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OnLive lost: how the paradise of streaming games was undone by one man's ego

theverge.com • Archive • Like & Archive • Like

“I’m the one that brought you here. I’m the one that ultimately made decisions, and I’m the one that ultimately takes responsibility. So I am sorry, and it didn’t end up exactly as we’d hoped.”

Two Fridays ago, Steve Perlman told the 200 employees of cloud gaming company OnLive that it was all his fault. He thanked them for their hard work, and then he had HR show them the door with no severance pay.

Then, through a legal insolvency tool, Perlman transferred all of OnLive’s assets to a brand new company and took over as CEO, hiring back only a skeleton crew to keep the ship afloat.

Employees were mad as hell, but not just because they’d lost their jobs and benefits without warning. Former staffers told The Verge that though Steve Perlman was the technical genius behind OnLive, his ego was the company’s undoing.

At the 2009 Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, OnLive was the talk of the town. Steve Perlman, the brains behind QuickTime, WebTV, and facial capture technology Mova, said he’d found a way to stream computer games over the internet at maximum graphical settings. Skeptics were everywhere — one long-term employee remembers how GDC attendees tried to pry open the booth walls to look for proof the demos had been fudged — but the idea was quite sound.

The actual game would run on a powerful server miles away, which the user would remotely control, and that server would stream compressed video frames of the action back to the user, letting them watch the game in motion. Yes, it could play Crysis, and that was actually one of the original games the company let attendees try at the show, streaming from servers 50-odd miles away in Santa Clara, California. The promise was greater still: since OnLive could harness the power of server farms, yet run on practically any device with a solid internet connection and the ability to decode video, the company could deliver those high-end Windows PC games to a Mac, an iPad, or even a cellular phone.

OnLive was a media darling from day one. “It was so exciting watching the Twitter traffic for mentions of OnLive that day. Initially, we were forwarding news articles to each other, but eventually there were so many we gave up,” one long-term staffer told me. “More people searched for ‘OnLive’ during the Game Developers Conference than for the phrase ‘video games,’” boasted Tiffany Spencer at the time, who handled PR for the company’s launch. Over 100,000 people signed up for a closed beta of the service. Investors and game publishers lined up.

And yet, three and a half years later, Perlman locked himself in a conference room for a week to figure out what to do with the failing company.

The problem was simple. OnLive never made any money, and it was burning through as much as $5 million a month. As Perlman himself explained during the fateful all-hands meeting, the company had deployed thousands of servers that were sitting unused, and only ever had 1,600 concurrent users of the service worldwide. Over the past week, OnLive has tried to distance itself from that 1,600 number, but every former employee we spoke to in a position to know told us that it was true. “We were so optimistic at launch, but the users never came,” one long-time staffer said. “There were all these reasons why we were going to be an instant success, but it didn’t succeed instantly.” Even if the users had come, though, some employees dispute whether the service could scale: OnLive needed a physical machine for each concurrent player, and though Steve continually pressed the team to figure out a method to virtualize the load, the current model might have been untenable. When Nvidia offered possible solutions, though, employees told us the company decided not to negotiate.

Officially, the company states it has 2.5 million users, and 1.5 million active users, but staffers tell us those numbers count every single person who ever signed up for a free account, or tried it in the last year. The other thing you need to understand is that many of those users never paid a dime. One of OnLive’s most compelling features was that you could instantly try a time-limited demo of any game without having to install a thing. “We had single-digit income a lot of days after launch,” one employee told us. In terms of sales, the company counts first-person shooter Homefront as one of its successes, and yet the game sold in the low thousands, according to one former employee. OnLive did better with the PlayPack, a Netflix-like subscription to back-catalog titles for $9.99 a month, but one well-placed employee says the firm had as few as 12,000 subscribers on board. In an attempt to spur sales, OnLive offered a free MicroConsole with many purchases, a $99 set-top box that came with a wireless controller, exclusively for playing the OnLive service. The silicon was inexpensive, but one source told us that even at $99 the company took a loss, due to the pricy materials and all the cables that management insisted they include in the box.

If you ask employees, they can point to any number of reasons why the paying users didn’t come. Broadband in the United States is fickle, and even in households with a good connection, if one family member started up a YouTube video, that could disrupt the other’s game. Within those bandwidth constraints, the service streamed games at a compressed 720p resolution, on par with consoles, but which didn’t look as good as titles rendered by a proper gaming PC. That could have alienated early adopters, whom the company relied on for positive word-of-mouth. Despite these and other limitations, game publishers insisted on charging a similar MSRP. But above all, OnLive failed to secure the most important reason that gamers migrate to a new platform: top-tier games. Electronic Arts and Activision, the two biggest video game publishers, were no-shows on OnLive. Negotiations failed with Bethesda, maker of the wildly popular Oblivion and Skyrim role-playing games, and Valve, which makes Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress and Portal.

The thing is, Electronic Arts was actually on board. Former staffers told us Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins were ready and would have launched on day one if it wasn’t for Steve Perlman. At GDC 2009, when OnLive revealed itself to the world in style, a rival named Gaikai did the same behind closed doors, and when Gaikai CEO David Perry came by the OnLive booth to greet his competitor, Perlman starting screaming at him. On June 17th, 2010, the day OnLive launched, Gaikai announced a multi-year deal with Electronic Arts. Perlman received the news in the OnLive booth at E3 2010. “He went ballistic,” one witness recalls. “We had to slam the conference room shut and crank up the music so people wouldn’t hear him.” Perlman told EA he wanted exclusivity, even though Gaikai only offered game demos via the web rather than fully playable purchases. When EA refused, Perlman ordered his staff to remove all EA titles from OnLive. “We were instructed in no uncertain terms to pull the EA games at the very last minute,” one ex-staffer related. Mike McGarvey, COO at the time, argued against the move, but Perlman wouldn’t hear it. Shortly after the launch, McGarvey was sidelined.

From then on, employees told us, Steve shot down any game that Gaikai nabbed first; even titles that the company had already spent money to onboard, test, and certify with a game publisher. Both OnLive and developer CD Projekt RED confirmed that The Witcher 2 would arrive on the service, but Gaikai got it first.

Bulletstorm was an attempt to get back into EA’s good graces last year, and the game was ready to go — but when Gaikai added a web demo, sources tell us, Perlman pulled the plug. When Ubisoft refused to drop demos from Gaikai, he threatened to cease doing business with the company. Perlman also allegedly scared Valve off with a broad pitch when the company merely wanted to test the waters, and a source told us that negotiations with Bethesda failed because OnLive simply wasn’t willing or able to pay a fee to offset the onboarding costs of their games.

While OnLive was struggling to attract and retain game content abroad, though, employees told us Perlman was also beginning to alienate his staff at home. Steve Perlman has a fairly well-documented reputation for not getting along with others, and as the majority shareholder at OnLive he didn’t have to answer to a soul. One manager told us that he outvoted the board of directors on occasion. Several employees mentioned that Perlman also kept cabinets full of special double-wall glass mugs and expensive tea exclusively for his use, and personal assistants whose job it was to keep them full, citing this as a sign that Perlman felt he was above his employees in some regard. Others accuse him of favoritism when hiring Etienne Handman as COO, whom he introduced as an old friend and who, some claim, blocked deals he didn’t understand due to a lack of knowledge about the gaming space.

Mostly, though, ex-staffers told us they objected to Perlman’s short-term goals and obsessive micromanaging. “Steve’s a genius, don’t worry about it, he’ll figure it out,” his defenders would say, when employees raised concerns about the company’s lack of visible budgets or long-term planning. The company never had a CFO, and even managers who were outside Steve’s inner circle complained that they were left in the dark. Several ex-employees told us the major reason users never came is because OnLive never had a real marketing budget, and after the original VP of marketing left, the company was unable to fill the role. When the existing director of marketing applied, she was turned down. When she turned in her notice, Steve allegedly fired her on the spot. One prospective candidate told us that they didn’t want to work under Perlman, a skilled salesman, because he insisted on doing everything himself, from criticizing photography to writing press releases, and publicly ridiculing those who didn’t live up to his standards. “Steve had that talent, but he never empowered anybody,” one ex-staffer told us. “He would tell people they were stupid in front of the entire office.”

So, instead of attempting to find additional users, Perlman focused the company’s time and resources on developing new products and features in the attempt to attract additional investment, sometimes on extremely short notice. Perlman waited until mid-December to tell employees that they’d have to work over Christmas vacation to push out the PlayPack subscription package. Still, long-term staffers told us that for about a year after launch, things were relatively calm, possibly thanks to the $40 million that HTC invested in February of last year. “I think if you asked me in the summer of 2011, I would have said hands-down this is the best place to work,” related one.

That’s roughly when employees began to notice a change of atmosphere at the company. Things started to feel desperate, and the company pivoted like mad. Employees told us that it seemed like Steve was looking for an exit. The service launched in the UK in September 2011, airlifting servers from the US at great expense to handle the initial load. By December, they had developed mobile apps for Android and iOS, and rearchitected the company’s wireless controller to work with Bluetooth and a 2.4GHz USB dongle. OnLive never gave up on the iPad app, but deprioritized work as it became clear that Apple would never approve without getting a piece of the action itself. Then, immediately after the December app push, it was a sprint to push out OnLive’s Cloud Desktop service in time for the January Consumer Electronics Show, which meant employees lost their Christmas break on short notice for the second year in a row. “We always delivered things very fast under really tight timeframes, but I felt that the asks were getting bigger and bigger, and the infrastructure… wasn’t architected for the types of problems we were asked to solve,” said one. Another employee claimed that during the Christmas rush, Steve would call to see how work was progressing, from his cabin in Lake Tahoe.

People started to leave, and they weren’t replaced: around December 2011 the company instituted a hiring freeze. With over 200 staffers, unused servers and an expensive office in the heart of downtown Palo Alto, the company was feeling the crunch, and it didn’t look like Perlman was interested in saving the firm. He’d allegedly turned down offers from Sony, Dell, and Adobe in the past.

Then, in June of this year, Hewlett-Packard came calling.

An HP executive gave Perlman a personal check for $10,000 to open negotiations, and then offered $15 million for an exclusive 60-day window to make a deal. HP was primarily interested in OnLive’s Cloud Desktop platform, perhaps seeing it as a way to revitalize their enterprise tablet business. Allegedly, HP already had clients lined up for the idea, and employees worried the games business would fall by the wayside. About a month ago, though, employees discovered that the deal had fallen through, and management hadn’t said a thing. The excuse was allegedly that HP’s stock price had fallen and that the company couldn’t afford OnLive anymore. Morale fell yet again, and more employees left.

