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Die Mär vom DRM und wie alle von Kontobindung profitieren könnten
weltraumer.de

Barrierefreiheit: Games mit unüberwindbaren Hürden
zeit.de

Computerspiele als Kulturgut: Wir wollen Games, die den Intellekt nicht beleidigen
zeit.de

Mastery vs. Hoping – Games and Gambling Machines
keithburgun.net

Insult Swordfighting: Game informing, revisited
insultswordfighting.blogspot.de

Features - Dwarf Fortress in 2013
gamasutra.com

Meeting Mikami • Interviews • Xbox 360 • Eurogamer.net
eurogamer.net

Pacifique Irankunda
theamericanscholar.org

EarthBound: So what's the big deal?
destructoid.com

Animal Crossing: New Leaf Review (3DS) :: Games :: Reviews :: Paste
pastemagazine.com

A trip inside the mind of Journey's BAFTA-winning composer, Austin Wintory - Features
edge-online.com

Lost Garden: A single game as a lifelong hobby
lostgarden.com

Historical Wargaming and Asymmetrical Play
playthepast.org

Homosexual Heroism: Being Gay In Rogue Legacy
mediumdifficulty.com

The Story Of The World’s Unluckiest Game Developers
rockpapershotgun.com

Assholes are assholes.
merseyremakes.co.uk

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Die Mär vom DRM und wie alle von Kontobindung profitieren könnten

weltraumer.de • Archive • Like & Archive • Like

Microsoft hatte ursprünglich eine Vision mit der Xbox One: die innovative neue Welt der Online-Distribution. Zwar über den Zwischenschritt der Kontobindung, die die Disc nur noch zum – im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes – Datenträger macht. Nutzlos und unbrauchbar, sobald er seinen Zweck als Transportgut erfüllt hat. Microsoft wollte die Steam-Welt auf Konsolen bringen. Eine umfassende Spiele-Bibliothek, jederzeit nur einen Mausklick, pardon, Kinect-Zuruf entfernt, mit günstigen Preisen ohne Handels- und Transportmargen.

Diese schöne Vision haben wir kurzsichtigen Gamer, die wir uns permanent gegen Neuerungen wehren, mit unserer Nörgelei zerstört. Jetzt haben wir unseren Gebrauchtmarkt wieder. Mit all seinen Konsequenzen: Höhere Preise für Neuprodukte, Aussterben aller Studios, die das Pech haben, zwischen Indie und AAA zu entwickeln. Außerdem eine weitere Konzentration der Publisher auf bekannte Marken und Serien.

So las man es in einigen Kolumnen und stellenweise in Facebook-Kommentaren nach der 180-Grad-Drehung von Microsoft in Sachen DRM. Auch Cliff Bleszinski wird auf Twitter nicht müde, das ursprüngliche DRM-Modell schönzureden, und den renitenten Kunden die Schuld für alles kommende Schlechte der Branche in die Schuhe zu schieben, weil sie Microsofts Xbox-One-Vision nicht teilen.

Xbox-One-Trugbild

Der einzige Haken an dieser Vision: Sie ist Blödsinn! Microsoft hat und hatte niemals vor, ein kunden- und entwicklerfreundliches Distributionssystem auf der Xbox One zu etablieren. Auch der Vergleich “Steam für Konsolen” funktioniert nicht. Wer glaubt, dass die Preise auf Steam deshalb so niedrig sind und schnell fallen, weil Valve die wegfallenden Margen der physikalischen Distribution an Kunden weitergibt, der glaubt auch, dass Kapitalismus gut fürs Gemeinwohl aller sorgt. Steam ist nur deswegen so günstig, weil es in Konkurrenz zu anderen Händlern (stationär oder online) steht, die stellenweise sogar Steam-Keys verkaufen.

Mit Xbox Live hingegen hätte sich Microsoft einen monopolistischen Marktplatz erschaffen, auf dem nur sie selbst die Preis diktiert hätten. Dann kostet ein Call of Duty zwölf Monate nach Release eben noch immer 69,99 Euro.
Dass Publisher und Entwickler solch stabile Preise ohne Second-Hand-Markt gutheißen, ist verständlich. Selbst mit den üblichen 30 Prozent Provision an Microsoft bliebe damit auf lange Sicht mehr in der eigenen Kasse als beim jetzigen Modell, bei dem die Kosten eines Titels innerhalb des ersten Monats eingefahren werden müssen, bevor Preisverfall und Gebrauchtmarkt Gewinnmargen zerbröselt haben.

Aber wäre das Äquivalent der Buchpreisbindung für Spiele nicht toll, weil es Entwickler und Publisher schützt? Die könnten wieder risikofreudiger werden; innovative, neue Spielideen ausprobieren. Das Gegenteil würde eintreten: Neuveröffentlichungen würden sich noch mehr auf bekannte Marken konzentrieren. Viele Kunden sind heutzutage nur bereit, den Vollpreis für ein Spiel zu bezahlen, weil sie wissen, dass sie es im Zweifelsfall verleihen oder weiterverkaufen können. Doch was werden sie kaufen, wenn diese Möglichkeiten wegfallen und der Preis dauerhaft auf hohem Niveau bleibt? Wenn ich mich künftig entscheiden müsste, ob ich ein Remember Me oder das neue Assassin’s Creed für 69,99 Euro kaufe, würde ich mich sehr wahrscheinlich für Letzteres entscheiden. Hier kenne ich die Marke, weiß, dass mir die Serie gefällt. Die FIFAs und Call of Dutys würden sich auch mit DRM und digitaler Distribution gut verkaufen, für kleinere, neuen Marken würde es hingegen noch schwerer. Dass DRM mit Kontenbindung durch Wegfall des Gebrauchtmarktes gut für die Diversität des Angebots wäre, ist eine Mär; die eingangs aufgezeigte, schöne neue Xbox-One-Welt ein Trugbild.

Die Lösung: Digitaler Trade-In

Das Spiel der Zukunft wird digital distribuiert, daran besteht kein Zweifel. Doch gibt es hierbei keine Lösung für das oben skizzierte Dilemma? Doch, die gibt es: ein digitales Trade-In-System. Plattformhalter sollten Kunden die Möglichkeit geben, eine digitale Lizenz zurückzugeben. Ein Teil des Kaufpreises wird dann dem Account wieder gutgeschrieben. So wird sichergestellt, dass das Geld im System verbleibt, da es zwangsläufig in neue Software auf der Plattform investiert wird.

Auf Angebotsseite verschmelzen Neu- und Gebrauchtware, da diese Unterscheidung bei einem vollständig digitalen Produkt per se obsolet ist. Aber: Je mehr Lizenzen zurückgegeben werden, desto schneller sinkt der Preis des Spiels. Im Umkehrschluss würde allerdings auch ein besonders beliebtes Spiel, das Kunden in ihrer Bibliothek behalten wollen, lange auf hohem Preisniveau verweilen, da kaum gebrauchte Lizenzen in den Umlauf gebracht werden. Der Preis eines Spiels würde sich nach Angebot und Nachfrage berechnen; in einem, wie er in der Betriebswirtschaftslehre heißt, vollkommenen Markt.

Ein System, von dem alle Seiten profitieren würden: Kunden bekämen angemessene Preise und hätten außerdem die Chance, ein Spiel bei Nichtgefallen wieder aus ihrem Account zu lösen. Allein dieses Wissen erhöht zweifelsohne die Kaufbereitschaft, selbst wenn davon schlussendlich gar kein Gebrauch gemacht wird.

Publisher bekämen von jeder veräußerten Version Geld gutgeschrieben, nicht nur bei Neuware. Auch der Plattformhalter profitiert, da bei jeder Transaktion Provision fällig würde. Außerdem könnte das bei ihm investiertes Geld nicht wieder abfließen, sondern würde auf seinem Online-Marktplatz verbleiben.

Denkt mal drüber nach, Sony, Microsoft und Steam. Dann klappt’s vielleicht auch mit der schönen, neuen Downloadwelt.

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Barrierefreiheit: Games mit unüberwindbaren Hürden

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Computerspielern mit Behinderung wird in zahlreichen Games das bloße Weiterkommen verwehrt. Vielen Herstellern ist das Problem gar nicht bewusst.

Im Spiel “Edna bricht aus” vernimmt die Protagonistin ein Quietschen – und ein gehörloser Gamer dank einer Sound-Visualisierung ebenfalls.

In einem düsteren Schloss hat die zierlich wirkende, dennoch nicht ganz unschuldige Alice soeben ein paar Lakaien blutig niedergeschnetzelt. Nun betritt sie einen Saal, dessen Türen sich kurz darauf auf geheimnisvolle Weise wie von selbst verschließen. Im Hintergrund läuft unheimliche Musik, doch ich nehme sie gar nicht wahr. Im Raum findet meine Spielfigur drei Hebel vor, die vermutlich mit den Türen zusammenhängen. Ich probiere diese wahllos, ohne dass irgendwas geschieht. Sowohl stupides Dagegenrennen inklusive Hämmern auf der Aktionstaste als auch ausgiebiges Auskundschaften der Räumlichkeit bleiben ergebnislos, worauf ich resigniert meine Hand von der Maus lasse. Wie geht’s an dieser Stelle bloß weiter, in American McGee’s Alice (2000)?

Was ich zunächst als Bug vermute, stellt sich beim Lesen eines Online-Walkthroughs als akustisches Rätsel heraus. Bei Betreten ebenjenes Raumes werden nämlich drei Töne abgespielt – einer für jeden Hebel, beziehungsweise jede Tür. Es gilt, diese Hebel in der richtigen Reihenfolge zu betätigen und weiter geht’s. Als gehörloser Gamer stoße ich jedoch auf ein unüberwindbares Hindernis. Diese eigentlich simple Herausforderung kann nur jemand lösen, der normal hören konnte. Für Gamer mit Hörbehinderung ist ein Weiterkommen schlichtweg nicht vorgesehen.

Solche Barrieren gehören heutzutage, im Jahr 2013, zum Glück der Vergangenheit an. Wo Inklusion doch in aller Munde ist! Wo niemand mehr wegen seiner Behinderung diskriminiert wird! Wo die UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention Menschen mit Behinderung, die im Schnitt zehn Prozent der Gesamtbevölkerung ausmachen, die vollständige Teilnahme am gesellschaftlichen Leben zugesichert hat und somit auch ein Recht auf barrierefreie Computerspiele! Oh, wait…

Noch heute ärgern sich körperlich eingeschränkte Gamer über scheinbar unwillige Spielehersteller, die eine freie Tastenbelegung der Controller nach wie vor nicht zur Option anbieten. Eine hohe Frustrationstoleranz müssen zudem Menschen mit kognitiven oder motorischen Einschränkungen haben, wenn Spiele lediglich einen einzigen Schwierigkeitsgrad vorgeben und die spielerischen Herausforderungen so zu Überforderungen werden. Und auf blinde Menschen brauchen wir gar nicht erst zu sprechen kommen – für diese ist beim heutigen Stand das Gros der Videospiele ohne fremde Hilfe unspielbar.

Zu diesem Artikel

Autor Thomas Mitterhuber, 33, ist seit seiner Geburt gehörlos.

Dieser Artikel ist in der neuen Ausgabe des Magazins WASD erschienen, das sich in Essays mit dem Thema Games befasst.

Computerspielen ist in diesen Tagen längst mehr als nur ein millionenfach ausgeübtes Hobby. Die gesellschaftliche Relevanz nimmt kontinuierlich zu und somit auch für Menschen mit Behinderung. Insbesondere für diese Zielgruppe stellt dieser Zeitvertreib eine Möglichkeit dar, sich zeitweise aus ihrem Alltag oder ihren Leiden zu entfliehen. Schlüsselfähigkeiten wie Koordination oder analytisches Denken werden – das haben Studien bewiesen – trainiert und nicht zuletzt werden mit der Multiplayer-Option soziale Netzwerke geschaffen, die denjenigen im Real Life mitunter kaum nachstehen. Ohne Vorurteile, ohne Ängste und ohne dass man vom (Roll-)Stuhl aufstehen muss. Wenn es nicht ständig diese Barrieren gäbe, wodurch manchen nur noch die Deinstallation des Spiels übrig bleibt und das angespielte Game sogar nicht mal zurückgegeben werden kann.

Wenn heute Rampen und Aufzüge in öffentlichen Gebäuden (fast) eine Selbstverständlichkeit sind, wenn Blindenführhunde vom Staat finanziert werden, wenn verschiedensprachige Untertitel in DVD-Filmen längst Standard sind, dann heißt die Forderung an die Spieleindustrie: Game Accessibility. Sprich: Die Zugänglichkeit von Spielen für möglichst viele Nutzer. Davon ist die heutige virtuelle Realität jedoch noch weit entfernt.

Aktuelle Computerspiele sind weitaus umfangreicher als deren Urväter. Ein damals erfolgreiches Spielprinzip wie etwa bei Space Invaders (1978) macht heute lediglich ein Minigame im Echtzeitstrategiespiel Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty (2010) aus, welches selbst sogar Rollenspielelemente enthält. Mit dem Anstieg der Komplexität von Computerspielen sowie der Einführung technischer Neuerungen eröffneten sich zwar neue Möglichkeiten, allerdings nahmen oft auch die Barrieren zu.

Unrentabler Nischenmarkt?

Dieses Dilemma verdeutlicht zwei Bewertungen von ablegamers.com, einer Art Wertungsportal von und für Gamer mit Behinderung. Während dort eine weitgehend unbekannte Rollstuhlsimulation namens Slalom, The Videogame die Höchstwertung von 10 Punkten erhält, wird Far Cry 3 – ein weitaus komplexerer Open-World-Ego-Shooter von Ubisoft, einem großen, erfahrenen Spielehersteller – mit einer Wertung von 2,8 abgestraft. Unter anderem, weil einarmige sowie farbenblinde Gamer das Spiel nicht ohne fremde Hilfe abschließen können. Ein größeres Entwicklungsbudget führt demnach nicht unbedingt zu einer höheren Zugänglichkeit. Schreckt etwa der Aufwand die Entwickler ab? Werden behinderte Gamer sogar als unrentabler Nischenmarkt ignoriert?

Wirtschaftliche Gründe dürften kaum eine Rolle spielen. Nach Schätzungen von Experten sind die zusätzlichen Entwicklungskosten für Game Accessibility nur marginal – vorausgesetzt, diese werden bereits bei der Konzipierung mit bedacht und richtig umgesetzt. Im Gegenteil, für die Hersteller könnte sich die Umsetzung von optionalen Accessibility-Features sogar rechnen. Sind die Engines erst einmal für die barrierefreien Features umprogrammiert, können sie in weiteren Titeln ohne größeren Mehraufwand übernommen werden.

Zudem würden von barrierearmen Games nämlich nicht nur Spieler mit Handicap profitieren, sondern das gesamte Spielerpublikum. So wie Rampen auch Eltern mit Kinderwägen sowie Rollatoren nutzenden Senioren zugutekommen, würden Gelegenheitsspieler, die selten viel Zeit in den Einstieg investieren möchten, etwa Auto-Aiming (Zielhilfe) oder ein leicht verständliches Tutorial begrüßen. Games, die etwa wegen eines zu hohen Schwierigkeitsgrads oder einer furchtbaren Steuerung zu Flops wurden, gibt es nämlich zur Genüge. Und manche Features würden selbst Hardcore-Gamer ansprechen, denn ein Spiel muss ja nicht automatisch einfacher oder langweiliger werden, nur weil es Accessibility-Optionen besitzt.

Eine Handvoll von Herstellern beweist, dass es auch anders geht. Seit Jahren ist die Visualisierung von Soundeffekten fester Bestandteil in Spielen von Valve (angeregt durch Proteste gehörloser Gamer zu Half Life 1). Die Fußballsimulation FIFA 13 wurde zudem von ablegamers.com aufgrund der zahlreichen Accessibility-Einstellungen wie zum Beispiel ein Spielgeschwindigkeitsregler, ein hoher Farbkontrast oder frei belegbare Tasten mit hervorragenden 9,9 Punkten ausgezeichnet. Und in Blizzard-Werken jüngeren Datums lassen sich unter anderem Untertitel in sämtlichen Videosequenzen einblenden und Sound-, Dialog- und Musiklautstärken unabhängig voneinander konfigurieren.

Der Game-Accessibility-Lichtstreif am Horizont ist definitiv da, es reicht jedoch noch lange nicht aus. Den meisten Spieleherstellern ist die Thematik einfach gar nicht bekannt. Es fehlen zudem oft verständliche und praxistaugliche Informationen, wie sich Barrieren vermeiden lassen. Anhaltspunkte gibt es aber bereits, wie etwa die Wunschliste für Accessibility-Features bei gamebase.info oder die Top Ten von der IGDA GA-SIG. Hinter diesem sperrigen Kürzel verbirgt sich die Game Accessibility-Arbeitsgruppe der International Game Developers Association. In diesem weltweiten Netzwerk setzen sich Entwickler und Wissenschaftler mit ebenjener Thematik auseinander. Doch dieses ehrenamtliche Engagement kommt leider nur schleppend voran, Kooperationen mit anderen Game Accessibility-Initiativen sind Mangelware.

Staatliche Spieleförderung sollte Accessibility fördern

Sicher, einzelne betroffene Gamer könnten ihren Teil zu einer barrierefreieren Spielelandschaft beitragen, indem sie ihre Bedürfnisse selbstbewusster vortragen und sich zu Interessenvertretungen zusammenschließen. Diskriminierungsklagen gegen Hersteller nicht zugänglicher Spiele würden ebenfalls entscheidende Impulse setzen. Jedoch vielmehr, um ein öffentliches Bewusstsein zu dieser Thematik zu schaffen und nicht, um den Herstellern zu schaden. Dieses Thema wird ohnehin noch zu selten von der Fachpresse aufgegriffen, bei Computerspiele-Awards fehlen zudem Accessibility-Kategorien komplett und staatliche Spieleförderungen sind nicht an barrierearme Features geknüpft, obwohl der Staat in der Verantwortung ist, Diskriminierungen zu vermeiden.

Daher sind Spielehersteller aufgefordert, sich in dieses Segment vorzuwagen, Marktforschung zu betreiben, mit behinderten Gamern zusammenzuarbeiten und sich an den wenigen Konkurrenten, die sich bereits jahrelang in Game Accessibility versuchen, zu orientieren. Ohnehin dürften bei der aktuellen Demografie spätestens in einigen Jahrzehnten, wenn die heutige Spielerschaft zur Silver Generation mitsamt all ihren altersbedingten Einschränkungen geworden ist, Accessible Games einen zentralen Markt darstellen. Ich freue mich schon mal darauf, in einigen Jahrzehnten im fortgeschrittenen Rentenalter weiterhin Rätsel knacken sowie Lakaien mit einem bewegungssensitiven Controller niedermetzeln zu dürfen – und zwar in seniorenfreundlicher Spielgeschwindigkeit.

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Computerspiele als Kulturgut: Wir wollen Games, die den Intellekt nicht beleidigen

zeit.de • Archive • Like & Archive • Like

Computerspiele gelten offiziell als Kulturgut, aber die meisten Hersteller interessiert das nicht. Und die Spieler kämpfen nicht dafür.

“Journey” – ein Spiel, bei dem manche Gamer geweint haben sollen

“Besonders pferdvoll” – dieses Attribut gab Otto Waalkes im Buch Otto seiner kleinen Posse von Robin Hood, dem Rächer der Enterbten. Der Witz war klein, aber wichtig. Damals, Anfang der Achtziger, uferte der Drang wieder mal aus, kulturelle Produkte zu veredeln durch das Attribut “wertvoll”. Als seien alle anderen eben nicht so wertvoll.

