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On Fez and patching…
merseyremakes.co.uk

Report: Das Gesetz der Serie - Warum Fortsetzungen Pflicht sind
gamestar.de

0 XP: The Zynga Counterrevolution
mediumdifficulty.com

Paging Dr. Wasteland: One man’s crusade to heal DayZ’s zombie victims
arstechnica.com

Canada’s New StarCraft II Champion Proves It Isn’t Who You Are, But What You Can Do
egmnow.com

ihobo: The Thin Play of Dear Esther
blog.ihobo.com

EA and their hate of sales
terminally-incoherent.com

The Difference Between A Good Video Game and a Bad One
kotaku.com

What makes a good game good? « being playful
ericzimmerman.wordpress.com

How I Got Nintendo Powerfest 94
blog.pricecharting.com

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On Fez and patching…

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

I’ve been massively uncomfortable with the way certain press outlets (most?) have been covering the Polytron announcement that the TU1 patch for Fez will not be patched again.

I’m uncomfortable when the reporting becomes a review of a person first and foremost and I’m also uncomfortable with a no quarter attitude towards what developers should do.

I’m uncomfortable when the debate is hinged around indie vs corporate, choose your victor. The issue at hand, that of the ability for developers to patch games without having to worry about whether you can afford cash-wise to patch said game is a problem that effects all scales. That it hits indies and their limited funds harder is certainly a consideration and one that seems to get lost in the wordguff that’s surrounding this issue.

I’m uncomfortable when the debate ignores that the TU1 patch fixes the majority of issues with the game, leaving (as far as I’m aware) a corrupted save issue. Something that can be remedied by clearing the cache and restarting the game. An uncomfortable thing to have to do but hardly the shit-o-geddon customer hating attitude that it’s being painted as.

I’m uncomfortable when people feel comfortable pulling the getting into bed with the devil argument, you signed a contract for fame and fortune and now, this is the price you must pay. I’m uncomfortable because it leaves no room for nuance, it leaves no room for context. It becomes a moral argument with nothing that hinges around whether something is fair, whether something is unfair, whether something is even viable. I would not like to be the person to cast such a judgement because I would not like to be the person if something went titsupus contractualus for me, to have the same argument thrown in my face.

I’m uncomfortable when people feel comfortable totting up numbers in their head and saying that “this much money must exist because this” because the world doesn’t work in such simple terms. Especially when what was supposed to be a 1 year game project has spiralled into spanning multiple years, during which the entire landscape of gaming has changed.

I’m uncomfortable when people say “you should have just released on Steam in the first place” when contracts were signed at a time when Steam was still 12 months away from showing its indie selling claws to one and all, when its notorious difficulty to get greenlit was at its peak. When other services were seen as behind the XBLA curve. I’m uncomfortable with hindsight being used as a stick to berate people with.

I’m uncomfortable with any debate that can argue around patches being seen as bad things to have, things that customers or services need to be protected from. Patches are to improve games. Patches are to make games better. Arguing against patches is to argue against the right to have better games. This is a ridiculous thing, beyond absurd. I’m uncomfortable when an imaginary line is drawn between services where patches are ok and where patches are not. Why is a patch to an iThing seen as desirable but XBLA not, beyond the whims of Microsoft?

I’m uncomfortable when any and all nuance is lost. I’m uncomfortable when random soundbites are used to justify removing the context from a debate.

I’m uncomfortable with the “but it’s Fish” train of thought because next time, it might not be Fish. It might be me. It might be you. It might be your friend or a developer you love not a developer you love to hate.

Right now, I’m just uncomfortable with the whole charade that’s sprung from a statement which points out the ridiculousness of a system that can penalise people for wanting to make better games. And I’m uncomfortable with how comfortably we let this shit slide over us.

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Report: Das Gesetz der Serie - Warum Fortsetzungen Pflicht sind

gamestar.de • Archive • Like & Archive • Like

Report: Das Gesetz der Serie

Warum Fortsetzungen Pflicht sind

Spiele ohne Vorgänger werden immer seltener. Gehen Spieleentwicklern die Ideen aus? Wir gehen im Report näher auf diese Frage ein und zeigen unterschiedliche Fortsetzungs-Trends.

Von Dennis Kogel |

Datum: 15.07.2012

Zum Thema » Gute Idee? Schlechte Idee! 5 gescheiterte Spielideen » Furchtbare Fortsetzungen 10 Sequels, auf die man verzichten kann »Mein Vater wird sterben. Er lebt in Los Angeles - das ist ganz schön weit weg von mir - und es geht ihm gut im Moment, aber er ist krank. Das klingt unglaublich deprimierend, aber die letzten Erinnerungen an einen Menschen sind so stark, dass es immer schwerer wird, sich an sie als gesund und glücklich zu erinnern. Ich bin nicht sicher, ob ich ihn in diesem Zustand sehen will. Letztens habe ich mir das aktuelle Mario Kart gekauft. Das hat sich überraschend ähnlich angefühlt.« Edmund McMillen, der Erfinder des Hardcore-Jump&Runs Super Meat Boy, macht sich Sorgen. Über die Gesundheit seines Vaters. Und über endlose Spielefortsetzungen, die seine Kindheitserinnerungen an glückliche Stunden vor dem Super Nintendo zerstören.

Auf eine überzeichnete und makabere Weise drückt McMillen etwas durchaus Wichtiges aus: Kaum ein modernes Spiel ist keine Fortsetzung. Etwa zwei Drittel aller PC-Titel, die 2011 von den größeren Publishern veröffentlicht wurden, waren: Fortsetzungen, Neuauflagen und Haustiermöbelstückerweiterungen für Die Sims 3 . Das Jahr 2011 war das Jahr, in dem Nummern zum wichtigsten Bestandteil eines Spieletitels geworden sind. Einige der beliebtesten Spiele des letzten Jahres waren Fortsetzungen, so wie Portal 2 , Battlefield 3 oder Batman: Arkham City . Es sind großartige Spiele.

Nur: Während die Fortsetzungen gefeiert werden, sind es immer öfter Spiele ohne Vorgänger, die binnen kürzester Zeit in Vergessenheit geraten. Bethesdas Brink , ein Team-Shooter mit innovativen Bewegungsmöglichkeiten, wird kaum noch gespielt. Epics clevere Drauflos-Ballerei Bulletstorm war ein Kritikererfolg - nur kaufen wollte sie fast niemand. So interessant neue Spielkonzepte häufig klingen, gekauft wird das, was die Spieler schon kennen. »Es ist alles Geschäft«, winkt McMillen ab, »wenn bei Spielen das Geschäft Vorrang vor der Kunst hat, dann werden gute Ideen gemolken, bis nichts mehr da ist. Bis sie leer sind.« Gehen der Industrie also die Ideen aus?

Ideen-Ebbe?

»Es war noch nie schlimmer«, klagt Mark Harris, meint aber gar keine Spiele, sondern Filme. Auch Hollywood leidet an chronischer Sequelitis, der Fortsetzungskrankheit. Jeden Sommer verwirklicht die Filmindustrie mehr Fortsetzungen und weniger frische Ideen.

The Secret World: Die Kombination aus Mystery-Geschichten, Puzzles und Shooter- Mechaniken macht Funcoms neues Online- Rollenspiel zu einem spannenden Projekt. Harris ist Filmkritiker für das US-Magazin GQ und rechnet ab: »Hollywood ist eine Institution, der mehr daran liegt, Actionfiguren zu verkaufen, als interessante Filme zu drehen«, schreibt er empört und sehnt sich eine Zeit zurück, in der Regisseure mit vielversprechenden Ideen mehr Macht hatten als Marketingabteilungen. Laut Harris ist Hollywood ausschließlich an Markennamen interessiert. An Filmen, die sich zielgruppengerecht verkaufen und fortsetzen lassen. Filme, die Produkt sind, keine Kunst.

Auch für große Spieleentwickler gehört das zunehmend zum Geschäft »Ich denke, das hängt mit der beginnenden Reife unserer Industrie zusammen«, argumentiert Aaryn Flynn, der bei Bioware als General Manager die Mass Effect-Serie verantwortet. Für Flynn ermöglichen die Blockbuster allerdings Kreativität in anderen Bereichen: »Wir sehen in jedem Fall die Notwendigkeit von vorhersehbarem Erfolg und kalkulierbaren Risiken. Mit diesen Erfolgen können wir unsere Entwickler auch bei etwas gewagteren Spielen unterstützen.« Heißt: Serien bringen dank ihrer Fanbasis sichere Einnahmen, die man dann in neue Ideen investieren kann. Oder zumindest könnte.

»Was der Spieler nicht kennt, spielt er nicht«

Ein Blick auf die großen Namen des Spielejahres 2012 zeigt folgerichtig viele dieser »kalkulierbaren Risiken«: Diablo 3 , Mass Effect 3 , Dota 2 , Max Payne 3 , Far Cry 3 , Grand Theft Auto 5 - das sind nur einige der wichtigsten Fortsetzungen. Wo bleiben die gewagten Projekte?

Dishonored: Ein spannender, an den Schleich- Klassiker Dark Project erinnernder Shooter im Steampunk-Stil von Harvey Smith, dem Lead Designer des ersten Deus Ex.

