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Opinion: What The Hell Is With That Hitman Trailer?

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The latest Hitman Absolution trailer reveals disturbing truths about what game marketers think we want to see.

by Keza MacDonald

May 30, 2012

We’re all used to a bit of tasteless violence in videogames. It happens all the time. We’re also used to attention-seeking trailers. The latest Hitman Absolution trailer, though, pairs gratuitous violence with sexualised imagery to create the most troubling piece of marketing material I think I’ve ever seen. It’s obviously designed to shock, but the effect isn’t thought-provoking or emotional – it leaves you feeling uncomfortable, mildly disgusted, and wondering what kind of warped conception Hitman’s marketing team has of what gamers want to see.

If you’ve not seen Attack of the Nuns, it’s embedded below. Here’s a summary: Agent 47 strips off bloodstained clothing in a motel bathroom, redressing in his trademark crisp white shirt and red tie. Meanwhile, a group of women dressed as nuns marches from a schoolbus parked outside the motel. The camera focusses on their breasts, downturned faces, and high-heeled shoes, before focussing on the eyes of one of the women. They bring pistols, SMGs and a rocket launcher out from under their habits before stripping them off to reveal tightfitting, PVC-and-leather, bondage-reminiscent costume, heavy on the suspenders, crotch shots and sashaying walks. Agent 47, meanwhile, is putting clothes on, slipping a jacket over his shirt and pulling on his trademark black gloves.

The barely-dressed nuns line up outside the motel and launch a rocket at it, kicking off an explicitly violent fight. Agent 47 strangles one of the women and punches her in the side of the head. He then shoots two more in the neck before another kicks him to the ground. When another tried to strangle him, he breaks her nose in slow motion. Another fights with him briefly before he hits he square in the face, batting another’s guns away before using the woman with the bloodied face as a human shield She absorbs bullets, and then Agent 47 shoots the final nun square in the forehead before she can fire a round at him. He then closes her dead eyes, and there’s a shot of him standing before a burning building. Intercut with all of this are slow-pans of his shining guns.

This is difficult imagery. This would be difficult imagery even if it was tasteful. But it is not tasteful, it’s grotesque and tacky and actually quite dangerous. Let’s be clear here: the problem is not that Agent 47 is graphically murdering a group of women, though that’s pretty nasty. It’s that it fetishizes the violence and sexualises the women, drawing a clear line between sex and graphic violence that makes the trailer really distressing to watch, and leaves you questioning who the hell it’s designed to appeal to.

Let’s break this down. The women in this trailer – let’s call them female assassins, for want of better information – are objectified from almost the first shot in which we see them. The typical innocence/sin imagery of a naughty nun is warped here to extreme proportions, providing a kind of obscene justification for the violence; as if, because they look like they do, they probably deserve to get taught a lesson, the slutty whores.

It’s as if the marketing people figured out that showing Agent 47 brutalising a bunch of women would probably be a bit hard to stomach, so decided to dress them up as slutty nuns to… what, make it OK? What the hell? In the minds of the people behind this trailer, are we supposed to be more comfortable with watching these women being brutalised because they’re dressed like whores? What kind of message is that?

What are you, the Straight Male Gamer to whom Hitman is primarily marketed, supposed to feel when you’re watching this trailer? Are you supposed to be turned on by the nuns, or the violence, or both? This is fetishizing violence – specifically, it’s fetishizing violence against women, which is just not a message you want to be associated with your video game.

On top of all of that, it’s not remotely relevant to the game – Hitman is about a silent assassin, about plotting kills and assassinations and disappearing without a trace, not hand-to-hand fights and explosions. Even if, for some reason, none of this imagery bothers you, there’s no denying that it’s not representative of the game. It’s a grab for attention that misrepresents its source material. (Hitman Absolution looks great, by the way, and not remotely like anything in this trailer.)

We’re always seeing sexualised women in video games. There’s also an established stereotype of the sexy ass-kicking femme fatale, clad in skintight clothing and experienced in dishing out death. You only need to look at any fighting or action game to find evidence of these rather depressing female character archetypes in action. But other games don’t fetishize their gruesome demise like this trailer does. They aren’t about how cool it looks to brutalise them.

This isn’t the first time that Hitman’s marketing has courted this this uncomfortable synthesis of violence and sexualisation in search of attention, either. Remember these stomach-turning ads from Hitman: Blood Money, which were banned in several countries?

Maybe you’re not grossly offended by this trailer. I wasn’t, the first time I saw it. The first time I saw it I just thought it was a bit gratuitous. But as soon as you think about it for more than a few minutes, it’s impossible to get away from the sheer moral and aesthetic unpleasantness of this imagery. There’s no context, no mitigating circumstances – this is violence-porn, put together to look cool. Is that what people think gamers find cool? Breaking the noses of women in suspenders in slow motion? This trailer panders to violence-worship and misogynistic desires that have nothing to do with the game, and that surely don’t exist in the minds of Hitman fans.

Are we supposed to find this trailer appealing? If so, why? What is supposed to appeal to us about it – the violence, the sexy nuns, the slow-motion gun pans, the image of scantily clad women getting taught a brutal lesson? This isn’t cool. We shouldn’t shrug and accept this kind of marketing material as representative of what we, as gamers, want to see. Publishers need to stop these tactics. It’s not acceptable, and in the eyes of many, many people it does a lot more harm to Hitman Absolution’s image than good.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN’s games team in the UK. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.

by Keza MacDonald

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Hitman - Absolution: Szenen aus einem Populärmedium des 21. Jahrhunderts

videogametourism.at

Hitman - Absolution: Szenen aus einem Populärmedium des 21. Jahrhunderts

Seufz. Es ist schwer, Computerspiele als Medium zu verteidigen. Gewalttätig seien sie, so hört man regelmäßig von Kritikern jeden Kompetenzgrads, trash, infantil, als Kunstform nicht ernstzunehmen. Es ist mühsam, immer wieder gegen dieselben Vorurteile anzureden, es braucht Zeit und Nerven, die Skeptiker mit Positivbeispielen davon zu überzeugen, dass Games mehr sein können als nur pubertäre Gewaltfantasiebefriedigung, die hauptsächlich von sozial unterbelichteten pickeligen Jungs unter 17 konsumiert wird.

Und manchmal, wenn man gerade argumentiert hat, dass die mediale Verteufelung, oft anlässlich tagesaktueller Ereignisse, etwa Tragödien im Schulumfeld, einseitig wäre, wenn man beteuert, dass Games erwachsen geworden seien in den letzten Jahren, dass es vielleicht noch ein langer Weg sei, es aber durchaus in Richtung eines anspruchsvollen, vielfältigen neuen Mediums gehe, rülpst die PR-Abteilung des nächsten hoffnungsvollen Megasellers einmal kurz und begräbt sämtliche zarten Hoffnungen unter sich.

Anlass dieser Klage: Ein neuer Trailer zu Hitman: Absolution zeigt uns, dass manche Firmen ganz zufrieden damit sind, das Klischeezielpublikum pickliger, gewaltgeiler, sozial unterbelichteter Jungs unter 17 anzusprechen.

Es ist eine undankbare Aufgabe, diesen Trailer zu kritisieren. Ich persönlich habe kein Problem mit Trash und Gewaltdarstellung, bin großer Tarantino-Fan und sehe mich beileibe nicht als Puritaner, der bei jeder Gelegenheit die Feminismuskeule schwingen muss. Doch es fällt schwer, angesichts der Anhäufung derart pubertärer Gewaltfantasie nicht dem Reflex zum facepalm zu folgen. Dass Hitman seit jeher außerdem eigentlich ein Spiel ist, in dem es um sorgfältige Planung, um Taktik und vorsichtiges Vorgehen geht, ist ein Zusatzaspekt, der in diesem Zusammenhang zumindest einmal Erwähnung finden sollte.

Sexy Nonnen mit Knarren, High Heels und Korsagen, die vom adrett in Anzug und Krawatte gekleideten Hitman exekutiert werden - man braucht nicht Klaus Theweleits Klassiker “Männerphantasien” gelesen zu haben, um einzusehen, dass hier eine dumpf sexualisierte Machtfantasie aufgerollt wird, die ein zutiefst gestörtes Verhältnis zur “bedrohlichen” weiblichen Sexualität aufzeigt, aber schaden kann es nicht - vor allem, wenn sich so erschütternde Parallelen zeigen.

Zur Information: Theweleits Werk untersucht die sogenannte Landser-Literatur, die (prä-)faschistische Unterhaltungsliteratur im Soldatenmilieu - wenn man so will ein Populärmedium vom Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts.