Diese erzbürgerliche Geste, mit der ein Kulturprodukt von Staats wegen zu etwas Gutem und Richtigem erklärt wird, hatte ihre Blüte damals eigentlich schon hinter sich. Seit 1951 vergibt die Filmbewertungsstelle ihr Prädikat. Einer der vielen schönen Skandale des Jahres 1968 war jener schöne Kurzfilm, in dem ein Penis die Rede eines CDU-Mannes zum Thema spricht. Und selbst das ist arg lange her. Seit im Kino Trash und Hochkultur nicht mehr zu trennen sind (man denke nur an Tarantino oder die Renaissance der Zombiefilme), hat es keinen mehr geschert, ob der Kulturbetrieb etwas “wertvoll” nennt.

Und dann rückten die Videospiele ins allgemeine Bewusstsein. Bei ihnen schwebt nicht über dem einen oder anderen Game der Hammer gestrenger Kulturbewerter – sondern bei Spielen wird gleich die gesamte Kulturproduktion dem kritischen Blick unterzogen. Sind Games eigentlich Kultur? Diese Frage begleitet uns seit etwa einem halben Jahrzehnt und liefert bis heute Diskussionsstoff. Plötzlich lebt eine alte Diskussion wieder auf.

Begonnen hat alles ziemlich genau vor fünf Jahren. In den Jahren 2007 und 2008 passierten mehrere Dinge, die Spiele in den Kulturbetrieb katapultierten. Vor allem: Grand Theft Auto IV erschien. Die schrille Saga um Kleinkriminelle und die Straße, die noch GTA San Andreas darstellte, war schwer und düster geworden. Ein serbischer Kriegsveteran, selbst von Schuld belastet, war der Held, sein Ziel war Rache. Seine Geschichte eine hochkomplexe Groteske über den American Dream und sein Scheitern an einer bitteren Realität. Als ästhetisches Erlebnis hatte einen zuletzt Der Pate so umgehauen. Die Plakate zum Spiel hingen überall, plötzlich wurde jeder von seiner Oma gefragt, was ist das denn. Plötzlich druckten alle Zeitungen Besprechungen ab.

Im neuen GTA5, auf das dieses Jahr nun alle warten, soll es sogar drei Hauptfiguren geben, deren Erlebnisse sich ineinander verschlingen und eine Story vorantreiben. Da zittert der Medientheoretiker schon jetzt freudig erregt: Wird das vielleicht eine Art verteilte Narration sein, nähern sich hier der auktorial erzählte Roman und das Spiel an, kommt das Ende des Subjektivismus der Videogames? Vielleicht. So etwas könnte die ästhetische Form Videospiel voranbringen. Bitter nötig hätte sie es. Denn, ja, sie ist Kulturgut, hochoffiziell, aber sie ist es noch lange nicht innerlich.

Zu diesem Artikel

Autor Thomas Lindemann betreibt eine blogartige Artikelsammlung unter games-feuilleton.de. Dieser Artikel ist in der neuen Ausgabe des Magazins WASD erschienen, das sich in Essays mit dem Thema Games befasst.

Doch zunächst zur Geschichte der Dinge. Irgendwann, eben rund fünf Jahre her, wollten wir Gamer auch dazugehören, zum Kulturbetrieb, zu den echten Medien, die rote Teppiche bekommen und Politiker als Schirmherren und Redner. Noch in den Neunzigern war eine LAN-Party wirklich ein wenig subversiv. Dass wir, statt zu studieren, unsere Nächte mit Mario Kart, FIFA, Counter Strike und Thief rumbringen, durfte man den Eltern nicht erzählen – schon weil sie es nicht verstanden hätten. Und dass wir beim Spielen Club-Mate tranken, laut Chemical Brothers hörten und uns tödlich cool fühlten, konnte man oft nicht einmal Kommilitonen erklären. Sicherlich konnte man mit diesen Anekdoten niemanden aufreißen, im Club an der Tanzfläche. Spieler waren eine kleine, etwas seltsame Gruppe.

Das alles ist vorbei. Neue Spielkonsolen kamen, Uwe Boll kam, Angelina Jolie spielte Lara Croft, der Umsatz mit Videospielen überholte 2004 den mit Kinokarten. Heute spielen angeblich 25 Millionen Deutsche regelmäßig, Frauen wie Männer, jeder Teenager weiß, wer Nico Bellic ist, und die Fußballer der Nationalmannschaft spielen wichtige Begegnungen vorher an der Playstation durch.

Anerkanntes Kulturgut oder Duldung auf niedrigem Niveau?

Im Sommer 2008 wurden die Entwickler von Videospielen in den Deutschen Kulturrat aufgenommen – der Rat hatte vorher schon oft wörtlich die These “Computerspiele sind Kulturgut” vertreten und dies damit nur noch besiegelt. Kurz davor, Ende 2007 nämlich, verkündete Kulturstaatsminister Bernd Neumann seinen Plan, einen deutschen Computerspielpreis zu fördern (was im März 2009 dann ja auch geschah). Doch nicht ohne Widerspruch: Sofort protestierte Christian Höppner, der Generalsekretär des Deutschen Musikrates. Computerspiele zum Kulturgut zu erheben, sei “abstrus”. Und überhaupt sollten Kinder, sagte der Cellist und Dirigent, lieber musizieren.

Mit diesem Punkt seiner ansonsten dümmlichen Presseerklärung hatte er natürlich Recht. Kinder sollen viel musizieren. Wenn sie weit kommen, spielen sie eines Tages vielleicht beim Soundtrack eines tollen Games mit. Die Anekdote zeigt nur, von welchen Grabenkämpfen der lange Marsch der Games durch die Kulturinstitutionen begleitet war. Nach und nach sind sie alle verstummt. Höppner ist seit März Präsident des Kulturrats und hält sich trotzdem zurück. Christian Pfeiffer, selbst ernannter Kreuzzügler gegen die Videospieleindustrie, kämpft heute mit der katholischen Kirche. Und von Rainer Fromm, diesem TV-Journalisten, der mehrmals im Jahr Beiträge zum Thema drehte, wie gefährlich Spiele seien, hört man gar nichts mehr. Aber man hört Dinge wie dies: Vor drei Jahren nahm die Library of Congress ein paar Spiele in ihre Sammlung auf, legte einen Kanon der bedeutendsten Games an. Doom ist drin und Tetris.

Spiele sind also nun Kulturgut. Man könnte aber auch sagen: Auf niedrigem Niveau werden sie geduldet. Die deutsche Filmförderung gibt jährlich knapp 200 Millionen Euro aus. Das deutsche Videospiel wird praktisch überhaupt nicht gefördert – lediglich mit den lumpigen 385.000 Euro plus einer hübschen Veranstaltung, die der Bund für den Computerspielpreis gemeinsam mit der Industrie springen lässt. Nimmt man noch ein paar mutige Länderprojekte hinzu, die Spieleentwickler unterstützen, kommt man trotzdem deutschlandweit maximal auf ein Hundertstel der Filmförderung.

“BioShock Infinite” – ein Kunstwerk

Für den, der innerhalb der Spieleszene auf “kulturell Wertvolles” wartet, dem vielleicht Förderungen und staatliche Siegel ganz egal sind, der aber wirklich klügere Unterhaltung will, ist alles genauso schwer. Das Warten auf das kulturell wertvolle Spiel ist eine lange Geschichte der Enttäuschungen. Dabei ist “kulturell wertvoll” hier gar nicht so verschnarcht staatstragend gemeint, wie es von den Institutionen und Fördergremien längst gebraucht wird. Sondern wir suchen doch einfach nur Spiele, die den Intellekt nicht beleidigen. Wir schauen uns den neuen Film von David Fincher oder Jim Jarmusch an und diskutieren dann stundenlang in der Kneipe darüber, ob die Inszenierung des zerfallenden Alltags nun gelingt oder nicht, und ob das eigentlich links ist. Wir lesen den neuen Tom Wolfe und haben eine Meinung über Dandy-Literatur der Ostküste. Und selbst zu Til Schweiger als Tatort-Kommissar fällt uns etwas ein. Nur wenn wir ein Game spielen, reden wir hinterher selten in heißen Diskussionsrunden darüber. Denn meist gibt es nichts zu diskutieren.

David Cage, der Macher von Fahrenheit und Heavy Rain, sagte mal im Interview zu mir: “Ich bin erwachsen, ich habe Kinder, ich habe wenig Zeit – warum soll ich die mit viel zu schweren Spielen verschwenden, die mir nichts geben?” Er hat gute Antworten versucht, und er wird es weiter versuchen müssen. Denn Heavy Rain ist zwar großartig, ich kenne aber niemanden, der es zweimal gespielt hat. Vielleicht ist es gar kein Spiel sondern eher ein Film mit Knöpfchendrücken. Die Suche nach einem Spiel, das sich in erwachsene Alltagserfahrung einfügt und ihr etwas sagt, geht also weiter. Denn, egal wie lange man jetzt über seinen Kunstbegriff philosophiert, um mal zu explizieren, was “kulturell wertvoll” eigentlich heißen soll – eins dürfte klar sein: Es muss uns bewegen. Es muss uns etwas sagen. Es muss mit dem modernen Leben korrespondieren.

Ein paar Glanzlichter gibt es

Zum Beispiel mit Feminismus und mit Mann-Frau-Klischees. Und siehe, Tomb Raider ist erschienen. 13 Jahre nach dem letzten richtigen Spiel der Reihe (oder akzeptiert hier irgendjemand den Krempel der Nullerjahre?) ist Lara Croft zurück. Und sie wurde als Erstes ihres Atombusens beraubt. Das war albern. Aber sie wirkt menschlich, sie weint auch mal, irgendwie macht es Spaß, sie zu spielen. Das war klug. Tatsächlich macht es auch richtig Spaß, Lara zu sein, bis zum Schluss. Man fühlt etwas mehr als nur die konkrete Spielaufgabe, man fühlt auch noch eine größere, abstraktere Aufgabe, nämlich die Frau aus dem Schlamassel zu retten und somit etwas Gutes zu tun. Damit hat Tomb Raider auch dem Spiel Far Cry 3 etwas voraus, bei dem es ja dreist kopiert hat, was das inhaltliche Setting betrifft, den Rahmen der Story und die sozusagen psychologisch-archetypische Lage, aus der die Hauptfigur sich retten muss. Und Tomb Raider hat auch aus der Vergangenheit gelernt. Alles, was die FEAR-Reihe damals so schrecklich falsch gemacht hat, indem sie eine Frau als große Antagonistin mitbrachte und diese dann immer lächerlicher mythisierte und verzerrte, als müsste man Angst haben vor dem Prinzip Weiblichkeit – das alles schien nun geradegebogen. Frauen können im Spiel auftauchen. Und nein, sie müssen keine Monstren wie Bayonetta sein. Das ist alles schön. Und letztlich muss man dann doch zugeben: Etwas, das in einem banalen Bossfight endet, sich also strikt an die Konventionen des Unterhaltungsschemas hält, kann mir vielleicht doch nicht so viel über mein Leben sagen wie ein Buch von Haruki Murakami.

Aber das Hoffen geht weiter, und zwar zu Recht. Bioshock Infinite ist eines dieser Glanzlichter, das mit den Spezifika des Mediums arbeitet. Also mit dem subjektiven Blick, der zu den meisten Spielen grundsätzlich gehört, und mit der Sicherheit, ein Subjekt zu sein, ein Ich, das eine feste Identität hat. Genau diese Sicherheiten benutzt das Spiel und zerstört sie – das erzeugt Beklemmung, das verlangt tiefes Nachdenken, das ist eine Kunst-Leistung. Und da ballt sich alles Kluge dann manchmal auf ein Kulturprodukt zusammen, es redet zu unserem sozialen Bewusstsein. Es zwingt den Spieler, mit einem Mädchen zusammenzuarbeiten, die ganze Zeit, und mit Staunen seine Freude daran zu entdecken. Es kommentiert heimlich die Gegenwart, wenn man etwa gegen Schluss den Bürgerkrieg einmal aus der Ferne sieht, die Sprecherstimmer sagen hört “die Vox nimmt hier alles auseinander”, und das brennende Gebäude ist gut sichtbar mit “Financial District” überschrieben – da ist der Kommentar zur aktuellen Weltpolitik leicht zu erkennen. Und was da noch alles thematisiert wird! Die Seancen, das späte 19. Jahrhundert, das Springen zwischen Dimensionen, die Superstring-Theorie, als hätten der Arzt Mesmer und Stephen Hawking beim Kaffee ihre wildesten Ideen zusammengeworfen. Es dürfte das erste Spiel sein, das so konsequent einfach mal die Welt komplett ändert, mehrmals, und den Spieler in immer neue Herausforderungen wirft. Ein Kunstwerk!

Irgendetwas hakt

Aber, apropos Bioshock Infinite: Als ich eine Besprechung dieses Spiels einem sehr großen allgemeinen deutschen Medium anbot, antwortete die Redakteurin mir am nächsten Tag: Sie habe mal mit einem ihrer “spieleaffinen” Kollegen geredet und der meine, das Spiel sei wohl nicht so wichtig. Dass es tatsächlich eines der wichtigsten Spiele des Jahres ist, muss hier nicht betont werden, und auch dass einer, der in einer deutschen Redaktion das Label “spieleaffin” vor sich her trägt, in Wirklichkeit von Tuten und Blasen keine Ahnung hat, ist gar nicht das Problem. Das Problem ist, dass die Redakteurin sich selbst kein Urteil darüber bilden konnte. Zu den neuen Platten von Rihanna oder I am Kloot, zu jedem Gebäude von Rem Kohlhaas, zu jedem Buch von T.C. Boyle hätte sie entweder schon ein Urteil gehabt oder sich innerhalb von Minuten eins gebildet. Bei einem Spiel war das nicht möglich – und es war ihr auch nicht peinlich. So funktioniert der Einzug der Spiele in die Kultur natürlich nie.

Natürlich gibt es Journey, bei dem angeblich Spieler geweint haben. Und Papo & Yo erschien kürzlich völlig zu Recht nach dem Konsolenleben auch noch auf Steam, ein scheinbar leichtherziges Jump-and-Run-Puzzle, das aber eigentlich väterliche Gewalt gegen ein Kind thematisiert und dem Spieler damit immer mehr auf die Pelle rückt. Und wir warten gespannt auf Last of Us und Beyond: Two Souls. Aber wenn sich nicht Sony so stark für alternative Spielideen engagieren würde, fände all das nur in einer kleinen Off-Szene statt. Electronic Arts und Ubisoft haben die Förderung ungewöhnlicher Spiele ganz aufgegeben, Activision-Blizzard hat sie noch nie betrieben. Um nur einmal die Größten zu nennen. Irgendetwas hakt einfach beim Thema “das kulturell wertvolle Spiel”. Keiner will es so recht. Und wir Spieler kämpfen nicht dafür.

Computerspielpreis verdeutlicht die Probleme

Nur das Establishment will es. Will es vereinnahmen. Beim fünften deutschen Computerspielpreis am 24. April 2013 zeigten sich wieder alle Probleme offen. Das einzige deutsche Spiel von Weltrang, der Kriegs/Antikriegs-Shooter Spec Ops: The Line gewann nicht den Preis als bestes Spiel, was schlicht ein Skandal ist. Einige Jurymitglieder verrieten später offen, dass wieder einmal Druck ausgeübt wurde: Es darf nichts mit Gewalt sein. Ganz im Gegensatz zum Film übrigens, dessen erklärter Fan und Förderer genau der Bernd Neumann ist, der neuerdings Egoshooter per se vom Computerspielpreis ausgenommen wissen will. Eine Zensur gewalthaltiger Spiele findet weltweit im Wesentlichen nur in Malaysia, China und Deutschland statt. Eine Zensur gewalthaltiger Filme findet in Deutschland bekanntlich mitnichten statt. Das ist zwar eine andere Diskussion, aber es behindert ein Kulturgut Game in Deutschland zumindest enorm – und gehört deswegen zum Problem.

Der historische Moment, das Kunsterleben im Game zu entdecken, zu fördern und zu lieben, dürfte aber genau jetzt sein. Nicht irgendwann, wenn die mit den muffigen Talaren ausgestorben sind oder uns in Ruhe lassen. Gerade ist der neue Roman des SciFi-Autoren Daniel Suarez erschienen. Er hat das “Darknet” erfunden, eine Art Second Life, das aber genau über der realen Welt liegt und eine zweite dazustellt, die nur die Inhaber einer bestimmten Brille sehen können. Das fängt als Spiel an, wird irgendwann blutiger Ernst, und in seinem dritten, aktuellen Thriller, gibt es schon gar keine Games mehr: Das Game ist Teil der Welt geworden und dort verkommen. Es könnte doch sein, dass Spiele sich immer mehr mit Film und Webbrowsing und allgemeinem Leben verbinden und langsam als ästhetische Einheit flöten gehen. Jetzt ist die Gelegenheit, sie als solche zu entdecken.

Vielleicht erleben wir gerade schon den Niedergang. Vielleicht hatte das in der vorigen WASD so schön wiederentdeckte Hidden Agenda (1988) unterm Strich mehr politische Sprengkraft als die Napalm-Szene des durchaus großartigen Spec Ops: The Line (2012). Wer garantiert uns denn, dass es immer aufwärts geht, nur weil die Technik sich entwickelt? Für Kunst muss man arbeiten. Man muss sie können und wollen, um mal den blöden, abgedroschenen Spruch von Max Liebermann umzudrehen. Der sagte angeblich: “Kunst kommt von Können, käme sie von Wollen, so würde sie Wulst heißen.” Im Bereich des Videospiels fehlt uns das Wollen. Also, hier der Slogan der Stunde: Mehr Wulst!

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Mastery vs. Hoping – Games and Gambling Machines

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If you have any output randomness at all in your game, or any of a certain kind of input randomness, then it’s quite likely that a compulsive gambling mentality will be the thing driving players to play.  This is interesting to me because I have always said that single player games require some randomization to maintain their status as games, but there’s an interesting pitfall with regards to this that I think a lot of people aren’t totally aware of.

At a basic level, you could say that there are two totally different desires – the “game desire” of creative mastery (I want to see what I can do), and the “gambling desire” of hoping (I want to see what the system will do).  I should also mention that both of these desires are referring to subconscious desires, not conscious ones – I’ll explain that further later on.

First, I need to delineate classical gambling machines and how they work.  This section is a bit obvious to most people, but I just need to be clear on it before I move on to my real point.

Gambling Machines

I’ve talked before about how “gambling machines” are really quite different than games.  The classical, obvious examples of gambling machines are things like Blackjack, slots, roulette, or a lottery.  While the best gambling machines give players some amount of choice to give them some illusion of agency, this choice doesn’t usually matter very much and is highly solvable.

While this solv-ability would be a terrible thing in a competitive game, it’s actually something of a boon for gambling machines.  This is because it allows players to have the following thought pattern:

“I’m playing SUPER well.  The only reason I haven’t won yet is just a series of flukes.  If I keep playing, I’ll definitely win.”

And eventually, they will of course win, so it’s not that that thinking is wrong.  They are likely playing optimally (or close to it), and eventually the dice will tumble in their favor.  So, this is roughly how this kind of compulsion loop thing works (more info on that here).  It tells you that “you’re doing everything right, it’s only a fluke that you didn’t win, so if you play again, you’re likely to win”.

