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Play to win

Warum eigentlich Cheaten?

Veröffentlicht: 12.06.2012 | von: loess | Rubrik: Blog

Kim “Dotcom” Schmitz hat es allen gezeigt. Ein Selfmade-Millionär, der sich gern mit schönen Frauen und fetten Karren ablichten lässt und seinen ausschweifenden, fast provokant dekadenten Lebenswandel mit großem Eifer in die Öffentlichkeit trägt. Ein Mann also, der eigentlich mit seinem Leben und dem Erreichten zufrieden sein könnte, doch wie so oft machen erste Erfolge, egal wie groß sie auch sein mögen, nur hungrig nach mehr. Kim Schmitz, das Mondgesicht hinter der geschlossenen Datenschiebeinstitution Megaupload, ist deshalb in seiner ausufernden Freizeit zu “Megaracer” geworden, um sich nicht nur in der realen, sondern auch in der virtuellen Welt als König zu fühlen. Kim Schmitz errang die Modern Warfare 3-Krone, bevor ihn Anfang des Jahres die Begleiterscheinungen seines Erfolges, in Form einer Anklage wegen mutmaßlicher Copyright-Verletzungen, einholten und er neben seiner Spitzenposition im XBOX-Leaderboard auch seine Freiheit verlor.

The man who has no life

Das Beispiel von Kim Schmitz zeigt sehr deutlich, wie wir in unserer Ellbogengesellschaft mit erfolgreichen Menschen umgehen. Hat jemand auffallend großen wirtschaftlichen Erfolg, werden die Hintergründe dieses Erfolges bis ins letzte Detail durchleuchtet, weil stets ein Grundzweifel an der Rechtmäßigkeit besonderer Errungenschaften besteht. Immer wieder müssen sich populäre Musiker den Vorwurf gefallen lassen, Melodien ja nur geklaut zu haben und das Filzen nach Plagiatstellen in Doktorarbeiten renommierter Politiker darf fast schon als neuer Volkssport bezeichnet werden. Dass hierbei immer wieder bestätigende Einzelfälle ans Tageslicht treten (Guttenberg, Bushido), die unsere Zweifel nähren, kann fast schon als Teufelskreis verstanden werden, der einer seltsamen Dualität unserer Einstellung gegenüber Erfolg geschuldet ist. Einerseits ist da das Streben nach Anerkennung durch bemerkenswerte Errungenschaften, für die manche sprichwörtlich über Leichen gehen, auf der anderen Seite bringt die Anerkennung eben genauso viele Neider und Zweifler mit sich, für die fremder Erfolg stets unsauber anmutet.

Für Videospieler ist das Anzweifeln von High Scores, Ranglistenplätzen und besonders imposanter Statistiken längst ein alter Hut, der wie festgeklebt auf den Köpfen der hinteren Plätze zu sein scheint. Aus der Luft gegriffen ist solch ein Verhalten auch hier nicht, schließlich sind die Betrugsmöglichkeiten in Spielen zahlreich und die zu befürchtenden Konsequenzen beim Erwischtwerden nicht mit denen zu vergleichen, die Kim Schmitz gerade zu spüren bekommt. Doch warum betrügen manche bei etwas so Unbedeutendem wie einem Videospiel, wenn ihnen doch kein greifbarer Vorteil dadurch entsteht? Und geben die wenigen schwarzen Schafe den ehrlichen Spielern das Recht, jeden Erfolg unter Generalverdacht zu stellen?

SUCKMYROCKET!

Die Gründe für das Cheaten in Spielen sind vielfältiger, als man vielleicht zunächst annehmen würde. Es gibt die Singleplayer-Cheater, die gerne mit unendlicher Munition gedankenlos drauflosballern oder bei den Sims auch mal genügend Geld für ein paar goldene Wasserhähne haben wollen, ohne erst etliche Spielstunden verstreichen zu lassen. Ich habe mir beispielsweise mit meinem damaligen besten Freund gerne die Raketen in GTA um die Ohren gehauen und damit uns die nicht ausgingen, hatte Entwickler Rockstar für uns dankenswerterweise direkt passende Cheatcodes implementiert, so dass das Modifizieren des Spieles nach unseren Wünschen sogar durchaus gewollt war. Derlei harmloses Schummeln schadet niemanden und kann womöglich sogar dafür sorgen, dass man an einem guten Titel noch mehr Spaß hat. Dummerweise ist die Ära der klassischen Cheatcodes in Spielen schon seit geraumer Zeit vorbei. Wer sich heutzutage ein paar zusätzliche Vorteile im Spiel verschaffen will, der kann das aber natürlich gern gegen bare Münze machen, zum Beispiel indem er sich für ein paar Kröten alle Waffen und Perks in Battlefield 3 freischalten lässt, für deren Erwerb andere Spieler mehrere dutzend Spielstunden investiert haben.

Hoppla, Battlefield 3 ist natürlich jetzt kein Singleplayer-Titel, der höchstens mal mit einem Kumpel im Keller per LAN gezockt wird. Und das “Shortcut-Bundle” ist auch keine Schummelei, da es EA schließlich von sich aus anbietet, möchte man meinen. Dennoch fühlt sich ein nicht unwesentlicher Teil der Community betrogen, da plötzlich Spieler die selben Privilegien ohne den zuvor betriebenen Aufwand erhalten, den sie dafür auf sich nehmen mussten. Da macht sich wieder die hochgelobte deutsche Arbeitsmoral bemerkbar: Niemand darf etwas haben, für das er vorher nicht hart gearbeitet hat! Schon gar nicht, wenn man selbst dafür arbeiten musste! Ist das also seitens EA tatsächlich ein Schlag in den Nacken für die schuftenden Battlefield-Veteranen, die doch sowieso schon obgleich aller Gegenmaßnahmen mit Aimbotusern, Wallhacks und Stat-Boostern zu kämpfen haben? Oberflächlich betrachtet schon, wenn man verbrachte Spielzeit tatsächlich als “Leistung” ansieht. Schaut man sich die Konsequenzen eines solchen Systems an, dann stellt man allerdings schnell fest, dass die Käufer dieser Freischaltpakete sich vielmehr selbst betrügen, da der vermeintliche Vorteil des direkt verfügbaren kompletten Arsenals eher dazu führt, dass die Lernkurve, die andere Spieler durch das intensive Ausprobieren einer neu erworbenen Waffe haben, für die Abkürzungskäufer entfällt. Da wird dann der geübte Spieler selbst mit seiner Handknarre noch den gekauften Sturmgewehrträger ohne größere Probleme ausstechen können.

Der kürzeste Weg zum Erfolg?

Mal davon abgesehen, dass viele Publisher in Form von käuflicher Ingamewährung oder Freischaltungen also sogar höchstselbst die Spieler zu Quasi-Schummeleien animieren wollen, gibt es natürlich noch die ungewünschten Spielmanipulierer, die anderen Spielern mit ihren Methoden die Spielfreude rauben können. Am geläufigsten sind wohl die schon kurz angerissenen Cheatereien in Ego-Shootern, aber auch indirektes Betrügen, wie das Ausnutzen von Exploits und Bugs, also beispielsweise den Anstoßtorexploit bei Fifa 09, sind recht häufig anzutreffende Mittel, die ein Fehlen von notwendigem Können ausgleichen sollen. Ziel solcher Mätzchen ist es nicht mehr, den eigenen Spaß am Spiel zu erhöhen, sondern der einfache numerische Erfolg oder schlichtweg das Ruinieren des Spiels für andere. Niedere Motive also, die zum Teil aber auch tief blicken lassen, wie verzerrt die Wahrnehmung von Erfolg bei manchen Spielern sein muss. Letztlich ist es für ehrliche Gamer wohl nur schwer nachzuvollziehen, inwiefern ein erlogener Sieg das eigene Selbstwertgefühl steigern können soll, denn was sonst treibt einen zu einem virtuellen Betrug, wenn nicht die Pflege des eigenen Egos? Wie ein kleines Kind, das beim “Mensch ärgere dich nicht” immer gewinnen muss und ansonsten schreiend und fluchend das Spielbrett in die Luft wirbelt. Aber wahrscheinlich ist das eine zu simple Art und Weise, solch ein Verhalten zu interpretieren. Generell spiegelt jedoch der Gamesbereich ganz gut die gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit wider, in der das Ego über allem steht und Missgunst der Schatten jedweden Erfolges ist. Deutlich wird das auch in den Kommentaren zu Kim Dotcoms MW3-Prahlvideo, in denen mehrfach User sein übermäßiges Körpergewicht, ihren ja eh viel größeren Skill und sein doch offenkundig fehlendes Real Life ansprechen. Da kommt man schon ins Grübeln, ob man lieber ständig als Noob oder doch lieber als Cheater und No-Lifer beschimpft werden will. Oder eben als fett.

Fakt ist, dass es unter Spielern bisweilen einen sehr ungesunden Umgang mit Erfolg und Misserfolg gibt, der manch einen zu unlauteren Mitteln greifen lässt. Wir spielen mit Hardware, auf deren Packung in fetten Lettern “Play to win” gedruckt steht und verfluchen alles und jeden, der uns dabei im Wege steht. Nur uns selbst nicht. Wie ein Tennisspieler, der nach einem vergeigten Schlag den Schläger wechselt, obwohl er und nicht das Material den Fehler begangen hat. Wie im Fußball, wo lieber mit dem Schiedsrichter als mit der eigenen Leistung gehadert wird. Und die Musikindustrie hat zu ihrem angeblichen Niedergang ja auch nichts selbst beigetragen, keine Frage.

Da ist doch was faul!

Aber wollen wir als Spieler tatsächlich den alltäglichen Druck einer Leistungsgesellschaft auch noch nach Feierabend auf unserer heimischen Couch spüren? Sollten Videospiele nicht vielmehr einen Ausgleich dazu bieten, sich ständig messen und bewerten lassen zu müssen? Der Statistikflut moderner Games und dem stetig stattfindenden Abgleich mit den Leistungen anderer Spieler nach zu urteilen, wohl eher nicht. Das ständige Relativieren der eigenen Performance ist zu einem Reflex geworden, den selbst Grundschüler schon aufweisen, wenn sie ihre Noten vergleichen und die bessere Bewertung eines Mitschülers als ungerecht empfinden. Natürlich ist das keine ausreichende Erklärung oder gar Legitimation für das Cheaten in Computerspielen, es ist nur ein Versuch des Verstehens. Die Problematik liegt nunmal oft nur zu einem geringen Teil in der Spielarchitektur, denn die Mentalität und die Bereitschaft zu betrügen entsteht in der Regel nicht erst, wenn wir den Controller oder die Maus in die Hand nehmen, sie wird außerhalb der virtuellen Welt geprägt. Und doch kann man manch einem Entwickler durchaus vorwerfen, sich dieser Reflexe habhaft zu machen, indem Mechaniken eingebaut werden, die Spieler dazu verleiten mehr Geld zu investieren, um besser mit anderen mithalten zu können. Es ist ein unnötiges Befeuern unsozialer Denkstrukturen, das eine Community spalten kann und einen künstlichen Druck im Spiel erzeugt, der frustrierend statt motivierend wirkt. Als Stichwort sei nur noch einmal das Auktionshaus in Diablo III genannt.  Aber solange es dem Unternehmen zum Erfolg verhilft, ist ja bekanntlich jedes Mittel recht.

Es liegt also an jedem Spieler selbst, ein wenig mehr auf seine Reflexe zu achten und richtig einzuschätzen, welchen Preis er bereit ist für den spielerischen Erfolg zu zahlen. Auch sollte man von Zeit zu Zeit einer bemerkenswerten Leistung mit der gebührenden Anerkennung begegnen, statt wie blöde loszuflamen. Leistungsdruck und Missgunst begegnet uns doch schließlich im Alltag schon mehr als genug. In diesem Sinne möchte ich “Megaracer” nachträglich zu seinem ersten Platz in Modern Warfare 3 gratulieren. Obwohl…das technische Know-how zum Cheaten hätte der Mann ja allemal…

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Schlechte Computerspiele - Vollgurken treffen auf Machodünnpfiff

sueddeutsche.de

Einst wurde der Computerspielemarkt mit Schrott überschwemmt, heute gibt es nur noch selten schlechte Spiele. Ist deshalb alles gut? Nein, denn die Branche hechelt jedem fragwürdigem Trend hinter - und die Spieler lassen sich mit albernem Zubehör viel Geld aus der Tasche ziehen. Das neue Games-Magazin “WASD” rechnet ab.

“Tasty Trash” heißt die erste Ausgabe der WASD, einem neuen Magazin rund um die Gameskultur. Zum Auftakt einer Kooperation mit dem Magazin veröffentlichen wir folgenden Text, dessen Autor SpielerZwei tagsüber ein unauffälliges Leben als Großindustrieller, Multimillionär und Jetset-Playboy lebt. Nachts kämpft er mit tapferen Mitstreitern im Blog Polyneux gegen 08/15-Spielejournalismus.

In den 80ern und frühen 90ern wurde der Markt noch tonnenweise mit regelrechten Unverschämtheiten überschwemmt, aber inzwischen ist die durchschnittliche Qualität von Spielen allgemein so hoch, dass die Frage nach gut oder schlecht immer mehr zu einer Frage des persönlichen Geschmacks geworden ist. Natürlich finde ich auch heute noch viele Spiele schlecht, aber da reden wir im Wesentlichen von Spielen, die mich persönlich einfach nicht ansprechen, nicht von Totalkatastrophen, von deren Kauf man grundsätzlich jedermann abraten müsste, weil sie in jeder Hinsicht indiskutabel wären.

Sicher, es gibt sie noch, die Kernschrott-Spiele, die man nicht einmal seinem ärgsten Feind empfehlen würde. Dieses Jahr hatten wir da zum Beispiel “Duke Nukem Forever”. Das war wirklich richtig schlecht! (Falls Du, lieber Leser, zu der knappen Million gehören solltest, die es trotzdem gekauft hat, mach’s wie die anderen auch: Rede es Dir mit Floskeln wie “retro” und “oldschool” schön. Das Spiel bleibt aber trotzdem kapitaler Mist.) Aber der Marktanteil solcher Vollgurken ist heute deutlich geringer als früher.

Vielleicht spielt in meinem Fall ja inzwischen auch etwas Altersmilde mit hinein, aber ich kann mich in den letzten Jahren auch nicht mehr so richtig über schlechte Spiele aufregen, weil es da meistens doch eine mehr oder weniger große Zielgruppe gibt, der ich durchaus einräume, auch mit diesen Spielen ihren Spaß zu haben. Sollen sie doch ruhig den “Güllepumpensimulator 2012” oder “Mein Ponyhof 24: Jetzt erst recht!” spielen, wenn es sie glücklich macht. Solange ich genügend Alternativen habe und nicht gezwungen bin, ebenfalls derartige Titel zu spielen, kann mir das doch vollkommen egal sein. In dieser Hinsicht bin ich über die Jahre wirklich scheißliberal geworden.

Stumpfe Deckungs-Shooter-Mechanik

Wirklich problematisch, ja, sogar richtig ärgerlich, werden schlechte Spiele für mich heute nur noch, wenn sie so erfolgreich sind, dass sie weitreichende Branchentrends setzen. Was ich damit meine, kann ich am besten anhand eines meiner Lieblingsgenres, den Shootern, erläutern: Ich hasse zum Beispiel “Gears of War”. Nicht etwa weil es bis unter die Hutkrempe mit infantilem Machodünnpfiff vollgestopft ist, den eigentlich nur 12-jährige Jungs gut finden dürften, ohne sich dafür schämen zu müssen. Und für sich allein genommen, ist seine stumpfe Deckungs-Shooter-Mechanik inklusive Auto-Healing auch noch kein Grund, sich ernsthaft über dieses Spiel aufzuregen.

Der eigentliche Grund für meinen Groll auf dieses Spiel ist sein immenser Erfolg. Bei weltweit über 16 Millionen Einheiten, die von der Reihe inzwischen verkauft wurden, bleibt es natürlich nicht aus, dass sich andere Entwickler kräftig bei “Gears of War” bedienen.

“Gears of War” hat selbstverständlich weder das Auto-Healing, noch das Deckungssystem erfunden, aber es hat sie so extrem populär gemacht, dass seit einigen Jahren gefühlte 90 Prozent aller Shooter diese beiden spielerisch anspruchslosen Elemente einsetzen und mir damit ein Stück weit mein geliebtes Shooter-Genre versaut haben.

Geklonte Kriegs-Shooter

Ähnliches gilt übrigens auch für die “Medal of Honor”- und “Call of Duty”-Reihen, die dafür gesorgt haben, dass wir seit über zehn Jahren in geklonten Kriegs-Shootern ersticken, weil in der Spieleindustrie die gleichen Mechanismen gelten, wie in fast jeder anderen Branche: Hat jemand ein erfolgreiches Produkt, werden alle Mitbewerber versuchen, diese Formel so gut es geht zu kopieren. Und der Erfolg gibt ihnen recht: Die uninspirierten Shooter von der Stange verkaufen sich nach wie vor wie geschnitten Brot.

Da kann man schon fast von Glück sprechen, dass die beiden interaktiven B-Filme von David Cage, “Fahrenheit” und “Heavy Rain”, zwar noch viel zu gut, aber Gott sei Dank nicht gut genug vom Publikum aufgenommen wurden, denn sonst würden wir bei storylastigen Spielen vielleicht bald alle nur noch auf dem Bildschirm angezeigte Quick Time Events nachdrücken und uns dabei ernsthaft einreden, wir würden doch tatsächlich noch immer richtige Videospiele spielen.

Es sind aber nicht nur bestimmte Entwicklungen in einzelnen Genres, sondern auch branchenweite Trends, die ich als schlecht empfinde und die mich dementsprechend ärgern. Mir ist es beispielsweise ein Rätsel, warum DLCs von der Mehrheit der Spielerschaft so gut angenommen werden. Es geht mir dabei nicht um das klassische Add-On, das wir früher schon auf Datenträgern gekauft haben.

Honkiger Kleinkram

*Half-Life: Opposing Forces oder “Starcraft: Brood War” waren beispielsweise sehr gute und vollwertige Erweiterungen, die ihr Geld wirklich wert waren. Aber seit ein paar Jahren wird einem ja überall honkiger Kleinkram wie beispielsweise zwei zusätzliche Waffen oder drei neue Hüte und ein Tribal-Tattoo für die Spielfigur angeboten. Da werden Teile des fertigen Produktes gezielt zurückgehalten, um mit ihnen später noch zusätzliches Geld in die Kassen zu spülen.

Da frage ich mich manchmal, ob man Videospielern nicht auch Hemden ohne Knöpfe verkaufen könnte, um sie ihnen später als kostenpflichtiges Zubehör anzudrehen …? Und was ist das überhaupt für eine Nummer mit EAs Möchtegern-Steam-Konkurrenten “Origin”? Erst empört sich das halbe Internet darüber, dass sich EA in den Nutzungsbedingungen das Recht vorbehält, uns theoretisch mit “Origin” ausspionieren und die erhobenen Daten sogar an Dritte weitergeben zu dürfen, und dann kommt “Battlefield 3” als das perfekte Trojanische Pferd um die Ecke und kaum jemand besitzt die Konsequenz, EA entsprechend abzustrafen, indem man das Spiel einfach nicht kauft.