Theweleit schreibt im Zusammenhang mit dem Bild der “Flintenweiber”, die sich außerdem in Krankenschwesterntracht (!) perfide verkleiden:

“Man spürt, wie eine lang aufgestaute Wut in diesen Attacken (gegen die Frauen, Anm.) ihr Ziel findet: endlich! (…) Ein Teil der Triebenergie, die uns bisher als ausweglos aufgestaute begegnet ist, entlädt sich hier. Hier ist ein Objekt, auf das die Libido sich stürzt. Diese Frauen, die scheinheilig auf die Schonungspflicht bauen, angreifen und vernichten zu können - das sind Durchbrüche, Befreiungen. (…)”

Und weiter:

“Alle bisher aufgeführten Übel des aus der Spaltung der Frauen hervorgegangenen ‘bösen’ Teils - dass sie Huren seien, schmutzige Tiere, dass sie Männer morden und kastrieren, dass sie sich, um nicht als ‘Flintenweiber’ (Frauen mit einem ‘Penis’) erkannt zu werden, der ‘weißen’ Schwesterntracht bedienen, sich den Abglanz der ‘reinen’ Mutter/Schwester zuzulegen versuchen, deren Bilder aber dann beschmutzen und pervertieren - all das scheint hier zusammenzulaufen zu einem einzigen Rechtfertigungsknäuel für die wütende Lust, mit der die Soldaten sie verfolgen. (…) Terror gegen die Frau, die nicht mit dem Mutter/Schwesternbild identifiziert ist, ist grundsätzlich Notwehr.” 

 (Klaus Theweleit: Männerphantasien. Bd. 2, München 1995. S.186ff.)

Alles halb so wild, nur trashiger Spaß, Überinterpretation, “ist ja nur ein Spiel”? Wenn Games als Medium ernstgenommen werden wollen, müssen sie sich derartiger Kritik stellen können - eigentlich.

Eins ist klar: Hitman - Absolution ist ein Spiel für Erwachsene - eigentlich. Altersfreigabe und Thematik sind eindeutig “ab 18”. Der aktuelle Trailer zeigt allerdings, wo die Marketingabteilung ihre Kaufanreize im Publikum zu finden glaubt: in den dunkelsten Ecken pubertärer Triebverdrängung samt Gewaltfantasie.

Das ist traurig für alle, die Spiele als Medium verteidigen wollen und sich derart sabotiert sehen: Wenn so wie hier alle Vorurteile gegen Spiele bestätigt werden, wirft dies de facto die Wahrnehmung des gesamten Mediums zurück, das sich, zumindest in jenen Titeln, die explizit für Erwachsene gedacht sind, ja eigentlich an ein Publikum richtet, das spätestens mit dem ersten Kuss Abschied von hilflosen Masturbationsfantasien wie dieser hier genommen hat. 

Seufz. Es ist schwer, Computerspiele als Medium zu verteidigen. Trailer wie dieser machen es noch ein Stück schwerer.

EDIT: Wie’s auch geht, zeigt der neue Trailer zu Dishonored. Gewalt an sich ist nicht das Problem, wie man sieht.

Verfasst von rainer sigl am 31. Mai 2012 - 13:03

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Turnaround

penny-arcade.com

Turnaround

Tycho

@TychoBrahe

Friday, June 1 2012 - 12:01 AM

I saw a single still used to promote a Hitman: Absolution trailer, a phalanx of leather-clad Battle-Nuns, and decided to skip it.  I felt like I had probably seen something very similar at some point.  But being mad at it is apparently a thing, a compulsory thing.  Except I don’t do compulsory, and I also don’t do infantilizing chivalry.  So I don’t do well at these kinds of parties.

The cinematic ambitions of the Hitman games have always been prominently displayed on (or very near to) its sleeve; I watched the video to see what the deal was, and they’re playing around with their subtitle in a pulpy, grindhouse vein.  Robert Rodriguez through and through.  It’s fight choreography, and it may set an “erotic” stage but it quickly - and I mean quickly - gives way to a gruesome, life or death, septum obliterating struggle that might be hot for somebody but I suspect that’s a very specific demographic.  Only a necrophile could be titillated by something like this; by the end, it literally defies the viewer to maintain an erection.  As spank material, it leaves something to be desired; specifically, spank material.

I think that once a nun produces an RPG from her habit, we have passed through a kind of “veil” critically speaking.  We can certainly talk about it for a long time if you want to.  But she did pull out a rocket launcher, seriously just right out of there.  It came out.  And then people still wanted to talk about this as though it were some kind of haunted obelisk around which an entire medium whirls.

I don’t understand what it is about the idea of a “medium” that people find so confusing; it’s a conceptual space where works that share certain characteristics may occur.  Nobody is going to approve of the entire continuum.  There’s no shortage of games for the broadest possible audience - there isn’t, and grotesque sums are being made seeking the wide part of the curve.  There are also niches, as in any ecology.  You can certainly find things you don’t like, but those things aren’t anti-matter; when they come into contact with things you do like, there is no hot flash which obliterates both.  This totalizing dialogue, where “everything” and “everyone” is this or that, and here are the teams, and morality is a linear abstraction as opposed to its three dimensional reality is a crock of fucking shit.

The swooning and fainting and so forth about this stuff, the fever, is comical in its preening intensity.  There is clearly some kind of competition to determine who is the most scandalized.  It reminds me of church, frankly; I don’t do church, either.  I have no common cause with perpetually shocked viziers of moral pageantry.  Indeed, I think it is fair to say that I am their enemy.

The answer is always more art; the corollary to that is the answer is never less art.  If you start to think that less art is the answer, start over.  That’s not the side you want to be on.  The problem isn’t that people create or enjoy offensive work.  The problem is that so many people believe that culture is something other people create, the sole domain of some anonymized other, so they never put their hat in the ring.  That even with a computer in your pocket connected to an instantaneous global network, no-one can hear you.  When you believe that, really believe it, the devil dances in hell.

(CW)TB out.

with the white gloves

Turnaround

Tycho

@TychoBrahe

Friday, June 1 2012 - 12:01 AM

I saw a single still used to promote a Hitman: Absolution trailer, a phalanx of leather-clad Battle-Nuns, and decided to skip it.  I felt like I had probably seen something very similar at some point.  But being mad at it is apparently a thing, a compulsory thing.  Except I don’t do compulsory, and I also don’t do infantilizing chivalry.  So I don’t do well at these kinds of parties.

The cinematic ambitions of the Hitman games have always been prominently displayed on (or very near to) its sleeve; I watched the video to see what the deal was, and they’re playing around with their subtitle in a pulpy, grindhouse vein.  Robert Rodriguez through and through.  It’s fight choreography, and it may set an “erotic” stage but it quickly - and I mean quickly - gives way to a gruesome, life or death, septum obliterating struggle that might be hot for somebody but I suspect that’s a very specific demographic.  Only a necrophile could be titillated by something like this; by the end, it literally defies the viewer to maintain an erection.  As spank material, it leaves something to be desired; specifically, spank material.

I think that once a nun produces an RPG from her habit, we have passed through a kind of “veil” critically speaking.  We can certainly talk about it for a long time if you want to.  But she did pull out a rocket launcher, seriously just right out of there.  It came out.  And then people still wanted to talk about this as though it were some kind of haunted obelisk around which an entire medium whirls.

I don’t understand what it is about the idea of a “medium” that people find so confusing; it’s a conceptual space where works that share certain characteristics may occur.  Nobody is going to approve of the entire continuum.  There’s no shortage of games for the broadest possible audience - there isn’t, and grotesque sums are being made seeking the wide part of the curve.  There are also niches, as in any ecology.  You can certainly find things you don’t like, but those things aren’t anti-matter; when they come into contact with things you do like, there is no hot flash which obliterates both.  This totalizing dialogue, where “everything” and “everyone” is this or that, and here are the teams, and morality is a linear abstraction as opposed to its three dimensional reality is a crock of fucking shit.

The swooning and fainting and so forth about this stuff, the fever, is comical in its preening intensity.  There is clearly some kind of competition to determine who is the most scandalized.  It reminds me of church, frankly; I don’t do church, either.  I have no common cause with perpetually shocked viziers of moral pageantry.  Indeed, I think it is fair to say that I am their enemy.

The answer is always more art; the corollary to that is the answer is never less art.  If you start to think that less art is the answer, start over.  That’s not the side you want to be on.  The problem isn’t that people create or enjoy offensive work.  The problem is that so many people believe that culture is something other people create, the sole domain of some anonymized other, so they never put their hat in the ring.  That even with a computer in your pocket connected to an instantaneous global network, no-one can hear you.  When you believe that, really believe it, the devil dances in hell.