The lottery is a great example.  You’re absolutely playing optimally by picking any numbers at all.  You’re doing the best possible move, so if you don’t win, that’s just some fluke.  Therefore, you should probably try again.  Even if the odds aren’t good, it’s only a matter of some random numbers going your way…

Random Videogames

What players – and possibly many developers – don’t understand is that if you have a videogame that has even some of a certain kind of randomness, that game may be driven by the same kind of compulsion that causes someone to continue playing the lottery.

Most people already know that this is how games like Diablo get people to keep playing.  What item is that monster going to drop this time?  But I think few people realize that many games which seem totally skill based are actually just as driven by compulsion as Diablo.

For instance – my friends and I spent about 2 hours playing Super Crate Box on the OUYA (by the way: there will be an article forthcoming about how awesome the OUYA is and how you need to get one, stay tuned).  I had played this before on PC, but with the whole console atmosphere, it was much more playable.

Super Crate Box

Super Crate Box, at first, seems like a completely skill-based competitive game.  Most people would certainly not think of this, upon first sight, as a “random” game, and certainly not as a gambling machine.  You run around, jump over monsters, and shoot, all of which requires lots of twitch dexterity.  There’s even a decently interesting strategy metagame going on, in terms of “when do I slow down and kill a bunch of monsters to clear out the screen” vs “when do I just rush for crates” (which are the objective).

However, none of that is what made us play this game for two hours straight.

We were handing the controller around and playing round after round, and as my friends were playing, I was thinking – what is the reason that this friend of mine, a super critical hardcore strategy game player, is so motivated to play dozens upon dozens of matches of this game, which isn’t particularly dynamic or exciting to play?

I realized it’s because Super Crate Box is most certainly, at its heart, a gambling game.

You see, at the top of the screen, monsters are streaming into the game.  They stream in at seemingly random rates, of random types, and heading in a random direction.  Now I’m sure there are some constraints on this;  I don’t think you’ll ever see a stream of 6+ large-head monsters come out of the thing in a row, but with that said, the constraints are still loose enough that sometimes, you get a harder game than other times.  This is particularly true since the three possible monster types aren’t at all equal in their difficulty.

This is compounded by the fact that the goal of the game – collecting crates – is also super-random.  The crate spawns in what seems to be a truly random position.  Sometimes it spawns very close to you, sometimes it spawns on the other side of the map.

Oh, not only that, but the weapons are also given out randomly, and they are certainly not balanced, especially if you consider the context of the current game (certain weapons are better versus certain spawns).

So, I think that when we play this game over and over again, we’re subconsciously compulsively HOPING for that one game where the monster spawns are favorable/easy and the crates all spawn really close to each other.  That, in a nutshell, is what gets people to play lots of Super Crate Box, and I don’t think the developers realize that.

I also don’t think most players realize it either.  Consciously, they’re thinking “yeah I gotta perform better”, but the thing that’s really drawing them to play over and over again is not mastery at all, but hoping.

Unfair Randomness

A game that has Unfair Randomness is a game that has some significant level of difficulty variance due to its randomness.  To avoid having Unfair Randomness, then, every play of a game must be equally (or very close to equally) difficult.

By “Unfair Randomness”, I don’t mean randomness that makes a player die right away and has the player going “What?!  That’s completely unfair!”  Unfair Randomness is usually very subtle and many players don’t even consciously notice it (but their brain does!).

The most common form of Unfair Randomness is simple “to-hit %” found in most RPGs.  While people will counter-argue with this by saying “oh well over many many hits, it averages out”, in reality, this isn’t the case, because not all hits take place in the same situation.  Sometimes, you’ll get a critical hit when you REALLY need one.  Sometimes, a monster will miss you when you REALLY need him to, and sometimes… that monster will hit you in those moments.

So taken over the course of one match, sure, maybe things always head towards 50% in general, but that doesn’t mean that you weren’t very fortunate with when the extremes struck, or very unfortunate when they did.

Another note:  Unfair Randomness doesn’t actually have to be “random” (well, actually nothing we deal with in any games is truly random, but you know what I mean).  For example, perhaps people don’t consider the way a ball bounces down in Pachinko or Peggle to be “random”, but it’s certainly effectively random, in that no one can possibly predict how it will land.  It’s quite similar to a real life dice roll in this way.

100 Rogues

Let’s take another example – 100 Rogues, my own first commercial game.  I designed this game back in 2008-2009, and I’ve learned a lot about interactive systems design since then.  Largely, 100 Rogues was based off of the existing “Roguelike” template, and so it has tons of input and output randomness.

I’ve been spending some time with the new OUYA version of the game (by the way, it’s the best version of the game ever, upcoming article on that, too) and I’m realizing that the most exciting part of the game is “finding out what item was in the treasure chest”.  This is a thing which the player has absolutely zero agency to affect, and yet it’s the most engaging thing about the game.

The Crusader’s “Faith” ability – one of the best abilities in the game, and also the most random.

Now that I understand this about 100 Rogues, I can make it a much better gambling machine.  The abilities need to be more random.  There need to be fewer item restrictions on the classes – for instance, the Fairy is probably less fun to play than the Crusader almost entirely because she has less chance of drawing great random items she can use.

So here’s the litmus test for whether or not your game has unfair randomness, and is therefore possibly more of a gambling machine than a game:

Is the most exciting thing that happens in your game something that the player has absolutely no control over?

For 100 Rogues, and many many other videogames, I’d say the answer is yes.  This doesn’t mean at all that I’m saying 100 Rogues is bad, mind you.  Instead what it does is inform me that I need to take it in a more gambley direction.  I didn’t have any idea of this “unfair randomness” concept back then, so I tried hard to take Roguelikes and make them more strategy/tactics gamey.  Much later, I realized that to do this I had to start from scratch, which resulted in AURO, which has essentially tossed out the entire Roguelike template and has very controlled randomness specifically to avoid the unfair kind, because I really wanted AURO to be a competitive strategy game.

We’ve worked hard to make sure that in AURO, the random arrangement of tiles and the placement of monsters is always fair, and that each game should be pretty damn close to the same in terms of difficulty (for Trials mode – the highest-score single-player mode).  In the future, I’ll be keeping an eye on this to make sure that it remains the case.  If I find that it’s still too swingy, I’ll look for solutions.

Other Examples of videogames that are accidentally gambling machines:

Civilization – “Hoping” to start near friendly/weak civilization, or large amounts of valuable resources, or to be the only one on your continent, etc.

Dominion – “Hoping” that the synergistic cards I bought will get drawn together

Arkanoid – “Hoping” that when the ball gets stuck up behind the wall, it will bounce around up there a billion times and basically clear the level for you.  Again, this “isn’t truly random”, but in the same way that a dice roll isn’t truly random.

Match-3 abstract games – This one’s a bit obvious, but, basically these games are all about “hoping” that gems fall in a favorable pattern.  I think probably stuff like Candy Crush and Bejeweled embrace this, which is part of why they’re more popular than stuff like Puzzle Fighter or Dr. Mario.

The point here is not even to make a value judgment about “strategy games VS. gambling machines”.  I, of course, greatly prefer strategy games, but as my two-hour stint of Super Crate Box shows, I can get sucked into a skinner box just as quickly as the next guy.

The point is that we should be aware of what it is that we’re doing.  There’s only so much room in a given system for sources of interest, and if your game has significant Unfair Randomness, that’s going to be the primary draw of your system.  Of course, there are other ramifications that Unfair Randomness has on a strategy game, which I’ve talked about at length.  But beyond that, you can strive to make a very good gambling machine, if you figure out that that’s what you’ve got.

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Insult Swordfighting: Game informing, revisited

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Four years ago, I wrote a post called “Game informing,” in which I gathered the concluding sentences of several previews from a single issue of Game Informer. I did this because I possess the ability to remember things I have read in the past, and to connect those memories to things that have actually happened. Over and over I would read previews that glossed over potential problems and expressed hope that a game would be great, only to play the game for myself months or years later and discover that it had not delivered on the previewer’s promises. Optimism is a good quality, but the blue-sky attitude we read in previews rarely matches up with reality.
It’s not a problem unique to Game Informer. A lot of previews are too credulous. But I thought it might be worth revisiting that post and seeing what came to pass with those games.

Splinter Cell: Conviction — “Let’s just hope Sam doesn’t sneak past his fall release, because we’ve been waiting long enough to play what’s looking like one of the best games of the year.”
It sucked. (Partly for this reason.)

The Last Guardian — “With the PS3 breaking down technical barriers, the possibilities with Team Ico’s next masterpiece seem to be endless.”
The possibilities are always endless for a game that still doesn’t exist.

God of War III — “With the massive titans waging war, more gods entering the fray, and Kratos determined to topple Olympus, God of War III will be packed with jaw-dropping moments worthy of passing into legend.”
It was boring.

Assassin’s Creed II — “We’ll know more about whether our high hopes are justified as we get hands on time with the game in the coming months.”
They weren’t.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves — “Our time with the game left us confident that Drake’s second big journey may be just what Sony needs to draw in PS3 doubters.”
This was true.

ModNation Racers — “If the gameplay shows even half the potential of its customization tools, ModNation Racers might be the game that finally drags the kart-racing genre into the 21st century.”
I have no idea what this game is.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii — “There definitely were bigger, more graphically impressive games at E3, but we’ll be surprised if many of them are as anticipated as New Super Mario Bros. Wii.”
Sure, I guess.

Dirt 2 — “We’re eager to see what other cities Codemasters has transformed into rally circuits.”
Hands up if, in the year 2013, you can name even one city in Dirt 2.

Heavy Rain — “We can’t wait to meet the remaining protagonists in the upcoming months to see if they, too, can dodge a grisly end.”
Some of them could! Also, this is way less effusive than most of the rest of these lines, and then Heavy Rain turned out to be the best game of 2010.

Alan Wake — “While we still have nearly a year before this spooky narrative finally hits the Xbox 360, it looks like the title will be worth the long wait.”
It wasn’t. I mean, it was a fine game, but it wasn’t worth the long wait.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow — “But if the final game can live up to the excitement caused by the trailer… Lords of Shadow may finally give gamers a 3D action title worthy of the Castlevania name, even if some series staples are missing.”
It couldn’t.

Borderlands — “With fast-paced action, strong co-op, and this much variety, we can’t wait to gather some treasure hunters and start exploring this promising wasteland.”
Again, this is one of the most restrained lines in the whole piece, and it’s about the game that ended up as my 2009 GOTY.

Homefront — “Though it wasn’t shown or talked about in detail… what little we’ve seen of Homefront looks good.”
This sounds even dumber today than it did then.

League of Legends: Clash of Fates — “We’ve spent a lot of time with DotA and other games, and League of Legends is clearly the most exciting title in the sub-genre to date.”
Vindicated!
Thanks to @oldgameswriting for reminding me that this post existed.

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Features - Dwarf Fortress in 2013

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By Mike Rose
“What we’ve done is lay out a framework for version 1.0, and you just have a giant piece of paper with everything on it, and there’s the stuff that’s on the paper, and there’s the stuff that’s off the paper.”

Tarn Adams and his brother Zach have been working on procedurally-generated fantasy game Dwarf Fortress for around 11 years now, although if you include the DragSlay and Slaves to Armok development work that preceded it — and essentially molded the game’s early beginnings — it’s more like 13 years.

Although you can download and play the game for free right now, version 1.0 is still a long time coming. Tarn Adams recently estimated that we can expect 1.0 in around 20 years’ time, although he admits it’ll probably take even longer than that, “because I always underestimate release times.”

But the Adams brothers have a clear goal, regardless of timeframe. The duo recognize that they have gotten stuck in plenty of development ruts before, and their solution is to lay everything out in front of them, and decide on what will make the cut.

“We try to stay on the paper as much as possible,” says Adams. “When we finish the paper, that’s 1.0. And there’s a whole lot more to do after that. I mean, obviously, if we’re in our 50s, we’ll have all kinds of life decisions we’re making, so there’s no reason to think that we’ll stick with this plan for even another five years or whatever.”

But that’s the general idea — sticking to the plan without getting too deep in the weeds. “Just kind of lay out a skeleton, flesh it out a bit, but not put the little curly hairs on it like we did in the first version of the game, where we had curly hairs on every part of the body, and measured their exact flash points and everything, and you could teleport someone’s nose off and so on — although we’re pretty much there in Dwarf Fortress again.”

The 30-Year Plan

What’s so intriguing (and perhaps questionable) about Adams’ 30-year-plus plan is how exactly the designer can stay focused and enthused about a project that may potentially take up his entire adult life.

I regularly talk to developers who tell me “I’ve really enjoyed working on this game, but I cannot wait to get it behind me and work on something new.” How, then, does Adams keep up the enthusiasm for Dwarf Fortress? Isn’t his attention starting to meander to other projects?

“Not really,” he answers. “I mean, if we didn’t have vents for things like that, then I think it’d be a realistic expectation. But having put in the years, I kinda know where I’m at. And I kinda know I’ve made time for myself to make side projects, even though I haven’t released anything since Dwarf Fortress that wasn’t related to Dwarf Fortress… like the Cobalt Quest, the Mac porting project, or whatever.”

Zach and Tarn Adams

In fact, Adams says that he has around seven other big projects that are sort of in the works but not — “they are all sort of large undertakings that I don’t have large undertaking time for,” he says. “There’s time when we’re watching stupid stuff on TV over at my brother’s place where I have my other laptop, and I work on those games, just as kind of a break.”

“We don’t really talk about them that much, and don’t say what they are,” he continues. “We don’t want to build any hype for them because it’s not necessarily anything that’s ever going to see the light of day. It helps, though, to know that we still have other ideas that we can work on, and there are lots of other interesting things to experiment with.”

There’s another reason why the Adams brothers don’t believe they’ll ever get bored of Dwarf Fortress development — the sheer scope of the title, and the ridiculous number of avenues that they can potentially go down at any given point.

Adams says that whenever he becomes bored of a specific element of the game, he can simply go off and work on something else completely different instead. “Like, if I got sick of geology, I wouldn’t have to look at geology again for 10 years, right?” he laughs. “You can just go do something else.”

This is why Dwarf Fortress development is so completely different to, say, your average triple-A or mobile game design. A regular game development team might spend months and years refining a title and polishing it up, making it “ready for market,” and this is where Adams believes the enthusiasm can be lost.

“You explore new ideas in the interative development process, so it’s not completely stagnant, but I can see how you can wear down a bit more,” he notes. “With me, I was like ‘Ohh — I get to look up all the medieval garden crops now and learn all about plants!’ I learned a lot about bananas recently. It’s just wherever the mind takes you, you can explore. It’s like getting tried of learning is where Dwarf Fortress is at now.”

But Adams isn’t convinced that he’ll make the 20 year deadline, regardless of dwindling enthusiasm or not. Sitting at his computer day-in, day-out (or night-in, night-out, as the case may be) is taking its toll on the developer — plus it’s not like he’s able to control how the world will work in the coming decades.

“I’m sure there’s going to come a point obviously where we’re kinda fading out, not really from disinterest, but just because our bodies are falling apart,” he says. “And at that point, I don’t know if the game is still going to be viable — what operating systems are like, what weird headbands people are going to be wearing that let them see weird stuff with their iPhones — and Dwarf Fortress could just be totally dead by then.”

“Who knows how this stuff will work out,” he adds. “But if we’re still around, and we need to pass it on, then we’ll probably think of some open-source solution that just gets passed along, and lets people do whatever the heck they want with it. We’ll put up all our dev notes, etcetera. But that’s just idle speculation, right? That’s the general idea.”

He sees the future life of Dwarf Fortress going the same way that the likes of Nethack or Dungeon Crawl have, with new devs teams picking them up and pushing them along.

“We’ve just had our mitts on this one for a long time without passing it along,” he says, “but that’s not going to be a forever thing, obviously. It’s only going to stay afloat as long as people keep it afloat, right?”

Impenetrable

Dwarf Fortress was rather tricky to get into from the get-go, thanks to its ASCII art style and general lack of tutorials. But to an outsider looking in on this game so many years into development, with such a wide scope of features and potential play styles, it’s fair to say that getting into Dwarf Fortress is perhaps one of the most daunting tasks the video game industry as a whole can provide.

“I think the game has actually gotten easier compared to what it was in 2006,” Adams reasons. “It’s not really the mechanics that matter so much, since a lot of the mechanics in DF are under the table. A lot of the updates don’t matter either — I mean, I spent a month on beekeeping, but you’re not confronted with beekeeping, and you don’t need to learn how to do it, but if you want to make wax crafts and honey, then it’s an avenue you can explore.”

The designer argues that there are different types of impenetrability, and that it all depends on what a player focuses on.

“There’s the basic interface problems, such as not using consistent keys,” he explains. “Then there’s using graphics that aren’t graphics, that kind of thing [laughs]. And those have gotten slightly better, rather than worse.”

“But when it comes to things like indecision — like not being goal-orientated, or requiring people to set their own goals — I guess you could argue more features make that worse. Really, the fundamentals of staying alive haven’t really changed much at all.

“So I think the more time that goes on, the better the Wiki is, the better the tutorials are, the more videos get put out, the larger and more helpful the community is. So I think it’s probably easier to get into Dwarf Fortress now than it ever has been. Not that it is!”

When the game reaches the aforementioned version 1.0, Adams envisions tutorials, a more consistent interface, some context-sensitive help — all these things are on his piece of paper, although he has no intention of including isometric, supported or packed-in tiles or 3D interfaces, given the great job that the Dwarf Fortress community has done on the visual side of things already.

In fact, Adams has already attempted to start work on tutorials for the game, but has found that this is an element of design that can really impede development progress.

“We talk about the graphics slowing down development, and it’s one of the main reasons why we don’t have them,” he says. “Tutorials are sort of the same way, in that they are an anchor that you need to keep updated. But that’s definitely a sacrifice that I’m willing to make, just because I think they would make a big difference just to get people started.”

For now, he’s happy to let the Dwarf Fortress community do the job for him. “There’s a lot of people dedicated to helping others get into the game now, and if I were to become one of them, that would be even better,” he laughs, adding, “I’m not laughing at people’s pain — it is hard, and it is all my fault. It’s just when you’ve been talking about something for years, you start to get flippant, sometimes.”

I asked Adams whether he believes it would be possible to build a game with the insane depth of Dwarf Fortress, that would feel more accessible to the average gamer.

“Surely,” he answers. “It would be about delivering depth quickly. I mean, think of something like The Sims — how many copies did that sell, right? That’s not an uncomplicated game, and yet it’s still played by millions of people. The Sims is a really good example of a game that is complicated yet accessible.”

“And I mean, I’ve never played Minecraft, but I assume there’s some depth to the game, if you wanna have it, right?” he adds. “Yet the base game itself is playable by an eight year old. So I think it’s already here.”

Fan Drought

It’s a godsend for the Adams brothers that they have such a dedicated fanbase that is not only happy to keep playing the game and help newer players out, but also donate tens of thousands of dollars simply to keep the brothers afloat. But what happens if, in the years to come, the player numbers begin to fall away and the income is no longer sustainable?

“I’ll probably have to join that group of people who can’t get a job,” laughs Adams — although he’s well aware that that most likely wouldn’t be the case. “I think we probably are at the point where if we started hyping a new project, people would pay attention.”

“We could always trade in our reputation on a Kickstarter,” he adds. “There’s all kinds of choices these days, so it’s not like I feel that I’d need to go and immediately do Dwarf Fortress part-time while I seek a job. There’s alternatives. We’d still want to do Dwarf Fortress.”

It’s not really something that Adams likes to think about too often, given how incredibly depressing the thought is — that people would just stop caring about your life’s work.

“But it’s also a foregone conclusion, right?” he says. “That’s how these things always work. There are some things with staying power, like if you look at these roguelike games. But those communities are fractured a million times over. So who knows.”