Spiele, die keine Fortsetzungen, keine Remakes und keine Lizenztitel sind, lassen sich im Portfolio der großen Publisher an einer Hand abzählen: Arkanes spannender Steampunk-Shooter Dishonored , ein paar Multiplayer-Neuzugänge wie Firefall und The Secret World , seltene Ausnahmen wie das witzige Quantum Conundrum , ein Puzzlespiel im Portal-Stil über das Reisen zwischen Dimensionen.

Die Konzentration auf Fortsetzungen ist durchaus verständlich in einem Klima, in dem der Publisher THQ Verluste von über 55 Millionen Dollar schreiben musste, nachdem er versucht hatte, mit neuen Marken wie dem mittelmäßigen Shooter Homefront zu punkten. Doch was hat zu diesem Klima geführt? Weshalb ist die Entwicklung von originellen Ideen und Titeln so riskant geworden? Wieder lohnt sich der Blick auf Hollywood, um Antworten zu bekommen.

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0 XP: The Zynga Counterrevolution

mediumdifficulty.com • Archive • Like & Archive • Like

by Matt Carey

Imagine a slot machine gambler. For hours she pumps coins into a slot for the privilege of pushing a button. Each time she pushes the button she watches an animation on the machine’s video screen. Usually the animation is about the same. Sometimes, though, the animation is a little different, indicating that something relatively unusual has happened in the machine’s random number generator, but that the gambler still loses.

The spillproof carpet beneath her is threadbare. Only when she looks down at it does the hum of the janitor’s vacuum float up above the surface of her consciousness. It’s late at night. Above all, the gambler is aging. She is hunched forward. Her stool doesn’t allow her to lean back. Her mind has mostly stopped working. When she has to take in her surroundings again her head will feel fuzzy, groggy. She is slowing down. The liquor in her glass is cheap, to lower her inhibition against loss, but not free because she is not a high roller. She loses money slowly. Her time is not considered valuable.

How did the slot machine gambler get this way? For many contemporary gamers a bank of slot machines is a vision of Hell: offering only a perpetual repetition of a single-button, zero-player game. Why would anyone voluntarily trap herself in this behavioral loop?

At a June 26 press event, Zynga announced its plan to help millions more make this grievous life mistake available as a video game with its new game Zynga Slots. It’s a slots game where you don’t actually have any chance of winning any money back. (But did the slot machine gambler ever have any hope of coming out ahead? Probably not.) The important thing is that Zynga Slots lets players experience pathetically dumping their money down a black hole just like at a real casino, with such premium downloadable content as “Cup of Coins” ($9.99), “Bucket of Coins” ($19.99), and “Vault of Coins” ($99.99). And if that just isn’t enough coins, there’s always the Platinum Purchase Program for $500 and up.

It’s easy to see Slots as an admission that Zynga’s design philosophy of “repackage XP grinding in a variety of brightly colored wrappers” is finally starting to wear thin for the social network set. And it’s quite heartwarming, actually, to think that someone within Zynga must have had the epiphany that “If the mechanics of our game boil down to rewarding players for pushing a button at the same semi-random intervals that would result in wins on a slot machine, maybe it’s time for us to be honest and present our game as a slot machine simulator so we can target players who are actually interested in that kind of interaction.”

Zynga stock is already down more than 45 percent since its December 2011 IPO. Maybe becoming publicly traded meant that Zynga finally exposed itself to some smart money, which meant its game design began to be scrutinized by people whose profits depended on it. In 2009, before the IPO, Forbes uncritically accepted Zynga’s claim that part of its strategy was to make games in a variety of different genres, while CNN called Zynga “more than a one-trick pony” because it had not only produced Farmville, but also Mafia Wars, YoVille, and Café World. But now that investors have wizened up, Zynga has learned that it can drive its share price down just by announcing a new slate of awful games, as analysts “questioned whether Zynga’s new offerings were diversified enough” and raised concerns about the quality of the games.

It’s a bit of a shame that the non-gamers who got hooked on Zynga’s bad games aren’t rejecting them in favor of better games. More likely they’re just going back to being non-gamers, as the percentage of users who play games on Facebook has fallen into decline. We can only hope Zynga’s last remaining corporate strategy is to brazenly cash in on the few “whales” still willing to pay money for this garbage, in order to keep the company’s price/earnings ratio out of the gutter until the founders dump their stock options and flee the company, leaving shareholders left owning nothing but an empty shell.

Maybe this new, humbled Zynga finally signals the end of the wave of non-gamer game developers, who invaded the gaming industry in the past few years, promising to turn every possible gameplay element into a marketing opportunity by being armed with advanced insight into human motivation that somehow boiled down to “add experience points and real-money currency to every game ever made.” Certainly the Zynga formula still has some addictive potential, as shown by its ability both to inspire and to crush imitators like The Sims Social, but I think they’re starting to realize that they haven’t actually stumbled on the magic formula that will lull all of humanity into mindlessly cow-clicking and Ville-farming until they die.

But it would be arrogance for us more serious gamers to assume that, just because we don’t turn our brains off in the same way when we play, we can’t fall prey to the same kind of operant conditioning and reward scheduling as a slot machine gambler or a Zynga whale. Unwary hardcore gamers still get taken advantage of, but more like a gambler at the Cantor Fitzgerald sports book: they’re highly knowledgeable, highly engaged by a constant influx of data and statistics, and hard-pressed to use all their skill to finish the game with a manageable loss instead of a huge one. We all remember comrades—good men and true—who lost considerable chunks of their young lives to WoW circa 2004 to 2008. And it’s impossible to ignore that even a fairly respectable game like TF2, while it can offer plenty of depth to geek out over, now revolves around a metagame that works in precisely the same way as a Zynga slot machine.

Players “find” special items at random but decreasing intervals that don’t actually depend on player performance. The game demands such an outrageous amount of grinding for certain rewards that buying them for ten bucks or so in real money almost feels like a reasonable idea. And of course, anyone trusting enough to go after a new item by grinding for it may find that it’s been nerfed by the time they reach it. Valve has announced plans to monetize its next free-to-play, Dota 2, in the same way — although surprisingly Valve claims that none of the items for sale in Dota 2 will be game-breaking.

Obviously the kind of “loss” a gamer needs to be worry about isn’t exactly the same that a gambler has to worry about. Gamers don’t expect to come out ahead in money, but they should expect to get some kind of worthwhile experience when they spend their time. Too often instead they get experience points that serve as numeric markers for the gaps in the middle of the narrative where the interesting experiences were supposed to go. The real danger in a game is that you’ll spend dozens (or hundreds!) of hours trying to work your way up to the “good part” only to find that the game was unworthy of your attention all along. And even if you feel grindy game mechanics don’t have a big influence on you personally, they’re still a danger to the obsessive completist who could actually become one of those whales who end up paying the developers’ kids’ college tuition.

There may be no shortage of commentators ready to decry pay-to-win grindfests as “evil” design, but what’s still needed is a code of ethical game mechanics that provides a yardstick to measure which games and which game designers can be trusted not to unduly manipulate their audience. Probably the most important standard for such a code would be: “The machine does not use the brevity of the user’s precious mortal life as a stick to beat him with.” Far too many games threaten to waste players’ time as a gambit to extract money from them (and some games do it merely for the bragging rights of padding out the length of the game).

Obviously some players like their gameplay a little repetitive, and developers shouldn’t be blamed for providing that kind of gameplay to those who want it. But when progression in the game involves performing a simple task repeatedly, developers should be expected to allow players to get the same benefit simply by demonstrating their mastery of the challenge, rather than sitting at the computer and grinding indefinitely. For instance, if the game dispenses rewards for doing nothing, do the developers allow indefinite idling? Is scripting allowed to automate simple tasks like harvesting gold from enemies? Is there a fast-forward feature once the player has queued up a bunch of actions (like in SpaceChem) and is it adequate to skip past the trivial part of the game? Can you manually adjust the number of farmable resources in your inventory (like in Minecraft)? Is there an “unlock all” feature (like in the redoubtable VVVVVV)?

When the developers block these functions is there a serious justification in term of fairness to other players, or is the scarcity of in-game benefits purely artificial? And are players informed at the outset of the amount of grinding that’s going to be required to access all the game’s content? Or are the developers sitting around running analytics on the players’ in-game activities, ready to release mandatory patches that tweak the game rules to move the goalposts?

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Paging Dr. Wasteland: One man’s crusade to heal DayZ’s zombie victims

arstechnica.com • Archive • Like & Archive • Like

I would have to travel for two days to reach Dr. Wasteland, M.D. He wanted someplace remote. I couldn’t imagine a better place than the abandoned town of Kumyrna.

My avatar remains concealed, wedged under the bush where I left him. I check that he is still hidden from all angles, then open my in-game map. If I head straight to my objective, southeast from my current position, I will have to wade through two large towns. Here in Chernarus, those built-up areas will be filled with the walking Zed and criss-crossed by survivors scavenging for food and equipment. Instead, I decide to head due east, skirting along low stone walls for a kilometer and a half, and then move south towards the Black Forest. I have never been in those woods, but they’re just north of my rendezvous point and offer concealment the whole way to the meeting.