Still, up to the very last moments before the fateful all-hands meeting on August 17th, employees thought Steve was about to make a deal. Rumors swirled that LG, Samsung and Vizio were interested in buying, each hoping to make a play for the smart TV. The rumors were founded in part by the highly tentative deals each of them had with OnLive or Gaikai to preload a cloud gaming service. Two Fridays ago, when Perlman apologized and told employees their stock was worthless, they were utterly shocked to hear that the company hadn’t been bought. Many clapped during the presentation, having no idea they were being laid off.

Not least of which the employees who spent real money to buy their stock. We spoke to employees with tens if not hundreds of thousands of options, and while many didn’t exercise the right, some actually purchased real stock, spending thousands of dollars for what is now reportedly worth nothing more than the paper it was printed on. If OnLive had sold to any of the bidders Perlman rejected, they claim, they might have been able to cash out. What really angered them, though, was that the company hadn’t really reduced the value of their work to nothing at all: Perlman had seemingly found a legal loophole to extract that value and deprived them of it in the process.

The Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, as it turns out, is a fairly commonplace legal alternative to bankruptcy which can help things turn out better for all parties involved, and it’s quite likely that everything was done above board. It’s even relatively common for an assignee to sell a company’s assets as soon as they’re transferred: it’s called “sale as a going concern.”

It’s important to note that all parties lost their stock in the process, including Steve, who lost control of the company. Still, federal courts have expressed a particular worry about California’s ABC laws: since they allow companies to transfer assets to whomever they want and sell those assets at any price they wish, there’s a risk of abuse. One source tells us that in this case, the assets might have been sold for as little as $4 million. It seems that in a world where Sony bought Gaikai for $380 million and companies like HP dropped $15 million just to negotiate, the property would be worth a little bit more.

It’s hard to say, though. Steve Perlman convinced many players that OnLive was worth investing in, up to and including some employees who gambled their money knowing that the company wasn’t making a dime. Everyone we spoke to believed in the power of the cloud. Everyone expected a savior around the corner, but when it came to realizing that vision, only Steve was holding the cards. In hindsight, said one employee, management didn’t do such a bad job: “They managed to carry this thing four years longer than anyone thought they would.” Steve also donated $50,000 to a fund to help former employees pay for some health insurance.

The question is what happens now. The new OnLive says it hired nearly half the staff back and intends to continue the business as if nothing happens, but employees dispute that, stating that only around 60 employees got rehired, and a number of them only on 30-day contracts. Sources tell us that critical departments got scuttled, including the teams responsible for onboarding new games. It seemed like the company brought on a skeleton crew to keep the ship running while it preps the company for a sale. Then, something strange occurred. Employees convinced the new owner, Lauder Partners, to let Steve Perlman go and put employee-friendly former head of operations Charlie Jablonski in charge.

Make no mistake, OnLive was the future. Companies who embrace cloud computing will want to give their customers a way to manipulate those computers as if they were in front of them. Streaming games make sense: There’s no ability to pirate titles, and manufacturers don’t have to build up an install base by selling expensive hardware to their customers at a loss. But as with Quicktime and WebTV, it seems that Steve Perlman had an idea ahead of its time yet again, and under his management, much of its potential may have been squandered. With the cloud streaming poster child in the throes of insolvency and its spokesman departing for greener pastures, it may be difficult to reconvince investors of that potential in the short term. We’re curious to see how OnLive will proceed without its all-powerful founder at the helm.

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Documenting the death of OnLive: notes from the company's final meeting

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Joystiq

Documenting the death of OnLive: notes from the company’s final meeting

by Ben Gilbert on Aug 18th 2012 9:00AM

“I’ve been a non-stop fundraising machine,” OnLive CEO Steve Perlman told his entire staff yesterday morning. “And I finally got to the point where I just could not bring in enough funding to carry this thing forward.” The hundreds of employees that make up OnLive were – en masse – relieved of their positions in yesterday’s meeting, including Perlman himself. “All of us, technically, as of today, our jobs have ended – our current jobs with this company,” another administrator informed the crowd after Perlman finished speaking. OnLive is entering what is known in California as an “Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors,” or an “ABC,” (a form of bankruptcy) wherein an “assignee” (a person, persons, or entity) takes over the assets of the current company – in OnLive’s case, this means “the software, hardware, network architecture, our logo, all that stuff,” according to Perlman – in an effort to lighten the previous company’s debts and get its creditors paid off. Thus the “Benefit of Creditors” part of that acronym. Perlman didn’t say who that assignee was during the company’s meeting, only referring to him as “an extraordinary guy” (not an entity), and a “very accomplished and well known venture capitalist” who is “very wealthy.” The unknown assignee apparently believes that OnLive “is the entire future of everything,” Perlman told employees. Unfortunately, he isn’t wealthy enough to bring on the 150-200 people that OnLive employed. “Here’s the tough part, and this is the thing I’m very sorry to say: it’s just not possible for one individual in a startup – whether it’s that old startup or this new startup – to bring in this many people into a company,” Perlman said. Without giving numbers, Perlman said that, in the new company, “the people that come on board are the essential people, as needed, to go and accomplish that goal of getting this thing to cash-flow positive.” He prefaced that news with a stinging reality: “The people that are gonna be coming on board here, that will come out of the group … I’m gonna tell you, most of the people will not be coming on board.”

So, what caused the sudden implosion of the gaming industry’s most successful consumer-facing Cloud Streaming service? In so many words: scale. “There’s no way to exactly estimate how many servers we’d need. So we literally bought thousands of them, and all the equipment and networks to go with it,” Perlman told employees. Those servers, he said, came with lengthy contracts – contracts that tied OnLive’s capital up in maintaining servers that few (if any) users were actually using. “If you’ve got 8,000 servers and 1,600 users, how could we ever get to cash flow positive, right?” Perlman rhetorically asked employees during the meeting. Beyond the servers, Perlman said the company “dramatically expanded the number of employees” during its past few years. And during those years, it never downscaled to account for its lacking user base. “We made it through the whole recession without any disconnects, any layoffs, or any down rounds,” Perlman boasted toward the end of the meeting. Going forward, the employees who won’t be joining the new venture are being offered “a very simple consulting arrangement.” Former employees who help smooth the transition to the new startup will be offered stock options in the new venture. If at some point that new venture becomes profitable (read: gets sold or goes public), those options gain value. If not, the stock remains worthless. Additionally, any stock that former employees own in the original company (“OnLive, Inc.”) are now valueless. This includes the preferred stock options offered to executives. Perlman expressed regret several times during the speech. He even directly accepted blame for the whole mess. “I’m the one that brought you here. I’m the one that ultimately made decisions. And I’m the one that ultimately takes responsibility. So I am sorry, and it didn’t end up exactly as we’d hoped,” he said.

OnLive reps are adamant that the service will continue, uninterrupted, during the transition process, and “future products and services” are also unaffected.

If you’re a former employee and you’d like to contact us, we’d appreciate hearing from you.

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Messe-Babe

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Jan ‘earlmobileh’ Hoppe schreibt hauptsächlich für den mit seinem Freund und Mitstreiter Marcus ‘loess’ Dittmar gegründeten Blog 99leben.de. Dort diskutiert er Spiele nicht als Summe ihrer Teile, sondern als Ganzheit und Kulturgut wobei er seine Berufungen als Film-Fan, Buchliebhaber, hobbyhafter Musikmischer und Soziologe stets im Hinterkopf behält. Außerdem ist er allergisch gegen Pferde.

In den letzten Monaten wurde kein Thema von der internationalen Gaming-Presse so kontrovers diskutiert wie Sexismus. Dabei scheint stets dasselbe Skript abzulaufen: Zunächst schreibt jemand einen Text, dann wird dieser irgendwo veröffentlicht und dann regen sich alle darüber auf. Da auch die deutsche Blogosphäre von diesem Modus operandi nicht verschont geblieben ist, sind es viele von euch vermutlich langsam leid, sich mit dem Thema zu beschäftigen. Das ist aus zweierlei Gründen schade, denn einerseits ist es frappierend, wie falsch viele Autoren bei diesem wichtigen Thema liegen und andererseits bin ich mir beim Lesen der Kommentare oft not sure if trolling or just stupid. Vielleicht ist es mein soziologischer Background, der mich hier besonders sensibel und reizbar macht, aber ich kann es mir in Anbetracht der allzu polemischen Art, in der das Thema aufgegriffen und rezipiert wurde, nicht verkneifen, einmal mit etwas zeitlichem Abstand zum Höhepunkt der Diskussionen zu erklären, warum eigentlich jeder falsch liegt.

Um jetzt nicht nur abstrakt Herumzuschreiben und weil ich bei der GamesCom die Möglichkeit hatte, mir das Spiel vorführen zu lassen, ziehe ich als Beispiel einmal die Kontroverse um das im kommenden Jahr erscheinende TOMB RAIDER-Reboot heran. Als kurze Erklärung für diejenigen, die jetzt gar nicht wissen worum es geht:

Während die Szene selbst noch nur die Andeutung eines Vergewaltigungsversuchs zeigt und für sich genommen vermutlich nicht ausgereicht hätte, um die Gemüter in Wallung zu bringen, goss der Produktionsleiter Ron Rosenberg Öl in das leicht ausufernde Feuer, indem er gegenüber Kotaku verlauten ließ: „They’re more like ‘I want to protect her.’ There’s this sort of dynamic of ‘I’m going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her.’ […] She is literally turned into a cornered animal […].” Autsch, das ist natürlich nicht in Ordnung, aber warum eigentlich?

Die Meinungen hierzu könnten verschiedener nicht sein. Unterm Strich redet eigentlich jeder von etwas ganz anderem. Leider könnten die Meinungen hierzu aber auch nicht mehr viel kurzsichtiger sein. Keine Sorge, ich möchte jetzt nicht in die Populismus-Falle tapsen und ebenfalls ein übereiltes und dogmatisches Statement abgeben, sondern im Gegenteil versuchen, die Debatte zu entwirren, indem ich die einzelnen Standpunkte – die sich häufig weder wider- noch zusprechen, sondern vollends aneinander vorbeigehen – näher zu beleuchten. Ich lege einfach mal los und hoffe, dass das Thema auch ohne Trolle und Shitstorms funktioniert:

„Wenn man den Designern reinredet beschneidet man die Redefreiheit, also hört mit dem Gemeckere auf!“

Über diese Aussage stolpert man insbesondere in Internetforen leider immer wieder. Ich vermute, sie hat ihre Wurzeln vor circa zehn Jahren geschlagen, als die Massenmedien noch jeden Akt von Gewalt mit Videospielen in Verbindung brachten. Damals sah man sich als Spieler in eine defensive Rolle gedrängt. Mit falschen Fakten und abenteuerlich hergestellten Kausalzusammenhängen wurden Games bis aufs Äußerste verteufelt. In Anbetracht dieses Generalverdachts gegenüber Videospielen gab es eigentlich keine andere Möglichkeit als sie in jedem Falle zu verteidigen.

