interessantes Experiment aus den USA). Das Entdecken, das Tüfteln, das Untersuchen: das steckt meistens in Spielzeugen und Gadgets, die für Jungs vermarktet werden. Wer auf die Bilder des Mainstream achtet, die Kinder und Jugendliche heute immer noch größtenteils umgeben, die Stereotype, mit denen sie aufwachsen, dann ist es immer noch so (und sogar: wieder verstärkt), dass Mädchen größtenteils vermittelt wird, dass die Welt von Technik, Computer, Internet und Tüftelei über das nächste Facebook-Event hinaus nicht die ihre ist.

Und trotzdem wird ihnen dann, nach 18 Jahren voller Busenwunder und Lillifee, Barbie Dreamhouse und “In Mathe bin ich Deko”, Topmodel und Hollywood, vorgeworfen: “Wie, und jetzt hast du das Gefühl, Informatik passt nicht zu dir? Naja, selbst dran blöd!” Natürlich ist das deutlich überspitzt und verkürzt ausgedrückt, aber unterm Strich ist die Tatsache, dass im Bereich Berufsbilder immer noch sehr hartnäckige Geschlechterstereotype am Werk sind, die sich etwa die Spielzeugindustrie auch wirtschaftlich zu nutze macht, nicht zu leugnen.

Eine Frage des Zugangs

Eine neue Erkenntnis ist das natürlich nicht und verstärkt machen sich in den letzten Jahren Menschen daran, dieses Problem anzugehen. Frauen (und auch Männer), die den biologistischen Klischees entgegentreten und versuchen, jungen Mädchen einen Zugang zur Welt von Technik und Programmieren zu ermöglichen, etwa durch spezielle Aktionswochen an Schulen und Förderprogramme. Die Frage, inwieweit geschlechtergetrennter Unterricht in bestimmten Altersgruppen oder bei bestimmten Fächern Sinn macht, wird zwar immer wieder diskutiert. Aber auch fernab von den Abziehbildern von “verschüchterten Mädchen” und “dominanten Jungs” erscheint es bei Computer- oder Programmierkursen, für die sich auch bei jüngeren Jugendlichen bereits das Klischee der “Jungssache” (bzw. “keine Mädchensache”) festgesetzt hat, als eine sinnvolle Maßnahme, Mädchen sich erst mal unter sich ausprobieren zu lassen. Besonders, wenn sie vielleicht noch keine oder wenig Berührung mit technischen Themen oder Computern hatten. Das hat viel mit Zugang, mit Prägung und Peergroup-Dynamiken zu tun. Was in den oft lauthals geführten und von zahlreichen Schreckgespenstern bevölkerten Bildungsdebatten der letzten Jahre selten erwähnt wird: Jugendliche jeden Geschlechts können sich durchaus gut verstehen und produktiven Unterricht zusammen haben. Aber wenn es um die Gefahr geht, sich zu “blamieren”, wenn es um etwas geht, von dem Mädchen vielleicht schon einmal das subtile Gefühl vermittelt bekamen, sie können es nicht so gut wie andere(s), dann werden sie beim gemeinsamen Computerkurs vielleicht doch eher sagen: “Mach du erst mal, ich gucke zu”.

Mädchen wie Sarah Lutteropp, die 2010 mit 17 Jahren sowohl beim Bundeswettbewerb Informatik als auch beim Wettbewerb “Invent a Chip” erfolgreich mitgemacht hat, sind da zwar ein gutes Vorbild, aber gleichzeitig zeigt ihre Geschichte, was noch im Argen liegt: Zwar hätte ihre Informatiklehrerin (!) sie motiviert, am Wettbewerb teilzunehmen, aber

“schlussendlich hatte ich dann auch deshalb daran teilgenommen, weil ein Mitschüler meinte, das sei nichts für Mädchen, und ich dem das Gegenteil beweisen wollte – es gibt im Kurs einfach einige Jungs, die sich ungeheuer aufregen können, wenn sie in Informatik schlechter sind als ein Mädchen.”

Im Fall von Sarah hat diese Bemerkung ihren Kampfgeist geweckt – vielleicht, weil sie auch noch Unterstützung durch eine Lehrerin hatte. Eine motivierende, gleichberechtigte Lernumgebung sieht aber anders aus.

Natürlich gibt es auch Jungen, denen eine über das Schulangebot hinausgehende Förderung in diesem Bereich weiterhelfen würde. Kinder aus prekären Haushalten, egal ob Junge oder Mädchen, wachsen nicht immer mit iPad oder den neuesten Computer- oder Spielekonsole-Modellen auf und haben so auch in diesem Bereich oft schlechtere Startchancen. Ihnen entgeht so leicht der spielerische, frühe Umgang mit dem Digitalen, der die Berührungsängste ab- und die Neugier und das Vertrauen in eigene Fähigkeiten aufbaut. Nimmt man nun die prägenden Geschlechterstereotype und die soziale Frage des Zugangs zu Computer & Co. zusammen, sieht es für Mädchen aus ärmeren Verhältnissen mal wieder am schlechtesten aus. Gerade hier sollten Initiativen beispielsweise ansetzen, etwa durch kostenlose Angebote.

Kleine und große Visionen – einige Beispiele

In Deutschland ist das wohl bekannteste Programm, um Mädchen für Berufe mit unterdurchschnittlichem Frauenanteil zu begeistern, der u.a. durch das Familien- und Forschungsministerium geförderte “Girls’Day”, der an einem Tag im Frühjahr Mädchen in Labore, Werkstätten und Programmierstuben einläd. Auf mich wirkt dieser Aktionstag in seiner Wirkung immer etwas willkürlich – was am Ende für die Teilnehmerinnen dabei rumkommt (außer einem schulfreien Tag) ist doch stark vom lokalen Angebot und vom Engagement etwa ihrer Schule abhängig (was natürlich ein generelles Problem ist). Zudem ist die thematische Ausrichtung des Girls’Day sehr breit, was zwar grundsätzlich nichts Schlechtes ist, aber dafür auch nicht sehr in die Tiefe geht.

Ein spezifischeres Progamm ist “Roberta”, eine Initiative des Fraunhofer IAIS, bei dem insbesondere Mädchen über Roboter-Bau-Kurse für die Bereiche Naturwissenschaft, Informatik und Technik begeistert werden sollen. Das klingt sehr spannend und ist es in der Praxis vermutlich auch. Wer sich aber die Roberta-Website ansieht, bemerkt ebenso: so richtig ansprechend für Jugendliche ist deren Gestaltung nicht. Und mit ansprechend meine ich in diesem Fall: an der digitalen Lebenswelt von Jugendlichen bzw. Mädchen orientiert. Viel besser scheint dies zu gelingen bei Programmen, die von Expert_innen aus den jeweiligen Branchen heraus selbst initiiert und gestaltet werden, was mir in einem “größeren Stil” bis jetzt vor allem in England und den USA aufgefallen ist (sicher auch meinem Blickwinkel geschuldet und ohne Anspruch auf einen Überblick).

“Little Miss Geek”, eine Initiative von Belinda Parmar, die sich bereits mit ihrer Firma “Lady Geek” für besseren Zugang von Frauen in der Tech-Welt einsetzt, bringt Programmiererinnen, Game-Designerinnen und andere Frauen aus der Tech-Branche für Workshops und Vorträge an Schulen – und das mit keinem bescheidenen Ziel:

“Our vision is to run Little Miss Geek Academies in every school for every girl in every country where women are under-represented. […] We won’t rest until women make up 50% of the UK’s tech workforce.”
(“Unsere Vision ist es, Little Miss Geek Academies in jeder Schule, für jedes Mädchen, in jedem Land abzuhalten, in dem Frauen unterrepräsentiert sind […] Wir werden nicht aufhören bevor Frauen nicht zu 50% in Tech-Berufen in Großbritannien vertreten sind.”)

Dies finanziert sich aus Spenden und natürlich auch mit Unterstützung aus der Industrie, was sicher ein Punkt ist, der im Bereich solcher Förderprogramme (und nicht nur da) kritisch im Auge behalten werden muss, der aber andererseits auch oft kostenfreie Angebote erst möglich macht.

Einen ganz aktuellen Weg der Finanzierung geht ein Projekt aus Portland, das AppCamp4Girls, ebenfalls von Programmierinnen ins Leben gerufen, will es Sommer-Workshops für Mädchen anbieten, in denen Apps für iOS programmiert werden. Ihre Crowdfunding-Kampagne auf Indiegogo läuft noch 29 Tage, das Ziel von 50.000$ ist jedoch bereits überschritten. Es lässt sich also nicht sagen, dass es keine Unterstützung für große Visionen gäbe:

“Long term, we’re thinking big – AppCamp in other states, and eventually in other countries.”
(“Auf lange Sicht haben wir größere Ziele – AppCamp in anderen Bundesstaaten und irgendwann in anderen Ländern.”).

Erreicht hat dieses Ziel bereits die Initiative “Girl develop it” für Mädchen und Frauen, die ihre Programmier-Kurse in diversen Großstädten der USA und Australien anbietet.

Das Programm Black Girls CODE, das sich speziell an Mädchen of color richtet, für die der Zugang zur Tech-Industrie noch schwieriger ist, wurde bereits im kleinerdrei-Rückblick auf das Personal Democracy Forum vorgestellt. Dort beschrieb die Gründerin Kimberly Bryant in ihrem Vortrag das Konzept und einen ihrer Meilensteine: Bis zum Jahr 2040 einer Million Mädchen of color Coden beizubringen.

Dies sind vier unterschiedlich ausgerichtete Initiativen, die Mädchen die Mitgestaltung der digitalen Welt ermöglichen wollen, aber in ihren Zielen und Visionen denken sie ähnlich groß und umfassend, mutig und inspirierend.

Kurse für alle?

Doch wie sieht es hierzulande aus? Initiativen zur besseren Vernetzung und zum Mentoring von Frauen, die auch Kurse anbieten, gibt es schon einige, etwa die Berlin Geekettes oder die Code Girls Leipzig. Recht bekannt sind bereits die Rails Girls, eine internationale Initiative, die Einsteigerinnen-Kurse für die Programmiersprache Ruby anbieten, unter anderem in Deutschland. Jedoch erreichen diese Kurse oder Intiativen noch vorrangig Frauen jenseits des Schulalters – in diesem Zusammenhang ist auch die häufige Verwendung des Wortes “Girls” schon zum Diskussionsgegenstand geworden, da nicht alle Frauen sich davon angesprochen fühlen – unter anderem bei “Fiona lernt programmieren” oder dem Talk “How to get more women in Tech in under a minute” thematisiert.

Gemischte Einsteiger_innen-Kurse, bspw. in Javascript, bietet unter anderem die ehrenamtlich organisierte Open Tech School an, die dieses Jahr auch einen ersten Kids Hackathon in Berlin veranstaltet hat. Ebenfalls gemischt sein wird das zweitägige Camp “Jugend hackt!”, dass diesen September in Berlin stattfindet. Toll ist, dass das “Jugend hackt”-Camp ebenso alles kostenlos anbietet und damit eine wichtige Zugangshürde beseitigt ist. Mittlerweile in vielen Ländern auf der ganzen Welt (in Deutschland bis jetzt in München, Köln und Würzburg) vertreten sind die “CoderDojos”, eine in Irland von James Whelton gegründete Open-Source-Initiative mit einem Netzwerk aus Mentor_innen, die in eigenen “Dojos” vor Ort kostenlose Programmierkurse für Kinder anbieten. Wer selbst ein Dojo starten möchte: hier steht wie und warum.

Einschränkungen bei vielen dieser Initiativen, die aus der Tech-Szene heraus entstehen, sind natürlich, dass sie oft auf Großstädte beschränkt sind und eher die Kinder und Jugendlichen erreichen, deren Eltern, Verwandte oder eventuell auch Lehrer_innen ohnehin in diesem Bereich tätig, engagiert oder daran interessiert sind, die so vielleicht auch eher schon mit Computern in Berührung gekommen sind oder diese besitzen.

Begrüßenswert wären in Deutschland zusätzliche Initiativen wie “Little Miss Geek”, die auch direkt an Schulen gehen bzw. mit diesen gezielter zusammenarbeiten, wodurch mehr Kinder, möglichst unabhängig von ihrem sozialen Umfeld und Wohnort, erreicht werden könnten (falls Euch solche bekannt sind: Ich freue mich über Hinweise!). Zumal, auch wenn gemischte Kurse sicher genauso funktionieren können und ebenfalls eine unterstützenswerte Sache sind, ist gerade bei der Förderung von Kindern und Jugendlichen eine gezielte Ansprache von Mädchen eben doch noch aus allen oben genannten Gründen notwendig und sinnvoll.

