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Sind Videospiele für 60 Euro zu kurz - oder zu lang?

derstandard.at

foto: sony

Wie viel Spielzeit erwarten Sie sich von einem Vollpreistitel für 60 Euro? (Bild: “The Last of Us”)

Die Frage um die richtige Spielelänge ist eine Frage der Preispolitik - und des Zielpublikums.

Wie lang soll ein Videospiel sein? Auf diese scheinbar einfache Frage gibt es wohl so viele Antworten wie Spieler. Während der Casual-Freund am iPad auf längeren Busfahrten schon mal zwei, drei 99-Cent-Titel ausprobiert und dann nie mehr ansieht, und während Games-Experimente wie “Journey” oder “Dear Esther” in der Dauer eines Kinofilms durchzuspielen sind, beziffern die Freunde epischer MMOs, Multiplayer-Krieger, aber auch “Farmville”-Opfer ihre Spielstunden schon mal vierstellig.

Natürlich lässt sich die Frage auch wegen der Unterschiedlichkeit der Genres nicht beantworten: Ein Spiel wie “FIFA” oder “Civilization” kann man, ebenso wie reine Multiplayertitel, kaum von Anfang bis Ende “durchspielen”. Versuchen Spiele aber eine Geschichte zu erzählen und dabei ein spannendes, cineastisches Erlebnis zu bieten, wird die Spieldauer zum oft bitter umkämpften Streitthema. Wann ist ein Spiel zu kurz - oder gar zu lang?

Ökonomische Hintergedanken

Angesichts der Ereignisse der letzten Wochen rund um Xbox One und den von manchen Seiten erbittert geführten Kampf gegen den Gebrauchtspielemarkt äußerte sich Avalanche-Chef Christofer Sundberg vor kurzem in einem Interview zum Thema: Die meisten Spiele, so der Chef des Studios, das hauptsächlich für die Open-World-Action-Reihe “Just Cause” bekannt ist, seien schlicht zu kurz und böten kaum Wiederspielbarkeit - aus ebendiesem Grund würden sie auch eingetauscht und weiterverkauft. “Wenn ein Spiel in acht bis zehn Stunden durchgespielt ist, würde ich es auch eintauschen. Wenn ein Spiel wenig Abwechslung und kaum Wiederspielbarkeit bietet, gibt es einfach keine Motivation, das Spiel zu behalten. Das ist auch ein Grund, warum ich in Gebrauchtspieleladen nur selten eines unserer Spiele sehe”, so Sundberg weiter.

Möglichst lange Spiele, die ihre Spieler nicht stunden-, sondern im besten Fall monatelang an den Bildschirm fesseln, sind so gesehen und aus der Sicht der Branche das Nonplusultra. Und das aus mehreren Gründen: Für einen Titel mit derartigem Langzeitappeal kann mit gutem Gewissen der klassische Vollpreis verlangt werden, und, wie von Sundberg erwähnt, auch  der Secondhand-Markt knabbert dementsprechend weniger an den Margen. Zudem lassen sich so per DLC- oder per Abomodellen über die Spielzeit verteilt eventuell sogar noch weitere Gewinne lukrieren: Kunden, die hunderte Stunden in “CoD”-Multiplayer oder “DotA” versenken, lassen sich im besten Fall auch eher zu In-App-Käufen oder DLC-Addons überreden.

Size matters

Auch die Spieler berechnen traditionellerweise den relativen Wert eines Titels anhand des Schlüssels aus Spielzeit zu Kosten, und dabei gilt stets: Je mehr, desto besser. Tatsächlich ist die Frage nach der richtigen Spiellänge aber immer auch eine nach der Preisgestaltung: Wer 60 Euro für ein aktuelles Konsolenspiel ausgibt, fühlt sich betrogen, wenn schon nach sechs Stunden die Credits rollen - ein Grund, warum bei vielen eigentlich erzählenden Singleplayerspielen wie “Tomb Raider” oder aktuell “The Last of Us”, die ihre Geschichte in zehn, zwölf Stunden fertig erzählt haben, mehr oder weniger gelungene Multiplayer-Komponenten an das Hauptspiel geklatscht werden oder aber höhere Schwierigkeitsstufen und Achievements-Schnitzeljagden die Spieldauer künstlich verlängern sollen.

Denn mit explodierenden Entwicklungskosten und immer aufwendiger und teurer werdenden AAA-Titeln werden die meisten Spiele, zumindest in ihren Kampagnen, tatsächlich kürzer. Beim Aufwand für Vertonung, Artdesign und Animation, der für einen aktuellen Blockbuster betrieben wird, ist die Produktion von 20, 30 Stunden Spieldauer  in den allermeisten Fällen schlicht nicht finanzierbar. Doch nicht nur das: Auch die heutzutage gebräuchliche Kampagnenlänge von zehn, zwölf Stunden, wie sie etwa beim spezialisierten Portal HowLongToBeat als akzeptierte Durchschnittsspielzeit erhoben wird, lässt sich in der Regel nicht ohne Längen, Wiederholungen, mühsam in die Länge gezogene Tutorials und Recycling von Spielelementen bewerkstelligen. Die meisten Spiele polstern so ihre Länge mit mäßig interessantem Füllmaterial auf.

Eine Frage des Geldes

Die Branche geht auf unterschiedliche Weise mit diesem Dilemma um: Während klassische Einzelspielertitel wie etwa “Tomb Raider” oder “Bioshock: Infinite” den gleich bleibenden Vollpreis mit ihren zehn Stunden Spieldauer und Multiplayerteil bzw. “New Game+”-Modell rechtfertigen wollen, drehen andere Teile der Branche an der Preisschraube: Im Indie-Bereich haben sich niedrigere Preise oder Pay-what-you-want-Modelle eingebürgert - bei durchschnittlich unter 10 Euro pro Titel lassen sich auch kürzere Spiele gut verkaufen. Im Mobile Gaming hat man sich wohl oder übel, dank regulärer Dumpingpreise, auf drastisch verkürzte Spiele oder schlicht reduzierte Komplexität und Qualität verständigt; in großen Multiplayer-Titeln oder MMOs experimentiert die Branche seit längerem mit Free2Play, In-App-Käufen oder Abomodellen, um die Spielerschaft einerseits an die Titel zu fesseln und sie andererseits zum Geldausgeben zu bewegen.

Kein Wunder, dass in diesem Kontext, also bei jenen Spielen, die die längste Spieldauer versprechen, das “grinding”, also das recht stupide, eigentlich langweilige Abgrasen in den jeweiligen Spielmechaniken den absoluten Löwenanteil an den “hunderten Stunden Spielspaß” ausmacht. Auf den ersten Blick paradox: Spieler, die gewillt sind, dafür Geld auszugeben, können sich genau diese Spiellängenstreckung per Zukauf von XP-Verdopplung oder Ähnlichem wieder verkürzen.

“Games are too damn long”

Dass die reine Spielzeit demnach vielleicht ein untaugliches Qualitätskriterium ist, kritisierte etwa Jamin Warren, Herausgeber des legendären Gameskultur-Magazins KillScreen. Was nützt Spielern ein Spiel, das zwar lang, aber dafür uninspiriert gestreckt und mit Füllmaterial aufgeblasen ist? In einem polemischen Artikel mit dem Titel “Games Are Too Damn Long” kritisierte Warren schon Ende letzten Jahres die Tendenz der Industrie und der Fans, die reine Spiellänge als Qualitätskriterium zu sehen, und auch Michael Thomsen beklagte für das US-Qualitätsblog Slate in einem ähnlichen Artikel die übergroßen Zeitanforderungen, die etwa “Dark Souls” an ihn stellte.

Warum müssen Spiele aber überhaupt eine derart hohe Beschäftigungsdauer anbieten? Vermutlich ist es ein Relikt aus der Geschichte des jungen Mediums, das hier der Quantität den Vorzug gibt: Traditionellerweise richten sich Spiele an ein Publikum, das wegen seiner Jugendlichkeit zwar wenig verfügbares Geld, dafür aber massig Zeit zur Verfügung hat - der stereotype jugendliche Gamer, dessen mühsam zusammengespartes Taschengeld einmal im Monat für genau ein Spiel reicht, muss nicht zuletzt durch die Spiellänge davon überzeugt werden, dass Games gegenüber anderen Freizeitvergnügungen wie Kino oder Ausgehen die bessere Investition sind. Wenn somit ein Besuch im Multiplex samt Popcorn auf zehn Euro für zwei Stunden kommt, muss der Vollpreistitel dementsprechend mindestens siebenmal so lange Spaß machen, so die Rechnung.

Kürzere Spiele für ein erwachsenes Publikum?

Irgendwo liegt hier allerdings ein Missverständnis: Der Durchschnittsspieler heute ist kein Teenager mit wenig Geld und endloser Tagesfreizeit, sondern zunehmend erwachsen - und das Verhältnis zwischen freier Zeit und Einkommen ist ein anderes. Es überrascht eigentlich, dass die Branche nur in einigen Ausnahmenischen den Zeitbedürfnissen dieser erwachsenen Spieler entgegenkommt: Episodische Titel wie “The Walking Dead” können in kurzen Sessions gespielt werden und sind narrativ auch darauf ausgelegt, Indie-Titel wie “Limbo” oder “Journey” bieten zum niedrigen Preis Spielspaß für einen Abend und auch einige wenige Hochglanztitel aus jüngerer Zeit, etwa das augenzwinkernde “Call of Juarez: Gunslinger” experimentieren mit einer Mischung aus niedrigem Preis und dafür reduzierter Spieldauer.

Dass dieser Weg hin zum kürzeren Spiel nicht ganz verkehrt sein kann, untermauert auch eine andere Beobachtung: Nur 10 Prozent aller Spieler spielen einen Titel bis zu seinem Ende durch - eine Statistik, wie es sie in fast keinem anderen Medium abgesehen von Maturaleselisten zu beklagen gibt. Ob es da die richtige Lösung ist, gleich ganz auf ein Ende zu verzichten, wie es Jason VandenBerghe von Ubisoft vorgeschlagen hat?

Dauerbaustelle Preispolitik

Man könnte das Pferd auch andersherum aufzäumen: Kürzere Spiele ohne Füllmaterial und Wiederholungen würden vielleicht auch jenes größere, “erwachsene” Zielpublikum bei ihrem Medium halten, das sich in seinen Dreißigern massenweise vom Zeitfresser Games verabschiedet. Der Knackpunkt hierbei wird allerdings eine andere Dauerbaustelle der Industrie sein: die Preispolitik. Vielleicht wäre es an der Zeit, die Worte des ehemaligen EA-Chefs John Riccitiello endlich ernst zu nehmen und die Vollpreispolitik der Branche kreativ zu überdenken - aber nicht unbedingt, wie in den letzten Jahren geschehen, in Richtung des vor allem bei den Spielern unbeliebten Free2Play-Modells.

Denn eigentlich kann ein Spiel nicht zu kurz oder zu lang sein - aber dafür sicher zu teuer im Verhältnis zu dem, was geboten wird. Ob kurz oder lang: Videospiele, lange wie kurze, sollen unterhalten, und es gibt wohl für jede Zielgruppe die “passende” Länge. Die Herausforderung für die Branche wird es sein, den zu den jeweiligen Längen passenden Preis zu finden. (Rainer Sigl, derStandard.at, 12.7.2013)

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Österreichische Spielentwickler holen Gold und 50.000 Dollar bei Imagine Cup [31]

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iPhone-App transferiert echte Gegenstände in “Minecraft” [9]

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“Summer Sale”: Steam senkt Spielepreise um bis zu 75 Prozent [125]

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Entwickler: Gratisspiele werden zur Goldgrube [52]

Boss-Alien-Gründer: “In den nächsten drei oder vier Jahren könnte ein Spiel zehn Millionen Dollar am Tag erwirtschaften”

Umstrukturierung

Microsoft ernennt neue Xbox-Chefin [28]

Ehemalige Windows-Leiterin Julie Larson-Green übernimmt neue Hardware- und Games-Sparte

Design

Microsoft zeigt Xbox-One-Prototypen: Wie die Konsole aussehen hätte können [56]

Konsole und Controller durchliefen hunderte Entwicklungsstufen

PC und Konsole

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Multifunktional

Microsoft bewirbt Xbox One als günstige Büro-Maschine [114]

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Portierung

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Games-Journalist

“Giant Bomb”-Gründer mit 34 Jahren gestorben [18]

Angesehener Videospieljournalist hatte gerade erst geheiratet

Rezension

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Nicht weniger als 14 Läufer nahmen am Speedrun teil

PC

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Spieler werden schubweise aufgenommen

Kritik an Nintendo

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Schlechte Verkaufszahlen und Online-Mängel lassen EA, Ubisoft und Activision an Nintendo-Konsole zweifeln

Gangsterepos

“Grand Theft Auto 5”: Erster Gameplay-Trailer zeigt Bankräuber in Aktion [183]

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“Konsolenkrieg”

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Bestseller

“The Last of Us” verkauft sich 3,4 Millionen Mal in drei Wochen [165]

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derstandard.at

Haywire Magazine: Joe Köller gibt Auskunft

videogametourism.at

Seit fast einem Jahr gibt es das Haywire Magazine, eine reine Online-Publikation, in der klug und quer über Spiele geschrieben wird. VGT-Mitautor Joe Köller ist Gründervater und treibende Kraft hinter dem englischsprachigen Projekt, das Joe und seine Mitautoren zunehmend auch auf der internationalen Gamesjournalismuslandkarte aufblitzen lässt. Soeben ist Nummer 5 mit dem ergiebigen Thema “Violence” erschienen, zu dem Superlevel-Kollege Dominik Johann das tolle Cover und Joe zwei seiner für VGT geschriebenen Texte beigesteuert hat.

Grund genug, meinem Kollegen mal ein paar Fragen zu diesem ambitionierten Onlinejournalismus-Projekt zu stellen, das ihm oft genug die Zeit für VGT raubt. 

Was ist Haywire Magazine? 

Haywire ist ein alle zwei Monate erscheinendes, digitales Magazin zu digitaler Spielekultur und nebenbei auch ein eher verwaister Spieleblog. So könnte man es nüchtern zusammenfassen, aber Nüchternheit ist für mich als Chefredakteur ja rollenwidrig. “Haywire ist Alchemie” steht dazu auf unserer Seite, und meint: Hier kommen Amateurkritiker, Jungautoren und sonstige Wirrköpfe zusammen, um unter Anleitung eines größenwahnsinnigen Anglistikstudenten dem Schnellschuss-Konsumjournalismus der Spielebranche und dem minderwertigem Blog- und Forengekritzel ihrer Fangemeinde ein professionelles, reflektiertes, meinungsstarkes Magazin entgegenzusetzen.

Was war deine Motivation, dieses Projekt zu starten?