Gerade beim Thema Digital Rights Management konnte man in den letzten Jahren immer wieder gut verfolgen, wie so ziemlich jeder Aufreger in der Spielergemeinde spätestens dann komplett verpuffte, wenn der entsprechende Must-Have-Titel mit dem Mechanismus XY auf den Markt kam, den dann doch keiner verpassen wollte.

Ärgernis Durchschnittskonsument

Ihr seht, ich rege mich eigentlich nicht über einzelne schlechte Spiele auf, sondern vielmehr über deren Käufer. Also über Euch, liebe Leser. Natürlich nicht über jeden einzelnen von Euch. Viele von Euch sind bestimmt ganz nette und intelligente Menschen, die sich nicht jeden Müll andrehen lassen und auch nicht blind jedem Trend hinterher hecheln.

Frechheiten der Hersteller

Aber der sogenannte Durchschnittskonsument bestimmt mit seinem Kaufverhalten letztendlich das Angebot. Und genauso, wie dieses Kaufverhalten positiv dafür gesorgt hat, dass die durchschnittliche Qualität von Computer- und Videospielen in den letzten 20 Jahren zugenommen hat, sorgt es auf der anderen Seite leider auch dafür, dass sich gewisse Frechheiten seitens der Hersteller tatsächlich als Normalität etablieren konnten.

Gut, viele von Euch sind natürlich dadurch entschuldigt, dass sie als videospielabhängige Junkies nicht mehr die volle Kontrolle über ihren Spielekonsum haben, aber diejenigen unter Euch, die sich noch etwas Selbstkontrolle bewahrt haben, sollten einmal ernsthaft darüber nachdenken, ob man sich nicht vielleicht gezielter gegen diesen oder jenen Trend wenden sollte, um sich nicht am Ende einem Markt gegenüberzusehen, den man mit all seinen Käuferentmündigungen und durchkonfektionierten Einheitsspielen so nie gewollt hat.

Also, reißt Euch in Zukunft mal etwas mehr am Riemen, dann habe ich Euch alle auch wieder lieb.

sueddeutsche.de

Unabhängigkeitserklärungsbedarf - Telepolis

heise.de

Unabhängigkeitserklärungsbedarf

Rainer Sigl 09.06.2012

Was heißt da Indie: Die Independent-Games-Szene blüht und gedeiht - und befindet sich trotzdem in einer Sinnkrise.

Vor wenigen Jahren war das Leben noch einfach: Es gab die großen Games-Publisher wie Sony oder Electronic Arts, die die “Kreativen”, die Entwicklerstudios, aufkauften und mit ihren Multimillionen-Budgets den Mainstreammarkt mit immer größer und zugleich stromlinienförmiger werdenden Blockbustern belieferten. Und abseits davon, in einer verschworenen Gemeinschaft, blühte die kreative, enthusiastische Subkultur all jener, die unabhängig von diesem Big Business mit viel Liebe und Idealismus ihre Spiele quasi aus dem Schlafzimmer heraus per Internetvertrieb an ihre Spieler brachten: die Independents, von Publishern unabhängig und deswegen frei, ihren eigenen Vorstellungen von dem, was das Medium zu leisten imstande wäre, nachzugehen.

Spätestens seit dem Millionenerfolg von Minecraft, das seinen Entwickler Markus “Notch” Persson beinahe über Nacht zum Millionär gemacht hat, ist jedoch auch auf dem Indie-Games-Sektor einiges anders geworden. Während der Begriff in den letzten Jahren hauptsächlich für nicht-kommerzielle, oft experimentelle oder auch mit Retro-Ästhetik spielende kleine (Download-)Titel stand, ist “Indie” 2012 eine Schublade für alles geworden, was sich abseits der Blockbuster mit ihren immer höher werdenden Titelnummerierungen in Nischen auch auf dem Markt behaupten kann und dabei mit unkonventionellen Bezahlmethoden und starker Fan-Bindung arbeitet. Und seit der Software-Riese Electronic Arts, per Definition der Gottseibeiuns der Unabhängigen, Anfang Mai unter dem Titel “EA Indie Bundle” den Erfolg des Spiele-Bündelkaufs zum freundlichen Preis für seine eigenen Zwecke entdeckt hat, steckt der Indie-Begriff in einer handfesten Sinnkrise, die aktuell zahlreiche Diskussionen auslöst: Indie, was ist das?

Übervolle Schublade

Eines zumindest ist sicher: Indie ist populär wie nie. Alleine der Erfolg von Download-Marktplätzen wie Apples AppStore oder GoogleMarket bringt nie zuvor erreichte Massen von Indie-Spielen an ein wachsendes Publikum, alternative Finanzierungsmethoden wie Crowdfunding oder Pay-what-you-want-Modelle à la “Humble Indie Bundle” haben einen lebendigen Markt abseits des alten Publishermodells entstehen lassen. Sogar im Kino ist die junge Subkultur angekommen: Die US-Doku Indie Game - The Movie, zu Beginn des Jahres in den USA angelaufen und derzeit leider noch ohne Starttermin in Europa, wirft einen liebevollen Blick auf die heimlichen Superstars der Indie-Szene. Mit der Ende April in Berlin abgehaltenen A MAZE IndieConnect etablierte sich dieses Jahr erstmals auch ein europäischer Treffpunkt für die globale Indie-Szene, der zu einer europäischen Alternative zu den amerikanischen Großevents Independent Games Festival (IGF) und Indiecade werden soll.

Indie-Megablockbuster: “Minecraft” machte seinen Erfinder Markus “Notch” Persson über Nacht zum Millionär.

Trotz - oder vielleicht auch wegen - dieser Erfolge scheint die ursprüngliche Definition des Independent-Begriffs ihre Relevanz verloren zu haben: Independent, also unabhängig vom Publisher, das sind im weitesten Sinne auch große Einzelstudios wie Valve oder “Farmville”-Macher Zynga. Auch über die Beschaffenheit der Spiele oder ein wie auch immer geartetes “Underground”-Ethos selbst sagt der zunehmend populär werdende Begriff eigentlich nichts mehr aus: Ist der zwölfte uninspirierte Bejeweled- und Minecraft-Klon im AppStore tatsächlich mit Ausnahme-Einzelkämpferprojekten wie Dwarf Fortress” oder experimentellen Games wie Dear Esther” in denselben Topf zu werfen? Darf man im Gegenzug thatgamecompanys eigentlich in allen Kriterien dem strengen Indie-Ethos entsprechendes Journey nur deshalb kein Indie-Game nennen, weil Macher Jenova Chen bei Sony unter Vertrag steht?

Indie-Experimente abseits des Mainstreams: “Dear Esther”

Letztlich ist es das in jeder Konsumkultur unweigerlich ablaufende, uralte Spiel der Abgrenzung einer Subkultur vom Mainstream und deren darauffolgende Aufweichung und Übernahme, die sich nun auch im jungen Massenmedium Games abspielt: Die Unzufriedenheit mit dem Massenmarkt lässt neue Nischen entstehen, die bei Erfolg in den Mainstream wandern und so wiederum neue Gegenbewegungen auslösen. “Kommerzialisierung”, das schlimme Wort jedes Undergrounds, ist so betrachtet letztlich nur ein Beweis für die Vitalität der neuen Konzepte.

Aufbruch in die Vielfalt

Dass dieser Ausverkauf zu verminderter Kreativität dieses Untergrunds führen wird, ist zum Glück nicht zu befürchten: Die US-Amerikanerin Anna Anthropy, selbst Independent-Games-Macherin, sieht in ihrem jüngst veröffentlichten Buch The Rise of Videogame Zinesters” einen bedeutsamen Punkt in der dynamischen Entwicklung des am schnellsten wachsenden Mediums des 21. Jahrhunderts erreicht: Durch neue, einfache Tools sei es inzwischen auch technischen Laien möglich, ihre eigenen Spielkonzepte und Ideen zu verwirklichen und per Internet an ein größeres Publikum zu bringen.

Das milliardenschwere Zynga ist der Definition nach auch “Indie” - auch wenn die Szene damit hadert.

Für Anthropy stehen Games - und als Avantgarde unweigerlich das, was mit dem problematisch gewordenen Begriff Indie-Games einmal gemeint war - genau jetzt an der Schwelle zu einer zuvor nie erreichten Tiefe ganz abseits der marktschreierischen Befriedigung des seichten Massengeschmacks: Während es, so Anthropy, bislang wegen der technischen und finanziellen Einstiegshürden  hauptsächlich weiße, technisch versierte junge westliche Männer gewesen seien, die als Spielemacher unter dem Erfolgsdruck riesiger Produktionsbudgets ihre Ideen in das Medium einbringen konnten, stünde die Welt des Spielens nun auch bislang atypischen Kreativen und somit neuen Ideen offen. Spiele, so Anthropys optimistisches Fazit, werden unweigerlich früher oder später in ihren Themen und Konzepten ebenso abwechslungsreich und erwachsen werden wie ihr Publikum. Der kreative Games-Underground wird daran federführend beteiligt sein - ganz egal unter welchem Label.

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Für die Spieler selbst, und das ist trotz der Sinnkrise des Indie-Sektors beruhigend, bleiben all diese Definitionskrisen zum Glück letztlich belanglos. Denn in der Praxis werden die wenigsten Spieler so streng zwischen den Schubladen trennen und sich etwa neben Mainstream-Größen wie Diablo III auch selbstverständlich an Indie-Games wie Tiny Wings oder Minecraft erfreuen oder etwa im Hochglanztitel Arma II per unabhängig entwickelter Day Z-Mod auf Zombiejagd gehen - die strenge Trennung der Bereiche existiert nur auf dem Papier. Hierin unterscheiden sich Spiele nicht von anderen, arrivierteren Medien: Der Mainstream braucht den Underground - und umgekehrt.

Ist Jenova Chens meditatives “Journey” nur deshalb kein Indie-Game, weil es von Sony releast wurde?

Telepolis > Kultur > Games

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Kommentare lesen (7 Beiträge)

Re: Die Dame… (11.6.2012 14:44)

ArmA II Hochglanz? (10.6.2012 8:46)

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Die “Initiative gegen ein Leistungsschutzrecht” (IGEL) will über eine Gefahr aufklären, die den deutschsprachigen Teil des Internets stärker gefährden könnte als der JMStV

Im Trubel um den Jugendschutz-Medienstaatsvertrag (JMStV) ist eine andere massive Bedrohung des deutschsprachigen Teils des Internets etwas in den Aufmerksamkeitshintergrund geraten: Das “Leistungsschutzrecht”, mit dem Presseverlage Verbotsrechte beanspruchen wollen, die weit über das Urheberrecht hinausgehen und zu deren Hauptopfern vor allem Blogger gehören könnten.

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Visiting the Village: The Mode 7 Games Blog and Podcast » Blog Archive » How to Be an Indie Game Developer

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How to Be an Indie Game Developer

I got an email a while back from someone who was effectively asking, “How do I become an indie game developer?”

I replied to them and did my best, but I wasn’t entirely sure exactly what they were looking for in terms of advice. We get asked similar questions quite a bit, so I thought I would write a post to which I can refer people in the future; a kind of miscellany of advice that might be useful.

Two notes: this is aimed at relative beginners who know a bit about games and will probably have a PC bias.

Who We Are

As one person commented – somewhat ominously – on a previous article I wrote for Gamesbrief:

the future success of the guest poster will solely affect the validity of these ‘tips’.
let the games begin.

Mode 7 is an indie development studio based in Oxford, UK. We started formally in around 2005 and released an unsuccessful multiplayer sword-fighting game called Determinance in 2007.

After that, we moved on to Frozen Synapse, which was released in 2011.

I always feel a bit “my apartment smells of rich mahogany” when I talk about this stuff…

Here’s FS’s rap sheet:

- Over 400k units sold - 85 Metacritic - 9/10 Edge, Eurogamer, Destructoid; many other high review scores
- Headlined its own Humble Bundle
- Independent Games Festival Audience Award; PC Gamer Strategy Game of the Year; Indiegames.com Strategy Game of the Year; RockPaperShotgun “Best Glowy Lines in a Game” Award (really)

We are currently working on an iPad version of the game which will be out later this year.

Myself and Ian Hardingham (Lead Designer and Coder) head up the company as Joint Managing Directors and co-owners. There are currently four other people in our office, two of whom are full-time employees. We also work with various freelancers remotely.

Who I Am

I’m Paul Taylor: I do business development, marketing, audio, music, writing, some art direction, some UI design, some single player design…and some other things as well!

The Question

For the purposes of narrowing things down, I am going to presume that, by asking how to become an indie dev, you mean this:

“I want to move from what I’m doing now to being a full-time indie game developer.”

Let me just say at this point that if you want to make an indie game solely for the purposes of creative expression or indeed for fun, then please don’t let me put you off.

In fact, let me do the opposite: some of the most amazing things I’ve seen in the last few years have been games developed by people who didn’t have a commercial bone in their body. Some of them have even made a decent amount of money, even though that wasn’t the primary goal.

Also, you might want to develop interactive stories in Twine or amazing physical experiences like Johann Sebastian Joust rather than the more stereotypical computer games I’ll be discussing, so please don’t think I’m excluding you even though my focus is elsewhere.

That’s the end of this apparently interminable preamble: on with the show…

The Basics

The process of making and releasing a computer game will probably feature the following aspects:

- Game design - Code - Level design (or some other, more tactical, “micro” form of design if you don’t have levels) - Art and animation - Audio and music
- Writing
- Biz (legal, marketing, PR, bits of web dev and other miscellany)

All of these are necessary and important; all are extremely challenging disciplines that one person can spend a lifetime mastering.

Here’s the rub: you will need to cover all the bases yourself, find willing partners, or start paying others to do the work for you.

Personally, I think from the outset you should be ready to pay professionals to handle the stuff you can’t manage personally: that’s the fastest, easiest and often (somewhat counterintuitively) cheapest way to get stuff done.

If you’ve never outsourced anything before, I recommend The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss: the attitudes expressed there are fairly extreme and quite amusing, but I guarantee that it will make you think.

If you’re lucky enough to know people who might partner up with you, make sure they’re in it for the long game, that you trust them implicitly and that you feel you have shared goals at a profound level. People like that are hard to find, so hold on to them if you do.

Unpaid volunteers will, more often than not, give up when things get hard. They may also not tell you that they’ve given up and waste a vast amount of your time.

Let’s look at each discipline in turn and figure out what we’re talking about…

Game Design

This, by Spelunky creator Derek Yu, is one of the best things you will ever read about game design or any creative endeavour – read that and come back!

Game design is a creative discipline which also requires an extremely analytical mind at a high level; this would seem to explain why most game designers I know are a tiny bit unhinged (in a good way)!

Game designers design game mechanics; yes, they often contribute to the high-concept narrative stuff as well, but their primary role is to design the actual game. I’m still surprised by the number of people I talk to who don’t seem to know that.

There are three ways to learn game design; I’ve put these in descending order of efficacy:

1.) Make games, then watch people playing your games

[GREAT BIG GAP]

2.) Play other games analytically
3.) Study game design theory

I’m not saying that 2 and 3 are worthless by any means; they are just worth less.

Your life as a designer will be a hell of a lot easier if you are a competent coder: the great game designers you read about who are not coders often will work in tandem with a large team of high-level programmers; unless you are extremely rich and risk-prone, you won’t be doing that initially.

It is certainly possible to be an indie designer who does not code at all: however, you’ll have to have amazing “people skills” to compensate for that.

If you’re using game creation software like Adventure Game Studio, RPG Maker or RenPY, you will reduce the amount of hardcore coding you’ll need to learn at the outset in order to start designing. Be aware, though, that until you delve deep into the nuts and bolts of those tools you’ll be severely limited in terms of the designs you’ll be able to execute.

Design is vital, but it is not everything. If you were being so crass as to give game designs marks out of 10, there are plenty of  successful indie games which would score 7 or 8.

That said, there is never a good reason to aim for mediocre design: gamers come for the presentation and concept but they stay for the design.  Also, if you do hit that elusive 10/10 then a lot of other things will suddenly get a LOT easier.

Here are three things I wish designers would do more:

- Try to get the player making interesting, meaningful decisions as quickly as possible
- Try to minimize the total amount of time the player has to do boring things
- Try to include at least one completely innovative element, even if it’s just a small thing

There’s nothing wrong with sticking to a broad genre, but the people who buy indie games generally like such entertainment – at least partially – for its novelty and innovation: if your game is boring in any way then prepare to fail!

Finally, a word of warning. There is something about game design which makes people believe that they can do it, even if they have never done it before. I’m not precisely sure what quality it has which makes it appear so easy: it is incredibly difficult.

My final thought on design is that you need to find your own way and express your own personality. Clarify your goals and maybe even write them down, just like Gunpoint creator Tom Francis did recently.

Concept

Game concepts occupy a weird space between aesthetics and mechanical considerations. They add atmosphere and emotion to the raw mechanics; also, they are often the primary reason that people try or buy a game.

The more generic your concept (e.g. “fantasy MMO”) the more pressure you put on other aspects of the game and the greater the need for quirks or twists on the formula (“fantasy MMO where the combat is four-dimensional Backgammon”).

I wrote a bit about concepts in my Gamasutra marketing article.

Here’s an excerpt:

Scott Steinberg would advise you to aim squarely at the mass market: “Music, animals, sports, raising a family… Keep game premises rooted in real-world frames of reference whenever possible.” – Scott Steinberg, Sell More Video Games

Jeff Tunnell, on the other hand, thinks you should stick to where your passion lies:
“I make games that I want to make, and find out if there is an audience later. Trying to come up with a forecast is not an art or a science, it is an exercise in futility. Back in the day after Dynamix was acquired by Sierra we did have to work with marketing and do the prediction dance, but it was rarely correct, and the games I believed in the most like The Incredible Machine got terrible forecasts.” – Jeff Tunnell, What is My Game’s Sales Potential?

Here’s my take:

There are commercially-successful indie games about gangly kung-fu fighting rabbits, abstract computer landscapes populated by tiny green squeaking things, and small, dribbly blobs of goo. These are never going to be as big as The Sims, but they were never intended to be. By “commercially successful”, I mean “making enough money for their creators to continue making games”. That’s your goal, right?

Go for a “popular” concept only if you have a passion for it: you need passion to drive you through the process of making the game. If you’re coming up with something wackier, realize that you’re going to have to work harder to find the audience, and start figuring out how you’re going to go about doing that before you start development.

Code

That’s enough about design and concept: they both mean nothing if you can’t actually code a game!  There are a huge variety of “How do I learn to program?” resources around on the internet, just a Google search away, so getting access to the basics should be trivial. However, I’m now going to hand over to Ian for his advice on coding for indie games…

“I’m going to assume you’re working with an existing game engine if you’re reading a “how to get into games coding” piece – if you’re rolling your own then you’re already beyond my advice.