Und leider bleibt das ungute Gefühl im Hinterkopf, dass es auch mit diesen nachahmenswerten Förderprogrammen und Initiativen ein hartes Stück Arbeit ist, gegen das gesamtgesellschaftlich getragene und kontinuierlich gefütterte Klischee von an Technik uninteressierten Mädchen und Frauen anzukämpfen. Gruppenbilder wie dieses vom Wettbewerb “Invent a Chip” 2012 könnten jedenfalls offensichtlich noch etwas Diversität vertragen. Nun: Für “Invent a Chip”  werde ich zwar nicht mehr zugelassen, aber selbst mal ins Programmieren einzusteigen nehme ich mir auch schon länger vor – das wäre zumindest ein kleines Teilchen im Puzzle.

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Zum Weiterlesen:

“MINT”-Dossier bei der Mädchenmannschaft

Von Lucie am 23. Juni 2013 

kleinerdrei.org

Senf ab: Wenn das Hobby zur Arbeit wird - Blog

gameone.de

Im Vollbildmodus anzeigen Senf ab: Wenn das Hobby zur Arbeit wird

Ich kann mich genau an den Tag erinnern, an dem das hier alles angefangen hat. Zu meiner Einschulung bekam ich einen Game Boy samt “Tetris” geschenkt und seit diesem Tag begleiten mich Videospiele durch den Alltag. Nach gut 21 Jahren des Zockens bin ich in einer Redaktion angelangt, in der ich mich nicht mehr nur in meiner Freizeit mit Videospielen befassen “muss”. Und nun fange ich an, mir Fragen zu stellen. Fragen, die sich sicher auch der eine oder andere Redakteur, Kritiker und Tester schon gestellt hat:

Kann es sein, dass ich irgendwann den Spaß am Spielen verliere, wenn ich mich täglich damit auseinandersetzen muss?

Um noch etwas weiter auszuholen: Zocken ist schon lange kein einfaches Hobby mehr. Es ist zur Leidenschaft geworden, die mein Leben maßgeblich beeinflusst. Ich bin zwar sehr dörflich aufgewachsen und war viel mit meinen Freunden draußen, doch strahlende Sonnentage waren nicht immer gleich ein Grund zum Rausgehen. Vor allem nicht mehr, als der erste eigene Fernseher ins Zimmer kam und PlayStation sowie N64 daran angeschlossen wurden. Zudem hatte ich mein Zimmer im Keller, so dass es auch im Sommer immer schön kühl war. Warum also noch rausgehen, wenn schon in der Welt von “Turok” das Klima tropisch ist?

Wenn sich eine Chance zum Zocken ergab und meine Eltern mich nicht zum Atmen von Frischluft zwangen, dann hab ich gezockt. Daran hat sich bis heute nichts geändert. Mit Arbeit hatte das früher nichts zu tun. Ich hatte bis vor kurzem aber auch nie den Drang, mich in diese Richtung zu entwickeln. Um Spiele zu programmieren, war ich nie gut genug in Mathe und hab mich auch nicht groß für Informatik interessiert. Um Journalist in einer Fachzeitschrift zu werden, fehlten die Möglichkeiten und der richtige Drang zum Schreiben. So konnte ich mich auf das Spielen an sich konzentrieren. Und das ist doch auch das Tolle daran. Wir nehmen einfach das Gamepad oder Maus und Tastatur in die Hand und legen los. Ganz ohne Zwang, einfach spielen.

Die Situation änderte sich mit dem Studium. Hausarbeiten und Recherche bestimmten meinen Alltag. Sachliches Schreiben lernte ich dabei schnell. Das Spielen rückte zu der Zeit leicht in den Hintergrund. Als die Wissenschaft dann allmählich zu langweilig wurde, fing ich zum Spaß als freier Spieletester an. Ich schrieb Testberichte im Internet. Spiele geschenkt zu bekommen und ein, zwei Seiten in freier, persönlicher Form dazu zu verfassen, war ein guter Deal. Diese Aufgabe brachte aber die ersten Einschränkungen mit sich, denn die Tests mussten immer innerhalb eines kurzen Zeitraums verfasst werden. Um ein Spiel gründlich und mit echter emotionaler Beteiligung durchzuspielen, war keine Zeit. Das Spielen wandelte sich langsam vom Vergnügen zur Verpflichtung.

Wie ist es jetzt? Ich bin den ganzen Tag umgeben von Konsolen und immer auf der Suche nach dem neuesten Hit. Wir spielen Spiele, die uns gefallen und suchen kreative Wege abseits von 08/15-Tests, dir wir mit ein bisschen Glück zumindest manchmal finden. Bei allen persönlichen Spielepräferenzen kommen aber auch wir nicht um die großen AAA-Titel herum, obwohl wir manche davon vielleicht gar nicht mehr sehen können. Dabei dem Zeitgeist auf der Schliche zu sein und zu versuchen, Spielen immer wieder was abzugewinnen, ist oftmals aufreibender als man es sich von außen vorstellt.

Wer sich hier über einen längeren Zeitraum mit einem Spiel auseinandersetzt, trägt ein großes Stück Verantwortung mit sich herum. Die Zeit, die einem dafür zur Verfügung gestellt wird, muss effizient genutzt werden und ein ansprechendes Ergebnis hervorbringen. Und trotzdem darf der Spaß am Spielen niemals zu kurz kommen, denn ohne Spaß würde euch schließlich auch das Ergebnis keinen Spaß und das Arbeiten hier keinen großen Sinn machen.

Es ist also wichtig, eine Art Gleichgewicht herzustellen. Auf der einen Seite muss ein Bewusstsein für einen professionellen Umgang mit der Videospielkultur geschaffen werden. Auf der anderen Seite sollte man immer versuchen, seine Leidenschaft und die Faszination für Videospiele am Leben zu erhalten. Das kann gerade bei Erfolg auch schwierig werden, denn wenn das eigene Hobby zum Lebensunterhalt mit anderen geteilt wird, wächst mit dem Bekanntheitsgrad auch der Druck. Irgendwann kann es passieren, dass man den Punkt erreicht, an dem man wie eine Maschine Content für seine Fans, Zuschauer, Abonnenten raushauen muss. Dann wird man unter Umständen auch seinen eigenen Umständen nicht mehr gerecht. Und schon hat der einstige Traumjob mit Spaß nicht mehr viel zu tun.

Das muss in diesem drastischen Umfang nicht passieren, bei nahezu jedem Arbeiter innerhalb der Videospielmedien ändert sich aber auch die Wahrnehmung von Videospielen. Das Staunen und das leidenschaftliche Erfahren wandeln sich zu kritischem und analytischem Handeln.

“Hab ich schon tausend Mal gesehen.”
“Das macht das andere Spiel besser.”
“Toll, der zwanzigste Ego-Shooter dieses Jahr.”

Dann können Spiele einen eventuell nicht mehr “berühren”. Man neigt zum Pauschalisieren, Wertungen fallen vorschnell nach oberflächlicher Betrachtung. Dabei können viele kleine Details übersehen werden und vor allem kommt die persönliche Bindung zu kurz. Und das persönliche Empfinden gegenüber einem Spiel ist ja genau das, was diese “Beziehung” so besonders macht. Wenn ich ein Spiel mag, spiele ich es. Wenn ich es von vornherein ablehne und eine “abgeklärte” Sicht an den Tag lege, verpasse ich die Chance, mich überhaupt in ein Spiel zu verlieben.

Es ist darum sehr wichtig, eine gesunde Mischung zwischen beruflicher Verantwortung und leidenschaftlichem Erlebnis zu finden. Das bedeutet, dass ich mich immer wieder neu fordern muss. Ich muss mich selber motivieren. Selber nach neuen Dingen suchen, die mich antreiben, über sie nachzudenken, sie auszuprobieren. Es ist wichtig, aus Empathie heraus über Spiele zu berichten – nicht aus Zwang und Kalkül. Nur so kann man guten Content erschaffen.

Die harte Arbeit ist also nicht das Spielen an sich, sondern das Suchen und Finden neuer, interessanter Möglichkeiten, um das Spiel und das Spielen zu vermitteln. Dabei sollte man bei der Arbeit unbedingt über den Tellerrand schauen. Ich weiß aber, dass man sich stets gerne an bekannten und gewohnten Dingen orientiert. Neues birgt immer das Risiko, nicht zu funktionieren. Trotzdem ist dies wichtig, denn die Fließbandproduktion von immer gleichen beziehungsweise ähnlichen Inhalten beißt sich mit der hoffentlich vorhandenen Leidenschaft.

Leidenschaft, besonders im Berufsleben, kann nur durch kreative Prozesse und Mut zur Eroberung von unbekanntem Gebiet weiterleben. Das ist natürlich abhängig von gegebenen Strukturen und äußeren Einflüssen. Grundsätzlich entspringt sie jedoch dem eigenen Antrieb und der Liebe zur Videospielkultur. So lange ich mich also dieser Leidenschaft offen hingebe und mich nicht zu sehr in Routine verliere, bleibt mir der Spaß am Spielen (hoffentlich) noch erhalten.

AUTOR: Herr Heinrichs KATEGORIEN: games Dieser Eintrag wurde am Dienstag, 02. Juli 2013, 10:00 Uhr veröffentlicht.

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The politics of four dollars

ramiismail.com

The politics of four dollars

3 jul 2013

Imagine you need 4 dollar to make a sports game. Seriously, let’s imagine it costs four dollars. Sure, it’s going to be somewhat of a tight budget, but it’s doable.

It’s a sports game made with a great team, well-crafted and beautiful and progressive and in your mind, it is everything you want it to be. You go straight for some publisher funding, and through some rough negotiations you end up getting the project signed with EA Games at 30 dollars.

With all this extra money, you could make this a way better game for the consumers. You look at your scope – what we call our goals – and decide to re-scope the project for thirty dollars. You can’t make a game that costs 4 dollars with this budget – what will the publisher think? What will people think? It needs to show these production values.

You start working on the game and several month into the production of the game you’re down to the last 10 dollars and the things you’ve designed for thirty dollars might be a little bit more than you can afford to properly make with those last 10 dollars. Of course, marketing has already started talking about the game and expectations have been raised that this will be a production with good values. You look at the new scope and decide you need an additional 15% of funding, let’s say another 4 dollars. With 14 dollars, you should be good.

EA Games refuses the additional 4 dollars and you start running out of money. You mention this in the press and in interviews. You talk about how you can’t just cut down on scope at this point. EA still refuses the extra money. The game is released in a state that’s not nearly as good as it could’ve been. People are disappointed, your game gets slammed on Metacritic and finally, you decide to explain your side of the story in the press. You talk about the initial overfunding, the subsequent overscoping, the long hours, an increasingly battle-worn team struggling against an uphill foe while money was running out, a game that was going to under-deliver no matter what. If only you would’ve gotten that additional few dollars of funding to really wrap up the game.

Imagine what the comments would look like. EA would get slammed. Hadn’t they been warned about those four extra dollars?

Now multiply all the values by 100.000, replace EA Games with Kickstarter, sports game with adventure game and you with Double Fine. Isn’t this exactly the beautiful thing about Kickstarter? That developers don’t have to compromise, like they would’ve if they’d been beholden to a publisher? That we can find new, creative solutions to problems like these?

There’s no doubt that overscoping is a problem and there’s no doubt the responsibility is on Tim and his team. Here’s the deal, though: this is game development and some games are made with under half the budget, some are made that need double the budget. Double Fine set out to make a game with eight times the budget we had on some of our titles and suddenly had to re-scope when Kickstarter expectations were they were going to release a game that’s worth three million dollars. Instead of holding back, they are trying to give every single one of their backers the maximum amount of game for their money.

Kickstarter has some weird quirks to it and overfunding combined with consumer expectations seems like one of the most devious ones. That they managed to stay within a margin of error of 15% is also on Tim and his team and I think that’s an impressive margin. I think it’s even more impressive that they communicate openly and honestly about these problems. I’ve always tried to be as open and honest about this at Vlambeer. This is not some hyper-idealized reality for a documentary: this is real.

Welcome to the trenches, internet – and thanks for taking people there, Double Fine.

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ramiismail.com

Sid Meier: The Father of Civilization

kotaku.com

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kaploy9

I wonder what’ll it be like when these little people send a spaceship to his head. Will they be disturbed by the earwax? Name his schnoz after some roman deity, perhaps?

6/26/13 9:01pm

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Sid Meier: The Father of Civilization

Before Sid Meier was Sid Meier—the iconic video game designer whose name is stamped on classic titles like Pirates! and Civilization—he was just another computer hacker.

In the early 80s, the then-20-something programmer had a job at a company called General Instruments Corporation, where he worked alongside a gruff Air Force pilot-turned-businessman named John “Wild Bill” Stealey. Meier, who had graduated with a degree in computer science before there was a personal computer in every home, spent his spare time reading hacker magazines, fiddling with code on his Atari, and building his own versions of arcade games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. At one point he made a space game and put it up on his office network; it hooked so many employees that his bosses forced him to take it down.