I’m two weeks into my third life in DayZ, a zombie-infused mod for modern military shooter ArmA II that now has over 500,000 players despite still being in alpha. In those two weeks, I’ve stocked my ALICE pack with everything needed to survive the game’s harsh environment for days without having to take the time to hunt and cook: two cans of beans, a hunk of wild boar meat, and three full canteens of water. If I run into trouble, either human or Zed, two morphine injectors can get me back on my feet while the painkillers keep shock at bay. Hopefully I would burn through the six 30-round magazines of 5.45mm ammunition for my AK-74 before it comes to that. If all else fails, I have a single M67 defensive grenade.

Death at this point would force me back to one of the spawn points on the beach, supplied with nothing more than a single bandage and a flashlight. Death means no pistol, no hatchet, no food. Death means a high chance of more death.

In such a state, it could take me a few days of play just to collect enough equipment to survive once more on my own; I don’t have that kind of time. I’m also haunted by the memories of my second life’s final moments, trapped alone in a barn by a pack of zombies—legs broken, unable to move, quickly devoured.

The last item in my inventory is a single blood bag, which I have to chuckle at. It might save my life, but only if I can use it—and you cannot give yourself a transfusion in DayZ. For that, you need another player that you trust, and those are in short supply this far north. That’s why people call Dr. Wasteland, M.D.—the man I’m headed to meet.

The Rendezvous

Enlarge / I caught sight of Kumyrna’s ruined church from the top of a hill to the east at the end of my second night in game.

Just getting to the meetup point is grueling. Taking the safer, more circuitous route through the woods requires a multi-night effort by foot, and “safety” is a relative concept. Here in the central northern section of the 225 km^2 map, I am occasionally forced to silhouette myself against the softly rolling hills, making me easily observable for miles around. This region of Chernarus is helicopter country, and the hope of finding a downed chopper and its accompanying ultra-rare weapons attracts roving bands of heavily armed bandits, starved of ammunition for their powerful guns. They run laps from the northwest airfield, down through the supermarket in Stary and the abandoned church in Novy, then back to their hidden camps in the far northern woods, killing and looting as they go. If I zig-zag a bit and vary my speed, I should make a hard target for anyone drawing a bead on me through a sniper scope.

A couple of hours into my trip, I scan Novy Sobor from the top of a hill with my binoculars, trying to get my bearings. I’ve been glassing the town for perhaps three minutes when I hear footsteps. One… two… at least three sets running towards me from the west. Hidden inside a pine tree, my back against the trunk, I don’t risk any movement. Four heavily armed survivors pass not more than 10 meters from me. Two have DMR semi-automatic sniper rifles, one has a silenced M4, and the last has an M240 machine gun—bandits just back from a raid on the airport, no doubt. Their footsteps begin to fade out to the east before I realize I have been holding my breath—in real life. I re-plot my course to avoid them.

DayZ is a cruel game, in that it forces new players into the world with little to no understanding of its rules. Most players know there are zombies, but few appreciate how fast and how fickle they are until it’s too late. Most know that loot is rare, but few know where to find even those trifling items to be had in the safer parts of the map. The very easiest way to survive—indeed to thrive—in this world is to kill your fellow man. Often you can loot other players without even firing a shot; just listen for the flies buzzing around the carcasses of the dead. But some players refuse the bandit’s life on principle.

After perhaps four hours of careful in-game travel over two days, I can finally see the burned-out husk of Kumyrna’s buildings through my binoculars. It is here that I will, finally, meet the good doctor.

Dr. Wasteland

Enlarge / Despite full camoflauge and night-vision goggles, Dr. Wasteland was taking considerable risk meeting me in game, where our voices were audible up to 80 meters away.

Cries for help

The “need medical assistance” thread on the DayZ forums stands at 50 pages as of July 1, and it reads like a 911 call log. Broken legs, gunshot wounds, survivors passing out from shock… The thread is a haven for people learning the game, and also an unofficial quest board for those on the White List. From pages 49 and 50:

“Morganski”: I am in need of a blood transfusion. I’m down to about 2,500 blood and am passing out all the time. I have 2 bloodbags on me and willing to give one away if you’ll come help me. I am up near Berenzino at the docks.

“gobacktogo”: Does anyone have antibiotics? I really need them. Can not pass a zombie with that cough.

“alexispao”: Need blood badly! It’s around 2.5k and I am very far away from towns (near Vishnoye). If anyone can assist that would be awesome!

“sp2468”: I really need help. I’m right outside a barn on the way to Stary from Electro. I’m on 4k blood… after being attacked by two bandits, one in Electro and one outside of it.

Dr. Wasteland takes the harder path. He is one of the very few people playing the game who is actually here to save his fellow players. He is the progenitor of an elite group of combat medics and the curator of the “White List,” a catalog of the only people in DayZ that you can trust without question.

I find him hidden inside the burned-out church, where he’s plucking zombies off with a silenced pistol, clearing the way for me to reach him. We move away from the buildings and the wandering undead, out into the woods where we chat by starlight through night vision goggles. (We are too afraid of drawing attention to light a fire). He looks around nervously while I transcribe our conversation.

“I’ve never been betrayed by a patient,” he says. “Never. Most of the time I die it’s because I am doing stupid stuff, or a sniper gets me in an open field.”

He holsters his sidearm but still clutches a monstrous M249 light machine gun to his chest. I wonder what people think as they see him running past their position. Are they afraid to fire? Eager to down him and take his kit?

In a world this paranoid, even a healer has his limits. “In every case if I see a[nother] survivor and they don’t see me, I let them go,” he says. “If they see me first, I run. If [we see each other at] the same time and we’re close, I might start shooting. You’ve got to protect yourself.”

Enlarge / Before our interview, the good doctor cleared a path for us using a particularly rare silenced M9 he had been gifted by the high level players that drove him to our rendezvous.

Anti-clan

I’m curious about the infrastructure of the organization. I ask him for details about the clan, about their hideouts and safe houses. In DayZ, a character’s information, including current inventory and map location, is saved on a single central server with the developer, Bohemia Interactive. This means that whatever privately hosted game server you join, your character is always in the same place with the same kit. This allows for exploits, like server-hopping for multiple rolls on the same loot pile, or logging off moments after you come under fire from an adversary. I want to know how Dr. Wasteland and his clan of medics use DayZ’s unique architecture to their advantage. But he stops me short. He’s not starting a clan.

“If we were a clan, we’d have several stockpiles scattered across several servers, significantly sized, but nothing we weren’t willing to lose. I’m encouraging people to not make this a clan,” he says. “If you want to be a medic then all you have to do is provide proof [on the DayZ message boards] that you have helped someone. Because of the way I do it, and my reluctance to create a clan, most doctors make their own stockpiles. I know a few that have their own campsites, three or four doctors together. I know where it is, I will go occasionally. I have my own tent, off in the wilderness on one server, and it has supplies. But most medics on the White List are self-sufficient. And that’s the way I want it. I want them to operate on their own in hostile environments. I don’t want them to register, check in. It’s still their game, their way of playing.”

The ArmA II engine allows for direct chat in-game, so as his avatar’s lips move, I can hear the frantic, almost pleading tone in the doctor’s voice. He wants to make sure that I spin this story the right way.

“What do you have against clans?” I ask him.

Enlarge / Helicopter country. This gray model is surrounded by ammo crates and rare, powerful weapons that attract quite a crowd, including zombie air crew.

“I play the game by myself. If I want to go to Stary Sobor or the northwest airfield, I ask a few folks over Mumble or Steam and we go. Then we break up. And that ties into why I don’t want to make a clan. I have this type of personality, call it the entrepreneurial spirit. In high school I made a few clubs, in college I made a society. But the second I left, they died. If I set up a clan… I’m sure I could set one up, but I don’t want the obligation to always be there for that clan. A clan for me, or at least being the leader of the clan, has the obligation to serve the clan. If I wasn’t serving them every minute, I would feel like I was doing something wrong.”

He’s drawing on the spirit of the lone-wolf player and the virtual cachet of the clan to graft a new role into the game through sheer force of will. His method of paving the way for others, of sharing his prestige with them, is expanding the number of different roles people can take on inside the game world. Where there were only bandits and survivors before, now there are saviors as well.

The folk hero

There are perhaps 15 doctors on the trusted White List at any one time, and Dr. Wasteland figures that together they’ve saved around 400 people. For about a month, he was doing up to four or five rescues a day himself, he says. His patients are strangers to him. They post in the DayZ forums, or friend him on Steam, and he develops relationships with them over the two or three hours it takes to reach them in-game.

Thanks, doc

Player “Karbo” posted his appreciation of Dr. Wasteland and his White Listed medics on May 25:

Man these guys are THE TRUTH… I was stuck in Lopatino (way northwest side) in my longest life up to date and I had 3K blood left going unconscious when I saw this thread for medical assistance. After “pzrapnbeast” and “chenarus transport” reached out to me and went to 2 other towns [on my bad directions] in their helicopter.