Angefangen hab ich es ja eigentlich nicht. Wie alle kreativen Projekte beginnt auch Haywire mit dem Diebstahl einer Idee: Unser Designer Andrew Walt hatte sich mal so ein Magazin in den Kopf gesetzt, nachdem ihm aufgefallen war, dass er nach einigen Jahren Unizeitung ja wohl alle nötigen Fähigkeiten beisammen hätte. Das Resultat war ein im Rückblick eher mageres Blättchen namens Guardian Force, bei dem ich auch schon für einen Gutteil des fragwürdigen Inhalts verantwortlich zeichne (Hier werden Jugendsünden enthüllt!). Aber immerhin, ein Magazin! Die zweite Ausgabe aber fiel über Wochen hinweg langsam glorios auseinander, es stellte sich heraus, dass Andrew weder Nerven noch Talent für die Organisation des Ganzen hatte, schon gar nicht neben Unistress. Nun waren aber Layout und Autorennetzwerk quasi schon da, was lag also näher, als ihm das Heft zu entreißen und unter anderem Namen neu zu starten? So oder so ähnlich bin ich auf dem Chefsessel gelandet: Weil es sonst keiner machen wollte. Dass es uns nach sechs Ausgaben immer noch gibt, sehe ich als Rechtfertigung für mein Regiment.

Daran sieht man auch schon, welch naive Überlegung mich ursprünglich zu dem Projekt geführt hat: Ich wollte über Spiele schreiben. Ich wollte vor allem besser über Spiele schreiben (damals bezog sich der Vergleich aber noch auf eigene, frühere Arbeit) und mich dafür zur regelmäßigen Übung und hohen Standards zwingen. So gesehen war erstmal alles eine interessante Gelegenheit, zu lernen. Aus anderer Leute Fehler etwa, beim Korrigieren und Überarbeiten ihrer Texte. Deadlines waren für die meisten von uns ebenso Neuland, was man immer noch an gelegentlichen Verspätungen merkt. Im Wesentlichen hatte ich einfach keine Ahnung, wie man ein Magazin führt und wollte es mir selbst beibringen. Stilrichtlinien und eine Art Vision oder Zielsetzung entstanden unterwegs, aus genaurer Auseinandersetzung mit meinen Vorstellungen von Qualitätsjournalismus.

Auf der anderen Seite habe ich dann auch gleich wieder Gelegenheit, das Gelernte weiterzugeben, immerhin ist das auch die einzige Entlohnung, die ich Autoren anbieten kann: Sie profitieren von meinem Minimum schriftstellerischen Talents und dem bisschen Reichweite, das wir mittlerweile erreicht haben. Die eigentliche Motivation schwankt ständig zwischen der Förderung anderer, der Selbstverbesserung und Selbstvermarktung, und der simplen Freude, etwas zu erschaffen. Aber das sind so ungefähr die drei Säulen meines Wahnsinns.

Hat das Feedback bislang deine Erwartungen erfüllt?

Kaum. Ich werde etwa viel seltener angeschrien als erwartet (Allerdings wäre ich auch erst zufrieden wenn wir einen hauseigenen Troll angelockt haben). Das mag aber auch daran liegen, dass es generell eher ruhig bleibt, wir sind eben noch ein kleines Nischending, da muss man die Hater auch mal in Eigeninitiative stellen. Vernünftige Kommentare fallen in der Regel zwischen erfreut und begeistert. Das ist doch schon fast so gut wie Bezahlung.

Was sind die weiteren Pläne für das Format bzw. die Webseite? Eventuell Druck?

Ich rüttel mal am Wortspielbaum: Druck ist mir zuviel Druck. Eigentlich haben wir ja sogar Printversionen, jeweils genau eine pro Ausgabe, die stehen als schöne Erinnerung in meinem Regal. Sowas kann man aber nicht umsonst anbieten und Geld zu verlangen ist mir momentan zu viel Stress. Preisschilder bringen sofort eine andere Erwartungshaltung, was Inhalte und Qualität angeht, da würden mir die paar durchgeschlüpften Tippfehler noch viel mehr schlaflose Nächte bereiten. Außerdem ist nicht gerade klar, wo Profit in unseren anarchischen Hierarchiestrukturen hinfließen sollte.

Professionalität wird sich bei uns fürs Erste auf den Inhalt beschränken, was in naher Zukunft vor allem den Ausbau der Seite und die Entschlackung des eigentlichen Magazins bedeutet. Unser Designer geht im Herbst für ein Masterstudium und eine Assistentenstelle zurück an die Uni, also schwankt das pdf-Format gerade, aber wir hoffen noch, dass sich das durch Reduktion und bessere Fristeinhaltung meinerseits ausgleichen lässt. Zum Ausgleich möchte ich ja am liebsten noch viel mehr Inhalte auf der Seite bringen und da sich die werte Autorenschaft nicht beliebig schinden lässt, ist mir auch deren Aufstockung mit frischem Blut ein Anliegen (hint, hint). Und die Diversifizierung natürlich, so ein reiner Männerverein ist ja wirklich nicht mehr zeitgemäß.

Als “foreign correspondent” für Critical Distance hast du einen Überblick über den Stand des deutschen Gamesjournalismus im Web. Was fehlt deiner Meinung nach? Was sind die Stärken? Braucht es einen eigenen deutschen Gamesjournalismus oder wird der englische notgedrungen immer dominant bleiben?

Ich würde nicht behaupten da einen echten Überblick zu haben. Was ich habe, ist eine ellenlange Bookmarkliste, bei deren Aufruf stöhnt Firefox erstmal ein paar Sekunden bevor reihenweise Tabs auf meinen Bildschirm explodieren. Ich gehe dennoch davon aus, dass meine Blogzählung noch unvollständig ist, oder sagen wir: Ich würde gerne glauben, dass ich das Beste einfach noch nicht gefunden habe. Wenn es das denn schon gewesen sein soll, fällt mein Fazit nämlich eher kritisch aus: Viel Mist, wenig Brauchbares.

Das heißt bei meinen Standards natürlich vor allem: Viel Oberflächliches, wenig Reflektierteres, Tieferes. Viel Amateurservicejournalismus und -kritiken gibt es bei uns, auch viel Nostalgie und “Humor”, meist mies, inhaltsleeres Wutbürgertum und Aufregerei. Wenig geht über die Frage, was man denn gerade spielen muss, hinaus. Soziale, wirtschaftliche oder kulturelle Themen, mit denen Spiele als Kreativindustrie mit reger Fangemeinde untrennbar verknüpft sind, werden selten behandelt. Wenn überhaupt, dann oft in Antwort auf englische Quellen, jüngstes Beispiel: Anita Sarkeesian. Ihre Kampagne und Videos haben Sexismus und Geschlechterklischees auch bei uns wieder stärker ins Gespräch gebracht. Feminismus bleibt da aber meist das Höchste der Gefühle, einen Diskurs zu Heteronormativität, Transgender oder sonstigen LGBT Themen gibt es bei uns eigentlich nicht, Rassismus, Kapitalismuskritik und die Politisierung von Spielen sind ebenso verwaiste Bereiche. Wenigstens meiner Perspektive nach, ich lasse mich aber mit dem größten Vergnügen korrigieren, falls noch jemand Linkvorschläge hat. Bitte Leute, schickt mir eure Texte!

Natürlich ist auch hierzulande nicht alles schlecht. Superlevel finde ich etwa durchgehend großartig, da werden heikle Themen in Eigeninitiative mutig und klug abgehandelt, und mir geht das Herz auf. 99 Leben mag ich auch. Aber sonst? Polyneux bietet hauptsächlich Kritik, mit der ich noch dazu selten übereinstimme. Pixelpunsch wirkt ja interessant, aber bei diesen kurzen Texten habe ich leider immer den Eindruck, es ist vorbei, bevor es richtig angefangen hat. Über Polygamia und Shodan News hab ich schon gar nichts Nettes mehr zu sagen.

Deutschen Spielejournalismus gibt es aus demselben Grund, aus dem es bei uns lokalisierte Spiele gibt. Natürlich ist der englische Markt im Vergleich wesentlich größer und wird auch immer größer bleiben, es gibt auch genug Leute hier die, wie ich, lieber Originalversionen spielen. Aber man darf auch nicht vergessen, dass noch immer nicht jeder des Englischen uneingeschränkt mächtig ist. Und den Sinn eines Punkt-für-Punkt-Tests auf IGN zu erfassen, ist da auch noch eine andere Kategorie, als Kill Screen mit Vergnügen lesen zu können. Als Linguist will ich ungern so einen reduzierten Kommentar zu Sprachpolitik abgegen, aber ich halte deutschen Spielejournalismus schon für notwendig. Wenn er sich jetzt noch etwas von dem Testcharakter entfernen könnte …

Du bzw. die Haywire-Autoren wechseln zwischen sehr analytischen und sehr intimen Zugängen à la Jenn Frank - eine immer noch recht gewagte Mischung im technisch dominierten Feld. Wer ist das Publikum? Schreiben wir mit diesen Experimenten, wie ich des Öfteren befürchte, möglicherweise nur für uns selbst?

Nachdem sich Haywire zurzeit nicht finanzieren muss, kann ich zum Markt für anspruchsvolle Gamesliteratur eigentlich wenig sagen, außer, dass ich offenbar reger Konsument derselben bin. Bei uns ist der schwankende Stil auch eher der breiten Autorenschaft und meinen lockeren Vorgaben geschuldet. Natürlich basiert auch das auf Überlegung: Mir gefällt die Fusion von Privatem und Analytischem, weil Vertrauliches immer auch die Ansichten der betreffenden Person verrät, ebenso wie Analytisches immer im Subjektiven, Persönlichem wurzelt. Privates ist politisch, und Politisches auch privat.

Ich gehe nicht davon aus mit so einem Ansatz irgendeinen Massenmarkt zu bedienen, aber auch für so verkopften Unfug gibt es Abnehmer, das beweisen Unwinnable auf der persönlichen und Kill Screen auf der analytischen Seite. Oder Five out of Ten. Und bei uns gibt es ja auch alle heilige Zeiten die WASD.

Abschließend: Was sind die Ziele für Haywire? Anders gefragt: Wo soll das alles nur hinführen?!?

Das vordergründigste Ziel ist natürlich, möglichst viel guten Inhalt zu produzieren. Sollte uns das tatsächlich mit entsprechender Frequenz gelingen, untergräbt man mit Gratistexten natürlich auch irgendwie die Existenz des eigenen Markts. Irgendwie muss sich der analytische Tümpel, in dem wir mitmischen, eben auch erhalten.

Zur Finanzierung von Qualitätsjournalismus hab ich dann aber eben auch noch ein paar elitäre Ansichten: Erstens, Werbung ist scheiße. Die nervt Leser und stellt Magazine indirekt auf die Lohnliste der Industrie, die sie eigentlich kritisch überwachen sollten. Das ist kein unausgleichbarer Interessenkonflikt, aber nach meinem Verständnis sollte man sich lieber ausschließlich der eigenen Leserschaft verpflichten (Ich mache mich ja an anderer Stelle gern mal über das geflügelte Wort Servicejournalismus lustig, aber auch diese Art langer Interpretation ist Service für Leser, die ihre eigene Ansicht um wohlgeformte Meinungen ergänzt wissen wollen). Was dann aber auch heißt, dass man sie irgendwie davon überzeugen muss, das Ganze zu bezahlen.

Dabei mag ich aber zweitens auch Paywalls nicht. Bei Kill Screen und Five out of Ten lasse ich mir es noch gefallen, weil das gebotene Produkt sein Geld stets wert ist, in der Regel bevorzuge ich aber, ganz verträumter Idealist, freiwillige Modelle. Etwa den Endless Telethon von Unwinnable, oder auch die Subscriptions bei Rock, Paper, Shotgun, wenn sie denn noch auf die Werbung verzichten könnten (aber dafür machen das wohl nicht genug). Auch den Crowdfundingversuch von Reactionzine finde ich ungemein spannend. Hoch gesteckte Ziele, hoffentlich wird das was. Oder Artikel online frei zu veröffentlichen und daneben optional Sammlungen der besten Werke als pdf oder Print Versionen anzubieten. Das wäre ein Modell, das ich mir persönlich vorstellen könnte.

Irgendwann in weiter Zukunft, wenn ich dann mit meinen beiden Studien fertig bin, möchte ich ja auch gern fürs Schreiben bezahlt werden. Das bedeutet wahrscheinlich erstmal irgendeine Art Brotberuf, aber je mehr Geld dann beim Spielejournalismus rausschaut, desto mehr Zeit kann ich ihm widmen. Ich sehe da zwei Möglichkeiten: Entweder ich überlege mir irgendein Finanzierungsystem und Haywire selbst wird zur hochoffiziellen, professionellen Wortschmiede, oder eben der Internetruhm katapultiert mich zu einer der anderen Publikationen, die es da so gibt. Option zwei klingt fast verlockender, mal abgesehen davon, dass ich mir dann nicht selbst den ganzen Stress der Verwaltung antun muss, gefällt mir auch die Idee, Haywire als freie Amateurplatform zu hinterlassen. Eine Art Ausbildungstätte für aufstrebende Kritiker, mit ständig wechselnder, junger Besetzung. Vorausgesetzt, ich finde jemanden der im Fall der Fälle meinen Posten übernehmen will, und ich werde dann CEO von Superlevel Inc., mittlerweile eine Zweigstelle von EA. Oder so.

Verfasst von Rainer Sigl am 8. Juli 2013 - 12:45

Tags:

videogametourism.at

Used Games And Gameshops

gelurzt.at

13.07.2013 -

Normalerweise steht das Fazit am Ende meiner Beiträge und versucht den Inhalt möglichst schnittig zusammenzufassen. Gebrauchte Spiele brauchen eigentlich keine erklärenden Ausführungen, denn die Problematik ist bekannt und jedem der schon einmal darüber nachgedacht hat auch bewusst: Gebrauchte Spiele sind Gift für die Spieleindustrie und tragen auch die Schuld an unzähligen Studio-Schließungen der letzten Jahre.

Meine persönliche Meinung geht sogar noch einen Schritt weiter und ich behaupte, dass es keinen Grund gibt Käufern von Videospielen auch nur annähernd ein Recht auf einen Gebrauchtmarkt einzuräumen. Diskutiert mit mir, bewerft mich mit Steinen, jagt mich mit Heugabeln oder steht mit Fackeln vor meiner Haustür. Okay, das mit den Steinen, Heugabeln oder Fackeln lassen wir vielleicht dann doch weg.

Das Grundproblem ist gar nicht der Gebrauchtmarkt an sich, es ist der kommerzialisierte Gebrauchtmarkt von spezialisierten Einzelhandelskette wie zum Beispiel GameStop oder Game. Dort änderte sich in den letzten Jahren das Geschäftsmodell weg vom Verkauf neuer Spiele, hin zum Handel mit gebrauchten Spielen. Was anfangs die gleichwertige Präsentation gebrauchter Titel im Regal und deren Bewerbung war, gipfelt nun im aggressiven Verkauf dieser. Geht man in eine Filiale der Ketten und versucht ein neues Spiel zu kaufen, wird man spätestens an der Kasse fast schon genötigt ein gebrauchtes Exemplar zu kaufen.