Learning to program is something which requires the kind of focus and effort which most programmers by nature don’t have or can’t muster, so it’s always a hard road.

I advise the same approach whether you’ve never programmed before in your life, or (as with me) you have a coding background but are suddenly presented with a hugely complex 500,000 line game-engine you have no idea what to do with. Don’t bother “starting small” – go straight for what you actually want to do, and start doing it. However, within that extremely ambitious framework you must be intelligent about what part you start with. Find a self-contained part of the larger project – something which is achievable in a month with a real payoff – and set that as your first target.

Run head-first, flailing, into the code-base and hack away until you can make something change. Change something’s colour and then celebrate. Badger people in the community for the game engine endlessly – your questions will start off stupid and they’ll be exasperated with you, but every day your questions will get slightly less ridiculous, and eventually you’ll be helping other people. If there are books available for your chosen engine, buy them and read them cover to cover WITHOUT doing any of the actual coding exercises first. Only then should you start doing the actual exercises.

Assuming you have any kind of natural talent for programming at all – and if you have none maybe you should go for the art side of game dev – then the only real enemy you will have is uncertainty. Don’t EVER go into a problem with an attitude of “I don’t know what to do” or, even worse, “I don’t know if this is possible”. Everything you will be trying to do is possible, and if you’re confident of that you’ll find everything much easier.

Learning game programming is as hard as learning anything else: expect it to take six months of very hard graft to get to any kind of position of knowledge.”

You should find a game engine to use that suits your project. If you’re really stuck for ideas, have a look at Torque, Unity or something HTML5-based. Alternatively, you could go for something extremely powerful but aimed at beginners: GameMaker.

Level Design

Game design and level design are different skills: one is designing a system and the other is working out how to present that system in the most rewarding way.

Level design tends to be very specific to the game in question, and is something that has to be worked out on an iterative basis; it tends to take a long time. I’ve included it here just to remind prospective indie devs that they will probably have to get used to doing it or find someone else who is willing to do it for them!

There has been a recent trend towards procedural generation; this requires both strong coding skills and a keen eye for what works in your game: don’t see it as an easy way out! Yes, you’ll get greater bang for your buck, but you’ll probably spend as much time tweaking generators as you would building the levels by hand.

Art and Animation

I have a lot of respect for indie devs who make their own art: I’m currently playing through Size Five’s Ben There Dan That and the very…erm…handmade art in that particular game (especially the character walk cycles) is hilarious and perfectly suits the tone.

If you’re not the greatest artist in the world, then you can either use that to your advantage and go for a super simple style (even using free tools like GIMP and Blender), or you can outsource art to someone else.

Art is probably the easiest part of game development to outsource: if your game engine is reasonably standard you can usually just give the artist a spec, agree a price and leave them to get on with it.

I would recommend using artists who have a good track record. Someone who has completed a lot of projects, and maybe has industry experience, will know all the right questions to ask and will have a much higher chance of doing their work on time. That advice applies to freelancers in other disciplines as well.

You can sink a lot of money into art, so it’s probably worth thinking about the 80/20 rule here. Think about the art that your game really needs. Bear in mind that it’s worth focussing on the things the player will be looking at most – it’s all very well having glossy cutscenes, but if you have rubbish main character animation, people will say your game looks terrible.

Shop around for artists: don’t just hire the first person you find: you’re really after a cost / benefit balance here.

On Frozen Synapse, we made a few decisions that I think really helped:

- Keep it simple

We had almost no art budget, so changed from a fairly complex 2D style to a much more abstract top-down aesthetic that could look good with a low number of assets. I think that simple art works really well for complex PC strategy games – look at something like AI War, which has a nice 2D art style.

- Know where you’re going

Concept art is really useful to give you something to aim for, but don’t go overboard with it.  As an indie, you’ll need to put your limited resources into creating actual assets you can use in your game.

- Focus on aesthetic rewards

When a player gets a kill, they’re rewarded with a nice death animation and blood splatter. We spent a lot of time and a bit of money on getting both of those things to look as nice as possible in the context

- Front-load the awesome

I see so many games with butt-ugly splash screens and menus. I never understand why as they are so easy to get right: they’re mostly just static images!

If a shop has a beautiful interior, but a sign and window which look like they were painted by an aesthetically challenged four-year-old, nobody is going to be quite sure what to make of it.

Having menus animate in and out might seem like a small thing, but if I’m showing my game to a reviewer, IGF judge, or jaded gamer, they are going to sit up and take notice as soon as the first nice thing happens on-screen.

- Polish, polish, polish, polish…

Atmosphere and presentation are about creating a mood: when you’re trying to do that you have to pay attention to all the small details that contribute to someone’s unconscious understanding of a situation.

Apple are masters of this in their product and UI design; just look at the iPad: it’s a proliferation of tiny details which add up to a ridiculously polished user experience.

Think about how you want someone to feel when playing your game, then tailor ALL of the art to this, from the menu buttons to the mouse-click sound effect.

None of this stuff needs to be expensive – it can be as simple as taking the time to ensure that everything is lined up correctly on your login screen – but it does matter. It’s also hard to get right – you’ll miss stuff – but putting the effort in will mean that’s kept to a minimum.

Music and Audio

Audio is the least important of the creative disciplines in indie games: I can think of many, many successful games which have utterly terrible sound and music. I say this with a heavy heart as an audio person myself, but it’s true!

You can still apparently get away with just buying a load of reasonably crappy stock sound effects from somewhere like SoundDogs setting their levels appropriately and shoving them in your game.

However, things are getting a lot more competitive in high-end indie games;I really would recommend outsourcing your audio (or doing it yourself if you’re an awesome audio dude like Jasper Byrne).

Even if you don’t have very much sound, it still adds a great deal of polish simply because other indies still aren’t paying attention.

Voice acting can be incredibly difficult to get right and, as it’s not really necessary, is probably best avoided unless you feel it’s really essential. If you need voice acting, find someone who works in theatre or TV to give you advice on how to go about it: once again, knowing people can come in very useful.

If you’d like to learn how to make music and audio yourself, then I recommend buying Computer Music magazine for a few months (not just because I used to write for them!) and following along with some tutorials.

I like Ableton Live a lot; once you have that and a few free synthesizers, you’ll be able to bash out some early musical horrors in no time. You can also use Live to do all your SFX editing and processing.

If you do have the budget (or skills) for a good soundtrack, you’ll start to get a load of different benefits. Not only can you sell soundtrack downloads, and put the score up for things like the indie game music bundle, you’ll also add an entirely new way for people to discover your game.

Writing

Writing is optional or minimal for quite a few games but it can make a big difference. It can also be an opportunity to inject personality into an otherwise dry game. Again, I’d recommend hiring a freelancer for this if you don’t have any writing experience yourself, or at least checking with some other people to make sure what you’re doing makes sense!

You don’t have to include a huge amount of text (this can be a disadvantage, of course) but try to ensure that what you do have is of a reasonable standard, especially if you’re writing a script for voice actors.

Something I learned writing Frozen Synapse is that the overwhelming majority of gamers want quick, front-loaded exposition: they need to know what they’re doing and precisely why they’re doing it in as few words as possible. As a species, we haven’t really moved on from “avoid missing ball for high score”!

Put your literary aspirations in check and make sure you’ve got the basic context in place, then go back to doing all the ridiculous arty stuff you were planning on doing…

Be aware that many people will take any text in your game completely literally, irrespective of context.

A Note on Freelancers

“Where do I find all these mythical freelancers?” you may be asking. It really is as simple as Googling, looking on forums and asking around. If you are thinking of delving into outsourcing, you’ll need to develop the skills of finding people for yourself, as that’s the entire battle.

Suffice it to say, here’s a few tips…

A big list of forums to get you started:

http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-indie-game-development-forums/

Places like Polycount and even DeviantArt can be good for artists.

I’ve always found coders by posting jobs on GamesIndustry.biz or other industry websites, but freelance coders are not all that hard to come by in general.

But honestly, Google is your friend.

Business and Marketing

Making a game is approximately half the battle! Here’s some info on the other stuff…

Basics

Being a professional indie game developer (even just a one-man-band) means that you are running a small business.

In order to do that effectively, you need to look at a few different aspects:

Small Business Fun Time

You will need:

- An organisation like BusinessLink

- A good accountant who knows what the internet is and (ideally) has other small games companies on his books

- A solicitor, especially if you are setting up a company with other people

BusinessLink (or local equivalent) will be able to give you all the information you need to set up a company: you most likely will want to find your country’s version of a “limited liability company”.

Your accountant will do your end-of-year tax return (or Satan’s Pestilent Administrative Armpit) for you and tell you about how to save money.

Your solicitor will stop you making a massive error when you’re “just trying to get a game done” and inadvertently giving away all of your company to a publisher. They shouldn’t charge you money just to chat to them when you’re a start-up: if they do then tell them where to go.

That’s literally it – it’s not complicated but it is boring.

A quick tip for finding professionals who will be good in the long run: they will travel to see you (within reason!) for the initial meeting and give you genuinely useful advice for free. Anyone who bothers to do both of those things has my attention immediately.

What size and structure suits me?

Personally, I am not a designer or coder, so I partnered 50:50 with someone who is highly skilled at both of those things. That leaves him to get on with designing, coding and managing, while leaving me to spend my time on with a catalogue of odds and ends in various other disciplines.

We also have two brains to apply to strategic issues, as well as two very different personalities to evaluate our products. It helps immensely.

For this reason, I really think most one-man-band devs should look at bringing at least one other person eventually: just an opinion! I don’t think you can hit your full potential slogging it out on your own forever: you need that second perspective.

What are my long-term goals?

If you have never made a game before, please just make one and release it, even if it’s just for free: don’t let planning distract you from that. You need to have that process figured out before you think about anything else. Just do it!

Once you know you can make games, that’s the time to start planning ahead.

If you want to make indie games for your entire career, you’ll have to figure out a way to find a niche, stay ahead of what other game devs are doing and keep trying to make your games stand out.

This is where having a strong creative lead will help you: if you have great ideas and the ability to present them well, you’ll be able to find a market for what you’re making.

Be ready to make your next game and move onto it promptly as soon as you have completed one project. It can be tempting to just sit there milking one thing (especially if you have had a hit) but you absolutely need to keep going.

You might want to grow your business or stay small: both are valid, despite the fact that people will criticise you for doing either. A lot of this is down to personal motivation and drive: if you are not interested in running a big business with a lot of employees then don’t do it!

Strategy

I’ve come up with four ways that an indie game studio can set itself up for the long-term. Obviously these are crude, and there are many other valid approaches. Here they are:

1.) A regular (at least one release every two years) string of strong (but not necessarily hit) pay-once games

OR

2.) A single large-scale – probably free-to-play-with-microtransactions – game with a decent conversion rate and ARPU (average revenue per user)

OR

3.) One singular Minecraft-style breakout hit!

OR

4.) Any / all of the above combined with outsourcing and contract work

Pay Once

Most indies start (even if they don’t know it) with 1.), because they are making a pay once game. They think, “I will make my game, get it on Steam / App Store / Android Marketplace, do some PR and make money”. The reason that we are in a golden age of indie development right now is that this can actually work with the right game!

If you make a good enough game, get a decent distribution agreement from a big distributor, and get some good PR behind it, then you can make money.

However, it’s most likely, even with additional revenue streams like DLC and ports, that you’ll need to do this on a regular basis: that’s the major challenge.

Successful small (or one-man-band) companies who follow this model are Arcen Games and Positech Games.

I still recommend that newer devs start with 1.) because of the challenges inherent in the other categories. Making a successful free-to-play game is more creatively restrictive and simply harder than making a pay-once game, whatever the free-to-play camp will say.

Set a fair price that you feel is appropriate for your game based on the amount of content and depth it has in it. Make sure that you don’t undervalue what you’re doing: you can compete in areas other than price.

Free-to-play

The technical abilities and funding level of many start-up indies probably preclude 2.) but it is certainly worth looking into if you have an applicable game design..

2.) is certainly capable of making many times the revenue of 1.), but is harder to design and requires many more ongoing resources (like servers and support staff for large multiplayer games), as well as continuous evolution and development.

This business model is very in vogue at the moment and so its disadvantages can be overlooked: I have been told by the developers of several free-to-play games that they wish they had gone with a traditional pay-once model.

However, despite idiots ranting on the internet, customers of all demographics tolerate free-to-play models. The only evidence you need that it works in the hardcore space (if that is your target) is League of Legends and Tribes: Ascend. It was recently announced that Valve’s DOTA2 will be free-to-play and monetised entirely by aesthetic content: to my knowledge, this is the first time that a core game as done that and it will be a fascinating test case for that model.

Free-to-play also allows for much more long-term iterative development and practises like “minimum viable product” where you develop your game in tandem with a lot of community feedback and metrics. This also allows you to scale your company directly proportional to the revenue your game is making and build things up that way.

Finally going free-to-play means that many, many more people will try your game compared to one released under a pay-once model (even with a demo). If you want to truly aim for the biggest possible market, and you’re convinced that your game will retain players for a long time, by all means give it a shot.

For examples of successful smaller free-to-play games I’d check out Kongregate (they have a great presentation from GDC this year over at GDC Vault as well). The results that lone developers can achieve with free-to-play games on there are nothing short of astonishing.

Contract Work

Mode 7 switched from original game development to mostly contract work after the failure of our first game, and it was a great move at the time. We were able to get funding to make exactly the game we wanted to make on our own terms.

After Frozen Synapse’s success, we have largely moved away from contract work again for the following reasons:

- It is very unpredictable - The time spent is always greater than the amount quoted for - The ongoing support needed for any large project is a huge time drain
- The potential upside is always lower than working on an original product
- There are no long-term benefits like IP ownership

Some successful studios like Remode manage to combine original IP development with contract work in a very considered way. Others, like the brilliant Fish in a Bottle are based pretty much entirely around very targeted game design for brands and other companies.

Again, it’s all about finding your own balance.

Marketing

Here’s the link to my Gamasutra article again, because I don’t like repeating myself…even though I just…did.  Um.

I think many of the things I said there probably still stand up.

The most important thing is to let your game take the lead. It’s pretty difficult to take the lead yourself: you’ll have to be an intriguing personality that the press want to speak with until you at least have some kind of intriguing game in development, and if that’s going to happen to you it will happen naturally, so don’t worry about it.

One thing I am finding at the moment is that frequency matters a lot: blogging regularly and tweeting / posting on Facebook every day is a good way to keep people engaged with what you’re doing.

In terms of people actually buying your game, hitting high-profile sites like RPS and Kotaku combined with a sale or big release is still the best thing to aim for. It’s worth taking the time to get to know journalists who work for the larger sites while your game is in development so that you can hit them up when it comes to launch.

All in all, still the most important thing about marketing an indie game is to think about how it will speak to people: how you can create and execute a concept which people will genuinely love. All of the other activities need to be driven by a strong belief that your product is amazing and that you have put all you can into it.

Video

Video is ridiculously important these days. Here’s a quick idiot’s guide (as in, a guide written by an idiot) to video for indie game dev:

1.) Use FRAPS to capture footage from the game at a good resolution – there’s basically no sane alternative and it’s very cheap. FRAPS is great.

2.) Sony Vegas 11 for editing your captured footage – frankly, it’s a bit ropey and proper video people will laugh at you, but it’s easy to learn and not too expensive. Other editing software is available!

Make sure you set the “project settings” to something sensible when you start a new project, as a lot of the Vegas default projects are stupid – I think 1080p, 30fps and non-interlaced is good.

3.) Export as an uncompressed AVI – this will be an unbelievably stupidly big file, so you may want a spare hard drive handy.

4.) Use Handbrake to encode this AVI to a format suitable for YouTube – you’ll be wanting H.264 – that’s YouTube’s native format so it won’t re-encode it once you upload (APPARENTLY), leading to better quality. The resulting file will be much smaller.

That’s the sum total of my current knowledge and we’ve managed to do alright with trailers!

If you want to film stuff with a camera to spice up your videos buy a Sony HX9V – basically point-and-shoot but can do 1080p video like a badass. Professionals use them as backup cameras, and that means something. I bought a mini tripod called a Gorillapod with mine and that’s been invaulable too – can just sit it on your desk and talk into it then.

Advertising

This is tricky to get right, and most indies don’t do it, but don’t write it off. If you have a site which is metricated using Google Analytics, you can tie that in with Google Ads to figure out where to spend your money. It will take time and persistence but if you get it right, it can be very useful.

Final Thoughts

I believe it will take a skilled person with a strong work ethic starting from scratch a minimum of two years to get any kind of significant financial return from making indie games, probably longer. I dare you to prove me wrong! I would honestly expect most people to take three to four years. In any case, you will need to have some decent savings (or external funding) if you’re going to jump into full-time indie game dev.

It is possible to do it part-time, just be prepared to have no social life (I’m not being hyperbolic here) and to somehow figure out how you can work on something seriously around a full-time job. It’s one of the hardest things you can ever do, but, as I said, it is possible.

Once you’re in the swing of making an indie game, it’s a good idea to start reaching out to other people. Go to events (like Bit of Alright), meet other indies, tell people what you’re doing. Firstly, you’ll start to get a bit of attention and you’ll make friends who can help you. Secondly, this will make you much more likely to finish what you’re doing: the social aspect of committing to do something is usually the most powerful driver for actually accomplishing it.

Always try to think about things from the perspective of the player and customer (when you have them). This can be difficult and challenging at times – also you will face the harsh reality of areas where you’re failing – but it is worth doing and worth pushing yourself to improve. You need to think about your bottom line and your customer experience simultaneously: try not to be either Borders or Amstrad!

While you’re taking community feedback, stay true to your own ideals and don’t deviate from the concepts which drew you to design your game in the first place.

Games are an insanely wonderful, silly, beautiful and diverse artform: if you want to get involved with them you need to respect that and then think about how you can destroy / remake / change / evolve it.

The Independent Games Festival had almost 570 entries this year and that is definitely on the increase: your mission is to make something that will stand out above the crowd in the future.

I have written quite a bit about business and money, but ultimately there is no point doing this unless you love making games.   There are as many different approaches to being an indie dev as there are indie devs: if you think I’m an idiot and you want to go out and prove me wrong then please do so – I look forward to seeing your game.

Good luck and have fun, as they say!

If you’d like to hear more from us at Mode 7 then sign up to our email list and we’ll tell you when, if ever, we do something interesting.  Follow us on Twitter @mode7games

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Own Up Or Change – 14 Misguided Defenses For Misogyny In Games

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Save me, own me, help me, stare at me, gag me, bind me, dominate me, take me, touch me, pity me, earn me, win me, beat me.

Quick trigger warning: a collection of possibly disturbing screenshots and concept arts from AAA games below!

Preface

Misogyny in games is everywhere and almost as old as popular games are. I love games, I work in games, I play games, games are awesome, powerful and wonderful. But the way the games industry and community treats roughly 50% of the human population is a giant festering ugly tumor, right in our favorite cultures’s face.