I finally spotted the bird… I was hiding out in a huge warehouse and apparently I’m not the only one who spotted the chopper… There were like at least 90 or 100 Zeds around the building and the chopper was just hovering around [machine gunning] the shit outta em… Anyway when it cleared up, “pzrapnbeast” got down with a squadmate and rescued my ass by doing a transfusion on site.

We popped off a couple of more Zeds and then got to the chopper safely… They were even cool enough to let me hang with them for a while since I hadn’t met any friendlies… That rescue mission was something out of a fucking movie. It was AMAZING. I was with my roommate and we couldn’t even believe what we were seeing… Amazing, amazing, really some game without any type of structure these guys come and make real rescue missions on the fly literally… best/coolest/realest situation I’ve ever been in [in] a game! The fuckin TRUTH haha.

“I’ve never gotten so much thanks or so much gratitude in my life… people get so attached to their characters. They are overflowing,” he says. “‘I was gone, there was nothing I could do, and you CAME!’ I’ve gone as far as 13 kilometers. ‘You came, you healed me up, you gave me food, you gave me water, and then you left.’ In a lot of ways, it’s powerful.”

The Doc’s right hand man goes by the handle “pzrapnbeast.” Dr. Wasteland holds him up as an example of best practice in bedside manner. “When I met him he was pretty new, but he already knew a lot. Since then he’s surpassed me as a fighter. It was with him that I treated my first patient.”

Dr. Wasteland sees himself as a teacher, but he has turned into a kind of folk hero in the game, more Robin Hood than The Hero of Canton. “It’s not only medical assistance. It’s advice and direction. I give them my strategies for the best ways to get out of certain areas,” he says. “If someone contacts me and says they’re in Chernogorsk and they need help I tell them, ‘I don’t go into Cherno, it’s too dangerous… you’re going to have to crawl out for me to help you, and here’s the best route, and I will meet you the second you get out.’”

Like a true folk hero, Dr. Wasteland isn’t in this business for (virtual) material gain. “I usually don’t accept payment,” he says. “My biggest objective is to keep repeat customers from happening. Why would I want to take things from them that they need to succeed? The stuff I have now, NVGs, rangefinder… it’s people who like what I’m doing who have given this kit to me. Not patients. The whole reason I got here tonight is someone that likes what I do drove me here in their scavenged car. They gave me the NVGs, rangefinder, and the ride. All for free.”

“High-end players are looking out for me. There have been times when I have nothing, get a patient, and I hit a hospital with nothing, and come up to other players in need asking for help. There have been times that I don’t want to run all the way to the coast and I suicide to get to the coast. People on server chat are like: ‘Who killed you? We’ll get them!’”

Playing a role

Enlarge / My general practitioner is not nearly this heavily armed during my yearly physical.

DayZ is in alpha right now, and each patch presents new challenges and obstacles for the development team and players alike. Those already in the north since the last major patch, 1.7, came into the world during a time when players started with a pistol instead of a flashlight, back before hatchets were melee weapons. Some, like Dr. Wasteland and myself, started back before wood could be harvested and burned to cook meat. The game development itself has forged a narrative, developing from a home-brew variant on a highly successful military simulation and a cockamamie scheme to teach real soldiers the consequences of their actions in the field, into a full-fledged PC gaming phenomenon. All the while, individual players have been telling their own stories, building communities out there in the woods.

Some dark things have happened out there, but some players try to pull the game back into the light. The end game for Dr. Wasteland is something brighter, something more emergent: players working together, creating memories with and for each other.

The memories

Dr. Wasteland, M.D. brings his own brand of drama to the game. His posts on the DayZ forums give some insight into how he sees his role developing in the metagame:

“I just had the saddest moment. My friend Raiko was shot in Pusta, and I was in Prig, so we go to meet on the dirt path between the two towns, and I manage to get to him right as he’s bleeding out. I realize I have no bandages, so I start a transfusion, hoping to get him healthy enough to make it to a structure. He’s counting his blood for me on Mumble, and just as the transfusion finishes, he dies. It was so close that he actually was still standing.

“Can’t save them all, but why did my friend have to die in my arms?”

“One of the things I love about DayZ, maybe because I’m an actor, it’s the story that comes out of the game,” he says. “I have a story that I tell new players. I shot at someone from a farmhouse, and they shot back and they killed me, but they came over and looked me right in the eyes until I died. They shared that moment with me. If I’m role playing my character, I’m glad someone was with them in their last moment. Someone was right there with them.”

“I think one of the things we can do better, we can role play more. Can each of us [on the White List] have more personality? Can we give them not just medical help, [but] give them an experience? They get to tell their friends, not only did they come and help me out, but they gave me a real thing, a story to bring back to my friends. I think we can do better. That’s my goal…  generating a story and not just a service.”

Just as we wrap up our conversation, a massive explosion rips through the air to the east, down the hill between Kumyrna and Staroye. We both swivel around, and Doc switches to his night vision rangefinder to scan farther out into the night. It could have been someone crashing their car, a grenade intended to pull zombies away from a loot spawn, or something more sinister.

“I don’t hear any gunfire. We should probably get out of here,” I say, and he agrees. We say our goodbyes, wish each other luck, and lay down in the brush to log out.

Back to the coast

I die seven days later while crawling up a hill not far from Kumyrna, trying to outflank a nest of snipers that had just killed my traveling companion. I never even saw them, just the smoke from their rifles puffing from the scrub grass a few meters in front of me.

My fourth life starts when I awake on the beach near the port city of Chernogorsk. I’m armed only with a flashlight—which is to say that I am unarmed—and sitting just a few hundred meters west of the largest, most dangerous city in all of Chernarus. I duck down below a line of rocks, the sound of the surf rushing in my ears; it’s been nearly a month since I last heard it.

I set out at a crouching run into the city, towards a marketplace that I know is the only place within kilometers where I can reliably find matches. I’ll need them to start a fire, which is the best way to stay warm and to cook meat. If I’m not very fast and very lucky I could be starting my fifth life in a matter of minutes.

If I make it north again, I will be more careful. Perhaps I will bring more support when I’m out scavenging, or maybe I will try to use a few well-placed smoke grenades to cover my movement when I come under fire. If all else fails, I know that I can call on the services of Dr. Wasteland, M.D. and the other medics on his White List. And at least I’ll have a good story to tell when it’s all over.

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Canada’s New StarCraft II Champion Proves It Isn’t Who You Are, But What You Can Do

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Last weekend played host to the Canadian leg of the StarCraft II World Championship Series, and Blizzard’s outrageously popular real-time strategy game has a new champion: Team Acer’s Sasha “Scarlett” Hostyn.

It wasn’t just that Scarlett won the Canadian WCS tournament—she won it soundly. In walking away as the new Canadian National Champion, she did so with only one loss under her belt—in contrast to the twelve victories she had earned. (The only opponent she did not go 2-0 against was Ostojiy.)

Scarlett comes off as a shy, soft-spoken person, somebody who just wants to sit down and play the game versus getting her time in the spotlight. That spotlight has shown on her, however, and not just because of her skills at StarCraft II. Already seen as out of place by some due to being a girl wanting to play a “guy’s game”, back in April she spoke up to answer rumors by admitting that, yes, she was indeed transgender.

After deciding that I’d say something about Scarlett and her situation here, I then changed my mind and thought that maybe instead I wouldn’t. Scarlett has made it a point that she’s never tried to bring attention to herself in regards to personal matters, or on any other level beyond her skill at the game. And—given how nervous she indeed seems to be when put into the public eye during the various conversations that have cropped up about her—it’s easy to feel like bringing up that topic yet again might be something to avoid.

At the same time—for good or bad—Scarlett has become one of many recognizable faces in the discussion of diversity in gaming, and her win at the WCS tournament last week wasn’t just a win in terms of mouse kicks and keyboard presses. More and more, she is proving what’s most important in gaming: That is isn’t who you are, what you look like, where you come from, or anything else like that, but what you can do in the game. Some in the community may have found reasons to say why she doesn’t belong, but not only is Scarlett proving that she does belong, but that she can soundly kick your ass in the process.

Scarlett’s story isn’t about being a transgender female who plays StarCraft II, or even simply a female who plays StarCraft II—it’s the story of a person who plays the game, and who is damn good at doing so. From watching the Canadian StarCraft II finals to EVO 2012 a few weeks ago, that’s a point that rings clear and true. Race, sex, region, sexual preference, cultural background, gender identity—all that matters is what you can do when you get a controller/joystick/mouse + keyboard in your hands.

Next up for Scarlett is the North American Championship on August 24th, where she’ll be competing with players from the US and Mexico to earn a spot in the World Champion Series Global finals in Shanghai, China.

Good luck Scarlett—not that you’ll need it.

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ihobo: The Thin Play of Dear Esther

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Much has been written about Dear Esther, alas little of it useful. Too much noise has been generated by people objecting to the idea that thechineseroom’s title qualifies as a game – some, like Tadhg Kelly, insist that it is worthy as a piece of modern art, but it isn’t a game because there is no agency. In Implicit Game Aesthetics, this aesthetic judgement  is termed the agency aesthetic, a way of enjoying play that focuses on the player’s ability to enact meaningful change in the fictional world of the game as the sine qua non of game aesthetics and hence a necessary condition of ‘gamehood’. Others object on grounds based directly on the addictive dopamine-hit of winning expressed by the victory aesthetic or the problem aesthetic. But none of these objections help people to understand the play of Dear Esther.