Stellt man den Vorschlag in Frage, folgt eine Argumentationskette, die anscheinend jedem Mitarbeiter am ersten Arbeitstag per Gehirnwäsche immer und immer wieder eingetrichtert wird. Die Qualität ist gleich, man erhält zwölf Monate Garantie und es ist auch um 5 bis 10 Euro günstiger als ein neues Exemplar. Und falls der Kunde dann noch immer nicht aufgegeben hat, wird die psychologische Schaufel ausgepackt und die Denkfähigkeiten in Frage gestellt, denn wer wird schon so dumm sein und 10 Euro unnötig aus dem Fenster werfen.

Es geht hier nicht um gezielte Gebrauchtkäufer, denn diese mit Neukäufern gleichzusetzen wäre falsch. Aber welcher gezielte Gebrauchtkäufer besorgt sich tatsächlich seine Spiele bei GameStop oder Game? Vermutlich keiner. Hier geht es vielmehr um Neukäufer, die an der Kasse so lange manipuliert werden, dass quasi zwangsläufig zur gebrauchten Version gegriffen wird. Das Resultat auf lange Sicht wird noch schlimmer, denn wer einmal den minimalen Rabatt in Anspruch genommen hat, bleibt tendenziell diesem kruden Geschäftsmodell treu.

Krudes Geschäftsmodell? Bei einem Neukauf teilt sich der Gewinn in etwa 60% für den Hersteller und 40% für den Händler. Bei einem gebrauchten Kauf sieht es anders aus, denn hier bekommt der Händler einfach 100% und der Hersteller geht leer aus. Dank der Tatsache dass digitale Medien keine Abnutzungserscheinungen haben, lässt sich dieses System belieb lang fortsetzen und so entsteht bei jedem potentiellen Neukauf durch das aggressive Verkaufen eines gebrauchten Exemplars ein direkten Verlust beim Hersteller. Als Rechtfertigung kann die Beratung durch die Mitarbeiter nicht herhalten, realistischer scheint eher die Gier und das Ziel der Gewinnmaximierung.

Aber warum ist dies ein Problem bei Videospielen und nicht bei anderen digitalen Gütern wie CDs oder DVDs. Die Gründe liegen im Verwertungsmodell sowie dem grundlegend falschem Vergleich.

Die Wertschöpfungskette bei Musik und Filmen ist deutlich umfangreicher als bei Videospielen. Sieht man sich die unterschiedlichen Einnahmequellen von Musiker und Bands an, stellt man schnell fest, dass der Verkauf von Alben oder MP3s nur einen sehr geringen Teil der Einnahmen ausmacht. Der größte Brocken fällt auf Konzerte sowie Merchandise und ebenfalls nicht zu verachten sind die Lizenzkosten, die auch noch fließen wenn ein Lied nach Jahren im Radio oder auf Streaming-Plattformen wiedergegeben wird. Bei Filmen ist es ähnlich, nur dass statt der Tournee die Veröffentlichung um Kino in den meisten Fällen zu einem profitablen Ergebnis führt, der Verleih ein weiteres Zubrot ist und nach dem klassischen DVD Verkauf die weitere Lizenzierung im Pay als auch Free-TV folgt.

Natürlich ist auch der Gebrauchtmarkt bei Musik und Filmen zum Nachteil der Plattenlabels und Filmverleihe, jedoch schmerzt dieser dort deutlich weniger. Der direkte Verkauf stellt finanziell betrachtet nur einen kleinen Teil des Verwertungsmodells dar und nicht wie bei Videospielen die quasi einzige Einnahmequelle. Und ja, es gibt auch bei Spielen zusätzliche Möglichkeiten zur Monetarisierung mittels kostenpflichtiger Zusatzinhalte oder Mikrotransaktionen, aber diese stehen momentan noch in keiner relevanten Größe im direkten Vergleich zum Verkauf.

Der zweite Grund liegt im eigentlich falschen Vergleich. Früher wurde ein Spiel produziert, auf einen Datenträger gepackt und ausgeliefert. Die Sache hatte wie bei Film- oder Musikproduktionen einen mehr oder weniger definierten Start und ein Ende. Heute sind Videospiele eher als Dienst anstatt als abgeschlossenes Produkt zu sehen. Server müssen am Laufen gehalten werden, erforderliche und nicht erforderliche Updates werden produziert, Fanseiten und Foren wünschen sich Betreuung und bei Problemen sucht der Kunde beim Hersteller nach Unterstützung. Das sind Dinge die Geld kosten, viel Geld und dies auch noch mehrere Jahre nach der ursprünglichen Veröffentlichung.

Noch makaberer wird die Sache wenn man überlegt wie die Kunden eigentlich in die Geschäfte kommen. Die meiste Werbung machen die Ketten nicht selbst, sondern die Hersteller der Spiele. Der über die Jahre gemeinsam mit der Industrie aufgebaute Marktanteil wird nun als Waffe verwendet und es werden Forderungen gestellt, die schon fast mit Erpressung gleichzusetzen sind. Für den Käufer beginnt dies bei exklusiven Bonusinhalten und endet im Extremfall mit speziellen Editionen, die es sonst nirgends zu kaufen gibt. Zusätzlich räumen sich die großen Ketten spezielle und langfristige Rückgabekonditionen ein, um im Zweifel unverkaufte Spiele quasi kostenlos an den Hersteller zurückschicken zu können.

Der so bewusst produzierte Markt kann eigentlich nur als pervers beschrieben werden und es ist traurig, dass es die Fachmarktketten geschafft haben sich von der Spieleindustrie hochzüchten zu lassen und diese nun nach Strich und Faden über den Tisch zieht und verarscht. Durch die Fokussierung auf den aggressiven Gebrauchtverkauf konnten die eigenen Gewinnmargen in den letzten Jahren stetig gesteigert werden und gleichzeitig die Neuverkäufe an Videospielen reduziert. Das Resultat? Weniger Einnahmen für die Spieleindustrie, die Schließung von Entwicklerstudios, der Verlust unzähliger Arbeitsplätzen und das indirekte Blockieren neuer Konzepte. Und wer ist aus Sicht der Käufer fälschlicherweise daran schuld? Die Gier von EA, Microsoft, Sony, Activison, Take 2 oder Publisher XY. Quasi eine Win-Win-Situation für GameStop und oder Game aufgrund der höheren Gewinne und auch dem Kunden, der 10 Euro beim Kauf eines Spiels gespart hat. In Wirklichkeit aber eine Lose-Lose-Situation für die Spieleindustrie, die Spieler und das Medium Videospiele.

gelurzt.at

The Witness

unwinnable.com

The strangest thing about The Last of Us is that, despite how much I enjoyed the game, despite how emotionally challenging it becomes, I find myself continually thinking of new ways in which I wish it were different. For every intriguing twist and turn it took, I can see the path not taken and wonder what lay down it.

When I started playing it, I hated how many enemies there were. For a game named The Last of Us, the world seemed very crowded. I didn’t want The Road: The Game per se, but I did want more space, more quiet tension, more emptiness. I am keen to see a game released that focuses on a long atmospheric exploration punctuated by only one or two terrible moments of violence and danger.

After I finished The Last of Us, I was recovering from a bad illness and I wondered what a game would be like if it could cause its player actual physical discomfort. What if playing a game could make the player feel frail and vulnerable?

Most recently, a month after I put The Last of Us back up on the shelf, I came across a screenshot from the demo shown at E3 2012. It once again got me thinking.

What if, instead of playing grizzled Joel, the latest (and in many ways, most interesting) iteration of the strong, silent protector archetype, the player took the role of Ellie for the entire game?

The Last of Us flirts with this notion twice. In the prologue, the player takes the role of Joel’s daughter Sarah on the evening before the apocalypse. As Tommy, Joel’s brother, drives and Joel navigates, Sarah is left to her own devices in the back seat of the car. All she can do is roll about from window to window and watch her world descend into chaos. It is a brilliant, emotional moment.

Much later in the game, the player controls Ellie for a stretch of time. She is a capable character in Joel’s absence, though smaller and physically weaker. However, she bristles with weapons and is, most importantly, on her own.

The Last of Us I wish I could play is everything between those two points. I’ve driven around in characters like Joel a million times, but I’ve never had to follow someone like him. I can always fend for myself in a videogame, but what if I needed to have someone fend for me?

Instead of being the offensive brute, I want to play the support role, jury-rigging items and tossing bandages at a crucial time. I want to stay out of sight while the men with guns are hunting me. I want to risk my own life to save Joel’s by flying out of cover with my switchblade at the last possible moment.

No matter what the narrative tries to impart over the course of The Last of Us, Ellie is never in danger when Joel is around. Enemies can’t see her, even when she is right in front of them. It is a dissonance caused by design decisions meant to minimize a player’s frustration at chaperoning a fragile companion who they can’t directly control, a gameism, as Tom Bissell calls it. And yet, if you change the roles, the dissonance disappears.

More intriguing, though, is how the relationship between the two characters could change. Instead of their proxy father/daughter relationship playing out in cutscenes, a player in the role of Ellie could be working to foster or diminish that bond.

Periodically, when Joel dispatches someone in particularly grisly fashion, Ellie will express her shock and disgust.

“What the fuck, Joel?”

These are moments intended to subvert what would traditionally be a self-congratulatory moment in a game. When else do we celebrate but when we have dispatched our opponents in grand fashion? Ellie’s disapproval underlines the actual horror of the violence.

I wonder what it would feel like to merely sit and watch, to observe the violence instead of to inflict. Would I push the “What the fuck, Joel?” button after a kill? Or would I stay silent? To appeal too much to Joel’s humanity makes him a less effective protector. When surrounded by murderous bandits, I do not want Joel to hesitate in keeping me safe. Yet, after the battle, I do not want to pretend to be all right with the terrible gore.

The line between being protected and being a prisoner blurs.

Videogames tend to focus the player experience on how it feels to commit violence. We rarely find ourselves placed in a role without agency, one that forces us to bear witness. If we did, we might not be so quick to justify as necessary the shooting of an unarmed man in the face with a shotgun. We might find ourselves uncomfortable in the company of a man whose deeds are good but whose actions are murderous. The line between being protected and being a prisoner blurs.

Perhaps then, the title The Last of Us wouldn’t refer to the number of people left in the ruined world. Perhaps it would refer to something inside, a limited resource of human connection that, when depleted, leaves us nothing worth fighting for.

———

The Burnt Offering is a semi-regular column in which Stu Horvath thinks too much. Follow him on Twitter @StuHorvath, where he doesn’t.

unwinnable.com

Beautiful Weapons – The New Inquiry

thenewinquiry.com

It’s a landmark week 69 of @impkerr’s triple-decker weekly http://t.co/xIUQGWMNHk

Beautiful Weapons

By Finch Kaye

Deadly Blessing, 1981

The Twine-game designer on interactive fiction, “trash spinning ,” and how to destroy the “completely unredeemable” games culture

Porpentine’s newest Twine game, created to accompany this issue, is called Parasite. Click below to begin playing:Porpentine is a game designer, writer, and erotic photographer whose work on the Twine platform has recently attracted critical attention. Finch Kaye spoke with her recently at her Oakland home to discuss her work.

Finch Kaye: To start off, can you talk about some of the games you’ve made?

Porpentine: I made a game called CYBERQUEEN, a sci-fi body horror incorporating my queer sexuality. It asks, What if the evil female AI won? And what if she was extremely horny? Cry$tal Warrior Ke$ha weaves together pop star Ke$ha’s personal mythology into this epic battle against trans-dimensional haters. How to Speak Atlantean explores my conflict-blasted body as a series of enormous mechanical zones followed by scavenging a hideous trashscape for spare parts to repair my broken Hitachi and cum my brains out.

I’ve made a game about communicating nonverbally with alien partners through the use of symbols, a game about hacking cupcakes designed to be played by a live audience, and an online multiplayer game about hungry ghosts sucking identity from the bodies of their fallen comrades to transcend the lamia-plagued plane of existence to which they are bound, to name a few. I made all of them in Twine.This interview appears in TNI Vol. 17: Games. Subscribe for $2 and get it today. 

FK: Tell me a little more about what Twine is. My sense is that it’s an important program because it’s so accessible. 

P: Twine is probably the most accessible way to make games in the world right now. People who never made a game in their life are making games in Twine — people traditionally disenfranchised from game creation. It came into popularity because me and other queer women started using it.

Twine dispenses with a lot of the bullshit traditionally surrounding games — the gatekeeping, the obscure control schemes, the worship of high-end visuals over game play, etc. Twine is a really great visual environment. It lets you create your writings in nodes and connect them very spatially. It requires no code. I mean anyone can make a game in it in five minutes.

Twine is guerrilla warfare. It is cheaply-made pipe bombs and land mines that can proliferate and crop up in the dominant space. Besides being easy to create, it is not enough that our art be beautiful. It must be a beautiful weapon. We must ensure that our art is weaponized and can destroy other things.

We can flood sites and the Web with our games because it’s so easy to upload and share. There’s just no obstacle to playing them — you just load it like a webpage. We’re competing now with AAA games. That’s what I mean by weaponization. It’s hard to argue with that kind of viral, proliferating, breeding spirit.

Well, I guess I want to know what it is you want to destroy?

I mean, all of it. Just, all games culture. It’s completely unredeemable. The good games people have made will be around still. We don’t need any of the bullshit misogynist racist culture. Games journalism is toxic, games writing is toxic, game design — the most popular, the mainstream of it is just sick. It’s hard for me to answer that question, its just so big and virulent and there and monolithic.

You once wrote that creation is the most powerful criticism because it allows you to destroy what you critique. Could you expand on that?

Criticism is powerful too. A lot of my favorite criticism is legitimate art on its own merits, like Cara Ellison’s poem Romero’s Wives, which was later read by Anna Anthropy. And on the everyday level pushing back and being loud in our social spaces is important. We have to fight for every inch of our space. If we don’t we will be crushed by the insidious creeping tendrils of liberalism where every act of violence against a minority can somehow be justified.

That being said, what I meant is that our radical energies can be neutralized by pathological snark. It’s important to spend time with friends and alternative power structures, because otherwise you are purely locked into combating an oppressor whose goal is to make you feel insane. We have to take care of ourselves. Fighting and fucking. Basically, I don’t have time to explain to 1000 people about why I deserve to live and why being trans is beautiful, but I can make 1 game about it that 1000 people play.

How do you compose in Twine or construct experiences in hypertext? There’s a lot of that I don’t really understand in terms of placement of links as opposed to, say, poetry. 

I’ve always just called it trash-spinning. Just like rolling up trash. But most of my games are just spontaneous improvisations where I roll up everything in my environment and I wad them together. They’re a big, crystalized trashy ball of everything that’s happened to me over the 24 hours or 48 hours in which I made the game. Like conversations, or you’ll notice how I incorporate all of the music I’m listening to in my games. It’s just very organic. Then I try to turn it into a weapon, something people can feel. How can my emotions be transmitted to another human being? A dart of nausea, arousal, triumph, crying, even radical, transformative joy.

What’s the place or role of music in these games? I mean, I’ve played Ke$ha Crystal Warrior, but —

Music is paramount: I make music games. Music is my surrogate emotion when I have none. I can’t emphasize it enough. I list the music I listen to while making the game because a lot of the games are actually kind of shrines to the music. They’re kind of hypertext music videos in some ways, Ke$ha being the most obvious example. But others are embodiments of the song in some way.