Considering the damage misogyny in games does to pop culture and to society at large (games are a large cultural force now), I find myself always flabbergasted at the consorted and massive efforts from gamers to keep things as disgusting as they are, whenever someone speaks up against it.

Instead of joining forces with people, who care enough to make games better for all of us and, yes, help women get a better standing in society, gamers get defensive. They play the victim, rationalize, become offensive and even resort to hostile attacks and vandalism.

This is not helping. It is generating additional damage to our culture, in fact. Whatever the aspect of games, the community or themselves it is, they get so protective about… they are completely poisoning and deforming it, by their own misguided actions defending misogyny in games.

Recent target of various forms of underserved vile by the thin-skinned heterosexual male gamer community is Anita Sarkeesian. She must to be a very very scary person for the male establishment, considering the massive amounts of preemptive warfare directed at her (including cyber attacks). Sarkeesian, a feminist popculture critic (and a very good one, I might add) is currently running a kickstarter project, which you totally need to check out and support.

This article is kinda written in, at least mental, support for her. We need more Sarkeesians and Borderhouses to make people more media savvy and get the discussion going. And we need more reasonable and serious attempts at finding common ground from publishers, developers and gamers, instead of pro-misogyny apologetics.

Here are 14 common defenses, deconstructed and answered:

1. It’s not misogyny.

Girlfriend with undefined personality, hanged as set decoration and plot point. Shadows of the Damned.

What is argued:

Misogyny is about hating women. Displaying scenarios, where you save them and appreciating the female body has nothing to do with hating them.

Reply:

Yes, it is.
Dismissing the term misogyny, when it comes to the overwhelming sexualization of women and the objectification of women, is just a result of you not knowing your definitions correctly. Here it is:
“Misogyny …. is a central part of sexist prejudice and ideology and, as such, is an important basis for the oppression of females in male-dominated societies. Misogyny is manifested in many different ways, from jokes to pornography to violence to the self-contempt women may be taught to feel toward their own bodies.” – Allan G. Johnson

Basically, misogyny is not necessarily the explicit expression of hatred or even dislike towards women. Prejudice targeted at women is enough here. The default treatment of female characters as less, than male characters is misogyny. The frequent sexualization of female members of the community is misogyny. The casual use of gendered insults is misogyny.

It is understandable, that single instances of misogyny are sometimes hard to recognize as such. But looking at the overall picture, connecting the dots and recognizing patterns, makes it impossible to define misogyny out of existence here.

Own up or change.

2. It’s just words and pictures.

Damage model design for the Sonya character from the fighting game Mortal Kombat. Punching and kicking damages her body tissue but also conveniently gets the clothes off of her.

What is argued:

The way women are depicted in games and the gendered language gamers use are just words and pictures. There is no actual harm in that. If people would stop being offended, there wouldn’t be a problem.

Reply:

There is actual harm and damage resulting from derogatory words and pictures. Especially, when they are tolerated, accepted and even defended by a group.

This is some of what misogynistic language and imagery in games does:
– psychological harm: women get marginalized, humiliated and devalued by social peers.

– trivialization of sensitive issues: Issues like gender inequality, rape and domestic violence become elements of entertainment and slip into the realm of acceptable defaults. This makes it harder for the conversation about those issues in real life to be clear and productive. This is especially dangerous with issues like rape and domestic violence for example, where there are already tons of social barriers, misunderstandings and prejudices, keeping victims from pressing charges.

– save haven for real haters: Truly committed women haters have an environment for their hate speech, in which they rarely get challenged and sometimes even get defended.

– encouragement of abuse: Men willing to physically dominate and abuse women get positive reinforcement of their values.

– damage to culture image: The games community displays itself currently as a misogynistic group of people. This makes it harder for games to be accepted as meaningful hobby, valuable field of work or form of art.

– exclusion of 50% of the worlds population: Misogyny and even just strongly male-centered content is alienating for female audiences, making games less attractive for women, hindering industry growth and development.

– institutional discrimination: When a group with identifiable values becomes big enough, the market responses and institutions start offering goods and services tailored to the identified values. Misogyny becomes a business strategy and developers, publishers, print media and sites embrace it to increase revenue.

The thing is, words and pictures are neither sent nor received in a vacuum. YOur words have consequences.

Own up or change.

3. Some of my best friends are women.

Getting oral from identical twins, who are even wearing the same school uniform (power fantasy). Duke still has more attenion for a video game then for the two women.

What is argued:

I don’t have anything against women. I like women and nothing I do is meant to disrespect them. So stop calling me out for being misogynistic.

Reply:
Saying a gamer is misogynistic because of his behavior and saying one needs to be misogynistic to like how women are used in games is an assertion. Granted. Therefore it is a poor criticism argument. Granted. But here are the 2 buts:

But 1. The negative consequences listed under paragraph 2 are occurring as a result of your gendered language and your preferences towards misogynistic media as a consumer… not as a result of your inner feelings. You believing that you respect women does not offset the negative effects of you not treating women respectfully.

But 2. Once you are pointed towards the negative effects of your behavior (a simple “that’s insulting to me” should suffice), you need to adjust your behavior. Or you need to own up to the fact, that you value the way video games and language between gamers currently are higher than the social well being of women and higher than the social health of games as a culture.

Either way, saying you don’t meant to do harm, but deciding to continue to do so, do not go together.

Own up or change.

4. It’s Freedom of Speech! So shut up!

Completely unnecessary display of abused, bound and gagged Harley Quinn (who lives in an abusive relationship with Joker). The player can decide to gag her again. Just for fun.

What is argued:

Stop complaining. I have the right to say whatever I want. You just can’t handle the freedom of speech.

Reply:
Using this argument is completely missing the point of the discussion, missing the point of “the freedom of speech” and involuntarily self-ironic.

First of all, nobody is prohibiting you from speaking. When someone tries to force you to stay silent about an issue, either by physical force, blackmail or lawsuit… we can talk rights. As long as somebody is just criticizing how you exercise your free speech, rights are no issue.

Second of all, the first amendment of the US Bill Of Rights, where “freedom of speech” is defined, guarantees only that the government will not create laws that prohibit you from speaking freely. There is nothing about “You have the right to say what you like and everybody has to be cool with that.” in this document or anything similar.

And third of all, telling somebody to shut up because there is freedom of speech is completely self-defeating. Whoever is criticizing you is just exercising his or her own freedom of speech.

It comes down to “rights” does not mean “right”. The Constitution guarantees you the right to be mean, derogatory and misogynistic, if you wish. That does not make it okay.

Own up or change.

5. I don’t like to be told, what to do.

What is argued:

Do not tell me what to do. I do not tell you what to do either.

Reply:
Social groups have rules. They have laws, conventions, etiquette and courtesy. You probably wait in line at a cashier, you pay for stuff you want to have, you say “thanks” and “your welcome” occasionally, you don’t verbally insult your boss… you do all those and similar things to socialize, to foster relationships and to simply be treated with courtesy in return. (Assuming you are no misanthrope.)

In that regard, it is already sad enough that one has to tell you that you need to change your behavior towards women in games. But then also rejecting that demand clearly articulates that you do not see women worthy of your courtesy, which is misogyny.

Own up or change.

6. C’mon. It’s just how video games are.

Very early Donkey Kong arcade flyers and recent Mario 3DS promo art. Nintendo like girls “to get stolen” in their story lines.

What is argued:

Video games have always been like that. Video games are stupid and silly. So why bother?

Reply:

No they have not always been like that. Before video games became a popular medium, in the early 80s, they where a playground for programmers and computer geeks. Around 1984, when the first movie licensed games and the arcades came up and games became part of popculture, suddenly marketers jumped on the one dominant demographic… men and boys.

There is nothing intrinsic about the medium itself, that makes it misogynistic. The culture is like that because people make it so. Because companies market to male audiences and male gamers behave like they own the place. For decades.

Own up or change.

7. Sexism goes both ways. But do we complain?

What is argued:

Men are as much stereotyped as women. They get to be the violent musclebound guy with the big guns. But do you see us be up in arms about that? No we relax and enjoy games for what they are.

Reply:
Yes, men and women both get stereotyped in games. But there is 2 very important differences here.

First, muscles and guns represent power. When men get stereotyped they get stereotyped as the powerful dominant force. While when women get stereotyped, they end up as the damsel in distress, helpless, weak, sexually available, submissive.

Also the stereotypes for men and women play into the real world ideas of the patriarchy, we are living in. Elevating the men as the powerful deciding group and degrading women to something men need to handle. Video game stereotypes of men and women are reenforcing real life misogyny.

Stereotyping in and out of itself value free. Positive or negative depends on the preconceptions that get represented by a stereotype. So, yes, there are gendered tropes for male characters also, but the women definitely get the short end of the stick here.

Own up or change.

8. You sound like a broken record.

What is argued:

Yeah, we know, alright. You are not getting support, when you are so damn persistent. Give it a break.

Reply:
This is as if you are telling the doctor not to tell you that you are sick. The diagnosis is not the problem… the problem is the problem. Sticking your fingers in your ears does not solve anything.

If you really are annoyed about the repeated criticism, you do not need to read the article or watch the video. As simple as that. There is no need to ask someone to cut it out, except if you want that person to stop expressing his or her views in general. Do not disguise your attempt at silencing a person with dishonest strategic advice, as if you share the expressed views and just want to help.

Own up or change.

9. You discriminate against men.

Questionably defined as a feminist icon. Samus rewarded players in her first appearance on the NES by revealing more skin, depending on how fast the player was in completing the game.

What is argued:

You hate men! You want men to look bad. You want to take our rights away and/or punish us.

Reply:
Yes, there needs to be privileges taken away for men to make room for more consideration for women. It’s called affirmative action not discrimination and it is necessary to help an oppressed group get the footing they need to break free from that oppression.

There is no need to insert anger, revenge, grudge, envy towards men here. Feminism is not about punishing males. It is about empowering females.

Currently, heterosexual men have almost all the seats at the gaming table and some of those seeds need to be cleared, if women are to sit there as well. There is just no way around it. If you care about women in games, you will have to sacrifice a big chunk of male centered stories in favor of allowing female centered stories and IPs for example. Men are not the victim here.

Own up or change.

10. Can’t we have a little fun?

What is argued:

We like sexy women naked in our games. We like sex in our games. We like violence in our games. You want to make all this go away. That’s not okay. That’s censorship!

Reply:
There is a room in misogyny in games as in any other popculture medium. Those rooms are called genres. There is porn, torture porn, horror, schlock, trash, exploitation. Tropes from these film genres are the default tropes for many video games. Your demand will fuel a market. You will get your stuff.

There is even a place for real life domination and violence against women. With a proper basis of trust and clear rules, there is the kink scene, where people consent to tie each other up, inflict pain, sometimes even tissue damage. All in the name of excitement, escapism, katarsis and fun. Also contact sports, where consenting adults engage in regulated fights.

Misogyny should not be a default. When there is proper labeling, every desire can be fair game, when only involving consenting adults. Your fear is not, that you wont get what you want any longer. You fear, that your preferences in games will become the same niche interest like they are in other media.

Own up or change.

11. It totally makes sense in the story of the game.

Naked women in sex poses and high heels, getting raped and forcibly impregnated by alien creatures. Duke Nukem Forever. Duke’s comment “You’re fucked!”

What is argued:

Nobody enjoys seeing women getting hurt or degraded. Displays that might seem misogynistic are added into games because they bring the story forward and enhance it. They need to be there. It makes total sense.

Reply:
Whatever story situation or context needs a display of a woman being objectified, sexualized, hurt or otherwise devalued, is created by the writers. Writers write stories and whatever happens in that story is prepared and embedded there by a writer.

Even with historic scenarios, where certain events are already defined, the writer can decide what to show, how long, how often and if he wants to add something to offset potentially questionable scenes.So, any scene that contains misogynistic messages is there, because someone wanted it to be there. There is always an alternative to misogyny in storytelling. Always.

Own up or change.

12. Aren’t you used to it by now?

What is argued:

Why do you even bother? You know that you get hate mail and stupid comments. It is how it is.

Reply:
Most people actively dealing with misogyny are in fact used to too much of backlash and too little progress. But progress is there.
Questioning if the effort and backlash are worth the progress shows how little empathy you have with women and how hard it is for you to put yourself into their shoes. Misogyny is not an inconvenience.

Misogyny is a blocking force for women and girls in their own personal development and a driving force for oppression and abuse towards women and girls. It must be fought and it needs to end. You are in the privileged position of not having to fight against misogyny. You just need to change a few habits.

Own up or change.

13. Shut up and make me a sandwich!

What is argued:

Kitchen. Mouth. Penis. Sandwich. Ovaries. Time of the month.

Reply:

Sigh… go away. Thanks.

14. Vandalism and attacks.

What is argued:

This space is intentionally left blank.

Reply:

You probably belong into jail.

So, I hope this helps dealing with some of the stupidest apologies and those, which are just prone for misunderstandings on both sides.

Have you backed Sarkeesian’s kickstarter project yet?

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The PA Report - Banning E3 booth babes isn’t good manners, it’s good business

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Photo Credit / Dabe Alan

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Banning E3 booth babes isn’t good manners, it’s good business

Ben Kuchera / Wed, Jun 13, 2012

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The first thing I saw at E3 this year was a group of scantily clad ladies giving out energy drinks in front of the Los Angeles convention center. There was another group of female models posing for pictures upon entering the building, and to the right was another pod of “booth babes” giving away T-shirts. Going up the escalators I was greeted by yet another leather-clad group of women pitching a war game. The amount of female flesh on display before you even enter the show floor was impressive, and impossible to miss.

The message it sends is clear: This is a show for men, with advertising, promotions, and booth design aimed at grabbing male eyes. In a time when console makers and major publishers are struggling to connect products with gamers, this is a dangerously short sighted marketing strategy. The issue of booth babes isn’t about being sensitive, it’s about selling to the actual video game market, and not the perceived reality of an all male audience. Video games are a diverse art form, and it’s time for our most important show to reflect that truth.

Why this is a problem

The Entertainment Software Association’s own data shows how large the female audience has become. “Forty-seven percent of all players are women, and women over 18 years of age are one of the industry’s fastest growing demographics,” the group’s 2012 report stated. “Today, adult women represent a greater portion of the game-playing population (30 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (18 percent).” Of course, you wouldn’t know this from walking the show floor at E3.

The ESA is, unsurprisingly, unwilling to give more than a standard response to the issue of promotional models. “Exhibitors determine for themselves what is the best representation for their companies,” Dan Hewitt, Vice President of Media Relations and Event Management, Entertainment Software Association, told me. “Models are welcome if companies would like to have them, but that’s an individual exhibitor decision.”

The problem is that booth babes have become a pervasive part of the show, and that’s an issue for an industry that hopes to attract a mainstream audience. “E3 and other trade shows featuring half-naked booth babes, who know nothing about the games they’re promoting, do a disservice to the entire industry,” Tami Baribeau, the Editor in Chief of The Border House, told the Penny Arcade Report. “They reinforce the fact that games are marketed and predominantly designed for a demographic that excludes us. With every direction we look, from box cover art, to character design, to professional trade shows, to narrative, to costumes and equipment, to the game industry’s wage gap, it becomes more and more clear that we’re not ‘supposed’ to be enjoying games and they’re not for us.”

It’s not a question of whether this approach is alienating for the many women in the industry, it’s a question of how much damage is being done. “I dread heading off to work at E3 today, the show is a constant assault on the female self esteem no matter which direction I look,” game designer Brenda Garno Brathwaite said on Twitter. “I feel uncomfortable. It’s as if I walked into a strip club without intending to.” She’s not alone, other women I spoke to at the show, whether they be press or industry professionals, complained about the pro-male environment and reliance on sex appeal to sell products. The problem goes even deeper: Women who speak up about the male-centered marketing focus of the show became targets for hateful language and verbal attacks via social media. Critic Anita Sarkeesian, who is working on a video series dealing with the representation of women in video games, has been threatened with both beatings and rape. The message may be implicit when it comes from the industry, but it’s explicit when it comes from many gamers: Women aren’t welcome, and they need to shut up about it.

The trick is to create booths and displays that appeal to both men and women. Why not go after the largest possible audience, and make sure female reporters and industry professionals feel comfortable learning about your brand and game?

Leaving the blatant sexism that comes from both the publishers of games and many of the people who play them, this is simply bad business. “So it turns out if you want to find out what the future looks like, you should be asking women,” Intel researcher Genevieve Bell stated in a recent presentation about women’s role in the adoption of new technology. “And just before you think that means you should be asking 18-year-old women, it actually turns out the majority of technology users are women in their 40s, 50s and 60s. So if you wanted to know what the future looks like, those turn out to be the heaviest users of the most successful and most popular technologies on the planet as we speak.”

There is very real money to be made marketing technology to women, or at the very least creating an environment where women feel like they can be part of the discussion. Consider that the high level of consumer adoption of technology by women happens despite the fact that trade show are usually designed by men for an aggressively male audience. In fact, E3 isn’t the only show to struggle with the changing reality of the market. CES has long pandered to a male audience, despite the huge female market for emerging technologies. “It’s confusing, because it’s sending this message of what my sex is here to do, and obviously I don’t feel that way, because I’d rather be learning about the products,” Molly McHugh, a technology writer for Digital Trends, stated in a piece about booth babes at the show.

The use of models at trade shows is rapidly becoming an anachronism, but the culture of marketing only to a male audience has proven hard to shake. “Booth babes emerged back in the 1950′s, when they were probably the only women on the convention floor, but this is no longer the case.  Booth babes alienate and offend female conference attendees. Not to mention that many booth babes promote companies that have female employees standing in the booth, just a few feet away,” marketing manager Rikki Rogers wrote in a blog post on the subject. “Professional, successful employees with all of their clothes on. Booth babes send a message to your female colleagues that women ought to look pretty and alluring, not educated, ambitious, or—gasp!–actually capable of selling a product based on its virtues alone.”

CEA President Gary Shapiro tried to sweep the problem under the table, in probably the most condescending way possible during an interview with the BBC. “Sometimes it is a little old school, but it does work,” he said about the use of booth babes are the show. “People want to go towards what they consider pretty. So your effort to try to get a story based on booth babes, which is decreasing rather rapidly in the industry… it’s cute, but it’s frankly irrelevant in my view.” 

Let’s be frank, Gary Shapiro is full of shit, and the Entertainment Software Association’s statement above isn’t much better. The ESA is a trade group tasked with keeping the video game industry healthy and growing. By not taking a stand on this issue, the ESA is helping to promote the idea that gaming is something that is for young men, and that attitude stunts the growth of gaming as a whole.

“Games should speak for themselves—they have rich stories, bleeding edge graphics, impactful sounds and music, and exciting presentation,” Baribeau said. “I’m embarrassed to work in the game industry when I see the media coverage of E3; it looks like a giant spectacle more akin to a strip club than a celebration of an interactive form of entertainment. I imagine a film festival and think about how they exist to appreciate the art form of movies, not strip their leading ladies down to their underwear to prance around advertising the movies.”