It helps the long-term reality of Dwarf Fortress that the game was recently chosen as one of the Museum of Modern Art’s historial video games — an event that really spurred Adams and his brother onwards.

“It made us feel like it’s not like the floor is going to suddenly drop out behind us, even if support for the game dries out,” he notes. “It also makes you feel like maybe support for the game won’t dry out. It was a good milestone. And we’ve hit these milestones along the way, all of these things were stepping stones up to a feeling of confidence in our continued existence, and that’s been nice.”

Of course, there are methods by which the Adams brothers could potentially make their future more secure. One would be to get Dwarf Fortress on Steam, putting it front and center before millions of potentially new pairs of eyes. That process would involve going through Steam Greenlight.

“It’s things like Steam Greenlight that have made the world a little weirder for us,” Adams reasons. “Our policy is like well, it’s like Field of Dreams, the Kevin Costner movie — if you build it, they will come. Everything has been coming to us, all the press — we’ve never placed an advertisement, never gone to a conference, or expo, or whatever.”

Adams notes that he’s not trying to make himself out to be selfish or arrogant — it’s simply that he didn’t care about getting publicity when he first started developing the game, so when the hits began to roll in, he just sort of accepted what was happening.

This is where he isn’t too sure whether Greenlight would be a good idea for Dwarf Fortress. “When you have things like Steam Greenlight — I don’t know if it’s to that point where we’re like, is this a low-hanging fruit that you should just reach out and say ‘Okay, we’ll be distributed on Steam,’” he says.

“I don’t know enough about it, and it’s the kind of thing that, from the years of inertia, we don’t have these business instincts that kick in and say, ‘Yes, we need to get on that.’ So it’s sort of the thing where, if enough people bug us because they want Steam to track their user hours or whatever… if our current fan base wants it on there, it’d be more of the kind of thing we’d be interested in, rather than increasing our audience.”

So getting Dwarf Fortress on Steam would be more of a fan service move than one aimed at pulling in new players?

“I guess so, yeah,” he answers. “I don’t know if I sound incredibly selfish when I say that, because people work to get their games put up on Steam and work really hard on getting people to see their games. I wouldn’t say we got that stuff for free, because there was a lot of work put into the game to get it to the point where people would start talking about it. But now that I’m not concerned about that, I just don’t know if it’s a total waste, or whatever.”

Platformer

While the topic of getting the game out to more people is up in the air, I ask Adams whether he has considered porting the game to other platforms, such as mobile or the PS Vita.

Mobile hasn’t really been a possibility up to now, since Dwarf Fortress is a pretty intense game CPU-wise — even ignoring the potential interface problems, mobile devices simply haven’t been powerful enough to keep up with the vast number of calculations that the game is constantly doing. However, Adams acknowledges that “the specs are starting to get into line,” so the possibility of Dwarf Fortress on a tablet is definitely closer to reality now.

As for PS Vita, he notes that “if someone approached us, we’re not giving the code to anybody for any reason, so it would have to be something we could compile ourselves.”

“It would also need to make sense to put it on the Vita,” he adds. “Right now I’ve got a process that I do myself, where I compile it on Windows, compile it on Linux, and compile it on the Mac manually over here. The guy that ported it had to go through a pretty hellish process of my not giving him the full source code. He didn’t get it, despite working with me for years, and basically having my complete trust. I mean, one mistake and we’re in a lot of trouble with the code being out there.”

Potentially signing an NDA to counter this possibility wouldn’t matter to Adams. “I need to have a way to compile it, and I just have no idea how that works on [other] platforms,” he adds. “I guess you download these developer SDKs. If Sony was willing to bear with me through that kind of nonsense, which I don’t think they would be, to get one more game… it would take that kind of dedication. Which is why it usually comes from fans who care, and people who are willing to volunteer and go through the nightmare with me.”

“So we’re not against other systems, but it has to fit into the pipeline we’ve got, because of our restrictions,” he says.

It’s obvious that at this point in Dwarf Fortress’ development, Adams and his brother must have received plenty of offers from publishers — both to publish the game, and to offer the duo jobs. Adams tells me while he would never consider working for someone else (“we want to work on our own stuff, and the money doesn’t matter”), he has considered signing Dwarf Fortress up with a publisher before.

“There was an offer to use the Dwarf Fortress name - sort of ‘Dwarf Fortress: Subtitle’ or whatever — they wanted to brand one of their other games,” he tells me. “And the amount of money on the table was six figures.”

He adds, “When you look at that you think well, there’s trade-offs. Does the brand get cheapened? Are you deceiving people? As long as they’re clear this is not Dwarf Fortress or whatever, and this is not Dwarf Fortress with graphics, as people call a lot of things that are coming out these days. As long as you’re upfront and honest, there’s not technically a problem with that — it’s our brand to piss all over if we want.”

Signing up with a publisher or giving Dwarf Fortress rights to another developer wouldn’t necessarily be bad for the current fans either, he reasons. “I mean, if we had enough money suddenly to become independently wealthy and not worry about our health insurance anymore, then we’re working on Dwarf Fortress even more than before — who should complain about that?”

He muses, “It would take a very philosophical person interested in way down in the details of ethical behavior, I think, to find points of concern there. I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with that person. But we’ve certainly talked about it, and considered some ramifications of that.”

Those ramifications are what has held the Adams brothers back from such a deal — namely, the pair believes that they were actually end up losing money in such a deal, rather than making more.

“If people saw that there was this other thing out there, we considered in the worst case scenario, then the contributions from people would just dry up, and we’d be sitting with this lump sum that would not have added up to 10 years’ salary or whatever. So do we want the stress of having to search for a new IP, or a new angle all of a sudden? We have some name recognition to be able to do that kind of thing perhaps, although it’s a very chancy thing.”

Of course, the flipside is that it’s not like Dwarf Fortress isn’t risky enough as it is — as Adams notes, “putting all your eggs in one basket like we have is a very chancy thing, right? I mean, it just takes a superior game to blow it all out of the water. There are no rules when it comes to copyright, or whatever.”

Orc Fortress

With Adams touching on the idea of another similar game taking Dwarf Fortress to town, I asked him why he thinks no one has managed to successfully clone the game yet. There have been plenty of notable games inspired by Dwarf Fortress, of course, but none that really copied both the depth and the visual style of the title.

Adams believes that one of the main reasons his game has held its own is that other developers who are keen to create a similar product realize very quickly just as much of an undertaking it will be.

“We can’t really know whether they were discouraged at the size of the undertaking, or whether it was never their intention to begin with,” he adds of projects like Town, Dwarves?, and Game of Dwarves.

“Things like Clockwork Empires coming up are more ambitious. It seems to be doing a bunch of stuff, that’ll be an interesting one to watch. But I’m just not sure if there’s a point to emulating Dwarf Fortress completely, because it’s not like we’re a big market. It’s not like people see our $50,000 a year and think ‘Hey, I want a piece of that pie.’ They’d much rather look towards things like Minecraft, where there are hundreds of millions of dollars.”

On the topic of Minecraft, Adams is hugely grateful whenever Markus Persson and co. says that the game is inspired by Dwarf Fortress — “that’s probably where half of our fans come from!” he laughs.

Going back to potential cloning, or perhaps even a Dwarf Fortress-like game that does the job better, Adams says it’s bound to happen sooner or later.

“We’re happy we’ve managed to stay afloat for so long,” he says. “I’m surprised that we haven’t had our wings clipped by somebody. It just hasn’t happened yet.”

Free-to-Survive

“I was reading on Gamasutra about ‘Is free-to-play ethical?’ and all that kind of thing, talking about monetization and Skinner Boxes,” Adams tells me. “We’re very fortunate that we’ve escaped from having those concerns, and managed to make a living somehow.”

Indeed, the way in which Dwarf Fortress is funded — a completely free game that survives via donations from players — is a far cry from the various business models that are carted around in the modern video game industry.

Adams reckons he knows exactly why his business model works for him, but wouldn’t work for many others.

“We’re not searching for a million-dollar hit, which is the feeling I get from other people — what they are searching for when they release on iPhone and so on,” he notes. “That’s not everybody, of course. But we don’t have to work that hard anymore, thinking about exactly how we’re going to monetize.”

“I’ve seen what people go through,” he continues. “Rocketcat Games (Punch Quest) lives out here, and we meet up with him sometimes. And it’s just a struggle, right? To decide how you wanna set up your free-to-play model. His was, what, too generous? So it didn’t work out. Those kind of decisions, we’ve been very fortunate to have enough wiggle-room to bobble the ball completely, which is what we’re doing.”

Those who have followed the Dwarf Fortress story will know that Adams sends out crayon drawings to people who donate money, and adds them to a “Champions’ List” — a rather different proposition to what game developers offer nowadays.

“I mean, that’s just completely weird, right?” he laughs. “But fortunately we don’t have high demands, we don’t need a lot of money, and we’re making just enough to tread water. $50,000 for two people a year.”

“I guess it’s like shareware,” he says of his own monetization technique. “We didn’t really take inspiration from anything. Someone said to us, ‘Why don’t you put up a PayPal button for your birthday so I can send you $50?’ And then over the next four or five months, we made around $300. I was still working then, and Dwarf Fortress wasn’t even out. Then we released the game, and started making $800, $1000 in the subsequent months. And we were like, ‘Maybe we actually have a shot.’ Now we’re averaging $4000 a month, baseline, which is crazy.”

With Dwarf Fortress making $50,000 a year from donations alone, I questioned what sort of spread of donations Adams received. I’d assumed (correctly, as it turned out) that it isn’t simply a bunch of people paying small amounts, but rather, Dwarf Fortress has its own “whales” — people paying silly, unnecessary amounts.

“There’s a subscriber system now, just because people asked for it,” he tells me. “There’s people who have given four-figure amounts. But these are not people who we necessarily haven’t talked to before — all of them send in their regards ahead of time, and they all know exactly what they’re getting, because they’ve all been playing the game for ages — years, in some cases — before they send anything. They’re not getting any sort of compensation for it besides some sort of story.”

“I guess there are lots of parallels to be drawn between the whale system,” he continues, “but there are people who give recurring money and large amounts. Some people have donated computers. Some people have donated their time — there’s a lot of volunteers handling the bug tracker and answering questions for people. There’s the guy who did the port for Mac and Linux — that was all free.”

Everyone just wants to see Dwarf Fortress development continue, he reasons, so if they like the game, it’s in their best interest to throw some money his way.

“I guess you could say the whale has an interest in receiving their present,” he adds. “It’s obviously a spectrum of giving — a spectrum of ethical behavior. I don’t know enough about what goes on in other markets to pass judgment offhand, but I know people talk about that.”

Hey Scenesters

While the Adams brothers are very clearly indie developers, it’s notable that the pair rarely converses with other indie devs, or gets involved with the “indie scene” at all.

“It’s not a deliberate thing,” Adams tells me. “It’s part of a personality thing, if anything. I didn’t have many friends growing up, and didn’t feel the need to hang out with anybody. So with Dwarf Fortress, I don’t really see the upside. I’ve never really been a Twitter/Facebook kind of guy. I mean, it’s fun to watch people talk to each other, but it’s never the sort of conversation I would participate in.”

That’s not to say that the brothers don’t ever participate. As previously mentioned, they’ve met up with Rocketcat Games and sampled a wide variety of mobile games that they wouldn’t ordinarily have tried. Plus, the pair went to the EVE Fanfest earlier this year in Iceland, with Adams as a speaker — “we accepted it because, you know, it was cool!”

But in general, Adams isn’t so keen on socializing with other devs. “Things like GDC to us, were not a place we were invited to go,” he says. “It was a place that you paid to go. And all the expos too. And networking never made sense to us, because of the nature of our situation.”

“It’s not like we’re going to look for a job if this doesn’t pan out — we’re not going to go and work for another studio or something,” he continues. “We’re just not interested in doing that. So there just hasn’t been a need for it, even though I’m sure we’d benefit from it a lot. We don’t feel like talking about the craft of game design or whatever. We kind of have a mature process, I guess, since we’ve been doing it for 13 years.”

Although Adams has a PhD in mathematics from Stanford University, and taught mathematics for a short while, he says that his lack of drive to socialize stunted his mathematics PhD work somewhat. As he points out, mathematics is a very social field, at times.

“As much as you imagine people in closets working out theorems in the dark or whatever, it’s all about co-authoring papers and not stepping on each other’s toes, and working together on things because it’s so complicated,” he says. “I’m just not a socially-constituted person, I guess.”

But despite his lack of social skills and his hiding himself away while he works on the game of his life, Adams is perfectly happy with where he is, and how the future is looking.

“I’m really satisfied with how things have turned out,” he explains. “Having spent 13 years, you can kind of talk about 20 years without seeming like a total prat [laughs]. But we fully recognize that when you’re talking about two decades in the future, who knows what the heck’s going to be going on, right? Anything could happen. We’ll be entering the age of health problems. Economic this and that.”

“But I feel more at ease,” he adds. It was something I never felt in mathematics when I was working on that stuff. I never reached a milestone like that. But who knows what’s going to happen next.”

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Japan’s master of horror on the evil within and the evil without.

By Simon Parkin Published Friday, 19 July 2013

Shinji Mikami sits down in a claustrophobic, makeshift room hidden at the very centre of the E3 video game conference floor in Los Angeles. It’s a fitting place for the designer, whose work has, one way or another, influenced the majority of the blockbuster video games that flash and growl at the crowds outside the door. These games all carry third or fourth generation strains of Resident Evil 4’s DNA. Arguably the designer’s greatest creation, its over-the-shoulder viewpoint was subsequently adopted by games as diverse as Gears of War and Batman: Arkham Asylum, while its aiming system, which snaps the camera inwards to focus on enemy targets with a squeeze of the controller’s trigger, is now an industry standard. Mikami’s inventions, much like the man in this room, sit at the centre of blockbuster video game development today.

After Capcom dissolved Clover Studio, Mikami set-up a private development studio called The Straight Story, named after the David Lynch film.

How does he feel, walking the show floor, catching familiar glimpses of his ideas reflected in other people’s games? “Maybe I influenced them, maybe I didn’t,” he says. “But I don’t really care about all that. I don’t think about my influence in the industry. I just make games that I’m interested in.” Mikami’s nonchalance and swagger is warmer in person than in transcript. He smiles wryly throughout our conversation and, while his answers are often short and pointed, the eyes shine beneath the off-white baseball cap, inviting engagement. At 47 he has worked in video games for close to half his life, having joined Capcom after he graduated from Doshisha University at 25 years old. But all this Los Angeles stuff with the lights, the screens, the action, was never his ambition.

“I didn’t play video games as a child,” he says. “I wanted to become a Formula One driver, not a game designer.” Mikami grew up in the Yamaguchi Prefecture in the Chūgoku region of Honshū island. “It’s most famous for the naval base stationed there”, he says, referencing the Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, which was bombed by American B-29’s the day before the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Mikami mentions Hiroshima twice in his recollections about growing up, but, perhaps out of sensitivity for the soil on which we meet, the translator neglects to translate what he says.

For Yamaguchi’s residents, the memory isn’t so easily glossed over. A number of Hiroshima’s nuclear victims were brought to the Iwakuni - just 45 minutes away from the damned city - after the bomb dropped, where they died at one of the local army hospitals. Every year residents remember Hiroshima Day. To this day they continue to line the streets with around half a million origami cranes each September to remember the atrocity and to act as a prayer for lasting peace. Mikami grew up amongst the echoes of history’s horrors.

Mikami is no fan of re-releases, once telling a Japanese video game magazine he would “commit hara-kiri” if Resident Evil 4 came out on yet another platform.

Horror played an important part in Mikami’s adolescent years in another sense as he became obsessed with movies such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Evil Dead. “It wasn’t just the high you feel from watching something frightening,” he explains. “For me, I would obsess over what I might have done differently had I been the protagonist in that situation. I always wanted to do different things. That’s why I wanted to make horror video games: to give myself the opportunity to play out my own choices in these extreme, scary situations.”

Throughout his teenage years Mikami spent his free time studying karate and kendo. The first video game he played was a wrestling title in the arcades, but his interest in the form was fleeting at most. He studied product and merchandise at university and it was only when he attended a meet-and-greet for promising graduates hosted by Capcom that he considered entering the video game industry.

“In Japan, college graduates are invited to corporate presentations and parties where the company pitches themselves to potential employees” he recalls. “Capcom’s presentation appealed to me more than any of the other ones I attended.” Initially, however, Mikami’s application to Capcom was rejected. “It’s mysterious,” he says. “During the screening process I was turned down. Then a week later, out of the blue, they called to say I was hired. I have no idea why that happened.”

Mikami began his career as a junior game designer and spent his first three months at Capcom working on a quiz game (Capcom Quiz: Hatena? no Daibōken) for the Game Boy. Subsequently, he worked on three licensed Disney titles and an unreleased Formula One game. One of these games, Aladdin, was a sizeable hit, selling in excess of 1.7 million copies and, as a result, his superiors approached him with an offer to direct a sequel to Sweet Home, a popular Famicom game based on a Japanese horror movie.

Tango Gameworks, Mikami’s current game studio, has been acquired by ZeniMax Media, the owner of Bethesda.

The resulting title, known as Biohazard in Japan, was a George A. Romero influenced zombie horror game in which you play as a member of a law enforcement task force trapped in a mansion overrun with mutated creatures. The game artfully combined 3D polygonal characters with pre-rendered backgrounds, a graphical decision that made character control cumbersome. This limitation only added to the game’s considerable tension. The technique of limiting the player’s abilities rather than accentuating them has become a hallmark of Mikami’s horror work. Indeed, when showing off a demonstration of his forthcoming title, The Evil Within, we see the protagonist sustain a serious leg injury that hinders his retreat from a pursuing butcher. The sense of encroaching panic while trying to manoeuvre the character around furniture to make an escape is potent, even as an onlooker.

Perhaps this is where other horror game directors go wrong. They make their protagonists formidable. “Used at the right time and in the right way disempowerment can be the most powerful tool for the horror game creator,” says Mikami. Is this the reason Mikami, who, apart from a light collaboration on 2011’s Shadows of the Damned hasn’t made a horror title since 2005’s Resident Evil 4, has chosen to return to the genre: because nobody else gets it? “Sequels are a big problem in horror entertainment,” he explains. “As a horror game series continues you begin to know who the enemies are going to be. Just this knowledge naturally makes the game less scary. So to capture a wider audience designers add more action. That further reduces how frightening the game feels.

“That’s one reason I’m making The Evil Within,” he says. “Also, because the graphical quality of games has increased. This has the capacity to make the fear much closer to you. We can add in a far greater amount of animation and make it context based, so, for example, we can change how a character moves in a certain situation.” He adds, with a laugh: “Really, I’m making this game just because it’s fun to scare people.” With The Evil Within, Mikami isn’t seeking to reinvent the genre he established and refined. “Instead of trying to introduce new ideas I want to return to survival horror’s roots,” he says. “We’ve strayed from that. I want to explore fear again, and that sense of overcoming fear, one that’s unique to games.”

The Evil Within emphasises stealth over shooting and, as Mikami proudly asserts “will not feature boring QTEs”.

Nobody can begrudge Mikami this return to his design roots. Horror remains a rich seam, largely unexplored in games, not least by Capcom’s own, faltering continuation of the Resident Evil series following Mikami’s departure from the company in 2007. But I wonder if he feels any frustration at the fact that so much corporate publisher money is spent on refinement rather than invention. The overwhelming focus is on improving a relatively small number of modes of play: the first and third person shooters, gun games.

