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So, Fez II - Giant Bomb
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A developer's guide to surviving fame, trolls and themselves
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Internet Toxic Shock Syndrome: How Don't Read The Comments Doesn't Work
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if you cut me, i will bleed
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Bad Dads Vs. Hyper Mode: The Father-Daughter Bond In Videogames :: Games :: Features :: Paste
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The ‘80s Strike Back: The Complete Story Behind Blood Dragon
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So, Fez II - Giant Bomb

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Fez II is no longer in active development, according to developer Polytron and its designer, Phil Fish. That’s the word from Fish, who dropped his mic this weekend.

“FEZ II is cancelled,” said Fish in a statement on Polytron’s website. “i am done.i take the money and i run. this is as much as i can stomach. this is isn’t the result of any one thing, but the end of a long, bloody campaign. you win.”

For the record, I don’t believe him, even though I’ve “confirmed” the news with Fish myself over email. I suspect we will, at some point, see (and play) the sequel to Fez, but this weekend’s events provide an opportunity for Fish to leave the spotlight and protect his sanity from the world and, well, himself. Fish speaks too passionately about games to leave them behind. That isn’t some subtle hint, either. It’s my gut feeling.

But how did we get here? It begins with the latest episode of Invisible Walls, a Game Trailers podcast, featuring a lengthy rant from Marcus Beer, a longtime member of the industry now commentating under the named “Annoyed Gamer.” The podcast was discussing the recent turn of events regarding Xbox One self-publishing, and how both Fish and Braid designer Jonathan Blow used Twitter to criticize the press for running towards both of them for quotes about what was, then, still a rumor coming from Game Informer about the news. A rumor with some legitimacy? Sure, and while it eventually proved true, Blow was upset reporters were asking for commentary without more information (for example, the revenue share ratio) and Fish lamented the press seeking a quote before everything was confirmed. Fish’s divisive nature is easy traffic.

Cue Beer:

“But, of course, the press, wanting to get reactions, they went to a couple of indie developers. In this case, Jonathan Blow and Phil Fish, because those guys are the self-styled kings of the indie genre. They’ve been on Indie Game: The Movie, and they’ll turn up and quote for anything and everyone. And Ms. Fish and Blow, or BlowFish as I’m going to call the two them right, because while they may be moderately tasty, they’re also kind of lethal. [They] decided to go bananas and bitch and moan to Game Informer, in particular about “How dare you, how dare you ask us questions about this story! I’m sick of you guys wanting my opinion on this story!” Both of them, both bitching away. And I’ve just got a little message for the BlowFish. Gents, you are the guys who did Indie Games: The Movie, and some of you looked relatively normal in it, one of you looked like a total tosspot in it. You can’t have it both ways. You’re successful game designers, you’re indie game designers—hurrah, good for you, you fucking hipsters. Let’s get something out of the way. If you are successful and you want people to promote your games, and you go to the press and give them quotes for anything that pertains to your shilling your next title, when the press, then, come to you and say “this is something that’s pertinent to the indie scene, let’s talk to BlowFish because BlowFish are successful and they are, you know, supposedly these pioneers” don’t get fucking snicky about it, alright? Jesus, you should be grateful that these guys consider what you say something of use.. Me? I think the both of you are a pair of tosspots. You may make good games. Well, Blow makes…Blow makes a good game. Fez, I’m just not into at all. I’m just not into it. I respect people that do [enjoy it]. My own personal opinion, though? Having seen these wankers over and over again, bitch and moan—Phil Fish in particular, though.

Other Commentator: He does come across as whiny.

Beer: Whiny? He’s a fucking asshole most of the time. I’m an asshole, but that’s what I am, that’s what I do. I suck it up. But what I’m saying is that if you guys want the promotion the next time around on your Fez 2 or…what’s the follow-up to Braid, The Witless? Witless? Whoa! Yeah, c’mon. I would like to say to every outlet who got dismissed by BlowFish, fuck ‘em. Next time they have something to shill, say “yeah, not so much interested.” It is a two-way street, it’s a symbiotic relationship. You guys are out there, you have to suck it up.”

Game developers do not owe us anything, and I don’t owe them anything. It’s archaic to view the press-developer relationship as strictly symbiotic, and is indicative of an old view of the press-developer relationship. Do I often rely on developers to open up and allow me to tell their stories? Yes, but it’s an optional dance we do the tango to. No one is indebted to the other once that exchange has run its course, and that’s the end of the road. If you’re on a writer/journalist making this argument, that’s really bad.

Anyway.

Fish caught wind of Beer’s comments, and exploded on Twitter.

(“Compare your life to mine and then kill yourself” is a Futurama quote, but that’s a bit besides the point.)

That’s just a taste. Beer eventually responded, and offered Fish an opportunity to discuss his commentary on camera, but Fish wasn’t interested. Over the next hour or so, Fish continued to vocally express his displeasure, speaking more broadly about his feelings about people slinging crap his way, and the toll it takes on psyche. It ended with Fez II’s abrupt cancellation, despite having been announced only recently.

I spent the weekend largely disconnected from the Internet. Like Fish, I’m a public figure, someone who puts themselves out there and deals with what comes back—the good and the bad. I’m not proud of the fact that I’ve grown a thick enough skin to deal with rape threats targeted at my wife simply because I’ve had the audacity to talk about sexism in video games. Nor am I proud of being able to withstand pot shots from anonymous jerks about my deceased father. These are not traits that will ever be mentioned in my resume.

We all handle criticism, especially the vitriolic kind, differently. I stopped responding to jerks, and ask people to come in my direction through email, private messages, or questions over Tumblr. Over time, it’s produced excellent results, but not pulling the trigger and snarking back at a jerk is hard. Vocal game designer Hideki Kamiya tells people to fuck off. Fish responded by yelling, stirring the pot, and unironically latching himself to a photo of known troller (he probably would have hated that term) and comedian Andy Kaufman.

Some of his comments are indefensible, and some, I suspect, he wishes he could take back.

But I know the good of the Internet, too, and I wish Fish had, either, seen more of it or reminded himself of what it produces. I’ve had my moments with the Giant Bomb community, but so much has been tremendous.

I mean, look at this stuff.

When my father passed, the Giant Bomb community started a thread with well wishes about my work and anonymous comments about my father, a person none of them had ever met. I kept that thread bookmarked on my phone during the first week of my father’s passing, and would often head into the bathroom, page through the thread, not really reading anything, and cry. It was a showing of genuine compassion by a group of people who only knew me from what I put out there. When I needed them, they had my back.

And that’s to say nothing of how we pulled together for during the passing of the irreplaceable Ryan Davis.

Whenever someone gets under my skin, I reach into my bag. Tucked into a pocket are a series of letters, private thoughts from people who have reached out over the years, thanking me for one thing or another that I’ve been involved in. Most of them bring a tear to my eye, and each reminds me why I’m still doing this.

99% of the Internet has been nothing but nice to me, even when it’s a backhanded compliment. It’s easy to focus on that 1%. That 1% is vile, hateful, spiteful, jealous, mean, and would likely be as venomous in a public place as they are with a badge of anonymity. Many are probably teenagers who will grow up and learn to regret their ignorant actions, but some of them aren’t, and those are the people who scare me the most. But I can’t spend my day worrying about the 1%. I wake up every day trying to make the other 99% happy.

I hope I’m doing an okay job of that.

Cyberbullying and the boys' club

gamecultureclub.org • Archive • Like & Archive • Like

(Authors note: I am a Game Designer for Sharkbomb Studios, not a psycho- or sociologist. I have neither conducted nor read any scientific studies on this topic. The following solely represents my perspective and opinion.)
Some days I despair. I feel that the culture surrounding games is so badly broken that there just is no way to salvage it. Today is one of those days.

You might have heard of the cancellation of FEZ 2 by developer Phil Fish. And you might have also seen the GamerFury tumblr that chronicles the verbal abuse aimed at a Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 developer for changing the stats of a gun.

The comments on the Polytronic website (FEZ) and the tumblr are filled with raw aggression. Calls for the rape, death and murder of the respective developers are plentiful. I can only find the word hatemail to describe this. These two peoples virtual identities are flooded with vile hate. And for what? For tinkering with digital make-believe worlds.
(Photo by Aphexlee)
Why is that? What causes this and why does this kind of Cyberbullying seem so common in games? It seems to me that it rarely happens in other media. You rarely see outbursts of a similar nature when a movie is released or a book hits the shelves. So I went looking for answers, and this is what I ended up with:

### Tech-Savvy
Compared to other media video games are primarily digital. This means that their audience needs to be able to navigate in the digital world. Especially when it comes to the more world of AAA video games, the home of what’s stereotpyically considered gamer culture. The internet also gives them access to tools like twitter or anonymous commenting that make bullying tremendously easy.

### Average Age
Video games are also a comparatively young medium. This skews the audience towards younger ages. Granted, by now the average age has moved up considerably, but they still are firmly embedded in youth culture. And that just means a lot more irresponsibility. At age 16 most of us were still testing the limits of their surroundings, trying to fit in.

### Entrenched AAA Machismo
And that is kind of where the real trouble begins. If “Gamer" is the core of your identity and your sense of self, then anything that might threaten that concept also threatens you. So keeping the status quo intact becomes important. And that leads to gamers trying to keep their games a boys’ club.

Artsy fartsy games? Bad!
Women criticizing games? Bad!
Women playing games? Bad!
(GTA V artwork)
This stronghold of male power is also evident in the abundance of verbal sexual aggression. Threats of rape, sexual violence and diseases is frequent as are slurs such as fag. Anything that doesn’t conform to the group is fair game.

### Cyber-Mob
But why does it cluster so heavily around some events? I guess that within the different groups inside the scene, the victims become designated targets. First by only insulting and badmouthing them inside the group. It becomes a sort of group activity over which to bond - shared enemies provide an easy focus to rally around.

That also creates an easy opportunity for some to gain status within the community. By doing something to the hated offender that others might not dare, they become “cool". Especially if the victim reacts to this abuse, preferably in a manner which is perceived negative by the community. Because as we know: Bullies like that.
(Photo by Anton Bader)
Couple this with the reach of the internet and things can easily escalate. As soon as the shit-slinging starts, the victim is fair game for all others. This isn’t unlike the "broken window" theory. It also requires the aggressors to escalate, to step up to be “cool". And that leads to death threats and other nastiness.

So that’s a big bummer. But what can we do about it?

In general it is a fact that those who complain or hate are much more vocal that those who do not. So they do not represent the whole gamerdom but they are very loud. They create and fortify a culture resistant to and vile towards change.

There are many ways to go about that. We could imagine better media education for people, to create awareness. We could also come up with harsher laws for cyberbullying. I propose a different approach:

The positive and civilized Gamers ones among us will just have to be a little bit louder. So from now on I will, whenever I find myself enjoying a game (or a part of it), try to let the devs of the game know. And maybe you’ll join me. I wish I had a snazzy hashtag for this… If you come up with one, let me know ;)
(FEZ screenshot)
Anyway, let’s start this thing right here:

### An open letter to Phil Fish
Hi Phil,

I don’t have a means to contact you so I’ll go with this open letter. Hope that’s alright. Thanks for FEZ. I’m a kinda nerd for games with complicated spaces (see here) and when I first saw FEZ, I was  intrigued. Then I forgot all about it and was pleasantly surprised by it’s sudden release. I bought the game for my Xbox 360 and rushed through it. I loved the twist mechanic, the levels, the style. Most of all I enjoyed what I didn’t expect: the wondrous sense of exploration and all the little details and secrets.

Thank you for the joy and inspiration. It is a pity to see that there will not be a sequel, but I understand and respect your decision. I know how draining it can be to slog through some phases of game development. And I don’t presume to know how it feels to be on the receiving end of all that hatemail.

I wish you all the best,

Martin
(Second authors note: Thanks for everyone who participated in the facebook discussion that got my brain fired up and sparked this blog post. You know who you are.)

A developer's guide to surviving fame, trolls and themselves

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Edmund McMillen was standing in the checkout line at Whole Foods a few days ago. The guy behind him said, “Hey, aren’t you the Super Meat Boy guy?” They enjoyed a pleasant chat while they waited their turn.

“What’s this all about?” asked the woman behind the checkout, curious about the exchange.

“This guy’s famous,” said the dude, explaining that McMillen had been featured in a hit documentary about game developers.

“Yeah,” replied McMillen, somewhat embarrassed. “I’m Lord of the Nerds.”