How to market based on your product, and not sex

Booth babes may get the attention of the crowd, but this happens at the possible expense of attracting a larger, wider audience to that game or product. I spoke with Stephanie Schopp, a PR executive who is a veteran of video game trade and consumer shows. She admits that pretty models will get people to pick up promotional materials, but it could be much more advisable to feature models of both genders promoting the game itself.

“It should be related to your brand,” she said, although she did point out that many female characters on the cover of games are scantily clad. In her experience, sex works on some levels but there are better, more effective ways to get the attention of the crowd. “If you had, for example, an Assassin’s Creed character in your booth, I think he’d get as much attention, or photographs, as females.” The trick is to create an outfit or costume that is related to the brand, and gives people something to get excited about. “There will always be people taking pictures with the pretty women, but if you had a man in a badass outfit you’ll see the same reaction,” she explained. “You see that more at Comic Con, the male characters, such as the Thors, Hulks, and the Batmans. When the guys do it well, they get a crowd. I’ve seen guys not being able to walk the floor at Comic Con.”

Using male and female models dressed up like the characters in the game promotes the brand better than simply using sex appeal, and that approach is fun and inviting for both male and female press and industry professionals. It will make your booth more approachable and welcoming for a wider demographic, which is good business.

There was a Family Guy display near one of the halls at E3, proudly brought to you by IGN, where the presenter barked sexual comments at women as they passed by. It’s just another way the industry tries to send a message that any woman at the show is there because of her body or looks, not because she likes video games. There are hundreds of wonderful games by creative people, aimed at every demographic, that are shown inside the show, and it’s time to stop pretending E3 is a club house for pubescent boys. Gaming is an inviting art form, and it deserves a show that makes all gamers feel welcome and valued.

penny-arcade.com

The psychology of... Avatars - Edge Magazine

edge-online.com

Our appearance changes every day. When we get up each morning, we decide what clothes and jewellery to wear, which hairs to shave and which to style. All of this varies by occasion, and some of us make more radical alterations as well, such as getting tattoos, piercings or cosmetic surgery. In real life, though, we’re often limited in the changes we can make to appear taller, say, or more prosperous. Videogames and virtual realities, on the other hand, are more flexible. They can let us be a hulking brute, a sultry minx or a fleet-footed athlete. We might even choose to be a different species altogether. Or we can just be ourselves, but with flawless skin or huge pectoral muscles.

Researchers have been studying the reactions to our real appearance in others for a long time, but they’ve also started to seriously study the psychology of our avatars. At first they used models of human behaviour relevant to appearances in real space, but have gradually built up new concepts to understand how people behave when they adopt different types of in-game form. It’s a topic that interests academics in fields as diverse as psychology, political science, communications, sociology and marketing because of its ever-growing potential to impact lives. So why do we choose the avatars that we do? How do different avatars change our behavior in games? And how does the experience affect us when we select ‘quit game’ and re-enter the real world?

Explaining why we adopt some the avatars we do is easy: it’s down to the demands of the game. We decide to look like an elf because we want to max out our mage build, for example. But what about virtual playgrounds where we have options that aren’t constrained by the game’s mechanics? An emerging line of research says that when the choice is ours, it’s often about building a better version of ourselves.

“Studies have shown that, in general, people create slightly idealised avatars based on their actual selves,” says Nick Yee, a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center. He should know: Yee has spent the past ten years studying the effects of avatars on human behavior in settings such as Second Life and World Of Warcraft. “But a compensation effect has been observed. People with a higher body mass index – likely overweight or obese – create more physically idealised avatars, [which are] taller or thinner. And people who are depressed or have low self-esteem create avatars with more idealised traits, [such as being] more gregarious and conscientious.”

Palo Alto Research Center research scientist Nick Yee and Boston College assistant professor Seung-A Jin

Other researchers have found that the ability to create idealised versions of ourselves is strongly connected to how much we enjoy the game, how immersed we become, and how much we identify with the avatar. Assistant professor Seung-A ‘Annie’ Jin, who works at Boston College’s Communication Department, did a series of experiments with Nintendo Miis and Wii Fit. She found that players who were able to create a Mii that was approximately their ideal body shape generally felt more connected to that avatar and also felt more capable of changing their virtual self’s behavior – a fancy way of saying that the game felt more interactive and immersive. This link was strongest, in fact, when there was a big discrepancy between participants’ perceptions of their ideal and actual selves.

“I would definitely recommend that developers allow players to design and don whatever kinds of avatars they like,” states Jim Blascovich, a professor of psychology at the University Of California in Santa Barbara, and co-author of the book Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, And The Dawn Of The Virtual Revolution. Doing so tends to make the game more appealing and lets us connect more with our avatar and the world he or she inhabits. But what then? Once we’ve adopted an avatar, how does its appearance affect how we play games and interact with other players?

This research has its roots in what’s called self-perception theory, a watershed concept in social psychology pioneered by physicist-turned-psychologist Daryl Bem in the 1960s. Essentially, the theory says that we observe ourselves and use that information to make inferences about our attitudes or moods, as opposed to assuming our attitudes affect our behaviours. For example, someone who hurls themselves out of an aeroplane with a parachute might think, ‘I’m skydiving, so I’m the kind of person who seeks out thrills.’

In one clever study of this theory by Fritz Strack and his colleagues, subjects were given a ballpoint pen and told to hold it in their mouth in one of two ways. Some were asked to use pursed lips and others were told to hold it between their front teeth, with their lips drawn up and back. The former approach tricked the subjects into frowning, while the latter got them to smile. When asked to rate the amusement value of a cartoon, those who were being made to smile thought it was far funnier than those who were forced to frown. Their appearance was affecting their mood.

This kind of ‘first behavior, then attitude’ effect has been widely replicated in other studies. In one, researchers hooked male participants up to a monitor that beeped in time with their heart rates while they perused centrefolds from Playboy magazine. When the researchers used their control over the machine to fake an accelerated heartbeat, subjects decided that they must have a thing for the particular model they were viewing.

So first we perceive what we look like or what we’re doing, and then we draw conclusions about our attitudes and identity. And it turns out that we may continue to act in line with that presumed identity. In fact, Yee started his career by taking the precepts of social identity theory and using them to understand how people behave depending on the virtual avatars they assume. In one of his earliest experiments, Yee had subjects don a head-mounted display that let them perceive and move around in a simple virtual environment. There was just a virtual room, another person controlled by someone else, and a virtual mirror. The mirror was important, because it obviously wasn’t a real mirror and the researcher could use it to show whatever ‘reflection’ of the subjects’ avatars he wanted. In fact, Yee randomly showed subjects one of three types of avatar reflection: ugly, normal and attractive.

6

edge-online.com

IT ALL BEGAN WITH A STRANGE EMAIL - Valve

blogs.valvesoftware.com

It was late at night in October of last year when the strange email arrived. In fact, I only read it by accident and did not delete it by some miracle of fate.

Before the Euro Crisis erupted in 2009, I was just another economics professor, minding my own little theoretical endeavours, writing obscure papers and esoteric books that only a few hundred nutcases around the world (like myself) would ever read, terribly satisfied in my very own academic cocoon. Back then, I would never even imagine not answering an incoming email.

And then, all of a sudden, as if by the wave of some vengeful wizard’s wand, the tranquility was shattered and I found myself in the midst of an acrimonious Europe-wide debate watched over by millions. (If interested, you may take a look at the blog I have dedicated to these debates here.) It is what, I suppose, happens every seventy years or so when a major economic collapse turns us economists from creatures to be avoided at all cost (especially on TV or around the dinner table) into minor celebrities whose words are eagerly followed by a despairing public. Why me? For two reasons I think. First, because I am Greek and Greece was the canary in the mine (whose death warned the rest of Europe of the impending ‘gas explosion’). Secondly because I am a rather unconventional Greek whose line of argument on the BBC, CNN etc. raised eyebrows – for reasons I shall not bother you with here. Anyhow, my life was transformed overnight.

A side effect of this ‘transformation’ was that my inbox became impenetrable to the human eye, receiving as I did thousands of unsolicited non-spam messages from people with a wide range of fixations – from sharing their world view, to seeking advice on what to do with their investment in some pig farm in the north of Greece, to offering me a share in some far-fetched business venture.

When I read the opening line of the email in question, my finger almost pushed the delete button:

“I’m the president of a videogame company (www.valvesoftware.com).”

I thought to myself: Oh, not another “business proposal” from a crackpot… However, something in my head stopped my finger from pressing DEL while my eyes pondered the next line:

“We are running into a bunch of problems as we scale up our virtual economies, and as we link economies together. Would you be interested in consulting with us?”

I was intrigued. The finger retreated from the keyboard’s right hand side and I read on:

“I have been following your blog for a while… Here at my company we were discussing an issue of linking economies in two virtual environments (creating a shared currency), and wrestling with some of the thornier problems of balance of payments, when it occurred to me “this is Germany and Greece”, a thought that wouldn’t have occurred to me without having followed your blog. Rather than continuing to run an emulator of you in my head, I thought I’d check to see if we couldn’t get the real you interested in what we are doing.”

At that point, I was more than intrigued. I was interested! While the signature did not ring a bell (it read “Gabe Newell, Valve, Seattle, WA USA”), and while I was as ignorant of the world of computer games as one can be (yes, I confess, horror of horrors, that I am not a gamer), the notion that a computer game company has surreptitiously and quite spontaneously created virtual economies that it comprehends as ‘economies’ (which deserve study and regulation) was enough to write back instantly: Yes, I was interested!

By a stroke of serendipity, a few days later, my wife and I were due to embark on a lecture tour of North America, promoting a recent book on the global crisis of 2008. A two-day visit to Seattle was added to the last part of our itinerary. So, after an arduous, albeit satisfying, series of lectures (in various US and Canadian Universities, at the New York Federal Reserve, at Bloomberg etc.), the Valve visit was going to be a two-day relaxing break from normal activities during which to see what these weird computer gamers were up to.

Face to face

Upon arrival in Seattle, Mikael, the driver who picked us up on Valve’s behalf, asked me: “Here for an interview, Sir?” I answered that, no, of course not; that I was just visiting Valve for a couple of days. Little did I know! Upon entering Valve, I was met by a group of mainly young persons, gathered together in a meeting room, presided over by Gabe who took no time before asking everyone to introduce themselves and to explain what they did. Jetlagged and sleepless, and confronted by a wall of information about things that I had no prior experience of (indeed, the last time I had played a computer game was Space Invaders at University in the mists of 1981 or so!), I struggled to keep up. Soon, however, I realised that this bunch of people were not just weird but also wonderful and, to boot, that what they were describing, the digital community they had facilitated into existence, was an economist’s dream-come-true. Think of it: An economy where every action leaves a digital trail, every transaction is recorded; indeed, an economy where we do not need statistics since we have all the data!

Escaping ‘computerised astrology’ – Valve’s allure

For the first time since I switched from mathematical statistics to economics (around 1982), I saw an opportunity for scientific research on some really existing (albeit digital) economy. For let’s face it: Econometrics is a travesty! While its heavy reliance on statistics often confuses us into believing that it is a form of applied statistics, in reality it resembles computerised astrology: a form of hocus pocus that seeks to improve its image by incorporating proper science’s methods, displays and processes. Is this not too harsh a judgment on econometrics?

Not in the slightest. Econometrics purports to test economic theories by statistical means. And yet what it ends up testing is whether some ‘reduced form’, an equation (or system of equations), that is consistent with one’s theory, is also consistent with the data. The problem of course is that the ‘reduced form’ under test can be shown to be consistent with an infinity of competing theories. Thus, econometrics can only pretend to discriminate between mutually contradictory theories. All it does is to discover empirical regularities lacking any causal meaning. To put it bluntly, it is impossible to avoid absurd conclusions such as “Christmas is explained by a prior increase in the demand for toys”. And when we do (avoid them), it is only by accident (or because of a good hunch), as opposed to scientific rigour.

And the reason for this unavoidable failure? None other than our inability to run experiments on a macroeconomy such as rewinding time to, say, 1932, in order to see whether the US would have rebounded without the New Deal (or to 2009 to see what would have happened to the US economy without Ben Bernanke’s Quantitative Easing). Even at the level of the microeconomy, keeping faith with the ceteris paribus assumption (i.e. keeping all other things equal in order to measure, e.g., the relationship between the price of and the demand for milk) is impossible (as opposed to just hard).

In sharp contrast to our incapacity to perform truly scientific tests in ‘normal’ economic settings, Valve’s digital economies are a marvelous test-bed for meaningful experimentation. Not only do we have a full-information set (making sampling superfluous) but, more importantly, we can change the economy’s underlying values, rules and settings, and then sit back to observe how the community responds, how relative prices change, the new behavioural patterns that evolve. An economist’s paradise indeed…

Great expectations?

This is how my relationship with Valve began. While a total ignoramus of the world of video games (as per my confession above), the people at Valve and I discerned a double coincidence of interests. My academic curiosity blended nicely into Valve’s burning desire to serve its gaming community better, through the development of services that are in tune with the community’s needs as gamers but also as traders, developers, participants in something much bigger than just video games.

By studying Valve’s economy, we would have an opportunity to enhance the experience of its customers, in addition to sharpening my own thinking about what makes real economies tick. And as if all this were not enough, there was another incentive thrown into the mix: the opportunity to understand better the remarkable social organisation of production within Valve itself. (But more on this in another post…)

Within hours, an agreement was reached: I would become, in some capacity (that was to be hammered out later), Valve’s economist-in-residence. Valve is not the first video game company to have brought an academic economist on board (e.g. EVE Online were the first to do so, recruiting Eyjólfur Guðmundsson – whom I would like to thank for making my name sound almost easy-going…). My intention at Valve, beyond performing a great deal of data mining, experimentation, and calibration of services provided to customers on the basis of such empirical findings, is to to go one step beyond; to forge narratives and empirical knowledge that (a) transcend the border separating the ‘real’ from the digital economies, and (b) bring together lessons from the political economy of our gamers’ economies and from studying Valve’s very special (and fascinating) internal management structure.

Starting from today, I shall be committing to this blog weekly reports on our projects, experiences and ideas regarding Valve’s various social ‘economies’.

Welcome to VALVE Economics

blogs.valvesoftware.com

Tetris: can a Cold War classic evolve for the touchscreen?

theverge.com

The game couldn’t be simpler. One of seven shapes falls from the sky. As the “Tetrimino” inches down the screen, the player rotates it and moves it into place among other similar objects. Build a horizontal line across the board and the entire thing vanishes. Create four lines at once, and they all disappear as the gamer earns massive points. Rotate, drop, explode. Rinse, wash, repeat. Again. And again. And again. A simple and repetitive task, but one that’s beautiful when performed correctly.

Tetris, created in the mid-1980s by a Russian computer engineer and marketed to the world with the help of an affable Netherlands-born, New York-bred, Hawaii-based video game designer, is arguably the most recognizable computer game on the planet. Hundreds of millions of copies exist on every platform from ancient PCs and NES consoles to smartphones and Facebook. Tetris can be played in 50 languages and 185 countries, spanning roughly 95% of the world.

Sticky TOC engaged! Do not remove this!

More than 100 million people paid to download the game on their mobile phones. The game can help eliminate traumatic memories. A cadre of elite “professional” players conjure on-screen magic the casual gamer can barely comprehend. Tetris is expanding into a lifestyle brand, with pillows and stress blocks, lotto tickets and sleepwear. Techno Source publishes a board game called Tetris Link that the American Mensa organization gave the 2012 Mensa Select Award. Electronic Gaming Monthly called Tetris the “Greatest Video Game of All Time” in its 100th issue, while it ranked 2nd behind Super Mario Brothers in a 2007 IGN poll.

How does Tetris, designed at the tail end of the Cold War for systems with multiple button inputs, translate to a world of touchscreens and tablets?

Despite its popularity and classic status, the game finds itself at a crossroads. In a gaming landscape where downloadable content and add-ons provide vital revenue streams, how does virtually perfect Tetris generate continuous cashflow? More importantly, how does Tetris, designed at the tail end of the Cold War for systems with multiple button inputs, translate to a world of touchscreens and tablets?

A Brief History Lesson

Alexey Pajitnov did not set out to create one of the world’s most recognizable games. In fact, it’s impressive his creation made it out of the Soviet Union at all. The Moscow-born engineer developed Tetris on an Electronica 60 in 1984 while working for the Computing Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, an R&D center funded and controlled by the Communist government. In an interview with Joystiq in 2009, Pajitnov said with his thick Russian accent, “As soon as the first desktop [computer] appears, I needed to start playing with all my puzzles, riddles, and stuff.” Pajitnov drew inspiration from the Russian game “Pentominoes,” a puzzle game consisting of shapes made from five congruent squares. But there are 12 possible pentominoes, and Pajitnov realized that was too many for the fast-paced version he envisioned. The solution lay in the seven possible permutations of Tetriminoes.

Tetris was an immediate success, capturing the imagination of the Soviet Union in 1985 and jumping to North America and Europe two years later. The attraction was obvious. Tetris was different from most games at the time. “It had a broader appeal because it’s not about a cartoon character or a spaceship killing things. It was seen as slightly more mature. It felt more like chess, checkers, or backgammon,” Adam Cornelius, director of the documentary Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters that focuses on the 2010 Classic Tetris World Championship, says. “It’s very pure. And most importantly, in its classic incarnation, Tetris has an endless difficulty curve. There’s really no end to how good you can get at it, which I think is the sign of every great game.”

Pajitnov created a winner, but the Soviet government owned the rights to the game. Therefore, the creator did not see a single ruble from his initial efforts. Enter Henk Rogers. The University of Hawaii-educated, Stuyvesant High School graduate had already created The Black Onyx, Nintendo’s first turn-based RPG, by the time he saw Tetris at the 1988 Consumer Electronics Show. After falling in love with the game, he secured the rights and his company, Bullet-Proof Software, released it for PC and NES in Japan. Tetris rapidly sold more than two million copies. A year later, Rogers and Pajitnov met for the first time, bonded instantly, and began a working relationship that lasts to this day. In the early 90s, Rogers helped his colleague move to the United States where they established Blue Planet Software as the exclusive agent for the game. The rest is gaming legend. “I was just trying to help Alexey in 1993. The ex-Soviets were trying to screw him out of the rights. I said, ‘I’ll help you.’ and I’ve been helping him ever since. It did become a career, not by choice, but by circumstance,” Rogers says, happy he followed fate’s path.

As the years progressed, Tetris jumped from platform to platform. The Gameboy edition was hugely popular, followed by editions for increasingly sophisticated systems as well as graphing calculators and other simpler devices. SNES begat Gamecube, which led to PS3. The game also expanded to new categories. As of April 2011, EA — which purchased the worldwide mobile rights in 2005 — had seen Tetris bought 132 million times, making it one of the best-selling mobile games ever. For comparison, the free, ad-supported version of Angry Birds boasted 140 million downloads by August 2011.