Nun haben sich die Zeiten allerdings geändert. Kritik an Videospielen ist nicht mehr schwarz und weiß, sondern grau. Kaum jemand aus der Öffentlichkeit kommt noch auf die Idee, ‚Killerspiele‘ unter Verbot stellen zu wollen oder in Games den Quell einer mutmaßlichen Verblödung der Jugend zu sehen. Nein, Spiele werden zunehmend als Teil unserer Medienlandschaft akzeptiert. Damit geht aber auch einher, dass sie inhaltlich ernster genommen werden, was wiederum die Tür für differenzierte Kritik öffnet. Das ist eine gute Sache, denn am konstruktiven Herausstellen von Fehlern innerhalb der Videospielkultur können wir nur wachsen. Im Falle von TOMB RAIDER sind es zum Teil also schlicht die überalterten Beißreflexe, die hier noch greifen: „Jemand kritisiert ein Spiel?! – Der will es doch bestimmt verbieten!“ Am eigentlichen Problem wird hier allerdings vollkommen vorbeigeredet, denn die Ära, in der Kritik immer mit Zensurforderungen einherging, ist glücklicherweise vorbei.

„Die Szene wird ja nur angedeutet, man sieht ja gar nichts, wo ist das Problem?“

Dieses Argument taucht immer wieder auf, verfehlt aber leider vollkommen den Grund dafür, warum der angedeutete Vergewaltigungsversuch kritisch betrachtet wird. Vertreter dieses Standpunktes beschränken sich in ihrer Betrachtung vollkommen auf die Oberfläche, dabei ist es gar nicht das offen Sichtbare, das hier angeprangert wird. Ähnlich wie im Vorgehen der ESRB wird hier jeglicher Kontext ignoriert und nur auf die explizite Darstellung geachtet. Blut ist Blut, egal ob die Erzählung ihr Statement für oder gegen Gewalt richtet.

BREAKING THE WAVES, Lars von Trier

Ich denke nicht, dass man so vorgehen sollte, denn das Beschränken auf die Oberfläche ist bei Medien mit Erzählungen geradezu naiv. Vielleicht hat jemand von Euch ja mal Lars von Triers BREAKING THE WAVES gesehen. Der Film macht ein paar wirklich starke Aussagen zu Themen wie Machtverhältnissen in Partnerschaften, Abhängigkeit und Sexualität. Die Szene, die mich dabei am intensivsten mitgenommen und sich am stärksten in mein Gedächtnis eingebrannt hat, ist die, in der die Protagonistin ‚Bess‘ bei einer Busfahrt einem fremden, älteren Mann einen runterholt. Die visuelle Darstellung beschränkt sich auf ein absolutes Minimum und dennoch – oder vielleicht gerade deswegen – war ich von der Darstellung des Vorganges vollends erschüttert. Es ist das Kopfkino, das das Kino zum Leben erweckt.

Ähnlich verhält es sich auch bei der Szene in TOMB RAIDER. Es geht hier nicht um das Sichtbare, sondern um die Bedeutung, die dem Vorfall im Rahmen der Handlung beikommt – um das was man dabei empfindet. Das ist wiederum eine passende Überleitung zum nächsten populären Standpunkt.

„Wie bitte!? Der Pressesprecher betont, dass der Spieler sich als Schutzpatron fühlen und Lara, die wortwörtlich wie ein Tier in die Ecke getrieben wird, per Quick-Time-Event aus der misslichen Lage bringen soll, fast vergewaltigt zu werden? Das klingt nicht in Ordnung!“

Stimmt, das klingt tatsächlich ziemlich zweifelhaft. Sexuelle Übergriffe sind ein leider sehr verbreitetes und extrem ernstzunehmendes Thema. Es gibt entschieden zu viele Frauen, die Opfer von verschiedenen Formen sexualisierter Gewalt geworden sind und Medienschaffende sollten besonders darauf achten, das Thema sehr sensibel zu behandeln. Leider sind ein Bewusstsein darüber, was man eigentlich genau ausdrückt und die Behandlung sensibler Themen in der Tat noch keine ausgesprochenen Stärken von Games, sodass Skepsis angebracht ist.

Das liegt zum einen daran, dass der Produktionsprozess von Spielen in der Regel so abläuft, dass Autoren erst an Bord geholt werden, wenn das Spiel schon halb fertig ist. So steht der Schreiberling vor der kaum lösbaren Aufgabe, modulartige Versatzstücke mit einem Sinn zu füllen. Das Ergebnis ist unüberraschenderweise in vielen Fällen hanebüchener Quatsch, der höchstens Groschenromanen Konkurrenz macht und dessen inhaltliche Bedeutung bestenfalls dünn und schlimmstenfalls unmoralisch ist. Was die Seite der Sensibilität gegenüber schwierigen Themen betrifft, nun ja, ich kann nur nochmal auf Ron Rosenbergs Aussagen verweisen. Seine Wortwahl lässt an keiner Stelle auch nur den Verdacht aufkommen, dass ihm bewusst ist, über was für ein traumatisierendes Thema er hier spricht – im Gegenteil, er klingt fast stolz, während er Lara als hilfloses Tier bezeichnet. Diese Unbedachtheit irritiert mich insbesondere, da der ebenfalls vom Hause Square Enix gestartete HITMAN-Skandal gerade erst am abklingen war. Dass Lara Croft bis dato die vollkommen übersexualisierte Ikone der späten 90er Videospieljahre ist, erschwerte die Indizienlage wohl zusätzlich.

Es deutet also alles darauf hin, dass die Kritiker hier einen Punkt haben und vor einer Woche hätte ich auch noch zugestimmt. Nachdem ich nun aber auf der GamesCom die Chance hatte, mir den Beginn von TOMB RAIDER präsentieren zu lassen, habe ich einen anderen Eindruck gewonnen. Einerseits wurde seitens der Designer und des Publishers immer wieder betont, dass die Autorin Rhianna Pratchett früh ins Boot geholt wurde; damit ist der übliche Videospielfehler des nachträglichen Writings vermieden worden. Andererseits wirkte das Storytelling mit dem Ziel zu erklären, warum Lara Croft die taffe Person geworden ist, die sie ist, tatsächlich sehr ambitioniert. Ich nehme nur die Einführung vorweg, wenn ich berichte, dass sie als 21-Jährige Studentin auf einer Expedition Schiffbruch erleidet und sich auf einer unzivilisierten Insel wiederfindet, auf der sexuelle Übergriffe kontextual schon mal nicht allzu unwahrscheinlich erscheinen. Die ausweglose Situation, die dann im Trailer zu sehen ist, bewegt Lara schließlich dazu, das erste Mal in ihrem Leben einen Menschen zu töten. Diese ersten Spielmomente wirkten auf mich weniger effekthascherisch als erwartet, sondern wie der ehrliche Versuch eine kohärente und storygetriebene Spielerfahrung zu vermitteln. Die Worte Ron Rosenbergs, die sich ätzenderweise beinahe so interpretieren ließen, dass Lara aus dem Vergewaltigungsversuch gestärkt hervorgeht, scheinen Schall und Rauch zu sein.
Nun bleibt es natürlich abzuwarten, ob ich mit meinem Eindruck Recht behalte und die große Aufregung lediglich auf einen Pressesprecher zurückzuführen ist, der sich noch nicht darauf verstehen zu scheint, mit einem erwachsenen Publikum zu sprechen oder ob das Spiel nach der Skandalszene in die Belanglosigkeit abdriftet. Im Ansatz, sieht es aber so aus, als sei die polarisierende Positionierung vieler Kritiker etwas überhastet. Damit möchte ich mich allerdings nicht so verstanden fühlen, dass ich das nachfolgende Argument plausibel finde:

„Wenn Quentin Tarantino in seinen Filmen etwas Provozierendes zeigt, finden es alle cool, bei Spielen wird aber gleich mit dem Finger gezeigt.“

GEGEN DIE WAND, Fatih Akin

Es stimmt, Filmen gesteht man dieses Recht in der Regel zu, ohne einen großen Skandal daraus zu machen. Ich kann mich Beispielsweise nicht daran erinnern, dass sich auch nur irgendjemand beschwert hätte, als Sibel in Fatih Akins GEGEN DIE WAND Opfer einer Vergewaltigung wurde. Die Feststellung, die hinter diesen Bemerkungen steckt, ist die einer vermeintlichen Doppelmoral. Dieses filmische Recht zum freien Ausdruck ist allerdings nicht vom Himmel gefallen, sondern hat sich erst langsam mit der Entwicklung vom Film zu einer anerkannten künstlerischen Ausdrucksform entwickelt und genau darin liegt auch der gravierendste Unterschied zu Games.

So schade das auch ist, große Spielproduktionen haben noch einen langen Weg vor sich, bevor sie primär als kreative Erzeugnisse betrachtet werden können. Der wichtigste Schritt auf diesem Weg ist dabei die Emanzipation vom rein marktwirtschaftlichen Kalkül: Noch sind Games in erster Linie sehr professionell erstellte Konsumgüter, die hauptsächlich einem Ziel dienen, nämlich dem finanziellen Gewinn. Wie ich vor rund einem Jahr schon einmal in einem Artikel dargelegt habe, fehlt der Spielebranche noch eine vernünftige Förderung von Indie-Projekten. Wo Visionäre der Filmindustrie beispielsweise auf Independent-Studios und Filmförderfonds zurückgreifen können, fehlt bei Games jegliche Infrastruktur.

Das hat nun leider zur Folge, dass Spiele ihr kreatives Potential nur mangelhaft ausschöpfen, da sie ja hauptsächlich erst einmal dem Markt gefallen müssen. Für viele von Euch klingt das nun vermutlich nach einem minimalen Unterschied oder gar Haarspalterei, aber in der moralischen Konsequenz ist es etwas vollkommen anderes, ob schockierende Szenarien genutzt werden, um eine emotionale Reaktion beim Spieler hervorzurufen und etwas zu vermitteln, oder nur dazu missbraucht werden, ihn dazu zu bewegen, das Spiel zu kaufen. Ersteres ist künstlerischer Ausdruck, letzteres ist marktwirtschaftliches Kalkül und alleine der offene Umgang mit dem Thema – damit meine ich, den Schockmoment prominent im Trailer zu verhökern – legt die Überlegung nahe, dass hier die Erreichung eines Marktes im Vordergrund stand.