One year, as Stealey recalls, the two men went to an electronics trade conference. On the second night of the show, they stumbled upon a bunch of arcade games in a basement. One by one, Meier beat Stealey at each of them. Then they found Atari’s Red Baron, a squiggly flight game in which you’d steer a biplane through abstract outlines of terrain and obstacles. Stealey, the Air Force man, knew he could win at this one. He sat down at the machine and shot his way to 75,000 points, ranking number three on the arcade’s leaderboard. Not bad.

Then Meier went up. He scored 150,000 points.

“I was really torqued,” Stealey says today. This guy outflew an Air Force pilot? He turned to the programmer. “Sid, how did you do that?”

“Well,” Meier said. “While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.”

A great video game, Sid Meier likes to say, is a series of interesting decisions: a set of situations in which the player is constantly confronted with meaningful choices. It’s an ethos that has served him well: the majority of Meier’s games are critically and commercially acclaimed. A 2009 Develop survey asked some 9,000 game makers their “ultimate development hero”—Meier came in fifth. (First was Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.)

Meier’s games are all full of interesting decisions, and they’re always totally different. There’s the open-world pirate adventure game; the real-time strategy game set during the Battle of Gettysburg; the simulation game about railroad management. Meier’s most recent release, Ace Patrol, is a top-down strategy game in which you maneuver fighter pilots to take down targets across the battlefields of World War I.

And then there’s Civilization.

In a world full of eight-figure budgets and ambitious video game cinematics, the 20-year-old Civilization’s scope is impressive even today. Some games put players in charge of people, cities, or armies; Civilization put them in charge of world history. You’d pick a nation—Americans, Romans, English, and so forth—and guide them from 4000 BC to the modern age, year by year. Every turn, you could move your people across a 2D map of the world, build settlements and cities, engage in diplomacy with rival countries, research new technology, irrigate land, and wage war.

This formula has spawned five main games, several spinoffs (including the North America-focused Colonization and the sci-fi epic Alpha Centauri), and tons of expansion packs. It’s also made “Sid Meier” a gaming household name: the official title for Civilization is not Civilization; it is Sid Meier’s Civilization. The title implies ownership, arrogance, cockiness. It would be easy to conclude, then, that the father of PC strategy games is a man with an ego—the type of man who would put his name on every game he makes.

But Meier is amiable and soft-spoken, a friendly man who colleagues call brilliant, unassuming, and humble. “In the [13] years and all the people I’ve worked with at Firaxis,” said fellow designer and close confidant Jake Solomon, “there has never been anyone who’s had a personality issue with Sid, ‘cause it’s not possible. He’s such a wonderful person.”

Last month, I met the legendary designer in a chilly meeting room in Manhattan’s Union Square. Meier was genial and energetic, with a warm smile and a dark grey cardigan. He was accompanied, as always, by his wife, Susan, who occasionally chimed in to help him remember important facts, or moments he’s forgotten. We talked about his games, his history, his triumphs and regrets.

A devout Christian, Meier loves music and plays organ for his church in Baltimore, Maryland, where he and Susan live. His job title at Firaxis, the studio he helped found, is “Director of Creative Development,” which essentially means he can do whatever he wants. Sometimes that means working on his own games; other times it means offering his considerable design acumen to other people at the company and helping out on projects like XCOM, the sci-fi strategy game helmed by Solomon.

“You can always drop in—his door’s always wide open,” said Solomon. “Anybody can stop in and talk to him about anything… he’s incredibly welcoming. He spends a lot of his time working. If you come in on the weekend, there’s a fair chance that Sid’s car’s in the parking lot, and he’s in the office working on his latest idea.”

Solomon: “If you come in on the weekend, there’s a fair chance that Sid’s car’s in the parking lot, and he’s in the office working on his latest idea.”

I asked Meier, who is 59, if he ever thinks about retirement. “I kinda feel like I am retired,” he said, laughing. “I’m doing what I wanna do—I’ve been retired for a long time. I still love making games, so I’ve really never thought of that.”

That’s good news for video game fans: Meier has a knack for making strategy games that are fiendishly addictive and consistently delightful. He’s fascinated by history, and he is particularly good at turning events that would seem quaint, dull, or old-fashioned to your average game player—like the battle of Gettysburg or a World War I air skirmish—into accessible interactive entertainment.

“He just is brilliant,” said Solomon. “He has a gift that I certainly don’t have. It’s very rare to find someone who is able to look at the world in such a way that you could give him a topic for a game and I guarantee you in a weekend he could come up with a prototype centered around that theme that would make you go, ‘Oh man, that’s pretty fun.’ Sid just has a very insightful way of looking at the world. He can find the fun in almost anything.”

“He just thinks differently from us,” said Brian Reynolds, a longtime collaborator who designed Civilization II. “It’s an ineffable thing. His smartness doesn’t come off as, ‘I’m smarter than you, haha.’ You just have this really interesting conversation and it starts to dawn on you how much smarter he is.”

“I gave him a [Civil War] book for Christmas one year,” said Stealey. “And at New Years he gave it back to me. I said ‘Sid, didn’t you like the book?’ He said, ‘I’ve memorized it already.’”

After whupping Stealey at Red Baron, the young Meier told his co-worker that Atari’s flight sim was okay, but he could make an even better one. Stealey took the bait: “if you could, I could sell it.”

Meier lived up to his end of the bargain, and a few months later, he brought Stealey a build for a combat flight sim called Hellcat Ace. So Stealey went out and sold it. This was the beginning of a partnership that would last for the next decade: As Meier designed and programmed, Stealey would go out and pitch his games to local hobby stores. After a year of sales—$200,000 worth, Stealey claims—Stealey quit his job at General Instruments to work full-time at the company they were now calling MicroProse. A year and a half later, Meier did too.

Over the next few years, MicroProse made and marketed a number of flight simulators and arcade action games for Atari consoles: games like the World War II flyer Spitfire Ace, the rudimentary platformer Floyd of the Jungle, and the helicopter sidescroller Chopper Rescue. Like many of the earliest video game companies, MicroProse felt like an upstart gang of rebels more than a professional operation.

“We put [the games] in baggies,” Meier said. “Bill would drive around to stores and sell them. It was very bootstrap round-up work process. That’s the way things were.”

“I would call computer stores and ask to buy Hellcat Ace,” Stealey told me. “And when they didn’t have it, I would yell and scream at them, ‘What kind of computer store are you?’ and hang up. I would do that three times in three weeks, each time pretending to be a different person. And the fourth week I’d call and say, ‘Hello, this is John Stealey. I’m a representative with MicroProse, with this game called Hellcat Ace.’ They’d say, ‘Hey, hey, hey, everyone’s been calling about that, can you help us get that game?’”

In 1983, a video game crash caused by market saturation crippled companies like Atari and Magnavox, but MicroProse still found success releasing a steady trickle of high-quality games designed by Meier: mostly flight sims, because that’s what the two were interested in making.

A few years later, as the company continued to grow—”It took three years to get to $3 million,” said Stealey—someone suggested that they make a game about pirates. Meier liked the idea, and he recalls one particularly important conversation with Stealey:

“Bill said, ‘When’s my next flight simulator coming out?’ And I said, ‘I’m not doing a flight simulator; I’m doing a pirates game.’ He said, ‘Well that’s crazy, ‘cause people want your next flight simulator… Wait a minute. Put your name on it. Maybe if they liked your flight simulator games, they’ll recognize the name and buy this crazy pirates thing.’”

Stealey has a different take: “We were at dinner at a Software Publishers Association meeting, and [actor] Robin Williams was there. And he kept us in stitches for two hours. And he turns to me and says ‘Bill, you should put Sid’s name on a couple of these boxes, and promote him as the star.’ And that’s how Sid’s name got on Pirates, and Civilization.”

Wherever it came from, the idea stuck. In 1987, MicroProse released Sid Meier’s Pirates!, an open-world exploration game in which players took on the role of glamorous swashbucklers who scour the world for treasure, stave off mutinous crews, and try to earn as much money as possible.

“We had created this graphic tool that allowed us to bring up pictures quickly,” Meier said. “Memory was limited. Everything was limited, so you had to be very efficient, but we found an efficient way to kind of pop up these pictures. We were able to kind of illustrate each scene in the story. That gave it a little bit of this adventure book story kind of quality that I think worked well.”

It worked extremely well: Pirates! won a number of awards from industry shows and magazines, and influenced a great deal of future games, including Will Wright’s SimCity, which would then go on to influence Meier’s Civilization.

Meier recalls early Game Developers Conferences in San Jose, California, where he’d get together with Wright, M.U.L.E. designer Danielle Bunten, conference founder Chris Crawford, and about 50-100 other early game creators.

“We would have fun and basically tell each other how much we like each other’s games,” Meier told me. “There wasn’t really any collaboration, because we just all wanted to make our own games. It was too much fun to let anybody else.”

It was the first generation of video game designers. And it felt like they were at the precipice of something big.

“We were trying to develop an industry,” Meier said.

If you play more than one of Meier’s games, you will notice certain common characteristics: there is never any blood, for one. Although Meier likes to cover violent historical periods, he does not like to show violence: battles in Civilization, for example, are represented abstractly, with two army tiles colliding until one disappears.

Meier’s games are also known for giving their players all sorts of options: instead of telling a focused, linear story, Meier prefers to create situations in which the player can create his or her own narrative. It could be the story of America wiping out every other nation and creating a global empire, or it could be the story of the most friendly pirate in the Caribbean. It’s totally up to the player. “I prefer games where the player can lead the game in the direction that they want,” Meier said. “And then they kind of end up with that unique story that only they can know.”

Meier: “I prefer games where the player can lead the game in the direction that they want, and then they kind of end up with that unique story that only they can know.”

No game epitomized this principle more than Civilization, which Meier and his team started developing after Pirates! and their next game, a business sim called Railroad Tycoon in which players could built and manage their own railroad companies.

”[SimCity] planted the seed in our mind about this kind of building, and that games don’t have to be about blowing things up—they can be about creating,” Meier said. “And so we kind of took some of the ideas from Railroad Tycoon, and some of the ideas from SimCity, and said you know what’s a bigger topic that we can tackle? And we ended up with the idea of Civilization.”

Today, it takes two or three years and a team of at least 100 to make your average blockbuster video game. Civilization, Meier told me, was made by a team of 8-10 people in under a year.

“Ultimately we had 640 kilobytes [of memory] in the computer,” Meier said. “When that was full, we were done. We couldn’t put any more code in there. So development time was a little less in those days.”

Today, Civilization is known as one of the premier turn-based strategy series, but funny enough, one of the game’s first iterations was actually set in real-time, like StarCraft or Age of Empires. The unreleased prototype just didn’t pass muster with Meier.

“It was more like SimCity, where you’d kind of say, I wanna have a village over here and a farm over here and maybe I want to have some things happening over here, and then you could kind of stand back and watch your people gradually do things,” Meier said. “But it was a much more passive kind of process. There was more watching than doing. It was just not happening.”

So they switched gears. They gave more control to the player and changed up the pacing: now, instead of waiting for the world to change, players could change the world. Time wouldn’t progress until players made their decisions.

Brian Reynolds, who at the time had just started working at MicroProse, remembers early builds of Civilization keeping him and his co-workers up all night.

“It started to kind of go ‘viral’ within the company—not that anybody knew that term back then,” Reynolds said. “It was one of those things that suddenly everybody was kind of playing it. There’d be a new version every few days. I would go in and just be this random 22-year-old guy stopping by and saying, ‘Here’s some ideas!’ [Sid] was very tolerant, patient of all my ideas for Civilization.”

“It was a very fun development,” said Meier, who was in his late 30s at the time. He remembers scaling down a lot—the game’s map was originally going to be twice the size, and there were two different types of tech trees—and he recalls lots and lots of play-testing alongside assistant director Bruce Shelley.

“Testing was a bit of a challenge because it took so long to play the game,” Meier said. “And we didn’t really have much in the way of testers, so I was one of the main—a lot of my time was spent playing and then fixing and changing.”

Civilization came out in late 1991. It took a few months for buzz to build—there was no Internet just yet—but as people started to discover the game, it spread like the Romans. Meier’s masterpiece won various awards, ranking #1 on a list of “150 Best Games Of All Time” compiled by the magazine Computer Gaming World. And it sold 800,000 copies, according to Reynolds.

When Meier finished the game that would make his career, he was eager to make something bigger. Better. More ambitious. But he also knew that would be ridiculously difficult—“I said if I continually get in this mode of trying to top the last game or do something bigger or more epic, I’m gonna drive myself crazy,” Meier said. So he decided to scale back. He gave Reynolds the steering wheel for the U.S.-focused Colonization and the Civ sequel, then went off to do his own thing: a music application called CPU Bach that allowed players to create their own music compositions. (It never really took off.)