I disavow the term ‘game’ if it is going to get in the way of understanding games, and Dear Esther is a game worthy of study. Both my colleague Ernest Adams and I have long wanted games to be less obsessed with giving players fictional guns to wield and more willing to allow players to enjoy the environment. In a GDC talk, Ernest singled out Far Cry as an excellent example of a virtual world sadly closed to tourists because there is a perpetual gunfight going on inside. I share this sentiment. I have spent many happy hours crafting wonderful environments inside Far Cry’s first-rate level editor that alas fell flat because most were ill-suited for gun violence. Still, I have enjoyed roaming their virtual hillsides and shorelines for hours at an end. How sad that I was the only person who was enabled to do so – especially since examining Dear Esther practically shows how pathetically simple it would have been to have games/art of this kind available for play years before if only the development community hadn’t been so busy with its primary preoccupations.

At its heart, Dear Esther isn’t just built with an FPS engine, it is built as an FPS. Players who have now racked up hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours in control of a disembodied gun-graphic forget that just moving around in these worlds in first person perspective is a skill that has to be learned. For many of us, it has become second nature – the fact that my gaming group has played Counter-Strike for so long has made these controls natural even to me, a player of very few such games. Those who object to Dear Esther on victory or problem grounds should reflect that there are players for whom negotiating the entire island with this set of controls would be a significant challenge. The objection cannot, therefore, be that there is no challenge or goal, only that it is too easy to be a game (which says a lot about the kind of players who would raise such an objection!). In fact, I would say it is still not easy enough, but that is merely my preference for games/art that can reach everyone, not merely every gamer.

The FPS influences of the game run deeper than the controls, though: the level design is written in the language of the first person shooter throughout. That the fictional world of games have a language, a semiotic dimension that communicates, is one of the most interesting things about them – players of Assassin’s Creed, for instance, learned to associate a cluster of birds as a signal to jump from the rooftops, one of many well-formed aspects in this game’s visual language. For Dear Esther, the familiar branching-path layout introduces itself immediately and remains throughout, offering the traditional decision: players try to establish which is the dead-end so they can explore that first (since this is the most efficient method of exploration, and most gamers have explored a great many fictional worlds). Instead of a power up or heatlh, however, they find a part of the story – a different kind of reward, but a reward nonetheless.

However, the game also takes some of its signals from other places – the ever-blinking red light from the antenna in the distance is a classic weenie, Walt Disney’s terms for giant landmarks that guide people precisely because they’re taller than everything else around them. There are also berms, the Imagineer’s term for earthworks that block line of sight, but these are more common in games than weenies for the most part. The mountain in Journey is an obvious exception, a weenie serving the same role as the antenna light – structuring the play of the game towards a signalled goal. Both titles conspicuously borrow successful theme park concepts, gainfully learning from playful architecture how to guide-without-pointing – what is called telegraphing or landmarking in game level design.

The confluence of the weenie (the antenna light high in the centre of the mountain) and the traditional FPS branching path structure creates unusual decisions for the player, ones low in overt reward but high in expressive value. The way forward is seldom unclear, except perhaps for a few moments in the underground caves if the player gets turned around. This leaves them sometimes facing a path split that would put them back to where they have been before. There is no new voice to be heard for retreading old ground, so making this choice is solely an aesthetic decision on the part of the player, to lengthen their path, to see the island differently. I myself could not resist walking back on the sandy shore to view the lighthouse in full, even though doing so did nothing but lengthen my game. Therefore it would be wrong to claim that there is no agency in Dear Esther, it is just incredibly thin.

This thin play is precisely the game’s strength, since it allows the fictional elements more focus. Walking around the island is, many people have commented, meditative. It is strongly reminiscent of the early sections of Silent Hill 2, which also focus more on evoking atmosphere and experience, with challenges and puzzles deferred to later. In Dear Esther, however, those victories-to-come never emerge, and the game seldom uses fear or anxiety to raise the level of excitement. It aims for a much calmer state-of-being, one that I am tempted to compare to the also-meditative play of William A. Romanowski’s tranquility, although the games have very little in common representationally.

Conversely, the mainstream videogames industry specialises in very thick play – the thick cumulative goal challenges of Modern Warfare’s multiplayer mode, the bountiful, overlapping tasks of a Zelda game, or the shop-driven cornucopia of many economic social games. These games are, in the psychological sense, overjustified – the player’s actions are strongly conditioned by goals and rewards, and these determine what the player can and will do at any given time (as discussed last week in Does Overjustification Hurt Games?). Agency in these games seems to be present in abundance, but what the player will be doing at any given time has been specified in advance. At best, they get to work their way through the chocolate box in the order of their choosing, but mostly any sense of agency in these games comes solely from what Espen Aarseth has called transgressive play – finding the unexpected corners of what has been set in advance for the ideal player to do.

Against the overjustification that is necessarily abundant in the commercial mainstream of games, Dear Esther is a welcome offering of thin play, albeit not so thin that you cannot spot its first person shooter pedigree (although it has clearly bred with some mongrel offspring of the adventure game). One of the most stunning things about it is that the game asks you to conduct all the pathfinding of an FPS but without any killing on the way, as if the form of the gun game is now so codified that developers cannot help but use its tropes. Then again, perhaps (as Ian Bogost suggests) the engine itself cannot help but extrude the echoes of its first person shooter heritage.

However you look at it, though, Dear Esther is worth looking at. Provided you are not seeking the addictive fun associated with the thicker offerings in the marketplace, you will find something very different and quite unique here. A beautiful fictional world has been dressed with a brooding backstory, exposed simply by traversing its spaces. It’s a kind of game/art I’ve been waiting a long time for, and that there have been absolutely no good reasons for the industry not to be making. The technology has been around for years, but no-one thought to look at what could be done with those toy-view worlds when you finally silenced the guns. I can but hope that the success of Dear Esther makes it easier to create this kind of thin play in the future.

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EA and their hate of sales

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I don’t know if you heard about this, but sometime last month David DeMartini – the head honcho at EA’s digital delivery platform known as Origin (you know their incredibly shitty spyware ridden attempt to replace Steam) said they will never do Valve style sales events. I didn’t get to comment on this back then, so I wanted to discuss it a bit now. I apologize if this is old noodles for you now. Bear with me – I will try to make funnies along the way.

Here is the direct quote from Mr DeMarcepaniPants:

Obviously they [Valve] think it’s the right thing to do after a certain amount of time. I just think it cheapens your intellectual property.

Right, that pretty much goes directly against everything we know about sales and marketing. It flies directly in the face of what everyone else is doing but let’s see what this guy has to say. Maybe he has a point. Maybe every fucking sales executive in the world has it wrong, and DeMancyPanda has it right.

I know both sides of it, I understand it. If you want to sell a whole bunch of units, that is certainly a way to do that, to sell a whole bunch of stuff at a low price.

Right. So the bottom line is that DeMoodPruneJob does not want to sell a bunch of units. Deep discounts are a way to move large volume of merchandise, and I guess Origin does not want to do that. Wait… No. This makes no sense at all. If you don’t want to sell a lot of video games, then what exactly do you want to do?

The game makers work incredibly hard to make this intellectual property, and we’re not trying to be Target. We’re trying to be Nordstrom.

In other words, Origin strives to be an outlet that does not sell video games. Cause Target certainly does sell games, and it does have bargain bucket deals on them, whereas Nordstrom does neither.

When I say that, I mean good value, we’re trying to give you a fair price point, and occasionally there will be things that are on sale you could look for a discount, just don’t look for 75 per cent off going-out-of-business sales

Ah, got it. Now we are getting to the bottom of the issue. It is a philosophical one. The upper echelons of EA seem to be stuck in the mindset of copyright maximalist. Let me explain DeMarcoPolo’s point to you in a way that does not make him seem like he is snorting coke of the ass of a hooker between sentences.

EA believes that their inventory of virtual goods has some intrinsic bottom live value. This is of course a flawed reasoning. Pretty much everyone knows that while a physical product has a manufacturing cost beyond you can’t discount it without taking major losses, a digital product can make profit at any price point as long as the volume of sales is large enough. For example, if it costs you $5 to factory press a CD, print a label and assemble it, then you can’t sell your product for less than $5. The way you recoup development costs is by taking profits and subtracting the manufacturing costs. But if you are offering a digital product there is no manufacturing costs. You can sell the same $5 product at $0.99 and you can still re-coup your development costs provided you get enough people to buy. That’s how the digital distribution world works.

EA however believes that video games should never be sold at deep discounts, period. The philosophy here is that virtual goods do not take up shelf space. You see, if you run a retail store you probably don’t want to have a hundred copies of a 5 year old game in your inventory. Chances are no one will want to buy that game at full price anymore, and it takes up the limited shelf space you have that could be better utilized for displaying the new, hot releases. So what do you do? You discount the game by 75%, throw it into the bargain bin and hope it clears out before the end of the quarter. Digital games however don’t take up space. You only have to store a 1DVD worth of data on a server somewhere, and that data can generate infinite sales. So since the game is not wasting much space, there is just no reason to discount it. Does it make sense now?