Neben diesem Unterschied in der Qualität der Kommerzialisierung muss auch noch angemerkt werden, dass Filme deutlich vielseitigere Perspektiven und Themen aufgreifen. Auf jeden Exploitationflick kommt mindestens ein feministisches Werk und auf jeden Gonzo ein ambitionierter Kurzfilm. Während Filme im Ganzen also ein breites Feld menschlicher Erfahrung abbilden, entsprechen Spiele leider in den meisten Fällen noch der Vielseitigkeit des 80er-Jahre Actionfilms. Erst wenn diese Scheuklappen einmal abgelegt werden, verschwindet auch der Generalverdacht. Wir haben es beim Vergleich zwischen Film und Spiel also keinesfalls mit dem Gleichen zu tun und müssen daher zu Recht noch(!) zweierlei Maß ansetzen.

„Also haben alle Unrecht oder was? Warum dann die Aufregung?“

Nun, zunächst einmal trifft man mit dem Wort ‚Unrecht‘ nicht wirklich den Nagel auf den Kopf denn jeder kritische Standpunkt zur Debatte hat richtige und nachvollziehbare Ansätze, es mangelt lediglich an einer stärkeren Orientierung am großen Ganzen. Leider stolpert man viel zu oft über Texte, die versuchen, die ganze Debatte in wenigen Worten und mittels nur eines Argumentes zu ver- oder entschärfen. Das dürfen wir als Community nicht zulassen! Weder hilft uns die vollkommene Hysterie, noch die Verklärung des offenen Sexismus innerhalb unseres lieben Hobbys

Solange die Mehrzahl der Kommentare unter kritischen Artikeln noch in etwa in die Richtung „too many pussies these days“ gehen, lohnt es sich, den Finger weiter in die Wunde zu legen, denn jeder weitere Skandal macht der Industrie klarer, dass wir keine Lust mehr auf triviale Geschichtchen haben, sondern Spiele verlangen, die sich selbst genauso ernst nehmen, wie wir es tun. Nur so kann es gelingen, sich endlich von trollenden Kiddies abzugrenzen und in der Ära anzugelangen, in der Spiele als vollwertige Kunst- und Ausdrucksform anerkannt werden können und müssen.

Ob die Aufregung letztendlich gerechtfertigt war, wird sich mit dem Erscheinen von TOMB RAIDER zeigen. Der Streit hat sich aber, auch wenn er anstrengend war und zuweilen etwas ausgeartet ist, gelohnt, denn er macht deutlich, dass der Anspruch steigt. Ich hoffe bei der nächsten größeren Kontroverse erkennen wir, dass es nicht darum geht, das eine richtige Argument zu finden, sondern dass das Üben von konstruktiver Kritik schon Selbstzweck an sich ist, indem sie dem Medium hilft, sich und seine Wirkungsmacht besser zu begreifen.

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A Brief History Of Garry’s Mod: Count To Ten

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PHYSICS!

By Craig Pearson on August 29th, 2012 at 12:00 pm.

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“It was never meant to be a big deal. I was just fucking about!” says Garry’s Mod creator Garry Newman. His innovative physics-based mod for Half-Life 2 turned out to be a remarkably big deal, not least by being a forerunner in iterative and community focused design, and a game that’s perennially in Steam’s top twenty game stats. It’s an exercise in giving gamers tools and no direction, one of the few games that makes just messing about a core goal. Its strength is a flexibility that makes it a platform for people to make things like comics, maps, weapons, even gamemodes. It might have grown by enabling sexually suggestive poses of Valve’s stoic game characters, but six years on there’s so more to GMod than just fucking about. Here’s how it got there.

Everyone learned about Half-Life 2′s physics in the same way: the can goes in the bin, and anything else is open rebellion. From that moment, where gamers defiantly whacked the can off the guard’s nose in physics-based insurrection, Garry’s Mod was born. Everyone hunted for more mischief to make in Half-Life 2′s physics engine, bigger cans to throw, uglier guards to mess with. Apart from a game of catch with D0G and a few traps in Ravenholm, there wasn’t a lot of inventive interactivity in the game itself. Gordon’s story never stretched to stacking, grabbing, or fighting, leaving us all to think the same thought – “what if?”. Garry just thought about it a bit harder than most.

Not, however, harder than the people making the JBMod physics sandbox mod, which was something that Garry admits inspired him: “A bunch of guys on some forums had been playing JBMod, which hooked up a bunch of stuff that was seen in the leaked source code (all of the code was in the SDK). Maps were created where you would press buttons on the wall and objects would spawn. You could then weld those things together.”

He continued: “This was great, but I kind of wanted more. I played with the SDK and made things like a rocket launcher that created melons. It was about the best I could do at the time, but there were lots of things in the engine that I wanted to play with more.”

GMod 1 was released on December 24th 2004, with Garry’s typical bluntness evident in the readme file: “Lots of changes I can’t be bothered to type about. I only really made this to get to know my way around the SDK.” It was just a few tweaks to the engine allowing you to spawn Manhacks, but it was a beginning. GMod 2 was where it grew from being an experiment with the SDK to something resembling more what we now know as Garry’s Mod. It had ropes that could connect objects, a physics gun that let you manipulate objects, a camera, and welding. It was the first glimpse of the ad-hoc A-Team aping creative mode – it was just about possible to create a rickety truck from a cargo container and welded tyres. Back then, it felt like magic.

Later, GMod 3 introduced the first version of gm_construct, the official map. The ugly build space was a lumpy rectangle of grass with a spawn station. Here you could magic up HL2 characters, and then and manipulate them with the physics gun. Ragdoll posing, probably the most infamous of GMod’s tools, was born. People with vague ideas about comic strips rejoiced. As did the perverts.

The obvious inspiration created friction, and it wasn’t long before Garry and the JBMod team had a nasty spat, with each attempting to outdo each other’s work. However, Garry had a trick up his sleeve. He could work on his mod all day while living off the proceeds of a dating site he ran: “I got chatting to a guy over the net who turned out to live a street away from me. He had a dating website and was quitting his day job to go full time with it and he hired me as a web designer. I wasn’t the best at web design but I was a pretty good PHP programmer, and ended up doing that a lot more. I became a bit disgruntled after seeing how much money he was making from the site (which my ego felt like it had created) and me being paid in comparison very little, so instead of confronting my boss like I probably should have, I decided to start my own dating site in secret while still working for him.

“This was admittedly a total dick move on my part, and of course lead me to being given the choice of shutting down the site or being fired. By that time I was making more per month with the other site than I was being paid – so I decided to be fired. The site was pretty much completely automated, and apart from support emails I didn’t really have to do anything.”

So Garry was free to provide us with tools to make Mr Vance blush, while JBMod floundered and eventually disappeared. But as exciting as Alyx bending just so was, versions 4 and 5 topped it. Version 4 was the first attempt at multiplayer, initially it was as crude as a posed G-Man, but soon the ability to build together would be one of the defining moments of the GMod’s development. I popped into a server while writing this and found someone building a catapult out of office equipment while someone sat waiting to be fired from it. This sort of mild madness is still the thing that brings most GModders together.

With each iteration, more features were expected, and being so early in development they were all game-changing when they arrived. Version 5′s biggest addition was the spawn menu. Until now, spawning was hooked into the map, but with this adjustment it freed builders to use custom maps. Not to be outdone, Version 6 brought the most iconic Garry’s Mod tool: the Face Poser.

Poor G-Man. His carefully captured features could now be twisted into Joker-like grimaces, or ludicrous gurning. This is what Garry’s Mod is best known for, and remarkably Garry barely remembers doing it: “I seriously can’t really remember creating the Face Poser. I can remember technical programming fears of it. Like ‘networking 128 floats on every entity with a face… will that be ok? Yeah I’m sure it will’. But mostly I think it was one of those common sense things that needed to be done.”

So he did it. It was probably the decision that made him a millionaire: the G-Man’s face, splayed open like an impossible, grinning gargoyle is the most iconic image of the game and the most direct way of showing you the mod’s capabilities. You could grab this famous face’s cheeks and pull them all over the place. A subtler addition, but just as important, landed in that sixth update: the Multitool. The gun that you could reprogram to be a number of handy tools, and the device that’s now the heart of the current builder’s toolkit. It delivers everything from welds and pistons to the community-built custom weapons.

Version 7 was released in February 12th 2005. All this had happened in under than two months. Nowadays there’s a shift towards games being released early and developed in public, but it seemed new when Garry was doing it, nearly seven years ago. And he was progressing astonishingly quickly. Update 7 was mostly a series of tweaks to the template, and would be the last major update until June.

It was around this time that Valve took notice of what was happening down there. Erik Johnson, a long-standing Valve employee, was intrigued by the potential, and started chatting to Garry. Johnson told me: “Right after we released Half-Life 2 we were keeping a close eye on the modding community to see where people would take the Source engine. So while it’s fair to say that we noticed Garry’s Mod right around when it was first released, we really started to pay attention when we saw the way that Garry was interacting with his community over the following few months. He was iterating out in the open, was transparent with his community, and was producing a ton of value with each new release.”

That approach was proven with version 8, which was a major overhaul. It consolidated the tools into one window for ease of use. This was the update that solidified most of what GMod can do out of the box, with depth of field and image effects coming in to give creative types a few more options when it came to generating screenshots. Images of the G-Man ‘snuggling’ with Mossman looked so much classier when the bloom effect was added.

V8 could have been the final release of GMod. There’s not much more you could do with the engine, and if Garry hadn’t found the coding language Lua, this is probably where GMod would peaked. According to Garry, though, Lua changed everything: “Lua made its appearance in GMod 9. I think out of every feature added to GMod it was the most revolutionary. It gave the game to the community. They can mod any part of it. You can join a server and play a completely different game. It made modding the Source Engine a little bit more accessible.”

Without it GMod would have been stuck with the same format and be beholden to Garry for most of its content, but its inclusion turned the game on its head. Mods of mods. Mods within mods. It was like Inception with polygons. Lua was and still is to GMod what Face Poser is to faces. Anyone joining a server would have their game bound by the server’s instruction, which could be anything from a weapon that shoots ASCII characters, to an entirely new gamemode. Server owners and modders could take the initiative, using GMod to flesh out their own games and easily deploy them. And I’ll get to what the community made with GMod – which has been a frankly astounding rainbow of creativity – in another article.

By now, after nearly a year of providing a free platform for game, Garry began negotiations with Valve over a possible retail version of the mod: “I think I was talking to Erik Johnson via email about something else, and the first time the idea was floated I shot it down. Who would buy it? But some time passed and the more I thought about it the more I thought I could do something good with a brand new version, coded from scratch. So when I talked to Erik again (about some terrible idea for a game I had) and he brought it up again I snatched his hand off. I don’t think anything had been sold on Steam when we started talking about it, so nothing was really known about how it would turn out. But I trust Valve – they always have the best intentions, and always think a step ahead.