(CW)TB out.

with the white gloves

penny-arcade.com

Why “if you don’t like it, make your own” is not a valid argument

deirdrakiai.com

Today, in response to critical outcry on a certain disgusting videogame trailer making rounds on the internet (relevant links here, here, and here), Tycho of Penny Arcade fame responded saying that rather than complaining about it, people should instead be making their own art. As a creator of my own art for the last decade or so, this particular silencing tactic — because let’s face it, “silencing tactic” is exactly what it is — angers me on a very personal level, if only because I once bought into it completely.

Don’t get me wrong. I love creating my own art. It’s an activity out of which I get more joy than almost anything else. I love encouraging people to create their own art too, because the art I enjoy most is the kind that’s personal and intimate. I haven’t even so much as touched a big-budget videogame in quite some time, simply because none of them interest me very much, these days. The book Tycho linked to in his post, Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, is absolutely fantastic and empowering and I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone reading this. And yet… that’s not all there is to the story.

For one thing, not only are sexist and ultraviolent videogames still continuing to be made in spite of better alternatives, they also happen to have some of the highest development and marketing budgets in our industry, to the point that when laypeople think of “videogames”, they immediately think “immature adolescent male pastime”. To say that this doesn’t have any kind of effect on the medium as a whole is absolutely ignorant. When you’re an industry professional, like myself and others I know, trying to hold videogames to a more mature standard, it gets really frustrating when orders from above dictate that you produce for the lowest common denominator. These are, after all, the People Who Buy Videogames. Trying to appeal to underserved demographics? Well, that’s a risky proposition, isn’t it? We all need to make money so we can eat, you know, and look at all those other games that tried to do something risky and didn’t sell. We can’t have that!

And the more this happens, the more confirmation bias you get. The videogame industry believes that the only people who will buy games are straight white men with an immature adolescent mentality, and as a result, the only people who do buy games are straight white men with an immature adolescent mentality. This, then, extends to people who wind up driven to be creators in this medium, because people tend to want to make games because of the games they’ve played, and it becomes a feedback loop, shutting out those of us who don’t belong. Even the well-lauded “indie” scene isn’t immune from this fate, since almost all success stories on that front are, you guessed it, straight white men creating games about being straight, white, and male — pretty much the same thing you see in the more commercial segments of the game industry, except maybe slightly quirkier.

Those of us in the margins, making our own art through the medium of games… well, I can only speak for myself, but seeing all this happening around me can be overwhelming, disheartening, and exhausting at times. I create for myself, yes, but I also want to speak to the rest of the world, engage in a dialogue… otherwise, what’s the point? I need to be heard, but how can I be heard through all this noise? How can I compete with their budgets, their armies of talented technical craftspeople? How can I polish and hone my skills when so much of what I’m trying to do is practically uncharted territory and I have so few mentors? When I release a game and the response is crickets — or if I’m lucky, fifteen minutes of fame before the collective attention span of the internet gets diverted to the next “ooh, shiny” thing — it can often feel like I haven’t made any kind of a difference at all.

I’m still going to make my own games because I love doing it and it’s important to me, but to make any kind of real change to our industry, that’s not going to be enough. I don’t claim to have any concrete solutions — and if I did, I’d be filthy rich by now — but I do know that pointing out and calling attention to the things that are wrong with our industry, as opposed to sticking our heads in the sand and ignoring them is, if not necessarily a better approach, then at least a more honest one. And hey, who says you can’t critique and create more art, or even critique in the form of art? Satire is a pretty neat tool, if I do say so myself.

So, in short, in case it wasn’t absolutely clear, not only do I not mind critics of violent, sexist media, I welcome and encourage them. They aren’t impinging on my ability to create my own art; if anything, they’re helping it. Let’s put the “if you don’t like it, make your own” non-argument to rest, because all it does is shunts those of us who do make our own art back into the margins, where we can’t really do much of anything.

[1]

[2]

deirdrakiai.com

News - Opinion: The Depth Jam

gamasutra.com

  Opinion: The Depth Jam
by Jonathan Blow
    May 31, 2012   [In this reprinted #altdevblogaday opinion piece, Braid developer Jonathan Blow shares some constructive criticism on game jams, game design retreats, and local developer meet-ups — and offers an alternative.]

Last week, I got together with three other designers for a four-day intensive design retreat known as the Depth Jam. The other attendees were: Chris Hecker of Spy Party, Marc ten Bosch of Miegakure, and Daniel Benmergui of Storyteller. This event was an experiment. Chris and I had been discussing the idea for a while, but it took us a couple of years to get around to it. One of my personal goals in setting up this event was to find a new way to stimulate my professional development, because the old ways were not cutting it any more.

The Depth Jam was designed in reaction to shortcomings of other game-related events. In order to explain the design choices behind the Depth Jam, I will speak critically of these other events, in order to highlight the problems that the Depth Jam is meant to address. If you are a fan of these events, organize some of them, or otherwise identify closely with them, then this will be uncomfortable. The best I can do here is to assure you that this isn’t attack-style negativity; it is criticism that comes from years of carefully considering these situations and thinking hard about how to make things better.

Conferences When I first started working in video games, I learned a lot from conferences and lectures. The few days I spent at the Computer Game Developers’ Conference in 1996 were eye-opening, even though I wasn’t comfortable enough as a game developer to know how to make effective use of that time. As years go by and we get better at what we do, a natural shift occurs: in the beginning, we are mostly deriving benefit from other attendees and presenters; later on, we are mostly providing benefit to other attendees, getting little out of it ourselves. I have been to the Game Developers Conference 17 times now. I find that I still do get something from attending, but it really takes a lot of work and there are very few people I can expect to learn from. All the smart programmers I know complain about conferences and consider them basically useless (except for the smart programmers who are also on conference advisory boards). I certainly developed this kind of frustrated “there’s nothing good here to see” attitude in the early 2000s, but to mitigate this situation I shifted into being much more of a conference presenter than an attendee. A lot of creative energy went into planning new conference sessions and making them good. This helped extend the useful life of conferences, because I was learning a great deal by running sessions. After about eight years, though, this ran its course and I had gotten the bulk of what I was going to get from this arrangement.

Game jams

In a typical game jam, developers gather for 2-4 days to do a working sprint, the goal being to produce a finished game entirely during the event. I was lucky enough to be around for the Indie Game Jam, which probably started the game jam trend (though I was often too busy working on last-minute GDC lectures to make jam games, sadly!).

From the first Indie Game Jam. Pictured: Brian Jacobson, Sean Barrett,
Ken Demarest, Charles Bloom, Jonathan Blow, Brian Sharp, Doug Church.

The Indie Game Jams were very different from the jams we see today. The IGJ was founded on the idea of exploring the design ramifications of a crazy technical question; we would provide attendees with some code to accomplish some technical feat, then they would see where that would lead in terms of design. For example, the question for the first IGJ was “Graphics hardware is pretty fast now; what will people design if we give them an engine that can draw 100,000 little sprite guys on the screen at once?” We were picky about who we invited: attendees had to be designer-programmers who were actually good at programming, because dealing with new technology on a short timeframe can be very challenging.

Also from the first Indie Game Jam. Pictured: Art Min, Charles Bloom, Robin Walker, Thatcher Ulrich,
Brian Jacobson, Zack Booth Simpson, and … I don’t know, Justin Hall? Charles Bloom again?

In contrast, contemporary game jams are more open. The idea is that it’s great to make a game, any game, and that even if you don’t manage to finish, you were still part of a community. This community spirit is often upheld as the best part of a game jam. I think these jams can be really nice for beginners, to show people that making a game is something within reach, and to help them meet other people interested in making games. For experienced developers, though, I think these jams are not so good, because the jams are part of an overall social context that supports stagnation. Experienced developers would do well to continually hone their craft and push beyond their comfort zone, but jams celebrate low expectations and provide Warm Community Feelings that create a comfort coccoon. “You made a game that is not very interesting? You didn’t finish a game at all? Well, you are still part of a community that likes you because you are participating in a game jam, and that is what is truly important.” I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with desiring a feeling of community, but we must take care to separate the notion of participating in the community from the notion of success. Participating in a game jam is not an indicator of success at game development — nor is attending the Independent Game Summit or Indiecade. I think that nice feelings are nice, but you want to build an ecosystem where the nice feelings coincide with behavior that will make developers robust and powerful and interesting in the long-term. You don’t want nice feelings to act as a soporific. Activities that are good for beginners are often stagnant for intermediate developers. What to do about this? I think if there were a category of game jams with higher expectations, so that advanced jams were differentiated from beginner jams, that would be a nice start. The IGJ model definitely asked more of participants, but I don’t think the IGJ is the right thing going into the future, because even if you are playing with challenging technology, the time-limited format prevents you from going deep.