Recently you wrote a piece called “Seven Thoughts on Women in Games” in which you talk about making a Twine game called Howling Dogs, for which you were criticized. I think someone called it a crime. What was Howling Dogs and why did some people react that way to it?

Howling Dogs is something — God, what a question. It’s a game that uses the central hub of being trapped in this tiny room, and you only have a daily regimen of base nutrition and hydration. Every night you go into a virtual-reality chamber and experience something that the artificial intelligence creates for you, and then you’re back again. The reasons are probably twofold, or threefold, for why people disliked it. In interactive fiction at the time, parser was dominant and people reacted strongly to nonparser work. Parser is like the old text adventures where you type commands to “go East,” or “pick up … fucko…”

Sword?

Sword, that’s better. “Fucko” is not a commonly recognized term. Whereas hypertext is clicking on links to navigate, and I guess it has superficial comparisons to choose-your-own-adventure books, yet it’s far more complex than that, as people are proving.

And really, we need both tools. Parser is adapted for expressing spatiality. For instance, the most popular parser authoring tool, Inform 7, posits everything within it as rooms with items inside them and actors where the default node that it creates is a room. Twine creates passages of words, which could be any kind of writing. Hyperlinks are just infinitely versatile. So while parser is created for spatiality, hypertext is suited to representing emotions and thoughts and more complicated things than mere physical space.

And I was able to play with physical space in Howling Dogs as well. The core is this physical space and then the exterior is arranged in all these dreamlike spokes. But to get back to what you were saying, another reason people disliked it was because I was a woman and I was trans and I had people specifically saying things or reading trans subtext into my work because they knew I was trans, which is a very cheap thing to do. People were commenting on the pictures on my site — talking about my game and also the pictures on my site in the same breath, like using the fact that I take erotic pictures — that I do queer erotic photography — as something against my game.

Earlier you told me about new game mechanics that people were developing. What are these, and do they show up in indie games in general?

There are a lot of interesting things people are doing with hypertext. Leon Arnott developed a lot of cool scripts for us to use. It’s like if you were a writer and suddenly you could make your pages play music or flip faster or change colors or have words melt mid-sentence.

Christine Love’s done some of the most experimental stuff with Twine. She has one where you don’t even click but your cursor’s a gun, and whenever you even hover over a link it just explodes! It’s a very volatile game. It just keeps going forward, propelled by your clumsiness.

In later games, the thing I’ve been impressed most by has been the cycling macro which actually lets you click on the hyperlink but it’s like a dial, so only the hyperlink changes. Previously in hypertext, how do you handle variables changing? You click on a link and you go to another page and there you set a variable. Whereas with cycling links, you have one page with words you can morph by clicking to change them around. It’s a way to give the player aesthetic agency. So it’ll say, “the sun is bright”, or “the sun is shrouded by clouds”, and you click it back and forth. And then you maybe click “and then I go outside”.

Controlling the world just seems so different from the normal control over what your character or your avatar in the game is doing. 

Yeah, it gives the player a huge level of collaboration — which is what writing is in the first place. It’s saying, okay, what do you want this world to be? And you can just have it be aesthetic. It doesn’t have to show up later in the story and affect anything. I feel people feel the need to hard-code things. What people have been experimenting more with lately is just a more mercurial environment. I think people are going to be playing more and more with that. But that’s just one approach out of infinity. The important thing is giving people open-ended tools so they can surprise us. I just want to be surprised.This interview appears in TNI Vol. 17: Games. Subscribe for $2 and get it today. 

Some people think games have to be about surmounting a challenge —

[ppffff]

— that you try to win. Are your games winnable?

I don’t think that’s a factor. I guess climax is a better term. I think win is a bit dominating. You wouldn’t say of a film, “Did they win?” I guess you could say was there a happy ending or not, but there’s a respect for non-happy endings as well in film. There can be a respect for games where you are not the victor. My games have a lot of different endings. They do have fairly triumphant endings. But I think some of them have pretty ambiguous endings. What do you think of the endings of my games?

There’s a dominant idea of alternative endings or a different set of choices. Like, you’re good or evil and you get a different ending. I found myself pondering over the end to “Howling Dogs” for a long while after.

Which one?

I don’t know! I think I’ve only had the same ending. You get up and then there’s one more phrase and then the quote at the end. 

Is it the one with the leaves?

Maybe. I don’t know.

Is it the one where you wake up and get out of bed?

Yeah. 

That’s the false ending. But it reinforces the real ending if you find it.

Please fill in all fields

Previously by
Finch Kaye

Beautiful Weapons

No. 17: Games

TNI Magazine

June 25, 2013

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Competition as a force beyond good and evil

ramiismail.com

8 jul 2013

Now that we’re preparing the release of the first update for Ridiculous Fishing, it’s a rare opportunity to reflect on two years of hard work and controversy. There’s one final subject that has been bothering me since the start of the Ridiculous Fishing cloning debacle, and it’s been one that has required me to think for a long time. That subject is the place of competition in our industry.

For some people, competition is some sort of magical force that makes things improve. That’s perfectly fine – some people need some sort of external quality bar. When Ridiculous Fishing got cloned, they were the people that told us that that’s how free markets work and that we should ‘just make a better game’. When I responded that we don’t want to compete (that’s why we try and make new, original games) they somehow felt this was an issue that should be corrected.

As the business half of Vlambeer, I try to keep competition out of what we’re doing. Just like at any good game jam, we’d rather be helping out than competing with each other. What surprised me, however, was that some people felt that this was –for some reason- an inferior stance towards the business of videogames. Zachary Knight, for example claimed Vlambeer had started to suddenly love competition now that we had ‘beaten’ Ninja Fishing. That’s not true. The only reason we cared about ‘beating’ Ninja Fishing – whatever that may mean – is so that we could show the industry at large that when you clone a game, you do get an inferior product. We wanted to show the industry that making games because you want to make games is the better way to go about game development.

The problem is that these people have an outdated understanding of motivation in relation to business or entrepreneurship. They see the economy at large being driven by competition, but cannot separate the larger forces at play from the individual motivations that drive people.

For Vlambeer, competition is not a driving force – in fact, like in the case of Ninja Fishing forcing us to compete with them, it’s often a distraction. Our driving force is outdoing ourselves: the next game has to better than the previous. Our next marketing campaign has to be tighter than the last. Our next deal needs to be better than the previous. Our next interview better than the last. Our next talk needs to be more effective, our next seminar more educational, our next gamejam more useful. Not because of the market, not because of the economy, not to show the world that we’re better than others – but because we want to get better.

On a much larger scale, though, Vlambeer wants to cooperate. We both care a lot about game development, about indie development, about the people already in the industry and the people trying to get into the industry. We’ve set up dozens of opportunities to help out and co-organize a large number of events and initiatives to that point. We realize that, if we want gaming to be a healthy, welcoming environment, you have to treat people coming into the environment with respect and courtesy. You tell them that making games is about making games and helping one another out. If you want them to rip off ideas instead of creating their own, you teach them that it’s just about competition and that making games isn’t about making games, but about minimizing costs and optimizing profits. It’s that simple.

Sure, you need to make enough money to stay afloat, but the verbial pie is large enough to share it amongst all of us – often without the need to compete at all. Chris Hecker explained this eloquently in his GDC 2013 talk, in which he pointed out that Nobody Knows About Your Game. Eitan Glinert worded things even better: ‘We’re not competing with each other, we’re competing with obscurity.’ The fact that someone bought an indie game doesn’t mean they won’t buy another indie game – in fact, it’s more likely that they will.

What I do isn’t about being better than somebody else, it’s about being relevant to the industry, the medium and the people I care about. It’s about making sure I work with Jan Willem and the rest of our collaborators to make great games for the fans. It’s about helping out other developers, whether they’re just starting out in an emerging region or established developers looking for some feedback, It’s about inspiring and informing students all around the world. It’s about sharing and cooperating against obscurity. These are sentiments that I see all around the scene, cooperation instead of competition, sharing instead of patenting, collaborating instead of antagonizing.

Whether you want to compete, improve, dabble, change the world, just have fun – or whatever your motivation to make games may be – know that your motivation is perfectly valid whatever anyone on Gamasutra tells you. Make the games you want to make, make them with the tools you like – and most importantly, make them on your own terms.

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ramiismail.com

Avellone, Vlambeer, Introversion Talk Meaning Of ‘Indie’

rockpapershotgun.com

Indie Megachat Ultrotranscript, Pt 1

By Nathan Grayson on July 8th, 2013 at 11:00 am.

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Let’s try this again. Earlier this week, I posted the audio from a spur-the-moment indie megachat I put together during Rezzed, but its audio quality ended up a casualty of the fact that everyone at Rezzed never stops screaming. Never. The agony of existence. It is terrifying.

So as a (probably much better) alternative, I’ll be posting a transcription over the next few days. If I did it all in one go, the page would strike the bottom of the Internet and rupture its core (and, you know, take a billion years to read), so here’s part one. In it, Obsidian‘s Chris Avellone, Dreamfall‘s Ragnar Tornquist, Introversion‘s Chris Delay, Vlambeer‘s Rami Ismail, and Redshirt‘s Mitu Khandaker discuss the evolution of the “indie” scene in the gaming industry, the gulf between triple-A and smaller-scale development, and the way Kickstarter-empowered no-longer-triple-A developers like Obsidian and Red Thread are starting to bridge it.

RPS: To begin, indie is word that gets thrown around a lot in the gaming industry, but for each of you, what does it actually mean?

Tornquist: Independent? I don’t know, yet. I haven’t gotten that far. The most important thing for me is being able to show the game without worrying what anyone else is going to say afterwards. Being able to show broken builds and work in progress to people. That, right now, is the best thing about being indie.

Avellone: For me, it means the only people you really answer to are yourselves and the players.

It has nothing to do with team size. It has nothing to do with money.

Delay: Yeah, I’ll agree with that. The cool thing about indie is being able to have total control over what games you work on, when you release them, and all of that. But I think it’s developed another meaning as well, which is something to do with the idea of very small teams. There’s a lot of disagreement about that.

Tornquist: Yeah, absolutely. I would vehemently disagree about that.

[Everyone laughs]

Ismail: It’s interesting, because my perspective… You guys obviously have some background in the gaming industry before all of this. I just started being an indie studio, doing an indie studio. For me it has nothing to do with size or independence, because I just don’t know another way of making video games. For me, the core of indie is more about community and working with the people that you make your games for, but also working with other developers in a really open, sharing way. We do a lot for the community and the community does a lot for us. For me, that’s the thing I think about when I say “indie.”

It has nothing to do with team size. It has nothing to do with money. At some point I think it has nothing to do with working with partners, whether they’re a publisher or whatever. I think it’s about this weird sort of thing that’s there, where there are all sorts of people making things that I run into everywhere. I run into Chris [Avellone] at pretty much every event. I run into the Prison Architect guys every now and then. I haven’t run into either [Ragnar or Mitu] yet, but… It all feels really open and friendly. It doesn’t feel like a competition. It feels like a cooperation of all these people doing video games.

Delay: I think what you described there, though, is just the games industry.

Ismail: I know, but there’s this weird thing where… This is a really visible thing, in the indie scene.

Tornquist: You don’t just run into the developers of Call of Duty or Battlefield. They’re isolated, in a way. They’re brought out to do PR. I’ve worked on games like that. You don’t go to everything. You go where you’re supposed to go and meet who you’re supposed to meet and do the presentations where you’re supposed to be at. You don’t have the…

Avellone: They’re very targeted events.

Tornquist: Exactly.

Avellone: With very few variables… There are certain things that you’re never familiar with. Nathan, I’m sure you can’t ever feel those talking points being brought out again and again and again.

RPS: No, never. Every interview’s a snowflake. [laughter]

Avellone: Such a special snowflake.

Ismail: I would agree, though, that we’re friends with a lot of triple-A developers as well. It’s not as if the triple-A developer community is closed. It’s just that they’re not allowed to be that way publicly. And they have a lot of responsibilities. They have responsibilities toward shareholders.

Avellone: I think it goes back to who you’re answering to. The indie scene, I feel, is very much about… The community of developers is a different point to make. But it’s mostly you developing the game with your teammates. You work it out with them. But ideally it’s all about entertaining the player and making sure they’re having a good time. There’s really nobody else involved in that.

That sense of community and everyone wanting to help out… I think that’s what’s great about the indie community. I feel like you guys are more willing to share and help out with things and share experiences. In the traditional publisher model, I feel like there’s that paranoia. You can’t let any secrets get out. We can’t share any technology.

Ismail: It is our strength, as a community. We’re sharing and open. We talk to each other about the things we do, the experiences we have. It’s the only way that a one- or two-person team can survive in a world of huge studios and publishers.

Avellone: [To Mitu] One-person team. I am totally impressed.

Khandaker: To me… My background is similar to yours, Rami. I didn’t work in another game company before going indie. I just started making games. So for me, creative control is part of it. Also, being indie just means that I’m by myself in a little room and don’t see other humans. [laughter]

RPS: Is that where the community aspect of it comes in, though?

Khandaker: Absolutely. That’s why knowing other indies is so valuable. Admittedly, my situation is a little bit different, because I’ve got another indie developer, Positech Games, publishing the game I’m currently working on.

Delay: A publisher!

RPS: Traitor!

Khandaker: But an indie publisher! So a non-evil publisher.

Avellone: But you developed the game concept first, and then they were interested and they came to you?

Khandaker: Yeah, I pitched the game to them

Tornquist: A one-woman indie with a publisher, and we’ve got a huge team, so we can…

Delay: Indie is variety, isn’t it? There’s variety in all things. Valve’s an indie. They don’t have publishing contracts. They publish all their own stuff on their own network. Why don’t they call it that?

Ismail: I think in the end it’s also if you want to identify as indie. I’ve never heard Valve call themselves indie. At this point Notch has basically said that he doesn’t think of himself as indie. I’m not gonna say, “No, you’re indie! Dude, listen to me, you’re indie!”

Avellone: So what is the difference?

Delay: I don’t know.

Avellone: You’re like Socrates. I’ve got the questions… [laughter]

Tornquist: I think we’re not going to be talking about indie [as a distinction] for much longer. At some point in the future we’ll be game developers. That distinction is very concrete now because it’s a movement, right? As this grows bigger and the lines are blurred around what more people do… You guys are crossing that line all the time. You can say that you’re straddling both sides of the fence, but that’s what more and more people are going to do.

Ismail: It’s interesting, because if you look at indie as a thing, it started in around 2008, with the ascent of the indie developer. It kept growing, both in size but also in public perception. We’ve had IGF since, what…?

Delay: Oh, ages. Steam started shipping indie games in 2005. Xbox had a big explosion of indie around 2007 and 2008.

Ismail: Then what happened, obviously, is that as it started growing, more people started being interested in this. Indie has made this weird sort of professionalization, where it went from being people who make video games on small forums, making games in like three hours and throwing them out there as little experiments, and sort of like this… It’s almost super-experimental. “We just want to make games. We don’t want it to have anything to do with money.” Money was a dirty word. “Money, no, we don’t do money. We do games.”