Last weekend’s Phil Fish episode, in which the Fez developer argued on Twitter with video presenter Marcus Beer and then furiously quit game development, has spent these few days of news-cycle intensity being portrayed as yet another example of online rage, trolls and baiting.

But after talking to developers behind games such as God of War, The Binding of Isaac, DayZ, Duke Nukem, Depression Quest and World of Goo, it’s clear that this is also a story about people who have found public recognition without always being prepared for its consequences. There is a big difference between being an individual who gets into a flame war, and being an online celebrity who does the same thing.

Polygon spoke to leading developers about the perils of public recognition, including Edmund McMillen, Ron Carmel, George Broussard, Zoe Quinn, David Jaffe and Dean Hall.

Game developer fame is a quirky new form of quasi-celebrity, at its most pressured in the online digital world. McMillen isn’t bothered much in supermarkets or in the street, but lots of people on Reddit and Twitter and NeoGAF know exactly who he is. When he, or Fish, says something controversial online, lots of people respond, some of whom choose to be unpleasant.

Of course, developers are as prone as the rest of us to saying something regrettable or downright stupid. When they do, lots of people notice because, in this microcosm of gaming, they are famous.

“It’s idiotic. It’s totally retarded,” said McMillen. “It’s the most alien thing in the world to me. Never in a million years, growing up in the ’80s, would I have thought that nerd culture would rise up and create the celebrity nerd.”

“It’s idiotic. Totally retarded.”

Both Phil Fish and Braid creator Jonathan Blow were heavily criticized by Beer (aka ‘Annoyed Gamer’) in a GameTrailers video show for declining to comment on a rumored story about Xbox One self-publishing.

Beer argued that the two men had appeared in the documentary
Indie Game: The Movie and that they are public figures who, he said, ought not complain about requests for media comments and should be grateful that their opinions are valued. He called them “a pair of tosspots” and “fucking hipsters.” Fish responded angrily in a series of aggressive tweets, culminating in his announcement that Fez 2 had been canceled.

McMillen and his development partner Tommy Refenes also appear in Indie Game: The Movie, along with Fish, who has a story arc about the struggles to get his game, Fez, to market.

According to McMillen, the fame this film has generated has also created personas of each of them that are targeted by online critics both in the media and on social media. He said that each of them have become archetypes for critics who show up whenever they appear in the press.

“If it’s about me, they say I’m an overrated fat fag. If it’s Phil Fish, they talk about him being a crybaby. They will call Jon Blow pretentious and they’ll call Tommy an asshole.”

Each of them has responded to his fame in different ways. McMillen fronts it out, plays to the crowd, entertains us with juicy quotes. Refenes keeps to himself. Blow looks like a man who understands the value of trying to maintain a dignified posture. Fish gets into fights and, a few days ago, apparently lost it completely.

There is no guidebook for becoming a game developer celebrity. Most people who make games do so because they love to draw, or fiddle with computers, or write stories or play games. These are solitary pursuits that, until very recently, did not indicate an obvious path to celebrity. Aspiring actors and singers will often be open about their desire for fame. Aspiring game developers who dream of headlines and paparazzi generally keep it to themselves.

“I’m a social outcast. I am in my room all the time,” said McMillen. “There’s no reason for me to be in the public eye. I grew up at a time when artists were losers, in their rooms, and no one would care.”

Few game developers yearn for paparazzi

He said that a “lack of experience” was a big problem for well-known game developers, when dealing with the public and the media. None of them can get used to the idea that “anyone takes a single thing we say seriously.”

“Phil doesn’t think that he’s that important that he would say something and then have it plastered all over the world, and then have his character assassinated,” he added.

Interacting with the public is problematic. Experienced celebrities and corporations barricade themselves behind publicists, and every public utterance is vetted and stripped of any possible offense. But game developers, especially indies, embrace their roots, make use of social media, talk openly. This leaves them open to trolls, to mischievous headline writers, to misinterpretation and to their own displays of anger, ego and error.

David Jaffe has been a well-known game developer for two decades, with massive hits like God of War and Twisted Metal. Like McMillen, he hasn’t opted to tone down his opinions.

“Some of us, like myself, are happy to make fools of ourselves if it means we get more attention for our games, our teams and yes, at times, for our own egos. And more often than not, the actions that have given me a wonderful group of fans are the same actions that have also made me a target,” he said.

“It’s just me, my ego”

Jaffe added that he had chosen this route, rather than it being a course of action he had been pressured into. “It’s just me, my ego and a genuine enjoyment that comes with discussing and debating the medium of games. Direct interactions allow you to keep the perspective of the pure consumer and the pure fan, which is something we all began as. End of the day, we are slaves to the customer and the fan, which is as it should be.”

But even Jaffe, evidently no wallflower, has days when the online pressure gets to be too much. His reaction, not unlike the less experienced Fish, is to vent, very publicly.

“‘Everyone deals with it differently. As I get older and busier, I don’t care about it as much. But on the days that I do care, I just drag the abuse or bad journalism into the light of Twitter and my blog and vent. That’s kind of all I can do,” he said.

“There is genuinely valid media criticism that hurts because it’s true and comes from a place of wanting to inform readers and improve the medium, and then there’s the click bait stuff that is just pathetic.”

Jaffe said that he had been known to “shoot [his] mouth off without thinking of the consequences,” but he added that developers have a personal responsibility for what they say, and whom they talk to. They can choose, he said, to retreat from the public eye, if they wish.

Zoe Quinn wrote the successful Twine gameDepression Quest, and received many warm words of thanks about her work, as well as some unpleasant communications. She does find them upsetting.

“Sometimes I’ve been too open and vulnerable and that’s bitten me in the ass, but it’s a process of learning the hard way,” she said. “There’s probably a better way to do it. I don’t think ‘just grow a thicker skin’ is it, though. There are enough hard-hearted people in the world. I’d rather see people find healthy outlets for their emotions than try to suppress them.”

“There are enough hard-hearted people in the world”

She copes by turning to the real world, and the opportunities there to find goodness. “Commiserating with other developers or doing something positive and helpful,” she said. “These days when I get harassment that actually manages to get to me, I go look into helping out other people or groups dealing with the same thing so I don’t turn into a depressed and anxious blob. Reminding myself that the world doesn’t have to be a horrible place, by doing something positive and helpful for others on it, seems to have been the best thing I can do for my peace of mind.”

Quinn believes that the strange nature of game developer fame is fueled by the fact that the lines are blurred between fans and creators, that game developers are basically fans who made something good.

“A lot of people care about the person behind the works they consume and I think that this is magnified by the current ‘games made by scrappy underdogs that are just like you’ narrative surrounding independent games. When you combine that with the unprecedented direct access to the creators behind your favorite works via social media, then you get this situation where people will care about your personality and not simply your games.”

Until last year, Dean Hall (pictured climbing Mount Everest) was an ex-soldier who had turned to game development, Now, he’s known by a multitude as the guy behind DayZ, the Arma 2 mod. He finds himself, every now and again, receiving unexpected negativity from fans, including weekend exclamations from people on Steam that he quit fooling around playing games and get back to work.

“I can understand someone reaching the point where they say, ‘This just isn’t worth it,’” he said. “People often define and identify you by your success, and not as a person. That can be very frustrating especially through social media. People’s expectations can quickly become ridiculous and incessant. I think while we’re all sad to see Fez 2 not happen, what matters far more is that Phil Fish is happy and enjoying what he does.”

One of the biggest reactions to the Phil Fish affair has been an outpouring of anger against anonymous trolls who insult people online. Although Fish has indulged in unpleasant public arguments with identified people, he has also been the victim of such attacks.

“People define you by your success, and not as a person”

“People start forgetting that you’re actually a real person, and what people say can have a very real effect,” said Hall. “I think people tend to hold their ‘media personalities’ to a very high standard, often one much higher than they would hold to themselves or their friends.”

Hall has learned that there is a balance to be found between engagement with the public, and privacy. “Knowing when to disengage from the media and social media is probably one of the most important and hardest-to-learn aspects of courting publicity. I think you have to know when to just grin and bear something as well.”

He has a formula for moments when it gets too much. “I ask myself these questions. Would this person actually say that to me if we were face to face? Does this person actually know me and the facts involved? Is this someone’s advice I would actually value as a friend? If the answer is ‘no’ to at least one [of] those then, rationally speaking, why am I bothered about what they are saying? If the answer is yes, then it’s quite possibly an important issue that has been brought to my attention.”

George Broussard spent many years facing the ire of ‘fans,’ as he struggled to complete a new Duke Nukem game. The veteran developer takes a practical view, saying that game makers can choose their own levels of interaction.

“Some embrace it and actively pursue it and some are like vampires running from the spotlight,” he said. “What you have to balance is how honest you will be in public. Do you filter yourself or do you share a polarizing opinion while soaked in gasoline? You can’t be truly honest with a collective like the internet. You’re one comment away from a sensational headline about how Japanese games suck.

“If you make something creative and release it to the world you’re going to get good, bad and ugly feedback,” he said. “Most of it is out of your control. You can’t control when the media takes things out of context or sensationalizes an event for page views. You can’t control when the internet mob [goes] ape shit insane over something game-related. In the best of situations you just have to be the type that can tune out and ignore the hate. It always passes, like a tornado.”

Broussard also points out that there is an element of personal responsibility. “If you want to be private, be private. Nobody makes you offer public opinions or post on Twitter.”

Ron Carmel is best known for World of Goo, and for helping other developers through the Indie Fund.

“Phil, he’s an emotional guy and he feels things very intensely,” said Carmel. “I spent a lot of time with him during the development of Fez and I got a glimpse of who he is. I imagine it’s a hard life living inside his mind and I wouldn’t trade places with him. But I know that Phil tries really hard to do the right thing. I’ve also seen his remorse when he knows he screwed something up.”

(Polygon contacted Phil Fish for comment for this story.)

Fame warps perceptions, which are then magnified by the intensity of Twitter and media scrutiny during intense public dust-ups, to which Fish has always been susceptible.

Game developers are as guilty as everyone else of saying stupid things. “Everyone has an internal compass, something that tells them what is a good idea and what is a bad idea, and it should help them draw a line between what they are comfortable sharing in public and what they are not,” said Carmel. “Phil lets it all hang out on the internet, unfiltered. He is completely himself with the world, and I think he suffers because of it.”

For Carmel, like many of the developers we spoke to, simply pretending that insults or unfair media treatment does not exist is not an option. Choosing to get above the morass is possible.

“Every time I write something when I’m worked up I try to put it away and not send it or share it with anyone until the next day. Sometimes I fail because I give in to my self-righteous inner asshole. But I always try to ask myself, ‘What do I hope this will accomplish?’ And if I can’t answer that, or if what I’m writing will not accomplish what I want it to, I don’t send it. Again, sometimes I screw this up.”

This is advice most of us have learned in the age of instant communication. Generally, a thoughtful approach is better than an angry one. For someone in the public eye, operating in the realm of news cycles and widespread fan indignation, it is much, much more difficult.

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Internet Toxic Shock Syndrome: How Don't Read The Comments Doesn't Work

shoshanakessock.com • Archive • Like & Archive • Like

(Warning: This will not be language safe. Because frankly, this whole argument demands a little bit of four-letter wording).

In one moment, I’m going to show you a video that I saw in a recent Penny Arcade article about the recent Phil Fish / Fez II meltdown that occurred this past week. If you’re not familiar with the situation, let me give a breakdown so you understand what set off this post in the first place. Here’s a little context:

Phil Fish is an indie video game designer who created a game called Fez. He was in development of a sequel to Fez called Fez II when Marcus Beer of the GameTrailers podcast went on his show and verbally ripped Fish fellow indie creator Jonathan Blow a new face. For what reason? I can honestly not pretend to care. It was mostly about the fact that Fish and Blow (who Beer decided to nickname BlowFish) decided not to answer questions about the upcoming indie games offerings on X-Box Live. So Beer decided to target his self-confessed “bitch and moan session” at these creators for not answering questions.

That’s when things went mayhem. Because Fish shot back over Twitter and the two got into a heinous fight over the internet – which as everyone knows, always ends well. And in the end, Phil Fish quit making his game Fez II and who knows what will happen from there. Now, forgetting the fact that this turned into an internet slap fight of epic proportions, let’s step back for  second. A guy who is out there making a thing completely lost his shit because, effectively, he was getting slammed by folks in the media. The response from a lot of people have been, “Big deal. The media hits folks all the time. The internet is an unforgiving place. Don’t read the comments, suck it up, walk it off, get back to work.”