“It didn’t go completely smoothly. The community was getting antsy because I hadn’t released an update for a while. They thought I’d given up on GMod, when in reality I was secretly starting again on GMod 10. So I decided to announce what was happening. The internet exploded. This was kind of a stupid move: as Erik pointed out in an email the same day, it wasn’t official and we hadn’t signed contracts. At this point I could have died. If it didn’t happen now after I’d just announced it I’m going to look like I’m insane. I guess I could play it off as a prank?”

Garry needed a little help: “Erik took me under his wing and emailed me the contract to sign and fax back. Which I did, except I faxed the back of it. He got 15 pages of blank paper. So I tried again, and did the exact same thing again. This time I’d made note of which way I put the paper in, and after the third attempt it was all good. It was all signed, and not even I could fuck it up now.”

Erik remembers all this as “very entertaining”, but points out the way GMod came together mirrors the way Valve worked, which made it a perfect fit for Steam: “There were a bunch of people at Valve that were fans of Garry’s approach to how he was building GMod iteratively, and how fast he was moving it forward. Combine that with the growing number of people that were downloading it and creating content for other people, and it became obvious to many that this was something special and something he was already doing professionally in every other respect.”

Erik views the time Garry spent working for free as a hugely significant exercise: “As opposed to the constraints that tend to get placed on ‘professional’ game developers, my guess is that it was valuable for Garry to spend a bunch of time figuring out what the interesting problems were to solve, and how to solve them in the best way for the long term. This is a pretty difficult thing to do when you have a large audience that will quickly outstrip the amount of work you can get done day-to-day, and Garry did a great job at figuring out how to navigate those issues.

“To put it simply, I think Garry figured out what he had to do to make a large number of customers happy, and that is the core problem to solve before trying to figure out how to build a business out of it.”

In November 2006, nearly two years after the first mod release, Garry’s Mod 10 was released on Steam. It was a smoother, cleaner, version of the free mod that gave millions of gamers so much fun. And it sold bucketloads. It’s been continually reworked in the same fashion as the mod was, with rolling additions making it easier to find content in-game and download it for free. The heart of it is still the Sandbox, it’s where most people spend their time, just building silly things and showing them off. But if they adventured out of gm_construct, they’d discover amazing, amazing things.

Next: Community contraptions.

__________________

« Secret World Sells 200K, ‘Smaller’ Funcom Games Ahead | Dear Videogames, Stop Telling Me Everything »

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Polygon and the Game Journalism Club

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There are days when in order to maintain my sanity I have to remind myself of the division between video game journalism and the actual world of video games. Otherwise I can get so wrapped up in my desire to make it in this business that I completely lose perspective. I was given a healthy reminder of this on Tuesday when I had lunch with a buddy of mine who I play games with on Xbox Live most days of the week, a friend I used to work with but who, since he moved to New Hampshire many years ago, I hadn’t seen in the flesh since.

I was telling him about the “Screw Your Criticism, I Want A Review!” panel I’m moderating at PAX Prime this year. The panelist list has changed somewhat – Jim Sterling can no longer make it, but Arthur Gies of Polygon and Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb will be joining us. I’m pretty stoked about it because I think it’s going to be good fun with Kyle Orland and Kirk Hamilton still on the panel as well.

My friend had no idea who the fuck any of those people are. I was shocked that he didn’t even recognize the name of Jeff Gerstmann after the Kane & Lynch firing, an event so widely discussed online that it solidified Gerstmann as one of the most recognizable names in this industry. Yeah, no, my friend had no idea who he was. I don’t think my friend had ever heard of Polygon, either. He knows what Kotaku is but after a few reads decided he fucking hated it and I don’t think he’s ever gone back, and if he knows Ars Technica it’s probably because I’ve linked him to stuff I’ve written over there.

My friends and all of their friends on Xbox Live are the grown-up portion of the core video game audience. They’re almost all married with kids, in their mid-30′s, and precisely the kind of audience that the new, grown up video game journalism outlets are aiming for. And most every member of the grown-up core video game audience I know has no fucking idea who anyone in the video game journalism industry is and hardly recognizes the name of any video game journalism outlets save the giants like IGN and GameSpot.

Hell, most of them don’t know who Cliff Bleszinksi is. If you’re reading my blog you’re probably a member of my small audience or were otherwise directed here by someone else who reads video game journalism and the idea of not recognizing Bleszinksi’s name is probably insane, right? How the fuck do you not know who Cliff Bleszinksi is? Or Ken Levine? I don’t mean to put those two on a pedestal but as far as recognizable names in game development go I think those two are at the top of the list for all their willingness to speak to the press and being real characters.

My friend from New Hampshire and all our friends from Xbox Live don’t know who Bleszinksi and Levine are and furthermore they don’t give a flying fuck when I try to tell them. And that goes for my friends at the tabletop wargaming club, many of whom are video game addicts as well. They don’t know and they don’t care. And that goes for friends of mine at work who are hardcore gamers ready to talk the endless minutiae of games all day. They don’t know Newell and Molyneux, Miyamoto and Kojima, Wright and Spector or any of the myriad names I would personally consider it insane not to know as someone who plays video games…but then I remember that my knowing these names has absolutely nothing to do with being one of the most devoted people to video games in almost any circle I’m a part of.

It has everything to do with the fact that I’m a video game journalist, which has fuck-all to do with being a gamer, and realizing that makes it a little easier to deal with the stress of trying to break further into the industry and the inevitable drama one has to bear witness to along the way.

September will mark my two-year anniversary of being a freelance video game journalist, measured by when my first professional pitch was accepted, and my experience has been paradoxical. It was much easier to break into freelance video game journalism than I thought it would be. There are lots of people who want to be video game journalists, but very few people who know how to write, just like there are lots of people who would love to be rock musicians but they don’t know how to sing or play an instrument.

Freelancing as a point of fact means nothing more than getting something published that you’re also paid for on a semi-regular basis. I don’t think that’s too difficult to do if you know how to write and are diligent and have the requisite people skills and the ability to take criticism and learn from it. The hardest part, I think, is drumming up the courage to pitch stories and being willing to face the rejection until something sticks. I still sometimes hesitate to send pitches to outlets I would really like to be published in!

I also sometimes still feel a little uncomfortable referring to myself as a freelance video game journalist or a freelance writer. By virtue of the Escapist column and the regular work I still do for G4 it’s technically true but often I just feel like a piker, someone picking up work on the fringes of the industry but not someone who actually lives there. The people I know who do this gig full-time are online between eight and ten hours a day, on work chat rooms and surfing the web for stories and ensconced in the world of video games. That, to me, is what it means to be a video game journalist. That, to me, is what it means to be a member of the club, and why it’s fair to think of it as a club. Any time you have a closed-off space that is difficult to get into and admits a very specific type of person that is fairly referred to as a club, and this is where the paradox comes in. It’s easy to get in the entrance, but it’s difficult as hell to get into the private rooms in the back.

Full-time freelancing seems reserved only for those who can afford the uncertainty by virtue of either having a partner who can supplement their freelance income or otherwise being able to tolerate not making a lot of money.  I know only one full-time freelancer who only writes about video games, and they were recently lamenting about their inability to afford much more than a bag of groceries for their household for months on account of invoices being paid late. Most of the full-time freelancers I know diversify by writing about things other than video games.

The actual, salaried, stable full-time positions are precious and rare and the line to get one is very long. Every once in a while you might see an aberration. A friend of mine got hired to a full-time gig at Kotaku, which I would argue is one of the plum gigs in this business and something that people likely fight for for years, hired strictly off content written on a personal blog, an audience accrued thusly and nary a single paid, professional credit to their name. It’s likely the kind of thing I will never see again, and does in part speak to their reaching an audience that not many others do – Gerard Williams, otherwise known as “The Hip Hop Gamer,” also achieved whatever it is he’s achieved by purportedly reaching an audience no one else does- but by and large you pay your dues, you wait for a chance to land a steady or full-time gig, and there are a whole lot of people who have been doing this for much longer than you have and who are already in line for those spots.

What got me thinking about the game journalism club and my two years trying to break into it was the teaser trailer for the Polygon documentary that was shown for the first time on Tuesday. My official stance on the teaser and the longer trailer is I don’t give a fuck, which sincerely is not meant in a hostile way but rather a bluntly honest one. I approach those teasers the same way I approach game previews or movie trailers or book excerpts, which is to say I don’t give a fuck until the release of the product is actually upon us such that I can view the hype material and then view the finished product and see whether there was anything to the hype or whether it was all complete and utter bullshit. You get used to doing this when you’re a video game journalist and are inundated daily with press release hype.

I’m much more interested in the reaction to these trailers than the trailers themselves, because the reactions can tell us an awful lot about how the game journalism club operates if you know how to unpack those reactions.

There’s a reason I love meta-questions about the video game press. Getting the answers is my way of learning the business. One of those meta-questions is how seriously video game journalists should take their jobs. Let’s sketch out the poles here. One side says “We’re just writing about toys so let’s not get all full of ourselves,” and the other side says “We’re writing about one of the most important forms of art in the 21st century so how dare you say they’re just toys?” Most people fall somewhere in the middle.

The Polygon crew is clearly taking their work seriously, and I don’t think you can make a full-time run at this career without doing so. I think you have to be a little bit crazy to want this, and if you achieve it I think not taking it seriously is a little bit even more crazy. It’s difficult work with long hours, dealing with a video game industry that is often intransigent in its unwillingness to grant access to development figures for features, an audience which is more than ready to spear games journos and rotate them on a spit over internet flames, and a general perception that video game “journalism” is anything but and you’re an arrogant fuck if you dare to think and declare otherwise (and this is a sentiment that can be issued by games journos themselves).

The documentary in question is going to be about the construction of the Polygon website because technically Polygon doesn’t exist yet. They publish content under the banner of  The Verge but have been hyping the new technology that’s going to be running under the hood of their site proper, which is still being built.  Some of the reactions to the teaser trailer for this documentary have been venomous. Accusations of runaway ego and bloated self-importance abound.

If the name of your game or the name of your game journalism outlet isn’t on lips and minds you’re not going to cut through the static. Polygon can’t just rest on the laurels of their staff, they need to make sure everyone knows they’re here. They already have the attention of their peers, but I’m not so sure they have the attention of the audience, which I would personally lay on the fact that they’re running a lot of long-form content which is atypical of the industry’s output. I’m sure they grabbed another good share of attention with that teaser trailer though, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the venom was not only expected but welcomed because, well, this is the internet and hate spreads across the electronic highway faster than anything else and not everyone who gets exposed to the teaser by way of taking interest in the hate train is going to react negatively to the teaser.