Meanwhile, MicroProse was facing corporate restructuring as Stealey attempted to balance the company’s budget. In 1993, Stealey sold MicroProse to a company called Spectrum Holobyte. A year later, he left. “It was a great run. We should’ve done better. We had great people,” Stealey said. “I think all our people are still very proud of their MicroProse days. We had a family atmosphere. We had cash bonuses for everybody. I think it went very well for a long time.”

Sick of the layoffs and corporate politics, Meier—along with Reynolds and fellow designer Jeff Briggs—decided to leave MicroProse and start a new company. They called it Firaxis Games.

Sid Meier doesn’t like thinking about business, and he clammed up a bit when I asked him about MicroProse’s new ownership. “Sid didn’t want to be involved in that at all,” Stealey told me later. “No business—not at all.”

“Sid is happiest in his office writing code,” Solomon said.

Perhaps that was what made the idea of Firaxis so exciting for Meier: there they were independent, totally free to make creative decisions without worrying about meddling corporate parents. By then, Meier already had a reputation in the booming video game industry, and the company was quickly able to strike a deal with Electronic Arts for their next couple of games: Alpha Centauri, a Civilization spinoff set on an alien planet, and Gettysburg, a real-time strategy game set during the eponymous Civil War battle.

“Ah, Firaxis,” Meier said. “The convicts are running the asylum. It was great fun.”

For a while the company stayed small and nimble, making games with a team of 10-15 people, but over the past decade and a half, it’s grown closer to 120. In late 2005, Firaxis was acquired by Take-Two Interactive—the publishing company behind Rockstar (Grand Theft Auto) and 2K (NBA 2K).

Meier: “Ah, Firaxis. The convicts are running the asylum. It was great fun.”

“Everyone here is really nice,” said Solomon, who joined Firaxis in 2000. “We really value nice guys and gals. We don’t really put up with personality conflicts here, and that comes from Sid. That is 100% because our studio grew out of Sid Meier, and his personality has a huge impact on how the studio is run, how people interact with each other. His vision is sort of our company vision.”

Over the past decade or so, Firaxis has gone on to make a whole bunch of Civilization sequels and spinoffs, including the console-driven Civilization Revolution and a remake of Colonization. Last year’s reimagining of the sci-fi strategy game XCOM (directed by Solomon) earned tons of critical acclaim, winning Kotaku’s 2012  Game of the Year. And now, with Ace Patrol, the ghoulish Haunted Hollow and an iOS port of XCOM, the studio seems to be diversifying a bit more.

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Ahab had Moby Dick. Sid Meier has dinosaurs.

For the past decade-and-a-half, Meier has unsuccessfully tried to spear a tyrannosaurus rex. He’s always wanted to make a game about the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods—”Sid Meier’s Dinosaurs” does have a nice ring to it—but he just couldn’t figure out how to make it fun. The theme worked, but he never found the right gameplay foundation: what would the dinosaurs do? Just fight one another? What’s the progression?

“I did three different prototypes,” Meier said. “One was real-time, one was turn-based, and one was a card game. And they were all kind of fun but just not fun fun.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

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“I play the game,” he said, sounding very much like one of his legendary counterparts, Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto. “That’s how I develop it, by playing the game, tweaking it and changing it. If other people play it, and they’re like ‘Oh, that’s okay,’ I ask, ‘But you’re still not playing it?’ If they say, ‘No, I put it away’ then I know it’s a problem. If they’re still not playing it, then it’s not as fun as it needs to be.”

Meier’s wife, Susan, chimed in. Susan has been with Firaxis since the beginning, first as the head of human resources, and now as “Master of Miscellaneous,” as she likes to call herself. “One of the reasons you knew you had something was that people at work were playing it long and often,” she said.

“Even when they didn’t have to,” Meier said, laughing. “That’s a good sign.”

Meier: “If other people play it, and they’re like ‘Oh, that’s okay,’ I ask, ‘But you’re still not playing it?’ If they say, ‘No, I put it away’ then I know it’s a problem. If they’re still not playing it, then it’s not as fun as it needs to be.”

But he just couldn’t nail down the dinosaurs. Solomon, meeting with Meier for the first time while interviewing for a job at Firaxis, recalls sitting down with the designer and playing one of his dinosaur prototypes.

“He fired it up and he let me play,” Solomon said. “I think he basically just looked at this as an opportunity to get feedback from somebody. I played the game and we talked about the game… and all he was interested in was, what do I think of the game? Did I have fun? What would I change? And it wasn’t an interview in the sense of—well, I suppose he might have been using it to gauge my personality—but really, it was an interview in the sense of, I played an awesome little prototype of Sid Meier.”

Solomon couldn’t make the game great, though. Meier likes to talk about the “valley of despair”—the moment in which a game designer, crushed by the weight of failed ideas and discarded prototypes, just feels like giving up. (“Sid’s famous for saying a game is a series of interesting decisions,” Solomon told me. “On Civ Rev one time he cracked and said, ‘Playing games is a series of interesting decisions, but making games is a series of heartbreaking disappointments.’”)

Sometimes, they get out of the valley. Other times it can be smothering.

Not long after Solomon joined the company, Meier told everyone that he was finished. He couldn’t make the dinosaur game work.

“So he goes home, and we don’t see him for two weeks,” Solomon said. “Then he brings everybody into a little room and he’s like ‘Okay, I’ve got the next game.’ And so he puts it up on the screen, and it’s SimGolf.”

It wasn’t a video or a bunch of words about SimGolf: it was a working prototype that Meier had just built. Players could design and build basic golf courses, just like they eventually could in the final product.

“At that time, [then-EA exec] Bing Gordon came out and went into Sid’s office, sat down, played the game for maybe an hour or two, came out and said ‘Yep, we’ll be able to sell that!’” Solomon told me. “Anyone who saw it saw that it was pretty awesome.”

That prototype-centric mentality is how Meier has always made games, and it may be one of the explanations for his success: he doesn’t believe in design documents, or long, written descriptions of how a video game will work. While many game makers put ideas and concepts on paper before taking them to a machine, Meier’s approach is all hands-on.

“Sid’s never had to write a design document, because instead of debating with you about some new feature he wants to implement, he’ll just go home and at night he’ll implement it,” Solomon said. “And then tomorrow when he comes in he’ll say, ‘Okay, now play this new feature.’ And you’ll play, and then you can have a real conversation about the game, instead of looking at some design document.”

Meier is known for these types of rules and mantras, which he likes to share with other game designers as often as possible.

“‘Find the fun’—that’s Sid’s phrase,” said Reynolds. “Essentially, you have to make something in order to have any chance of finding the fun. Fun wasn’t going to be found on a piece of paper, at least fun in terms of a video game.”

To hear Reynolds describe Meier’s process calls to mind the old joke: “How do you carve a statue of an elephant? Get a block of marble and remove anything that doesn’t look like an elephant.” How do you make a good game? Get a game and remove all the parts that aren’t fun.

“He told me a phrase I use all the time,” said Solomon. “Feedback is fact. That’s the way you have to look at feedback, as if it’s a fact. You’ve worked on this massive system or this game, and they come in your office and they go, ‘I played it, and I was bored.’ The worst thing you could do as a designer is start to defend your design or argue with that person. What you do is accept what that person told you as a fact. They said they were bored, so guess what? Your game bored that person. And you need to figure out why that is.”

There are other rules, too. Reynolds recalled one that stuck with him: if you are making a video game, and you’re having trouble with a number—say, the number of damage points a unit can do—either double it or cut it in half.

“He didn’t have any patience for, ‘Let’s try increasing it by 10%. Let’s try another 10%,’” Reynolds said. “Turns out that’s a pretty good rule of thumb to start with for a game designer, because the typical thing is to be really careful and try to inch up a little bit, and then you have to change it seven times to get it right. If you double it, you’ll immediately feel whether making it stronger was even a good idea.”

Meier: “I guess the next question is, ‘What would you do to try to make the game less fun?’”

The process works. Meier’s games are undoubtedly excellent, to the point where gamers often tell stories about them: “I started playing Civilization at 8pm and then suddenly it was four in the morning” is a common one. The word “addictive” is often thrown around—always with positive connotations, yes, but addiction can be a dangerous thing.

So I was curious, during a chat with Meier. Does he ever worry that his games could have a harmful effect on peoples’ lives?

“The responses we get on the forums, and interacting with players, and talking to people… our impression is that it’s a positive experience. It’s a way of using your leisure time that might otherwise be spent watching television or whatever. It’s a leisure time choice. So our reaction from players has been positive in terms of the time they spent, what they thought they got out of it, how they exercise their brains, and learn things about the world.

“I guess the next question is, ‘What would you do to try to make the game less fun?’ It’s funny—in some of the very early PC game designs, we used to have this ‘boss key,’ which you’d—you’d kinda hit a special key, and a spreadsheet would pop up on the screen so you could pretend you were doing your job. So I guess it’s been a consideration going back even 10 or 20 years. Games are just fun.

“It’s up, with any form of entertainment, it’s up to the player or parents to decide what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate. Our goal is to make the games as fun as we can make them. I think that seems to be what most people are looking for.”

Civilization doesn’t have slaves, and some have criticized the game for that glaring historical omission. It’s a common trend in Meier’s works: although they cover history, they tend to omit the nastier parts. That’s just how Sid Meier makes games. It’s been that way from Civilization to SimGolf to any of the games he’s worked on in the two decades since.

“There’s a conflict between an emotionally-charged topic and kinda giving the player this freedom of choice that really makes the game good,” he said. “One of the things we really try to avoid in our games is this kind of—’this choice would be the right thing to do, but this choice is gonna help me win the game’—put the players in those kind of moral dilemmas. That’s not what our games are about. We want you to feel good about yourself when you finish the game.”

A feel-good, addictive experience with tons of interesting choices: that has become the definition of a “Sid Meier” game. Maybe that’s why they put his name on the box. There’s certainly value to video games that tell focused, morally-challenging stories—last year’s Spec Ops: The Line (published by 2K, the label behind Firaxis’s games) was lauded for just that reason—but Meier doesn’t want to make games like that. He wants to make the type of games that he wants to play.

Yet… to this day, Meier has yet to create a game as memorable or as significant as Civilization. After SimGolf was a remake of Pirates!, and then Meier designed the fourth Railroad Tycoon game, Railroads! Next was the console-friendly Civilization Revolutions, a Facebook game called CivWorld that shut down earlier this year, and Ace Patrol. All of these games, while generally good, have not stuck with people the way his magnum opus has. And although Meier told me he has no regrets—”Except that I didn’t think of Tetris.”—I imagine he must sometimes feel like Civilization is lording over him, daring him to make something with as much of an impact.

“When we made Civilization, it was not with the idea that this was gonna be the greatest game that we’re gonna be remembered by,” Meier said. “It was the best game to make at the time and we thought it was a lot of fun. Each game we make, we kinda go into it with that idea: this is gonna be the best game we can make on that topic. Some of them resonate stronger with game players; maybe some not as much. I don’t have a formula for making a super-memorable game. It’s just that we keep making the best games that we can.”

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12 participants@X

hienz7UJason Schreier

What a great article. Sid is an amazing game designer and I really hope he continues to do what he does.

Also…

I respect Fireaxis for opening my eyes to the most foul, evil, ruthless ruler to ever curse the face of this planet… Gandhi… 6/26/13 12:33pm

Flying_GazzelleUhienz7

Gandhi stole all my cows and then threatened me with elephants. :’(

The world should unite against this menace. 6/26/13 12:44pm

hienz7UFlying_Gazzelle

I found this picture that I believe best demonstrates the atrocity’s committed by this evil menace to world peace. 6/26/13 12:50pm

Flying_Gazzelle and 8 others…

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16 participants@X

smi1eyUJason Schreier

That was a fantastic read, and I don’t even much care for the Civ games. (I tried getting into Civ Rev, then Civ 5, but just couldn’t for whatever reason.) The fact that this dude plays a freaking organ for his church says a lot about his brain. People who plays those things are crazy! I wish there were more people like this rising up in the games industry nowadays. There are some, but the people that revolutionized the industry in the early days surely going to be missed in the future. 6/26/13 12:25pm

pushingrocks2Usmi1ey

Ahhh that’s like saying you tried to get into rap by listening to Vanilla Ice… please try a proper civ game 6/26/13 12:38pm

smi1eyUpushingrocks2

I tried Civ 5. Didn’t enjoy it. Suppose I should have mentioned that in the original post, but that didn’t come to mind since the FIRST game I tried was Civ Rev lol. Oh wow, still able to edit my original post! AMAZING! I added that so I don’t get a zillion comments stating the same thing. :P 6/26/13 12:39pm

PseudoHermes and 12 others…

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melicharmalaiseUJason Schreier

The next expansion for Civ V comes out a week before my wedding.