Then I saw this video and read this article from Penny Arcade. The video is Dave Chapelle of course being the bastion of goddamn wisdom that he can be:

Then I sat back and I thought about all the things I’ve been seeing on my own Twitter feed recently. A woman helms a project in England to get Jane Austin, arguably one of England’s greatest female authors, on some currency and receives rape threats on Twitter. She stands up to try to get the people prosecuted for threatening her and sparks a controversy. All this over work she’s done, and it comes in over YouTube. Feminist Frequency’s own Anita Sarkeesian, on the same day, tweets about the fact that she had to report two particularly heinous rape threats and she was curious if Twitter would do anything about it. I watched a YouTube recording of Reza Aslan, a twenty-year religion scholar and author of a new controversial book on Jesus, school the HELL out of a Fox reporter because she couldn’t get over him being Muslim long enough to engage him as a human being over his work and made the mistake of looking at the heinous comments section below. It was enough to make me slightly ill to the stomach.

All of it together has got me wondering: what the hell is wrong with people?

Folks, I am a critic. I am. Part of my job is writing reviews of things. I have reviewed books, television, movies. I’m not as famous perhaps as this Marcus Beer (I have no idea, I had never heard of him until this BS exploded) but I have people who have read my stuff. I’ve even written reviews that were heated and sometimes I’ve gone back and questioned whether or not I was entirely too unfair towards a personality involved. Still. I do not remember where in my undergraduate classes on film and media criticism my professors told me it was okay to blast the shit out of someone in a bitch session. I don’t remember where in my raising since childhood someone told me it was okay to take someone to the woodshed for their creative choices by attacking them personally. I don’t remember that being part of the job.

Now I might not be a big deal reviewer but I know some things. Let’s start with this:

One: Calling people ‘toss-pots’ and ‘fucking hipsters’ for doing their jobs in the indie world is not professional. Its shock jock provocateur behavior at its worst. Its third rate Howard Stern armchair quarterbacking. Its two steps above being that guy on Reddit yelling ‘yur mom’. Because you’re not critiquing the actual work these guys are doing anymore, you’re just taking shots at who they are. You’re that guy chasing the Kardashians for a picture of their belly fat and making up new ways to talk about celebrity nip-slips, only you’re doing it about the gaming industry. I don’t care how hurt your feelings are about not getting the quote or not getting the story you want. Learn to live with disappointments.

Two, here’s my question: where’s your game? Where’s your work? What movie did you make? What have you put out there? And how would you like it if someone went all over the place and called you names? If that sounds a little too touchy-feely and kindergarden teacher to you, that’s because that’s the place where people learn those lessons about how to talk to their fellow human beings – in PRE-SCHOOL. If you’re going out and being a critic, you better do one of two things: be prepared to be a human being about how you critique other people’s work or else you better be able to say ‘I’m a creator too’ when people ask you where your work is, and then you better be ready to take the same slings and arrows. Because if you want to sling, you best put your own hard work out there to be slung at too. And if you don’t care, if you can take that kind of muck-raking and don’t see that it is hurtful, then I don’t understand you. I don’t get where your empathy lies.

Phil Fish put this up on Twitter and it resounded so deeply in me, along with what Dave Chapelle said in that video:

So here’s a guy. He made a thing. He put it out into the world and he gets comments all the time. He gets garbage. And finally, he gets one last straw dumped on him and says he’s done. He’s out. And people are saying that he’s crazy or lost it. Think about what Chapelle said there. Think about how it feels when you get criticized and then imagine what kind of magnification a thousand fold this guy is getting. I’m not looking at what kind of a guy he is or whatnot. I’m looking at the stimulus he has to deal with constantly in his face for the simple sin of trying to be a creator in an industry he likes. He’s the ant under the magnifying glass. Eventually he’s going to burn up. Who wouldn’t?

Now I’m not going to lie. I’ve had shitty interactions with people who are creators when I’m press. Hell, I had a shirty interaction with a comic book writer who is SUPER well known that made me so grouchy that I basically still think he’s a douchebag ages later. But I realized something recently that made me think that maybe, just maybe, I owe that guy an apology: he is not my bitch. Neil Gaiman said that of George RR Martin recently to some folks and it bears repeating. These guys ain’t our bitches, reviewers and interviewers and fans. And treating them that way makes us the bitches. Does it suck when someone is shirty with you? SURE. But get over yourself. They don’t owe you shit, even if you’re media. They don’t.

The internet can give you some serious toxic shock if you step out there and try to create, or say a thing, or do a thing. I’ve seen it myself. I’ve had people put up videos calling me names. I’ve had rape threats sent to my inbox because I spoke up against that BS Grope Crew stuff happening on Twitter. I’ve been called names. I’ve had friends called names I wouldn’t call my worst enemy. I’ve seen reporters chase Anne Hathaway through a protest she was attending like a regular person (not a celebrity) shouting at her that she owes him and she’s a bitch for not giving him a quote. I read Wil Wheaton’s recent experience at ComicCon and I start to really think that some folks have lost their ever-loving, self-entitled little minds.

Every time people speak up about this kind of behavior going on, the answers are the same: don’t pay any mind, just let it roll off your back, don’t read the comments. Don’t read the comments? It’s not just in the comments anymore! It’s in the self-entitled disrespectful way people are treating one another on the airwaves, across the internet and in person. The only way to get the hell away from it seems to be to just shut down and get out now or just stop doing anything that gets other people’s attention. At all.

I had to go thru recently to see if I could track down how things got this bad. I think I got it. This is the process:

The internet gives us anonymity to say whatever the hell we want. Then folks step out who aren’t hiding but put themselves out as creators, voices, whatever, and they become targets. They become that way for a billion reasons – either someone has an opinion that differs, or someone is just having a bad day, or someone has some angst they want to vent at another target. They hide it behind things like freedom of speech and ‘this is my opinion’ and ‘you put yourself out there so you want the attention so here it is!’ And then they spew. And the good voices, the people who just come to have decent conversations on the internet or speak their opinions and criticism with respect and humor and community in mind get drowned out by waves of absolutely rancid garbage. Or worse, they get drowned out by voices of critics who use their own self-created voices to spew the same trash, except under the guise of journalism.

The Newsroom this week had a quote come out of the main character Will’s mouth. “I’m against censorship but I’m a big fan of self-censorship.” That means that just because you have an opinion doesn’t mean it SHOULD be said. And when you say it, you have a responsibility to consider what kind of impact it has on another human being. Just because you CAN say something a certain way doesn’t mean you should. It’s a matter of respect and empathy and we as an internet society seem to be fighting an uphill battle against a landslide of poisonous garbage that cuts a path through good people who are just trying to do what they love.

I don’t know Phil Fish. I don’t know a thing about him personally, about his behavior, and I have no opinion one way or another about him as a person. I don’t know Anita Sarkeesian. I don’t know Reza Aslan. But I know folks who have gotten this treatment. I have burst into tears over things said to me in hurtful, hateful internet crap. I’ve had people discount all the writing I might do or anything I’ve said on a panel to slam into me for being ‘a loudmouth bitch’ or ‘fat disgusting slag’. I have looked at my computer with open-mouthed disgust and thought, “Who the hell told you it was okay to say such things?”

And I decided it wasn’t okay. And I decided to try to do better, to be more careful about how I addressed others in my criticisms and treatment. I decided to work on examining people’s actions and output in my criticism rather than who they are as people because glass houses world, glass frickin houses. But I also decided not to keep quiet about the phenomenon. If the trolls and the nasty critics and the hopped-up internet bullies get a voice, so do to the folks who say that this isn’t okay. So I’m going to use that voice and say it loud AGAIN. Because, you know, it seems to need a reminder every five minutes.

This shit is not okay. Not anywhere. I don’t care who the hell you are. Learn to talk respectfully to one another again or put down the microphone because your attitude is not welcome in a community of creators, whomever they may be. I’m not prepared to stand as a creator in a community I’m brand new to and say its okay when creators are bullied and heckled and hurt. Or if that is the way the gaming community works, it best come to realize that not all of us signed up for that – I certainly didn’t – and I won’t stand for it in my interactions. I’m holding others to a higher standard now.

So seriously, come to argue, come to be critical of work, come to discuss. But for the love of everything holy, learn to keep a respectful, civil tongue in your head or count yourself as part of the sea of toxic crap that floats along the media stream. Be quality or be part of the problem.

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if you cut me, i will bleed

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Pretty much all of Comicon was awesome. However, there was one thing that was decidedly not awesome, and though I had initially decided not to talk about it in public, it's bothered me since it happened, so I wrote about it on G+ earlier today.

I'm cross posting it here, though, because it's important to me:

On the way out of the Syfy party on Saturday night, a pretty horrible thing happened. I wasn't going to talk about it in public, but I can't stop thinking about it, and I think this needs to be said.

When I was a Teen Idol*, and I traveled to New York for publicity all the time, it was fairly common for a handful of super weird people to hang out all day in front of my hotel, or in the lobby of my hotel, so they could pounce on me whenever I tried to enter or leave, and demand as many autographs as they could. It was really creepy and awful, and I always hated it. It was more than a little scary. I mean, who in the world spends an entire day sitting in one place waiting for someone? Oh, I know: crazy people.

So, crazy people, pay attention: If you camp out in front of my hotel while I am on location or visiting a city, if you camp out in front of a party I'm attending … basically, if you camp out anywhere so you can shove a stack of 8x10s into my face when I'm trying to enter or leave a location, I'm not going to sign them, and I'm not going to be nice about it.

I refuse to reward or validate that kind of behavior, and I'm done being polite about it.

When we walked out of the SyFy party on Saturday night, a pack of people — probably 12 or 15, I'd guess — appeared out of nowhere, and surrounded me. They shoved pictures into my face, thrust pens at me, and made it so that I couldn't even move. They separated me from my friends and my son, and, quite frankly, terrified me.

Let's stop for a second and think about this: in what kind of world is it acceptable to surround a person you do not know, separate them from the people they are with, and essentially trap them? Maybe in crazy entitled psycho world, but not the world I live in.

I tried to scrawl my signature on a couple of things, just so some of those people would move and let me keep on walking, but whenever someone took something away, something new immediately took its place. Somehow, +Felicia Day saved me. She reached through the mob, grabbed my hand, and said, "Sorry, we have to go meet some of our friends," before the literally pulled me away, to safety.

This is when the mob lost its shit. They yelled at me like I had done something wrong. They called me names, and they booed at me. (Seriously). A woman stormed up next to me and said, "If you don't sign these things for me, I'm going to tell Twitter what an asshole you really are."

I don't respond well to threats like that. Though my instinct was to explode at her, I took a deep breath, looked her square in the eye, turned on my dad voice, and said, "Really? Are you serious? We're done here." I quickened my pace, and for the next two blocks she followed us, screaming and ranting and raving about how she'd waited there for hours, driven all the way from someplace far, and that I basically owed her as a result of her choice. I eventually tuned her out, and I guess she went back to the Syfy party to harass whoever else came out next.

The whole thing was really scary, made me feel like a sideshow freak, and made me really, really angry. I was just trying to walk out of a hotel and go meet up with my friends. I didn't do anything wrong, and I'm not going to apologize forgetting upset about it.

This is important: I realize that just about anyone reading this on my blog isn't one of Those Guys. Please don't think the "you" here refers to, you know, you.

This is also important: When your motto is "don't be a dick," a certain kind of person is vigilantly looking for moments like this when you can be accused of violating your own motto, thereby proving to the entire world that you are, in fact, a giant lying pile of shit. I'm fairly certain that reasonable people can see who the dick was in this situation, and hopefully agree that it was not me. For everyone else: go fuck yourself.**

In Dancing Barefoot, I wrote about signing autographs at conventions:

Over the years, I've learned something from this experience: it's never about the signature. It's about that brief moment, that brief encounter with a Star Trek cast member, that is so important to the fans. That 30 seconds or so of hopefully undivided attention is what they're really paying for, and I always do my best to make sure they get their money's worth. Contrary to popular belief, sitting at a table signing hundreds of autographs for several hours without a break is hard. It's not just mindlessly scrawling my name; It's stopping and listening to the always excited, sometimes shaking, always sweating, sometimes scary dude who wants to know exactly why I did “X” on episode “Y” and would I please sign his picture in silver, because Marina signed it in gold and now he wants the men in silver and the women in gold, and I hated your character and here are 25 reasons why and I expect an answer for each one of them and I'm not leaving until I'm satisfied.