IGJ was nice in 2002, but today it would just contribute further to the problem outlined in Chris Hecker’s rant Please Finish Your Game. We see lots of wacky but shallow game designs all over the web, and it feels like a problem, or at least a vast sea of potential unreached.

As Chris says in his write-up about the Depth Jam, “game jams are shallow by design.” Because they are shallow, I don’t feel they are the right place for me to develop as a game design practitioner.

Retreat-like gatherings

There have been a few retreat-like gatherings for forward-thinking game designers: see for example Project Horseshoe and Phrontisterion. I have never been to these. I like the basic idea behind these kinds of events, but the execution seems to have endemic problems. I know people who have been to both of these events, but when I ask, they do not recommend attending the events. Certainly I have found Project Horseshoe’s written reports unhelpful.

The obvious problem with these events is that they are mostly just a bunch of talking. When people get together for a bunch of talking, most of them just say a bunch of bullshit (here I mean bullshit in the Harry G. Frankfurt sense) that is unfocused and untethered to reality. If it is not of critical importance whether what people say is right, then most of it is not going to be right. I really like the retreat model as a basic template. Over the past few years, I’ve been to a number of retreats, mostly for things like meditation or silent existential contemplation. There’s a lot good about going to a far-away place where you are not bothered by the concerns of everyday life. But looking at Phrontisterion and Horseshoe, the question arises: how does one design a retreat like this that is not just a bunch of talking? I knew some of the answer, because I’ve seen success in dealing with a similar question in a neighboring realm:

Local developer meet-ups Many cities around the world have regular meet-ups; once a month or so, game developers get together at a bar or something, and just chat and be social. I generally don’t go to these because bars are antagonistic to interesting conversations and because attendees tend toward the neophyte side, which means we have the same problem as at conferences: there’s little benefit to be had for an experienced developer. But these events also have the Horseshoe problem, in that the conversation is not focused and doesn’t really matter, so people just say a bunch of nonsense. If all you want is to get drunk and be social, these events are fine, but they don’t do much for professional development. Two years ago I started a series of monthly developer meet-ups in the San Francisco Bay Area; the idea was to keep discussion quality high by (a) holding the meetings in quiet places conducive to good discussion, like someone’s house (b) inviting only active game designers [this was not a “game industry” meeting, it was a “thoughtful game designer” meeting], and (c) starting each meeting with one of the attendees presenting their own work. After the presentation, we discuss that work specifically for a while; then at some point, the discussion naturally dissolves into separate, more-general discussions. (I have been to some developer meet-ups that also began with presentations, but which to me did not manage to establish a culture of quality. One example was the Austin IGDA meetings back in 2002-2003. I think there were many subtle things preventing quality from rising, mostly having to do with intention of the event: the goal of the meeting was to drive attendance, not to be deeply interesting; also, they were “game industry” meetings, with all the associated issues. Also, scale matters: the Austin IGDA meetings were bigger, and they occurred in offices or at places like Dave & Buster’s, which did not encourage a personal connection to the presentation or the other attendees). The meetings in the Bay Area were very successful at keeping discussion quality relatively high. The situation wasn’t perfect, but it was much better than your typical bar meeting. (I would have attended these regularly even if I were not involved in organizing them). Other attendees really enjoyed the meetings as well. After about a year, though, I stopped arranging the meetings because we seemed to have exhausted the supply of people willing to present, and I didn’t want to start having meetings that were not kicked off by solid presentations. Because everyone had a good time, there’s a reasonable probability that in the future we will pick these up again. I think we might be able to improve the discussions further by reducing the presenter-vs-audience asymmetry somehow (see the Depth Jam section below). Key to the success of these events was having specific, concrete issues to talk about: a specific game being presented, so that discussion could be anchored to the details of that specific game. It’s also important that the game was being presented by its author; if the session is just someone talking about someone else’s game that they liked or didn’t like or just want to say something about, it is too easy for the discussion to be useless bullshit. It seemed like this model could be applied to ground a retreat so that it would not just be a bunch of talking.

The Depth Jam idea Now, we come to the actual Depth Jam. We settled on the basic idea very quickly: the jam would occur in a relaxing retreat-like environment. There would be a limited number of participants; four seemed like a good number. Each participant would have a good game that he has already been working on for a while, and which presents some deep and interesting problem he would like to solve; this problem serves as a focus for discussion. The fact that every participant has a game under discussion means that every participant has “skin in the game”, which keeps discussion tethered and unfrivolous. I’d like to emphasize this last point because it can be subtle but it is crucial. Suppose some people are showing their games and being criticized and generally having a rough time due to all the stress that happens naturally when having one’s creation dissected; and meanwhile, the people who are criticizing do not have any obligations, and they are just tossing in comments from the peanut gallery. This situation creates a weird imbalance. The comments and criticism will not be as thoughtful as they could be, yet they will be taken very hard by the people showing the games. If everyone is having their creations dissected, there’s only one class of attendee instead of two. It is easier to empathize and avoid unnecessary harshness. People are going to be more careful that their ideas and criticisms are thoughtful, because they are acutely aware of wanting careful input when it comes to their own game.

The format Our first proposal for the Depth Jam had us spending one entire day on each game, so that we could dive into each game at maximum depth without context-switching. However, as the idea churned, we decided it would be beneficial to allow some iteration. Why not split the day into two time slots, so that each game gets half a day and we cycle through the four games twice? This would allow time to modify the games based on the discussion, which would give the discussion even more teeth: now we’re not just talking about a particular problem in a particular game (with some kind of tendency to wax philosophical), we’re actually figuring out how the author will address the problem here at the retreat, with the results of that approach to be plainly visible in the next session. In our pre-jam planning meeting, we decided to go even further this way, breaking each day into four slots, cycling through all the games four times (so that each game had a two-hour slot each day). This seemed to work pretty well and it allowed a lot of iteration, but it might have been excessive. Daniel thinks there was too much context-switching and he might have been able to think more effectively if given more stability. My impression is that the talking was great for the first couple of days and degraded in quality toward the end (but was still worthwhile even then). At least two attendees did not have a problem with this, though, and found that the final discussions were very valuable for them. For the next jam I would propose a mixed format: we’d start with two 4-slot days, just like we did this time, followed by a day with no-talking, all-working-and-quiet-and-taking-a-walk, followed by a final 4-slot day. (Or, perhaps I would lengthen the retreat to 5 days and put the rest day in the middle.) The nice thing about the 4-slot-per-day format, which would not have been true of the 2-slot-per-day format, is that it gives us the maximum amount of calendar time for ideas to stew between iterations. I have long been appreciative of the role of calendar time in good design. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how many hours you pack in trying to get things done; the good ideas will arrive unpredictably, and maybe you just need to allow time for this to happen. I was curious whether this principle would also be true on the timescale of a 4-day retreat. For me, at least, it was; I got my best idea in the shower on the morning of day 3, in response to discussions we’d had on day 2. During my session on day 3 we discussed and refined the idea, and on day 4 I showed an implementation of it.

Creature comforts We spent some money renting a nice beach house and ordering catered food; the cost for the event was around $5000. Chris goes into more detail about this in his write-up. You don’t need to spend any money on an event like this, but if you can afford it I recommend spending some money to help create a nice environment that minimizes stress and factors away concerns like “what are we going to eat for dinner” and “who is going to do the dishes.” The purpose is twofold: first, it helps you focus on the subject at hand; second, the minimization of external stresses helps you deal with the potential added stresses of working really hard and disagreeing with people all the time. If you think that the Depth Jam will help you make more headway on even one deep problem than you would have otherwise, and thus make your game better, it’s easy to think that the game will also sell a little better and that costs in the neighborhood of $1250 per attendee are easily justified.

Attitude Discussions can easily turn into arguments, or at least energy-sucking disagreements. As peoples’ energy gets drained, they become more irritable, so there’s a feedback loop lurking here. A little bit of this happened at our Depth Jam, but we saw it happening and course-corrected, so that the final day’s discussion was reasonable. Prior to the jam, though, we had not thought much about this. I think it would be helpful in future for the attendees to go in knowing that irritability is likely to happen; the mere fact of this awareness probably helps the situation, and anyway, a little bit of psychologically-aware pacing at the beginning would have gone a long way.