Sid, you’re a homewrecker. 6/26/13 12:33pm

PseudoHermesUmelicharmalaise

I am pretty down on Civ5, but the new expansion sounds fantastic… archaeology? Researching ancient battle sites? I NEED IT PLEASE 6/26/13 1:12pm

-Silver-Umelicharmalaise

Home-wrecking is one thing, life-wrecking might be up next. With XCOM having been released on iPad and iPhone, I bet it won’t be long before Firaxis move onto Civ V. That game was MADE for touch screen devices. And then… we’ll never be free. At least for now we can leave the house to get away from the game. 6/26/13 1:15pm

bsgk and 6 others…

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5 participants@X

Project ThanatosUJason Schreier

Didn’t Civilization: Call to Power have a slave system? 6/26/13 2:06pm

KittenMasherUProject Thanatos

Civ II: CTP is the only Civ game that doesn’t carry Meier’s name (that I know of). Many don’t consider it to be cannon since its technically an Activision spin off.

Personally it is probably my favorite, since it’s also the only Civ game that has real “future” tech instead of the current era being as advanced as you can get. Also the asymetric warfare (Slavery/Religion/Spies/Corporations) where all really cool and pretty much totally absent from any others. While not a perfect game, it is probably the most creative the series has ever gotten. 6/26/13 4:02pm

Project ThanatosUKittenMasher

I loved the underwater cities and space cities. I wish they’d revisit these in future version.

…that and Alpha Centauri please. 6/26/13 5:14pm

Jecht342 and 1 others…

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BulletmaUJason Schreier

It was somewhat ironic that last night i visited kotaku for what i thought was going to be a short session of light reading before bed but instead found myself up far later than i intended having read a long(ish) artical about a fantastic game that itself has on many occasions kept me awake long after I should have been asleep 6/27/13 1:31pm

Jason SchreierUBulletma

Yesssssssss. 6/27/13 1:33pm

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KillerGymSoxUJason Schreier

i am kind of jealous of the pioneers of video games. Those who have stories to tell and amazing things like getting the whole office hooked on a game you made. 6/26/13 12:50pm

negitoroUKillerGymSox

That can honestly still happen. There’s nothing to say you can’t make a tremendous game nowadays and still have great stories to tell about development.

Sure you lose some of the history setting precedents but I tend to think anytime you have a bunch of likeminded people doing something they all love for months and months on end, interesting stuff happens. 6/28/13 7:43am

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2 participants@X

BestInSlotUJason Schreier

For the love of god… please make a dinosaur game! 6/26/13 12:24pm

hienz7UBestInSlot

that’s what I thought too.

I really hope he makes it work one day. 6/26/13 12:28pm

Jecht342UBestInSlot

I’m not even sure how that would work, but it has dinosaurs, so I agree. 6/26/13 7:02pm

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j4x_UJason Schreier

I’m going to repeat what everyone else here has said: this man is a cornerstone of my video game enthusiasm. I remember dragging my PC into the car and going to my buddy’s house so we could set up and play Civ II next to each other. Constantly watching each other and steadily stepping up the difficulty. That game blew my mind, I was 9 when it came out, it just had such a sense of scale. It was one of the first games I ever played where it felt like I was looking at an entire world.

I flirted with Civ III but don’t entirely remember it. Alpha Centuri… I’m sick of installing mods, how about an expansion pack to 5 that sends us into space with ludicrous twists! Finally bought Civ 5 about a month back and it has consumed the majority of my weeknights since. Can’t wait for the expansion!

Great interview with well-though questions. Hey kids! This is what’s called “game journalism”.

And Sid? Thank you so goddamn much. Also, why do the Spanish always want a war? 6/27/13 12:20am

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jamesbond2198UJason Schreier

This was an excellent article, good job Jason Schreier. 6/26/13 4:35pm

Jason SchreierUjamesbond2198

Thanks! 6/26/13 4:40pm

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Grim_FantangoUJason Schreier

I’ll try not to wax lyrical about the impact Sid has had on gaming and my life in general but…

The man and his team have developed some of my most memorable gaming experiences. I was around when Microprose were a thing and playing Formula 1 and the Civ series enhanced my childhood so much, I feel like I owe them something. It was pointed out in the (brilliant) article that he sometimes omises things from history.

I feel that Sid just wants to make a fun game and doesn’t want to be tied down to some of the ugliness of history. These days that would be copping out or something similar but back then gaming seemed to be a purely fun based form of entertainment. Now where here games can have political undertones and messages.

Either way, the hours of entertainment, learning and pure joy I’ve had with Sid Meier has been unforgettable and I’m glad designers like him were the ones to help shape the early years of gaming.

If he managed to ever pull off that dinosaur prototype and tied it into Civ 6 and finished his career with that then I genuinely believe he would have been the greatest developer to have lived thus far. 6/26/13 5:17pm

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kotaku.com

I Am Not Games Journalism, or: The Limits of Symbiosis

falsegravity.com

I Am Not Games Journalism, or: The Limits of Symbiosis

Posted by Russ on June 21, 2013

I spend a lot of time with game developers.

This should not come as a surprise, but I know a lot of game journalists who don’t actually do this, so maybe it will be. And, to be fair, the internet has made a lot of things possible that once seemed magical. Like reporting on an industry which you never physically observe. OK. It’s a valid strategy. Just not mine.

So I spend a lot of time with game developers. I would even go so far as to say that some people who make games are people I would call friends. But here’s the thing: I am not one of them.

Multiple developers have told me over the years some variation of the following: “You should be more careful how you write about us, or interact with us, because we are all in this industry together.”

This is bullshit.

I can understand how someone could come to this conclusion. This is a small industry, and we all spend a lot of time around each other (unless you don’t, see above). As journalists, we get our bread from reporting on what developers do. Games journalism is, at the end of the day, a product-focused field. It is dependent on the existence of the product. Therefore, it makes a sort of logical sense to conclude that games journalism, as a nebulous whole, is dependent on games development.

While that may be fair, here’s the thing: I am not games journalism.

Let’s take a thought journey. Imagine you’re a developer of video games and suddenly, some day, games magically disappear. Like, from all existence entirely. Boom. No games. They no longer do, nor did they ever, exist. It was all a dream. What then?

If you are a game developer, your job ceases to exist. What do you do? This is a wildly impossible hypothetical, so it’s similarly impossible to answer the question with any degree of clarity, but one would have to assume (if one were playing along) that each individual game developer would end up on a different path according to their talents and tastes.

Game artists, for example, might end up making art for films or books or road signs. Game writers would end up doing similar things (minus the road signs). Level designers are actually problem solvers, and so could end up doing multiple other jobs. And so forth. Each person may or may not miss their (now anachronistic) former career in games development, but given the vast ocean of possibilities for talented, creative and smart individuals to make a living, I feel confident suggesting they would all be OK.

In a world without games, then, the people who make games would do other things. This is not a controversial opinion.

So what does a game journalist do in a world without video games? Well, if they’re a journalist of any competence, we must assume they could also journal about things that aren’t games. Or wash cars. Or whatever.

Point being, because I write about you does not mean I depend on you, the people who make games. If I wasn’t writing about Developer A, I’d be writing about Developer B. (And this is not idle speculation. We get turned down for interview requests all the time.) If all developers suddenly vanished, I’d be writing about something else.

This is no different from the assumption that game makers can make other things, and yet, in our industry, it’s a controversial opinion. Why, you may ask? I’ll tell you. It’s because a lot of people in our industry are full of shit.

You, as a game developer, are not my meal ticket. You are someone that I observe and try to understand and relate to people who want to know more about you. You are a fascinating and inspiring subject. You are a person living in a world that is magical to the people outside of it, and someone I take a great deal of pleasure in getting to know — and allowing my readers to get to know, through me. Occasionally, you are even a friend. But you are not my colleague.

Worth repeating: You are not my colleague. Nor am I yours.

I think most of the people who say that the journalism depends on the development understand this difference. Game developers are, by definition, pretty smart. While it is possible that some game developers actually do consider journalists to be in the same business as they are, but slightly to the side, or perhaps underneath, I don’t think that’s a widely-held belief. Not in so far as saying, “we’re literally in this together, so do what I say or else.” I think the people who genuinely hold this belief are easily spotted and avoided, and we all kind of know who they are.

I also think that most of the people who say things like “we need each other” are actually trying to say something else. I think they’re trying to say: “Take it easy on us, because we do this out of love and so do you, and you have the power to do us a lot of harm and that would be bad for both of us.” And believe me, I understand this and I’m not unsympathetic.

For as much talk as exists about how much money there is in making video games, I know that most of the people who actually work on the ground level could make a lot more money doing other things, but choose to work in games because of their passion and love for the medium. So there is a certain logic to the suggestion that, as passionate fans ourselves, we should consider ourselves a part of the industry and, so, “take it easy” on the people who make the games.

And yet, Journalism.

I consider myself a journalist first, and a game journalist second. And as much as I love the products of this industry and respect and admire and even care for the people who make them, I can’t go along with the idea that we are in the same business. Because we’re not. Developers make games, and I make journalism. We work near each other, but not with each other. And no matter how interdependent we may be on paper, we will always have dissimilar — and at times opposite — goals.

Developers and journalists work side-by-side and often in tandem, but we must also occasionally work in different directions. I am reminded of this every time I’m turned down for an interview only to see it show up somewhere else. Or when I see one of the story proposals I’ve pitched to a game company’s PR representative come back across my desk as an invitation to a press event that sounds amazingly similar to what I proposed, only with the added benefit of my competitors also being invited. Or when I am warned in harsh whispers, by a close friend, that they can’t be seen speaking to me or they’ll lose their job. Or when the head of a game company flat out lies to me because telling me the truth would be harmful to their business.

I am a journalist. They are game makers. We have different goals and strategies and that is as it should be, even when it causes pain.

I know that people who make games suffer when they see embarrassing news stories come to light. I know that their lives might be more pain-free if they didn’t have to answer to or defend against journalists. I know that many would greatly prefer if journalists actually did work for or with them and shared the same goals and strategies.

I also know that game developers are not alone in feeling this way. Politicians and Hollywood producers and sport figures and kings have all felt the same thing. Journalism is not designed to be their friend, even when it exists to primarily promote their products. I’d say especially then.

**

I was given a remarkable opportunity recently by Hidden Path Entertainment to visit their studio in Seattle and observe everything that happens there over the course of a one-year game development cycle. All on record. My report on this will be published at Polygon, in pieces, over the course of the next several months. Part One is up now.

Making this offer took an amazing amount of courage on the part of Hidden Path, and I have an enormous amount of respect for the members of that company for agreeing to let me in. But the most important part of our agreement (to me) is that even though I am embedding in the studio for days or weeks at a time, taking meals with them, getting to know them and even hanging out with them, they understand that I am not their business partner. They understand (and accept) that I am a journalist, and I am there to report on as much of the bad as the good. That even though I might come to like each individual a great deal, I am ultimately there to relate to my audience the true story of what is happening, not the version Hidden Path would have paid me to write. And when Hidden Path told me it wouldn’t have me there under any other terms was the exact moment I agreed to the assignment.

One could say that because I’m working closely with Hidden Path on this story, and that I wouldn’t have a story to write without its work or even permission, I should “go easy” on Hidden Path or consider we are part of the same industry, and attempt to build them up even if the truth didn’t reflect that point of view. I’m not going to do that.

The good news is that Hidden Path actually is a remarkable company, and the people who work there are fascinating. Telling the true story about their studio and game will not be a struggle for me, and after having spent a good deal of time with them already, I dont expect for it to be a painful experience for them, either. Although, who knows. This is game development. If shit goes sideways and I’m there to see it, that could be a difficult day. But they’re open to that possibility and ready to accept whatever comes of it, and I cannot overstate how much I admire them for that courage. I’m looking forward to sharing more of their stories in the months ahead.

Thing is though, if Hidden Path had told me it wanted me to “take it easy” or avoid certain topics or clear my copy through the company before filing or be sure to hit certain bullet points, or whatever, I wouldn’t be there. I wouldn’t be writing the story. That would be marketing and I am not a marketer.

I am a journalist. I am there to tell a story. I like telling stories. They have a story they’d like to have told. We are working in symbiosis only so far as those goals align.

To suggest our relationship is anything more is bullshit. And to anyone who thinks that it should be any other way, I’m sorry, but you’re dead wrong.