The crazy people who camp out don't care about that brief moment, that brief encounter. The crazy people only care about taking a piece of $Celebrity.person and possibly selling it, or hording it, or … you know, I don't even want to think about where that path leads.But that's why they behave the way they do. It isn't about our work, or about saying "thank you" or "high-five!" or anything about that. It's about entitlement and being crazy, and I will not validate or condone that kind of behavior ever again.

I realize that a crazy person who thinks it's entirely normal and not psycho to camp out in front of a hotel for hours and hours so they can trap a person isn't going to understand why I will not validate that behavior, but I need to make this clear for the future: I'm a person. I am a  human being and if you cut me I will bleed. I'm happy to sign things and take pictures with people in appropriate situations, but if some dude violates my personal space or freaks me out, and then gets mad at me when I try to get away from him, I'm not going to do anything beyond telling that person to go fuck himself, and I'm not going to feel bad about it. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman, I am not your bitch.

Finally: In before the inevitable "you're an actor and you chose this so you deserve what you get so suck it up because my life harder than yours because blah blah blah" comment (probably not here, but definitely at G+.)
*LOL.**See? I don't even feel bad. (Well, maybe a little bit. I need to work harder on it, I suppose.)

Bad Dads Vs. Hyper Mode: The Father-Daughter Bond In Videogames :: Games :: Features :: Paste

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I’ll never know what it’s like to be a father.

I’m a woman. So, there is that. But I think I should be able to dimly grasp what it’s like to be a Dad. Several recent video games have featured troubled fathers as their protagonists, which should pose the perfect opportunity for me to finally feel fatherhood. And yet, I find myself struggling to empathize with any of these Dad Simulators.

What’s my problem? I had no trouble self-inserting as Marcus Fenix in Gears of War or Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. If anything, I have a history of role-playing with a higher level of immersion and emotional commitment than most other gamers I know.

So, I expected to feel protective—yes, even fatherly, whatever that means—towards Elizabeth in Bioshock Infinite and towards Ellie in The Last of Us. Anyone’s heart would soften at Elizabeth’s dreams of seeing Paris after a lifetime locked in a tower, or Ellie’s humble joy as she sees the outside world for the first time: “you can’t beat that view, huh?” At ages twenty and fourteen, respectively, both women have spent their lives sheltered from society due to their genetic good luck: Elizabeth can create portals between worlds in Bioshock Infinite, and Ellie is immune to the zombie virus that has infected the world in The Last of Us. Both women do not know what it’s like to live a normal life—even a normal life according to apocalyptic standards. They’re special.

The few other people these young women have met in their sheltered lives have sought to control them and their mysterious gifts. But the player never quite gets that privilege (or, at least, not for long). You primarily interact with these women as an outsider, and eventually, as a mentor. You grow into a father figure role. You fall in love with these two young women, but not in that way—in a different way, a paternalistic way.

But in both games, you do not play a very good role model. Infinite’s Booker and The Last of Us’s Joel expose their daughter figures early on to an outside world filled with violence, and both men expect their young partners to get used to that violence—and fast. Although Ellie reacts slightly better at first to threats of violence and a life spent on the run, both Elizabeth and Ellie come to terms with this new life over time. By the end of each title, these young women regularly aid you in combat: Elizabeth uses her world-bending powers to provide you items and shelter, and Ellie eventually gets permission from Joel to wield guns and a bow and arrow.

Both games also implement a puzzling “fix” to a problem that often slows down games that require you to protect an AI character. In these games, enemies cannot “see” Elizabeth and Ellie. Both women can scurry across a battlefield unnoticed and unhurt. They affect the battle insofar as they can help you, but they’re never a burden, except perhaps on Dad’s conscience. They make charming observations, tell stories or jokes, and try to break down their fathers’ emotionally withholding exteriors—but they do not add stress to battle situations.

These women are not the Samwise to your Frodo, nor the Dom Santiago to your Marcus Fenix. They are not your best friend, nor are they your equal in combat. These women are your daughters, and gosh, are they both the best possible daughter a father could hope to have. Who could ask for someone more beautiful, more charming, or more capable? And she can’t even get hurt … unless it’s a cut-scene and the narrative calls for it. That’s barely even your fault.

Since you play as the grouchy member of the unlikely duo, you will start out both stories irritated that you have to deal with a young woman. Both Booker and Joel have lost a daughter already in the past; they’re reluctant to get close to another young woman, especially one who reminds them of their prior loss. But both women are a package quest: They must be delivered in order to obtain a reward necessary for you to survive. What’s more, both of these women make for such charming “packages” that you can’t help but feel attached. As the delivery process gets more and more complicated, both Booker and Joel feel less uncaring about the terms of the deal at stake than they did at their stories’ outsets.

So why didn’t I feel attached to Elizabeth and Ellie, like I was supposed to? Oh, I did—I wanted the very best for them. I wanted them to escape their fathers as soon as possible.
(Spoilers for Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us to follow.)
It isn’t possible, though. The ending of Bioshock Infinite does not feature Elizabeth saying “Get over this on your own, Dad(s), because I’m going to Paris.” Nor does The Last of Us end with Ellie striking out on her own, nor does it even end with her making a decision about her own welfare. The end of The Last of Us involves several adults making a choice about whether Ellie should live or die without asking her opinion on the matter, and as a sort of bonus, they lie to her about what’s at stake both before and after they make this decision about her.

Elizabeth and Ellie’s situations are not so different, but one key difference is that Elizabeth knows the facts of her situation, and her actions bring about the game’s ultimate ending. If Booker had been the one calling the shots at the end of Bioshock Infinite, it might have featured an ending closer to the one in The Last of Us, in which Ellie doesn’t know the full truth of her situation and she never has the opportunity to decide what she wants to do about it. Joel doesn’t tell Ellie the truth because he fears that if he does she’ll decide to leave him.

Both Elizabeth and Ellie grow up sequestered from society. Ellie explicitly reiterates her fear of being alone throughout the game. And yet both women would be better off alone; at the very least, they deserve better guardians than the ones they get, but children don’t usually get to pick out their fathers in real life, either. In these games, the player also has to cope with playing as the protagonist provided, and the endings don’t offer much substantial choice either. Both of these games offer only one ending, and your actions throughout the game don’t alter how it plays out.

The reason I referred to both Gears of War and Tomb Raider at the top of this piece is because these two games are about Daddy Issues, too—but you play as the kid in both games. In Gears of War 3, Marcus Fenix reunites with his father, but he does not ever manage to earn his father’s approval. In Tomb Raider, Lara Croft resents her late father’s reputation as a hard-headed fighter; by the game’s end, she has embraced and applied his lessons about survival, no longer reluctant or alienated by her legacy. Although Lara and Marcus are fundamentally different characters who each make different decisions, I found it easier to relate to both of them than to Booker or to Joel.

I also found it easier to relate to both Elizabeth and Ellie, but although The Last of Us allows the player to inhabit Ellie in its penultimate chapter (after which perspective returns to Joel), Bioshock Infinite does not ever let us see through Elizabeth’s eyes. Both games seem to expect the player to be more interested in keeping an eye on Elizabeth and Ellie, rather than the alternative. As a result, Elizabeth and Ellie both seem defined by your ability to watch over them, specifically by watching them and listening to them; they have the dialogue, the charisma, and the beauty. You’re stuck with the troubled sociopath who capitalizes on Stockholm Syndrome to keep a charming woman around.

It seems as though other players managed to feel paternal and protective easily enough, though, especially in The Last of Us. In NeoGAF’s spoiler-laden thread about “The Morality of The Last of Us”, and in the comments on Russ Frushtick’s Polygon story about the ending of the game, I read that, although some players were disappointed in Joel’s decision, most felt it was in-character, and several more thought Joel had made the right choice (comparisons to Liam Neeson’s character in Taken sprang up in the NeoGAF thread). Meanwhile, I couldn’t get over the part where Joel made this choice for Ellie.

Perhaps fourteen is too young to make one’s own decisions by some people’s standards; I don’t think so, though, especially in Ellie’s unique case. Elizabeth’s choice at the end of Bioshock Infinite broke my heart—was there no other way? No route that eventually ended in Paris and happiness? But at least Elizabeth had been allowed to see her fate and decide on her response. I never expected The Last of Us’s ending, an almost-perfect opposite from Bioshock Infinite, to make me feel even worse.

When I tweeted about how I didn’t think I “got” The Last of Us, a few strangers tweeted back to tell me that perhaps it’s because I don’t understand what it’s like to be a father. Some other games critics cheered me up by joking with me that if the game hadn’t made me feel like I understood fatherhood, then it hadn’t done its job.

On the contrary, I don’t think it’s practical to expect many people to empathize with the kind of fatherhood that The Last of Us depicts: a self-involved parenting style that, in theory, puts one’s child above everyone else, but actually just seems to be about putting one’s own comfort above that child’s decisions, dreams or personality. Joel makes a decision that makes him feel better, but it’s certainly not “for” Ellie. Russ Frushtick wrote in his column about this uncomfortable ending: “the audience doesn’t always know what’s best for it.” In the case of this game, apparently daughters don’t always know what’s best for them, either. Good thing their fathers are there to decide for them.

By making Elizabeth and Ellie into fully realized people—albeit women who are mere “packages” to be delivered, and who are ignorable-yet-helpful placeholders in combat, but who allow the player to ignore such simplistic readings with the sheer force of their humanity and charm—the developers of Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us prompted me to cry out in involuntary shock at their games’ endings. But they have not made me understand or empathize with their depictions of fatherhood. In Bioshock Infinite’s case, I’m not sure whose situation I’m meant to feel worst about, but in The Last of Us’s case, I doubt I was supposed to end the game by rooting for Ellie to surprise us all by evolving into a Kerrigan-esque queen of the Infected in The Last of Us 2.

It’s not even just that I can’t empathize with fathers; I think I’m just playing the wrong Dad Simulators. I can’t empathize with playing as a character that has immense social and physical power and misuses it to hurt the characters in the game that I have come to like, seemingly at the game’s behest. I don’t want to play a game and feel as though agency and value has been misattributed to the incorrect person; I find it difficult to even finish such games. It would be like playing through the latest Tomb Raider as Captain Conrad Roth, or worse, Dr. James Whitman. It just doesn’t make sense.

It’s not just about wanting to play as a good guy, or as a hero; I find the prospect of playing as a villain compelling, and I gave Hotline Miami and Spec Ops: The Line more credit than they may have deserved just for trying out such a tricky trope. But the idea of playing a game that encourages me to respect someone as a person, but then asks me to make bad decisions on their behalf…that, I cannot do, at least not without loud protestations from my brain.

Perhaps it is the realism of the situation presented in The Last of Us and in Bioshock Infinite that disturbs me the most. Real life includes plenty of bad parents. We are meant to empathize with this father’s feelings of regret and failure, because he tried. We are not meant to think too hard about the years that this daughter figure spent sequestered from other people, or the fact that this relationship is the only one she’s ever had (so, gas-lighting her into believing it is a normal, loving relationship is terrifyingly easy, because she has no point of comparison), nor the fact that she has never been allowed to make a decision for herself and might want to know what it’s like to do that.

These two games (and a handful of others, perhaps most famously Heavy Rain) highlight the difficulty of a father coping with the loss of a child, as well as the stress of protecting a child. Yet the game-logic of using a child as an object for a rescue mission or a package to be delivered, no matter how charming or human that package may seem in the narrative, does not adequately portray what I imagine is the true stress of fatherhood.

Forgive my assumption, since I do not know what it like to be a father and I never will, but I would guess that the hardest part of that role is the realization that, try as you might, you can’t control who your kid turns out to be, you can’t decide everything for them, and even if you try to impose structure, it may not go as planned. You can’t prevent your child from growing up and leaving you. One way to get around that in a game, at least, is to create a system that prevents daughters from leaving their fathers because the only possible escape from them is death. Having tripped while walking in these particular fathers’ shoes, I think I can understand why my daughter might make that choice.
Maddy Myers writes the biweekly Hyper Mode column for Paste Magazine. Her work has also appeared in the Boston Phoenix, Kill Screen and at the Border House. She also blogs at her personal website Metroidpolitan and tweets @samusclone.