The sustained success of such a simple game surprised almost everyone. “I’ve been at this since 1989, and everybody back then thought it was going to be a dead issue by 1995. It was anything but a dead issue by 1995. It was a huge issue by 1995. It’s gone on to become the biggest issue on mobile phones,” Rogers says. “There are a couple of ways of looking at that. One is that in its simplicity, it hits a nerve that other games don’t because they are more complicated. The other way of looking at it is that we’ve done a pretty good job keeping it alive by adding bells and whistles over the years to keep it relevant.”

One essential development occurred very early. Rogers says Pajitnov’s original game revolved around the number of Tetriminoes a user could play rather than clearing lines. The first version Rogers helped design included bonus points for clearing two, three, and four lines — known as a Tetris — at once, a change that fundamentally altered the game forever. Later editions added moves such as twists like T-Spins and L-Spins that allowed gamers to maneuver in tight spaces and earn more points for doing so. (See sidebar for other variations.)

The latest in the long line of innovations is the one-touch system. The Tetris Pajitnov invented required seven buttons: left, right, rotate left, rotate right, hard drop, soft drop, and hold. That system doesn’t translate to touchscreens, nor would it work for the mouse-based game that Blue Planet’s engineers envisioned for Facebook. So the company developed Tetris Stars for Facebook and worked with EA to create Tetris One-Touch for mobile devices ($.99 for iPhone) and tablets ($6.99 for iPad). When they were building the games, the discussion centered around how much to change the core game. The answer: as little as possible.

“There was some back and forth during the design of whether we were going to focus on multitouch to let players use two fingers to pinch or rotate. We decided not to support multitouch because that would eliminate compatibility with mouse-based games. We iterated on a number of different prototypes before we ended up with the one-touch,” Jared Eden, a Tetris Stars producer, says. “You go out and try all sorts of different things. Some are really complex, and as you’re iterating, you distill down to the most basic, pure essence of the design to something so simple. That’s where we ended up, and we’re really happy with it.”

The key to the one-touch solution is the AI. It offers the player a few choices for piece placement, and he picks one by touching or clicking the on-screen silhouette. (If the player waits too long, the Tetrimino falls straight down.) As with regular Tetris, the speed of the game increases as the player clears more lines and levels up. The AI is not perfect—a player can get a new set of choices by clicking or touching elsewhere—but it provides a new playing experience that works well on a touchscreen or Facebook.

“You have to move a block over three rows, rotate it, then drop it, and do that in a matter of seconds. You can’t do that on a touch device. It’s impossible.”

Indie gamemaker Zach Gage, who admits he’s never loved Tetris but respects the game, thinks Eden and the Blue Planet crew made a smart decision when updating the game for touchscreens. “The difficulty of Tetris is when it gets fast and you have to make these mechanical motions. You have to move a block over three rows, rotate it, then drop it, and do that in a matter of seconds. You can’t do that on a touch device. It’s impossible,” he says. “I think that’s why they were smart. They looked at it and said, ‘This is impossible. We’re going to have to change it, so let’s make the minimum number of changes that we need to make to completely change it from that mechanical aspect. We need to make people interact with it.’”

Gage’s thoughts are accurate: Tetris Stars and EA’s One-Touch are elegant solutions for the masses. (The mobile version also features Marathon mode, which plays much more like traditional Tetris and fails for the mechanical reasons Gage describes, as well as Galaxy mode, which requires player to perform challenges for coins. The rewards are similar the gamification elements on TetrisFriends.com, an online repository where players earn ranks, rewards, tokens, and stars.) The huge number of paid downloads indicate that it found a large audience. which was exactly the intention of the gamemakers. “We need to reach out to the casual gamer market that has gone the way of the casual gamer,” Rogers says. “That’s where the market is and we have to shape that market.” One-touch Tetris achieves this goal. But in attempting to attract the casual market, did Rogers and Blue Planet go too far?

On thinking for yourself

The two opinions pictured above sum up the wide variety of responses to touchscreen or click Tetris. Some love it, some hate it. Take this from a person who spent far too much time playing One-Touch Tetris on an iPhone when he should have been writing this article: It is fun and addicting, but it’s vastly different from the traditional game. The touch system is a necessary innovation, but it makes game play almost entirely speed-based. Relying on the AI to provide options is another massive difference. It does most of the thinking required. Then, you touch a spot on the screen, and the computer performs the mechanical manipulations as well. You are constantly aware of the “controls”—in this case, the touchscreen—in a way you are not on the arcade or console version. As a result, getting into the glazed eye zone where you are almost one with the game is difficult, if not impossible.

Getting into the glazed eye zone where you are almost one with the game is difficult, if not impossible

Growing up, I was a casual Tetris player, logging more than a few hours in offshoots like Dr. Mario, but wasn’t what you’d call a hardcore player. I went through three distinct phases after buying the app. The first one, which lasted the first 10 plays or so, was mostly the confusion of getting used to the controls. The touchscreen is simple to understand, but it takes a while to master. Then, I really started to enjoy playing. It was challenging without being too hard or too easy. I played pretty much constantly for a week or two. Now, I find myself somewhere in between. I still enjoy the game, but little details bother me. At higher levels, it’s almost impossible to get a new set of options if the AI doesn’t have the one you want. The speed overwhelms the touchscreen. If you’re too slow and the piece falls to the middle of the screen, it’s pretty much game over. It’s very, very hard to recover if the pieces get too high on the screen. Since the AI does so much work for you, One-Touch Tetris is repetitive in a way the console-based game isn’t. Overall, it’s fun, but I haven’t been playing nearly as much.

In engineer Eden’s mind, the game is changed, but not diminished. “It’s not that it dumbs it down. It’s a different thought process. With traditional control input where you’re discreetly managing the location, movement, and the drop, you’re using that spatial orientation. With the one-touch method, you’re choosing options that have already been decided for you. It leads to different ways of thinking and different styles of play,” he says.

All valid points. And yet, another opinion is also understandable. Alex Kerr, one of the only Grandmasters (more on that below) from the United States and a star of Ecstasy of Order, says, “Tetris Stars [and One-Touch] comes down to clicking the mouse really quickly [or touching the screen] and the game does a lot of the thinking for you in terms of how to make the piece fit. As long as you’re clicking around where you want to go, you can get the pieces down quickly. You still need to set things up—you can’t randomly do it—but it does change the possibilities a lot,”

Essentially, both Eden and Kerr argue that the game had to change, but draw different conclusions about the benefits and costs of those alterations. The opposing viewpoints result from their positions in the Tetris universe. The producer is looking toward the future with an eye on pleasing the growing casual gaming market. Kerr, who has spent thousands of hours mastering the old arcade games such as Grandmaster 2 and 3 and the NES version, takes the position of an expert. The good news is that the opinions are not mutually exclusive. The truth: There’s enough Tetris out there for everyone.

Grandmaster

Kerr played Tetris throughout his life, but seriously started around the time the game came out on Nintendo DS in 2006. The San Jose State computer programming major hones his skills in the college’s arcade. His Twitter feed is full of tweets like: “First game of TGM2+ Master today was 8:11.11 GM Green. Lost an idiotic amount of time in 900.” He loves and respects the game. (His “real quick” emailed explanation of how one reaches the rank of Grandmaster extends on for six detailed paragraphs. Basically, it requires being really, really good at Tetris.)

Tetris Grand Master 3 is brutal. Some players started to doubt the Grand Master rank even existed in the game. There are less than ten worldwide, but as of the past year we do have a couple of representatives from the United States in this camp. Again, there are various subsystems that are generally evaluating “play quickly, make tetrises,” but the game gets much faster — it’s comparable to Death mode from the previous game. If you can still perform to the same standards in spite of the speed hikes, you unlock an invisible credit roll. Now, it’s not just pass or fail — you also need to continue scoring tetrises and playing quickly throughout the ~55 second credit roll. Even still, the highest grade that can be attained through normal play is MasterM (the highest of several new oddly lettered Master level ranks in TGM3). You see, the game is keeping track of average performance using your account on the machine and, without giving you any indication of your improved performance, viciously demoting all of your “GM-worthy” performances to MasterM. Over half of your past handful of attempts must be “GM-worthy” before you assigning a Promotional Exam for the title: “Make another Grand Master performance. Now. This game.” If you fail to earn the grade this run, you’re back to wondering when you’ll be assigned another attempt. If you manage to pull everything together, then you’re truly world-class.

But more importantly, Kerr is a member of a small, passionate, and highly skilled group of Tetris aficionados who feel like they are being overlooked as Blue Planet and other licensees reach for an increasingly casual gaming audience. “If they release a new game for the handheld or mobile, a lot of people are going to buy it regardless because Tetris is an inherently interesting game. I think that’s a little bit unfortunate. Since it’s so successful, they can do whatever they want. They don’t necessarily need to listen to feedback about some things, which will hold them back in certain areas,” he says.

Kerr wants to see consistency for game aspects such as speed settings, controls behavior, and spin detection. (He does credit the companies with making some important changes to the multiplayer games on TetrisFriends.com.) There are some basic guidelines across titles, but few hard and fast rules. For the casual gamer, these inconsistencies won’t matter. For example, they likely won’t notice the “low fall speed and lack of increasing difficulty in the semi-invisible section of Tetris Friend’s Survival,” or even know what Kerr means when he expresses this frustration. A player with the grandmaster’s skill, however, will find himself playing some versions of the game for hours on end without losing. The hardcore community doesn’t ask for much. They simply desire new ways to compete that are challenging yet not endless. They don’t find these options in the newer games.

There have been a huge number of different versions of Tetris. Some were faithful adaptations. Others featured strange, sometimes terrible, sometimes brilliant, innovations. Here are some of the highlights (more here):

Hatris (1990)

Pazhitnov designed this versions that requires a player to line up five identical hats. It also spawned Hateris, a version in which an algorithm delivers the worst possible Tetrimino for that situation.

Tetris 2 (1993)

Different shapes, different shades, and this time, there’s bombs in it. That about sums this debacle up.

Tetris & Dr. Mario (1994)

The game brought the two games together into one package. Two-player mode was a hit.

3D Tetris (1996)

A failed attempt at adding another dimension. It did lead to this enthusiastic promo.

Tetrisphere (1997)

The Nintendo 64 game from H2O Entertainment Corporation took the flat board and turned it into a sphere. Players stacked pieces together in an effort to reach the center. It looks strange to say the least.

Magical Tetris Challenge (1999)

What Tetris really needed at the turn of the millennium was a story mode featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy. Or not.

The experts also hope to create some type of formal professional circuit, which requires a universalization of standards. It is a work in progress, but movement is slowly gathering steam. There are certainly reasons to think it could succeed. “Tens of thousands of players have dedicated the time to truly mastering the game on a level that the casual players doesn’t even realize exists. There’s this whole unheralded world of elite Tetris playing that I think has the same value as Scrabble tournaments, spelling bee tournaments, or crossword puzzle tournaments. In that world, games as sports, Tetris has a place,” Cornelius says.

Videos of Tetris tournaments depict a scene that is simultaneously hugely dorky and massively compelling. It is not for everyone, of course, but really, what is?

While Blue Planet is actively courting the casual gamer market with some of its newer games, they also say they are encouraging the experts to show off their skills. “We have supported the efforts of that community in sponsoring tournaments, where master players such as John Tran and Jonas Neubauer have walked away with world championship titles,” Rogers says. (Neubauer’s victory over Harry Hong is here. He’s the one wearing a football jersey.)

Tetris tournaments will not be as big as spelling bees, but they don’t have to reach that level. There’s no reason to think a small group of pros and their supporting cast couldn’t find a sustainable model. And maybe, just maybe, Tetris tournaments will gain traction with the masses. No one thought Texas Hold ‘em would sweep the nation. And millions more people have played Tetris than the previously obscure version of the card game.

Future of Tetris

Due to its remarkable success, Tetris won’t disappear. It’s too well ingrained and, to be blunt, brilliant. “At its core, it’s not just an activity. It’s something which is a pleasure center. Whereas other games you play with your friends or you play to get a high score, Tetris you just play even if there is no friends or high score involved. People play it as a Zen meditation exercise. Then, you can play it with your friends and that’s a bonus,” Rogers says.

“At its core, it’s not just an activity. It’s something which is a pleasure center.”

For Gage, the success is even simpler: “The draw of Tetris is that it has that easy curve. Even if you’re not good at Tetris, you can make a line. There’s nobody out there who fails to make a line. That makes them feel good about what they are doing,” he says. While making games, he learned that people will play and enjoy difficult games but only if the strategy is built upon an easily achievable task, for example clearing a line. (He attributes the success of his game Spelltower to his understanding of this phenomenon.)

But there is undeniably a push and pull between capturing the casual gaming audience and not alienating the experts who serve as the best ambassadors for the brand. “[The game developers] are spicing it up, but at the core, it’s really the simplicity that is the appeal. There’s a balance between adding new features and keeping something that’s not broke the same,” Cornelius says.

While One-Touch and Tetris Stars filter through the ecosystem, Blue Planet continues to move forward. According to Eden, future developments could include arcade games where each button is mapped a choice or a Kinect version where players can reach out and grab the pieces. They will continue to advance the quality of the AI, eventually offering multiple ones with each focusing on a different type of play. Rogers likens these to tennis coaches or caddies, who advocate for alternate strategies in similar situations. The one-touch future offers a slate of new input options limited only by the designers’ imagination.

But the one-touch future also means the gaming world will continue to evolve past Tetris. It is a game rooted in the technology and limitations of the 1980s and 1990s. The move to touchscreens and gesture-based systems like Kinect will take future versions of Tetris further away from the core of the game. BPS, EA, and the rest of the licensees are attempting to shoehorn something that relies on buttons into a touchscreen world. (It’s not just Tetris; think how many beloved games from the past don’t translate.) They managed to make a fun and reasonably faithful version, but the fact remains that while One-Touch Tetris shares some DNA with the original, it’s an entirely different species. New developments in technology are making the old game just that: a thing of the past that doesn’t quite fit in the future.

“I think the one-touch is really successful, but I think at some point, it’s going to be hard for them to continue. It will survive because it’s Tetris and everybody knows it. But in 30 years, people are not going to grow up playing Tetris on touch devices. They are going to grow up playing games that were designed for touch devices,” Gage says.

“And hopefully that won’t be Angry Birds, but we’ll see,” he adds, laughing.

Noah Davis (@noahedavis) got much better at Tetris than he intended while reporting and writing this story. He is still pretty bad.

Photo credit: Giuseppe Licari

theverge.com

The 'farmification' of a joystick factory

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By Regine
on June 14, 2012 1:10 PM

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Bring me home, please

Lisa Ma is interested in the fringes of society. From the ladies who are mad about cats to the communities campaigning to stop the extension of Heathrow Airport. Lisa is a designer and her role is to create platforms of engagement with these groups which are otherwise ignored by society.

One of her latest projects drove her to a joystick factory located in one of the suburbs of Shenzhen. She spent several weeks with the factory workers, sleeping in dorms, sharing their meals in the canteen, making friends.

Because most of these young factory workers come from a farming background and because joysticks might very well become obsolete soon, she proposed to the factory owners that they’d allow the joystick makers to work part-time in a nearby farm. She called the experiment Farmification - using farming to keep the factory community together when work dwindles.

Almost everything about the project intrigued me. So i asked the designer to give us more details about Farmification:

Hi LIsa! In your video you say that there are more than 230 million Chinese migrant workers? Why do you think we know so little about them? Is it because we prefer not to know about who they are and how they live? Or is it because it is difficult for an outsider to gain access to these factories?

We tend to be conscious of Chinese factory workers as a working mass. For example ABC’s “Monday morning, at the Foxconn’s recruiting centre over 3000 people have been lined up, desperate to work for Apple’s biggest supplier”, we hear about the impressive scale rather than relate to the workers as humans. When journalists write about factory salaries they are describing these workers in terms of economic values. Focusing on sensationalist extremes makes the workers difficult for us to relate to on a human scale and distances them, whereas I look into the workers’ daily lives and highlight their mundane events to make them more emotionally accessible for the viewers.

The manufacturing of our products is really a very secretive process. We are starting to grow a consciousness about material and ecological costs in the items that we use but there’s a huge part of how they are made that is still in the shade. The recent Foxconn stories have brought more attention to this but there are other examples of how the story of manufacturing affects consumption:

-In 2011, a luxury Italian furniture company called Davinci caused outrage in Chinese customers when it was exposed that their ‘imported’ products was in fact made in China. “By spending a day in the bonded zone, the furniture had changed from being classed as domestically produced” to being labelled as Italian-made.” Robert Olsen, Forbes, 1/05/2012.

-The value of a workforce demonstrates itself (sadly) in any touristic craft store, where there’s a supposed craftsman making spoons out of horn or glass-beaded bracelets for sale. The narrative process of the products becomes the main selling point.

-The village of Dafen specialises in making fake paintings. The process of faking a famous painting has actually become an tourist attraction. The point is that vendors can position their value in the craft process, even if it’s faking a famous painting. (Ironically, due to Dafen’s success, now other villages reproduce their own ‘fake Dafen fakes’.)

One possibility is that products might have a “Responsible Life-Work Balance” standard, similar to the “Free From Animal Testing” labels that we’ve become accustomed to as consumers. However, this is a very paternalist view of our connection with the manufacturing process. The goal of my research isn’t just to dictate what “good practice” should be. The stories I’ve been revealing hope to show the different threads of problems rather than a single answer that fits all. Through “Farmification”, I’m giving a design suggestion that would invite more potential alternatives by making the issue more approachable.

How did you manage to get access to a joystick factory in China? Was it a long and painful process or did it require little more than an email?

The best explanation is that “contacts of contacts” offered to me to stay in either a handbag factory or a joystick factory. I chose the joystick, largely because it was interesting as a technology on its way out.

It was a no frills package. I was literally sleeping in the dorms and eating with the workers day after day. At one point I was about to be covered in heat rashes and the factory owner, in exchange for some of the photographs, let me have his spare apartment. There were no glass in the windows and the air conditioning leaked over the bed. For a while I was sleeping with a bowl in my bed. On my third week I managed to ‘bribe’ a production manager, over a meal of duck congee, to link his broadband from the second floor window across to my window on the fifth floor, for 50rmb (£5). That was probably the best investment I’ve made.

Ethernet cable

I thought the place was pretty secure, with guard dogs everywhere, but once someone tried to force open my lock in the middle of the night. They took so long that I managed to boil a kettle of water to defend myself. It was like the Three Little Pigs. Luckily for both of us, the door held.

Sometimes I was really questioning if I was doing the right thing but it was worth it. I stayed for about 6 weeks there and after half a year, returned to them with my proposal.

Girl Dorm

What makes a joystick factory a fringe? Because surely 230 million people cannot be regarded as fringe?

Factory workers are fringe in terms of our awareness and industrial concern, not in terms of scale. There is in fact a huge amount of people in the peripherals of our vision. Joystick factory workers, specifically, are at the fringe of the innovation cycle. They are at the brink of being left out from demand for the products that they manufacture. They are an emerging group of people designed out by technology.

If I understood correctly, you proposed to the factory owners that workers would work part time at the farm. But what benefit (financial and non financial) is there for the owners of the factory to see their employees desert the building to work in the field?