“I am certainly disappointed that genres are so limited these days,” he says. “I want to see a broader spread of games. I love indie games. These younger people with lower budgets and bigger ideas; maybe they will define new genres?” Is this not possible in the blockbuster space then, I wonder? “Big budget games have to sell a great many copies,” he says, “which makes new ideas too risky. And sometimes the creator’s egos get in the way. I think small games, and personal creations: this is where we’ll find the new shoots for the future.”

With creative experiments such as God Hand and Vanquish to his name, Mikami cannot be accused of artistic conservatism. Indeed, a creative fidgeting marks his career, even when operating within the inescapable constraints of a sequel. No Japanese game designer can compete on this front. The Evil Within isn’t a small game but it is, arguably, a personal creation, a revisiting of the horrors, both fictional and historical, that have influenced his life. As our conversation ends, Mikami leans over the table to generously shake my hand, before opening the door to return to the E3 show floor. Few recognise the face under his cap’s faded brim, but the ambient, sub-bass rumble of his influence can be felt all around.

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Pacifique Irankunda

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Playing at Violence

On a fall afternoon a few years ago, inside my dorm room at Deerfield Academy, I started hearing gunshots. I had been warned that in America people hunt with guns. I comforted myself with this thought at first, but the sounds went on and on and grew increasingly familiar. It can’t be hunting, I thought. Why would anyone be hunting on the grounds of a Massachusetts prep school?

I threw my door open and rushed outside the building, but I couldn’t hear the sounds anymore. I saw students chatting and laughing as if everything was normal. Was I just dreaming? I went back inside the dorm. Walking down the hallway, I heard the sounds again. Oh, it must be a student watching a movie! I thought and returned to my room, closing the door. Idiot! I laughed at myself—where was I going to go anyway? I had just come to America, and I could hardly find my way around the campus. Even if the gunfire had been real, I would have had no idea where to run.

As I sat at my desk, the sounds brought back images from my home village in Burundi. This disturbed me. Finally, I covered my ears. From time to time, I would uncover them, hoping the movie had ended, but the sounds went on and on. A movie of gunshots and nothing else? I wondered. What type of movie is that?

As dinnertime approached, students started emerging from their rooms, and I joined them in the hallway. “Were you just watching a movie?” I asked one of my dorm mates.

“Oh, I’m sorry! Was it loud?” he said.

“No, no!” I said. “I just was curious to know what movie you were watching.”

“It wasn’t actually a movie,” he said. “I was playing video games.”

Huh, I thought. I did not ask for an explanation. At the time, I didn’t know what video games were, only that they made noises that sounded like gunfire.

There was a time when silence reigned all over my village. Rivers were loud, but their rhythmic sounds were part of the silence. People worked in their fields with hoes. There were no cars, no factories. I imagine that to Westerners that time and place would have resembled the Stone Age. Planes flew over the village, but never more than once a week. There was another season that broke this silence. It was the time of crops growing. From the early stage of the seeds’ sprouting, parents would send their kids into the fields to make noise and chase away the birds that ate the seedlings. This went on for a month, and after that the silence would come again. I enjoyed the quiet, but it did not last. Another season erupted and broke all the silence. It was the season of war. It came in the fall when I was four, and it lasted for more than a decade.

In this new season, just as in any other, some things died and others were born. Everything was transformed. When the militia attacked a village, it left behind the remains of the dead—people and animals—and the houses in ruin. People moved from their houses to live in the forests. New words appeared—ibinywamaraso (“the blood drinkers”) and ivyamfurambi (“deeds of the wrong first born”)—and new expressions: kamwe kamwe ku ruyeye ku rwembe (“one after another, gently on a razor”). This slogan and others like it said not to worry if you did not kill many people. The secret was to keep killing.

This new season made children my age wish they had been born blind and deaf so they couldn’t see their houses being burned and their mothers being raped before being killed, or hear the sounds of bombs or their parents screaming and crying. But at other times, you wished you had the eyes of a hawk and the ears of a deer, so that you could distinguish, in the dark, a black stump with branches from a man dressed in black pointing a gun, or a thin string tied to a mine from a long blade of grass lying across your path. These were times when you needed to know that the sound of raindrops falling on leaves wasn’t that of militiamen approaching on tiptoes. For a while you wished for something, and after another while you wished for the opposite. You learned to cover your eyes in the day; you learned to see in the dark.

In the hallway at Deerfield, the boy, whom I’ll call Luke, went on talking about video games, as we waited for our classmates to join us for dinner. Almost everything Luke said was so confusing that I asked him: “What do you mean by saying you killed so-and-so?”

“Well, my enemies. Paci, how often do you play video games?”

“Actually, what are they?”

The other students looked at each other and smiled.

“Come on, Paci!” Luke led me to his room. He took up a little device in his hands and turned on his computer. He pointed at the computer screen, at images of people with guns. “Once you press this button, they start moving and you hunt them, see?” Out of the computer’s speakers came the sound of shooting, the sound of war.

“You’ll have to play with us, Paci!”

I faced the computer but lowered my eyes. I didn’t want to offend him, but I didn’t want to watch what was happening on the screen. Instead, I watched his fingers moving, handling the device.

“What are you doing with this thing?” I asked, pointing  at the little device in his hands.

“I’m playing! That’s how you play!”

“So you’re actually doing the shooting?”

“Yeah! Here, you try it.”

“No, no. Thanks. Let’s go to dinner.”

In the seventh year of war in Burundi, I went to a public boarding school by the shore of Lake Tanganyika. At that school and many others, returning students hazed incoming ones. Although the rigor and form of hazing differed from one school to another, the objective of hazing was the same everywhere: to embarrass new students. Usually a group of returning boys and girls would gather in a circle around a new student, ordering him or her to tell vulgar jokes. This worked best with girls, who would often start crying halfway through a joke and be doubly embarrassed. Some new boys enjoyed telling dirty jokes, but all boys were embarrassed if they were made to cry in public, and if you were a boy, no matter how tough you were, you were unlikely to leave the center of the circle without wiping your eyes. Every word—every gesture—was treated as an insult by the hazers, and the penalty was for one of them to rap his knuckles on your head. If you were a girl, you often had to do more than tell a dirty joke. You might also be commanded by one of the boys, “Date me until I fall in love with you!” The hazers would tell you to caress the boy who had said those words. And then that boy would scream and call out, “She is harrassing me! Please stop! Stop! Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” Other times the boy would make noises as if he were having sex and say things like, “What a whore!”

A person was assigned especially to haze me. His name was Chrysostom. Most of the hazers wanted to inflict only psychological pain. Chrysostom was different. If, for example, you saw a new girl cradling her breasts in pain, you knew that she had been hazed by Chrysostom.

I met him on my first day at that school. He came up to me and yelled, “Kinyuzu!” The name designated a new student who, according to the rules of hazing, did not deserve a proper name.

I did not reply.

“Why don’t you open your mouth and say, ‘Yes!’ ”

I kept quiet.

Chrysostom looked puzzled, as if I had done something not only incomprehensible but absolutely stupid. He then laughed ironically and called me by my proper name. “All right, Pacifique.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you surprised I know your name?” he asked.

“Well, yes, because we just met,” I replied.

“Do you know my name?”

“No,” I said.

“Because mine is too unimportant to know, but yours … You’re a big shot, huh?”

Chrysostom was short but strong. He had a thick, muscular neck, and when he laughed, the muscles around his neck would get bigger and bigger as if air were being pumped into them. He was the boy who could get away with offending anyone, no matter how strong the other person was. Students would tell you: “Unless you intend to kill him, you should not try to fight Chrysostom.” Whether you started the fight or he started it, it was for you to end it. You had to accept humiliation and ask for mercy. Otherwise the fight would never end. He would never quit.

From the moment we met until the end of the year, Chrysostom never let a day go by without spending some time with me. He made me his closest friend, in his special way of companionship. He always wanted me to tell him jokes, but he also made sure I did not go to sleep without being beaten up. Unlike others who often were not interested in jokes but only in inflicting humiliation, Chrysostom would listen to my jokes and would laugh when they amused him. If someone else had beaten me up, he did not need to beat me again. I only needed to go see him and tell him I had already been beaten, and then tell him jokes.

There was a particularly vulgar joke that hazers found funny, so new students told it often. The joke went like this: two children are playing outside their house on a sunny afternoon. It is a hot day, and their parents are napping—windows wide open. All of a sudden, funny noises come out of their parents’ room; they are making love. One child runs over, looks through the window, and calls to his sister: “Mom and Dad are fighting!” The other child joins the first at the window. After a while, the children begin to cry. As they cry, the sister watches Mommy grabbing Daddy’s shoulder, and then she shouts, “Go, Mummy, go!” The brother grabs his sister, and a real fight begins—the kids are taking sides. After the parents have “come to peace,” they hear their children fighting outside. They rush out and separate them and angrily question them, and the kids reply, “But you were also fighting!” This was the punch line.

When I told this idiotic joke to Chrysostom, he didn’t laugh. After a moment of awkwardness, he asked me, “Were the kids seriously fighting?”

“The story goes that they fought to their bleeding,” I said. Then he broke into laughter. If there was anything related to violence in a joke, Chrysostom always wanted to hear more about it.

Another interesting thing about Chrysostom was that he wanted to tell me stories, too. He told me he lived in Bujumbura Rural, a province where a group of militia called the FNL (Forces nationales de liberation) camped. He would tell me how he enjoyed watching the FNL combatants—whom he called friends—fighting with government soldiers. Though he never said that he himself killed or had fought for the FNL, in his stories he sometimes used “we.” He would imitate the sounds of different guns and would keep doing it for such a long time that his voice would get hoarse. He repeated one story often. He never seemed to remember that I had already heard it. He laughed while telling it as if it were new every time.

“Back home, my friends, the FNL,” he would start. “You know the FNL, right?”

I would nod.

“When we catch people … oh it is so funny … the soldiers … those for the government … oh dear! Ntakintu kiryoshe nkico, wohora uraraba! Nothing else on earth could be more amusing! You know how a cat, when he catches a mouse, you know how he can play with the mouse knowing that the mouse won’t go anywhere? It is just like that. Oh, boy!” Then he would laugh and laugh. The muscles around his neck would swell. When he stopped laughing, he would go on: “We ask them questions, you know, and when they hesitate … You know, in the eyes!” He would stretch out his arm and point his long fingernails at my eyes. “And then after …” He would interrupt himself with laughter again. “The FNL would never waste their bullets, you know, they would use a rope, you know, even a shoelace, and put it around their neck, and …” Saying this, he would grab my neck and squeeze it. “And … strangle the idiots!” Then, as if hit by an electric shock, he would release my neck and fall backward onto his bed, and laugh so hard that tears came from his eyes. “I miss home! I very much look forward to vacation.”

I could see he was absorbed by his story, as if he were right back there strangling someone. He did not realize that I was shivering the whole time.

“What do you do on vacation?” he would ask me. For me, going on vacation did not mean going to my family’s house, but rather joining my mother and brother in the forest, where we hid from Chrysostom’s friends, the militiamen he always told me about. I could not tell him this, of course. I would change the subject.

I tried to please Chrysostom, hoping he would stop abusing me, but he was not aware of what I felt. I would take him to a restaurant, buy him soda and cookies, but it was like caressing a stone. He would often put his arm around my shoulders, and we would walk around while I told him jokes. He would listen very carefully and would laugh and even give me a high five. Students who saw us walking side by side thought we were the best of friends. In fact, Chrysostom himself seemed to think I was his best friend. When he learned I was going to another school for my remaining years of high school, he told me: “I will miss you! You are very sweet. I do not feel I will have someone else to spend time with and have fun.” And I could see in his face that he actually meant it.

It was an interesting friendship, but I am glad that it ended.

That evening at Deerfield, on the way back from dinner, Luke asked me to go play war video games with him. “No,” I said. “I have a lot of work to do.” I did have work to do. But I had other reasons for staying away. I thought that the boys who played the video games probably took drugs, that they were gangsters who pretended to be innocent.

One evening, I was having trouble with my computer, and I went to Luke’s room to ask him for help. I found him in the midst of shooting imaginary people. After he fixed my computer, he asked me if I wanted to watch him play for a little bit. I said I did not and tried to explain: “You know, I’ve seen the real thing. So I’m not really interested. I’m sorry.”

“Wait, you … How?” He stopped playing.

“There was a war back in my country,” I told him. “I was little when it started, and I grew up in it. So I saw a lot of that.”

“Wow!” he said. He asked me to tell him more. There was excitement in his face, which surprised me, and frightened me a little. When I first came to school in America, I assumed that I would never talk about the war in Burundi. Doing so might refresh my bad memories. And wouldn’t the other students think that I was violent myself? Besides, who would want to hear about such horrible things?

He wanted me to tell him about the war. I said I would tell him some other day, knowing that day would never come. It would have been like telling jokes to Chrysostom. Was this boy like Chrysostom? Was he addicted to violence, too? “And thanks so much for fixing my computer,” I said and quietly left his room.

Over the next few months, I realized I was wrong about Luke. He and my other dorm mates who liked playing violent video games weren’t gangsters at all. They were just young, inexperienced, innocent. It took me some time to realize that the shooting wasn’t real to them. They were just playing. For them the games were “mindless,” as one friend told me. Many kids at the school played the same kinds of games. So there was nothing unusual about Luke. He was just doing what many American kids did. I felt relieved, but I was also puzzled by what seemed to me like an odd sort of entertainment. How could violence so easily be turned into a game? How could companies invent such games in the first place? And how could parents buy them for their children?

I lived through 13 years of civil war. I know that violence can become almost a culture in itself, and that it twists not all but many of the people who are trapped in it. Of course, not all the children who grew up in the war became violent. How you responded to your own resentments, whether you seethed with thoughts of revenge, how your parents, neighbors, and friends responded to the bloodshed—all of these things helped determine your own taste for violence. I was lucky. Many others were not. Maybe Chrysostom was a particularly sadistic case. I don’t really know. Maybe he would have been a bad guy wherever he grew up. But he was not born violent, and certainly the war helped shape him. I don’t know what happened to him as a child, but I imagine that since he himself grew up in that season of war in Burundi, he probably underwent a transformation and adapted the way a plant adapts. Violence in my country and in neighboring Rwanda and Congo had a similar effect on soldiers and militiamen, and especially on children drafted into armies or rebel militias. I remember how Nyandwi, a schoolmate and a neighbor who had joined one of the militias, hunted my family. When we escaped from him, he killed his own sister, apparently out of nothing more than frustration. I recall how Nyandwi, when he was no longer a militiaman, would proudly tell stories of how he killed 30 children with machetes in a single night. It was how his militia colleagues had initiated him, he explained.

I remember how Gilbert, a neighbor and Nyandwi’s friend, enjoyed telling similar stories of when he was in the militia. How every one of his reactions, when he was back in the village, was violent and how he always laughed after he had done something violent. How he would heat a nail and stab the feet of his sisters to find out the truth if he suspected they had told him lies. To many young people, violence became easy and fun. It became one of their hobbies, as it seemed to have become Chrysostom’s hobby. It is hard to allow yourself to imagine that you could become one of those young people, but you have to admit that you could, when you remind yourself that the children who are twisted by war were once lovely three-year-olds who smiled and charmed with their innocence.

I think back to the season of war and remember how we fled deep into the jungle, far from any people. That was how we managed to survive, by hiding, by turning our backs on the rest of humanity. Those parents who sent their children into the jungle to protect them from the bloodshed—they would have envied the peace that Luke and others like him took for granted. Most of all, they would have envied the fact that these lucky children did not know the true devastation of war. That they only played at violence.

Pacifique Irankunda , who moved to the United States from Burundi, graduated from Deerfield Academy and, recently, from Williams College, where he double-majored in political science and psychology.

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EarthBound: So what's the big deal?

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EarthBound: So what’s the big deal?

3:30 PM on 07.20.2013
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Why people care about Mother 2

[Image by Anonymous]

EarthBound was re-released on the Wii U Virtual Consoles this week, with off-TV play and online access to the packed-in strategy guide from the game’s original 1995 release on the SNES. Many fans of the game were overjoyed, while many more took one look and said “You want me to pay $10 for this?!?” They may have grown to love Ness from his appearances in Smash Bros., heard about the game’s influence on the creators of South Park, seen the amazing merch from Fangamer, or read one of the many brilliant essays on the subject, but when confronted with the actual opportunity to buy the game, they were left cold.

The sad fact is, EarthBound isn’t any more marketable today than when it initially failed to meet sales expectations back in the ’90s. Though Nintendo was wise enough to avoid telling the world that the game “stinks” and is “garbage” this time around, the underlying barriers between EarthBound and the mass market remain the same. It’s very hard to see from a distance what makes the game so great.

Here’s my best attempt to give you an up close look at why this game means so much to so many.

The granddaddy of modern surrealist adventure games

The first time I played Pokemon, I thought “Cool. This is like the new EarthBound.” The similarities were everywhere, from obvious traits like the striking resemblances between the player characters, to “boy sets out his own in a big adult world for a vaguely aimless adventure” theme, to the sense of humor, art direction battle system, and even the bicycle.

The same thing happened when I first played Animal Crossing, and Majora’s Mask, and Chibi Robo, and Snowpack Park. Almost every “quirky” Nintendo game released after 1995 seems to have some tonal or thematic link to EarthBound. It seemed to play a major role in forming the company’s narrative identity.

The game’s presumed influence doesn’t stop at Nintendo franchises. Persona feels a lot like EarthBound with skinny teenagers. Others have drawn parallels between EarthBound and No More Heroes, Retro City Rampage, Homestuck, and even the more ridiculous parts of Grand Theft Auto. The validity of those comparisons are subjective, but there is no questioning how much more EarthBound stood out from the crowd in the ’90s than it does now. Fifteen years ago, nearly every videogame was a work up of some manga, Tolkien, or Western sci-fi/fantasty convention, and they almost never tried to be funny.

EarthBound sends the message that the real world was just as compelling and extraordinary as any fictional world you could dream up, and it sent that message with a decidedly irreverent comedic bent. It was a wildly risky departure from convention, one that paved the way for many of the franchises that we take for granted today.

Being a child doesn’t have to be childish

One of the main things EarthBound has going against it in terms or marketability is its mismatch between target audience and its surface-level appeal. Its a simple-looking game about children, which implies that it’s a simple game for children. Like many of Nintendo’s best properties, there is plenty for kids to enjoy in EarthBound, but it’s not a “kids game.”

EarthBound is an reflection upon childhood from an adult’s perspective. The game has been compared many times to Catcher in the Rye and work of Maurice Sendak, and for good reason. In EarthBound, the children are the genuine, selfless heroes, and the adults are the ridiculous, misguided, hubris-laiden fools, caught up in classism, selfish ambition, and immaterial goods like “money” and “power” (but more on that later).

It’s all made more pointed by the fact that it’s coming from a child’s vantage point. While it’s easier to see a child’s place as initially disempowered and unattractive, their starting point of weakness only extenuates their displays of strengths. When Robin takes on a room full of gun-toting criminals, it means more than when a full grown man dressed as a bat, armed with years of training and millions in body armor does the same. The same could be said for all the children of EarthBound achieve (even that little jerk Pokey).

A masterpiece of rebellious craftsmanship

EarthBound does not look impressive, but the game’s unified melding of music, writing, and visual design are masterful. The tone of sweetly strange obliviousness to convention is retained in every aspect of the game. The graphics often look like discarded doodles from a technically accomplished artist’s sketchbook, which matches perfect with the reams of NPC dialogue that lacks even a hint of self awareness or self consciousness. The music similarly defies conventional characterization, coming across like the sonic sketches from a composer who is skilled to the point where even their most effortlessly constructed melodies are endlessly infectious.