Games and attendees It’s very important the attendees be capable both of participating in good discussions and acting on the discussions to improve their games within a short timeframe. This latter requirement basically limits attendees to being competent designer/programmers. If someone can’t program, it’s hard to see how he can participate meaningfully in this style of depth jam, because it would be very hard to iterate. Possibly if someone is a level/world/puzzle designer who can build scenarios quickly in UDK or Unity or whatever, it can be made to work, but I still think that person would be feeling the limitations of being unable to make algorithmic changes. I don’t think that having teams of people would work, at least not for the format described here, because it would dilute the energy and bog down the iteration process. If you have one designer and one programmer trying to do the job that the other people are doing as single designer/programmers, your duo is probably going to have a hard time keeping up. If the jam is made up entirely of duos, it’s going to make discussions a lot messier and lower-energy (twice as many people talking about the same number of games). At least one of us felt that four people was already too many for high-quality discussions, because you keep having interesting ideas but have to wait for other people to stop talking in order to say them, and by that time the discussion may have moved on to a different topic. We have tossed around some ideas about how to scale the jam to larger groups, but haven’t come up with anything that is fully convincing yet.

It’s important that the games be high-quality efforts that pose problems that everyone will be interested in. We were fortunate to have four very interesting games: Miegakure, a puzzle-platformer in four dimensions; Storyteller, a game about building stories through character interactions; Spy Party, a heavily player-skill-oriented game about subtlety and deception in human behavior; and The Witness, a first-person puzzle game with a heavy emphasis on nonverbal communication. If time permits I may do a detailed write-up of the issues we discussed for each game and the resolutions we reached (though care must be taken here, as we don’t want to disclose aspects of these games that the designers would rather keep secret).

Conclusions I am happy with the way this first Depth Jam went. I think we can certainly tweak the format to improve it, but already it is a useful tool in my further development as a game designer. I got much more out of this four-person, four-day event than I do from attending a conference. It seems appropriate to me to do a Depth Jam every six months. Provided we are organized enough to get the next one together, we’ll adjust the format and see how it goes!

See also:

Chris Hecker’s write-up

Daniel Benmergui’s write-up

Miegakure website

[This piece was reprinted from #AltDevBlogADay, a shared blog initiative started by @mike_acton devoted to giving game developers of all disciplines a place to motivate each other to write regularly about their personal game development passions.]          

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Fearing the hipster developer - Edge Magazine

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Gamers – that is to say hardcore fans of traditional games who participate in community behaviours online, rather than those who would include games on a list of many preferred activities – have not been known to tolerate culture changes well. 

It seems like only yesterday we witnessed them get up in arms over a perceived invasion of ‘casual’ gamers, or resisting the DLC and microtransaction age. And it was even quite recently that a clutch of them undertook a jawdropping campaign of harassment against one of BioWare’s story-writing female employees for expressing her gaming preferences.

It happens no matter what age we’re in: this group, accustomed to being marginalised as ‘geeks’, wants to keep its club pristine. Fans of computers, science fiction, fantasy and such have never been seen as ‘the cool kids’. They had to develop their own society with its own laws in order to feel safe and empowered. Now here we are in the democratic Internet age, an info-overloaded digital world where anybody and everybody gets access to everything and anything, and the boundaries of a secret world get harder and harder to draw.

What’s funny, though, is that the culture of game development is experiencing a sea change, and communities of industry veterans seem as resistant to this culture shift as a gamer might be to finding out that their mum plays the same iPhone games they do. 

I can tell because we’re having that stupid hipster conversation on Twitter, in bars and on blogs. Although the hipster conversation has been going on in music, in literature and in the visual art world forever, games haven’t really been known to consider it till now.

What I mean by ‘hipster conversation’ is that inevitable and largely fruitless ‘What is a hipster?’ discussion – you know, the one that surfaces after people have been calling other people hipsters. For most intents and purposes, the hipster is supposedly that aloof young person who believes his or her taste to be superior to others. By advanced definition, it’s a person more concerned with swathing themselves in symbols that will identify them as ‘cool’ than with the substance and nature of what the symbols represent. 

Although the concept of a hipster is purportedly about values, you can apparently identify one by looking. Under this definition, the hipster gets closely correlated with the culture of ‘cool’ neighbourhoods in ‘important’ cities – New York’s Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or San Francisco’s Mission district, for example. They supposedly wear plaid, ride fixed-gear bikes, have beards and thick glasses, and colonise the service industry with ‘trendy’ boredom while they toil insistently at some creative dream rather than at some vast career.

Hipster is a concept that probably doesn’t exist. Sure, there are tons of people out there who think they are cooler than you are, or who are ignorant about whatever it is they’re being snobby about. But you can’t identify them by their fashion choices, or by whether or not they have tattoos and ride bikes, or whatever. They’re everywhere. It has nothing to do with youth or coolness – perceived or otherwise. 

What’s weird is that I heard the word loads at this year’s GDC. I read it in people’s tweets about parties and I heard it in discussions about young people’s work. Even within the context of well-intentioned and positive discussion, I realised that veterans of the game development community feel their field is being taken over by young hipsters.

There’s a documentary in Sundance about being an indie game designer. It’s becoming a rebellious art form, even an attractive thing to do. The result of all of this new creative blood – people who would have just gone and been some other kind of artist a generation ago – is that games are getting more interesting. This year’s Independent Games Festival saw more entrants than ever, and a higher quality bar, and it’s just going to keep getting higher. We can all agree that’s good for everyone, right?

Yes, more diversity in design forms, more creativity, and more experimentation is obviously healthy for our medium, particularly in a long console cycle where traditional retail avenues are bearing diminishing fruits. And the unintentional side effect is that games are cool now. Isn’t that what so many of you wished for back when you were kids? 

Why, then, this weird and judgmental resentment toward this industry’s influx of new blood? Is it so bad if fashionable young people are bringing a shot of creative weirdness to our space? These aren’t aloof cultural vampires we’re talking about; quite the opposite. No one here is a hipster.  When I hear people calling other people hipsters, I think those people probably feel threatened or worried about their own relevance. I think they fear not being ‘with it’ any more. 

And if that’s how the hipster fingerpointers actually feel, then rather than being judgmental, it’s probably a better expenditure of their energy to look at the work of the new cultures that are coming to the design table, and the new audiences that are springing up to receive that work. Change is hard, but it’s inevitable. It’s even good, if you can believe that. Stay ‘with it’.

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The Problem with Preservation from 1UP.com

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Note: There are some terms used throughout this piece that some readers may not be familiar with. These are linked to outside articles that can add clarity.

Nothing lasts forever, not cold November rain, and not video games. The battery in your Earthbound cartridge will die, the cathode tube in that old Joust cabinet will burn out. Even code isn’t immortal; emulators — software that mimics old hardware to run classic games — don’t always offer a perfect solution, so that version of Super Mario Bros. on your PC might be close to the original, but not entirely. Time spares nothing. You’d think that between the twin marvels of emulation and digital distribution, it would at least be easier to preserve classic gaming. Anyone who’s played an emulated PlayStation 2 game on their PlayStation 3 knows it’s not that simple, that even something as basic as a new television standard can greatly alter a classic experience.

Hence the boom of HD re-masters in the past three years. These collections of games from the final standard definition console generation have been remade to look prettier and play smoothly on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. What started with a trickle of successful reissues like the God of War Collection in 2010 and even earlier with downloadables like the Xbox Live versions of Perfect Dark and Banjo-Kazooie has now become a flood. The Jak Collection, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, Metal Gear Solid HD Collection; the best games of last decade are getting a new life.

Sometimes, though, that second life is none too pretty. Players of the new Devil May Cry Collection found versions of Dante’s adventures that were somewhat easy on the eyes during the fast-paced sword fighting, but painful and blurry to look at during the cinemas and even in menus. It turns out that properly re-mastering a game for a new generation of machines is as delicate an art as actually making a game. Preservation is no easy task.

How do you do it right? Of the many different studios that have put together some of these HD re-masters, they all agree that doing it makes for a huge undertaking. “The easiest thing to screw up is underestimating the task at hand,” says Glen Egan, President of Sanzaru Games. Sanzaru put together last year’s Sly Collection, re-masters of Sucker Punch’s Sly Cooper games.

Tomm Hulett, Senior Associate Producer of Konami’s Silent Hill Collection agrees. “Game re-mastering isn’t a quick and easy process. That first God of War Collection came out and did really well, and I think a lot of companies saw it as a good way to make a quick buck off old stuff. If you want to make a definitive version of a game, expect a serious time commitment. It’s been more than two years since we began the Silent Hill Collection project. That’s how long it took to make Silent Hill 2 in the first place.”