Besides the if you take this seriously you’re an ass crowd, I bet plenty of the ire is coming from people who aspire to be video game journos and they’re jealous of the Polygon crew because of what they collectively represent. They are the most perfect representation of “the game journalism club” that I could ever imagine. When the outlet makes a statement like “We’ve hired the best team of editors ever,” or words to that effect what that effectively translates into is “We’ve established the most perfect representation of the old guard ever assembled.” I mean no disrespect by that but you have former writers and editors from Joystiq, IGN, Kotaku, The Escapist, Destructoid and Game Informer all under one roof. It’s a who’s who of mostly men who were either fortunate enough to be a part of this industry at its nascent internet stages or who broke into some of the biggest and most established game journalism outlets in the business. Many of them are the people who defined the club’s territory.

One easy misinterpretation of the club metaphor is the mistake of thinking that once you’re in it’s just a bunch of good ol’ boys guffawing and patting themselves on the back and helping each other like Freemasons hiring new employees and then they get the secret handshake and the deal’s done. That’s not the case if my observations of my colleagues are accurate. I figured that once I started getting published I would have broken through the barriers that separated the fan sites and the wanna-be blogs who are often feted or granted review copies by publishers but who rarely publish anything meaningful other than those reviews, meaningful inasmuch as those review scores influence Metacritic averages, and so I figured that once I graduated from the amateur leagues and started selling work professionally I would be a member of the club.

I was wrong. Dead wrong. Just getting a published piece doesn’t mean shit. What matters is doing so over and over and over again at a level of quality that others recognize and respect. What matters is knowing how to network with your peers and to be humble and to learn and I fucked up plenty at this early stage by thinking I was a member of the club on account of having one professional clip! I had bought into this disdainful, common misconception of what the club might mean, and so I came off as arrogant as fuck and wanting to argue with established journos like we were all equitable peers and two years later I still worry about the potential damage I’ve done to myself and my chances, although in all likelihood the people I’ve offended have probably forgotten about my earlier imbecilic behavior. But I always remember what I’ve been told, that this is a very small business and you cannot afford to make enemies.

Club membership for me was the recognition and respect of these people. These were the editors who controlled the page space and the budgets, who assigned the reviews and approved or turned down the pitches, these were the people one had to get in with if they wanted to be a video game journalist. There’s no magic formula to breaking into game journalism but networking with the right people sure does help, and most of the folks at Polygon either jumped the hurdle of resonating with and establishing audiences or managed outlets that collectively jumped it together. Could we look at the teasers as ego maniacal flotsam? Sure. Has the Polygon crew collectively achieved enough in the game journalism industry to warrant it? Also sure. If you hold official club membership that none of your peers would question you worked your ass off for it.

Some of the venom is coming from other members of the games journalism community. There’s plenty of camaraderie in game journalism but there’s just as much or more competition, with everyone trying to out-do everyone else on scoops and original features, and page hits and unique users and other metrics. Polygon, then, being such a collection of veteran club members, and backed by the financial stability of The Verge, is not only hefty competition but also competition that is likely to be here for a long while, and I don’t care what anyone says, when you’re fighting over such a small audience there’s always going to be resentment when a new kid moves in on the block, even if it’s staffed with mostly old writers.

You still see vestiges of this kind of resentment through the way people talk about Destructoid sometimes. Yanier Gonzalez showed up at E3 in a suit and a homemade robot helmet as Mr. Destructoid and thus founded one of the juggernauts of modern video game journalism, and industry veterans were pissed. How dare this dancing clown muscle in on their territory? The phrase to pull a Destructoid wouldn’t have any meaning without this underlying message of upstart-ism. Dtoid went toe-to-toe with giants like Kotaku and Joystiq and from a certain point of view won by even being in the same caliber as those sites to this very day in terms of the size of the audience and the industry access they command, and as evidenced by the home-brewed media empire that Gonzalez continues to expand.

You can see the competitive spirit in the Polygon sales pitch – the best group of editors ever – which is also what’s pissed off some members of the games journalism community. There’s an inescapably-dismissive air to that statement which can lead journos who continue to work at the ex-outlets of the Polygon staff to feel like the quality of their work is being trodden upon. Some game journos are irked with Polygon the same way they were irked with Ben Kuchera, formerly of Ars Technica, who left Ars to join Penny Arcade. Part of Kuchera’s mantra is “Games journalism is broken. We can do better,” a statement which impressively indicts the whole of the games journalism industry in its wake.

Polygon’s sales pitch does carry an inevitable air of “We used to work at other sites, but now we’re working for a much better one,” but again I take this as mostly hype and not in a bad way. Just because the members of Polygon are members of the club now doesn’t mean they always will be. If Polygon crashes and burns the ill will generated by that sales pitch could burn some of them, but I imagine they are going to be around for a while, which means they’ve established one of the most sought-after Grails in the game journalism community: Stability. That, in and of itself, is likely to arouse jealous sentiment from some corners.

I personally like the metaphor of the club because it helps me visualize how I can raise my personal bar to edge closer and closer to the private rooms in the back, like challenging myself with different kinds of features or trying to land more original stories from events. The only way I can keep going is to keep thinking that the more I challenge myself and produce good work, the better my chances of getting noticed at the right place and at the right time, because luck is always a frustrating but inescapable factor here, as well. It has been for me several times.

I get really tired of the constant sniping and competition and snark and bullshit I see from the inside of this industry, though. Getting ensconced in all of that constitutes a forgetting of our collective place. Most gamers have no idea who the fuck the biggest video game developers are much less who the few, big names in video game journalism are. Maybe they know Geoff Keighley because he’s sometimes on those infernal promo videos that run in GameStop. But in the grand scheme of the video game industry and in the grand scheme of the wider journalism industry we are ALL small fry, even the greatest of us. Our EICs and well-known names are big fish in a very, very small pond.

Is there an aspect of losing this perspective in the Polygon trailers? Absolutely. But in the end, I think those trailers are meant for the other club members as much as anyone else. I have to imagine that other game journalists, as much as they might protest to the contrary, want to command the attention and respect of their peers. Polygon might not have everyone’s respect right now, but they sure as fuck have everyone’s attention. If their website delivers the goods these trailers might be looked upon more kindly when all is said and done.

In the interim, if Polygon wants to have their fun with these trailers so what? If their website doesn’t deliver the Polygon crew will pay the price for these trailers, not any of us. Can’t we all just be really fucking happy that we’ve managed to do something that so many other people would kill to be able to do? We get paid to write about video games.

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Dear Videogames, Stop Telling Me Everything

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Read this article to unlock the good ending

By Nathan Grayson on August 29th, 2012 at 1:00 pm.

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When I beat the absolutely wonderful Thirty Flights Of Loving over the weekend, I had precisely one immediate reaction: “Wait, what just happened?” I cannot even begin to tell you how much that excites me. But then I decided to write an article about it, largely because one of my greatest passions in life is defying nonsencial figures of speech. At any rate, Thirty Flights Of Loving packs loads of information into not-even-30-minutes with hardly any dialog or exposition. But, in some ways, it’s even more of a supposed “un-game” than, say, Modern Warfare 3. I mean, all agency is illusory. Without spoiling anything (note: that’ll happen a little bit after the break), you’re along for the ride – and that’s it. In a couple bits, it doesn’t even matter where you walk. The game will just jump-cut you to your intended location.

So why is it one of my absolute favorite games – and yes, I one hundred percent believe it’s a game – of the year? Because it made me think about what happened. No, scratch that. It required me to think.

This is, however, an example other games could stand to crib a note or two from – conceptually, if not literally. Most videogame stories feel the need to Spell. Out. Every. Last. Detail. The industry’s mass market now, after all. Wouldn’t want the unwashed masses turning their puny peanut brains into pretzels with some kind of ignorance-powered alchemy. But Thirty Flights Of Loving really isn’t that complex. It’s just detail-rich and open to interpretation.

This is the same reason that movies like Inception have resonated with such gigantic audiences. I mean, Inception was a smart film, but it wasn’t that smart. It was, however, positively brilliant at inviting the audience to take an active role in its consumption of the plot – right up to that oh-so-iconic ending. And that, in turn, made viewers feel like goddamn geniuses. Now, the gaming industry’s afraid of adding subtle curves to the yarns it spins for fear of alienating the lowest common denominator. But here’s a secret: everyone in the entire world likes feeling smart. Conversely, no one enjoys being treated like they’re stupid. And most people have a pretty good sense of when they’re being talked down to. You fucking lackwit.

It goes further than that, though. The other benefit of leaving stories just open enough is a certain sense of mystique and possibility. I don’t know everything about the world, and that’s the point. My brain fills in the gaps of what it perceives as this giant, fully fleshed out place – even when, in Thirty Flights Of Loving’s case, the developers only really constructed a handful of rooms. Hhere’s what I did immediately following the first time the credits, er… well, they exactly roll. Let’s just say that. Anyway, I didn’t miss a beat. The whirlwind tale of love, loss, espionage, and box people ended, and I jumped right back in for a second go-round. Why? Because there were a hundred details both big and small that I wasn’t entirely clear on, but I was right on the verge of knowing. Or at least, that’s how it felt. Thirty Flights Of Loving had given me this tiny slice of its universe, but there’s so much meat on those seemingly emaciated bones. So much to explore and dig into and understand and speculate about and obsess over. So then I played it a third time, and I picked apart each environment to really soak up what Blendo Games had created. And then I went through with developer’s commentary enabled.

Now, here’s the key bit: Thirty Flights Of Loving isn’t that complex of a story. Rather, it says just what it needs to with incredible confidence, dramatically drops its microphone, and then saunters off stage. And then the crowd begins to murmur. “Who was that in the flashback? Why did so-and-so A point a gun at so-and-so B? And oh goodness, what was the actual meaning of, well, the title?” In my case, I slowly but surely pieced many of those bits together. And I felt smart for doing it. That was my real participation. That was the game. Was it a story-based game or a game-based story? That question’s irrelevant. It was an amazing, incredibly unique experience either way.

Dear Esther pulled off a similar feat earlier this year – albeit, by taking an entirely different approach. Still though, it handed players tiny, randomly ordered narrative scraps and asked us to sow them into a meticulously interwoven tapestry. Except actually, it didn’t ask at all. But players just did it, because that’s how the human brain works. We like stories and patterns. So we seek them out even where they may not be fully formed – or even exist at all. And then thechineseroom tossed in randomly appearing ghosts, which only heaped fuel on players’ speculative fires and added to the world’s mystique. Again, the story was open. It was, in large part, the game. Taken in conjunction with the option to explore and digest the world as we saw fit, it created a perfect environment for both building this all-consuming curiosity and slowly but surely sating it.