In the last two years, you’ve seen this amazing movement, in which the indie developers that were young back then – the kids from those days that were making those experiments – and also the generation that I’m part of started to realize that at some point you kind of do need money. We started to professionalize a bit. You can see that.

Delay: Some of the richest game developers are in the indie scene. [laughs]

Ismail: It’s funny, because that’s a development that happened in, what, the last five years? Before that, that wasn’t true. Everybody knows the story of Cave Story, which is an amazing game, and what did it make until a few years ago? It made nothing. But it’s interesting for me that somebody like Jonatan Söderström, who was one of those experimental types, would make 150 games in a year, and then two years ago he decided, “I could use food.” [laughter] And he sat down and made Hotline Miami.

Delay: He could make 150 games in one year? That’s like one every two days.

Ismail: He would make games in an hour.

Avellone: Can I get some personal history on that? Like, did he purposefully make Hotline Miami just for the sake of [doing something bigger]?

Ismail: He met somebody that could focus him. And then together they worked on it.

Avellone: So he got a producer. I know I’m using a dirty word, but…

Ismail: Honestly, what he got was… He met this guy called Dennis Wedin. It’s basically the same story that Vlambeer has, where JW was the creative, chaotic mind, and then he met me. Jonatan and Dennis are sort of a similar story.

Avellone: So he acted as a funnel and a channel for, “Let’s focus on this idea first. I like what you’re doing here, but before you worry about all of this stuff, let’s go down this route, get that developed, see how that feels.”

Ismail: Yeah, we just fight over stuff. [laughter]

Avellone: But you finished it. That’s the most important aspect of management. That’s good.

Ismail: We tried to sort of figure out a way to make the projects that are worthwhile into something. That’s what Vlambeer is, that’s what Dennaton is. I think that’s an interesting development in indie. You see a lot of people making this jump from making little experimental things to taking those experimental things and exploring them all the way.

RPS: It’s interesting to see where it came from, too, because games are one of the only mediums that I can think of that started as a commercial enterprise. From very early on, it was about making money. I think the other side of indie, at least as we know it, is as a counterculture. And so initially, those people making games that were free, they were doing it because, “No, I don’t want to be one of those guys asking for money.” Basically taking a stand against conventional wisdom, a portion of gaming’s DNA.

Tornquist: It’s not a virtue anymore. The indie scene is self-calibrating. In the beginning, I think you’re right, but there’s an evolution there from being that counterculture – “We’re going to go in the face of big publishers and triple-A and do something creative and different.” Now it’s maturing into… It’s okay to make money. We celebrate the people who do. And that’s fine.

Khandaker: It’s not also the only answer, right? It’s okay to still be as counterculture as you want to be.

Tornquist: But people aren’t saying things like, “Oh, they’re sellouts, because they’re massive successes.” It’s celebrated.

Ismail: You’re all sellouts as far as I’m concerned. [laughter]

Delay: Actually, back in 2006, we got that. People said that we weren’t indie anymore because we’d signed a deal with Valve. Which is hilarious, because now Steam is the place for the indie scene. Back then we were like number two, I think. Darwinia was number two. So it was really early on. “You shouldn’t be in the IGF! You aren’t indie!”

Khandaker: I think maybe I just take exception to thinking of it as an evolution into trying to go down a commercial route with indie. It’s not that that is a natural place for it to go. I think it’s more about it opening up. Don’t get me wrong – personally I’m making Redshirt as a commercial endeavor, and I’m lucky enough that I have an indie publisher and I’ve been able to do that. But for plenty of people, indie is a really important space in which to be able to do it as [creative expression].

Ismail: The motivations are also an interesting thing, because there are indies making games just because they need to survive. There are indies making games because they want to make the game. There are indies making games as a political or social statement. Here, we’ve got games about shooting airplanes on one end. We’ve got games about running prisons. We’ve got games about being afraid about being stood up for a date on the other end. There’s this amazing spectrum.

Avellone: I just think that when you take the economics… I don’t know if it’s necessarily a stigma, but when I hear about someone doing a game for a political reason, I feel there’s a different motivation going on there that’s not quite as stigmatized. And also, if you’re just doing a game because there’s a game concept you wanted to do, that feels like… If you happen to generate money while you’re doing that, if you can survive and keep doing that, that seems to me…

Delay: But in the triple-A industry, they’re not doing it. They’re not exploring the possibilities of [developing for other reasons]. They look and they say, “You know what’s really popular? First-person shooters.”

Ismail: The economics of that are really simple. It costs millions and millions of dollars to make a game like that.

Avellone: And the worst part is, it’s not even the actual development costs. The development costs, $20 or $30 million, are insane – and that’s on the small end – but then there’s the marketing budget, which is just fucking insane. Audio and QA, oh my fucking god. That’s more money than I could ever dream of seeing in several lifetimes.

Ismail: So that’s the thing. They cannot take a risk.

Avellone: No, they have to be established franchises. Game mechanics we’re comfortable with.

Ismail: Of course, we’re right at the start of a new console generation right now. You’re seeing some new IPs, but all of those… They’re “new,” some are fresh, but if you look at them, they’re still within the space that we’re comfortable with.

Avellone: They have familiar elements. “Oh, that’s kind of like that game.”

RPS: But that kind of brings us to the main reason I selected each of you specifically. Chris and Ragnar, you’re both examples of people with long histories in triple-A who’ve made the jump into indie development. Your games straddle the line, too. The production values and team sizes definitely aren’t as “indie” as some.

Ismail: Triple-indie.

Tornquist: Triple-I? [laughter]

RPS: Triple-I sounds like an Apple product, so maybe not that.

Avellone: Yeah, triple-indie. The triple-indie forum… [more laughs]

RPS: So you guys shrunk down to do smaller productions that are more creatively oriented via Kickstarter. Does part of that come from the fact that you couldn’t explore a lot of the things that you wanted to in triple-A?

Tornquist: Yes. Absolutely. I think that… We’ve both been in sort of traditional game development, the publisher-developer model, for a long time. I’m speaking for you now, Chris, as I usually do. [laughter]

Avellone: That’s fine, I’m fine with that. I mean, if I could choose anyone to speak for me…

Tornquist: Well, but I mean… I have experience. I’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of freedom. I think you have too, in the past, even with our sort of traditional model, being able to make the games that we wanted to make. But that ended. It’s an economic situation where the publisher has to make more and more safe bets. It used to be less like that, but now it’s to the point where it gets in the way.

Avellone: I think the most memorable products that I’ve seen studios make are ones that were under the radar, but still in a larger studio. For example, Fallout wasn’t being carefully watched at Interplay. They pay attention to what’s going on – “Oh, it’s a GURPS project. Oh, now it’s the Fallout project.” – but it didn’t get as much attention as some of the other ones. They did a lot of stuff that was under the radar. Then, eventually, when it erupted, it had all these new concepts about it, but it was because it wasn’t being watched or controlled quite so much. I think sometimes that’s not such a bad place to be.

Planescape was very much the same way. “Baldur’s Gate is coming out. There’s some Planescape thing too, but screw that.” It was a fantastic situation to be in. Ideally, being out on our own, talking directly to the players – “Is this the kind of RPG you’d like to see? Let’s discuss the mechanics. Let’s discuss the narrative” – that stuff is a lot more freeing and liberating, without having some other person to answer to, who may not understand all those different mechanics, and they have a different model for how they want it released or how they feel things should be. Eventually you have to answer to the players no matter what, when you make a game. I would much rather make a smaller, more focused game, dealing just with the players.

Delay: It’s been interesting to me, always. The film industry has somehow gotten around this problem. They have equivalent things going on, but they do manage to produce massive blockbuster films which are not just another assembly-line.

Ismail: Well, if you listen to the people in the movie industry, they would not agree with you. I’ve been reading a lot of interviews lately about a lot of big studio executives saying, “This model is unsustainable. We’re all going to crash and burn.”

Delay: Some of these problems exist, but the movie industry is not trapped in the same way, the same as triple-A video games.

Tornquist: There are a lot of really creative movies, and perhaps not daring, but at least they’re trying to do something more than simply deliver a product. There are a lot of products, but there are a lot of exciting ventures as well.

Delay: Yeah, exactly. It seems like taking largely unknown directors and giving them things like Batman. That’s a huge budget, and they have so much confidence in this one guy that they let him…

Tornquist: Part of it is how established that system is and how controlled the process is. Yes, they can allow that creative freedom, because everything else is so set in stone, the way they work. I think our industry hasn’t matured enough for that, maybe.

Delay: Yeah. The idea is that there’s always a director and a producer, two different roles. The director’s there to dream and keep the vision together.

Tornquist: And the producer’s there to fire the director if things aren’t working out. [laughter]

Check back soon for part two, in which we discuss comparisons to Hollywood, potential unfairness when larger developers like Obsidian use Kickstarter, why Steam Greenlight really needs improvement, and responsibility to fans. 

__________________

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rockpapershotgun.com

Heroines in Dota 2

borderhouseblog.com

The following is a guest post from Max Seidman:

Max Seidman is a game designer at Tiltfactor, a game design and research lab located at Dartmouth College dedicated to developing games for meaningful social change. He posts design philosophy and game concepts on his blog.  Max lives in New Hampshire with Clementine, the Crystal Maiden to his Lycanthrope.

I love DotA.  I’ve been playing for over eight years at this point, and over that time I’ve sunk an absurd and unspeakable number of hours on the game.  I played it as a custom map for the original Warcraft III, then in the expansion Frozen Throne, then on the Garena client, and now in Valve’s standalone Dota 2.  And while I love the game, there’s one think I don’t love about it: its representation of women.  These are my thoughts on the things Dota 2 is doing poorly on this front.

Lack of Representation
A dearth of female characters is endemic to video games.  In games with a protagonist the argument is often made, “We’re marketing our game to men, so we’re going to make our main character male.”  While this is bullshit, I at least understand the argument.  However, not even this is a shield that games in the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre, games like DotA, can hide behind, as these games often have dozens of characters to choose from.

Dota 2 itself currently boasts over 100 heroes that players can play.  As you can see below, exactly 16 of them are female, identified either by their backstories, names or voices.  This is rather pathetic, and seems to imply that male players would be offended and turned off to the game by the mere presence of female characters, which I find fairly insulting.

Women: 51% of the U.S. population, 16% of the Dota 2 population.
(Hero selection screen alternating all heroes, and just female ones.)

Dota 2 heroes are split into three categories of proficiency which determine their roles in the game. Strength heroes are primarily defensive, wear armor and wield melee weapons, and are often extremely muscular. Agility heroes are mostly offensive, look slimmer than strength heroes, and can wield either melee or ranged weapons. Intelligence heroes support the other types by casting spells, and are usually ranged. Of the 16 female heroes, 9 are agility, 7 are intelligence, and none are strength. In addition, only 4 are melee. This limits the types of roles that players see female characters in. The game sends the message that women can be intelligent or agile, but never strong. They can be in combat, but only at a safe distance. Furthermore, because of these limitations, it is extremely rare to see a female hero carry a team to victory in the same way that certain male heroes often do. Finally, the heroes are divided into a team of good and a team of evil heroes. Two-thirds of the female heroes are on the good side. By relegating what few female characters there are to either fragile ranged support roles, or fragile ranged offense roles, Dota 2 is sending an extremely gendered message.

Lack of Diversity
Of the 16 female heroes, 12 share one body type; they have light skin, are small, thin and busty, with conventionally attractive facial features.  They wear clothing (only occasionally armor) that reveals a fair amount of skin.  And they are never muscular.  This stands in stark contrast to the male heroes in the game, who have a tremendous amount of diversity.  Male heroes range from short and stocky, to tall and lanky, to portly and not conventionally attractive.  They range from fit to body-builder in their musculature, with the occasional pudgy!

Despite one of them having a deer’s bottom half, their builds are pretty similar.
(Row of male heroes with diverse body types; row of
female heroes with generic, ‘thinwashed’ body types.)

Around half of the male heroes are distinctly monsters, with many more a mix between monster and humanoid.  A similar spectrum between humanoid and monstrous does not exist for female heroes.  The 12 slim female heroes are all distinctly humanoid, even if a few are animals from the waist down and another is riding a tiger.  The remaining 4 female heroes are complete monsters (one is a giant spider, another is a butterfly-like dragon, the third is shadowy blob, and the last is a gorgon).

(Spectrum of male heroes: human, tree-person, fish-monster with legs, humanoid shadowbeast, and giant scorpion. Spectrum of female heroes: human, human with wings, shadow monster, dragon, spider.)

There is a clear message being sent here: while there are all types of male creatures, from ugly to beautiful and human to inhuman, females are only allowed to be pretty humanoids or hideous but technically-female monsters, with no in between. 
Sexualization 
While a lot has been said about sexualization of women in video games, and much could be said about Dota 2, I want to highlight a specific instance of blatant pandering.  Several months back Valve released a patch to the game, as they have fairly frequently since it’s still in beta.  In addition to many mechanical hero changes and bug fixes, there was a change unlisted in the patch notes: all of the hero portraits used for hero selection changed resolution.  But more than just resolution… in order to add height to the images, more of most heroes’ bodies were shown.  While you can see the portrait expansion didn’t really have much of an effect on male heroes (on the right), the changes were striking for female heroes.  Windrunner (on the left) is a great example of a reasonable and representative portrait that was turned into just cleavage.  Other portraits had boobs featured before, but were edited to ensure they were in the players’ faces.

“The portrait is pretty good, but there are two things it’s missing..”–Valve
(Hero portraits before and after the update.)

I think the differences are striking.

Staunch Dota defenders are probably itching to come to Valve’s defense with the argument, “They’re just copying what was done in the original DotA, and don’t have say in character creation.” This is obviously not an excuse for sexualization, but nor is it for representation issues.  For example, Valve has already rebranded the previously sexless Puck (a faerie dragon) as female. This is a step in the right direction, and I would like to see it carried further. Many such sexless heroes exist: the shapeshifting morphling who is somehow male, and Enigma, of whom nothing is supposedly known (except apparently his sex) are prime examples of heroes who had genders arbitrarily imposed, and could have been made female. In addition, however, women who fill the spectrum between gorgeous human and hideous monster must be added. Muscular melee armor-plated female strength heroes are a necessity, preferably wielding wicked weaponry (a place where League of Legends is superior to Dota 2). Overweight and twisted women should exist in the game to parallel the same types of male heroes. The evil team (called The Dire) should not lack for female participation, since in a world where evil for its own sake exists, women should not be above enacting it. Finally, it would be nice to see a few male human heroes with the same body types as 75% of the women in the game.

borderhouseblog.com

Desert Bus: The Worst Video Game Ever Created : The New Yorker

newyorker.com

Morgan van Humbeck completed his shift in front of the television and passed out. Ten minutes later, his cell phone woke him. “Morgan, this is Teller,” said a small voice on the other end of the line. “Fuck off,” replied Morgan in disbelief. He hung up the phone and went back to sleep.