Beneath all that is a turn based RPG that works to correct many of the genre’s flaws. Unlike in Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, or many other RPGs of the time, enemies appear outside of the battle scene, allowing the player to try to avoid them, or even surprise them before battle. Even better, when you enter combat with an enemy that’s far below your experience level, the combat ends instantaneously, netting you the XP and potential item rewards with none of the potentiality tedious combat.

EarthBound focuses on minutia, but never feels trivial. Everything in the game, from the dialogue of the most inconsequential NPC to the overworld sprites of the tiniest attack slug feels intensely cared about while defying the status quo at every turn.

A candy shell concealing a deep well of humanity

EarthBound was originally released before the ESRB was in full effect. In 1995, it was rated KA (Kids to Adults). In 2013, it was rated T for teen. My guess is that upon initial review, the game was only scanned for nudity, blood, and swears, providing it with a “kid appropriate” stamp of approval. Somewhere along the line, the ESRB must have noticed all the stuff about America, politicians, post-traumatic stress, corporations, depression, capitalism, homosexuality, religious cults, and xenophobia. While I don’t agree with assessment that EarthBound is in any way inappropriate for children, I could see why some of this stuff could be seen as a little strong for some kids to process.

It’s hard to get into the better details without spoiling them, but I really want to. I really want to let you know that the last hour of EarthBound has had me thinking for years about my relationship with videogames, victims of child abuse, the meaning of evil, of heroism, of religion, and life in general.

I get why some people are angry that EarthBound is being sold for $10. It feels to them like Nintendo is selling them something that they could provide to the consumer for much less without suffering any financial burden. That said, I’m glad EarthBound costs what it does. I may be even happier if it cost more. This game has value. There should be no ambiguity about that. If you have any interested in poetic, experimental, heartfelt, satirical, or culture-critical games, then you will appreciate EarthBound. It does what it aims to do in a flawless manner. If that’s not worth $10 (or more) then nothing is.

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Animal Crossing: New Leaf Review (3DS) :: Games :: Reviews :: Paste

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It’s 3:30 AM. My “villager,” a bobble-headed avatar with the face of a Tarutaru, is sitting on a sofa in a model home, her legs swinging, an idle loop. Near her, a television is tuned to static. In my real life I’m ignoring the Nintendo 3DS, which I’ve left open and running on the kitchen counter.

At 3:32 AM—a full minute early, by my estimation—a UFO crosses the television screen. The animation quick-cuts to a space alien’s silhouette. I hold the 3DS closer to my ear: the alien really is speaking, and its voice is kind of spooky. Then, static. As suddenly as the alien broadcast had begun, it’s stopped again.

I smirk at this, then open the model home’s shopping catalogue. I order a television set of my own. It’ll probably show up sometime tomorrow; I think I’ll put it in my basement.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf is the first full game I’ve downloaded to my 3DS. Someone told me it was a good game to not-own-on-cartridge, since I’d want to dedicate only a few minutes each day to playing. That friend was a liar: I haven’t played anything else on my 3DS since I downloaded this software.

I always swore I’d never play an Animal Crossing game, probably half out of disgust—were a game’s screenshots ever more gooily twee?—and half out of conviction. I know I’ve been addicted in the past: to a browser game called Glitch, for one, and to a Facebook game called Mafia Wars, for a much more humiliating other one.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf isn’t quite a simulation; rather, it’s part of a genre I’ve always called “cultivation.” It’s a game about gardening, really, where “gardening” is an apt metonym for New Leaf‘s low-key economy of reaping exactly what you sow. But it’s also a social game—not in the nasty way we usually mean “social,” but in the way its reward system sinks its hooks.

What is the point of this game? Who are you? What do you do in it? I’ve been playing for weeks, and I still can’t tell you. You’re a town mayor, right, and you have this house, which can get bigger if you spend enough money on it. And you have NPCs for neighbors. And fruit trees. And flowers! And fish, and bugs crawling around everywhere making noisy bug sounds. And there’s an island! And if you play enough, you can go to strangers’ islands, and they can come to yours! But only if you want to do that, because you don’t have to do anything.

It’s tough to pinpoint New Leaf’s appeal. From the outside, the New Leaf phenomenon must be terrifying. It seemingly breaks grown men, turning them into idiots who commiserate over pieces of furniture and turnip prices.

“I have never felt so betrayed,” I typed to a friend last week. “I can’t believe it. Ricky threatened to move away.”

Ricky is an NPC. Furthermore, he is a squirrel.

I guess I can’t really blame Ricky—not because he isn’t a real person, but because, uh, he’s cantankerous, so he has trouble getting along with other townsfolk sometimes. I feel bad for him, you know?

I was terrified to even start playing. From the get-go I had no idea what I was doing, which is horrifying, as I’d already begun my reign as mayor. There are no tutorials here; you are left to wing it. Other villagers are happy to help you find your way, of course: chief among these is your assistant Isabelle, a blonde canine who is in turns instructive and conciliatory. She speaks to you in a chirpy sort of Simlish.

But Isabelle’s guidance was eventually not enough for me, so I took to the Internet with my questions. I heard from friends and strangers alike: I should plant red rosebushes close together if I want to grow black ones; to reel in a shark, I must close my eyes and listen harder for audio cues; if I find myself tripping a lot, I have been temporarily cursed with bad luck. My flowers are shimmering because someone recently watered them for me.

Soon a real-life friend is teasing me for what he feels is my wholly inappropriate crush on Cranston, a stork. Another friend marvels to me how adorable my villager Bluebear is. (“Thank you for noticing,” I agree, much too pleased.) Another friend instant-messages to let me know that Kyle, my rock star wolf-man who has a way with the ladies, is the love of her life. “I’m writing him a love letter right now,” she tells me.

I start leaving my town’s gates open while I work at home on my laptop, hurrying across the room toward the 3DS anytime I hear the little reveille announcing a visitor’s arrival. We keep having these protracted conversations in-game: I’ll hunch myself over the machine, jabbing at its onscreen keyboard with a stylus, slow and deliberate.

By evening my town will shutter, so I look for other open towns. At 2:00 AM I find a friend in England, where it is 10 AM; I take the train to visit his town, where it is also 10 AM. One late night I’ll host three men in my villager’s house. Two of these men live in different parts of Australia, while the third is in Malaysia.

My real-life friends trade me furniture, send letters, leave dryly funny notes on my town bulletin board. A friend puts his clothing designs on display in one of my shops; another visitor remarks how amazing these are. One morning, when I am packing my 3DS into my purse—not to play it, but to get streetpasses from other Animal Crossing players while I run errands—I realize I am staying in a very real neighborhood dotted with strangers, each with her own spectacular inner life. It’s stunning.

A colleague recently asked me whether he should bother with New Leaf. “I don’t know,” he admitted, “I played the others. But they all felt so lonely.”

I was astonished. “I don’t know what you played before,” I told him, “but there is not a more social game.”

What gets me is how immediately alive Animal Crossing: New Leaf is. It isn’t just that NPCs will approach to tell you they talked to one of your real-life friends and add “she’s such a fashionista!” and you think to yourself, yeah, she really is. It isn’t that the writing is good—and it’s beyond good, it’s ebullient and snappy and very, very funny—or that townspeople never seem to say something out of character. It isn’t that you can yell into your 3DS to call for a villager’s attention, and she will reply, “Follow my voice!”

It’s the way, if you build your house close to the ocean, you can always hear the tides pull in and out. There’s the sound of mud squishing after rain. Everything is clangy or clacky or crunchy. A colleague recently wrote at length about New Leaf and the sound of its cicadas.

And the lighting…! Sunbeams flood through windows or dapple apple groves. Sometimes the landscape is illuminated by a bright moon. My friend Daphny David pointed out to me that, for as much as mainstream game developers try to get light sources down pat, only New Leaf does it right. Her purple-shaded lamp, for example, casts a purple glow. I agreed: “I’m a fan of ambient lighting,” I told her, “and just as in real life, I always turn my overhead lamp off.”

There are so many fine details, too, like if you cast a fishing line too short, there’s a little half-second flicker of disappointment on your villager’s face.

What’s more, this is the only game I will crank the machine’s 3D effect for. Butterflies flutter into the foreground, while grass literally rolls underfoot. When rain falls, individual droplets splash here and there, and the 3D effect isn’t a distraction at all; it’s perfection.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf has its share of problems. The simple morality of the game is galling: get too greedy and you might be stung by bees, punished with very mild, temporary disfigurement. Run too fast through its pastoral greenery and your grass will die off, leaving sandy dunes behind.

Other issues are slight but significant. The most glaring problem is—and this is true of the entire franchise—your villager is invariably pale. It suggests an ethnocentrism I’m not even barely equipped to discuss, but it persists anyway. And for all the gains the series has made regarding gender identity, my villager Muffy has twice remarked on my character’s decision to wear a mustache, always in gendered terms.

Meanwhile other characters, like the aforementioned ladykiller Kyle, are actually programmed to respond differently to the opposite sex. Kyle, why can’t we just be friends?

It’s all very difficult to reconcile. “When I acknowledge the game’s problems,” I told a friend, “it’s like, I also love the game so much, my complaints feel like lies.”

Still, what Animal Crossing: New Leaf doesn’t get quite right, it does get better. The sum franchise, I am told, has been tweaked and refined, and New Leaf is the organic result.

For a game that glorifies life’s simplest pleasures, New Leaf is ambitiously, dreadfully massive. Your village is so changeable, thanks to “town ordinances” and “public works” projects, that possibilities can overwhelm. (The game guards against this, of course: You may only pursue one project at a time.) There are 313 characters who might move in and out of your village, while the maximum population of any given town is just ten. Because of QR codes, your villager’s wardrobe is restricted only by the vastness of the Internet. The comforting repetition of the town’s day-to-day is staggered by moments of authentic surprise.

What I’m saying is, there is no way to really stop playing this game. It never ends. It’s a trap. The experience is always evolving, always becoming impossibly more perfect. It’s your own private island paradise, and you can share what you like with whomever you want.

If this sounds insidiously evil, that’s because it is. New Leaf is as wicked a game as there ever was, the way it endears itself, slowly ingratiates itself to you, and then manages to infiltrate your waking hours (and your sleeping hours, too, if you leave your 3DS on).

Here is one small relief: If you choose to play the game a little different, it probably won’t eat you alive. You can, in fact, stop in once a day, check your mailbox, pluck some weeds from the ground, contentedly live in your single small room. You don’t have to visit friends or check on your neighbors. You don’t have to fall hopelessly in love with the tireless Isabelle. Maybe mysteries and wonder won’t unfold for you the way they did for me; if you’re pressed for time, maybe that’s better. Maybe you’re less compulsive. Maybe you’re the better man.

If you can stop yourself playing for a day or two, the magic will instantly disappear. “I don’t want to work on the island today,” you might remind yourself. “I feel lazy. And there’s nothing else to do right now.” If you can tell yourself this, you’re free.

But if you flip open your 3DS’s lid one morning and discover Isabelle announcing a new town activity, I can’t say what will happen to you next. If you stay in town for just a minute too long, only to discover a new animal wandering around—a camel carrying rugs, a human-sized seagull on the beach—New Leaf could catch your heart all over again, as if it were your very first day playing.

The nicest thing about Animal Crossing: New Leaf is—depending on your real-life schedule, your emotional wherewithal, your ego’s appetite—the game conforms. It will read you like a fortune-teller and uncannily predict your needs and desires. The game, for you, might score a 2 or a 10. Because, see, the thing about paradise is, it’s whatever you want it to be.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf was developed and published by Nintendo. It is available for the 3DS.

Jenn Frank has written for Unwinnable, 1UP, Motherboard, Wired Gamelife, and Gameranx. She blogs about video games at Infinite Lives.

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A trip inside the mind of Journey's BAFTA-winning composer, Austin Wintory - Features

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A trip inside the mind of Journey’s BAFTA-winning composer, Austin Wintory

A trip inside the mind of Journey’s BAFTA-winning composer, Austin Wintory

Edge Staff at 02:57pm July 22 2013

As Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “Without music, life would be a mistake.” But Journey, one of gaming’s most potent reflections on mortality, had music long before it had life. “The piece of music that plays when you’re on the XrossMediaBar before you launch the game – which is also the first track on the soundtrack, called Nascence – I wrote in early 2009, four years ago, the day [thatgamecompany] told me about the game,” explains composer Austin Wintory. “Before Sony had technically greenlit it, and before even there was a prototype or any concept art.”

On that day four years ago, creative director Jenova Chen called his old friend, the man who had collaborated with him as a student on Flow, into the company’s Santa Monica studios. There he delivered not a technical but an emotional brief for the new game – the vaguest outline of a lone traveller in the desert and the feelings he wanted players to take away. Not everyone could interpret so loose a commission into a defining piece of art, but that’s exactly what Wintory did. “So I walked to my car to drive back to my studio, and in a very unusual, and I guess very lucky, turn of events, the music just hit me like a flash. And so I left myself a voicemail kind of singing it, and walking through how I would arrange it. You know, start with a solo cello, then bring in a harp, and go to bass flute, and all this. And I had it all just suddenly in my head, so I drove back to my studio and I called my cellist, Tina Guo, and my flute player, Amy Tatum, and they met me at the studio about an hour later and we recorded Nascence. And that recording is what’s on the soundtrack. I never re-recorded it, and it ended up being the basis of everything.”

It was an exceptional moment, but a rare one – nothing else would come as easily. “The rest of the game was the opposite, very reiterative. [I was] constantly beating myself up and pushing it as far as I could possibly push it, never feeling like the music was going to be good enough.”

Wintory tells us that the joke at thatgamecompany is that he would still be working on the score today if he could, refining it endlessly. But while in some mouths this would reek of false modesty, the truth is that Wintory is too engaged in his own work to be an accurate judge of it. Others can see what he cannot, his score netting gaming’s first soundtrack Grammy nomination, BAFTA Awards for Best Music and Best Audio, and a Game Developers Choice Audio gong, to list but a fraction of its acclaim.

Such recognition highlights Wintory’s singular talent for conceptualising and exploring a world through a musical lens. When asked where that initial flash of inspiration took him, he describes a process of musical inception. “Rather than drawing on an experience of having visited the Mojave Desert or something, it’s more like I’m creating a fantasy in my head and then just going there musically, and working on it until it feels like an authentic experience. And then it becomes a fascinating phenomenon where you feel like you’ve gone somewhere, you’ve actually done something, because you took yourself in a very real way emotionally there. It’s like Total Recall. If you implant a memory that never happened, but you have that memory, it’s like it feels like it happened, so in a way it did.”

Emotional, interpersonal connections are the defining theme of Wintory’s career – which encompasses composing for games, films and The Boulder Symphony – affecting his work more than the inspiration of places or things. “I actually went to Jordan and walked through Petra while working on Journey, but I wouldn’t say that influenced the compositional process at all. But visiting an old childhood friend who I hadn’t seen in 20 years likely did. Things that have an emotional overlap are far more important than things that have superficial, physical overlap.”

And this philosophy bleeds through into the projects Wintory takes. A flick through the games portion of his CV shows numerous indie and small-studio titles – The Banner Saga, Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine, Flow, Leisure Suit Larry In The Land Of The Lounge Lizards – but no big-budget projects. It’s not because large studios haven’t called; rather, they haven’t been able to offer the creative left turns and personal collaborations that Wintory, a restless creative, craves. “If I felt like I was doing the same thing every day… Some people regard it as getting into a groove, but for me it feels more like being stuck in a rut.”

Seeking fresh challenges is how Wintory ended up working with Monaco creator Andy Schatz. The game designer wasn’t looking for a composer, just for a little licensable music with a ragtime vibe. A mutual friend put the pair in touch, and Wintory leapt at the chance to provide a score, despite being mid-swing with Journey. “I emailed him back and said, ‘You know, I probably have a thing or two that I randomly wrote in passing 100 years ago, but why aren’t we talking about writing a real score that’s just like that?’ And he was kind of like, ‘Can you do that? Do people do that?’ And I was like, ‘Hell yeah, are you kidding?’”

What seemed like a simple project quickly grew elaborate, since Schatz wasn’t working with a music engine and every audio cue had to be hard coded into the game. The pair put a lot of work in to make it feel like there’s a pianist in the room reacting directly to how you play. Look closely and you’ll even see Wintory embodied in Monaco twice: once in The Gentleman’s mansion, and again in a prison cell in the end credits, sitting behind his piano both times.

Which brings the composer full circle, because behind a piano is where Wintory found his life’s defining ambition when he was ten years old. “On a total, sudden whim I started piano lessons, and my piano teacher said, ‘What do you want to learn?’ And I said, ‘I don’t really know, because I don’t really know what’s out there…’ On our second piano lesson, he said, ‘I’m going to bring you my favourite music,’ and he showed up with some LP of Jerry Goldsmith’s scores for Patton, A Patch Of Blue and Papillon. And when I heard those scores, I couldn’t believe that people wrote music like that… So I just instantly was like, ‘Oh my God. I don’t know anything about being a composer, I’ve barely had one piano lesson, but I have to do that.’”

Wintory’s own career journey since has earned him high praise, but he wants gaming’s legacy to far outstrip his own. “My hope is that you look back 100 years from now and you say, ‘Look at what they did on Journey. How adorable! What we’re doing now makes that look like such a joke.’”

Tags: Austin Wintory, Journey

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Lost Garden: A single game as a lifelong hobby

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Do you finish one game and then move onto the next? This is the dominant pattern of play for gamers. What happens when players stop consuming and starts investing in a single evergreen computer game for years on end?

Players of traditional games specialize
Across the 5500+ year history of gaming and sports, players typically focus on a single game and turn it into their predominant hobby. A chess player may dabble in other games, but chess is their touchstone. They join chess clubs, they play with fellow chess fans and they spend 90% of their gaming time playing chess. Overall, players specialize.
Such players do play other games, but to a far lesser degree.

There are also communities that embrace the identity of being good at multiple games or sports. These are a minority.

And some are inclined to claim all hobbyists are ‘athletes’ or ‘players’ and thus unified in some common tribe. Such verbal gymnastics rarely provide much insight into a dedicated hobbyist’s specific passions or the nature of their community.

Specializing in a hobby occurs for many reasons. Traditional sports or games often have the following attributes:

- Evergreen activities: You don’t beat them. You stop when you get bored. Usually they consist of nested loops that operate on time scales of up to a generation. Consider the nesting of Match : Event : Season : Career : Training the next generation.

- High mastery ceiling: Most are nearly impossible to master completely. You can always get a little better. You can always get better at Go, Soccer or Poker.

- Strong communities: There exist strong social groups of like-minded players that have their own group norms, hierarchies and support structures. To be a dedicated basketball player is to be part of an extensive basketball playing network.

- Life long identities: Someone who excels in the game starts to identify as a member of that group. The game becomes source of purpose bigger than themselves. They can look back on their life and say “There were some ups and downs, but I’m secure in my accomplishments as a player of game X”

- Grass roots or service-based business models: Any cultural structure can be fruitfully analyzed by understanding the flow of money. Many traditional games have extremely low barriers to entry. It costs little to access the initial equipment. Often items like decks of cards or chessboards are either communally owned or purchased by a family and one set of equipment serves multiple participants.
At higher levels of play, cash flows into the ecosystem through purchases of more advanced or higher status equipment or various service, membership or event fees. In all cases, the businesses involved have strong financial and culture incentives to get you playing and keep you playing.