Compare that to the supposed pinnacle of videogame storytelling at this point: player-driven choices. Sure, we get to shape a game’s outcome, but it is – to my mind – oftentimes damaging to the creation of a believable setting. After all, there’s a series of predetermined resolutions, and it’s not terribly difficult to see the puppet master working the strings in the background. We’ve got a constant barrage of bars and meters and paragons and renegades and alignments. Or, failing those, blatantly obvious “choice” moments. Cause-and-effect. Cause-and-effect. Cause-and-effect. It’s all so mechanical and telegraphed – like, well, a videogame. And, on some level, it makes sense. I mean, players have shown a tendency to get pretty upset when, say, a character dies or they don’t get the ending they want. Without a clear roadmap toward setting things right, it’d be pretty easy to say, “Well, great. I just wasted 60 hours.”

So developers lay all their cards on the table. Because then we, as players, have power and control (or at least, the illusion of it) – which is, admittedly, what many people are looking for when they buy these games. But personally, I really like not knowing every last thing. Even in the case of narrative-altering choices, I think it crafts a far more interesting, emotionally involving story. The vagueness of cause-and-effect in games like Metro 2033 and Lone Survivor really made me stick to a set of convictions I actually believed in – as opposed to a set that would mold the plot and my character’s abilities as I saw fit. In Lone Survivor, for instance, I ended up making the majority of my decisions based on what’d make my character happy and healthy, because it really put me in a bad place to see someone so wretchedly, hopelessly, gut-twistingly miserable.

Don’t get me wrong: I also love suiting up in Shepard’s increasingly glowy armor and feeling safe in the knowledge that I can plot a course straight to space-saving sainthood. Similarly, there are plenty of times when I just want to sit down, curl up in a blanket, and have each and every drop of a plot spoonfed to me. But I think there’s also plenty of room for games that strike a better balance between straightforward and open-to-interpretation. And I think it’s even possible for the industry’s oft-sought “wider audiences” to really connect with stories that pull it off.

So that’s that, then. I have now spelled out my thoughts on the topic of vagueness in excruciating, lengthy detail. As such, this seems as pertinent time as any to offer the following incredibly universal life advice: Do what I say, not what I do.

__________________

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Brainy Gamer: Me, my avatar, and the space between

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We often cite interactivity as the defining characteristic of narrative games. It’s what most clearly separates the medium from its storytelling brethren in Theater and Film. When the good folks at Naughty Dog want us to know what will make The Last of Us special, they say it will unfold like a playable movie. When David Cage talks about his forthcoming game Beyond: Two Souls, he cites the importance of the player controlling both the protagonist and the powerful specter that accompanies her.

Cinematic and dramaturgical influences on such games are obvious, but the presence of a controllable avatar distinguishes games from other media, regardless of how much (Mass Effect 3 - eight alternate endings) or little (Shadow of the Colossus - one definitive ending) the player actually impacts the story.

Manipulating a character with mad skills through a virtual world has never lost its charm for me, but these days I find myself less interested in rolling a character or navigating choose-your-own-adventure narrative trees. Lately I’m drawn to authored characters like Jackie Estacado (The Darkness), Cole Phelps (L.A. Noire), and, most recently, Wei Shen (Sleeping Dogs).

These games hand me a controller, but not full control. I maneuver constructed characters through game worlds, but never fully command them. I relate to them as avatars who respond to my base choices (walk, run, eat, sleep, fight, flee), but I never fully identify with them. I can’t subordinate them to my will, but I’m with them, and I often feel I am them . Wei Shen may do things I don’t like, but until I press “W” he does nothing at all. He essentially ceases to exist. When I give him life, he springs to action and operates by his own rules. Under such conditions, it’s worth asking who is controlling whom.

I’m drawn to these characters and their stories, but I’m more interested by the space between us. This unique space between player and avatar - often dissonant, sometimes disturbingly so - informs my experience playing these games and impacts that experience more subtly than simple interactivity might suggest.

Protagonists with “issues” are all the rage, especially on TV. The four best dramas of the last decade - The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad - all feature deeply flawed central characters who sometimes do very bad things. It’s easy to observe that video games have yet to mine the depths of a Don Draper or a Walter White, but games are less equipped to explore characters in the ways serial dramas do.

What games can do is expose a layer of meaning that doesn’t exist in traditional media. This layer is generated by interactivity that implicates the player/viewer/actor in ways that extend beyond what’s possible in a sender-receiver relationship, ala film and television.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Early on in Sleeping Dogs, Wei Shen meets a beautiful Club hostess named Tiffany. She flirts with Wei, and the game offers the player a chance to sing karaoke with her.

As it does throughout, Sleeping Dogs communicates on several channels at once. In-game, Tiffany represents a means for Wei to infiltrate the Triad via the club’s VIP room. From a player perspective, she’s one of several “girlfriend options,” familiar to anyone who’s played GTA or other similar open-world games. And on a purely ludic level, Tiffany is the conduit to a karaoke mini-game the player may return to play any time.

All these functions trivialize Tiffany - as a minor plot device; as a “collectible”; as the key to an unlockable mini-game - and gamers who’ve met variations of Tiffany in GTA, Saints Row, etc. are unlikely to give her a second thought. Date her, have fun, get her number in your cell phone, and move on to the next girl and the next mission. This is what Wei Shen does in Sleeping Dogs.

Several hours and at least two girlfriend options later, Wei Shen meets a man named Calvin waiting for him outside his apartment. The man informs Wei that Tiffany has been cheating on him.

Calvin: I’ve got some bad news for you. You know Tiffany? From the club? She’s been stepping out. Seeing Longfinger Chau on the side.
Wei: What? There’s no way.
Calvin: Listen, man. I overheard her talking on the payphone outside her place. I guess she’s keeping him off her cell.

And so begins a mission called “Red-Handed Tiffany.” The player must locate the payphone Tiffany has been using, bug the handset, and listen in on her conversation with another man. With proof in hand, Wei Shen segues to a mission called “Following Tiffany” and finally confronts her:

Wei: Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?
Tiffany: Oh! So the big Triad gangster is mad now? Only the big Triad gangster can sleep with other people?… You think you can fool around on me and I don’t care?
Wei: She didn’t mean anything to me. That was just part of work.
Tiffany: Work? You think I’m an idiot? You think you can go around jumping into other girls whenever you feel like it? Well, what’s good for yang is good for yin.
Wei: Okay, okay. Look, I’m sorry, alright? I never meant for you to get hurt.
Tiffany: Hah! Some excuse. So you going to dump her now? Stay loyal to me? Or do I have to go find another man to keep me warm?
Wei: Let me see what I can do.
Tiffany: You know… I thought you were different. I guess not. Goodbye. (She walks away)

Suddenly, “player” takes on unexpected connotations. Tiffany justifiably accuses Wei Shen (and me) of blithely playing the field while expecting her to be available whenever Wei (or I) wants to see her. Sleeping Dogs turns the tables on player and avatar. Watching Tiffany sadly walk away, I was struck by the hard reality that I was no less guilty of hypocrisy than Wei Shen. I sought other girlfriends when the options presented themselves, and I bugged the payphone, eager to test her fidelity.

But it doesn’t end there. Being an open world game, Sleeping Dogs lets me choose what happens next. In a virtual environment with no real-world consequences, I’m free to respond to Tiffany’s rejection of Wei/me any way I want, as is any player who completes the mission. Observe the behavior of this player (whom I don’t know) in the same situation. (Watch for 60 secs.)

Intriguing, eh? I want to know what went through this player’s mind in the pivotal moment of decision. I want to know what made him consider it, and what made him stop.

This space between player and avatar (and more importantly, what emerges there) is rich with possibilities games have only begun to explore. Of course, it’s possible for players to disengage from reflection or deliberation and simply blow through a game like Sleeping Dogs without thinking about ethics, narrative, or dissonance. If fact, maybe jettisoning those concerns is just another useful function of a sandbox game that doesn’t insist on such deliberation to “beat the game.”

But the Tiffany missions (and other parts of the game) suggest its developers targeted that space between me and Wei Shen, inviting reflection and even reconsideration of how narrative games provoke us to think, feel, and choose. It models a kind of interactivity that mingles opposites: control and chaos, resonance and dissonance. Perhaps the real success of Sleeping Dogs - unlike GTA IV or L.A. Noire - is that it makes that space a place I want to be.

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How are video games like a French Dip sandwich? • Opinions • Eurogamer.net

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They’re both too good to be lost to history.

Phillipe’s is a small fast food restaurant located in Los Angeles’ Chinatown - although I think it predates most of the neighbourhood surrounding it. Phillipe’s has been there since 1908, in fact, which makes it fairly venerable in local terms. It’s an LA landmark, and it feels like it, too. You walk in, and it’s dark and pleasantly grimy: you instantly feel like you’re in on something good. It looks like a cop hangout or a favourite lunch spot for private eyes. I once asked my Dad whether his dad - who actually was with the LAPD between the 1930s and the 1950s - ever went there, but, being a richly and instinctively prejudiced man, Sergeant Donlan tended to avoid the place. You know, because of the French name.

He was missing out. The other day, I went to Phillipe’s with my aunt and uncle. I’ve wanted to go for ages. It’s one of a couple of different places in the States that claims to have invented the French Dip sandwich, see, where the bun is soaked in gravy before serving. “Soaked in gravy” is one of those phrases you learn to listen out for in life. Long story short, I can confirm that the turkey French Dip, at the very least, is totally amazing, and the potato salad is even better. But there’s something more to my visit than that, though. There’s something about Phillipe’s that got me thinking about video games.

That’s because, while the food is great, what’s really special about Phillipe’s is the way that it’s kept old LA - and, to a certain extent, old America - alive. There’s sawdust on the floor here, there are old pressed-tin advertisements for the railways on the walls, and there’s a rack of wooden telephone booths in a corner, waiting, presumably, for Jimmy Stewart to pad over and drop a dime. The cashiers don’t take plastic at Phillipe’s; it’s like they aren’t yet comfortable that the whole idea of credit is going to stick. Instead, there’s this complex ritual where you have to put your money in a marbled tray on the counter and then they take your tray away and quickly bring back your change. The plates aren’t made of normal plate stuff, but of roughly pulped cardboard. The ladies behind the counter look like ladies out of a Gary Larson cartoon: weighty, bespectacled, crimp-lipped, full of knowledgeable disdain for their clientele. There are rituals, here. There is private terminology.

If you do go to Phillipe’s, tell ‘em Chris sent you. They won’t know what you’re talking about, but it will make me feel good.

It made me think about preservation. Phillipe’s has preserved the French Dip, of course, but that wouldn’t actually be too much of an achievement by itself: take a couple of pictures, write down the recipe, and you can preserve the French Dip too. Phillipe’s, though, has actually done so much more than that. It’s preserved all the stuff that makes the French Dip special, trading you 10 dollars or so for a few minutes’ precious access to the era in which a sandwich dipped in gravy seemed like kind of a ritzy idea. The sandwich is always going to taste good, in other words, but when I go back to Phillipe’s, it’s probably not going to be the food leading me there: it’ll be a better insight into the city where so many of my family grew up.