* * * 

The drive from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada, takes approximately eight hours when travelling in a vehicle whose top speed is forty-five miles per hour. In Desert Bus, an unreleased video game from 1995 conceived by the American illusionists and entertainers Penn Jillette and Teller, players must complete that journey in real time. Finishing a single leg of the trip requires considerable stamina and concentration in the face of arch boredom: the vehicle constantly lists to the right, so players cannot take their hands off the virtual wheel; swerving from the road will cause the bus’s engine to stall, forcing the player to be towed back to the beginning. The game cannot be paused. The bus carries no virtual passengers to add human interest, and there is no traffic to negotiate. The only scenery is the odd sand-pocked rock or road sign. Players earn a single point for each eight-hour trip completed between the two cities, making a Desert Bus high score perhaps the most costly in gaming.

Van Humbeck, unconscious on the couch, had just contributed to what was then a Desert Bus world record of five points.

Whenever Penn and Teller were booked to appear on the David Letterman show, a close friend, Eddie Gorodetsky, the Emmy Award–winning television writer whose credits include “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Two and a Half Men,” and “Saturday Night Live,” would visit their office and pretend to be Letterman to help them prepare. During one of these rehearsals, the trio came up with the concept of a video game that could work as a satire against the anti-video-game lobby.

“Every few years, video games are blamed in the media for all of the ills in society,” said Teller. “In the early nineteen-nineties, I wrote an article for the New York Times citing all the studies that show video games have no effect on a child’s morals. But we wanted to create some entertainment that helped make the point.” The conversation with Gorodetsky seeded the idea of a video game that casts the player as a bus driver in a rote simulation. “The route between Las Vegas and Phoenix is long,” said Teller. “It’s a boring job that just goes on and on repetitiously, and your task is simply to remain conscious. That was one of the big keys—we would make no cheats about time, so people like the Attorney General could get a good idea of how valuable and worthwhile a game that just reflects reality would be.” (The U.S. Attorney General at the time, Janet Reno, was a critic of on-screen violence.)

The New Jersey–based video-game developer Imagineering created Desert Bus as one component of a larger game collection, called Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors, for the Sega CD, a short-lived add-on for the Sega Genesis console. Penn, Teller, and the game’s publisher, Absolute Entertainment, planned a lavish prize for any player that scored a hundred points, a feat that would require eight hundred continuous hours of play: a real-life trip from Tucson to Las Vegas on a desert bus carrying showgirls and a live band.

“But by the time the game was finished, the format was dead,” said Teller. “We were unable to find anybody interested in acquiring the game.” Imagineering went out of business, and Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors was never released. The only record of the game’s existence was a handful of review copies that had been sent out to journalists in the weeks before the publisher went bust, in 1995.

The game remained a curious rumor until September, 2005, when Frank Cifaldi, a freelance American journalist and self-professed video-game historian, received a package in the mail. Cifaldi is the founder of Lost Levels, a Web site dedicated to the preservation of rare and obscure video games. “The site attracted the attention of some people who happened to have copies of unpublished games they didn’t know what to do with,” he explained. “One guy who used to review games for a magazine in the nineteen-nineties still had his review copy of Smoke and Mirrors.” Cifaldi posted a review and a copy of the game to a number of Internet forums. Desert Bus had been rediscovered.

Van Humbeck is a former member of LoadingReadyRun, an Internet sketch-comedy group founded by Graham Stark and Paul Saunders in 2003. “I heard about Desert Bus in early 2006, on a Web site called waxy.org,” said Saunders. “The blog post linked to an extensive description of the main game, as well as the various mini-games included on the disc—and, most importantly, it had a torrent of the entire game available for download.”

Saunders wanted to film the group as it attempted to complete Desert Bus for a sketch. “At this same time,” he said, “one of the other team members, James Turner, brought up the idea of using our minor Internet fame to do something to benefit Child’s Play,” a charity that donates video games and consoles to children’s wards in hospitals around the world. “His idea was a live competition event where we would take pledges depending on how far we made it in various video games. We decided to combine both ideas and play Desert Bus for charity.”

Desert Bus for Hope was scheduled to begin late November, 2007, and Saunders built a simple Web site. “I initially called the Web site ‘The First Annual Desert Bus for Hope,’ but only because I thought it sounded funny,” he said. “We hadn’t thought about repeating the event at this point.” For every donation they received, the group pledged to drive a portion of the game’s route between Tucson and Las Vegas. They would film their progress and live stream it on the Internet. “The event itself was very cobbled together in the first year,” explained Stark. “The camera’s wide-angle lens was held on with rubber bands.” On the weekend of the event, Saunders and Stark set up the camera and a Sega CD system, and embarked on the first leg of the virtual journey.

* * * 

“They didn’t contact us,” said Teller. “Someone sent me a news story about the event over e-mail. So I got in contact.” Saunders e-mailed Teller back, thanking him for his interest. He asked if Teller might consider giving the team an encouraging phone call to inspire what had become a “hub of sleep deprivation.” After Morgan van Humbeck hung up on him, Teller found another number to reach the team, and asked what they’d like for lunch. “They sent me the menu for a local Chinese restaurant,” said Teller. “I made the calls and had it all delivered.” Teller called back every day to buy the group lunch; he and Penn each donated five hundred dollars.

“That first year, we had no plans for food or scheduling,” said Stark. “If it hadn’t been for friends and family coming by with food, and to just hang out and keep us awake, I don’t think it would have succeeded.” The team managed to score five points in a hundred and eight hours of continuous play before a driver, in the fog of drowsiness, crashed the bus. “When we discussed our fundraising goal, we decided to aim for one thousand dollars,” said Stark. “But I lobbied to increase our goal to five thousand dollars, to give our viewers something crazy to reach for. We raised twenty-two thousand and eighty-five dollars that year.”

Desert Bus for Hope is now going into its seventh year, and has raised over a million dollars. “I liken it to AIDS walks,” said Teller. “When they first started, I think everyone was quite puzzled by them. Then people began to understand that performing a mundane task and having someone sponsor you is an interesting way to raise money.”

Nevertheless, both Saunders and Stark struggle to understand the game’s efficacy. “I have friends involved in worthwhile charities that struggle for every twenty-dollar donation,” said Saunders. “But Desert Bus for Hope seems to operate in this strange alternate universe where you can challenge strangers on the Internet to donate five thousand dollars in the next five minutes, and the money seems to just suddenly appear.” Teller said that at a recent magic show, “a guy came up to me and handed me a hundred-dollar bill and asked, ‘Would you get this to the guys that do Desert Bus?’ ”

The charity has become an institution of sorts in the gaming world, and the game is now available for ninety-nine cents on iOS and Android. “The game isn’t the challenge for us; it’s the excuse to keep us all trapped in a room for a week,” Stark explained. “It’s the horrible glue that binds the whole event together.”

“I’ve achieved a Zen-like state while playing it, where it doesn’t bother me as long as I don’t think about it,” Stark continued. “If I do think about it, it’s goddam awful.”

Saunders agreed, mournfully: “It is, without a doubt, the very worst video game I have ever played.”

newyorker.com

oti xero • Gavin Moore: "Why do we want girls to play girls and why do we want boys to play boys?"

otixero.com

Gavin Moore: “Why do we want girls to play girls and why do we want boys to play boys?”

Editor’s Note: I’m happy about all the comments and discussions my interview with Gavin Moore has brought up around the internet, but I feel like I have to set something straight. I changed the title of this article. The original title: “Japan will never care about sexism, it’s a non-issue” was misleading. I didn’t specify the word “sexism” enough. I didn’t mean Japan’s general reaction to sexism, the interview wasn’t about that and Moore didn’t say anything about that matter. It was about the fact that now that we have this discussion about male and female protagonists in video games, people start asking themselves: “Wait, is it sexist that nearly every hero in a video game is male? Should I feel weird about this?”.  The title didn’t reflect that enough, that’s entirely my fault and I’m sorry for it. Please don’t call Moore sexist because I chose unwise words for my title. I’m the one to blame for this. 

Original article:

I had the chance to interview Gavin Moore, Creative Director of Puppeteer, a new game by Sony’s Japan Studio, at a preview event in Hamburg Germany. My preview will be published in the next issue of the German print magazines ConsolAT and ConsolPLUS at a later date. We talked about all sorts of stuff regarding the incredibly charming Platformer Puppeteer. One question though clearly stood out and gave me an opportunity to take a look at the Japanese video game culture (developers and players alike), which seems impenetrable for us westerners sometimes. I slightly edited the interview (mostly “you know”s and “I mean”s and “right?”s) and my questions and statements are bold for a more comfortable reading experience. To understand things better, you should watch the game’s reveal trailer first.

I: Why is (Kutaro) a boy? I mean, there is no option to change (him) to a girl, right?
M: No.
I: There has been a lot of talk lately about options, about gender, about the video games, so…
M: Well, you know, I did have a massive argument actually. We do mock reviews where we send it out to a service, right? Where they review the game for us. It’s not a real review.
I: Yeah, I know mock reviews.
M: And they tell us all the things, all the positives and negatives what they think, right? And they were telling me “Oh yeah, well it’s just a boy. Well it should be a girl” and it’s like, well no actually, look. I made the story. You don’t get to change Master Chief into a girl, do you? Doesn’t happen, right? And in Killzone I’m sure you’re not playing a woman, right? And, you know, in a fighting game, yes there are women characters and there are men characters but I think you’ll find that a lot of girls play the men characters and a lot of the guys play the female characters. So I don’t think it really matters. And in… and they were saying, “well Puppeteer, it’s so sexist”. And I was like “Puppeteer is not sexist”. The women in Puppeteer are really strong. You know, the witch and you know Picherina the…
I: Fairy.
M: Fairy character. And that’s not her true stage. She’s been transformed into that by the Moonbearking. They’re really strong, all the women you meet in the game are. And so I had a big argument with them and said, well they didn’t know what they were talking about basically. Why do we want girls to play girls and why do we want boys to play boys? It’s just a story and it’s just something that we should do. So I should as a game creator start pandering to public opinion? Over what is correct? As soon as we start doing that we end up like America, we won’t be able to say anything ever again and it all be very PC and like… You know, to me, I grew up under a very strong mom.
I: Me too.
M: Right? So I know what women are all about. So women are strong and they’re not… So I should have made a little pink Kutaro, for girls to play?
I: No, we don’t have to exaggerate. I mean just, just a female. It doesn’t have to be pink. Kutaro doesn’t have to be red or blue or something. We don’t have to go that far. Just like, an option, just to have it there to maybe… It would cheapen your vision, I think, just-
M: I do too.
I: Because of all the chatter we have lately. Even Miyamoto gets the question. I mean he’s Miyamoto. Nobody would have questioned him (about) anything and now people are asking “Why isn’t Peach playable in every single Mario game?” So now I think we are at the stage right now with all this outcry we had on Twitter and all that FemFrequency and all that stuff that, as developer you have to answer the question. And, even if you don’t-
M: Like it? One way or the other? I don’t think we should do it.
I: I’m not saying you have to do it.
M: No no no, I’m not saying… In my opinion I don’t think we should. I think we should be making what we want to make and if somebody is upset by that than please don’t buy the product. (I don’t mean that) personally. As I said here, I grew up under strong women, I know how the women are strong and I love women, I think they are wonderful, but, I’m not going to change my creative vision over something because somebody tells me that that’s what’s important now. Because I don’t think that’s important. I tested this game with kids. Girls and boys. Not one of them has mentioned it. Not one of them cares. Now all of them had fun.
I: I feel like you don’t care. You don’t care (that Kutaro is) a boy, because it’s just the player.
M: Exactly. It’s exactly, that’s what it is. I mean, he doesn’t even speak. He has no personality. It’s just you. You just impose your personality on him and play as you. I mean you’re controlling him on the theatre on the stage, that’s what you’re doing.
I: Well, you know, we have this discussion right now-
M: Yes, interesting. Interesting. You see, I’m out in Japan and so I never hear any of this.
I: No? Is there no discussion whatsoever?
M: No discussion whatsoever. Nobody would even ask.
I: That sounds incredibly sexist from a western perspective.
M: It does, but from their perspective it’s like “What would the point be? Why would you even care if the character is male or female?” I mean they play around with very strong female characters, you know, looking at Bayonetta and all those sort of things.
I: Like Gravity Rush.
M: Right, Gravity Rush by Toyama-san, right? So, it’s just the character.
I: It’s a non-issue there.
M: Yeah.
I: Dou you feel like this could become an issue sometime, or are the cultural-
M: Never.
I: Never?
M: Never will they care. You think they have more to worry about with the nuclear meltdown and the chance of another earth quake and I don’t think….
I: Yeah…

Moore may sound arrogant in some ways and to be honest, I felt the same way during our interview. Arrogant in the good way though. In the “I’m the artist, so I’m calling the shots” sort of way. A mindset which only artists who full-heartedly believe in their creative vision can build and follow through. I edited the text here and there for a more comfortable reading experience as I mentioned before, but you can listen to this particular part of the interview in it’s unedited entirety right here.

https://soundcloud.com/otixero/gavin-moore-japan-will-never

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Features - The SCUMM Diary: Stories behind one of the greatest game engines ever made

gamasutra.com

By Staff,Mike Bevan

SCUMM might “just” be a video game engine — but it’s a video game engine that can elicit emotions nearly as strong as the games that it powers. 

When you talk about of the heyday of LucasArts adventure games, you have to talk about SCUMM, the “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion” that powers some of the most memorable games ever made, such as Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit the Road, and, of course, Maniac Mansion.

Aric Wilmunder, along with famed game designer Ron Gilbert, built SCUMM, in effect providing a way for games like these to exist. Wilmunder and journalist Mike Bevan recently got together over email, discussing SCUMM and the stories around it. Here are choice pieces of that conversation, all in the words of Wilmunder.

We thought it was important to put Wilmunder’s words on Gamasutra, where they can “live,” because SCUMM is not just an engine or a piece of tech. For many developers, it was how they expressed and shared their artistic vision with so many people, during one of the most memorable periods in video game history.

On the evolution of the engine

One of the capabilities that distinguished LucasArts from most other developers was that many of us came from a mainframe background and so we developed tools and compilers on Sun workstations and then created hardware that allowed us to download the code and data to our target machines.  This started with the Atari 800 and when Ron [Gilbert] was hired to do C64 work a similar system was developed for that platform as well.

The key benefit was that we could develop tools in C, or in the case of SCUMM using YACC, to process and then tokenize the code.  Most developers were using the same machine to write and run their code, so their tools could only be as powerful as their target machine.  After the first few years of PC product development, the PC itself became as capable as some of our earlier workstations so one by one we began to migrate our tools until we effectively retired the Sun workstations altogether.

The evolution of features started very early.  I was the first internal developer to work on PCs and at the time the existing tools and compilers were very crude.  For example, the C compilers that we had been using would give very detailed messages if an error was encountered.  On the PC you would get a message like “File: walk.c Line:409 Error: 4004“ and your options at this point were to look at the line of code and try to figure out the problem or get out the manual to convert the error code into something meaningful.  Often the error descriptions were pretty obscure as well.  Since we didn’t have very good editors for writing code on the PC I would use the editors on the Sun and transfer the files over.  When there were errors on the PC, I would recompile and debug the code on the Sun workstation so this forced me to write cleaner code that would run on two vastly different computers from day one.