The ‘80s Strike Back: The Complete Story Behind Blood Dragon

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Nostalgia is a valuable currency in the video game industry. Nintendo’s biggest titles stick to decades-old formulas, and the indie scene is overflowing with pixelated throwbacks. Earlier this year, Ubisoft took a different approach to the ‘80s homage with Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. The standalone digital title combines the era’s iron-studded, fluorescent action films with Far Cry 3’s superb gameplay. Blood Dragon stands as an anomaly, both in terms of its aesthetic and marketing strategy. This is the story of how it all came together under the guidance of Ubisoft’s passionate 1980s savant, Dean Evans. It’s also the story of how Aliens: Colonial Marines nearly turned Michael Biehn, voice of Rex Colt, off from working in video games entirely, and how Hobo with a Shotgun director Jason Eisener helped inspire Ubisoft’s experiment.
A Stable Base for a Crazy Idea
Blood Dragon is a curious love letter to a bygone era built on a rock-solid foundation. Far Cry 3 hit late last year on 360, PS3, and PC. The latest entry in the multiplatform FPS sandbox series preserves the exotic setting: a tropical archipelago filled with animals and armed thugs. However, Far Cry 3 comes with some big changes to the series. Players gain new abilities by progressing through RPG-like skill trees. Far Cry 3 eschews the punishing realism of gun jams and malaria outbreaks with accessible, reliable gameplay more in line with modern, big-budget shooters. Enemy AI is improved, with patrolling pirates and indigenous wildlife that behave convincingly. Players can also liberate enemy encampments, creating a new safehouse and reducing the amount of roaming sentries. While the overall aesthetic of the game would change radically with Blood Dragon, all these elements (save for skill trees) remain. Critics praised Far Cry 3, and as of last May the game shipped 6 million units, 1.5 million more than projected.

The first piece of concept art for Blood Dragon

Well before Ubisoft knew how successful Far Cry 3 would be, the company decided to take a new approach for the downloadable add-on strategy. Over the past few years, gamers have come to expect DLC in the form of new costumes, multiplayer maps, or a story-expanding campaign chapter. These iterative episodic additions usually only cater to people who completed the core game, alienating potential newcomers. In an effort to break out of this stale approach, Ubisoft took a chance with Assassin’s Creed III by crafting The Tyranny of King Washington, a standalone,  alternate-history tale that deviates from the main game by pitting protagonist Connor against the preeminent founding father. For Far Cry 3’s add-on content, Ubisoft took it a step further with a standalone title that completely abandons the story, characters, and overall tone of the base game. The publisher opened up the doors to its development teams for ideas. Even the really crazy ones.

Among the Ubisoft Montreal devs organizing pitches for Far Cry 3 projects was Dean Evans. Growing up in the ‘80s, Evans spent his formative years binging on video games and absorbing the action section of his local video store in Surrey, a county in southeast England. He watched Arnold Schwarzenegger slaughter a police department over and over in The Terminator until his parents became concerned. Perhaps unbeknownst to his parents, Evans liked to pack up toy guns and practice breach and clear missions with friends at a nearby nursing home.

Bring up the topic of ‘80s action or horror films around Evans, and he responds with an enthusiastic stream of obscure film references, one-liners, or unusual game ideas exploring topics like animal revenge. Evans has an unbridled enthusiasm and a lack of self-censorship that’s rare in the PR-padded realm of the game industry. The powers that be at Ubisoft were smart, or crazy, enough to harness Evans’ overactive imagination to its advantage.
A screenshot from Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon's in-house pitch video
Evans funneled his penchant for hot pink hues and heavily armed heroes into an offbeat pitch for Far Cry 3’s downloadable counterpart. Set in a 1980s vision of the future, cyber commando Rex Colt sieges the island stronghold of his former military superior, Colonel Sloan. Far Cry 3’s modern pirates are swapped with leather-clad enemy cyborgs, giant laser-shooting reptiles roam the landscape, and the atmosphere is thick with moody fog and neon lights.

“Presenting it to some of the [Ubisoft] guys in Paris – those guys are brilliant poker players,” Evans says. “You’re doing the presentation to them and they’re faces are just like f---ing stone. It’s like, ‘Oh no! This is just going to be a f---ing disaster!’ Then once the presentation is, over they’re like, ‘Excellent. Good. Love it.’”

The editorial team greenlit the project, giving Evans’ team six months to complete it.
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon creative director Dean EvansFrom Wookiee, to Rookie, to Rockstar
Before Evans unleashed the ambitious insanity of Blood Dragon on Ubisoft, he made his entrance into the games industry with a Kashyyyk battle cry.

“It all started with a wookiee,” Evans says. “I was raging at a house party in South London and unleashed my throaty warble of a Chewbecca impression on an unsuspecting audience. Little did I know that a managing director of a fantastic advertising agency heard my wookie call and wanted to geek out. After a lengthy discussion, we got onto the topic of video games. His agency had just won the PlayStation direct marketing account and they were looking for an account executive. At this time, I was working as a delivery driver. Needless to say, I snapped up the opportunity to pursue a career in polluting minds. I always wanted to work in video games but at that time I had no idea how to get into it. The door was literally opened.”
A storyboard sketch of Spider's death at the hands of Colonel Sloan
After working on the PlayStation account, Evans joined Rockstar London as a product manager, helping launch titles like Max Payne 2, Manhunt, an#mce_temp_url#d Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

“These were truly my formative years in the industry,” Evans says. “Nobody understands tone and vibe quite like the folks at Rockstar Games, and working there opened my eyes up to what is possible in PR and marketing for video games. Break the mold. Shoot from the hip. Run with your gut feeling. We trusted each other’s tastes and sensibilities to create truly unique and artistic assets. If we like what we are doing and put gallons of passion into it, then this will be reflected in the final product and gamers’ attitudes.”

Rockstar’s dedication to consistent messaging, branding, and robust gameplay offerings would stick with him throughout his career. These lessons became invaluable when devising Blood Dragon’s effective marketing campaign.

Boasting games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Max Payne 2 in your portfolio speaks volumes, and in 2007 Ubisoft Montreal hired Evans as a marketing manager to help with gameplay trailers. He worked on the famous Assassin Creed “Lonely Soul” trailer, which pairs dramatic slow-motion gameplay of Altair with the somber vocals of The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft and driving beat of British band U.N.K.L.E. Evans’ careful music choices for trailers is an example of his passion for finding the right vibe for games.

After putting in his time as a marketing manager, Evans jumped over to game design with Splinter Cell: Conviction, where he helped develop Sam Fisher’s new customizable interrogations and Mark and Execute ability, which lets him rapidly gun down multiple enemies. Later he joined the conception team for Assassin’s Creed III, where he continued to flex his directing skills by putting together videos demonstrating design goals.

Assassin’s Creed III arrived in late 2013, shortly followed by Far Cry 3. Sometime before Far Cry 3’s release, executive producer Dan Hay told the team they had free reign on downloadable ideas for Far Cry 3. Hay wanted something unexpected, and Evans planned on seizing the opportunity to resurrect a VHS-era aesthetic he felt was lost to the times. Recent films like Manborgand Hobo with a Shotgun fueled his longstanding adoration of cheesy ‘80s action, and Evans felt this was the perfect time to tap the same vein of nostalgia with games. Manborg, released in 2011, is a low-budget science fiction adventure about vampire Nazis and cyborgs, overflowing with laser guns and green screen effects. According to Evans, Manborg “kicked him up the ass” to follow through on his vision.
Read on to learn about the axed armored minions of Blood Dragon and an important '80s sex scene

The Legend of The Oregon Trail

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by Jed Lipinski

Three student teachers changed the educational game industry from inside a janitor’s closet.

In the fall of 1971, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger returned to their Crystal, Minn., apartment to find their roommate, Don Rawitsch, sprawled on the living room floor, drawing a map of western America. The three men, all seniors at Carleton College, were student teachers. They spent their days in junior high classrooms teaching math and history in inner-city Minneapolis. At night, they huddled over dinner, sharing tips and debating teaching techniques. Until earlier that day, Rawitsch had been stumped on how to get his eighth-graders interested in his new history unit, “The Western Expansion of the Mid-19th Century.”

It wasn’t for lack of trying. Rawitsch had attempted everything from peppering his lectures with strange and compelling facts to showing up to class in full Meriwether Lewis regalia. Nothing seemed to work. But now, as he furiously sketched his map on long sheets of butcher paper, he thought he was onto something. “I’m making a board game about the Oregon Trail!” he announced to his roommates. Rawitsch pictured a game in which students would become pioneer families traveling the treacherous 2,000-mile route from Independence, Mo., to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. They would set out in ox-drawn wagons and purchase food, clothing, and ammunition; along the way, they’d encounter a series of historically accurate calamities. Surely, nearly dying from snakebite or exhaustion would get the kids’ attention, right?

Rawitsch planned to add an element to advance players across the board—perhaps dice or instructional cards. But his roommates, who had taken a few programming classes, had a different idea. “What if we put this thing on a computer?” Heinemann wondered. Instead of the pure luck of dice, the simulation could take into account the weight of your load or what you’d paid for oxen. Survival could hinge on your skill at shooting buffalo.

Rawitsch loved it. The problem was, he needed the game in less than two weeks.

Heinemann and Dillenberger glanced at each other.

“We can do that,” Heinemann said.

They had no clue that the game they were about to create would eventually sell more than 65 million copies and influence hundreds of millions of students. Not only wouldThe Oregon Trail go on to become one of the nation’s most popular computer games, it would become a beacon in the emerging educational game industry. But before any of that could happen, the trio needed to find a computer.

In the early 1970s, PCs were extremely rare. In their place, tech-savvy schools used teletypes: electromechanical typewriters that connected through a phone line to a mainframe computer the size of a room. So for two weeks, the roommates holed up in a former janitor’s closet at Bryant Junior High School, where the school’s teletype was stored, and spent their evenings programming. Using Rawitsch’s historical knowledge, Heinemann and Dillenberger developed a series of algorithms, punching hundreds of lines of code into the teletype. But just because they created the program didn’t mean they could breeze through it. When Heinemann tried The Oregon Trail for the first time, he died of pneumonia midway!

Rawitsch debuted The Oregon Trail in his classroom on December 3, 1971. He rolled the teletype into the center of the room, and the students gathered around. The machine churned out a roll of paper with questions like “How much would you like to spend on clothing?” When a kid typed in a number, the machine delivered a new question, along with an update on his or her condition. Some imagination was required. In order to hunt, students had to type the word bang. If they typed the word quickly and accurately, the machine responded: “Good eatin’ tonight!” If they faltered, the machine sniffed: “A little slow on your Colt .45.”

It was no Grand Theft Auto. But for students who’d experienced computers only as glorified calculators, The Oregon Trail opened up a whole new world. After a few rounds, the kids who previously had no interest in history knew a little more about the geography of the Western U.S. and the brutal realities facing 19th-century pioneers. The game worked on a conceptual level too. “The Oregon Trail was one of the first educational software applications that put you into the program,” Rawitsch says. “Despite the lack of graphics, students who played weren’t students anymore. They were settlers crossing a wasteland. Their decisions were a question of life or death.”

What Rawitsch hadn’t expected was how the game would foster teamwork. Initially, when the machine asked questions, students would shout various responses. When this proved inefficient, they started putting decisions to a vote. “They invented democracy out of necessity,” he says. Students also realized the quantity of food available hinged on how quickly they typed bang, and they began taking turns and learned to delegate: The best typist got behind the gun; the budding accountant kept track of the expenses. “They were like workers in a Henry Ford plant,” Rawitsch recalls with pride. “Everybody had a job!”

With the game’s success established, the three roommates loaded it onto the school’s “time-sharing” system, which enabled other Minneapolis schools with teletypes to play. Soon Dillenberger and Heinemann were sharing The Oregon Trail with their own students, who lined up outside the janitor’s closet after class to take turns. It wasn’t long before the kids found ways to exploit the program’s bugs. Spending a negative amount of money on supplies, for example, increased your cash flow. “Kids are clever,” Dillenberger says, adding that he and Heinemann continually revised the source code to refine the program. Seeing how engaged the kids were was immensely gratifying for the three teachers. “It was reinforcing to know that we’d spent our time and energies well,” Heinemann says.

When the semester ended, the unit was over. Rawitsch had no more use for The Oregon Trail, so he deleted it from the time-share program. As a souvenir of sorts, he printed out the giant roll of code and stowed it in his apartment. It would be years before anyone braved the trail again.

At the time, the federal government was nervous about competition from the Soviets. To keep America’s kids ahead, the government handed out massive grants for innovative approaches to teaching. And educators in Minneapolis-St. Paul were ideally positioned to receive them; computer companies such as IBM, UNIVAC, Control Data Corporation, and Honeywell all had offices in the area, making it a kind of Midwestern Silicon Valley.