Players of digital games consume
The hobby of computer or console gaming follows a different usage pattern; gamers play a wide variety of games. NPD claims core gamers buy an average of 5.4 games in a 3-month period. In a recent discussion of Steam purchases on Kotaku, commentators chimed in that they had purchased 100 to 800 games. These are played for a period of time and then set aside so that a new game might get some play.
These players specialize far less. They may prefer a genre of games such as RPGs or shooters, but they’ll still consume many games within that genre.

Why the difference in playing patterns? Commercial digital games have some distinct attributes that encourage serial play instead of evergreen play. Not all digital games fit this mold, but the trends are worth noting.

- Complete-able games: Most computer and console games can be completed in 5 to 40 hours. It is rare that you find digital games that retain users longer than 6 months. Actual playtime is shorter than the official length since most players do not complete their games and even fewer play through a title more than once. Compare this to the generational nested loops of traditional evergreen games.

- Narrative and Puzzle-focused gameplay: The majority of the gameplay is focused on high burnout single use puzzles or evocative narrative stimuli. Designers spend their budget handcrafting specific scenarios for maximum emotional impact the first time through.

- Low mastery ceilings: Since the design goal is to move players through the content of a game as smoothly as possible, the game mechanics are generally balanced towards the average skills of first time players. It is rare and surprising when a single player narrative computer game offers examples of masterful play. All this leads to early burnout where players rapidly become ‘bored’ and put the title aside.

- Weak player identities: It is difficult for a player to establish their identity around their excellence in any one game. To be a good Braid player just isn’t that special. Lots of other people have walked the same path; there is little player creativity and outside the occasional Let’s Play video, few people care.

- Content-focused business model: Digital games businesses have a strong financial incentive to get you to pay upfront and then move onto their next title. Games are treated as a content or boxed product business. An optimal strategy is to put high quality boxes on shelf (either physical or virtual) and get people to buy as many boxes as possible. Since exciting content remains a large cost center, there is ever increasing pressure to make games flashier and more marketable on the front-end and shorter on the back-end.

Shortness of play is perhaps the key reason why players end up consuming multiple games. With gamers spending 16-18 hours a week gaming, it doesn’t take long to burn through a single title. When a single game fails to entirely fill a person’s leisure time, players buy additional games. Only a set of multiple consumable titles provides enough engagement for someone to make a full-fledged hobby out of content-based games.
This fits the general profile of a media hobbyist. As we shifted from evergreen hobbies to digital retail-focused games, we trained users to behave in a fashion similar to that of a reader who reads many books or a movie goer who watches many movies.

A media culture
To be a ‘Gamer’ is to buy into numerous requirements that only exist to enable the creation of easily consumable media products.

- Reviewers exist to help players select their next media purchase

- Critics exist to demonstrate how media conveys a message to society. They are trained (if they are trained) in other media-centric fields such as movies or literature. There is little systemic thinking since media is first and foremost not a functional system but an evocative stimuli.

- The form of popular games is determined by whether or not it fits in a media box. Form is the standardized structure of a piece of media. The 2-hour narrative movie is a form of video. The 300 page novel is a form of writing. So too is the 14-hour adventure game or the level-based narrative FPS.

- Stores and storefronts exist to sell the hobbyist a steady trickle of new media. Since media creation is expensive and the share of a player’s time is small for any single piece of media, aggregators of content are typically 3rd parties that don’t produce all the media themselves.

- Communities are built around mass media that act as a shared experience for large populations of consumers. Big brands like Mario, Mass Effect or Final Fantasy form cultural anchors much like Star Trek or Star Wars. Comparisons, reminiscences and fan fantasies about future sequels or expansions are common.

Digital evergreen hobbies
Into this media-centric ecosystem we’ve seen the reemergence of major games that hew more closely to the traditional games of old. MMOs like World of Warcraft or MOBAs like League of Legends are services. A digital game like Minecraft ties into numerous communities and is often played for years. Some like Halo or Call of Duty cleverly camouflage themselves as traditional consumable boxed products all while deriving long term engagement and retention from their extensive multiplayer services. These games share many of the attributes of older hobbies:

1. They attempt to be evergreen.

2. They have high mastery ceilings and robust communities.

3. Many, especially eSports, replicate the nested yearly loops of a traditional sport.

Each of these games is a hobby onto itself. People predominantly play a single game for years. In one poll of 5400 WoW players, 49% claimed to never actively play another MMO.

The rise of services
This shift to services is accelerating, driven by business factors and steady player acceptance. Developers are slowly coming around to the realization that an evergreen service yields more money, greater stability and a more engaged player base. Experiments of the past few years with social, mobile and Steam games suggest that microtransactions will likely become a majority of the gaming market. They already represent 70% of mobile revenue and continue to grow rapidly on other platforms.
This new revenue stream places new constraints on game designs.  Types of laboriously handcrafted content that was once feasible when your game was played 10 hours is no longer profitable if revenue trickles in over hundreds or thousands of hours of play.  Deep mechanics once again matter.  Communities you want to spend time in become a competitive advantage.

There are indeed manipulative companies scamming settlers in this newish frontier. Don’t act so surprised. This is the case for any frontier and this is not the first time games have attracted disreputable developers.  Look beyond the flashy, inevitable crooks, just as you looked beyond the licensed games, the porn games and the gambling games that infest your typical game markets.  Look at the big picture and observe where the new opportunities for greatness blossom.

No, they won’t cross over
These new evergreen players become hobbyists, but not media-centric gamers. This is most evident in the audiences that play ‘casual’ social and mobile titles. Many of these players never bought into the current gamer culture. It is common to see someone deep into Candy Crush and when you ask them if they are a gamer, they will deny it. They do not ‘game’, they never have ‘gamed’. They don’t share a common heritage of Mario, Zelda, COD, Halo or any of the mass media touchstones that unite current gamers. What they have is a wonderful hobby that in their mind has nothing to do with existing computer games.
There exists a fantasy that somehow new players will get hooked on one game and then transfer over to consuming other games. Since this assumes a play pattern of high volume serial consumption, I doubt that this will occur. Great evergreen games leave little room in a hobbyist’s schedule for grand feasts of consumable content. You don’t finish a great hobby and then look for your next dalliance. You keep playing the game for years or even generations.

The perfect service-based game is one worthy of your entire lifetime of leisure.

If this seems an exaggeration and current titles feel unworthy of this high bar, wait a while. Developers are very talented. And the financial incentives to build the perfect service-based game are strong.

Not one gaming hobby but many
So where does that leave our understanding of ‘gaming?’

- Some people avidly knit in their leisure hours.

- Others play a creative game like Farmville, Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft or the Sims.

- Others participate in a social online game like World of Warcraft, Eve or Facebook.

- And then there is a small but active community of proudly old-school Gamers that like consuming puzzles and story media.

What we currently think of as ‘gaming’ becomes just another hobby amidst a vast jungle of digitally augmented hobbies.
There are those who might see this as a threat, but that is mere fear talking. Existing hobbies tend to last for at least a generation. Those who’ve tied their identity to consuming media-style games as their hobby will stop participating in the hobby when they die. I expect to see 80-year olds still buying adventure games because that is what they were raised on and that is what they love. Niche producers can make good money serving these avid fans.  The rise of new hobbies thus do not invalidate a current hobby.  In fact, you’ll have media-centric games for at least the rest of your life.

Though each hobby likely will need to compete for new members.

Impact on the cultural ecosystem
With this shift comes change. The following may challenge your existing expectations.

- Specialized interests, not shared experiences: The drop rates on defense potions matters little to your typical gamer. Yet it is of earth shattering importance to the community of Realm of the Mad God players, impacting hundreds of hours of their life. At a certain level of mastery, the language used to describe in-game concepts becomes indecipherable to casual audiences. This inhibits communication with external groups, but facilitates bonding within the group.

- Deep systemic analysis, not broad media criticism and reviews. Hobbies are predominantly comprised of human systems and communities, not texts to analyze or boxes to sell. Political, anthropological or economic forms of discourse are more appropriate yet there are few game critics trained in these fields. Successful commentators are typically past players with a master-level understanding of the hobby. They are rarely dilettantes flitting from media event to media event.

- Unique cultures, not mass cultures: A hobby can develop a set of inward facing social norms. This can be a negative if extreme viewpoints are allowed to fester. It can also be a huge positive and promote inclusivity, equality and long term positive relationships. Each hobby is a cultural petri dish that need not adopt dominant tropes or values.

- Participation, not marketing campaigns: New players of a hobby hear about it from a friend or stumble upon a free trial. They participate first and see if they enjoy the lifestyle that the hobby promotes. Big bang media events can flood the early stages of the acquisition funnel, but they do not directly result in revenue or a sustainable community.

One aspect that surprises me the most is the stealthiness of inwardly sufficient hobbies. A smoothly running process is barely newsworthy for those unfamliar with the hobby. Over 5 million people partake in Geocaching, one of the greatest modern games ever invented.  Yet other than the occasional human interest story, it rarely breaks into the public consciousness. What would a media-focused rag say?  ”People are having healthy fun…still.  Just like they were last year.” That’s not news. There is no new box to hype or content to whinge about.  There’s no advertising to sell. So silence is the default until you look inside the vibrant magic circle. Geocachers return the favor by labeling outsiders Muggles.

Let a thousand flowers blossom
The concept of one true gamer community will be less feasible as evergreen hobbies grow in popularity. Instead, we have a crazy mixing bowl of diverse, separate, long-term communities. Few will share the same values or goals. Few players will consider themselves having anything in common with players of a different game.
Social organizations such as PAX will still promote common ground, much like the Olympics promotes common ground between athletes. But day-to-day cross-pollination will be rare.

I personally value a wild explosion of diversity. We need less mass culture and more emphasis on vibrant, generative communities instead of passive industrialized consumption.

The existing society of players may be tempted to deal with those not like themselves negatively through shaming (“I can’t believe you play Farmville, stupid person!”) Here’s how we might instead react positively.

- Freedom of Play: Like freedom of religion, any player has a right to devote their life to any game even if it isn’t something enjoyed by another player.

- Mutual respect: Any player deserves your respect for their hobby even if you do not personally understand it. Avoid stereotypes and engage with the person.

- Willingness to explain: Any insider should be willing to explain to an outsider how their hobby works. Proselytize by inviting them to play with you. An open-minded outsider should be willing to listen.

The fact that individual hobbies exist is not new. The shift comes from realizing that individual digital hobbies will soon to be the default play pattern. Adapt accordingly.
take care,
Danc.

References and Additional Links

- Tie ratios 2012: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/184899/

- Do you play other MMOs: http://wow.joystiq.com/2013/04/04/breakfast-topic-do-you-play-other-mmos-besides-wow/

- Games per month: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-06-27-core-gamers-game-18-hours-a-week-npd

- Games are not media: http://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=1567

- Aging model train enthusiasts: http://www.009.cd2.com/young.htm

- What the dying of a hobby actually looks like: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/15/nyregion/graying-playing-with-trains-2-midtown-hobby-shops-struggle-customers-dwindle.html

- Shaming of a misunderstood hobby: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/on-the-vilification-of-rail-enthusiasts-and-what-this-tells-us-about-contemporary-society/

Note: Gamers often wonder why Farm Equipment simulators sell.  Judged as mass media, they are horrible.  Judged however as an independent hobby, they have many of the attributes of an engaging lifelong interest.  If you laugh at them, it is because you are outside their tribe and ignorant.

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Historical Wargaming and Asymmetrical Play

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By Peter Christiansen

Jul 17, 13

The videogame industry, like other computer and tech industries, tends to have a very buzzword-heavy culture.  Certain phrases just seem to resonate with game makers, who latch on to them, often overusing or even misusing them.  As some people have already pointed out, the new videogame buzzword seems to be “Asymmetrical Gameplay,” or designing games where players don’t all start out on equal footing.  Most of this sudden interest is due to the Wii U and its inherently asymmetrical design, with one player operating the gamepad and the other three using the usual Wii remotes.  However, other developers are jumping on the asymmetry wagon as well, with games like The Flock, which seems a bit like an online version of capture the flag (or maybe more like “Flag Tag” from GoldenEye).

A Game of Hnefatafl.

Players having asymmetrical roles is certainly not a new idea.  During the middle ages, Hnefatafl, a board game in which the king and his guards are besieged by a much larger force of invaders, was popular in much of Scandinavia.  Though it’s not entirely clear how far back the game dates, the Poetic Edda notes that one of the first things the gods did after creating the world was to relax and play some Hnefatafl (which would make it a very old game indeed).  Other traditional games like Fox and Geese share this asymmetrical style, with one player controlling a small, but powerful force, while the other player attempts to win with superior numbers.

Examples of asymmetrical boardgames are not limited to folk games.  Modern authored games take this approach as well.  Back in high school, my friends and I played a lot of wargames, from Risk to Mordheim to Kingmaker, though our favorite game by far was Axis & Allies.  Unlike games like Risk, players in Axis & Allies don’t start with equal resources.  Rather, they each take command of one of the major combatants in World War II at approximately the point in history when the United States entered the war.  This means that the Russian player begins in a tight spot, while the German player seems almost poised to win the game single-handedly.

Although Axis & Allies has some similarities to games like Hnefatafl, it’s not simply another example of the strong vs the many.  In fact, despite the Axis players being outnumbered three to two, the most powerful player in the game isn’t Germany, but the United States.  While the numbers seem to favor the Allies, in practice, we saw the Axis win just as many games over the years.  So how did the designers achieve this balance?  Much of it has to do with geography and distribution of forces.  The British start with a huge empire, but have few troops to defend it and no way to quickly reinforce them.  Germany has a lot of troops and a lot of room to expand, but is wedged between London and Moscow.  The US is both wealthy and easily defended, but is so far removed from the fighting that support to its allies often arrives too late to save them.  Each faction requires a dramatically different approach to be played effectively.

Axis & Allies Gameboard

What made this asymmetrical style of play really fun, however, was the dynamic that it created between players.  While each team shared a common goal, the best way of achieving it was often a contentious issue.  The tension between what was best for an individual player and what was best for the team led to lots of discussions and debates.  This tension could also be exploited by crafty players, such as Japan intimidating the US into building a huge stack of infantry to defend California while the rest of the Allies were overrun (although California was certainly safe for the rest of the game).  It was this social dynamic that made Axis & Allies so compelling.  It was also something that very few other wargames were able to do well.

So why don’t we see see this kind of asymmetrical gameplay in digital wargames as well?  The short answer is simply that balancing that kind of game is difficult, whether as a tabletop game or a videogame.  Most historical strategy games like Civilization or Age of Empires have nearly (if not completely) identical factions, differing only in a few unique units and some special bonuses.  An ambitious game might take a more Starcraft-like approach, having fundamental differences between players, but still starting everyone out on equal footing.  I’ve yet to find a strategy game that utilizes the extreme player inequalities that you find in Axis & Allies (unless you count the digital version of the boardgame, which was a bit glitchy).  This is not to say such a game would be impossible to make, but it does pose a number of problems.  For example, our biggest obstacle to playing was that you needed to find five players who were willing and able to play a game that could sometimes last seven or eight hours.  Although the game has rules for two, three and four players as well, you lose a lot of the excitement when one player controls multiple countries.  For this reason, we almost always played with the full five.  As our friends started going to college and moving away, we started recruiting their younger siblings to take their spots.  Videogames can address this problem somewhat by allowing for computer controlled players, though computer players usually face the same issue of not being able to reproduce the same social dynamic as a human player.

If trying to design an asymmetrical strategy game is so difficult, why should anyone even bother?  I would argue that it’s important today for the same reason it was important when Hnefatafl was first emerging – because war is generally asymmetrical.  Although the idea of two identical chess-like armies marching to battle makes for an interesting competition, it results in a more abstract, rather than historical, kind of game.  It’s probably safe to say that  Hnefatafl was at least partially inspired by an actual battle between the Swedes and the Muscovites (since that’s how the different pieces are referred to in some versions of the game).  The Swedes have no hope of defeating the invaders.  Protecting their king long enough for him to escape is as much as they can hope.  Although we don’t really know the outcome of this hypothetical battle, it was significant enough that the Vikings didn’t want to make stories and songs about the event, they wanted to replay it, experiment with it, and speculate as to how it could have gone differently if they had been there.  For me, this is the essence of what makes a historical wargame.

A German invasion of China

Let’s look back at Axis & Allies.  At the start of the game, forces and territory are distributed in a way that is, for the most part, historically accurate.  Both sides could certainly try to reenact the second half of the war by following the same strategies that were used historically, or the players could engage in a little playful historical thinking, trying to figure out in what other ways the war could have gone.  Is a D-Day invasion of France the best path to victory, or could the Allies have simply reinforced Russia and plowed through the Germans lines from the East?  What would have happened if the Allies had focused on Japan first, and Germany second?  Over years of playing, I’ve seen many scenarios like these, as well as some much more unlikely ones, such as the German Navy sneaking through the Suez Canal and conquering the South Pacific, a massive land war in Asia completely overshadowing the European theatre, and a lone German infantry unit launching a surprise attack on an unsuspecting China.  Though it probably did nothing to help any of us remember significant dates or events, it certainly prompted a lot of discussion about how tactics, diplomacy and geography related to those events.

Could the same lessons be learned from a symmetrical Risk-like game?  Probably not.  Although such games surely inspire their own discussions about history and warfare, they are unlikely to reproduce situations like D-Day or the Battle of Stalingrad.  In Axis & Allies, these are situations that the players have to think about right from the start.  The players’ knowledge of these events helps to inform their choices and the outcome of these choices gives new perspective on the historical events themselves.  I like these kinds of games, and I’d like to see more of them, especially on digital platforms.

I’m certainly in no danger of growing bored with balanced Civilization-style games.  In fact, I think there’s still plenty of untapped potential in them.  However, I’m looking forward to someone tackling the challenge of making the next great Hnefatafl  or Axis & Allies on a digital platform.

[Hnefatafl image by BoardGameGeek user jerzyab / Creative Commons Licensed (CC BY-NC 3.0)]

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Homosexual Heroism: Being Gay In Rogue Legacy

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Rogue Legacy takes players on a genealogical adventure through a mysterious castle filled with evil creatures and action-RPG elements. Each time your character dies, and he/she will (a lot), you are dead for good. But now you may choose one of three heirs to continue the good fight. As an heir you have traits that differentiate them along with different classes. You’ll find a barbarian with color blindness, a paladin with dwarfism, and perhaps even a homosexual mage. One of the traits in Rogue Legacy is even listed as “Gay,” described as “You’re fabulous!” and a further description of either “You’re a fan of the man” or “You like the ladies” depending on your character’s gender. I was curious, and a bit skeptical, about this trait as it seemed like it could either be funny, hurtful, or perhaps even moving.

Traits in Rogue Legacy are often used as funny diversions and small gameplay changers. There are some traits that will change the game altogether, like vertigo’s ability to flip the screen upside down, and other traits that do little to impede your progress, like being bald. When this trait was discovered by the gaming community it caught a little bit of flack, naturally so. People didn’t like the word choice the game used and, perhaps more importantly, they believed the game was saying homosexuality was a disorder or that it was being depicted as something wrong with the character. This was not the case at all, in an interview with Penny Arcade Rogue Legacy lead designer, Teddy Lee said:

[It] sucks, cause we never call it that, but everyone keeps using the negative terms, which automatically makes other people assume that the gay trait is negative

The majority of people that had a problem with gay being in Rogue Legacy stated that it was portrayed as a deficiency or disease of some kind, and that is simply not true. Rogue Legacy deliberately uses the word “trait” and keeps the idea of genetics, deficiencies, or diseases out of the picture altogether. Words like disability, disease, and deficiency all bring with them a negative connotation. The word trait can be defined as dealing with genetics; it can also be defined as: a distinguishing quality or characteristic, typically one belonging to a person. Celebrities and organizations constantly utilize different traits of people as not deficiencies but as unique characteristics. Rhetorically, when people ask what is unique about one’s self, I’d venture to guess that the majority of people would answer that question with a characteristic or trait that defines them in some way rather than their job or hobby. Many people looked at the gay trait in Rogue Legacy and were immediately resentful towards it, without giving it a chance to explain itself. To me, it’s a subtle way to tell the world that anyone has the potential to be a hero.