The PC presented a number of additional challenges since controls, sounds, and graphics were vastly different.  For controls, mice weren’t always standard equipment, so controls were designed to work for mice, joysticks or keyboard.  This made moving the game engine to other platforms easier since the controls were modularized.  For sounds, we supported the internal speaker; I think it was a sound card called CMS that was a precursor to the Adlib, as well as the sound system for the Tandy computers.  Graphics were also modularized since we were supporting the Black & White Hercules display, 4-color CGA graphics, 16-color EGA, VGA in a 16 color mode, and Tandy Graphics in yet another video mode.  To make this possible, all of our graphics were rendered into a buffer in memory and then very specialized routines would then copy the buffer out to the video card.  We used what is called a “dirty rectangle” system that kept track of what areas had been updated, so we only copied the portions of the screen that were necessary.

Aric Wilmunder

Speaking in SCUMM

SCUMM was a language that was compiled into a tokenized form. For example, the command ‘walk dr-fred to laboratory-door’ would convert the Walk command into a single byte command.  The next byte was which actor or character the command was for, and then the object ‘laboratory-door’ was converted into a 2-byte number so the entire command was reduced into 4 bytes of data.  For those unfamiliar, a Byte is a location in the computer’s memory that can hold a numeric value from 0-255. As you can see, the tokenized language was very efficient and the interpreter never had any understanding that one actor or another was “dr-fred” he was simply an actor-number, so we always tried to avoid hard-coding any specific information about a game directly into the interpreter.

There was one exception to that rule during Maniac and that was that the color used by an actor to display text…

When Maniac was being developed there were a couple of exceptions to the rule that the interpreter should not have any game values encoded and that had to do with the colors used for the actors and the color of the text displayed when they talked. The original code had those values built into the interpreter, and when Maniac was upgraded to the PC and before Zak McKracken, two new commands were added so those values could be controlled by the scripts instead. “set-actor-talk-color” and “set-actor-color” moved the last game-specific commands out of the interpreter, so now the scripts controlled everything.

Since I am talking about the interpreter, let me be specific about what it is.  The interpreter was the program that the end-user ran that would initialize the graphics and sounds, read the files from the disk, and interpret the scripts and data in those files to run the game.  When we would ship a game we would rename the interpreter to “Monkey.exe” or “Dig.exe”, but during development this tool was called SPUTM, which stood for “SCUMM Presentation Utility (tm)”. The name wasn’t really trademarked, but we wanted to name it after another bodily fluid.

SCUMM, or Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion was the tool that tokenized the scripts and also merged all of the game assets together into the files that we shipped on the disk.  The version of SCUMM that was used for Maniac probably shared 80 percent or more of the commands used in later games such as Full Throttle.  Once the language was developed, most of the key commands did not require modifications.  “walk bernard to clock” and “walk ben to motorcycle” were essentially unchanged.

SCUMM’s multi-tasking

Probably the most distinctive part of SCUMM was that it was multi-tasking. This meant that multiple scripts could effectively run simultaneously.  You might create a clock on the wall in Zak McKracken’s office and have it animate.  There would be a single, very simple script just for the clock that would tell the animation engine to change from one image of the clock to the next, tell the sound engine to play the “tick” sound, and then tell the script to “sleep-for 1 second” and then repeat.  The Sleep commands were deceptively simple commands that told the system that the script was complete, and to come back some period of time later and keep running the script from where you left off.  “Sleep” would wait for a specified period of time.

There was also the ability to “Wait”. This would often be used when you told an actor to walk to an object or turn and face a direction. The script would simply command the actor to walk, and then issue a “wait-for actor” command which put the script to sleep until the actor had arrived or was facing the right direction.  This allowed you to write your scripts in a very linear fashion reflecting the series of steps that you wanted the actor to follow.

All kinds of useful tools with gross names

Along with SCUMM and SPUTM, there were a variety of other tools we developed for creating the games.  SPIT was a simple font editor so we could design different text formats for different parts of the interface.  Dialog at the top might be in one font, but another would be used for the save game screen, and another on the bottom of the screen when we used a verb-based (Walk-To, Pick-Up, Look At, etc.) interface.  FLEM was a graphical tool used for managing the rooms.  You could mark the objects in the room, their different states (Doors open or closed), and also build the walk-boxes that controlled where actors could travel.  FLEM also let you preview the clipping planes, which were layers used to create the appearance of the actor disappearing behind objects or terrain.  In Maniac there was only one plane, but in later games there might be as many as three planes that the actor might clip behind.

Maniac Mansion

MMUCUS was the partner of FLEM.  MMUCUS took the room image and the object data, the clipping planes and the walk-box data and compressed the data into a ‘room’ file containing all of that information. This was important since having the bulk of the data compressed allowed the scripters to be able to make quick script changes and only need to compile the script before giving the change a try.  The room file would remain unchanged unless objects were added or walk-boxes were changed.

BYLE was our original animation tool used to draw and animate actors.  BYLE had a simple animation engine that could be programmed to cycle animations from one frame to the next and it also had a notion of ‘direction’ so you could change the actor’s facing.  You could compress actors using a variety of methods and this allowed very simple and fast animations like the beginning of Day of the Tentacle to take little space, while multi-colored characters like Ben Throttle would use another compression method that was necessary when 16 or 32 colors were used.  Over time we saw the need for even more complex animation types so a new tool, CYST was developed that still used the same costume data format but it was much easier to manipulate larger images.

For a short time we had a tool called SMEGMA.  One of the programmers had a child and told us that when babies are born, their first bowel movements consist of this.  Well, he was mistaken and it turns out that substance is called Meconium.  We hadn’t bothered to look up Smegma, we just liked the sound of it.  Once we did, the name changed a few days later. As you can probably imagine, standing near us in the lunch line was probably a bit unsettling as we talked about SCUMM, BYLE, MMUCUS, FLEM, et al.

Updating SCUMM

One of the criticisms of SCUMM was that it didn’t go through revolutionary changes and instead improved incrementally over time. A clear example of this would be graphics.  We started with 16-color graphics support in a 320 by 200 resolution.  As the installed base of graphics cards improved, we moved to 256 colors and 640x480 screen resolution. Acoustically, we started with the internal IBM speaker and moved to multiple channels of streaming stereo audio. Characters that were just a few dozen pixels tall could now zoom to nearly full screen height.  The interfaces evolved as well from the original verb interface to more sophisticated icon-based UIs, not unlike today’s Mac desktop.

One of the key steps was the integration of the INSANE engine, the video system developed for Rebel Assault.  I had originally hired Vince Lee to work on the Amiga version of one of the SCUMM games and he quickly showed his programming skills across a wide variety of platforms.  When working on SCUMM he saw how I had worked to isolate the primary machine-specific parts of the system making portability to other computers fairly straightforward.  During the development of INSANE he took that effort to a new level and added the ability to stream and branch video and that was quickly a high priority to incorporate into SCUMM.  Full Throttle was the first step in that process and with the rock-and-roll soundtracks by the Gone Jackals, when someone started the game in the next room, you quickly took notice.  The Throttle engine was not quite a match made in heaven, with the SCUMM system shutting down when INSANE started to run. So between Throttle and Monkey 3, I made the commitment to fully integrate the two systems, and tossed out the original video and cursor system and even the font system so that SPUTM was really running on top of INSANE.  This put more eggs into the same basket, but the advantages were that, say if I added Japanese or Korean support, now both the Rebel Assault products and the SCUMM products could now both support Japanese and Korean.

Impressively multiplatform

Because of the ease of portability, SCUMM games ran on over a dozen systems and in as many as a dozen languages.  We started on Commodore 64, then IBM PC, Atari ST, Amiga, 8-Bit Nintendo, Fujitsu Towns, FM Marty, Sega CD, CDTV, Mac, and most recently iPhone and iPad.  Not bad for a system that was first developed 25 years ago.  

With projects such as ScummVM, a fan-written SCUMM interpreter, additional target machines are now possible.  That Monkey Island was selected as one of five games to be running at an exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art shows how good storytelling is often more important than flash-in-the-pan games based only on technology.  

What isn’t always known is that SCUMM was also the basis of many top rated educational games such as the Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish and Spy Fox games and the Backyard Baseball/Football/Soccer products developed by Humongous Entertainment.  If you peel back the covers, you would find the same commands and much of the same code as their LucasArts brethren.

Learning SCUMM

At the time, all of the designers were also programmers and SCUMM, while unique in many aspects, was also pretty easy to learn and code.  There was no manual for Maniac or Zak but before Monkey a group of 6-8 new scripters were hired and a manual was created and a one-week training class (“Scumm University”) was organized.  For the training, Ron would take the most recent game and simply delete all but one room and put objects in that room that represented a range of capabilities.  

New scripters, or “Scummlets,” would start in that room and learn the fundamentals and within a few days they were taught how to add more rooms, create walk boxes, some had artistic talent and would create their own animations, others would focus on writing dialog.  Usually by the end of the week we had a pretty good sense of the skills that each of the Scummlets had and then the different project leaders would haggle to decide which ones would work on their projects.

I think that the first “Scumm University” or “Scumm U” started with the standard verb based UI.  One of the early projects was always determining how the UI was going to work. So typically one or two scripters would get started on getting that up and running. Regarding Scummlet training, I think that one time it was at the Ranch [George Lucas’ ranch] and everyone was up on the third floor of the main house. George’s offices were on the second floor so they had to be well-behaved.

The Secret of Monkey Island

The SCUMM advantage

One of the great benefits of SCUMM was how quickly a game could be prototyped.  The designer would have ideas for rooms and locations and the lead background artist could start doing sketches.  When enough of the sketches were done, they would get scanned in and you could very quickly add and connect them up using SCUMM.  Usually within just a few weeks of the start of the design process, there would be many dozens of rooms, often drawn as simple pencil sketches, and we would usually take the actors from another game and start wiring them up. You might find that a room needed to be flipped, or redrawn since they didn’t connect very well, but you could rapidly prototype a huge portion of the game.

The scripters could now create preliminary walk boxes so the actor could walk around, the background artists could start converting the sketches to final artwork, and the animators could now begin working on the character animations.  Since final characters were still under development, during this development stage you might be walking around in a penciled room from Full Throttle but your main character might be Guybrush from the Monkey games. Having the placeholders allowed the designers to experiment and make changes and improvements at very little development expense.

SCUMM’s longevity

I don’t think that any of us thought that SCUMM games would be around this long.  I worked on the system for about 12 years and I tried really hard to ‘future proof’ my code by testing across as many computers as I could.  When developing under Windows, I would test it under Windows NT, even if that wasn’t one of the target machines, but NT required stricter coding standards. So if it ran under NT, chances were improved that it would run under other future Windows operating systems.

I also tried to avoid too many coding tricks that might fail with future computers.  For example, you can write self-modifying code, but depending on the size and type of processor cache, this could fail. So instead I would write five or six slightly different variations of the same routine, each specifically optimized for a certain situation.  For example, there were many versions of the actor drawing code.  If the actor was full screen and didn’t clip behind other objects, I had one version of the code.  If the actor was off the left or right edge of the screen I might have another.  If the actor scaled I would have another.  I think that there were eight variations on how an actor might appear and I had eight versions of the code each optimized to do the task as quickly as possible.  I would also write the code initially in “C” to get it working and to optimize it.  I would then rewrite the code in assembly language to get every bit of speed possible.  Having the “C” code was handy when we developed SCUMM for other computers, since those developers could turn that code on and get everything working, and then optimize their code as necessary.

Scumm 2.0 was what we called the system for Zak.  Maniac was 1.0, Zak 2.0, Monkey was 3.0 and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade may have been on 3.0 or 3.1.  I would have to do some digging to get the actual version numbers.  There were also a number of special releases. The first Indy 256 color version was a promotion with a video card manufacturer.  I had gotten the code running, but there weren’t enough 256 color cards in the market yet, so we made a deal and shipped it along with the card.

Advantages of interpreted languages

Ron had worked with interpreters for some time. He developed a series of new commands that could be added to Commodore Basic so he had reverse engineered that system. When developing Maniac, he thought that this was the best approach, and Chip Morningstar had a background in language compilers so the language grew mostly out of their collaboration.  What is ironic is that Chip’s project at the time was Habitat, which instead of using interpreted code was written to support small chunks of 6502 Assembly code that could be swapped in and out and moved in memory.  Any time one of these chunks crashed, it would take out the whole system.  SCUMM on the other hand only used about 80 commands, and the commands were packed into bytes with values from 0-255.  If you ever got a command value > 80, the system would flag an error, so SCUMM was very quick to let you know if you were running bad commands, while Habitat would just crash, and it was very hard to trace bugs.  I think that in retrospect Chip would have decided to use an interpreted language.

Another advantage of interpreted languages is that they migrate from machine to machine very easily.  The interpreter was written in very portable C code and would simply parse through the series of command tokens.  One huge benefit was that since the entire game was data, when developing for new machines, you knew that your data was correct, so you could eliminate that entire portion when looking for bugs and simply focus on the small amount of code needed to get a particular machine working.

Working with the inimitable Ron Gilbert

Working with Ron was tremendous fun.  Here are a few tales…

Much of our early artwork was done using traditional art techniques.  Pencils, pens, paper, and occasionally errors were corrected by using an Exacto knife to make a repair. One day Ron snagged one of these blades and spent the next few days playing with it at his desk. He took to holding the knife between his teeth with the blade out while he would write code. One day I heard a loud gasp and turned to see blood running down Ron’s arm and onto the floor.  After helping to bandage the wounded hand, the conversation turned to tetanus and so I called my wife at home to see if Ron should get a shot.  What had happened was that Ron’s hair had gotten in his face. He had forgotten that he had the blade between his teeth and he reached up to brush the hair away and stuck the blade right into his palm.  After this experience, the knives stayed in the art department.

***

Another time, Ron and I were working one evening at our building on Kerner Blvd. near ILM and we had some major disagreement about how to implement a bunch of code.  Ron and I would often work until 10 or 11 at night, so we got to know the cleaning crews pretty well.  One of them even went on to become a movie editor.  Anyway, this evening I was sure that my solution to a problem was right, Ron was sure that his approach was better, and for whatever reason this escalated back and forth and turned into a huge shouting match.  Ron finally stood up and I think cussed me out and walked over to the door and slammed it as hard as he could as he left.  I was probably thinking good riddance and went back to coding.about five minutes later Ron came back in and said quite calmly, “Ok, we got that over with.  Now let’s figure out how we’re going to solve this problem.”  Within minutes we were back at the whiteboards working on solutions, listening more carefully to what the other was saying, and ultimately we developed a hybrid solution that took the best of each of our ideas and was better than either of us had originally envisioned.  Ron was a master collaborator.

***

Again, back in the early days, one of our co-workers was scheduled to give a presentation at a computer club in Berkeley.  We didn’t have any looming deadlines, so we jumped in the car to head across the Richmond-San Rafael bridge and watch.  About half-way across the bridge, Ron pointed to a car in the break-down lane, so I pulled over and there was our co-worker with a flat tire.  He didn’t have a spare and my tire wouldn’t fit, but he wouldn’t leave the car, so he handed us two boxes of floppy disks and asked us to give the presentation in his place.