In 1973, a man named Dale LaFrenz unwittingly entered the history of The Oregon Trail. A former math teacher, LaFrenz was hired as assistant director of a new statewide body called the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. MECC, as it was known, was tasked with providing computers and computer training to schools and colleges throughout the state. At the time, Rawitsch was inquiring about a job. LaFrenz installed Rawitsch as an entry-level liaison for local community colleges and explained that MECC was building a library of educational software to be used by Minnesota schools. LaFrenz let Rawitsch know that he was open to his ideas.

Over Thanksgiving weekend in 1974, Rawitsch exhumed his old yellow roll of code. Looking at the game again, he knew he could do better. Over the next year, he would thicken the plot, using facts he found from the diaries of Oregon Trail survivors. He discovered how often settlers ran out of water. He tallied the ways people died, and he took note of how Native Americans, contrary to popular belief, were actually quite generous with survival tips, letting settlers know whether it was safe to cross a river, for example. With his old friends’ consent, Rawitsch factored these details into a new version of the game and spent a holiday weekend punching the code back into a teletype—this time one connected to 1,500 terminals across the state. Suddenly, thousands of students were accessing The Oregon Trail every month. With the exception of a primitive version of email, which allowed students to pass messages from one teletype to another, The Oregon Trail had become the most popular software program in Minnesota.

dpa/Landov

By the late seventies, RadioShack, Commodore, and Atari were debuting sleek new personal computers. Of all the brands, MECC chose to support the Apple II—a durable little PC produced by two scrappy unknowns named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. In 1978, MECC delivered 500 Apple II computers to Minnesota public schools, marking one of the burgeoning computer giant’s first big sales.

Conveniently for The Oregon Trail, Apple’s software came packaged on diskettes, allowing the game to be easily shared and uploaded onto new school computers. Other state school systems, envious of Minnesota’s technical progressiveness, began purchasing binders of software from MECC. Suddenly, The Oregon Trail was in nearly 5,000 school districts nationwide.

With Rawitsch acting as a consultant, MECC’s young programmers, many of whom had played The Oregon Trail as kids, redesigned the game with basic four-color graphics. Now it was their turn to help shape the next generation’s view of computers. One twenty-something programmer tweaked the calamities, adding the grim announcement “You have died of dysentery.” (Today, it’s a popular T-shirt.) In subsequent versions, MECC staffers were recruited to sing popular folk tunes of the 1840s, like “Vive La Compagnie,” whose melodies were recorded and translated into beeps and buzzes to provide a soundtrack for the journey. Later, to aid in character renderings, MECC’s up-for-anything employees dressed in period costume (coonskin caps, hoop skirts) while an in-house videographer filmed them in front of a green screen. The game had come a long way from the text-only teletype version, which simply rang a congratulatory bell when players reached the promised land.

Through the ’80s and early ’90s, MECC dominated the so-called edutainment market. Its roster of games included hits like Word Munchers, Games With Words, and Spellevator—all programs that taught kids basic spelling or grammar through simulated adventures, like evading pixelated monsters or malevolent vacuum cleaners. But the bizarre storylines were only part of MECC’s formula for success. The real reason MECC games had become such a hot item in classrooms was their ability to give students immediate feedback. Instead of waiting for a teacher to grade papers or check a student’s work, the roaming Troggle that ate you in Word Munchers instantly confirmed your mistake. The Oregon Trail, which pioneered this technique, remained the company’s bestselling game. Its sales were so strong that in 1991 the State of Minnesota sold the company to a venture capital fund for $5.25 million. When MECC went public three years later, The Oregon Trail represented a third of its $30 million–plus annual revenue.

To celebrate the game’s enduring success, MECC threw a jamboree at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., in February 1995. In the company of a live buffalo named Cody, Dillenberger, Heinemann, and Rawitsch—who’d left MECC five years earlier—were presented with matching jean jackets emblazoned with a logo that read trailheads. The former roommates signed a map of the real Oregon Trail and received the latest version of the game, The Oregon Trail II, which featured more roles for women and minorities, plus a dozen new ways to die (“accidental gunshot” and “gangrene” among them).

MECC’s future seemed rosy. Edutainment had become a $500 million industry, and profit-hungry corporations started circling around makers of educational software. Not long after the jamboree, publisher and distributor SoftKey International Inc. acquired MECC for $370 million in stock options. A month later, SoftKey snapped up the Learning Company, and in 1998, Brøderbund—the original creator of Carmen Sandiego—as well. But the results weren’t pretty. “SoftKey basically gutted the research and development side and put all its money into marketing,” said Scot Osterweil, a former designer for Brøderbund.

SoftKey, which renamed itself the Learning Company after the acquisition, axed popular games like Reader Rabbit and Madeline for not returning Oregon Trail-level profits. The company cut dozens of jobs from MECC’s Minneapolis headquarters, forcing it to shut down in 1999. Later that year, toy manufacturer Mattel, which dreamed of letting Barbie rough it in The Oregon Trail, bought the Learning Company for more than $3.5 billion. Shorn of its talented staff, however, the Learning Company began hemorrhaging money. In 2000, Mattel posted a net loss of $430 million.

Despite all this, The Oregon Trail has endured. The iPhone version, released in 2009, has been downloaded more than three million times. The game’s Facebook page is thriving. Well-meaning parodies—like Fall Out Boy Trail, in which the band tours the country in an ox-towed van, and Organ Trail, in which players dodge zombies in a postapocalyptic landscape—abound. As Jon-Paul C. Dyson, director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, puts it, “The Oregon Trail taught generations of students not only about the history of westward migrations but also how to use computers.” He adds, “Any game that can survive so long in so many different variations has to be important.”

Today, the game’s three creators are still friendly. Heinemann teaches after-school and summer enrichment programs in math and chess. Dillenberger recently retired after nearly 40 years in Minneapolis public schools. As for Rawitsch, he lives in the Chicago area and works as a consultant to educational tech companies. And he’s still surprised by how much those two weeks of coding—three friends huddled in a janitor’s closet, programming at night—influenced his life. “The game has become part of our history for far longer than any of us could have expected,” Rawitsch says, laughing. “Being introduced as a co-inventor of The Oregon Trail has been a great icebreaker over the years.”

For all the game’s success, the roommates never made much money off The Oregon Trail. But they’re OK with that. “It’s become kind of a joke among us,” Rawitsch says now. “So many others had a hand making it what it became that we never think, ‘Gee, we got ripped off!’”

“We’re in awe of the effect The Oregon Trail has had on so many people’s lives,” Dillenberger adds. “How could we have any regrets?”

This story originally appeared in mental_floss magazine. You can get a free issue here or check out our iPad edition.

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July 29, 2013 - 1:20pm

The Making Of: Angry Birds | Features | Edge Online

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The Making Of: Angry Birds

Edge Staff at 12:29pm July 28 2013

Angry Birds is a feathered phenomenon. Rovio’s series serves as an envoy for the game industry, an app that people who don’t play games will happily while away their commuting hours with, but one that has also found a home on the phones of thousands of console gamers.

While it must credit its core design to the countless similar physics-based Flash games that preceded it, Rovio’s unprecedented success was far from simply a case of being in the App Store at the right time. The secret to its success is hard to pin down, but intuitive controls, satisfyingly bouncy physics and a level of polish far beyond many of its peers certainly helped. Of all its ingredients, perhaps it owes most to designer Jaakko Iisalo’s crisp designs, which proved appealing enough not only to inspire an entire game, but also move beyond the small screen to the big one, adorn lunchboxes, and even earn the trust of the famously protective LucasArts.

“Yeah, Angry Birds Star Wars was a huge stepping stone,” says co-founder Niklas Hed, pausing just a beat before delivering his punchline, “for LucasFilm.” From any other company, a comment like that might seem a touch bullish, but the Angry Birds series has sold 1.7 billion copies across its lifetime, which earns Rovio the right to puff out its chest feathers now and again. When Iisalo sketched those first infuriated birds, however, Rovio was far from the success story that it is today.

In early 2009, the studio was still doing subcontracting work for other companies and had downsized from 50 people to just 12. Having spent more than a year on a big contract, only to have it cancelled through no fault of its own, Rovio was in desperate need of a hit. This was an opportunity, those remaining 12 reasoned, to create something all their own.

“For me, that time was sort of a hibernation,” says Hed. “We took only selected projects and aimed to learn from them. We did a lot of prototyping, such as using the electronic compass of phones in games. That time taught us how technology is combined with games in a natural way, and how it isn’t.”

Rovio co-founder Niklas Hed.

And with over 50 games already under its belt, the studio hardly lacked experience. But this time, the team decided to approach the creative process differently, aiming to create a brand that could span more than just a single game. It knew it wanted to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, and to take advantage of the growing popularity of touchscreen-enabled smartphones, but exactly how wasn’t yet clear.

“We had already created several games, but because of the business and the environment back then, we really couldn’t see what we were able to do,” says Hed. “We’d been thinking about a ballistic tank game in the vein of Scorched Earth.”

Rovio had recognised the growing popularity of physics-based puzzlers in the casual space, but at the time decided military equipment didn’t have the mass appeal it was looking for.

“I started creating game concepts and pitching them to the management. Angry Birds was one of these concepts,” Iisalo says. “People didn’t really get the early game mechanics I suggested, but the character design was something that everybody liked: an angry flock of birds smashing through structures. After dozens of different ideas, we found the right style of game and started production. Of course, that’s when we realised the birds needed an opponent…”

Sickly green pigs wouldn’t have been an obvious choice to an outsider, but Iisalo had been sketching swine since childhood. And so through his own internal logic, the birds found their nemeses. Other elements of the game couldn’t get away with such abstraction, however. That intuitive catapult, for example, wasn’t always the mechanism through which the birds were granted flight: the initial version simply had players flick them in the direction they wanted to launch. It sounds simple enough, but the team quickly realised that the casual audience it was attempting to court didn’t share their natural gaming instincts. It needed something more.

One of Jaakko Iisalo’s Angry Birds sketches.

A catapult seemed intuitive, backed by the punchy physics that power the game. But while the physics has even inspired the likes of Wired to have a go at analysing the maths behind it, accurate modelling isn’t Rovio’s biggest concern. “There is basic maths behind it, and we couldn’t have ice breaking rock, because that wouldn’t make sense,”  Tuomo Lehtinen, VP of games, tells us of a title that has flightless birds and green pigs, ”but the feel is the most important thing.” Angry Birds respects the laws of physics, then, if not the laws of nature.

“Angry Birds ended up being the pet project of the whole studio,” says Hed. “The core team was small, but everyone was working on it to a degree. We loved doing it. It really kicked our confidence to a whole new level – we loved playing the game ourselves, and there was a definite feeling of things being on a roll again and the beginning of a new era.”

But polishing that early prototype took a long time, and work was hampered by a lack of resources. The skeletal team was working on several projects at once, and so had to divide its attention across them all. “At certain points it was causing delays [to Angry Birds],” says Lehtinen. “It’s really hard for a designer to create levels when the programmer is too busy on another project to finish the engine!” And the initial budget that Rovio had set aside was rapidly depleted, almost causing the development to be cancelled.

“The early results weren’t quite what we wanted,” says Hed. “It was surprisingly challenging to make the game world feel real, make all the blocks feel like glass, stone, ice, and so forth – organic. The birds kept bouncing in an unnatural way and the materials just didn’t feel right.”

All the hold-ups proved beneficial, though, giving the team time to iterate its gameplay and the tech behind it.

“If you play something long enough you start to notice what irritates you,” Lehtinen explains. “I was iterating camera controls almost until the last day of production. That was something that had to be perfect; it had to feel really, really nice. And I think one of the big reasons the game has proved so popular is because it doesn’t annoy you at all. We were able to iron out all of the quirks.”

Well, almost all the quirks. Play Angry Birds today and the experience is markedly different to the one that first launched in 2009. The iterative process on which the game was built has continued throughout its lifetime, resulting in the few clunky elements that did manage to slip by being smoothed off via regular updates. The core of the gameplay, though, remains unchanged.

When that first version launched, though, Rovio was apprehensive. “When we published the game, frankly it felt like was it was just one game among many,” admits Hed. “I definitely felt that Angry Birds was the best game we had ever done, but there was this nagging feeling that it wasn’t enough. We had done some research half a year earlier, and it always seemed to come down to the marketing – or lack of it.

“We had been working through mobile operators without a direct contact to the consumers up until then, and now we were entering the App Store, where the competition was really hard. Getting the critical mass of fans was really difficult, and if you can’t manage to do that, it doesn’t matter how good the game is. But in the end, we managed to catch the wave and it became one of the reasons why you should get a smartphone.”