What Steam does might be teaching the customer, ‘I might not want it in the first month, but if I look at it in four or five months, I’ll get one of those weekend sales and I’ll buy it at that time at 75 per cent off.

See, I don’t agree with this at all. You know why? Because when I’m really excited for a game, I don’t wait for Steam sale. I fucking pre-order that shit. I want to play it on day one. And yes, I might later regret not waiting a bit, but I still regularly plonk down money for brand new games. Unless they are Origin exclusives of course – but that’s EA’s own fault for making their delivery platform collect personal info without permission early on. They have lost my trust, and I won’t buy from them. But I digress.

I’m not an economist, but I see the video game market as a pyramid. The very top of that pyramid is composed of a tiny elite group of “Collector Box” customers who are willing and ready to pay upwards of $100 for the new game, as long as it comes in a fancy box with a cool doodad or gadget inside. Second tier customers are pre-order fiends like me who are eagerly waiting shove $70-80 down your throat as soon as you start taking orders. There are significantly more of us than of the collector box dudes. Also, because we didn’t pay for the deluxe-box we can be nickled and dimed with DLC’s quite easily. Third tier are the regular Joe customers who will buy the game at full price in the first week or two of sales and they might even buy some extra DLC’s (but probably won’t).

Below that tier there about a dozen price point tiers for thrifty or budget conscious gamers. Some won’t buy the game at the usual $69.99 price point, but will consider it at $49.99. Others won’t budge until the game is less than $30. At the very bottom of the pyramid there is a huge base group of customers that most companies calls “dirty unwashed pirates” because they have little or no disposable income, and no desire to buy games legally. But if the price is right they might actually consider going legit every once in a while. What is the right price to them? Anything below $10 probably.

What Valve does with their sales is hit every tier of this pyramid in sequence. They get the first three on the launch date. Few months later they drop the price by 10% and get the lower tier. Six months down the road they discount it 30% and get even more people to buy it. A year later they cut the price by 75% and get pretty much all the customers they could possibly get. And it works.

I mean, think about it – if you let the game sit in your catalog, after a few years no one will want to pay a full price for it. You may think that the game is still worth $60 but most customers won’t pay that much. For example, would you pay the same price for the original Deus Ex as for Deus Ex: Human Revolution? No, probably not. But would you buy it for $5? Fuck, why not, right? I know I did. I haven’t played more than 15-20 minutes of it but you know what – at that price point I don’t really care. Valve and whoever owns the rights to the original game just earned $5 from me, whereas at full price they would have earned exactly $0.

You want another example? I paid full price for Max Payne about a month ago. I knew summer sales were coming but I shelled out money for it anyway because I kinda wanted to play it. I should have waited, because just the other day I saw it being at a 50% discount, but alas there was no guarantee it would be on sale. Furthermore you never know how deeply will they discount an item. So DeMustartStain is right in one thing – Valve does train us a little bit, but in different ways than expected. How did Valve train me? It trained me not to wait for sales, because the title I want may not be discounted any time soon. They trained me to impulse buy during sales, because an item usually only stays at 75% discount maybe for one day twice a year. But if I miss that 75% markdown they usually graciously offer a 50% or 30% discount the next day so I can still shell out my money without feeling like a total chump. They trained me to spend ridiculous amounts of money in small increments on games I probably won’t play, just because they suddenly fall below my impulse buy threshold and I can’t resist.

Jason Holtman of Valve recently responded to the EA accusations re-iterating the same point I just did above:

The nice thing is buying a year later at some discount or special promotion, those things used to be really hard to find. It used to be, if you didn’t get a game in the first three months it was around, you were out of luck because you had to find a copy of it. You had to find a box where it was stocked. Now you can do things like say, I never did own XCOM. Maybe I should buy that for $2 or $5 and pick it up. Or I didn’t get that triple-A game from three years ago, maybe I’ll pick that up on a promotion. And that’s making people happier. And it’s making them more willing to even buy the first time release.

That’s the beauty of Steam sales. That’s the beauty of the large digital catalogs that sell not only the new releases but older games at deep discount prices. These older games can consistently earn money for years. Instead of sitting on some hard drive for years, hoping that some collector will come along and spend $60 (which becomes less likely every month as the game ages) the game can make profit every year, albeit at a lower price point. And regardless of what you may believe the game is “really” worth, it is still profit.

Hell, if Valve strategy was bad for content creators, would they use it for their own games? Chances are they wouldn’t.

If we were somehow on a cycle where you could see it, you wouldn’t see us repeating it. We wouldn’t repeat it with our own games. We wouldn’t repeat it with partner games. Partners wouldn’t want to repeat it. Actually everything we see is to the contrary. It’s funny, when you look at the data, things come out and they make you scratch your head for a little bit, and then you’re like, that kind of makes sense.

Holtman confirmed that data they collected from their 40 million customers, over many repeated summer/winter sales cycles completely debunks the EA claims. The sales actually had the opposite effect to the one DeMuppetFist described – the numbers of pre-orders and launch day sales on Steam have been steadily climbing each quarter regardless, or perhaps thanks to the extensive sales.

Valve gets human psychology. They know that while people like to bargain shop, and wait for big sales, big hyped releases will still generate high profits. People want to play the new game and talk about it with friends, and not wait 6 months hoping that maybe it will go on sale. That’s just not how people work.

EA, as usual is out of touch with reality. Not surprising really, seeing how they handle their fight against “digital piracy” – a war that Valve definitively won about a decade ago. No seriously – I actually don’t even want to pirate Steam games. It’s way too much hassle. Hell, Steam made buying games so easy and so addictive that I have bunch of games in my library that I have never played.

You would have to be completely out of touch, and a bit crazy to argue against hard data and real world results. But leave it to EA to do exactly that.

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The Difference Between A Good Video Game and a Bad One

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The Difference Between A Good Video Game and a Bad One

Stephen Totilo

During my first 25 years playing video games I had no theory about what makes a video game good. I knew the good ones when I played them. I just felt it.

Last year, however, I was forced to come up with a theory—a theory about what makes a video game good. I’ve been testing it ever since.

My theory is simple. Whether a video game is about shooting guns, flying planes, jumping over mushrooms, solving puzzles or rotating falling blocks, the game is a series of choices for the player. A good video game presents a series of interesting choices for the player to make. Should the game’s choices be uninteresting—should they barely be choices at all—then the game is bad.

Events in the year 2011 had forced me to come up with some sort of theory about what makes a game good. The events involved Zynga, the company behind FarmVille, CityVille and, as I understood in early 2011, much of the eVil plaguing video games. The Zynga games, I’d heard, weren’t so much games as psychological tricks that baited players to keep playing by enticing them with scheduled rewards, not by entertaining them as games should, whatever that meant. Millions of people may have enjoyed Zynga’s games, I had heard, but the thinking was that millions of people didn’t know what was good for them. These things Zynga made weren’t just bad games, the critics charged; they weren’t even games.

A good video game presents a series of interesting choices for the player to make.

How awkward, then, that Zynga was courting me throughout 2011 to play their games. They did that monthly, contacting me in my capacity as an editor at major video game website in the hopes that I would pay attention to their next big game, appreciate its improvements over the last big Zynga game and wind up with something positive to report about it. I did not want to play their games, but a reporter’s job is not to stem the flow of information. Yes, I told the Zynga people month after month, I’ll try your games.

Before the Zynga courtship began, I had only played FarmVille and only for a few minutes. The beginning of the game had presented no choices that interested me. It pulled me from one action to the next, telling me what to build or collect or what to wait for, giving me no sense that I was making any decisions of my own. It had bored me.

The Zynga people showed me FrontierVille. They told me about the game’s story. That didn’t make me want to play. They told me about Empires & Allies, which borrowed ideas from an old favorite, Advance Wars. Through its combat system I recognized that a player could lose a fight. The losing player, I realized, must have had a choice to make that brought them to victory or defeat. I was more interested in this game. But I tried that one and it, too, quickly bored me.

Then I tried Adventure World, a game Zynga would eventually re-brand as an Indiana Jones aventure. The hero of that series hates snakes, but an encounter with a snake in Adventure World is what convinced me that not only was this one a game, but it had the potential to be good.

I’ve tried to recreate my moments of discovery with some screenshots.

First, I entered one of the game’s maps and realized that I had a choice of where I could go. One path, to the upper left of the frame, would bring me toward bushes through which I’d have to slash. I had no idea if anything was hiding in them. The path to the right would bring me to a piece of red treasure but also toward a snake that was moving in a pattern of its own and might intercept me.

I chose to move toward the treasure—and toward the snake.

I grabbed the treasure, and the snake closed in.

I decided to fight instead of fleeing. I discovered it was too weak for me. I killed it.

These were not the most fascinating choices in video game history, but they were choices. They were choices that would lead to immediately distinct outcomes. They interested me.