The moment I saw this trait I selected that very character. I just had to see what happened. When I selected other heroes with other traits they were fairly obvious at first glance. Cellar Door uses fairly ridiculous gameplay mechanics to depict the traits, often times bordering on ridiculous and downright silly. Tunnel vision meant I couldn’t see incoming attacks, ADHD made my character move faster, and alektorophobia made my hero deathly afraid of the chicken legs used for health. Be it a male or female hero, my gay character didn’t have any noticeably different traits and played exactly the same way with no gameplay changes whatsoever. I smiled at that. I only encountered two differences throughout nearly 20 hours of game time. Firstly, there two statues, male and female, that give you health and mana before a boss fight. Which statue gives you what depends on your gender and sexual orientation. When your hero is male and gay, the male statue is the one to dole out health and mana, etc. Secondly, the ending of the game is changed ever so slightly if you happen to win with a gay hero and it makes for a smartly edited ending indeed.

However, the question remains: why have the trait in there at all? Well, if they didn’t have the trait in the game what would the majority of players think? If you’ve ever played a game with a silent protagonist, say Half-Life for example, do you assume that the character is gay or straight? To many of us we allow the game to give us those clues through its character development and gameplay. As a straight male I can only speak for myself but I typically find myself assuming a character is straight unless presented with evidence to the contrary. If a character flirts with one of the opposite sex I assume their straight and if the character he/she is flirting with is of the same sex I assume the character is gay. Games have become sophisticated to the point where many gamers don’t need to fill in the back story or life choices of a character; it’s all there for us to take in. Having the trait there sends a message to the player saying “Hey! This character is gay, and that’s that.” If a gamer chooses not to play that character for that reason, or any other reason, that’s their choice but props to Cellar Door games for putting the trait in their to begin with.

Another question that has arisen from the gaming community can a gay hero trait have an heir to whom he can pass on his armor and wealth. Just because someone is homosexual does not mean they’re unable to reproduce. And for those of you hiding behind the defense of “it’s just a game,” please come out from under your rock and join the conversation. Games have become too in-depth and sophisticated over the past fifteen yeears years to ignore as simply a significant piece of entertainment. When games like Rome: Total War can be used to make History Channel shows more appealing and when games have movies created after them, you know it’s more than just a game. We’re entering a time where games and their creators are making serious statements. Developers are using their form of expression to help their audience understand their message and it’s no different than a novelist placing political messages in a book. Games like Cart Life, Rogue Legacy, and The Swapper are proving that games can have just as much to say as any big budget movie. Is the gay trait in Rogue Legacy the best possible way of sending that message? I don’t know, but it sure got people talking. And we need that.

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The Story Of The World’s Unluckiest Game Developers

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Vlambeer Vs The World

By Nathan Grayson on July 26th, 2013 at 5:00 pm.

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Ever had one of those days where it feels like the whole world’s out to get you? Like you just can’t win? Like you are a magnet whose polarity is perfectly calibrated to attract gigantic, writhing jerkswarms who will stop at nothing to steal everything you love? Congratulations: you might be Super Crate Box and LUFTRAUSERS (among many, many other things) developer Vlambeer. Between countless clones and a recent theft of what basically amounted to their entire company during E3, the two-man team has been plagued by a string of bad luck so crushing that you’d think it was a giant joke.

So Rami Ismail and JW Nijman laugh at it. They laugh and count their blessings.

I am behind-the-scenes of Vlambeer. The scene: a convention booth. Me: worming around in its red-tinted inner workings. That, by my estimate, is about as “behind-the-scenes” as one can get. Rami Ismail has two things: a laptop and a bottle of Totally Not Coca-Cola. Sure, he’s surrounded by wires and the ugly backsides of demo machines, but it’s a pretty humble setup. This is not the frigid heart of an Activision or EA. It’s not a place for the thief who fancies himself a Robin Hood. And yet, Vlambeer’s been rocked by multiple instances of high-profile thievery. It really doesn’t make much sense, and both Ismail and Nijman are well aware of that.

Vlambeer’s stuff gets stolen, whether it’s our game ideas or our games or my bag. Our stuff gets stolen.

“We always have bizarre bad luck, I think, in terms of random stuff happening,” Ismail says, grim yet truthful. “It’s sort of like a joke, isn’t it? Vlambeer’s stuff gets stolen, whether it’s our game ideas or our games or my bag. Our stuff gets stolen.”

“All of our games get cloned, pretty much. Yeti Hunter didn’t get cloned. That’s something.”

Vlambeer’s hardly the only game developer to watch in horror as its babies go through the Replicatron, but every single time? That’s just ridiculous. It’s the sort of thing that’d make a lesser creator want to pack up shop and go home. Call it quits once and for all. Burn down the stand and never look back. It’s not like Vlambeer hasn’t considered it, either.

“We didn’t work for almost half a year [after Radical Fishing got cloned], and half a year in a company that makes a project in three months is a lot of time,” Ismail points out. “We nearly went out of business. The only reason we didn’t is because we have an amazing army of fans who love the stuff we do and care about what we do. If we hadn’t had people telling us, ‘We’re behind you, and when Ridiculous Fishing comes out it’s going to be amazing, so hang on there,’ we would have given up. I’m 100 percent sure we would have given up. We had that conversation twice.”

“That was the reality for six to eight months. I don’t want to go through that. I don’t want anybody to go through that. I don’t know what it did for us. I don’t know whether it was good for us. The talks we did got us some attention, the talks about cloning. So the way we responded to the clone got us some attention. But as for the clone itself, I would not wish that on anybody.”

But why? What makes Vlambeer’s vlambrand of arcade-y action so appealing to those with sticky fingers and consciences that look like shriveled up slabs of dead skin? It can’t just be luck, after all. Where there’s rhyme, there’s reason.

“I think our games are easy to replicate,” Ismail suggests, features settling into a thoughtful, obviously familiar position. “That makes it sound like we just make simple games, but they’re simple to play. The thing is, making something that simple is a lot of work. I think it’s easy to look at our games and say, ‘Well, this makes total sense. We’ll copy that and release it and make money.’ Vlambeer has enough popularity that people know if we release something, it’s probably going to be interesting.”

“I wonder if there are companies just looking for our next thing. It’s quite an amusing thought, that there might be somebody somewhere interested in our next big announcement that way.”

It is, then, a strangely inevitable part of the process for Ismail and Nijman. But when you face something day-in and day-out, you eventually get a sense for what makes it tick – the whirring, whining nuts and bolts. And from there, you can dissect it, make it yours. Blatant thievery may never help Vlambeer, but gone are the days when it dragged the duo so far down that they weren’t sure if they’d ever get back up again.

“What we’ve learned is that, at first, your first response is to be more secretive about what you do,” Ismail explains, almost lecturing. “You just keep it closer to your chest and don’t show anybody. We’ve learned to do the complete opposite thing and just be as open as possible and make sure that everyone knows this is our project. If anybody tries something like that, they get the largest possible backlash.”

“With the LUFTRAUSERS clone, the interesting thing that happened is that it just got taken down. It was just gone. I think the industry and consumer opinion and the general opinion of clones has gone down. It’s such a different world from when Ridiculous Fishing got cloned. Back then, people were saying, ‘That’s just part of video games. You should accept it.’ And we said, ‘No, this is not okay. We don’t want this shit in our industry. We’re not going to take it.’ That’s a great shift.”

Ismail doesn’t think Vlambeer’s the only company to benefit from that shift, either. His trials and tribulations might’ve only made up a couple dominoes in the chain, but he’s exceedingly happy with the end result.

“After Ridiculous Fishing got cloned, the debate got started,” he says. “Then you had a few really big cases. You had the Nimblebit case and Sprite Fox and Zynga. Suddenly it was the big issue, the one that everybody talked about. I think that changed things. If you clone a game now, you better be damn sure you can do it without being implicated, because if you are, people are going to hate you.”

“I think that’s good. We don’t need laws for this. We don’t want laws for this. We don’t want laws saying, ‘You can’t copy video games,’ because that’s just going to get used against creative development like in the mobile phone market, where you can’t release a mobile phone around the edges because Samsung and Apple hold all the patents for the user interface. It’s completely stupid. So it’s good that this is self-regulating. It’s good that people are saying, ‘We’re not going to buy this shit if you stole it from somebody else. We’ll just buy the original.’ That was all we could hope for when Ridiculous Fishing got cloned.”

As far as these things go, it’s a rather happy ending. Sure, clones are still a big problem, but at least things seem to be headed in a good direction. And for Vlambeer that’s especially good news, seeing as Ismail and Nijman derive their powers not from the sun, capes, or easily snipped hair (though their locks are uniquely magnificent), but rather happiness. Hope. Love of life.

“It’s been amazing,” enthuses Ismail, suddenly looking five years younger. “We finally found the energy. After Ridiculous Fishing launched, we finally found that energy that made Vlambeer fun. We started working on new stuff again. We’ve got like four things in the pipeline at the moment. We’re working on Super Crate Box for Ouya, which is coming really soon. I haven’t really slept yet today. We’re doing an update for Super Crate Box on iOS. We’re doing an update for Ridiculous Fishing on iOS. We’re releasing LUFTRAUSERS on five platforms simultaneously.”

“And we have a new project that we haven’t really talked about yet. We’re excited to not be telling people about it, because the people who have been following Vlambeer probably know what it’s going to be. We’ve talked about it in the past a bit. The people that haven’t been paying attention to us have no clue. So it’s this nice wink at the fans. We’re going to live stream all of the development on that.”

It’s really kind of insane, when you think about it. Vlambeer is two people. Two. But when they’re on, they’re on. And when they’re not? Well, it’s all about moderation. That and many rapidly draining bottles of Totally Not Coca-Cola.

“We might not sound like the healthiest people,” Ismail admits. “Vlambeer has been called the unhealthiest gaming company somebody has ever seen, and an infinite game jam. I can see how people would think that. At points in our history, that has definitely been true. But it’s that we care a lot about everything we do. We had to figure out that we need to take care of ourselves if we want to be able to do all that. In the past two and a half years we’ve found a balance where we can work ourselves to the point where we’re really tired, but not beyond that. We have a little bit of restraint.”

“Vlambeer is a lot about me and JW being happy. I think we pay a lot of attention to ourselves being happy. Our games sort of come from that mindset. They’re fun, interesting, weird, silly, all sorts of things, but we can’t make those if we’re not having fun. If you’re having fun at your job, you never have to go to work, I guess. Isn’t that the saying? I guess that’s true.”

And while Vlambeer’s slow march into the screaming eye of oblivion might sound like the result of an understaffed operation, Ismail and Nijman actually view it as the opposite. If you truly want to do things your way, the smaller the better. Sometimes (read: most of the time) that means off-the-wall game ideas that eventually come to fruition. Other times, it means taking a much-needed – and, by most standards, very long – rest.

“I think Vlambeer works because we can take stupid risks,” Ismail laughs. “If JW decides he doesn’t want to work for three months, and I decide I don’t want to work for three months, we can just suspend the company for three months at a minimal cost. We just need to make sure that we don’t die, which is not that expensive.”

He further points out that it’s not just him and Nijman, either. Many Vlambeer games have been collaborations with third parties, with various personalities sowing seeds all across different projects. Still though, it ultimately comes back to Ismail and Nijman – a partnership that, somewhat unsurprisingly, emerged from a pretty darn unlucky situation itself.

“What happened is, [JW and I] met each other going to school, and we instantly hated each other with a passion. The only reason we ended up working together was because the only thing we hated more than each other was the school itself. Shared enemies, that’s a good way to start talking.”

But somehow, it worked out. Before long, Ismail and Nijman dropped out of school to work on games like Radical Fishing and a prototype that would eventually go on to become Super Crate Box. And they fought each other every step of the way, which is pretty much their version of happily ever after.

“JW grew into a person who can really rapidly iterate on an idea,” Ismail says. “He can start with an idea and say, ‘No, that’s shit, let’s try again, half an hour. I learned this, so I’ll apply that.’ He’ll keep going like that. I come from the complete opposite side, where you sit down for a project and work on it for two years and then get that out there to people who want to play that. So we came from completely opposite philosophies of game development. That clash between us, that’s what Vlambeer is.”

“Me and JW will fight about something, and then we’ll say, ‘Oh, this is a solution. We’ll go in that direction.’ We don’t know where that is, but we’ll just go that way and see where it ends up. That’s the fun part. We don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s why we have games about airplanes and games about fishing and games about hunting yetis and games about smashing crates. We don’t know why these games happened. We know that if you play them, you will know that it’s Vlambeer. It’s just that, if you look at our games now, you won’t be able to tell what our next game is, because we don’t know either. There’s no formula or set idea of what we’re going to do. We just… Whatever. Video games.”

Vlambeer, then, is a developer founded on ups and downs. Constant strife. Difference. But somewhere in the center of the maelstrom, there is calm – or at least a brief glimmer of agreement. Ismail and I emerge from the red-as-a-heartbeat booth background and into the dim convention lights. Sure enough, he and Nijman immediately get to arguing about a potential feature for an upcoming unannounced game. But they part ways trading lighthearted jabs and chuckling, comfortable and collected among their own self-made chaos.

It’s hardly the sort of attitude you’d expect to see from two guys who – just a few weeks earlier – had “pretty much their entire company” stolen right out of a backpack at E3. But then, when you seem to relish, in a way, making your own bad luck, you kind of just learn to roll with whatever else life throws at you.

“I have a program set up on our server, so every time our computer logs in, it connects,” Ismail explains, also noting that everything on its was completely backed-up beforehand. “It just hasn’t pinged back. So I’m assuming that they opened the laptop, wiped it, and sold it.”

“Our stuff gets stolen. It’s something you have to deal with at some point. But on the other hand, if you look at how Vlambeer has been going, I don’t think we can complain at all. We’ve had the most amazing two and a half years that any game development company could wish for. It’s a lot of hard work and there’s a lot of setbacks like these, but in the end, the feeling I have with Vlambeer is always a really positive one. We still don’t know where Vlambeer is taking us either. We’re just having fun and seeing what happens.”

Note: Yes, there are many unlucky game developers in the world – for instance, Project Zomboid‘s own The Indie Stone. The title is not meant to be taken literally. Everything is relative, etc, etc, etc.

__________________

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Assholes are assholes.

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Did you know nice people make games? Did you know nice people make fantastic games? Did you know that you don’t need to be nasty or horrible or a bigot or just plain dumb to be driven to make fantastic games?

Yeah, of course, I know you know that. It’s a bit of a shame that some people haven’t quite got there yet.

“Unreasonable people often create amazing things.”

So the story goes that being an asshole is desirable because, y’know, at the end of it you get a great thing so that’s OK. Now whilst I don’t really think the things listed in the article are really all that asshole-ish in the grand scheme of things, the piece kicking off with someone essentially saying that he’d rather not be making the same old nerd stuff over and over again and all that makes me wonder exactly what’s so asshole-ish about that in the first place but… yeah.

The problem is, we keep fucking excusing assholes.

Phil Spector is a man with a tortured soul, a mad genius, that guy in the funny wig. He’s also the guy responsible for the Wall Of Sound and in turn, Be My Baby. Listen, Be My Baby is the greatest piece of music we managed to create during the 20th Century, Ronnie Spector fucking kills it and those drums. Those fucking drums. Without them, maybe we’d have never got You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve and then we wouldn’t have those fucking fireworks either. Those magnificent fucking fireworks. I mean who puts a firework in a song anyway? What’s that all about?

Except by tortured soul, mad genius and guy in the funny wig we mean “from quite a few accounts a pretty horrible and abusive guy”. By tortured soul we mean convicted murderer. But hey, he made some music happen so we’ll downplay that bit. I’m not entirely comfortable with telling the family of Lana Clarkson that unreasonable people often create amazing things and that’s desirable. Would you be? I don’t think they’d take much comfort from me explaining how wonderful Be My Baby is somehow.

But we’re not talking about that sort of extreme case here. We’re talking “in a specific context” and that context is… umm, well, we don’t know what people are like at home, we don’t get to see into their family lives but they sometimes come across as, well you know…

Now in this instance that “well, you know” comes down to not really especially asshole-ish behaviour. Oh god, did you hear that, he just said something about a game I like or oh god, did you hear that, he just said something sucks or that, shock horror, that guy said he doesn’t want to pander to the same stuff that everyone else panders to, what horrible people! It’s all a bit fucks sake internet, y’know? Can we move past the “saying something bad about a videogame is a crime against nature” thing or do I have to remind you once again that Elite is shit?

But let’s move past the people mentioned in the article because really, this isn’t about them and it’s unfair of me to really go on about it when my issue is with the idea put forth by the article.

It’s that the jist is there. It’s OK to be an asshole providing you make great art at the end of it. Ickier still, there’s that awful stuff about y’know, being an asshole is the thing that makes those pieces of art special, those fantastic pieces of music, fantastic videogames exist because it’s the same thing being an asshole as being driven and creative.

Bullshit. It fucking well is not the same thing. Because you know what? Reasonable people create amazing things more often so what’s their excuse? And in my experience, with 10 years under my belt of making videogames, there’s an amazing amount of actually genuinely lovely, kind, gentle and nice people making amazing things. People who don’t go out there calling people names. People who don’t go out there shouting their mouths off at people, people who don’t repulse you just by being in the room. Good people. Making Good things.

I’ve met one single person in all this time I didn’t want to be in a room with and I’m so used to this sort of nice, cushy get-a-long thing with Team RR that I didn’t know what to do but get incredibly drunk so I could tune his blather out. He had the swagger of someone who’s assholeishness was tolerated because he’d made something good too, y’know? And he had made something good but I was sitting round a table with people who’d also made good things who weren’t horrid so…? Uncomfortable.

I told him Elite was shit too just to be on the safe side.

The truth of the matter is, being an asshole isn’t some sort of creative thing, it’s just being an asshole. It’s not part of being driven, it’s not the thing that helps make good art, that’s something people could do without being an asshole. They just fucking don’t. And people don’t do it precisely because there’s a climate around our cultural touchstones where we happily excuse asshole behaviour, underplay asshole behaviour, applaud asshole behaviour providing it comes attached with some creative work we appreciate. It’s pretty gross and a massive injustice to the hundreds of people who write and create amazing things without saying boo to a goose. As if their talents are somehow lesser because they’re not tools to other people.

And you know what helps assholes be assholes? Saying it’s OK and desirable to be an asshole. Even when you mean it in “a specific context” it all goes towards one big fat thumb up to being an asshole.

So no, you don’t really want assholes to be making things. You want amazingly creative people to be making things. You want people to be making things because who knows what one person can do with the right idea and the right tools. And as creating good art doesn’t require you to be an asshole, you don’t need assholes to make you things either.

But I’ll tell you what, we’ll be a whole lot better off, all of us, if we stop encouraging asshole behaviour all round so let’s start by not excusing it when it comes attached to a game we love or a tune we love or whatever. Let’s say it’s not OK instead. Because then less people get hurt.

Maybe if we hammer this home hard enough, people will be less inclined to be assholes because we do not put up with that shit.

That’d be pretty nice, yeah?

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