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In light of the problems that plagued the Silent Hill Collection, Hulett’s comments emphasize just how delicate the remastering process is. The people who make these collections care about these games, but it’s hard work. What’s the secret?

Bluepoint Games have produced what are arguably the most successful remasters: The God of War Collection, The Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection, and The Metal Gear Solid HD Collection. Andy O’Neil, president of Bluepoint, says it best, “There are always shortcuts you can take. The trick is to not take them. Don’t cheat.”

Easier said than done. The biggest problem that all of these studios have faced is that no standard set of rules exists for re-mastering a game. Each one is profoundly different. “Every single game is a unique snowflake. There are certain things that are always going to come up, but you don’t know,” says O’Neil, “We run every game through a performance analyzer, which is a special type of PS2. We look at all the data that’s going through the systems. We say, ‘This is what’s going through that chip, this is what’s going through the vector unit (VU) assembler.’ We can use that analysis and figure out what bit of the process is going to be hard, what bit’s going to be a problem, and get a big picture view of hardware fundamentals.”

What kind of problems can come up? All kinds. “The biggest challenge is refactoring a codebase designed to run on one console to allow it to run on another,” says Sanzaru’s Egan. “With a really old game, say from the PS1, you could probably just run everything through an emulator, but with the PS2 you have to step backwards and figure out a way to get things to run natively. Until you have a very thorough understanding of the code you may not understand how easy or hard it is to convert, and it can take some time to understand 10-year-old code written by a completely different set of people.”

Having access to those original creators and creations can certainly help though. “Sucker Punch did an awesome job archiving their work so we were able to compile and review the original code [for Sly Cooper] quickly. From there we would just send emails and IM’s when we had specific questions. The tricky part for them was probably finding all the archived source art. It’s kind of like asking somebody to dig up an essay they wrote in high school ten years ago.”

The suggestion is that the closer the collaboration with the original studio, the better the result in the HD re-master. Andy O’Neil illustrates that having a close relationship with Sony Santa Monica actually resulted in God of War Collection being superior in some ways to the original incarnations. “When it comes to collaborating, it all depends on who’s going to be the best at getting what stuff done. Anything that changes the game — say there’s a legacy bug that needs to be changed — we ask them. For example, the movies in God of War were captured off dev kits and then had post-effects applied to them. There was a lot of talk from people saying that they don’t look that good, and there are some really good reasons for that. That recapture is very difficult, so what we did instead is we improved the bit rate, ran it through some spectromorphological filtering. Santa Monica had all the original frames so they said, yeah we can do all that and put it in the game.”

The addition of that source material was a boon for God of War and Bluepoint but it caused huge problems for Huelett and his team at Konami in making Silent Hill. “We got all the source code that Konami had on file — which it turns out wasn’t the final release version of the games! D’oh!” says Huelett, “So during debug we didn’t just have to deal with the expected ‘porting’ bugs, but also had to squash some bugs that the original team obviously removed prior to release, but we’d never seen before. A lot of assets such as textures and sound had to be taken out of the compiled game, and that brings with it a host of unique issues, especially taken on top of the tricky coding workarounds at play in the original games. We certainly had our hands full. I think at one point [Silent Hill 3 protagonist] Heather was blue.”

The lesson then would seem to be that if better archiving were done in the past, we would have better re-masters today. “Ten years ago, a lot of game companies assumed the games were ‘done’ once development finished, and that they wouldn’t need to use that data ever again. Now it’s clear that having all that data in an easy-to-manage format is important. Many consumers don’t realize you can’t just buy a copy of SH2 and then open up its code in a usable state.”

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Just being there: redefining the videogame - Edge Magazine

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Few questions in the discussion of videogames are more slippery than, ‘What is a game?’ Many have attempted to nail down a definition that’s specific enough to be useful, while also being broad enough to be able accommodate the many forms that exist. but eventually, inevitably, every definition is met with a ‘game’ that tests its boundaries.

Until recently, there were a few attributes that seemed so fundamental to what a game is that they appeared unquestionable: choice, interaction, challenge, and an emphasis on systems. essentially, something to do.

But what if a game had no challenges? What if it prioritised audiovisual aesthetics over deep or complex mechanics? What if there was nothing to do but move across a map? Is that still a videogame?

Many traditional definitions would imply that it isn’t. Even an inclusive one such as Sid Meier’s “a series of interesting choices” would seem hard pressed to count such software as a videogame. Yet several developers have recently begun to challenge these most fundamental of assumptions about what a game requires to be effective. They have crafted beautiful titles that, when played, undoubtedly feel like games, even as they struggle to fit within any preexisting definition. These games – some by intention and some by happenstance – push at the boundaries of not only what videogames are, but what they can be.

Thatgamecompany’s Journey, Ed Key and David Kanaga’s Proteus, thechineseroom’s Dear Esther: all these titles challenge the most basic assumptions of what a game is by doing away with any kind of challenge or conflict, and instead focusing almost exclusively on the player’s movement through a world. Each differs greatly in tone, atmosphere and style, but the task for the player in all of them is, ultimately, to walk from a starting point to a finishing point. None pose any kind of real hindrance to progression, and of the three only Journey has even the simplest of puzzles.

Journey

Each game is entirely minimalist in its interactive design, and at first glance, all lack many of the elements we have come to believe a game ‘needs’. Yet after playing them, you would struggle to argue they aren’t games. So how do they still manage to feel like games? And what does that mean for the future of the medium?

The fictional world in which a game takes place is often seen as merely a backdrop for the player’s actions. But in Dear Esther, Journey and Proteus, the world is brought to the fore.Tthe pleasure they offer comes primarily, in some cases exclusively, from exploring and moving through virtual worlds.

“When we started developing Journey, we knew the intent of the experience was to make you feel small in relation to the world around you,” says thatgamecompany’s co-founder and president, Kellee Santiago. “The desert environment was a really great place to evoke that feeling, because it’s such a vast and violent environment.”

But more than the environment itself, how the player can and can’t navigate it is paramount to their experience. “There are times in Journey when you walk very, very slowly through it, and then sometimes you can run super fast. We wanted to tune all of that to find a balance between these two states, where the player just takes it all in through a more contemplative mindset.”

Dear Esther

While Journey does also allow for a few more traditional game movements, such as jumping, both Dear Esther and Proteus lock the player into a slow walk for the duration of the game, almost requiring you to take in the world around you. For thechineseroom’s creative director and Dear Esther’s writer Dan Pinchbeck, this type of game is less about enforced walking and more about emphasising what he calls ‘downtime’.

“When all the stimulus [of combat and puzzles] drops away,” he says, “something fills that space and it’s usually the player thinking about stuff, reflecting on stuff. these quiet patches can give a massive boost to the type of emotional complexity that a game can [create].”

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Free-To-Play On $20 A Day - Feature

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Free-To-Play On $20 A Day

A shopper’s guide to the diverse worlds of “freemium” games.

By Joe Keiser and Keith Vincent

“Free to play” games seem like lovely bits of charity. Downloadable for the low, low price of nothing, they promise expansive worlds, varied play, and a community of like-minded individuals just dying to hang out with you. It’s not until you stumble into one that you realize they’re actually candy-colored commerce engines. Powered by humanity’s collective desire for frilly 3D underpants and virtual dolphin friends, these games wait for peer pressure to sink in. They question your uniqueness—if you don’t buy a special this-week-only hairstyle for your avatar, how exactly do you plan to express your individuality? And then they ask for your credit card number. Before you know it, you become the proud owner of a flying space hippo, emblazoned with “Gotta Be Me!” along the side. Your shame hippo is pretend, but the money you spent on it is all too real.

Anywhere else, $20 will get you a day or two of food, or a cheap video game, for that matter—one that doesn’t ever ask if you have PayPal. Here’s what $20 will get you in the world of free-to-play.

Note: Due to obfuscation and fluctuation, all fake-currency-to-real-money exchange rates are estimated.

Free Realms: A rocket ship and three monkeys
$20.50 ($10 for the rocket and $3.50 per monkey)

Pros: Easy access to an unlimited supply of low-cost monkeys means you can finally afford those dastardly space-based experiments you’ve always been planning.

Cons: Horrifying monkey tests are against the Free Realms Terms of Service.

Second Life: 180 pairs of vinyl pants
5,000 Linden Dollars

Pros: No need to worry about wearing the same pair of vinyl pants again for the next six months.