When the Zynga people showed me their next game, Mafia Wars 2, I knew what to look for: choices. The more the merrier, at least for Zynga, I thought. The Zynga people were getting better, I had decided. They were no longer making unbranching flow charts for their customers to click through; they were beginning to offer players branches; they were serving decisions that led to distinct consequences.

What Makes Tetris Great

As my idea about choices in video games coalesced, I began to look at my favorite video games differently. I love Metroids and Assassin’s Creeds, which I never doubted were video games. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is my favorite game, though I’m pretty sure that Tetris is the best video game ever made. All of these games support my theory, Tetris most purely among them, which is probably why it’s the best. Each falling piece presents the opportunity for some basic but almost always-interesting choices: Where will I put this piece? Can I rotate it fast enough? Should I drop it swiftly? What is the next piece coming and how will this piece set me up for dropping that one? Do I want to set myself up to score a four-line-clearing Tetris? Etc. The choices come quickly. The choices are always clear. The consequences are sometimes immediate, sometimes delayed. They are always clear.

The game isn’t really about falling blocks; it’s about a cascade of chances to make decisions.

Merihari… and Forks

I reached out to some of the smartest video game creators that I know and I asked them how they could spot a good game and distinguish it from a bad one. My theory was that the big thing was the presence of interesting choices, but what was their theory?

Dylan Cuthbert weighed in from Japan, which thrilled me because Dylan Cuthbert not only makes many video games that I like—Star Fox, PixelJunk Monsters, Digidrive, to name a few—but he has also worked closely with the top people at Nintendo’s Kyoto headquarters where many indisputably great video games have been made.

“Well to begin with, ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’” he told me over e-mail back in the beginning of the year. “For example I think Dark Souls is an amazing game but others might disagree with me. However, for any game that someone thinks is really good there are a few common factors. For me those are: Aesthetics (not just artistic beauty), Polish, Engagement, Originality and final but not least, ‘Merihari’.

“‘What’s merihar?’ you are probably asking; well it’s a Japanese word that embodies rhythm+balance+distribution—for example. imagine a roller coaster ride without merihari, and it would just be a continuous downhill ride. That may sound good, but, actually without the tension of that initial climb, a fairly large chunk of the thrill is lost. It’s why boss fights work well in games. The stage before it builds up the tension. If you have a game that only has boss fights, the experience begins to feel shallow. (a game that sticks in my mind for doing this, unfortunately, is Omega Boost from Polyphony, a game that would have been much better if it had built up the tension before each battle)

Cuthbert: “For any game that someone thinks is really good there are a few common factors. For me those are: Aesthetics (not just artistic beauty), Polish, Engagement, Originality and final but not least, ‘Merihari.’”

“Probably the main thing, though, is that old favourite: tender love and care—when the entire development team has loved and cared for the game that alone can simply make all the difference.”

The merihari thing sounded right. Theory revision! Interesting decisions + merihari. Plus other stuff too, probably.

I got another response, this one from Eric Zimmerman, a game designer and academic in New York:

“I don’t think you can answer the question in simple terms, i.e. a certain kind of game design or a certain kind of player experience,” he told me in an e-mail. “I would have to answer that deciding WHAT constitutes a good experience for your players is part of the design problem itself. A game designer has to decide what success will be for her game. And then she has to design it!

“This idea of a game designer defining her own design problem is particularly salient for game designers, as opposed to other forms of designers (like architects or industrial designers) because our work is usually explicitly non-utilitarian. A fork designer can always fall back on the success of a fork design being the functional use of the fork: someone actually can use it to eat food.

Zimmerman: “Fork designers usually have their own aesthetic goals, for example. But in the case of (non-educational) games, the non-functional goals are ALL THAT WE HAVE.”

“But in game design, we have to create our own criteria for success. This might include aesthetic goals, goals for exploring or conveying ideas, commercial metrics, and technical innovations, etc. Of course, all of these kinds of goals are things that non-game designers can take on, too. Fork designers usually have their own aesthetic goals, for example. But in the case of (non-educational) games, the non-functional goals are ALL THAT WE HAVE.

“So game designers themselves decide what makes a good game good. And it can be unique for each individual designer, and for each individual game a designer might make. A game might be good because it makes you sad, or happy, or angry. It might be meant to relax players, or excite them, to grind them into a zen state or snap them into problem-solving alertness. A game designer might decide success is loving social interaction, or ruthless trash talking, or solitary isolation. Or success might be thinking about violence in a new way—or maybe thinking about violins in a new way. Usually it is a stewy mix of a whole bunch of different and sometimes conflicting success criteria.

“And a designer’s idea of what success looks like for a game can even change as the game is being developed or after it is released. In fact the sweetest pleasure for a game designer can be seeing your game played in ways you never anticipated. That’s when your players teach YOU about what makes a good game good.”

This seems right as well, and helped remind me of my original quandary, which wasn’t to distinguish between good games and bad ones but to determine if something—specifically, the creations of the Zynga corporation—were games at all. Zimmerman did not address that specifically, but his comments about the goals of games helped me realize what it is that Zynga’s big FacebookVille games possess that makes it so hard for me to relax and just play them: their goal of making money for the people who created the game feels apparent every time I make a decision in one of those games. Every time I make a decision, I use one of my rationed pieces of energy, bringing me another step closer to having to wait to continue (that’s annoying) or to bug my friends for help (that makes me feels like I’m marketing the game for Zynga) or paying for more energy (that feels like I’m losing a test of wills with a rich corporation).

Possible theory revision: A good video game not only contains interesting decisions but doesn’t include decisions that make me feel like I’m being manipulated/used/nickel-and-dimed.

Super Mario Decision-Making

In 2012, armed with my theory I’ve been looking for games that are full of choices. The Zynga people still call, and they still show me their games. If the game doesn’t appear to offer choices I haven’t been offered before—or if it doesn’t offer choices that lead to distinct consequences—I lose interest.

As I’ve hunted for games full of choices, I’ve honed my taste in first-person shooters and realized that I’m less interested in the ones that feel as if they pull me down a straight line and not give me a choice how to solve my problems (so that’s why I liked 2011’s Bulletstorm so much… every enemy encounter was ripe with multiple choices about how to win it).

I’ve realized that my low tolerance for Japanese role-playing games might be less due to the stories they present than to the lack of choices available in the ones I’ve played (so that’s why the Fire Emblems are my favorites and why I despise level-grinding, the epitome of the uninteresting choice of how to spend your time).

Full size

My zeal for interactive decision-making has enhanced my appreciation for Angry Birds Space and explained my limited interest in the wonderfully-written but choice-limited Ace Attorney games.

I now crave from the games I play the choice to do radically different things to see what happens next. If I feel like I’m being funneled or forced to do only a certain thing next, I resist. I get annoyed. I dislike the game. This must be why I loved Portal 2 last year, a game that may have had just one solution to each of its puzzles but let me feel like I was experimenting—making decisions—as I tinkered with possible ways through. And this must be why I tired of Uncharted 3’s combat, which offered me the same choices against the same enemies ad nauseum.

When I say I now look for games that are filled with choices, I don’t mean that I’m always looking for BioWare-style role-playing games that are full of branching moral paths. For me, choice can involve having two different targets to shoot. It can involve something as simple and pure and being posed with the quandary of whether or not to jump.

A Mario level rushed through briskly is an encounter with a series of interesting choices.

I’ve always been fascinated by the act of jumping in Super Mario Bros.. I consider it the most perfect activity ever put in a video game (how strange that it’s not in Tetris!). Mario’s ascent is associated with discovery. On his way up he might hit a block that will sprout a mushroom or flower that grants him new abilities. His descent is an attack. On his way down he squashes his enemies. When combined, the ascent and descent are also a necessary means of traversal used to pass bottomless pits or avoid carnivorous plants that emerge from green pipes. Every inch of a Mario level presents the player a string of choices, almost all of which compel the player to decide whether or how to use the ascent, the descent or both to one’s advantage.

A Mario level rushed through briskly is an encounter with a series of interesting choices. The best levels in the series are composed of a series of obstacles that, when approached rapidly, offer a delightful set of quandaries. Do I run and jump over this guy? But then what does that put me in a position to do to the next guy? Do I take this upper path? But then do I miss the power-up that was hidden below? Do I hope on this turtle and knock its shell into the next few enemies, do I hop across each of their heads? Etc.

Perhaps this idea of good games that present interesting choices is too obvious a theory. Perhaps it does not sufficiently sift gaming’s good works from its bad, to say nothing of distinguishing between gaming’s good work and its greats. The theory has aided me, though, because it has helped me respect myself as a gamer and made me more conscious of how a game will use my time. If it offers me interesting choices, second by second and minute by minute, I may enjoy it. If it does not, I’d have been better off not playing it. This is how I now distinguish the good games from what I believe are the bad.

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What makes a good game good? « being playful

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07/11/2012 • 10:07 am

What makes a good game good?

Several months ago, Kotaku editor and game journalism impressario Stephen Totillo asked me to send him my thoughts on what makes a game good or bad. He included what I told him in an essay he wrote about the topic on Kotaku.