I’m thinking more about stuff like this because games are growing up, too, and they’re changing so rapidly that I’m starting to realise that the ways my children will one day play them will be very different from the ways I played them when I was a kid. I want to preserve those games I grew up loving - I want us to be able to explain to the next generation what games were like for us and why they have always been so exciting. But cripes: how do you go about doing that?

Focusing on the hardware and the software is not all that’s needed, I suspect. Putting a Megadrive in a locked safe so that some non-linear robot genius from the year 4500 can poke around on Quackshot isn’t really the complete solution, is it? It’s like the photo and recipe approach to the French Dip: you get the basic material, but you lose the vital context that brings the whole thing to life. For Phillipe’s you lose the sawdust, the fearsome old ladies, the pulped paper plates. For Quackshot, you lose the whole business of expectation as you stare at the screenshots in some magazine or other and wonder how well it’s going to animate. You lose the rumours at school about the one kid who had the game early, and the flurry of negotiations as that single copy got loaned around, and then everyone compared notes.

None of that sounds particularly exciting, perhaps, but it was a crucial part of my enjoyment of games as a kid: the longing, the endless granular discussions of parallax scrolling and secret areas, the trading and the bargaining. Having spoken to a few people associated with things like the National Videogames Archive, capturing exactly this kind of thing seems to be a problem they’re all too aware of. The code - and the stuff that runs the code - is a good place to begin, but where do you go next? How do you get to the interaction that makes games special? How do you get the forensic examination of the pages of Mean Machines, the arguments about Mario and Sonic having a fight? How do you get all the other rituals, private and public, that got us hooked, and perhaps have helped keep some of us hooked, too?

When Simon Parkin went to meet Nolan Bushnell recently, he spent some of his time at Barcade in Brooklyn, in which old arcade machines are placed, hopefully non-ironically, in a setting very similar to the one they were originally built for: smoky, slightly seedy gloom where drinks are spilled and loose change jingles in pockets. Hey, we’re back in Phillipe’s! Barcade and places like it are a great step forward: you get the original hardware, and you get a hint at the original context. Good stuff, but arcades had it relatively easy, remember: like fancy deli sandwiches, you went to a specific place to enjoy this sort of game, and these specific places were often relatively similar across large chunks of the planet. Home consoles and personal computers and mobile platforms and everything since makes preserving the important contextual elements much harder: the world of games has become more personal, and more varied.

1/17 Is the Monkey Island code wheel one of the more loveable DRM solutions?

Example: when I think of Monkey Island, the fact that it was the first really funny game I played is only part of what I actually love about it. What I really love, if I’m being honest, is memories of staying up late during sleepovers to play it on my friend Gareth’s family Viglen, while his moderately terrifying parents snored upstairs, and the streetlights outside cast the hallway where his PC was kept in a sickly sodium orange. I think about those evenings quite a lot, even now: they’ve stayed sharp in my mind while so much else has faded. I want my kids to have their equivalent of memories like that - although possibly without the Monkey Island code wheel, which Gareth kept losing - and it would be cool if they knew that those evenings were part of an informal tradition.

I don’t know how to go about saving what’s great about old games, of course, but a few years back, I visited the Game On exhibition in London, and one interesting thing struck me. The wonderful old hardware and the wonderful old software was there, and you could play on most of it if you could stomach the odd queue; as archives go, it was a decent jumping off point. What was really effective, though, was seeing the games and consoles juxtaposed with pieces of player testimony: a twenty-something guy listing his various retro purchases in minute, granular detail, and a kid - apologies, I’ve shamelessly used this before in a Zelda preview that simply wouldn’t bring itself to a neat conclusion - talking about the manner on which his lavish adventures in Hyrule had informed his own make-believe world in the back garden.

We need to preserve the players as well as the games in some way, and perhaps the anecdotes we pass down could be an important part of that. You know, anecdotes about classic WOW sessions, all day Worms 2 binges, that week you took off from uni to work through Metal Gear Solid 2, that period where you played Gears of War every Thursday with people from the office, and watched as they slowly became your friends. Is that as good as a trip to Phillipe’s? No, and it’s not as tasty, either - trust me. It’s a start, though, and there might be an additional benefit, too. Whenever I think of the Monkey Island evenings over at Gareth’s, one thought connects to another, and pretty soon so many little things I’d otherwise have forgotten are spilling back into my head in a reverie that I’d describe as Proustian, if only Proust had ever dropped 30 notes on - ugh - Galaxy Force, and if only his madeleine was a box of blue plastic diskettes.

If our memories are one of the keys to preserving games, then, maybe games can help preserve our memories at the same time. By saving games, we’ll be saving some crucial part of ourselves.

eurogamer.net • Archive • Like & Archive • Like

Why downvoting on Greenlight is ill considered…

merseyremakes.co.uk • Archive • Like & Archive • Like

…in more ways than one. Putting this down here because 140 characters on Twitter is a pain in the arse sometimes.

The Purpose Of Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down on Greenlight

When you give a game the thumbs up on Greenlight, it’s an explicit endorsement of the game. It is, by design, a button to agree that yes, this game should be on Steam. It has one purpose and one purpose alone.

1. A person, when clicking this button, agrees that yes, this game should be on Steam and that would be a jolly good thing.

When you give a game the thumbs down on Greenlight, it’s… hang on, it could be any number of things.

1. It could be that a person disagrees with the very thought of this game being on Steam.

2. It could be that a person simply wants to shoo the game out of the “unrated” list.

3. It could be that a person simply fancies downvoting something.

4. It could be that a person viciously hates a developer for existing, with or without good reason.

5. It could be that a person thinks that the game is currently not ready for Steam but maybe it will be in the future but for now, let’s just downvote it until changes are made.

6. It could be for the lulz.

It could be any number of things.

Thumbs down is a button without clear purpose

And that makes things awkward because then there’s no way of telling why a game is getting downvoted, only that it is. No-one will ever know if it’s for serious or for frivolous reasons because it’s just a button that gets pressed, there’s no feedback, nothing granular, there’s no reasoning that can be assumed. It’s a button of no certain purpose.

If the purpose of the button is to police offensive or unsupported content then it is duplicating the function of the report button and it can be removed.

If the purpose of the button is to see what people don’t want on Steam, it doesn’t just fulfill that purpose for all the above reasons.

If the purpose of the button is to enable people to dismiss games from their rating pile then it should reflect that, not be “thumbs down” with all the implications that brings.

You don’t have to rate everything up or down.

A simpler and more sensible route would be to offer people a way of ignoring the votes. Under the current system views are split into what you’ve rated/what you’ve not rated. Having a “I don’t care” button of some variety is one solution. Netflix use this system to reasonably good effect.

The ideal solution would be to just remove negative or ambivalent voting entirely and just allowing the games that do get votes to speak for themselves. That way those who don’t care or don’t want a title on Steam don’t have to take any action.

The Other Big Problem With Thumbs Down

AKA: Why it truly concerns me.

When you log into Greenlight as an author, you will see a display of the percentage of pos/neg votes. As an author, you will be fundamentally aware of the amount of negative votes your game has received and it will, for most people, be an overwhelmingly large number in comparison to positive votes. And it will be this way for a lot of developers for no other reason than the button exists with no clear purpose and people will have a thousand different reasons for using it and lo, they will have used it.

It can hurt be just ignored but that’s something a lot of smaller developers already cope with. To have a bar that explicitly tells developers that large groups of people don’t wants their work? That’s way, way different and when someone is already vulnerable, this is one super extra hard kicking that they probably don’t need, right?

Some games and developers are better equipped to absorb these downvotes

I’m 10 years strong FUCK YOU indie. I’m used to people downvoting my games, I’m used to harsh comments and I’m able to tune out large amounts of them because I know and have learned to concentrate on the people who do care. They’re the people who keep me making games, they’re important to me.

But as I say, I’m tough as old boots, my wings are like a shield of steel and I’m more likely to flid over a developer or something. I also have a great support network in place and a reasonable buffer of wonderful people who can always make up for any and all negativity. I’m not so easily bothered by a red bar filling up with votes, I take great amusement in my own, for example. It makes me giggle and I do not consider any negative votes as a problem for me.

But everyone is not me. And that’s super important to remember.

People will get hurt

Thumbs Down is a function that could, and probably will, discourage developers.

Not just discourage developers from submitting games to Steam again in future but from producing games again in future. Because if 1,000 people feel strongly enough to use the button without purpose to say NO SIR, THIS IS A THUMBS DOWN FROM ME then that can hurt. Not to sound like a soppy twat or anything but developers have feelings too and it’s already a massive ask for a lot of smaller developers to put themselves out there in the public eye like this. Just the very act of submitting a game to Greenlight, something I can do without a second thought and on a cheeky whim, is a super big massive thing to many that requires a leap of FUCK IT! that’s not to be underestimated.

No-one likes being told they’re shit

I don’t think this is a healthy thing for games development as a whole. To be ignored is one thing, to have something infer “you’re too shit for Steam” is hard to separate from “you’re too shit” precisely because people don’t tend to be unthinking automatons. People have feelings. There’s many talented developers who only have the scantest levels of self belief and it’s those that we run the risk of alienating from game development in the longer term through systems like this. Things that on the surface, perhaps, seem harmless but come loaded with potential things that can and will cut deep and cut hard for many.

You might well say “well, the developer should know better than to submit to Greenlight then because clearly their game isn’t good enough or they just can’t take the heat” but y’know, bad votes happen to good games as well as bad games. Just by the button existing with the vague-to-none-whatsoever-purpose, people will click it and people will get hurt who don’t deserve to feel bad about themselves.

We’re supposed to be encouraging people to make games right now and sure, someone’s first (or second, or third!) game might be shit and maybe it’s a reach putting it on Greenlight but Greenlight is going to be an important step for many and it’s harmful to discourage them from feeling able to do that if we want a healthy, vibrant and varied Greenlight environment that extends beyond the usual indie heavyweights and big names.

The game they put up there now may be guff but the next one might not be and if they’re already soiled for life on Greenlight or Steam or a large community of players, I don’t see how this can have a happy ending. I’ve seen promising developers quit for less than this because they’re already unsure of themselves and uncertain of their talents. I don’t want to see a system in place to tip that balance further.

Even allowing for all the myriad of reasons a person might hit that downvote button, that it could cost us future games from developers who may never continue after the kicking, I’d prefer to see it shot for that reason alone. I’d just prefer to see less people get hurt full stop, really.

And that’s good enough reason to lose that button, y’know? For the future of games.

merseyremakes.co.uk • Archive • Like & Archive • Like

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