Cons: You’ll be the only one wearing pants at the next 180 Second Life parties.

Team Fortress 2: A mullet and a pile of knives
$19.93

Pros: Be ready for ANYTHING.

Cons: No matter what you do, it won’t bring Patrick Swayze back.

MapleStory: A 450-day carrot rental
19,000 NX

Pros: You get to try the carrot before you buy it.

Cons: Oh, did you think could buy the carrot? You can’t. Everything in MapleStory’s cash shop is a rental, except for the random sales where things are actually for sale. And you already missed the carrot sale.

Vindictus: American-flag underwear, blond hair dye, and a makeover
18,500 NX

Pros: The stars-and-stripes bra straps and panties peek out from under armor, reminding everyone in this medieval world that These Colors Don’t Run.

Cons: Sure, you could woo the hideous Gnoll King with store-bought sex. But wouldn’t you rather have him like you for who you are? He’ll probably try to kill you regardless, but this isn’t about him. It’s about you.

Forsaken World: 1.4 intricate fetish costumes
800 Leaves

Pros: The populace will tremble before your vampire catgirl maid. And you’ll still have money left over for pasties and leggings.

Cons: Real-world relationships may suffer. Excuses like “I’m researching the pasties” only make it worse.

Gunz: A shark launcher and a panda mask
200 G-Coins

Pros: When you shoot someone with a shark, they will think the panda did it.

Cons: $20 will only get you a few months of shark launcher rental. Because let’s face it: You don’t deserve to own a shark launcher.

Star Trek Online: Six Tribble of Borg
1,440 Cryptic Points

Pros: These are like colorful dust bunnies that have been assimilated into the robotic hive mind of the Borg. Ha, that’s so stup—wait, that’s actually the awesomest thing Star Trek has done in years.

Cons: It sounds like a 56k modem. Come to think of it, that’s awesome, too.

Kingdom Heroes: 10 chances to win a donkey
1,990 Aeria Points

Pros: Owning a donkey seems pretty sweet, and 10 chances to own one is more chances than you’ve ever had before in your life. Failure to win still nets a consolation prize like “Miracle Urgency Pills” (although if you need those, you should probably just buy them directly).

Cons: Aeria recently shut down Kingdom Heroes, and with it your dreams of virtual jackass ownership. So you’ll have to find another free-to-play game that lets you purchase farm animals, if such a thing even exists.

Need For Speed World: BMW M3 GTR E46
4,500 Boost

Pros: It’s the only BMW you can afford.

Cons: Decisions like “I’m going to buy the Need For Speed World BMW” are the reason it’s the only BMW you can afford.

Battlefield Heroes: 8 permanent bloody facial scars
3,040 Battlefunds

Pros: Hideous visage portends grim death for the enemy. The mystery of your violent past will delight drunks and/or “chicks,” who allegedly “dig” hideous visages.

Cons: “I bought it in an online store” is a terrible scar story.

World Of Tanks: Some tanks
4,000 Gold

Pros: Good tank value. You will have some tanks, which really helps you fit in to World Of Tanks.

Cons: Everyone else already has some tanks. You also have some tanks already. There’s nothing to have in World Of Tanks but some tanks.

Atlantica Online: 40 percent of an orphan bikini cowgirl
20000 NX

Pros: Christine The Sheriff’s parents were killed in the Detroit Massacre (which sounds even worse than a normal massacre), but her abandonment-related self-esteem issues translate into HUGE SAVINGS!

Cons: The bottom hasn’t fallen out of the bikini cowgirl market yet, so you still can’t afford her.

Words by Joe Keiser. Illustrations by Keith Vincent.

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The Kid vs. The Dad

unwinnable.com

The situation on the couch is tense. The kid and I are struggling through one of the most knuckle-breaking levels in Rayman Origins and there is no room for error. Beating this sucker will bring us to the end of the game, but so far, we’ve lost again, and again, and again, and again, and this time, it’s my fault. I jumped too early and got in the way and killed us. Daddy fucked up.

The boy makes an angry sound that’s deep and big. It’s a kind of roar that starts between his clenched jaws, and gets louder the harder I laugh at him. I’m a little more nonchalant. “We can just try again.”

I would tell him, look, the giant’s coming for your town, watch out, but would he listen?

“I’m sick of this!” he growls, but then of course we hit the button and try again.

My kid and I play a lot of videogames together. In fact, we always play videogames together, at least half an hour every night, after dinner. Whether we’re hunched over the computer or slouched in front of the TV, all of his game time is spent with me – teaching him, supporting him or yelling at him.

“Make a box. Make a box. No, over there. Make the box over there. You need to make the box. Now! There! Make the box!”

That’s me playing Trine 2 with him the other night. I know I should be patient when we play together and most of the time, I am. I still remember the first game we played together, the splendorific Machinarium. This was two years ago, when he was finally old enough to play videogames (his mom, my wife, the only non-gamer in the house, didn’t want him to play until he was at least four, because, I don’t know, addiction or whatever?). We huddled in front of the PC in my office, and I taught him how it worked. He learned to use a computer mouse dropping plastic pails on a robot’s head. When I almost dropped the robot protagonist in a furnace, he screamed in terror; when we fooled around with the giant clock and carillon in the center of the game, he giggled in delight. We beat the game together, more or less, and I still remember the moment of joy when we solved a puzzle at the exact same time: “We need to use the toilet paper!” He was hooked on the medium, and I was the one who led him there.

There are bad times, too. When we play together, I’m not just his dad/coach/spirit guide; I’m also the other player who’s trying to win the game. That’s when things get frustrating. In Horde, he kept missing opportunities by getting sidetracked chasing princesses – and I would tell him, look, the giant’s coming for your town, watch out, but would he listen? It’s frustrating to watch someone else make a mistake and the black-and-white failure in games leaves no room for sympathy. I don’t care if you’re Mother Teresa playing with the Little Match Girl: watching someone make the same mistake 10 times would drive anyone insane.

Co-op gameplay is both the best and the worst. At our worst, we’re like squabbling kids, blaming each other for every mistake. We lasted 10 minutes with New Super Mario Bros. Wii  before I had to take it out back and bury it in the ground. To be fair, Mitch Krpata warned me, but I didn’t listen and I paid. Who would make a co-op game where it’s easy to bump into each other, to undermine each other and to pull each other into danger and then to “bubble” yourself and float around making a nuisance of yourself? The game is so toxic, I think the designers should go on trial at the UN.

At times like that, I pick up the bad habits of an older brother – a poisonous mix of superior knowledge and a monopoly on the use of “noogie justice.” I realize I should be the adult. So, maybe I shouldn’t play games with him. Maybe I should just sit on the couch and watch, or even go out in the other room, read a nice book and act like I don’t understand what he’s playing on that thing – the same way my parents dealt with me and my ColecoVision.

I may beat him on coordination, looks and pop culture references, but game after game, we complement each other well.

But.

When we find a game that doesn’t make us tear each other’s throats out, we just have too much fun. I get to admire my kid’s skills, some of which I never get to see in our daily life. He’s observant: he’s always the one who catches the patterns in a boss fight, while I just wade in and slog. He’s tenacious: when we’re up against an impossible platforming level, I’m ready to give up on the fifth or sixth try; he never gives up, until bedtime. I may beat him on coordination, looks and pop culture references, but game after game, we complement each other well.

The greatest co-op game we’ve ever played – so far – is Portal 2. The game has an entire set of levels that are designed for two players and they work well even if you bring wildly different levels of skill: one player may rush ahead and figure out the puzzles, but it takes both of you to execute the solution. When one of us is threading through an obstacle course while the other is opening gates, shooting portals and warning, “Watch out for the fire!”, we get to work together in a way that we rarely can in the real world.

We’re not just two guys on a couch, and we’re even more than family: we’re a team.

———

Chris Dahlen can be found tweeting pop culture references on his appropriately named Twitter @SavetheRobot.

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Why Screenwriters Fail at Game Writing « tjfixman

tjfixman.wordpress.com

Why Screenwriters Fail at Game Writing

Posted: May 28, 2012 in Uncategorized

This weekend I was down in Santa Monica, enjoying a nerd-powered tapas breakfast with a group of friends and a few film/TV folks I had never met before. As is customary when meeting new people, the subject of my profession came up. It’s a conversation I’m familiar with, and it usually goes something like this:

“So what do you do at Insomniac?”

“I’m a game writer.”

“So you, like, write the code?”

“I write the stories. What the characters do and say.” I pause so they can digest the revelation that my job actually exists.