No AAK Podcast This Week, Will Continue Next

Posted by Russ on January 5, 2012

Due to the @VoxGmes announcement craziness, I didn’t have time to do an AAK podcast this week. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that my new job with Vox will not prevent me from continuing to do the AAK podcast. So look forward to more of those for the foreseeable future. Starting next week, when my good friend and polar opposite Shawn Andrich returns.

falsegravity.com

Infinite Lives » I get angry, too

infinitelives.net

«  This week’s quicknotes: Feminist Frequency, horror movies, and toys for tots | Let’s play: ‘Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise’ »

I get angry, too

Jenn Frank · June 23, 2013 · Filed under Personal Essay

Recently, online, I picked a battle that isn’t mine to pick. Relief finally came in the form of an email. “My wife and I are Quaker,” the letter-writer explained; I was immediately overwhelmed.

My mother never identified Quaker as such, but when she was new to Christianity she was mentored by a Quaker, by a man called John Steiner. She spoke of this person a lot. She took certain ideals to heart and, although she would certainly tell you that her message, as transmitted to me, got all mixed up, some ideals really did glom onto me. I am anti-war; I am terribly conflict-averse; I believe in compassion and inclusion. I still identify as Christian—and make no mistake, I have several crises of faith in a single day—but none of those crises has anything to do with whether God, as I interpret Him, composed human beings lovingly in His own image. (Mostly my crises are about me being a shitty person. I am trying to learn to become more patient with myself.)

Principally, though, I am terrified of my own anger. Very few people have witnessed it, but they can tell you it’s an ugly, remarkable thing, a thing that gets away from me before I can grab back onto it and rein it to shore again. Like most people, I figure, my anger usually has something to do with an issue of “justice.” When I have been at my very angriest, my mother used to sigh—oh, my mother!—and warn me, “Jenny, don’t talk to people that way.” Now, here in her shadow, I am beginning to think she is right.

I understand the argument against “tone arguments.” I also hate tone arguments. It’s usually an unfair thing, this gambit is, demanding the other person sacrifice all emotion—indeed, all humanity—for the sake of being “calm,” “reasonable,” “rational.” These are loaded terms, denying a speaker all the emotion—which is, absolutely, another type of data, what we call “experiential data”—he or she is feeling. Women especially are socialized to couch their assertions of opinion with words like “I am beginning to think” or “sometimes I get the feeling,” which are all ways of preemptively apologizing for holding any opinion or valueset at all. Even now I’m using a type of passive speech, as a defense mechanism, certainly, so you will not feel like hitting me.

As we slowly open up and allow ourselves to discuss a hostile tech culture—or any hostile culture—it’s easy to use hostile language ourselves. This, I think, may be a mistake. If we are to make ourselves understood, I do think there is great value in “tone” as mediator. It would be peculiar if we ran around shouting, for instance, at little children, at hotel receptionists.

I don’t mean to diminish the concept of “righteous indignation,” either—righteous, because we are in the Right, and indignation because we recognize we or someone else is being disabused of human dignity. But bad behavior is not always the same thing as bad people, and “righteous indignation” is not the same as blind fury. We speak to one another with respect because we want to preserve dignity for all.

“We have many new tools to communicate,” Professor Michael Abbott writes, “but our powerful tools have outpaced our abilities to harness them responsibly. It’s just so easy to be mean.”

I would take it a step further: when a writer or speaker becomes mean, is the motive to inspire change in the person she or he is addressing? Or is the intent only to make an example of the person? I’ve been guilty of the latter (even very recently!). But to dress down individuals, make it personal—even if the person is not necessarily someone we’d enjoy lunch with—seems vindictive and cruel. Because it’s almost never the person; it’s the pattern of behavior that is the real problem. To that end, we are all, indeed, victims of our own culture.

This is all hypocritical of me to say: of course I have been uncompromising at times, and so I have been brash. I owe some apologies. But when I first decided to identify as “feminist,” I had to ask myself if I were also comfortable with friends and colleagues holding me up as an example of What Not to Say—could I be comfortable with being made an-example-of myself? I’ve continued to mull over it, and I guess I am.

I think I believe the human heart, like video games themselves, has the capacity to change other hearts and minds. The heart is made up of a lot of things—anger, fear, experience—but it is also an aggressive agent of love. Maybe I am saying this way works better for me: that anger can work but, for me, it almost never has.

For my own part, though, I believe the heart and mind should be used holistically. I believe video games are the most compassionate integration of the two because they extend to your listener, as a sort of olive branch, the opportunity to walk in other shoes for minutes or hours at a time.

[Image source: Brain Pickings – Helen Keller on Optimism]

Postscript (added): I feel like changes happen in two ways. They happen either in subcultures or in the mainstream, which are two potentially wildly-differing tacks. The first issue of Memory Insufficient, edited by Zoya Street, brings together some of the smartest writers working in games to talk about gender and queerness. Meanwhile, to mainstream outlets, doctoral candidate Samantha Allen presents this worthwhile challenge.

On a micro and macro level, both defy the “norm.” Street brings a higher caliber of writing to groups under- or mis-represented, while Allen asks the mainstream to enforce a civility of discourse.

For my own part, I guess I’m still not clear on which group I’m in—subculture or mainstream—and in any given moment I struggle to understand whom my message is directed toward. Probably the answer is, not “up the middle,” but just kind of both. It’s hard for me. I’m still negotiating it. But that does not, will not, change my message, which is one of advocacy and faith in change.

About Jenn Frank:
Jenn thinks the Atari 2600, Game Boy Micro, and Apple iPhone are all viable game consoles. Email her at jenn at infinite lives dot net.

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infinitelives.net

Five Things I Learned About Game Criticism In Nine Years At PC Gamer, by Tom Francis

pentadact.com

TOM FRANCIS REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Hello! I’m Tom, I designed and wrote a game called Gunpoint. I’ve also written things for PC Gamer, I sometimes write short stories and stuff, and I like figuring out how to be happy.

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Five Things I Learned About Game Criticism In Nine Years At PC Gamer

However bad at games writing I might be now, I was a lot worse when I started at PC Gamer nine years ago. When I first applied, my sample piece was so bad I didn’t even get an interview. I was hired as a coverdisc editor a few months later, and spent two years trying to worm my way into a writing job by volunteering for every piece I could get.

The editors gave me much-needed feedback, and when they didn’t have time, I’d study the printed version of my stuff to see how they’d changed it and learn from that. And I learned a lot just by being around the editing process: listening to people critique new writers, discuss what second drafts needed, and talk analytically about games writing without the writer present.

At some point, my stuff stopped coming back to me for changes. And at some point after that, I was involved in deciding what our standards should be. They became a shared set of beliefs between me and my friends, ones we’d tweak and discuss in the pub at the end of every week.

I’ve just finished tidying up after my PC Gamer leaving party. I’ll still be writing about games, but I’m at the end of my full-time career. So in case it’s of use to anyone, I’ll pick out the five most important things I learned about game criticism in the last nine years. They’re all rules I’ve broken, but they’re the ones I try to break less often as time goes on.

1. Get to the point

The reader doesn’t know who the fuck you are, what the fuck this is, or why the fuck they should care. At least, you’ll write better if you work on that assumption.

They certainly can’t read everything, so it pays to respect the attention they’ve decided to give you. And you can do that by telling them what the fuck this is and why the fuck they should care right away.

The two ways to treat a reader are: “I am important” or: “You are important.” Some readers do like the first. But for me, if your videogame review starts with the words “When I was six,” I rub my forehead and quietly close the tab.

2. Write like a person

The most common problem with early pieces by a new writer, myself included, is when they try to show off. It’s as if they put what they want to say through Google Translate set to ‘Professional Games Journalist’, and like Google Translate, what comes out is often painfully awkward.

Don’t translate it. Just tell me, the way you’d tell a friend.

“The latest title in the Splinter Cell franchise…”
Don’t write like a suit.

“Bursting onto the scene with silenced pistols blazing, Sam Fisher is back in his new adventure…”
Don’t write like a twat.

“The new Splinter Cell game…”
Write like a person.

3. Share your experience

It’s tempting to think you should summarise your time with a game, share the judgements you came to rather than the events that formed them. But giving specific examples is dramatically better in every way. They give a much more colourful picture of what the game’s like to play than any overall description could; they illustrate more about your point than you could ever articulate in the abstract; and as a bonus, they also make me believe you.

The combat’s satisfying? Describe a fight you found satisfying! Tell me what happened in it. That way I know a) exactly what you mean by ‘satisfying’, and b) whether it’s the kind of thing I would find satisfying.

It’s even more important for criticism, particularly if it’s a game I’m excited about. If you tell me Dishonored makes it awkward to play non-lethally, I think you probably just suck. But if you tell me you left an unconscious guard on a doorstep and he died because the ragdoll slipped six inches to the ground, I think “Jesus, yeah, that’s bullshit.” We’ve shared your experience, and I’m on your side.

4. Phrase with intent

The game gives you a “dizzying array” of options? Is that exactly what you mean, that the array caused you to feel dizzy? Or is that just the word you’re used to hearing before ‘array’?

If you reach just a bit further for the word that really matches what you felt, the phrase you use will stand out. It’s not the word I’m used to hearing, so I pay attention to the one you chose to use instead, because I realise you must have put some thought into it. That makes me picture it, and I follow you much more clearly and vividly.

5. Keep some perspective

When you know exactly what’s wrong with some element of the game, and you know exactly how to say it, it’s natural to say it. But your objective isn’t just a list of valid points about the game. The objective is to understand why a game works or doesn’t, and spend your wordcount on the stuff that really matters.

Keep checking: is this really the most important thing still unsaid? If it’s praise, is it really the fundamental source of your enjoyment? If it’s criticism, is it really what’s limiting or spoiling the game? If you changed that one thing, how would you feel about the game?

I want to rant for three paragraphs every time a multiplatform game has glitchy mouse behaviour in its menus. But if they fixed it, it wouldn’t change my score.

I could write essays about the heavy clatter your crowbar makes in Half-Life 2 if you dodge when Barney throws it to you. But if they took that out, it’d be the same game. If they took out the Gravity Gun, different story.

Next

Since I’m preaching being specific and giving examples, tomorrow I’ll take a chunk of something I wrote recently and pick it apart to show how this applies. Links below if you wanna hear about that when it goes up.

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Hit Self-Destruct: Raising Kane

hitselfdestruct.com

You might not have thought so, but “the Citizen Kane of video games” is something that you throw around lightly.

In video game criticism, Citizen Kane is a favourite topic. Game critics seem to harbour a collective obsession with identifying the one video game that can truly be called the Citizen Kane of video games: meaning, a video game as significant to its medium as Orson Welles’ 1941 classic was to cinema. It’s implied that the Citizen Kane of video games, when it arrives, will mark the moment that video games shift gears from flashy entertainment up to legitimate, capital-A Art.

Metroid Prime, Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid, Bioshock and The Last of Us, to name a few, have all been nominated as the Citizen Kane of video games; though the fact that the comparison is still being made would suggest that it’s none of those. This mocking Tumblr offers many more examples.

It’s fair to say that through overuse, “Citizen Kane of video games” has become a rhetorical cliché, perpetuated by writers and reviewers as an illusive and ultimately meaningless milestone for the video game industry. So long as there’s no way to conclusively settle the question, the guessing will probably continue.

Who could say for sure, though? Who could put this issue to bed once and for all? It’d have to be someone whose word everyone could accept as definitive on the subject of Citizen Kane. That’s not me; I admit that. Nor is it any critic or writer I can think of. If only we could ask Orson Welles himself! But Welles, who passed away in 1985, unfortunately cannot be contacted.

Or can he?

The Ouija board, or “talking board”, is a common tool for communing with the spirit world. Séance participants place their fingers upon the planchette - a wooden pointer - and a spirit, once summoned, subtly guides the fingertips, moving the planchette over the board to spell out messages. The spirit may wish to tell you who it was and how it died, or what the Citizen Kane of video games is.

Interestingly, the Ouija board was manufactured for the mass market by Parker Brothers, publishers of the classic board games Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit and Risk. Who knows which of the Parker Brothers was the weirdo into stuff like this. Perhaps an off-kilter Parker “cousin”, who came back from college with long hair and a denim jacket, and tried to get the Parker Brothers to hotbox in his Camaro.

In the United States, the Ouija board is available at major toy and department stores. Not so in my United Kingdom, where I had to buy a board on eBay. eBay, it turns out, hosts a thriving cottage industry of homemade Ouija boards. A popular model is a large, circular board with its letters shunted to the edge to accommodate a portrait of a majestic wolf. I opted for the board you see in the photo above: tasteful, decorated in black and gold and festooned with the signs of the Zodiac. I admit to being skeptical about whether a homemade Ouija board would possess the same spiritual energy guaranteed by the Parker Brothers’ corporate logo, but the homemade one was cheaper.