Well, we had no notes for the presentation, just disks, so when we were introduced, I just started to pull out disks and loaded whatever I could find on their computer while Ron gave a completely impromptu presentation.   Ron had worked in radio back in college and was on the “morning team” so he was very much in his comfort zone.  I never liked public speaking but I could give great software demos.  The presentation was really well received and we went home that night feeling pretty good about pulling this off.  We were still feeling pretty good in the morning until about 10 a.m. when our co-worker showed up for work and he was pissed.  We couldn’t figure out why.  We had covered his arse and the audience had a great time.  Well, it turns out that our co-worker had a friend in the audience.  When the friend was asked if we had demoed one particular piece, it turns out that we hadn’t.  We didn’t know what we were given, and we must have skipped it.  Instead of being thankful, our co-worker thought we had intentionally sabotaged his demo.

***

Ron Gilbert, Aric Wilmunder, Noah Falstein circa 1985 (via Mobygames)

There was the night of the Loma Prieta earthquake when Ron and I were going to drive into San Francisco to see if we could find his girlfriend. Bridges were down, we could see that fires had consumed over a city block in the marina district, and we were going to try to find someone.  My wife was very upset about this but I wasn’t going to let Ron try this alone.  We were just about to head out the door when the phone rang and she had caught a bus to San Rafael and needed to be picked up.

***

At one point, Ron left LucasArts because his girlfriend went on a teaching job to China. This was in the middle of my work on Maniac Mansion for the PC, so when I would encounter parts of the code that Ron wrote that I didn’t understand, I would literally convert the 6502 Assembly code straight to C so I could get the system to work even if I didn’t understand what it was doing.  This code was re-written as soon as Ron returned, but even years later there were rumors of 6502 code lurking inside the system.

***

While Ron was away, he lent his new RX7 to another co-worker. Unfortunately one night while driving home, a deer ran across the road and the car spun off the road and went backwards through a barb-wired fence putting scratches in the paint and ripping off the moon-roof.  The co-worker had all of the body work done before Ron got back and the car was repainted.  Ron didn’t know about the accident at first and was confused because he was sure his moon-roof had a different look to it.  Eventually the co-worker explained the whole story and Ron was relieved that he wasn’t going crazy.

My friend, SCUMM

Still, 25 years is a long time. I don’t think that there is a single list of all of the games that used SCUMM, but between LucasArts and Humongous it must be between 30 and 40 different games.  I know at times, some designers felt that SCUMM was confining. One described using SCUMM as being like trying to push an elephant with a pencil eraser.  

Still, I think that that designer’s best-received game was written in SCUMM, so there may be times that working within limits forces a greater degree of focus.  SCUMM was designed to do one thing, and as long as what you wanted to do was build great adventure games, SCUMM was certainly the best option around.

I played all of the SCUMM games start to finish many times, though on The Dig I think I skipped around and never played it from the beginning.  One of the disappointments being on the inside was that I saw solutions to many of the best puzzles ahead of time, either during design or while the artists or scripters were working on them.  Some puzzles I missed entirely since I knew the solution ahead of time so I didn’t need to look around for the clues.  I also played the games in many different languages and on different machines since I was responsible both for the international versions as well as cross-platform development.

My answer about my favorite SCUMM game has stayed the same for many years.  I was always most excited and most proud of the most recent game we were working on.  With each new game, we tried to push the boundaries and do things that had never been done before.  I always thought that if you weren’t moving the art or the technology forward, why bother?  There were some favorite moments, like the opening animation in Day of the Tentacle, or the humor in Sam and Max, the music in Full Throttle, or being able to walk all three kids simultaneously in Maniac. Each accomplishment was very different, but like your children, they each hold a special place in your heart.

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Monday, 8th July 2013 at 10:15 am

Valve’s ‘perfect hiring’ hierarchy has ‘hidden management’ clique like high school

by Michael French | Email a friend | Print

Hardware maverick Ellsworth was fired by studio in February and says it ‘stabbed her in the back’

Valve’s idealised ‘flat management’ structure is not all it’s cracked up to be, according to one of the developers fired from the studio earlier this year.

Hardware hacker and former head of Valve’s hardware division Jeri Ellsworth first offered a glimpse into the firm’s machinations when her tweet confirmed February layoffs at the firm.

Now, in a fuller video podcast interview, she has characterised secretive Valve’s purportedly utopian structure as masking ‘hidden management’ cliques that operate like High School adolescents.

It was this minority in the company that led a ‘witchhunt’ on the famous day Valve fired so many notable staff, rounded up “all the undesirables” and got rid of them.

Ellsworth’s very personal take on the situation was published this weekend in a lengthy discussion with The Grey Area podcast.

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“There is actually a hidden layer of powerful management structure in the company,” she claims.

“And it felt a lot like High School.

“There are popular kids that have acquired power, then there’s the trouble makers, and then everyone in between. Everyone in between is ok, but the trouble makers are the ones trying to make a difference.”

She later talks of a “‘Weird paranoia’ in the company that their culture would be contaminated - they went on a witch hunt” and a how this left her “stabbed in the back”

Developers were originally left scratching their heads when the hugely-respected game studio went through a round of redundancies in February. It was seemingly uncharacteristic as not only did it drop important staff members, including Ellsworth and Steam chief Jason Holtman - but the business is built to value and support all developers thanks to a flat management structure.

It even has a lengthy management handbook that explains how this radical operation uses peer review and colleague ratings to hire and fire individuals.

It was this mechanism which Ellsworth battled against to hire her own team - and which she eventually fell foul of.

Her frank account of what happened - detailing the tough side of Valve’s idealised structure, how it betrayed her, and why its hiring process are flawed - is 90 minutes long and well worth a watch if you have the time, especially as it details how Ellsworth managed to retail ownership of the hardware ideas she dreamt up for Valve - you can view the first part here.

But we have transcribed extracts below that detail specifically the situation about Valve’s hiring and firing practices.

“I should frame all of this with I have a lot of friends at Valve and there are lots of great people there. The hardware team was very close-knit [and we worked long hours together],” begins Ellsworth, when asked by interviewer Jenesee Grey, who had interviewed her in a previous podcast about her work with Valve.

“I’m going to try and be careful about what I say, because my view is not 100% true for all the different groups in there.”

Careful, maybe, but she is deliberate and detailed - and gives a very passionate account of how an idolised and idealised business may not get everything right. Or, er, anything at all going by this account. Read on.

Hidden management

Hardware hacker Ellsworth joined Valve to help build out a hardware offer - which over time was name checked by founder Gabe Newell as an important part of Valve’s future. But the problem was that Ellsworth struggled to get approval from her new colleagues to let her hire in more staff.

“The first time we spoke [on The Grey Area podcast] about the hardware department all stemmed from trouble hiring people,” she explains, summing up the problem which led to her departure - and which she ironically always had reservations about before joining the studio.

“When I first considered joining Valve I was sceptical they would stick with it. I really didn’t want to commit - but they started pumping me up and selling me on having control of the hardware group and build hardware. We all used to joke about how hard we worked, doing the jobs of five people at once.

“Now we’ve all seen the Valve handbook, which offers a very idealised view. A lot of that is true. It is a pseudo-flat structure, where in small groups at least in small groups you are all peers and make decisions together.

“But the one thing I found out the hard way is that there is actually a hidden layer of powerful management structure in the company. And it felt a lot like High School. There are popular kids that have acquired power, then there’s the trouble makers, and then everyone in between. Everyone in between is ok, but the trouble makers are the ones trying to make a difference.

“I was struggling trying to build this hardware team and move the company forward. We were having a difficult time recruiting folks - because we would be interviewing a lot of talented folks but the old timers would reject them for not fitting into the culture.

“I shouldn’t say the numbers, but there were very few of us in the hardware department. We were understaffed by about a factor of 100.”

The Valve hardware team were devising some strong concepts, specifically around augmented reality. Yet the ideas were killed off by the company in its regular peer-review process - a staple of the flat management structure - which can see colleagues that you rarely interact with vet your work and decide if your employment is safe.

When tweets from Ellsworth and breaking stories like Develop’s about the departure of Steam head Jason Holtman forced the studio to break tradition and comment on the redundancies, it said it wasn’t changing strategy on hardware.

That ‘didn’t jive’ with Ellsworth’s direct experiences.

“Well there were five of us working on this project, and all of us were canned on the same day,” she says pointedly in answer to Grey’s suggestion that Valve is out of hardware.

“The things that do work in Valve that we will bring forward into our new company is the idea of flat management structure, but on a small scale.

“Their structure probably works really well with about 20 people, but breaks down terribly when you get to a company of 300 people. Communication was a problem. That’s where management… Well if I had anything to do differently, would be to make sure a layer of management could do communication correctly.”

Specifically that includes outreach within the studio in terms of connecting staff together, she says.

“There’s all these resources in the business which are just there idling or doing things, maybe they could come and help us - but there was no way to reach them at all.”

Ellsworth’s vocal frustration with this was the start of friction between her and some peers, she says.

“When I complained about this - and this is what I think is hilarious, what I call really drinking the Kool-Aid… He said that ‘If communication was important at Valve it would have evolved a long time ago.’ Which is insanity.”

Ellsworth implies that Valve’s management structure - or lack of - has actually encouraged bad behaviour of a sort from some staff, rewarding those who manage to game the system or avoid risk.

“They have a bonus structure in there where you can get bonuses - if you work on very prestigious projects - that are more than what you earn. So everyone is trying to work on projects that are really visible. ‘Look at me, I am making all these great improvements to the latest and greatest video game’.

“And it’s impossible to pull those people away for something risky like augmented reality because they only want to work on the sure thing. So that was a frustration, we were starved for resources.”

‘Stabbed me in the back’

Which is pretty ironic given that it was Valve’s bottomless pockets which had given Ellsworth’s team plenty of technology to help prototype her visionary ideas.

“We had a machine shop with millions of dollars of equipment in it and couldn’t hire a machinist for $40,000 a year to manufacture machine parts for it. Because they were worried that bringing in a machinist would hurt their precious culture,” she said.

“If I sound bitter, it’s because I am. I am really, really bitter. Because they promised me the world and then stabbed me in the back.

“What I learned from Valve is that I don’t think it works. Give people complete latitude with no checks and balances it is human nature that they will minimise the work that they do and increase the control that they have.

“We used to joke that it’s good at hiring lots of lead guitarists. We went out and hired lots of great makers - but we were all lead guitarists, we couldn’t go out and hire someone just to manufacture the parts. Just getting a tech for around the lab was almost impossible. That’s why a layer of management can help organisations.”

Ellsworth found herself asking senior staff for help regularly - and frustrated with the hiring brick wall. In the end she says she that led to her being ‘fired for being abrasive’.

“And I probably was - but I just couldn’t find a way to make a process to actually deliver any hardware inside that company.”

Ellsworth was hungry to build scale so Valve could build hardware, and points to that other famous Seattle business that does have that kind of scale: “Like Microsoft, the rumour is that its hardware department has 1,000 people working in it [making the Xbox].”

At Valve, “I was working with people adding zero value, in fact creating negative value” so she chose to “use the Valve handbook and roll my desk away and work with someone who is productive”. But that approach only backfired and “appeared to the higher ups as abrasive and disruptive”.

Ellsworth is honest about how she too was blinded by the idea of Valve’s HR utopia.

“I drank the Kool-Aid really hard. Even up until the last day I was hopeful we could turn it around at least for our project. We had a goal and had proved that all the pieces were there that we could have all these cool virtual reality experiences.”

She had come to believe this through months of long hours, much of it spent with then colleague, fellow fired friend and new business partner Rick Johnson. He would work on one project at Valve in the day time (Valve’s move towards Linux) then spend his evenings with Ellsworth on the augmented reality tech.

Their project still lives on, since pulled out of the business and owned by Ellsworth and Johnson’s new venture, with Valve’s consent.

“The day I got fired I was walking up to the elevator and one of the mechanical engineers said ‘Did you hear so-and-so was laid off?’ It was someone on our project. I was mad. I hopped in the elevator and went straight up to our team - and I found Rick, and he said ‘I was fired. You too.’

“I couldn’t believe it. The handbook said that if you get too far off course they will tell you about it.”

But Ellsworth’s team was just dropped.

At first “I was in denial about it, thinking they would change their mind,” but during the wait for her meeting with Valve boss Gabe Newell she turned rebel and “started boxing things up. I was scared they would just junk it.

“I was hiding it,” she admits.

Ellsworth and her team had built a unique area of the office, filled with all sorts of strange equipment and unique lighting - including a chandelier - and some of it her own hardware. She started effectively shutting down the AR studio literally. “It took at 26 foot truck to get my stuff out - place looked like a ghost town after I left.”

When the time came to confront Gabe Newell, she said that “you should fund this externally or give it to us”.

“There was a lawyer in the room and Gabe just turned to him and said ‘Give it to ‘em’.”

Ellsworth later adds that there were protracted lawyer discussions, and it wasn’t this simple. But to all intents and purposes Ellsworth and Johnson were effectively working continuously the next day at his house. Four weeks after leaving Valve, their project came to fruition with prototypes for augmented reality glasses that use head mounted projectors with a special reflective mat and sub-millimeter head tracking - likened to the holographic 3D chess in Star Wars - demoed in May at the ‘maker’ event Maker Faire.

Her frustrating account has a happy ending, and Ellsworth has affection for Valve and its staff. And although it’s clearly hurtful that her departure was decided by an external group which wanted to “round up all the undesirables and get rid of them”, but she regularly caveats her personal response to the matter versus her friendships with the staff still there.

“I’m still really friendly with the folks there and the ones I wasn’t friends with before we became friends since. My heart goes out to them - it’s probably completely different, and they may have got their machinist.”

At one point, Ellsworth’s comments suggest Valve’s software culture couldn’t quite handle the demands and quirks of a hardware business: “being in a software company with no process for making hardware people were mortified by some of the prototypes we showed them”.

Yet Valve’s focus had its advantages, Ellsworth adds too.

She says: “It was great working under the guidance of software folk as it gave us focus,” pushing Ellsworth and co to ask for “gameplay from clever hardware ideas.”

Plus the firm’s in-joke of ‘Valve Time’ - where projects promised completion in a matter of weeks actually take months or years - is actually a by-product of stringent process.

“There’s a lot of reasons there is ‘Valve time’. A lot of it is chaos, but it’s also because they are thinking about their customers. And we want to keep that methodology to make sure what we promise is deliverable.”

At another point, she reminds the interviewer: “I love Valve, I loved them.”

But deeper probing just pushed back to a “‘Weird paranoia’ in the company that their culture would be contaminated - they went on a witch hunt and got rid of me and a bunch other talented folks. And it was just a couple of people [that did that] - that’s what happens when you have a flat management structure like that, a bunch of people can wreak that kind of havoc.

“They definitely don’t want this kind of story getting out there.”

You can view the full podcast here in six parts. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.

Image credit: Jeri Ellsworth

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