Over the years, Rovio has toyed with the format. Its first major deviation was Seasons, a release Rovio had been planning for a long time. Originally released as Angry Birds Halloween in October 2010, and closely followed by a selection of Christmas levels, Seasons now includes all manner of holiday-themed stages, even one based on the relatively obscure Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. Such wide-reaching cultural references are demonstrative of the broad appeal of Rovio’s games, but underneath its inoffensive exterior lies a much harder game. It’s easy to dismiss Rovio as a kind of one-hit wonder, trading on multiple variations of the same game, but Seasons was a brand-new challenge presented in a familiar skin.

And Angry Birds Rio, which followed in March 2011, was further evidence of a company unwilling to rely on simply rehashing past successes. Being a tie-in with 20th Century Fox’s animated film about exotic bird smuggling helped the game introduce new enemies, animated backgrounds, new birds, an ally in the form of bulldog Luiz, and even boss fights. It featured a new physics engine as well and, according to Rovio’s figures, is unique among the series in having a large following who only play that version. As marketing for the film, it didn’t do badly either: exit polls in the US revealed that the majority of moviegoers heard about it through the game.

But it was Angry Birds Space that deviated furthest from that initial template, gifting the birds prolonged flying time as gravity was dialled down. And, just like the first game, it almost didn’t happen.

“We felt that the first prototype was way too hard, and decided not to continue with it,” admits Hed. “But Jaakko [Iisalo] kept polishing it, and I remember one session we saw the redesigned gameplay and all of a sudden it made sense.”

“It took a lot of time to make it as simple as we wanted,” explains Lehtinen. “At first, it felt really hardcore: space and sci-fi are dark themes, and the player could shoot essentially anywhere. It was the hardest game to make right.”

But that sci-fi excursion got the studio thinking: what if there was a tie-in opportunity to be found along the lines of Rio? Rovio approached a number of companies, including LucasArts, with its idea, trying to get a feel for what would be required to make it happen. LucasArts was interested – it lacked a high-profile mobile presence, and the concept sketches Rovio’s artists had put together made it clear that this tie-in would be far from a half-hearted parody. Rovio and the notoriously protective LucasArts found a mutual respect in the careful way each handled its creations.

“To be honest, I had my worries about how rigid [LucasArt’s] approval process and brand guidelines would be, but in the end everything went much smoother than expected,” says Angry Birds Star Wars producer  Mikko Häkkinen. “We worked with some great people who understood how important the Angry Birds IP is for us, and were willing to respect our wishes and viewpoints.

“It ended up being more of a collaboration where they offered us guidance on lore and things, and came up with some great ideas for matching different characters and story points.”

And unlike the original game, Star Wars suffered from an excess of interest, with so many Star Wars fans in the company that almost everyone wanted to work on it – even in their spare time. “We ended up with such a vast amount of graphics assets that it was really hard to choose the best ones and settle on one style,” laughs Häkkinen.

It created new fans, too, both within Rovio and among its players, and just maybe convinced some of those last few hold-outs to give Angry Birds a go – after all, there are few things in life that can’t be made more appealing with the familiar scream of a TIE fighter’s engines. Yet Angry Birds Star Wars only scratches the surface of the licence’s potential and, Hed teases, how far that relationship gets taken is between Rovio and LucasArts. And likely subject to some tight non-disclosure agreements. But whatever happens next, the Angry Birds series has never been in ruder health – it’s already found its way to PC, social networks and even PS3/360, and looks to be in no danger of losing its momentum anytime soon, either. But could Rovio really ever top Star Wars when it comes to tie-ins?

“There is an old joke in Rovio of combining the birds and pigs with the He-Man universe,” Häkkinen teases. “You really don’t want to see the concept art [we] made for those muscular bird heroes in thongs, though.”

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When players buy your game before it's done: Expert tips on alpha funding

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By Mike Rose
On the face of it, alpha funding sounds like a relatively easy-to-implement ride. You develop part of your game, you put what you’ve created onto the internet with a price tag, and then use the money that comes in to fund the rest of the game’s development.

Of course, anyone with even the slightest idea of what this process entails knows that there’s nothing simple about it. There’s frequent updates to implment; there’s multiple methods through which to offer your alpha; there’s community interaction to keep them keen. If anything, you have to wonder whether offering an alpha build of your game could potentially distract you from actually making the damn thing.

But do the pros of alpha funding your game outweigh the cons? As part of Gamasutra’s Alternative Funding Week, I spoke with numerous developers who have tackled alpha funding campaigns, or are in the process of alpha funding a game, about the ups and downs of such a campaign.

Dean Hall - DayZ

Dean “Rocket” Hall is best known as the creator of the DayZ mod for Arma II. Hall originally built the open-world zombie mod as a side-project, and released an alpha build for free.

When the mod seriously took off (to the point where his mod put the three-year-old Arma 2 on top of Steam’s best-seller charts), Hall realized the full potential of the concept, and began working with Arma studio Bohemia on a full, standalone release for DayZ, reworked from the ground up.

Now Hall stands on the precipice of his second alpha-build launch in as many years, as the developer plans to also release this standalone version as a paid alpha.

“I think the biggest benefit is that you can get real momentum going for your game at the gestation period of the design,” he says of going down the alpha route. “Without doing this, the game can only become ‘hot’ when the design is already locked down and finished.”

He cites the recent Kerbal Space Program as a great example of an alpha release that has benefitted from this. “It became popular very early in its development, and allowed the scope and the direction of the game to adjust proportionally to this,” he notes. “If they had made the game completely first, I don’t think its scope and direction would resemble at all where it is today.”

But Hall is well aware that there are numerous disadvantages to alpha funding too, telling me that whether you should opt for alpha funding on your game or not all depends on the type of project that you’re working on.

“The primary [disadvantage] is probably that you fail to impress the community and so the sales stop in their tracks,” he says. “I think another tendency is to rush the project out either through meeting fan mania or financial pressures.”

Alpha funding can also mean that the development team becomes overwhelmed by success, and cannot cope with the pace of development, he reasons.

“A good example of that is possibly Project Zomboid — they faced really tough issues during their development (that they overcome and then some),” he notes. “I can’t help but think they were caused by the tremendous pressures they were under to succeed and develop at pace due to strong early interest from the community.”

There’s also the fact that a lot of people who pay for the alpha builds don’t completely understand the nature of game development, and misinterpret what the point of an alpha build is: “The best example there has to be Prison Architect [from Introversion]. They actually had to price their product such as to discourage people from buying it!”

(Don’t worry, we’ll be jumping back to Project Zomboid later on when we speak to the development team, while more in-depth discussion regarding Prison Architect is coming up later this week as part of a different article.)

And there was an added problem for Hall too, due to the nature of his development cycle. Since Hall built the DayZ mod first, this gave outside parties oodles of time to notice the surge of popularity for open-world zombie survival games, and attempt to recreate that setting before Hall could even get his own operations up and running.

We’re talking, of course, about The War Z, which was brutally panned by critics and gamers, and has since had its name changed. I asked Hall if, in hindsight, he would have done anything differently with regards to his alpha approach.

“How many words is the article?” he answers. “I could write a book on things I would do differently. But realistically, I think what matters most now are the things I think we did right.”

“One of those was opting to develop what best met the vision, no matter what that meant for timeframes and community reaction,” he continues. “We felt that the game engine needed to be radically changed in order to deliver the right experience. That meant enduring tough times.”

The most important things he’d do differently if he could go back essentially revolve around “more planning before leaping in, no matter how tempting it is just to get started coding.”

“I also think my messaging was confusing at times,” he admits. “In hindsight I could have been much clearer and more professional in my public image. But perhaps that’s part of the charm.”

Despite all this, Hall isn’t worried about clones, and has no qualms about the alpha funding method. “I like to think we’re trying to compete based on being an innovator, not just the innovation we’ve already done,” he notes. “While someone is developing ideas based on what we did last year, we like to think we’re developing new things.”

Dean Hall’s advice for studios thinking about going for alpha funding:

Plan for three different scenarios: big success, success, and failure. If you have a big hit and you aren’t ready, it’s very hard for your project not to get speed wobbles.

Carefully examine your pricing structure. Consider your audience, what consumer behavior you want, and then finally how people will perceive that. People’s perception is really important here and blowback is easy to get.

Make the design fun. People can handle bugs, missing content, and all manner of other things. But if the heart of the game isn’t there, and you find yourself constantly having to explain away “in the full version you’ll be able to do x…” when watching someone play it then people won’t get the game. Kerbal Space Program was excellent because when I played it, I thought “why has someone not made this before?” I could instantly see what they were trying to do, despite the fact it crashed within five minutes of me loading it.

Get the base foundation right. If you want to do multiplayer, you’re really going to have to do it at the start. Multiplayer in a patch? It’s unlikely and you’ll just end up upsetting the fanbase.

Markus Persson - Minecraft

It’s fair to say that Markus “Notch” Persson is the figurehead of the recent alpha funding movement in video games.

After Persson put up his game Minecraft as an alpha-funded title back in 2009, the game’s popularity snowballed to the point where the Swedish developer was pulling in thousands of sales every day.

Of course, everyone in the industry now knows of Minecraft’s roaring success, and much of that can be put down to the way in which Persson initially offered the game as an alpha build. His Mojang studio clearly still believes in the alpha route too, given that its second game, Scrolls, recently launched as an alpha.

“I don’t think there’s a magical best time for doing this,” he tells me of alpha funding. “All projects are different, and things fit in on different stages.”

“For a game like Minecraft, it makes sense to release early and fund early,” he continues, “but for other games (such as story-heavy games) it makes no sense to release an incomplete product. Then it might be better to look into something like Kickstarter if you absolutely need money up front to fund it.”

From Persson’s perspective, alpha funding is perfect for developers who have built up a close relationship with their fans, to the point where the fans become as excited about the possibilities of your game as you yourself. Of course, even in this instance, it’s always worth keeping in mind that you might still fail.

“The benefits are that you don’t have to rely on a publisher, and that you can get people passionate about the game early on,” he notes. “The added pressure of people already having paid for the game can help motivate you to work on it as well.”

And Persson cites one of the same issues that DayZ’s Hall brought up — that if your game isn’t very fun from the get-go, “you can’t really stop working on it and move on to something that actually might be fun, unless you have very understanding fans.”

I asked Persson whether, if Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general had been as massively popularity back in 2009 as it is now, would he have considered going down that route instead of alpha funding?

“No,” he replies. “I think the business model of ‘give us money now, and we might give you a full game in six to eighteen months’ is a bit shady, personally.”

“I’m much more comfortable saying ‘give us a smaller amount of money now and you get the game as it exists now, and when (and if) the game finishes, you get all updates for free.’ As I said, this doesn’t work for all games, but it works great for a game like Minecraft.”

From his experience with his Minecraft alpha funding project, Persson says that the number one thing to keep in mind when going down the alpha funding route is to make sure you clearly communicate exactly what you are selling from the moment you put it up for sale, what exists in the alpha build, and what might change in the future.

Chris Simpson - Project Zomboid

Another massive alpha funding success story is Project Zomboid, an isometric open-world zombie survival game that has been in development for a couple of year snow.

Chris Simpson, one of the founders of development team The Indie Stone, says that the key factors to take note of when considering alpha funding for your game are whether the genre and style of your project will work well in an alpha setting.

“Sandbox games, or multiplayer-focused games (or even more so, both) are definitely the best suited to alpha funding,” he reasons. “This is because the first experience of the game is not as highly valued as it would be with a heavily narrative-driven game, for example.”

“An equivalent would be going to see an early cut of a movie with incomplete CGI sequences and green-screens,” he continues. “It would ruin the experience, not let the player get invested in the story, and ultimately not be satisfying.”

Without the sandbox or community-driven elements, the number of surprises is reduced, and therefore someone coming back to an alpha build months later might not find much to talk about.

If you do have a game that fits the bill, though, Simpson argues that alpha funding can be the greatest thing for both your game and your studio’s creativity.

“It puts indie devs in a position where they can be much more realistically ambitious in the games they want to make,” he notes.

“Before we were aware of alpha funding, we just wouldn’t have ever considered any remotely sandboxy game. By that I mean the game we want to make ultimately, perhaps years down the line from today. The coding time, the art demands, the writing for that envisioned game would be so monstrous a development time [so as to make] funding it full time until completion an impossibility.”

Without alpha funding, The Indie Stone would have opted to create a multiplayer platformer for Xbox Live Indie Games instead of Project Zomboid. How fortunate for both the team and the players that they chose to go all-in!

“As long as, obviously, you know you’re capable of ultimately making the thing some day, and can keep moving toward that goal, then you can have as lofty ambition as you like,” Simpson says. “That’s quite liberating. And if you do well enough to expand, you may get there quicker than you set out to do.”