I’m proposing to encourage debate for all stakeholders, workers, owners, farmers, governments and internationally consumers. Farmification benefits the owners because it increases longevity in their businesses. Farmification would help the community that the owners invested time to build to remain alive through the cycles of a product. For the workers, Farmification stabilises their community as well as deals with their issue of disconnection with their origins. Farming is less alienating than manufacturing because the producers can be directly consumed locally, whereas in factory manufacturing the producers probably can never afford their own product. In addition, factories use shift-work so that the buildings are hardly ever left empty.

In Europe, there is a similar debate of “Farmification” for people to sustain themselves with direct food security. The allotments in the United Kingdom sustained the population against social unrest in the economic depression of in 1930s. Currently there are innovative farming movements with people such as Incredible Edible working to revive farming during the recession and making an impact on British policy-makers.

Mini shrine where workers burn fake money to their ancestors

Factory dormitory units

Watching tv in the street

Family picnic

What is going on at the farm nowadays? Are people still working there?

The factory is sadly downsizing and the farm is a strawberry field right now. I’m not sure if anyone will appreciate the irony of Strawberry Fields Forever.

Image: 鸡爪图片 noiawin

Did you find the answer to that question you’re asking in the video “who’s making all the food now”?

China’s importing huge amounts of food internationally. For example, the chicken feet, which are Chinese delicatessens are being imported out of American chicken factories as waste products. This is a nice story of recycling but depending so heavily on importation is not sustainable for the largest population in the world. China’s importing grain in record numbers. There is a 500% increase since last year and it’s having a huge impact on the price of food for the global community.

And finally can you tell us a few words about the other fringes you’ve been exploring since the Farmification project or the fringes that you are planning to explore in the coming months?

Building up from a previous project, Heathrow Heritage, about a local airport community and it’s activists, I explored similar possibilities in the airport of Shenzhen. A large proportion of Chinese airspace is militarized and passengers complain of the long delays, often abusing airport staff without giving the problem any further thought. I’m taking stranded passengers out of Shenzhen airport and into the snack streets of the slums surrounding the airport, where the staff live.

Lunch break around Shenzhen airport

I’m also starting a collaboration with mindfulness coaches Headspace to break the stereotypes of the meditation community.

Finally, I’m finishing off workshops I hosted on The Future of Sex Education in a Beijing Love Hotel. This project investigates what a sexually active generation, that’s never had its own sex education, demand of the future generation. As one of the participants in the workshop puts it: “girls learn from their boyfriends and the boys learn from porn”. The collaborators and I had to get through every loophole possible, for example, the anti-nudity technology was so crude that Garfield the cartoon cat was banned because of its tanned body. How do these people evolve their own fantasies when their first points of reference are from Western pornography downloaded from illegal cafes?

Thanks Lisa!

Previously: Heathrow Heritage.
Related: Err (or the creativity of the factory worker), a conversation with Jeremy Hutchison.

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tevis thompson

tevisthompson.com

Saving Zelda

Late in the original Zelda’s second quest, I got stuck.  I couldn’t find the relocated and very well-hidden eighth dungeon.  Then one night I had a dream in which I took a map of Hyrule and drew large circles around the other seven dungeons.  Somehow I had figured that dungeons were probably not right beside each other, and so by sectioning off portions of the map, I could better find the missing dungeon in the blank areas.  I woke up, drew the circles, found the dungeon.  Zelda possessed me, and in those pre-internet, pre-FAQ days, my mind worked on it even while I slept.

I still dream about videogames.  Sometimes Mario, sometimes the latest Civilization, sometimes nightmares brought on by Demon’s Souls.  But I don’t dream about Zelda anymore.

I’m a Zelda fan.  The original captured my imagination in 1987 and hasn’t quite let go.  I convinced my mother that Zelda II was so vital to my 11-year-old soul that she called, from Kentucky, a store in Canada to secure a copy.  (This proved unnecessary, and that French version of the Adventure of Link ended up going to my cousin, Bear.)  I’ve played every console Zelda through Skyward Sword, and I’ve even written fiction that takes Zelda (and Mario and Metroid) pretty seriously.

I’m still a Zelda fan today, but I’m not an apologist.  Zelda sucks, and it has sucked for a long time.  It’s not the greatest series in gaming, and Ocarina of Time is certainly not the greatest game of all time (it’s not even a great Zelda).  The original Legend of Zelda is the greatest Zelda, Skyward Sword is the worst, and the trajectory is mostly downhill with a few exceptions (the bold horror of Majora’s Mask, the focused charm of Wind Waker).

But merely comparing Zeldas is of limited value.  Sure, Zelda seems to occupy its own little pocket universe, but this doesn’t exempt it from comparison to its contemporaries.  Game reviewers with expertise in a series seem particularly prone to these sorts of provincial arguments: Skyrim is a much-improved Oblivion!  This does not mean it’s a good game. Skyward Sword being a fully actualized Wii Zelda doesn’t matter if Zelda itself is just a pleasant anachronism or, worse, fundamentally broken.

That is what I’m claiming: that modern Zeldas are broken at their core.  By modern I mean the console Zeldas Ocarina forward (though Link to the Past is not innocent), and by core I mean their central structure and mechanics.  I’m not going to harp on peripheral issues, though there are many that deserve mention.  I’m not concerned with graphics, even if Wind Waker’s still-amazing style nearly saves it or Skyward Sword’s compromise between the painterly and the realistic is just that – a compromise, where nobody wins.  I don’t think a modern game requires voice acting, although slow, repetitive dialogue boxes remain serious irritants.

I’m going to talk about the core of Zelda, its world, gameplay, difficulty, and story.  Consider it an open letter to Nintendo, or at least my plea to the goddess.  I want Zelda to be saved.

Everything That Is the Case

Why are there so many complaints about the initial thrill and then disappointment of Ocarina’s Hyrule field or Wind Waker’s ocean?  Even the Lanayru desert in Skyward Sword offers a similar unfulfilled promise.  The promise being: a world, vast, spread out before you, ripe for exploration, free.  But when was the last time Zelda truly offered this?  When the game plopped you in an open field and said: here is a world – have at it.

Modern Zeldas do not offer worlds.  They offer elaborate contraptions reskinned with a nature theme, a giant nest of interconnected locks.  A lock is not only something opened with a silver key.  A grapple point is a lock; a hookshot is the key.  A cracked rock wall is a lock; a bomb is the key.  That wondrous array of items you collect is little more than a building manager’s jangly keyring.

Almost everything in Zelda has a discrete purpose, a tedious teleology.  When it all snaps into place, some call this good design.  I call it brittle, overdetermined, pale.  It’s the work of a singleminded god, a world bled of wonder.

Players are constantly reminded that they’re shackled to a mechanistic land.  There is no illusion of freedom because the gears that keep the player and Hyrule in lockstep are eminently legible.  You read the landscape all too easily; you know what it’s asking of you.  One of the greatest offenders occurred early on with A Link to the Past: most bomb-able walls became visible.  What had been a potential site of mystery in the original Legend of Zelda (every rockface) became just another job for your trusty keyring.  Insert here.  Go on about your business.

It’s only gotten worse over the years.  Skyward Sword, with its segregated, recycled areas and puzzly overworld dungeons, is not an outlier; it is the culmination of years of reducing the world to a series of bottlenecks, to a kiddie theme park (this is not an exaggeration: Lanayru Desert has a roller-coaster).  But a world is not one predetermined sequence after another, and a world is not a puzzle with a single solution.  A world is more than a space, more than a place; it is something to inhabit and be inhabited by.  What you infuse a space with to make it habitable, to make it memorable (since memory is profoundly spatial), gives the place its character, its soul.

Tolkien knew this.  His landscapes speak more convincingly than his characters.  And Miyamoto knew this too.  The apocryphal tale of his boyhood discovery of secret caves makes perfect sense when you play the original Zelda.  That spirit of wonder, of potential secrets on every screen, permeated the map (and even the instruction booklet – it discreetly placed hints on the bottom of the page, inviting the player to pay attention because the hidden was everywhere).  The rules of Hyrule were not at all clear to its first visitors, and one of the greatest pleasures came in intuiting the underlying logic (one secret per overworld screen, but almost one on every screen).  The very existence of a second quest that remixed all the dungeons and all the secrets spoke of a world that was open and supple.  The magic of the first Zelda was not locked down, given to a single iteration.  It was its own sequel.  It seemed like it could go on forever.

It did not.  If Zelda is to reclaim any of the spirit that Miyamoto first invested in its world, it needs to do a few things.  It needs to make most of the map accessible from the beginning.  No artificial barriers to clumsily guide Link along a set course.  Players know that game; they know when they’re being played.  Link must be allowed to enter areas he’s not ready for.  He must be allowed to be defeated, not blocked, by the world and its inhabitants.

This world, dangerous, demanding exploration, must also be mysterious.  This means: illegible, at least at first.  Zelda needs new unstated rules, ones that must be relearned, even by Zelda veterans like myself.  How can you truly explore if you know how everything works already?  How can you ever be surprised if every ‘secret’ is conspicuously marked as such?  Hyrule needs space to breathe, fields of purposeless grandeur (like Shadow of the Colossus), where secrets could be anywhere because they’re not obviously right there.  What is an adventure if not a journey through an unknown landscape?  It’s not a retread across familiar ground, the car ride to work, the province of sleepwalkers.

Going Through the Motions

I know there’s something wrong with a game when it begins to feel like work.  When it becomes predictable, rote, tedious.  When I know what I’m supposed to do, but then I have to actually do it.

Zelda has felt like work since Ocarina, overstuffed with tasks, jobs, trials.  And not just in the plodding opening sequences or all the requests by the feckless citizens of Hyrule.  Even the sacrosanct Zelda dungeons, holiest of design holies, have fallen victim to this.  So many things to do, so little pleasure in doing them.  Dungeons suffer further in their over-reliance on environmental puzzles.  Even calling them ‘puzzles’ does a disservice to all the fine puzzles in gaming.  Most Zelda puzzles are tiresome and dull, but the problem isn’t just puzzle quality or lack of ingenuity; it’s using them as the structuring principle of a 30+ hour game.  They determine the very flow of Link’s dungeoneering and make the whole plunge into the dark seem more like a modest exercise, a mock trial in which you needn’t break a sweat.  Some claim the result is balanced, tastefully paced, well-appointed.  So why do Zelda’s dungeons often feel so pedestrian and domesticated, with about the same rhythm and urgency as the music we call ‘adult contemporary’?

But wait, hasn’t Zelda always been like this?  Aren’t puzzles somehow required by the Triforce?  No, they are not.  And it wasn’t always this way.  The first two Zeldas had virtually no puzzles.  You might have to push a block here or there, but the real test was finding your way through a maze and surviving.  You had to keep track of where you were, explore every corner, and fight your ass off.  In fact, mastering Link’s position on screen, in the game’s gridlike space, was key to fighting effectively.  It was, and is, a surprisingly coherent, unified experience.  It was, unapologetically, an action-adventure game.  And a fuller, more complete experience in 1987 than anything Skyward Sword, and its magic stick, apes today.

A game that relies on puzzles, and Zelda in particular, is sometimes considered a ‘thinking man’s game’.  Which is funny, because I haven’t had to think about much of anything in Zelda for years.  This embarrassing prejudice against facility with a controller certainly isn’t doing Zelda any favors.  We get instead a salad bar of limp riddles and the vague sensation that it’s good for us (kid-tested, mother-approved).  Where is the joy in movement, the miracle of motion onscreen?  We mostly just fumble with our keyring and call it a day.

It’s really a missed opportunity.  Because clearly Zelda can offer compelling action when it wants to.  Boss fights, when not overly puzzly, can still wow, and even standard enemies can engage on occasion.  I still remember my first Stalfos battle in Ocarina.  It felt like an actual encounter with real risk.  But after a few repetitions, Stalfos became just another bundle of ticks to observe and exploit.  The fighting in Wind Waker had potential too; Link was limber, his movements fluid.  One of the greatest Zelda moments occurs when he ‘wakes’ the drowned castle and must fight hordes of Moblins and Darknuts simultaneously.  The resulting chaos, and challenge, offers one of the few robustly emergent encounters in Zelda history.  And yet, its rarity speaks again to all the untapped potential.

Skyward Sword would seem to respond to this – it’s even got sword in the title.  But what a terrible, terrible response it is.  I must give credit to Aonuma and his team for trying something new.  But instead of dynamic, 1-to-1 motion controlled battles, we get fights that have been turned into puzzles.  True, you can’t flail and succeed, but the supposed precision required actually just makes for a game of Simon Says.  You go that way, I go this; you signal horizontal, I comply.  Each motion is discrete, requested.  (And that’s when the prickly Wii motion-plus actually works.)  It creates a moment-to-moment pacing problem, inserting pauses, start-stop-repeat, and thus you rarely chain moves together with any sort of fluidity.  Enemies are patient, almost polite, and usually allow for individual encounters, yet in a game about mastering a sword, you never even duel.  When the mobs do finally come at the end, there is no finesse to be had.  You will hack, and you will slash.

Basically, your skyward sword has no depth, never developing beyond the moves you learn at the beginning.  And it lacks all robustness, proving as brittle as the rest of the world.  There is, in fact, something brutish about Link and his whole grab bag of items, or rather, the way he switches between them.  Controls for any single tool are generally manageable, but there is nothing graceful, or even coherent, in trying to string them together.  It’s as if Nintendo thought the ‘adventure’ genre (which only Zelda seems to occupy) meant the player should be able to do just about anything.  Want to shoot arrows, bowl bombs, blow sand, fly a beetle?  Welcome to Zelda Party Resort, the mini-game gulag of champions.

We should’ve seen this coming.  Zelda’s inevitable item creep started with a Link to the Past and has led to a Link-of-all-Trades.  It’s only more pronounced now because of the mania for literally going through the motions, as if that’s what gamers have wanted all along.  I don’t reject motion-control out of hand – I’m curious about all the possibilities of play.  But when grafted onto Zelda, what becomes clear is that the series has lacked focus in its gameplay for a long time.  Zelda simply has too many verbs.  If the designers would choose just a few actions that Link could do very well (like moving) and coordinate them according to a common control scheme, then we might see Zelda achieve a true richness in its adventuring.  It needn’t be as tight and utterly focused as Mario is with jumping, but it could at least be of a piece, compelling and consistent from the beginning.

Zelda has struggled with lucid, integrated gameplay since transitioning to 3D.  Ocarina is lauded for taking Zelda into the third dimension, but I remain unconvinced.  Modern Zeldas are translations of their 2D forbearers; they’ve never been fundamentally reconceived in 3D from the ground up.  In choosing what elements made Zelda fundamentally Zelda, Nintendo chose poorly.  They took the puzzles instead of the action, the conventions instead of the world, the items instead of the spirit.  They never adequately considered the pacing differences inherent to 3D, the consequences of constantly looking around and recentering the screen, the changed expectations that attend a more recognizable world (not a compressed 2D gamespace).  Unlike Mario, Zelda never convincingly made the jump.  It’s no wonder Link still can’t.

Skyward Sword, the proclaimed future direction of the series, has only made this worse.  It’s built upon so many layers of clumsy, sloggy protocol that it can’t possibly save the series with new features.  Zelda needs subtraction, not addition.  It’s not radical to suggest that Zelda fans would prefer a game that is elegant rather than convoluted.  Fewer, deeper items and utterly overhauled but central swordplay would go a long way towards solving this.  With such focus, Zelda might develop technique in its players, such that they actually improve as they play.  As is, I can hardly claim to be much better at Zelda than I was after the first pitiless sequel.  Not that I have to be.

Helicopter Parents

Zelda needs to be harder.  Much harder.  Not harder to solve, like Ocarina’s Water Temple, but harder to survive.  The first two Zeldas were exquisitely difficult (the second excruciatingly so), and they were all the more wonderful for it.  Thus, when I beat Link to the Past the first weekend I had it, after three years of waiting, I couldn’t help but feel let down.  The Adventure of Link had actually demanded things of me, had forced me to up my game.  But Ganon fell within three days that spring of ‘92.  Heroism was, apparently, passé.

It’s been equally so ever since.  It’s not that certain encounters or sequences in Ocarina or Twilight Princess aren’t challenging (the silent realms are a Skyward Sword highlight).  But they are separate, repeatable, often asking me to merely hone a skill or discover a weak point (a strategy, they call it) before getting whacked too many times.  Failure occurs, but with little penalty.  And given the often incoherent controls, with little responsibility either.  The games themselves, piecemeal affairs, are not difficult.  It’s never a matter of if I’ll succeed, only when.

Don’t get me wrong: modern Zeldas are not simple, only simpleminded.  Some of this comes from convention and repetition, both within and across games.  The path through each is laid down with paternal care.  One senses at every turn that the experience has been carefully crafted by someone who surely knows best.  His guiding hand remains on the gameflow spigot so that it drips steadily; meanwhile, you won’t be tempted to get ahead of yourself or go out of order.  The first time you play Zelda, it’s no surprise that this tasteful staggering of content and gentle guidance of the player comes off as masterful game design.

For veteran players like myself, though, the profound conservatism at Zelda’s heart feels more patronizing with each repetition.  Why bother paying attention to the old man when I can just tune out and coast?  The game will do all the fretting for me.  It won’t let me fail.  I don’t even have to get good; I just have to get through.  Zelda asks nothing, demands nothing, except that I play along.

Another way to say this: modern Zeldas do not respect the player.  Many gamers express this as too much handholding and blame the Nintendo helpline reps who accompany you through Hyrule.  No doubt, Navi, Midna, and Fi intrude, remind, and overexplain, all naggy and mothersome.  At least Midna, one of the only strong characters the series has yet to produce, is cheeky when she chastises you.  Yet even if these more obvious guiding hands were eliminated from Zelda, respect for the player would not be restored.  Each game is one giant guiding hand, and even when its condescension is not spelled out very slowly via text scrawl, its gated world, blatant signaling (this goes there), and countless safety nets make sure the player gets the message.

Some contend that all of this is really for the new kids and we longtime Zelda players (the actual fan base) just have to suffer along like patient older brothers and sisters.  If only anyone could convince me that the tangled conventions that define Zelda were also approached with new players in mind.  Zelda pretty clearly wants to have it both ways, but it’s hard to imagine either veterans or novices being satisfied with, say, Skyward Sword.  Every Zelda has to be someone’s first, but I can’t help pity the player who thinks this is what the legend was all about.

Actually, we needn’t speculate on what the gods of Zelda had in mind when designing the difficulty.  Eiji Aonuma, director of Zelda since Ocarina, spoke to Game Informer about this directly:

“I never actually finished [the original Legend of Zelda]…I almost feel like there’s still no game more difficult than it. Every time I try to play it I end up getting ‘Game Over’ a few too many times and giving up partway through. Certainly after playing the original Zelda for the first time, I didn’t ever think that I wanted to make a game like that.”

Congratulations, Mr. Aonuma – you never have.  Instead, you’ve taken the teeth out of a hardcore series.  There’s no real danger now, no risk, nothing to lose.  You’ve redefined game designers as the ultimate helicopter parents.