I don’t know if you’ve ever asked somebody if you can come to their house to summon the spirit of Orson Welles via Ouija board. My friend Alex, would you believe, did not jump at the chance when I offered it to him. He relented, though, and one Wednesday night we found ourselves around his living room table constructing a candle-lit, paranormal shrine to Orson Welles, Citizen Kane himself.

In the photo above, you’ll notice DVDs of Touch of Evil and, underneath, The Third Man, which I placed there as totems to attract Welles’ roving ghost. It’s also customary to offer the spirit some physical sustenance. Given the video game-focused nature of my inquiry, I chose to offer Welles Mountain Dew and Doritos because of their unprecedented brand synergy with Microsoft’s Xbox and by extension, video games as an industry. I wrote “For Orson” on the bottle of Dew so that there could be no confusion.

Proper Ouija procedure is important. For example, you mustn’t drink alcohol, as this increases the chances of accidentally summoning an “evil” spirit, like maybe a Leni Riefenstahl. You also shouldn’t insult the spirit, so I instructed Alex not to call Orson Welles a fatty or joke about the outtakes from his frozen pea commercials. Welles, for all his talent, doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to laugh at himself.

With all other preparations undertaken, Alex and I set our fingers on the planchette and touched knees under the table to increase “energy flow”. I began my invocation.

“Hello.

“I would like to speak to George Orson Welles, commonly known as Orson Welles, who was born on May 6, 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and who died on October 10, 1985 in Los Angeles. I would like to speak to the Orson Welles who was an influential figure in cinema, theatre and radio, responsible for the esteemed films Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, The Magnificent Ambersons and F for Fake, among a host of others.

“I have here copies of Orson’s movies Touch of Evil and The Third Man. They are on DVD, which is a new technology. The picture and sound quality are very good. I also offer Orson’s spirit a gift of Mountain Dew and Chilli Heatwave Doritos. I have opened the Doritos packet for him a little bit.

“Please only communicate using the board. Otherwise I will have to ask Orson Welles to leave.

“Am I speaking to Orson Welles?”

Nothing happened.

I wasn’t sure what could be the problem. Alex pointed out that I hadn’t opened the bottle of Mountain Dew as I had the packet of Doritos. Not wanting to take my hand off the planchette, I wrenched the bottle open with my teeth, and put it back on the table so its smell might better entice Orson.

Time passed. We read the back of the DVD cases for inspiration and meditation on Welles’ spirit. We then grew bored and discussed what we thought about season four of Arrested Development.

“If you don’t want to eat these Doritos,” I warned the board, “I’m just going to throw them out.”

After ten minutes of silence, I repeated my question. “Are you there?” And finally, the planchette began to move under our fingers, very slowly, across the rows of symbols.

2
Two? I didn’t know what that meant. “Is this Orson Welles?” I asked.

The planchette moved to the Zodiac symbol for Pisces.
“Are you saying you are a Pisces?”

Cancer
We paused to look up whether Orson Welles was born either a Pisces or a Cancer. This took a long time, and it turned out that he was neither.

“What are you trying to say?” The planchette set off again.

L
E
R
V
G
“Are you illiterate?” I shouted at the board.

U
H
I’d had enough. “No more bullshit. Are you Orson Welles?”

Yes
“Okay. Mr. Welles,” I say slowly, as if speaking to the spirit of a small child. “I have called you here to ask one question.” My voice wavered, as I realised I’d been waiting to ask this question for my entire adult life. “As the star… and co-writer… and director… of the seminal 1941 film Citizen Kane, what… in your opinion… is the Citizen Kane… of video games?”

The planchette moved.

R
R. It starts with an ‘R’. The Citizen Kane of video games starts with an ‘R’!

E

RE. “Maybe he’s going to say Rebel Assault,” I whispered to Alex.

B

REB. What else could he be spelling? We racked our brains: Reborn? Rebirth? Was Welles ignoring the question and trying to tell us that he wanted to be reborn? That’s more than we really wanted to deal with.

L
S

My heart raced.

A
T

REBLSAT. “He’s saying Rebel Assault!” I whispered urgently. “That has to mean Rebel Assault!” But which Rebel Assault? There were two.
2

Alex and I exchanged looks. “Are you saying Rebel Assault II is the Citizen Kane of video games?” I asked Welles.

Yes

“Well… why?”

G
R

Gr… graphics? Because of Rebel Assault II’s graphics?

D

Not the graphics then.

S
T
F

GRDSTF? What does that mean? Grad staff? Grand staff? Is he saying that the LucasArts team that developed Rebel Assault II was a grand staff? Or grand stuff? Like he’s just affirming that Rebel Assault II was “grand stuff”?

Alex suggested that “grand stuff” was consistent with the kind of thing Welles might have said in his life, being a man from olden days. He’s right that it’s easy to imagine the Orson Welles pictured below, bearded and orotund, offering a terse “Grand stuff” as a grudging endorsement.

But why Rebel Assault II? The game is remembered, if it’s remembered at all, as a rare misfire from LucasArts’ golden age. Released in 1995 - the period in which LucasArts was still known for making untouchable adventure games like Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Full Throttle, and quality Star Wars titles like Dark Forces, X-Wing and TIE Fighter - Rebel Assault II disappointed. It’s not even the best of the Rebel Assault games. Alex and I, who each played Rebel Assault II as children, clearly remembered being let down by the game’s weird blend of risible full motion video, simplistic arcade shooting and wildly imprecise flying sequences.
In our confusion, I realised I had yet to dismiss Welles’ spirit from Alex’s living room. “You can leave now, if you’re ready,” I told him. I’d been warned that once summoned, some spirits don’t want to leave, and I was prepared for what to do in case Orson refused to

Goodbye
Just like that, Orson had gone, and the portal was closed.

Why does Orson Welles like Rebel Assault II so much? I confess that his reasoning still eludes me. Perhaps because Rebel Assault II, with all its full motion video is in many ways a movie, and thus something he felt he understood? I don’t know. But Orson Welles knows, I suppose, and perhaps that is enough.

Afterwards, once we’d turned the lights back on and I’d cleared away the Ouija materials, Alex found a 40-minute YouTube montage of Rebel Assault II scenes on his iPhone. We watched the video and ate from the packet of Chilli Heatwave Doritos. All in all, it was a pretty enjoyable evening. GRDSTF, some might say.

hitselfdestruct.com

Falling off the edge of the world

loseyourway.net

Falling off the edge of the world

Posted on 130625 by droqen

Games are finite, and we consume them. We gobble them up whole and utterly destroy them.

I am going to keep this blog post short — I promise.

The other day I was playing the Undertale Demo (it’s amazing, by the way), and I did something bad. I made some bad decisions because I thought it’s what I had to do, and I took several long minutes to consider my actions. I thought it’s what I had to do — but maybe I should have tried harder not to do it — but I’d done something irreversible and changed the world. I walked around for a while.

“let me guess, you [got the bad ending]?”

The friend who had showed me the game asked me this question — and my suspension of disbelief fell away. Of course, this was a game and it had all been designed. Either things had to turn out this way (in which case I did not make the choice) or things could turn out differently (in which case I’d be an idiot to knowingly accept the ‘bad end.’) I don’t want you to feel bad, friend who I’m talking about! You only made me acutely aware of how easily the edges are exposed and how difficult it would be to obscure them. You tipped some dominoes in my brain. And, of course, you showed me the game in the first place.

Almost everything has a completed state: a depleted state. Until recently it seemed as though everything was gravitating towards easy completionism; “We don’t want players to feel as though they can’t experience all of the content they paid for” is a slippery slope towards “We don’t want players to have their own experience.” If there are ten thousand ways to flavour an experience but you won’t be satisfied until you’ve tasted them all, we will all have one experience.

I’m not proposing a solution, or even claiming this is, necessarily, a problem. But I know I don’t like it when my hand feels forced — by a game having one ‘best ending,’ or by a level having one ‘best solution’ I’m meant to be aiming for, etc. — to experience something in one particular way. I know that, as a player, it’s often my fault, too.

I didn’t enjoy Gunpoint very much because I was trying to get the highest score when I should have been trying to enjoy myself more. I didn’t enjoy XCOM (the new one) as much as when I played from the perspective of one character, and treated the deaths of other characters as necessary, if tragic, losses of comrades — and not as imperfections in the way I was playing. If I’d done everything in my power to find absolutely everything in Fez, I doubt I would have liked it as much. I want to stop knowing what will happen in Animal Crossing, so that I can enjoy what is happening a little more.

I’ve learned to want everything, when sometimes I’d rather have something a little better.

loseyourway.net

In The Games Of Madness: Thoughts on The Last of Us

frictionalgames.blogspot.de

I have now finished playing The Last of Us and feel it has quite a few things worth discussing. Overall it is a great game and there is a lot that can be learnt from it. Especially noteworthy are the nerve wrecking encounters. When at its best they top even the ones in Resident Evil 4 (2005), which I think features some of the best action gameplay ever. It also manages to use just about every trick in the book to tell its story. It is a very solid package and masterfully crafted. At the same time, while wrapped in an emotional plot, it is really just a game about combat and part of, what I think is, a worrying trend in video game storytelling. Before The Last of Us can be properly analyzed, we need to go back to the early days of the game industry. At the beginning of videogame history, games were just about doing a few simple actions over and over. These games did not have a recognizable story as such, but simply provided a rough context for the action. In Asteroids (1979) the visuals consisted of simplistic line drawings, but in the mind of the players they controlled a spaceship blasting incoming chunks of rock. While this thin veneer of story was not really important for the game as such, it greatly enhanced the experience. This was clearly shown in early advertisements where the screenshots are small and concept art showing off this fantasy takes up most of the space.

For the remainder of this article I will refer to this extra high-level concept as the story layer. This essentially refers to any part that does not directly support the core gameplay but is there only there to add an extra sense of purpose and narrative. Important to note is that the gameplay can still incorporate parts of the game’s story; all of the narrative experience does not reside in the story layer. While these high level concepts were (and often still are) very simplistic, it is pretty clear that they are essential. There are very few games that do not share this quality and just go 100% abstract. Even a weird game like pacman has some form of story layer to it. This slowly gave rise to storytelling in action games. Rudimentary plots were added, for instance a summary of the background story at the start, and this eventually expanded to cutscenes in between the levels. The extra story content was not connected to the gameplay as such but simply provided context and rewards. But while it did not directly influence the gameplay in any meaningful way, cutscenes and an explicit plot could still improve the feel of the game. The biggest evolution in storytelling came from Another World (1991) where the story layer and gameplay fit almost flawlessly into one another. No longer were the narrative elements superficial, but instead carefully ingrained with the gameplay. Actions that were made in gameplay smoothly transitioned into a cutscene and vice versa. The interactive scenarios were also carefully designed in order to make sense in the games story. Despite this tight coupling, it is important to point out that the focus of all gameplay segments was still about challenge and “fun”. The game contained a number of mechanics and each section tested the player’s skill in one or more of these. While the non-interactive plot elements improved the experience, they were still not crucial. Were the story layer to be taken way, the gameplay sections would still work fine in their own right . Another World was a ahead of its time and it took a lot of years before the rest of the industry got up to speed. But when it did, the idea to close the gap between the gameplay and the story layer really caught on. Earlier, the story layer had mostly been seen as an extra, but ultimately superfluous, feature. But it rose in prominence, and was seen as increasingly crucial. Along the way, a host of new ways to add a story layer emerged. The audio logs from System Shock (1994), in-game cutscene from Half Life (1998) and the omnipresent narrator from Portal (2007) are probably the most important ones. All of these provided tools to merge the two conflicting elements. Along the way, the complexity and maturity of the story layers increased as well. Even though modern action games now come with a wide variety of stories, the basic format is still the same as in the early days. The player is given a narrow set of mechanics that needs to be skillfully used in order overcome the challenges provided. On top of this is an extra narrative wrapping, the story layer, that helps shape the experience into something more meaningful. This is a recipe that most recent high profile games use, including Dead Space (2008), Uncharted (2007), Tomb Raider (2013), Halo 4 (2012), Portal 2 (2011), Bioshock (2007), and many more. Here is where The Last of Us comes in; it is the latest step in this evolution. It is probably also the game that, so far, managed marry the gameplay and the story layer most elegantly. This makes it into an emotional journey, but it is crucial to remember its pedigree. It is still an action game with an additional story layer. Just like a number of recent games with narrative ambitions, e.g. Spec Ops (2012) and Hotline Miami (2012), it takes the gameplay as a starting point for the story. This is different from a game like Uncharted where the high concept came first. In Uncharted’s case it was to replicate an Indiana Jones-like adventure movie. Because of this, the gameplay’s need for constant bloodshed has a hard time fitting the happenings in the story layer. This caused a very noticeable discrepancy in the game’s narrative, the so called “ludonarrative dissonance”. The game’s protagonist would slaughter hundreds of people and afterwards crack a joke and worry about his relationships. But in a game like Last Of Us, the violent gameplay is taken as a given and the whole world shaped accordingly. The game is set in a story where butchering hundreds of people makes sense, giving the holistic experience a strong feeling of consistency. There are still a few problems between of the story layer and the gameplay, but on the whole the played narrative is quite coherent. It has been rightly celebrated for doing this, but few voices have been raised by the troubling development it is part of. If we agree that The Last of Us represent a high note of videogame storytelling, an example to follow, then our boundaries for telling stories are very narrow indeed. The game has a lot in common with the recent Spec Ops: The Line. Both feature a dog-eat-dog world, takes place in the destroyed remains of a city, and have you play as violent and deranged characters with no qualms about butchering countless people. Both of these games have also been praised for their mature and intelligent storytelling. And sure, they both feature deep and nicely portrayed characters, but what it all really boils down to are neat ways to justify a lot of violence. If this represent the future of videogame storytelling, then we are doomed to play as broken, murderous protagonists living in worlds populated by antagonists. When faced with the problem of reconciling a character like Uncharted’s Nathan Drake with the massive violence, the proposed solution is simply to make the character better fit with the killing. I find this close to giving up on the problem altogether. In a way games like Uncharted are, despite their gameplay and story layer discrepancy, much more interesting as they try to be about something other than raw survival. Embracing that videogames is all about violence feels very cynical and uninspiring to me. It is also crucial to keep in mind that the core gameplay has not changed much over the years. These games are still about doing a few actions over and over. When these actions do connect to the story, like they do in both Spec Ops and The Last of Us, it is not so much because they are proper narrative devices, but that the story has been shaped to fit with them. The repetitive action is still king, the need to have a massive body count is still a must. This is not bad as such, I thought Last of Us was a great action game. But, I have problems with it being seen as good interactive storytelling, it is really just good usage of the story layer. This might seem like play of words, but there is an important aspect to have in mind: Like games of the past, The Last of Us would have worked very well with its story layer removed.
When taking a closer look at The Last of Us, it’s action heritage is quite evident. It is very clear that at the core lies a straightforward game about looting, sneaking and killing enemies. Here are a couple of examples:

The goal of the player is always to go forward to a place highlighted early on. Once there, a cutscene takes over and reminds you of your next goal. It is basically a modern incarnation of the the ancient “walk left to right”-mechanic.

Every non-combat challenge of the game is a combination of a few simple elements: ladders, planks, pushable dumpsters, floating pallets and generators, all used in predictable and streamlined ways. This is typical of what you see in old actions games; there are a few well tested puzzle devices that gets reused throughout the game.

During gameplay, NPCs turn into combat objects and are streamlined to support the action above everything else. This is evident in how they do not affect your ability to sneak, can stand a lot more damage than the protagonist, have infinite ammo supplies, etc.

The game features plenty of looting and crafting which is just a revamp of what we have seen in Dead Space, Resident Evil 4, and many more. It is there to give the player something to do when going through the world and is used as a way to provide more variety to the combat. 

Environments where combat encounters occur are almost always crafted in such a way that it is possibly to know that a fight will ensue long before it actually happens. Strategically scattered bottles, carefully placed cover spots and early depots of ammo are among the things that hint that the game is now all about making sure the core mechanics of an encounter work.

There is more that can be pointed out here, but I think this is enough. The takeaway is that this is the core of the game; all of these elements are what sum up the game’s underpinnings and what provides the central experience. I think it is an incredibly important point. Before we speak of the game as some highpoint in storytelling we must realize where it comes from - it is an old fashioned action game. And if we do not realize this, we will be stuck in a dead end, because there is not much in terms of storytelling that can be done with this. The Last of Us probably represent as far as you can go with stories that are based on this foundation. This is when things get interesting. We can now see that the emotional narrative is not part of core gameplay, but comes from a totally different direction. Here The Last of Us has a lot that can be learned from and be inspired by.
First of all, the game uses just about every trick in the book to get the story across outside of the cutscenes. And not only that, pretty much every one of these elements has an excellent implementation:

Notes. The game feature scattered diaries, audio logs, manifests, letters and more, almost all of which have believable content and placement. They also have great length so they feel very fluent to pick up and read through. 

Overheard conversation. This can either come from hostiles in combat situations or from the characters in one of the few non-violent section with other people. They are effectively used both to convey the state of the world and to give more information about the characters.

In-game cutscenes. In a few areas, events takes place as you walk past them. For instance, at one location the military can be seen rounding up infected people. And if you go in for a closer look, the armed personnel act accordingly and push you away. This makes the scene feel alive instead of becoming some kind of carnival ride (as was the case Bioshock: Infinite (2013),  for instance). What I also think makes them work is that the game use these events sparingly and make sure they happen in appropriate places. For instance, in the above military scene it makes perfect sense why the player cannot get close to the civilians.

Artifacts. Various artifacts can be picked up that tell something about the world. These are things like maps, dog tags, photos, etc. All help to build up setting and are lot easier to fit in than notes (which easily feel contrived).

Protagonist and partner banter. As you walk through the environment there are conversations back and forth between the protagonist and his partner (for most of the game a teenage girl). This is also one of the few places where some of the responsibility is placed on the player. Once a conversation starts, the protagonist can be made to go off in whichever way; it is up to the player to act in a way that makes sense. Because of this a lot more and varied content can be put in these dialogs.

Graffiti and billboards. Here and there, texts are placed on the walls that help explain what has happened to a place or to just give some more texture to the environment. Survivors scratch words of warning, a settlement have lists rules and so forth.

Environments. The environments themselves is a great source of the storytelling. Abandoned homes, fortified warehouses, etc, all help to build up the world the game takes place in and tell the story of what has occurred.

None of these are new or revolutionary tricks, but they are put together really well and are never overused. It is so easy to just use one trick for everything, but Last of Us show restraint and use its devices where appropriate. Much of the time these devices work in tandem and that is when they really shine. A common example is walking around in a derelict building while the characters comment on the surroundings and notes found; this really increase the sense of presence and feeling of being inside a narrative. 

One has to have in mind that the world of Last of Us fits perfectly for the above devices, but there is no inherent problem with using them in just about any sort of story. Also noteworthy is that, apart from the overheard conversations, the narrative devices have very little connection to the core gameplay; they are all part of the story layer. It is incredible how many elements that make up this layer now. What began as a simple intro text or just a painted image is now a large collection of systems. While the story layer was once a fragile structure, merely having a supportive role, it is now so complex that is can pretty much stand on its own. In fact, that is just what it does a few times in The Last of Us. And it is now that we enter the really intriguing territory. We have now come to a point in the evolution of videogames where a once upon nonessential element has gotten enough substance to branch off and become something in its own right.

The best example of this is The Last of Us’ opening. Here the player takes on the role as a young girl who finds herself home alone while it becomes increasingly apparent that something terrible is happening in the outside world. Just about all interactions here has something to do with the story and minor details like the girl’s animations help set the scene. It features just about all the narrative devices mentioned above and uses them to tell the player a story through play. 

The opening is also a good showcase for how and when to use cutscenes. I normally see the goal with interactive storytelling is to let the player play from start to finish. However, in order to play certain parts properly you need to be in the right mood and have certain background information. The opening cutscene helps establish just that, and makes the gameplay so much more effective. While I still feel that cutscenes should be used sparingly, I am thinking more and more that it is wrong to dismiss them entirely. Many interactive scenes are not just possible to jump right in to, but require some kind of setup. Many times this setup is just not possible to play through, and needs to be carefully directed. In these cases a cutscene is required and lets the player play through a scenario that would not be possible otherwise. I think the main rule is just to make sure that the interactive part is where the engaging actions occur. The cutscene should not be the main attraction, it’s role is merely to be there as support. It is also worth mentioning that the opening cutscene works so well because it happens at the start of the game; the player has not become used to being in charge yet and is much more willing to be passive.

The next great story layer sequence is the deer hunting scene. Here you are hunting a deer in order to get food. The first arrows are not enough to bring it down, so you need to find it again and take additional shots. As you are doing this, you will eventually figure out that the best way to find it again is to follow its tracks. Having hit it once the deer will also leave a trail of blood, making tracking easier. While following the wounded animal you will eventually find yourself right outside a previously unseen building, the deer lying dead nearby. By letting you track the deer, the game has managed to lead you into finding a new location all on your own. This transition is really awesome and great way to progress the story simply by playing.

One could argue that this scene use the combat system and therefore part of the core gameplay, but I argue that is not really correct. It does use some combat mechanics, but the scene itself contain none of the dynamics of an enemy encounter. Therefore I think it is okay to say that this is scene is almost purely part of the story layer.

The final sequence I want to discuss is the giraffe scene. Like the previous scene, it is quite simplistic but extremely effective. It starts with the protagonist’s companion, the teenage girl Ellie, getting excited over something she has seen and then running off. This starts sets up a mystery, and gets the player curious over what it is she has spotted. She continues to run ahead of you, seeing the mystery object more times and getting increasingly excited. You run after her, but are never able to get a peek of what it is she is seeing. Finally you come to an opening and see that what she spotted is a herd of giraffes. It all ends with a serene scene as the couple watch the herd walk among a city block overtaken by trees. The build-up and final comes together very nicely.

Worth mentioning is that part of the power comes from all the hazards you have had to face earlier, but I do not see that as evidence that the core gameplay played an important part. These hazards could just as well have been made using other techniques.

The scenes I have described takes up a tiny part of the The Last of Us. Most of the game is about combat, looting and solving repetitive puzzles, elements that you are expected to find in a classical action game. But these sequences and a few others shows that there is much more to this medium than repeating a core gameplay mechanic. The truly poignant and yet fully playable moments of this game is a testament to this.

So when talking about how well The Last of Us does storytelling, it is not productive to discuss how consistently it manages to merge its gameplay and story layer. I hope to have shown that this is a dead end. What is important are the other things, the elements that used to be fluff but has now become a force to be reckoned with on its own. There is a lot to learn from The Last of Us, but it is important that we look in the right places. It might be an classical action game at heart, but also contain elements that show the way forward.

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_Us In case you are in need of more info on the game, wikipedia is a good place to start.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlBrenhzMZI To get some more insight into the workings of Spec Ops: The Line, I recommend this Errant Signal Episode. It is an excellent overview of how the game uses its violence to send a message.

http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2013/04/thoughts-on-bioshock-infinite.html In case you enjoyed this critique of The Last of Us, you will probably also like my thoughts on Bioshock Infinite. There are a lot of similar topics discussed.

Notes:

My history of videogames is a very quick and dirty overview. For instance some early games like Project Firestarter have some of the story integration seen in Another World, but I skipped those in order to make it a bit more clear. Also, many of these early games never really caught on and did not have nearly as much influence as the games I mention. I would have liked to do a more in depth article on the history of violence and storytelling in games, but not sure I will have the time in the near future, so this will have to do for now.

Once the story layer got more prominent the discussion about “story” versus gameplay started to grow. Many people thought that the extra story segment was really distracting and that games should only focus on the core gameplay instead. I cannot recall this discussion ever being about the incoherence between the two, but simply that the extra story elements were not very engaging. It took a lot longer for the idea to pop up that there was a sort of friction between the story layer and the gameplay.
It was not until the story layer had grown quite a bit until the idea of “ludonarrative dissonance” was brought up. First coined by the Far Cry 2 (2008)  lead designer Cliff Hocking, the core issue that it address is that the storytelling layer and gameplay disagree with one another. This of course has always been the case, but in a game design equivalent of the uncanny valley, it did not become apparent until the gap was small enough. So while the problem is true, the whole idea is kind of a truism. The gameplay and story layer has always been separate elements, and are conflicting in their very nature. I am not really a big fan of the term, as I think it is a bit backwards way of thinking. If the goal is to do interactive storytelling, all is already lost once you start dividing gameplay and narrative into different categories.

As I played The Last of Us, it also hit me that sometimes cutscenes work best when you there is no need for interaction. First of all, it makes the project so much easier to manage. Scenes with extensive dialog often require quite a lot of preparation and if they are to be highly interactive, then there is a constant need for tweaking. If the interaction is very simple (like button mashing), or not present at all, then you can evaluate these bits of the game at a much earlier stage and save a lot of headache.
It may also be good for the narrative if the player does not have anything to do during certain sections. In most cases a real life dialog is not a very active experience as many utterances come almost automatically. So not having much for the player to do might actually feel more natural. Also, if the player is forced to perform actions then it might detract their attention from what is being said. So instead of trying to make the dialogs highly interactive, it might be better to just make sure they are short and keep them free from gameplay.
This is actually an approach that we are taking with our new Super Secret Project. We scrapped many of the more wild initial approaches because they were too hard to do and often made dialogs less engaging.

frictionalgames.blogspot.de

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