I asked Simpson why a studio would choose to go with alpha funding rather than crowdfunding, especially given just how popular Kickstarter is these days.

“Kickstarter is the better route for those kind of games where the backers don’t want to have the game or story spoilt before it’s finished,” he reasons.

But he also notes that using a combination of Kickstarter and alpha funding can potentially have great effect. “If you do a Kickstarter then do alpha funding, then Kickstarter is a great way to bring attention to the game as well as fund it, and directs people to [Steam] Greenlight too,” he says.

Simpson’s tips for those studios looking to jump on the alpha funding bandwagon are as follows:

Listen to your community. Let it steer your priority list of planned features and take on board popular ideas. But at the same time, keep to the principles of your core game idea. Immerse yourself into the community, even if there are bad spots. The good times are good! Support the YouTubers and streamers as they are your life blood. Modding is awesome.

The price point on the first version should be cheaper than every version thereafter, both morally and also for the understanding and support of your community if there are bumps in the road. They are paying alpha price.

DRM seems to make no difference at all from what we’ve seen.

Keep updates regular. …But don’t let the (sometimes rather intense) pressure get to you with updates, and hold [the updates] back a few days if it needs it. The code has to evolve over years, as the game design often does also, so don’t be afraid to have to rip something major out and replace it — otherwise repeatedly bending code to your — or the community’s — will takes its toll on the stability of the game. Maintain multiple branches of the game for different severity levels of development, and merge changes.

David Rosen - Overgrowth

Wolfire’s Overgrowth is easily one of the longest-running alpha funding campaigns for a video game to date.

Anybody who has preordered the game since 2008 has been able to grab the latest alpha build of the game, and Wolfire has now been providing regular alpha build updates for nearly five straight years.

“Alpha funding is more appropriate for games that are driven by mechanics, and less appropriate for those driven by content,” Wolfire’s David Rosen tells me. “Action or strategy games usually find the fun pretty early on, and progressively expand and refine it, so they are engaging to users at any stage of development.”

He echoes the sentiment of other developers that I talked to, stating that both multiplayer games and procedural single-player games are good candidates for alpha funding.

“Dota 2, Don’t Starve, and FTL are good examples of this approach,” he says. “Puzzle or story games don’t usually work as well with alpha funding, because they are only meant to be experienced once, and usually don’t become fun until the game is mostly complete.”

For Wolfire, alpha funding has helped the team unify its Overgrowth development and marketing.

“Development milestones actually become interesting to press and to fans, because they can actually try out the changes immediately,” he reasons. “It also helps grow a community around the game, which can provide feedback, report bugs, create mods, and evangelize the game to new users.”

And, of course, it’s helped that getting pre-orders in so early has helped fund Wolfire’s game without the need for much capital up-front.

I asked Rosen whether the length of his alpha funding campaign has caused any backlash from fans. He says that as long as his studio is constantly looking to improve the game and release new stuff for pre-orderers, the fans mainly stay happy.

“There are always some who are impatient,” he says, “but most of them realize that we are working as hard as we can.”

Rosen says that alpha funding was a better route for Overgrowth than Kickstarter, since the latter takes a cut, gives you nothing if you don’t reach your target, and only runs for a finite period of time.

As for Overgrowth, Rosen says that “Let’s Play” videos have played a key role in the game’s steady sales build-up.

“It is helpful if your game is interesting to watch as well as to play,” he reasons. “Similarly, videos are a great way to demonstrate the changes in each update, especially if you put some effort into making them entertaining to watch! I try to make sure that each video concisely shows the changes for existing players, but could also provide a compelling intro for someone who has never heard of the game.”

Jamie Cheng - Don’t Starve

Klei Entertainment’s Don’t Starve is an interesting case study in alpha funding. The game was originally released as a paid alpha via the Chrome Web Store, and then became one of the first “Beta” games to launch on Steam, even before Steam’s “Early Access” functionality was launched (essentially allowing alpha and beta games to be sold on Steam.)

“In general I think games that are inherently replayable are more likely to be successful as an alpha/beta as players can return to the game and enjoy the changes as they’re made,” Klei’s Jamie Cheng explains.

“Making sweeping changes once the game is in the hands of the public was difficult, but we did it nonetheless,” he says. “We spent huge efforts to let our players know what we were doing and why, and throughout the development major features and changes to systems were made.”

Getting on Steam with his pre-release build wasn’t too difficult, thanks ot Klei’s past dealings with Steam, first as an indie with Eets, and then with Shank, Shank 2, and Mark of the Ninja.

“Somewhere in there we approached Valve and discussed testing the waters with the game on Steam,” he says. “This was quite a few months prior to Early-Access Beta being a real thing on Steam — we certainly didn’t know it would be a ‘thing’ yet.”

Carsten Boserup - Interstellar Marines

Another studio that has taken a similar funding route is Zero Point Software’s Interstellar Marines — although Zero Point has waded just a tad bit longer into development before offering early access than most studios I talked to.

Interstellar Marines was first announced back in 2005, and after several years, players could pay to become “Spearheads” or “Frontliners,” and receive alpha builds of the game.

Earlier this month, the game went up on Steam via Early Access, meaning that you can now preorder the game and grab an early build before its release.

If you’re unable to find a publisher for your game, or you simply want to be able to work more quickly on your game, then alpha funding is definitely worth considering, Zero Point’s Carsten Boserup suggests.

This second point in particular is something that Boserup is keen to stress. “Alpha funding can help enormously with speeding up development of a project,” he says. “Handled correctly, it can result in a positive spiral where more funding results in quicker updates, which results in more funding.”

“Additionally, being funded by players releases a developer from the binds a publisher may put around it — freeing you to make the game you want to make, rather than one you are forced to make.”

“Alpha funding your game can also help with marketing,” he adds, “as it can draw in a large crowd of players who spread the word through social media channels and their friends.”

Carsten stresses the same point that Minecraft’s Persson put across when it comes to the most important element of alpha funding: “Be clear. Absolutely, unambiguously, massively clear on what it is your game is offering today, what you’re planning to add in the near future and what your vision is for your game.”

“Do not leave anything on your store page or media which could be misinterpreted,” he adds. “Some people will still unfortunately miss the message about your game being an alpha, but you can always refer them back to the store page. Make your vision clear as well, because this is what most people are purchasing from you — not the game as it is today.”

And if you’re going to go through Steam Greenlight in the hope of getting a Steam Early Access campaign for your game, Carsten suggests that you need to have a large and active community first.

“If at all possible hire at least one full-time community manager (we have two) and give them the leeway and tools to work with, and for, the community,” he says. “Not only will they build up the momentum and mass you need to be voted up on Greenlight, but they will also remove a lot of pressure and time-consuming activities from your job as a developer.”

“If you feel you have the game and the community to be greenlit, then absolutely go for it. But please do remember it is a long process, it’s hard work, and you still have to focus on creating a game which lives up to the expectations of what your players are buying into. This is no mean feat, but if you manage to achieve the alpha funding you require, then it can make bringing your incredible new game to fruition that much easier!”

Richard Perrin - Kairo

Kairo is a 3D exploration game that focuses on puzzles and minimalism — you can learn more about it from this earlier Gamasutra interview.

The game’s developer Richard Perrin chose to go down the alpha funding path prior to its release, and found that there was an obvious point during development at which he could safely offer an alpha build to paying players.

“It’s going to be different from game to game, but essentially once you’re at a point where there’s at least an hour’s worth of gameplay and there’s enough meat in there for players to give you meaningful feedback,” he says is when alpha funding comes into its own.

“I did it for an adventure game which isn’t necessarily a good fit, but it actually worked really well for me.”

“The most obvious benefit is feedback,” he continues. “To make a great game I think getting constant feedback from both players and other developers is absolutely essential. An alpha funding program means that feedback is going to be really easy to get from players, otherwise you have to rely on specially run testing sessions or going to trade shows.”

As a small indie, alpha funding also has other pro points. Offering an alpha build meant that the press was suddenly interested in posting up previews, while players began sharing options on forums and the like. Essentially, the release of the alpha build led to many more tongues wagging.

Offering an alpha build also helped to keep Perrin on focus. Suddenly he had customers, and therefore the pressure to deliever — although this turned out to be a double-edged sword.

“I could no longer just abandon the game or work on other stuff as I had people I owed the finished game too,” he notes. “If anything that ended being the biggest down side of the project because I had some real lows working on that game but because of the alpha funding I had no choice but to keep plodding onwards.”

Why did Perrin choose to go with alpha funding rather than the increasingly popular Kickstarter route?

“It’s not something I’d personally be comfortable with doing myself,” he says of crowdfunding. “Firstly I think Kickstarters are really unfair on the players as they ask you to buy a game based on the promise of what it could be rather than what is actually made.”

He continues, “A lot of the most badly made games were put together by teams that thought they were making something good or at least trying, it’s hard to tell until you’re finished where you’ve landed. I would feel like a con artist if I took money based on what I hoped to make and couldn’t deliver it.”

And on a practical level, Perrin says that he’s not enough of a self-promoter to run a successful Kickstarter anyway.

“I’m pretty hardwired to be humble about my work and I don’t have the personality to spend an entire month pushing how awesome my games is going to be,” he says. “I think by day two I’d be fed up of hearing my own pitch and wouldn’t be able to stomach keep spamming news sites, Twitter accounts, forums, etc.”

As for the ins and outs of alpha funding, Perrins suggest that studios looking to start their own campaign should heavily consider the logistics beforehand.

“Have a decent payment provider and download service,” he says. “Obviously you want to be on Steam but whether you can get on there or not, speak to the Humble Store to handle your direct sales.”

“Tell people about your game without being an obnoxious spammer,” he continues. “Take all feedback graciously and don’t get shitty with customers who have complaints. Be vague about release dates because you’ll probably miss them and better to have been vague than to break promises.”

Chris England - Xenonauts

An upcoming turn-based strategy game inspired by 1994 release X-COM: UFO Defense (aka UFO: Enemy Unknown in Europe), Xenonauts is another game that is currently in the middle of its alpha funding campaign.

Chris England of Xenonauts studio Goldhawk Interactive tells me that “these days, studios really need something playable and interesting before they start taking money, unless they are already established studios.”

“It’s not that you lose sales by accepting preorders too early,” he clarifies, “but once people have paid for the game you have an added responsibility to keep them informed about the progress of the game, to take their views on board and ultimately to pay the money back if you decide to end development before completion.”

This in turn leads to a reduction in the agility of your studio early in game development, England reasons, and also limits the size of your community to those who have paid you money.

“We probably started taking money too early for Xenonauts,” he admits. “If we use alpha funding on our next title, we’ll definitely have a few months of free development on it to generate some buzz and create a community around the game before we start charging for it.”

The main benefit of alpha funding a game “is the extra money it brings in,” England continues. “You get access to more funds and can make a better game, which brings in more money and gets your customers a better game at the end of it.

England describes the same “virtuous circle” that Zero Point’s Boserup described: If you can get it right, you find yourself in the position where players are paying, the money allows you to make the game faster and better, and even more players sign up as a result.

“We’ve been very fortunate with Xenonauts, as there is absolutely no way we’d have been able to get to where we are now without the support of our community and the financial backing they have provided,” he adds. “And most of them seem very happy with the results too, so I’d consider us to be a case where it has worked well!”

Xenonauts is an interesting case, in that the Goldhawk studio utilized Kickstarter alongside alpha funding.

“The customers can be very different for the two different sales channels, so in my book it’s a great way to reach new audiences,” England notes. “In many ways, I actually think Kickstarter funding is superior due to the absence of the pitfalls of alpha funding, but there’s no reason at all not to mix the two.”

And what exactly are those pitfalls?

“Alpha funding is one of the easiest methods to generate funding, I think — but it can be a bit chicken-and-egg if you don’t have much money to start with,” England says. “Most people won’t invest their money until you have something worth playing, but often you’ll need money to make something worth playing in the first place.”

And then even when you’ve got started, the problems don’t stop there. “What happens if the preorder money dries up and you can’t afford to keep developing the game, but you’ve not delivered a finished product to the people who have already bought it?

“That would be a terrible position to be in for all concerned. Kickstarter is all-or-nothing funding, so that can’t happen, but it is a real danger with alpha funding and there’s no easy way out of that situation.”

At the end of the day, England reasons that “there isn’t really a way around it either — you just have to trust your instincts, sink a lot of time into the project and hope you get enough pre-orders to let you finish the game.”

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