“So an entire studio takes your script and turns it into a game? That’s awesome!”

Here is where my dilemma begins. Their assumption isn’t off base; in fact, it’s a pretty logical conclusion given how the rest of the entertainment industry operates. And yet, it is so completely backwards that it would take me the rest of the meal to explain the differences. So, do I launch into an explanation just so that they leave the table enlightened? Or do I take another bite of my eggs benedict, smile, and allow them to think I wield more power than I do, just so everyone can move on and talk about The Avengers?

This time I rattled off a short, bottled answer about it being collaborative and let it go at that. But every time I get asked that question, I’m reminded of just how skewed the perception of game writing is. I’ve met feature writers who tried their hands at game writing and crashed spectacularly, all because they weren’t ready for the mercurial madness of game production. So how can an industry that regularly churns out cinematic content be so different than the film industry it cribs from?

Well, for one thing, game development almost never starts with story. Every time I go to a convention, I meet fledgling writers who tell me they have an amazing game idea they’d love to pitch me. But the truth is, games aren’t pitched like movies or TV. What gets a game green lit is invariably tech or gameplay driven. A studio discovers they can do incredible realtime zero-g simulation with their engine? We’re doing a space adventure! Did the design team discover some super fun time-based game mechanic? Let’s do a time travel game! Games are built around two simple questions: “Where does our tech shine?” and “What is fun to play?”

Crafting a game story is more about assembling pieces given to us by other departments. Once we know what our core concept is, the Creative Director, Design Lead, and Writer will sit down and look at everything we have to play with as if it were a puzzle: minutes of animation time, number of characters we can build, the number of levels, etc. If the art department is passionate about a desert level, we’ll try to work it in. If a set piece was successfully prototyped, we’ll try to work it in. So while developing a feature starts and ends with the story, developing a game means assembling a puzzle with constantly changing pieces. Items are cut, rethought, added, and changed with such astounding regularity it’s almost impossible to track.

Which brings me to the next hurdle – extreme iteration. The primary goal of every game story, from Mass Effect to BioShock to Ratchet & Clank, is to provide context for gameplay. Why am I here? What am I doing? How do I succeed? Why did I fail? The answers to these questions are both critical and unpredictable. At Insomniac we test and rework every level, setup, and boss encounter to ensure the player understands what they’re doing while (most importantly) having fun. Often times, this can mean modifying characters, rewriting VO, or even cutting full levels – and as a writer, it’s my job to make sense of it. It doesn’t matter if your hero wouldn’t go through that door without backup. Those NPCs were cut, and gameplay says he needs to go through that door. Make it work!

Another common stumble feature writers make is thinking their scenes are the main focus. The best cinematics are used to pay off what could not be done technically in gameplay, provide our heroes with emotional weight, or simply cover a level load. They’re not there so you can have your gruff antihero monologue for an hour about his dark past.  Drama is great, but video games aren’t just show-don’t-tell; they’re do-don’t-tell. The medium is about experiencing the world, not watching it. Feature writers are used to a format where they control what the characters do, so this switch can be challenging. Think of it this way: it’s tough to execute an emotionally resonant exchange between two characters when they’re free to teabag each other.

The last factor feature writers struggle with is the all-too-familiar focus test line. You’ve heard them before in games. You’re walking along, slaying dragons or looking for that third generator to reboot, and suddenly your hero says something so dry and on-the-nose that it sounds out of character. “Looks like I need to access that door to reach the security room. Maybe I should use the [insert McGuffin here] I just got in the previous room!” Suddenly, you’re reminded it’s a game, and you wonder why such a terrible line exists. It’s not because the writer is bad. Well, sometimes it is. But other times we find that subtlety is lost on a lot of players, and we need to state clearly and explicitly what they need to do in order to get through a setup. Taking the hit so the game can shine is a tough part of our jobs, and many writers can’t handle it.

I’ve often joked that game writing is like building a raft of twigs and twine, and riding it down a waterfall while designers snip the twine. But changes are a part of the job, and when you find the game magically becoming more fun and engaging, you begin to understand why those changes had to be made. Those who can roll with the punches and bring a project home with a fun story will find that they took part in building an amazing experience. And that is something that no movie could ever dream of doing.

TJ

tjfixman.wordpress.com

Not Subtle

jonas-kyratzes.net

Not Subtle

I looked into the eyes of a dying girl once. She’d jumped from the top of the building where I lived. I was on the sixth floor, she fell from the seventeenth. The impact sounded exactly like an empty travel bag being dropped on the floor. I’d heard that people came to this building to kill themselves, but for a moment I didn’t want to believe what I already knew was true. Somebody had jumped, fallen past my window, hit the ground six stories below.

I went to the window. I looked down. Straight into the face of a dying girl.

Dying, but not dead. She was still there for a few seconds. She moved. Her brain still worked. And do you know what was in her face? Not peace, not sorrow, not transcendence.

Just confusion, and a little bit of fear.

Suicide is not a subtle thing. We’re led to believe that it is by misanthropic, self-involved artists with no grasp of reality. When you jump off that building, it doesn’t fade to the afterlife. There’s no pretty music, no angels playing Mozart on your way down. You fall. Then you hit the ground. Your body is ruined not by some quasi-artistic technique but by physics. It’s messy and painful. Later the janitor has to wipe away your blood.

No, suicide is not a subtle thing. It’s not subtle when two sick old people throw themselves off a roof because they can’t pay their health bills anymore. It’s not subtle when a man puts a gun to his head and blows out his brains in front of Parliament because he doesn’t want to live off digging through garbage.

But maybe these cases aren’t really suicides. They’re murders. They’re murders committed by those who say “give us everything you have, work for us, and in return we will spit on you and give you nothing.” There’s nothing subtle about that, either.

There’s nothing subtle about people dying because hospitals can’t afford necessary drugs. Nothing subtle about dissenters being attacked by riot police. Nothing subtle about my parents losing their life savings in a desperate bid to keep their pharmacy open when they are owed tens of thousands of euros by the state. And absolutely nothing subtle about spoiled, rich monstrosities like Christine Lagarde saying that people like my parents, who worked hard all their lives, who never broke a law or accepted a bribe, who did everything as it was supposed to be done and got nothing, are lazy and greedy and entitled, while the people who took the taxes my parents paid and gambled them away are job creators.

Austerity is not subtle. It’s like a brick in the face. It’s murder and theft and genocide.

And I know we’ve all been taught that subtle equals good, that subtle equals sophisticated. We’ve all been taught politics do not belong in art except as subtext, the more disguised the better. And maybe sometimes that’s true. But maybe sometimes it’s also a way for them to keep hitting you with that brick. Maybe sometimes subtle is a lie, because the truth is brutally simple. Maybe, in fact, sometimes “subtle” is just another word for “cowardly” – a word for the kind of cowardice that we’re not even aware of, the kind that encourages the bully and the exploiter. “I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act,” Chesterton said, “but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.” We are all part of the polis, whether we like it or not. If we discover that the polis has been taken over by tyrants and slave-drivers, if good people are being hanged by their necks in public squares, who but a traitor does not speak up? Who but a coward couches the truth in ambiguous allegories that may be interpreted or ignored according to the whims of whoever wins the day?

And if we are proud citizens of the polis, if we are truly commited to the project of democracy, why should we be so ashamed to discuss the affairs of the polis? Do we condemn a painter for talking about paintings? Do we condemn a doctor for talking about diseases? If we are all members of a society built on democratic principles, as our leaders assure us we are, why would it be wrong for us to discuss the great questions that face us all? Aren’t we, as members of a democratic society, supposed to be the ones calling the shots? I said leaders before, but aren’t they supposed to be representatives?

I know, I know it’s scary. I know it goes against everything we’ve been told about art. But maybe sometimes when they tell you “be subtle” they mean “sit down, be quiet, good doggie” – maybe sometimes when they tell you not to be so open in what you’re talking about, they’re really telling you not to talk about something because it’s inconvenient for them. Sometimes that which appears subtle is shallow, because its subtlety is that of a muddy puddle. Sometimes that which appears too clear and too simple has the clarity and simplicity of the sea on a bright, calm day, the kind when you can see straight to the sea bottom without even diving.

Sometimes… fuck it, sometimes you’ve just got to say “fuck it!” Fuck it, here’s the truth, like a fist in the air, like a brilliant light, like Jesus driving the money changers from the temple with a whip, like a joke that makes you laugh because otherwise you’ll cry.

They haven’t left us any space for subtle.

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by Jonas on May 29, 2012  •  Permalink

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Posted by Jonas on May 29, 2012

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