The point of a hero’s adventure (and Zelda is the hero’s adventure in gaming) is not to make you feel better about yourself.  The point is to grow, to overcome, to in some way actually become better.  If a legendary quest has no substantial challenge, if it asks nothing of you except that you jump through the hoops it so carefully lays out for you, then the very legend is unworthy of being told, and retold.  Death and punishment for failure are not outdated old-school notions, too demanding for the new eggshell generation.  Nor are they too grim for the charm and wonder essential to Zelda’s tone (Mario proves you can be both delightfully whimsical and motherfucking hard).  Meaningful difficulty, in which successes are owned and failures chastise rather than annoy, would more deeply engage the player, making her responsible, necessary, worthy of the legend.  Not just the recipient of a gold star, the kind you get for showing up.

Death Mountain Speaks for Itself

Zelda would be better if it had no story.  Or more precisely, no plot to structure the adventure.  The first Zeldas barely had any plot, and they were the better for it.  With plot, sequence matters too much.  The early Zeldas had situations, worlds and scenarios that framed the action, gaps to be filled in by the player, sequences to be broken.  Optimal paths and shortcuts weren’t a given; they had to be earned.  Items were the most prominent plot devices, and even they were not unduly strict about order.  You could be slow and steady or blast straight through with a little know-how.  The basic rules of the gameworld were what bound you, not some artificial necessity imposed for the sake of plot.  You could even play through the entire first Zelda up to Ganon without ever getting a sword.

Plot in modern Zeldas is another culprit in the Case of the Sluggish Pacing.  It only thinly veils the mechanics being explored, and it bends the adventure in ways that feel forced and unnatural.  Especially when the needy denizens of Hyrule get involved.  At this point, I fear speaking to anyone without a golden triangle on her hand.  When did everyone become so inane and needy?  The original Zelda had no villages or houses; the only remaining residents were hidden away in caves, the clearest indication that Hyrule had already fallen to the enemy.  They were cryptic, terse, mercenary and only rarely asked anything of you (one letter to be delivered to an old woman, one grumbly Moblin to be fed).  Link was a student of Hyrule and its people, learning how everything worked, how the world could be saved.  He was not the people’s personal benefactor slash errand boy.  This makes the player feel awkwardly like both the center of the universe and an indentured servant.  Myself, I need neither additional chores nor reinforcement for my solipsism.

Zelda doesn’t even have central characters.  It has echoes.  Repetitions with variation.  Only one-off characters, like Midna, have a singularity that matters.  The rest are foregone conclusions.  At their best, they can offer nuance or temporary affect, but the very nature of Zelda’s iterative narrative makes it hard for anything to stick. Even the more vibrant versions of characters (Wind Waker’s Tetra, Skyward Sword’s Zelda) are hamstrung by the larger narrative’s conservatism.  Get your crown on, princess.  Go to sleep.

Building up a world with a past, a believable place with its own logic – that would be enough.  Wind Waker’s post-apocalyptic drowned world was enough; Majora’s Mask’s temporal loops and grinning lunar horror were enough.  Zelda is a perfect candidate for environmental storytelling.  A Hyrule you can dwell in, despite its limitations (perhaps because of them), with gameplay that compels you further in – such a world will produce its own stories.  It will speak without over-signaling, it will invite readings without being immediately legible, it will become evocative, a space to be occupied by imagination.  A place of wonder.

To do this, Hyrule must become more indifferent to the player.  It must aspire to ignore Link.  Zelda has so far resisted the urge to lavish choice on the player and respond to his every whim, but it follows a similar spirit of indulgence in its loving details, its carefully crafted adventure that reeks of quality and just-for-you-ness.  But a world is not for you.  A world needs a substance, an independence, a sense that it doesn’t just disappear when you turn around (even if it kinda does).  It needs architecture, not level design with themed wallpaper, and environments with their own ecosystems (which were doing just fine before you showed up).  Every location can’t be plagued with false crises only you can solve, grist for the storymill.

Some Zelda critics complain about padding and filler, especially in Skyward Sword.  But Zelda’s plots have long been game-length filler, filling in for a failed, unbelievable world.  Its clockwork vistas do not evoke stories, so it must construct plots to tell them.  The game mechanics of early Zeldas provided plot enough, the kind that is boring to tell (then this, then this) but thrilling to play.  They required no narrative scaffolding to be justified; they justified themselves.  And strangely, the iconic simplicity of early Hyrules fired the imagination the way a good map does, opening up story possibilities rather than narrowing them down to just one.  Story flowed from world instead of world from story.

Zelda II performed a masterstroke in sequel-land when, after handing you your ass in the Death Mountain maze, it revealed the world from the first game to be but the tip of the Hyrulian iceberg.  It altered the scale of the screen (the original overworld’s 128 became approximately 1) and thus expanded the scope of the entire adventure in the player’s mind.  The raised stakes of the sequel were palpable; they were right there on screen.  The world, not the towns or their people or any text, grounded the adventure, gave it shape.  Death Mountain spoke for itself.

For all the talk of golden triangles and lost girls and pig thieves, this onscreen shift between the first two games makes visible the essential Zelda story.  It’s the movement from the world you know to the one beyond, from country to city, from country to world, ongoing still, ever incomplete.  It never gets old because it speaks to the inexhaustible experience of growing older, the perpetual Katamari Damacy scale shift of a life in time.  Modern Zeldas don’t need to lean on tired plots to tell this story.  The player could experience it firsthand if offered a compelling, expansive Hyrule, the kind of world that seems to expand the more you explore it.

Old Zelda Hands

There’s nothing like your first time, I know.  For players who came to Zelda later than me, I’m aware my criticism is treading on sacred ground.  But unless Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword was your first, the rest of the Zelda faithful must at least recognize the limits of the formula and how little the core experience ever changes.  For me, being a Zelda fan means wanting each new game to be the best possible Zelda, to further its promise as a videogame.

So fans can both acknowledge that a series’ glory days are long past and still earnestly hope that they’re wrong with each new release.  The revival of a once-great series also does not entail a simple return to its roots.  Despite all that modern Zeldas might learn from the first two, I’m not advocating remakes or revivals.  3D Dot Game Heroes tried this with Link to the Past as its model, and the result was curious for a few hours but ultimately slavish and unfulfilling, like most nostalgia projects.

Yet belief in Zelda is not based simply in childish attachment or blind need.  There is really some magic there; Zelda has not survived so long by chance.  The pleasures it first offered – those that come with being an explorer, a pathfinder and labyrinth conqueror, a fighter and survivor, a finder of secrets – remain completely viable in modern games.  They’re just not present in modern Zeldas.  Instead, we are given an unconvincing world, unfocused gameplay, unsatisfying difficulty, and an unnecessary story.  Skyward Sword is guilty of all of this and more, and yet as the proclaimed future direction of the series, it is unapologetic.  This is Zelda, they say, and you can hardly remember a time when it was much different.

But I remember.  I remember the peerless original, its unfairly-maligned sequel, and those later elements that suggested the magic had not been completely exhausted, from Wind Waker’s exuberant charm and grace to little Midna’s boundless sass.  Yet focusing on the series’ greatest moments won’t save Zelda.  Its obsession with its own conventions and culture has resulted in an insular little kingdom, walled off from the rest of gaming.  Zelda no longer has a vision of anything but itself, and the wrong parts at that.  It is choking on its own tail.

If I were to suggest where else Zelda might look for inspiration, it wouldn’t have to go far.  Mario remains as vibrant as ever, in no need of saving.  No series has so many extraordinary, crucial games that still sing when you play them.  Its focus on jumping and all its variations is bold and visionary rather than conservative and safe, and it manages to make the familiar new again and again.  As a model for how to develop a series, you could hardly do better than Mario.  But that would still not help create a single new Zelda, encumbered by its own legend as it now is.

For a while, I’ve been unable to imagine a better Zelda myself, not even as a reboot with a new studio.  I sensed what was wrong, and yet I couldn’t point to another modern game that offered many of those original Zelda pleasures.  Then I played Demon’s Souls last fall.  Its unremittingly bleak vision would seem to have little to offer a land as enchanting as Hyrule.  And yet, it captured my imagination (claws sunk into my brain, to be more precise) in a way that few have since the original Legend of Zelda.  Its world seemed real, lived-in (died-in), with a history and an artistry that burned every twisting passage into my memory.  Its gameplay was focused, coherent, and deep, built around encounters that were far more intellectual than Zelda’s puzzles.  Its famous difficulty demanded so much, not just from my hands but from my entire ragged nervous system, even from my temper, my character.  It never explained itself and so conjured, via ingenious online components, a community as helpful and treacherous as any group of humans.  And yet its difficulty was also exquisitely balanced and eminently fair.  It respected me enough to let me fail, then gave me reasons to try again.  And it graciously pushed all of its storytelling into the background, letting the world speak for itself.

After Demon’s Souls, I felt a better Zelda was possible.  The core experience it offered had not become obsolete over the console generations after all.  Games were still capable of possessing me; I was still capable of being possessed.  This didn’t mean another great Zelda would necessarily be like Demon’s Souls, especially in structure or tone.  But its spirit might be saved, so that old Zelda hands like myself might dream of Hyrule, and its secrets, again.  Isn’t that what we want?  For games to get deep inside of us, to restructure our consciousness, to reroute our labyrinthine nerves, to resonate with our captive hearts, to matter?  The way legends do.

~ Tevis Thompson

Published February 10th, 2012

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Kirby and Texture

A few of the pleasures of Kirby’s Epic Yarn: becoming a bump behind the landscape curtain, the ropey water spilling forth from his firetruck hose, the way some ground just barely bends beneath his step.

When I play this Kirby, my first of the series, I feel its texture.  I feel it with my eyes.  And this is what I return to, how a graphical style, a material concept can so determine my experience of a game.

I play to explore the fabric of Kirby’s world.  There is pleasure in simply seeing what comes next, how classic themes – a world of fire, of ice, of motherboards – will be reinterpreted according to its tactile logic.  The darkness of a ghost manor as patched, moth-eaten blankets.  The darkness of the denim cosmos punctured by buzzing buttons.  Echoes of Méliès and the materiality of early cinema.

Most of Kirby’s Epic Yarn presents a shallow depth of field, a kind of thick 2D.  There is little distance in the background, only layers of fabric; in fact, there is little distinction from the foreground at all.  Everything is intimate, close enough to touch, though not quite.

I am reminded of another play on dimensions in the Paper Mario series, but there it is the drawn quality of its images that underpin its paper-thin aesthetic.  Kirby’s world, though, celebrates the constructed over the drawn, the object over the image.  And not just any object – clothing: lived-in, cozy, everyday (“This grass feels like pants!”).  This is the opposite of the slick sheen that coats so many other videogames.  And it is this very texture and the presence it lends to Kirby’s world that I want to grasp.

But how can I feel, let alone grasp, this texture?  The only thing in my hands is a plastic Wii-mote.  And not even one in full revolutionary mode, but turned sideways for classic NES-style play.

How does it make sense to say that Kirby’s Epic Yarn is soft?  Pliant.  That it is beyond cute – it is gentle.  The gameplay is forgiving, famously so, though this is not merely an issue of ease, but collision as well.  The very touch of many classic videogames enemies is toxic, as if the mark of a true hero is the ability to master distance and remain untouchable until you are ready to pounce.  But Kirby bounces off many hapless foes, not in some wild whiplash, but mildly, almost politely.

I feel all these things not only with my hands or my eyes, but with my hand-eye.  I do not simply coordinate my senses – I conflate them.  They loop, collude, and as a result I feel the visuals and see the tactility.  Kirby’s Epic Yarn foregrounds the very synesthetic experience of videogames.  I can’t account for exactly how my senses cross and activate each other while I play.  Which is to say: I don’t yet understand the basic videogame experience.

But Kirby makes me feel closer to knowing, to almost grasping this common experience.  And not because its gameplay is particularly groundbreaking.  It is solid, friendly, mostly unremarkable.  In fact, the very classic feel of its platforming elements (wii-mote gyroscopic moments notwithstanding) draws me closer to the motions other games go through.  Its pronounced synesthesia throws into starker relief the invisible contortions all games demand of my hand-eye.

Even further, Kirby’s own interactions with his environment do not simply serve as window dressing.  When I yank down the fabric of a tree to climb higher or unzip a castle wall to reveal its shallow interior or patch the overworld and let loose the logic of the yarn, I feel as if I am seeing through to the inner workings of the world, wrinkling the very fabric of the universe.

Kirby himself is only an outline, a figure made of lines and thus by definition two-dimensional.  There can be no swallowing for Kirby this go-round, no consumption as usual, only a continual rethreading into different shapes and modes of play.  He and his world are fabricated from yarn and the spool, household matter, things at hand.  They’re reduced to base materials and stitched together with a DIY spirit that leaves the seams of the world exposed, and I feel as if his world, perhaps my own, might be finally comprehensible.  It is the world at hand, a world I can almost grasp.

But there it is again, that impossible word: grasp.  It is impossible to truly grasp Kirby and its virtual textures.  And yet, this contradiction produces a distinctly pleasurable cognitive dissonance.  Perhaps, in part, because the game intensifies, through its textile effects, those paradoxes of presence/absence, movement/stasis, touch/vision that exist in all videogames.  The variety of game modes offered in Kirby extends the logic of the yarn to genres beyond the platformer: racing, surfing, even the arcade brawler (in tank blaster form).  Specific games in videogame history are also referenced as Kirby is woven into a rocket (Galaga), digger (Dig Dug), dolphin (Ecco), firetruck (Mario Sunshine’s water nozzle), string in a maze (Pac-Man), star shooter (Kirby Super Star), and saucer (a possible nod to Kirby’s classic, and now missing, sucking ability).  It’s no wonder one of the final unlockable levels, offering a frantic mix of these mini-games, is named Meta Melon Isle.

When I play Kirby in these alternate modes, old games almost seem suffused with a new presence, a denser substance.  But even today’s most advanced control systems – the Wii MotionPlus, Kinect, and Playstation Move – can only track movement and provide audio-visual feedback, ever more precisely.  Videogames themselves cannot push back.  They cannot offer a reality of objects outside the self, those with weight, density, texture.  This defines their virtual lack, this absent feeling of things.  And yet Kirby’s untouchable textures remain pleasurable contradictions all the same.

It is to these pleasures I return.  They linger, even as I think back on the game now.  I peruse screenshots and ask myself again: why do they look SO PRETTY?  They draw me nearer still; they ask me to caress and possess their precise fuzziness, their stitched edges, their knitted substance.  I can already imagine a fully quilted, thoroughly unplayable recreation of Kirby’s Epic Yarn on BoingBoing.  I’m not arts-and-craftsy myself, nor do I long for some pre-industrial past, and yet even I can grasp this desire for substance.  It is not simply a creative impulse, to make things myself.  The pleasures of disassembly and deconstruction course through Kirby too (unraveling Capamari’s snug little hat is a palpable delight).

When I consider the ultimate textural lack in videogames, I see that it does not indicate some underlying emptiness, some missing authenticity.  It is but a function of our regular transactions with art and the imagination, with the virtual in everyday life.  Whenever I long to lodge myself in the creepier corners of Kelly Link’s sentences, or comfort poor Walter White in Breaking Bad, or explore again the actual passages of my childhood home (not just the ghost house of my memory), I feel the pleasurable contradiction of my desires.  I’ve grown so used to the impossible presences of art, to these material longings at play in my life – they’ve become practically invisible.  Kirby and its texture make them, joyfully, visible again.

~ Tevis Thompson

Published February 5th, 2011

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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auntie pixelante › indie game: the movie

auntiepixelante.com

so, full disclosure: this movie is in large part about a game called super meat boy, which i contributed art and one of my own characters to. i’m friends with the dudes who made it, and who star in the movie. and i got to see the movie for free as part of the 2012 game developer’s conference.

indie game: the movie tells a story about game development: it jumps between edmund mcmillen and tommy refenes’ struggle to launch super meat boy despite the continued efforts of microsoft, as publisher, to fuck them over, and phil fish’s attempts to promote his game fez, under the looming threat of a former business partner who has as much legal claim to his work, and the legal ability to prevent him from continuing, promoting and publishing that work. jonathan blow’s talking head floats by from time to time to make some sweeping statement about game design – the filmmakers, weirdly, have positioned him in a kind of “wise old master” role that makes me feel a little weird. (a friend of mine put it this way: he was the “yoda” of the movie.)

there’s a scene where edmund, his year-long labor to finish his game finally complete, relates, though tears, the story of a ten-year-old boy who stayed up all night to finish a piece of super meat boy fan art. edmund, at ten years old, did the same for super mario bros. edmund’s realization that he has become the kind of person to which he looked, as a child, and saw worlds open is a real and heartfelt moment. edmund’s, tommy’s and phil fish’s journeys as creators are a good story, but they’re only one narrative of game creation: one in which straight white guys who grew up playing super mario sacrifice every part of their lives to the creation of personal but nonetheless traditional videogames (all of the games in the movie owe much of their play and visual vocabularies to mario) for sale in a commercial marketplace.

this story will inspire some ten-year-olds to do just that: to devote themselves entirely to making their dream game. but it may not inspire, say, a young adult woman to realize that she can dabble in game creation without having to sacrifice her entire life to it, that there’s room for hobbyists and part-timers, that game-making isn’t just for men or for people who were raised playing nintendo. the narrative of indie game: the movie is just one narrative of independent game creation.

the filmmakers seemed confused, in fact, about who exactly their audience is. the movie opens with a bunch of games journalists trying to frame super meat boy’s success in gamer terms. someone who maaay have been anthony carboni (i don’t remember) rattled through a HIT LIST of names that are meaningless to a non-fanboy audience: “yeah! super meat boy! it was the biggest thing since braid, which totally blew world of goo out of the water, which we couldn’t wait for after physics dongs!” i paraphrase. (it also made me pretty uncomfortable to hear someone describe braid as a “love story.” not to spoil anything, but what that game is about is definitely not love.)

edmund’s and tommy’s and phil’s stories are compelling on their own! they don’t need to be framed in terms of UNITS SOLD or BIGGEST HIT SINCE X. there’s a moment late in the movie where phil is showing his game at PAX – the penny arcade expo, one of the biggest celebrations of videogame consumerism: “a place where the mutual lie of ‘video game developers are big shots’ can be reinforced on both sides,” my friend courtney put it. the film gives us a few thick minutes of its gross founder tycho spewing words about phil’s game. obviously, the only reason tycho is in the movie is because gamers might view him as an authority on what a good-looking game is. most people who are not gamers will probably find him disgusting and repellent and will probably be able to tell for themselves that fez is a good-looking game from indie game: the movie’s footage of it.

obviously, i think people outside of the toxic, exclusive culture of games ought to be informed that videogames don’t have to look like swollen, impersonal blockbusters made by straight white males. parts of indie game: the movie challenge that image and parts do not. but i was glad that both my book and indie game: the movie could find a place at the same game conference.

auntiepixelante.com

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