My response to his question was that there is no universal definition of what makes a game good or bad – in fact, it is part of a game designer’s work to define success for a particular game. This is complicated by the fact that games (in a classical sense) have no utilitarian function – they have no end outside themselves – as opposed to more functional forms of design like designing a fork or a car. Every game is a sort of system of pleasure, responsible for both stirring up needs and desires in players, and then frustrating and satisfying them in some way.

Stephen has his own answer to the question of what makes a game good or bad: for him it has to do with a game supplying “interesting choices” for participants. This is a great rule of thumb for designing engaging games, and in fact it’s very similar to the idea of “meaningful choice” – one of the central concepts of Rules of Play. Meaningful choice is simply the process by which a player is given choices, these choices have real outcomes, and the game communicates these outcomes to the player.

Actually, the concept of meaningful choice was almost my answer to Stephen’s original question about what makes a game good. But in the end I stopped myself from proposing even that basic idea. The problem with proposing a single model for a proper game is that any rule of “good design” is made to be broken, by some game or another, in some context sooner or later.

So yes, Stephen, “interesting choice” is a great way to understand what makes most games meaningful. And when I am teaching something like Introduction to Game Design, that’s the kind of model I use to help game design students understand the basic idea of engagement through choice and outcome in a game. So in that sense I’d absolutely agree with you.

But what if we took a wider view? Could we create a game that succeeded – despite giving players no meaningful choices at all? There may be some games that already fit this category: gambling games like slots or Roulette, or creation-based games like Exquisite Corpse. Perhaps in the end we’d no longer call it a game, but that is how cultural forms grow and change.

- – - -

Follow-up to some of the comments: The example of Guitar Hero is excellent – it does not appear to have choices because largely it is a contest of skill - which, like a footrace, does not appear at first glance to have any choices at all. Contests and games of chance (like Roulette) in their pure form do not have choices, but of course nothing ever exists in pure form. (Try telling Lance Armstrong that there are no strategic choices involved in a bike race!)

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How I Got Nintendo Powerfest 94

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Two days ago I purchase one of only two Nintendo PowerFest 94 cartridges known to exist. The purchase took 74 emails, 27 months, 6 phone calls, 5 failed meeting attempts, 1 sack of cash, and some additional twists and turns to finally complete. At the final meeting the two PowerFest cartridges were reunited and played in the first competition since 1994. Fellow game collectors might find it interesting to read how it all went down. On April 8th, 2010 I received an email from a person in Canada saying they were reading our article about and noticed that the #1 game on the list, , was a game he owned. He wanted to know if I would be interested in buying it. Nintendo PowerFest was a video game competition Nintendo held in 1994 at locations all over the US and Canada. Nintendo setup competitions at 130 different locations, mainly department stores and Wal-Marts, and let people compete over three days. Nintendo created a special cartridge for the competition that allowed 6 minutes to play Super Mario Bros: Lost Levels, Super Mario Kart, Ken Griffey Jr Baseball. After six minutes you received a total score for all three games. The high score at each location was invited to San Diego to compete in the finals. Nintendo made 32 of these cartridges for the competition and was supposed to destroy all of them afterwards to reuse for spare parts. Before this email was received there was only 1 known copy that survived and it was found at a and later sold to another collector. (You can read about this purchase ). I quickly responded to the email saying “yes” and asked for pictures to verify it was authentic. I wanted to see the game playing on a TV, I wanted to see the circuit board itself, and I wanted to see a picture of the cartridge with a piece of paper with his name written next to it to make sure he wasn’t just sending me pictures available online. The Seller quickly responded back with the requested photos and I made an offer. My initial offer was rejected very quickly because the seller was hoping to receive $50,000. I told him I couldn’t go that high but please keep me in mind if anything changed. I year and a half went by before I heard from the Seller again in December 2011. He simply asked: “Are you still interested?” I offered him a bit less than I did originally because he emailed at a time when I didn’t have as much money to spend on game collecting. Again, he said he couldn’t accept my offer but said he was only asking $25,000 now. We ended the negotiations again. Instead of waiting another year and a half, I decided to pursue the purchase a bit more and try to pull some more funds together. We were much closer to a deal this time than in 2010 and I didn’t want to let this rare game get away. I emailed a week later asking if he would sell PowerFest for a higher price than both my original offers. Again, he rejected the offer saying he had some interest from another collector at $20,000. He was going to wait and see if he could finalize a deal with them first. While I waited to hear about the other deal, I asked where he got the cartridge. In 1994 he worked for a marketing company that had Nintendo as one of its clients. He helped them run the competitions and kept one of the cartridges after they were completed. Because this cartridge was from the opening rounds of the competition home runs on Ken Griffey Baseball are worth 10,000 points. The other PowerFest cartridge was from the finals where Nintendo changed the scoring to 1,000,000 points for home runs. Because of this, both cartridges are unique even though they play the same game. On January 25, 2012 the Seller told me the other deal would not be happening and wanted to know what I could pay now. I offered $12,000 on January 27th and my offer was accepted on the 29th. We had a deal on paper but little did I know that this was just the beginning and completing the transaction would be much harder. I offered to pay all fees for escrow, paypal, or dwolla and pay for overnight mail (the usual way I have completed high value transactions of this kind) but the Seller was uncomfortable shipping anything or accepting online payment. He wanted to meet in person to make the sale. I had some frequent flier miles available and said I would look into flying to Montreal to pickup the cartridge. Unfortunately my miles didn’t work on any airlines flying to Montreal or anywhere in Canada - cross that off the list. Paying for a flight to Montreal would cost about $800 plus staying in a hotel for a night, which was another $100-150. I didn’t want to pay almost $1,000 in “transaction fees” - cross that off. The Seller traveled in the US and Canada on business and over the next few months he emailed occasionally asking if I could meet him in various cities to finish the transaction. Seller: “What about Vancouver, BC on March 7th?” Me: “Sorry, my miles don’t work in Canada.” A few weeks later Seller: “How about April 18th in Boston?” Me: “That is my son’s birthday party. Can’t do that one.” Seller: “Omaha at the beginning of July?” Me: “Sorry, I’m traveling somewhere else already.” It was starting to look like we wouldn’t find a way to meet to finalize the deal. My brother was getting married in Vermont in July and I would be flying out there for the wedding. I would be 3 hours away from Montreal and wanted to know if he could drive down and meet me (I couldn’t drive up because of various obligations as part of the wedding). The Seller thought this was a great idea. We finally had a location and date settled. While all of this scheduling was taking place I had exchanged some emails with Rick Bruns, a fellow collector who owned the other PowerFest 94 cartridge. We talked about authenticity and the history of the cartridge. When I mentioned where we would be meeting he said he lived in Upstate New York, only about two hours from our meeting spot and wanted to know if he could meet us and bring his cartridge so we could compete head-to-head on the cartridges for the first time in 18 years. If we could work out the final detail - Payment - it was going to be a really fun sale. The last big hang-up was the payment. The Seller wouldn’t accept paypal, cashier’s check, or even wire transfer at my bank with him watching the banker transfer the funds. He only wanted cash. My bank didn’t have branches in Vermont and I definitely didn’t want to fly with that much money. I can only imagine the questions and orifice probing I would receive at security with that much money on me. The plan we worked out was this: I would open a bank account locally at a bank that had a branch in Rutland, VT. We would meet in my hotel room to test the cartridge. I would have no money on me at all. After testing we would drive to the bank, I would withdraw the cash, and with all the security camera’s rolling I would hand over the cash. I felt this would be safe for everyone. A month before the purchase I opened a bank account at KeyBank in Denver and transferred the money into the account. The five days before the purchase I called the KeyBank in Rutland, VT to ask if there would be any problem withdrawing $12,000 in cash. They said they would be sure to have the money on hand but when I told them when I would be coming they informed me they are closed on Saturday - the day we had planned for the sale. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that a small town bank would be closed on Saturday. The Seller couldn’t come down Friday to complete the sale so instead of canceling the transaction when we were so close I decided to go to plan B (or was it plan L at this point). I withdraw the cash on Friday, put it all in a purple grocery bag, and kept it in a hotel security deposit box at the front desk until Saturday. I didn’t like this option but this was the only way to complete the deal. On Saturday July 14th at 11:30am the Seller and his mom and dad (brought for security), Rick Bruns and his girlfriend, and me and my brother (brought for security too) met in the hotel lobby. We walked to my hotel room and all seven of us crammed inside to test the cartridge. I put the cartridge into my Super Nintendo, which was hooked to the hotel TV and turned on the power. Nothing happened. I panicked. The system worked yesterday. Was the game a dud? Was it all going to fall apart because it didn’t work? Turns out I was an idiot and had unplugged the Super Nintendo to plug in my laptop. I was so nervous I couldn’t think straight. I played the game all the way through and embarrassed myself with a number of deaths in Mario, driving off course in Mario Kart, and what looked like sacrifice bunts in Griffey. It all added up to a horrible score. After testing was complete we all left the room, locked it up, and went do to the hotel lobby. I asked the front desk to access my security box and they handed me the purple sack with 120 $100 bills inside. The Seller and I walked into a private meeting room alone and shut the door. My brother was outside and would later tell me as soon as the doors shut the Seller’s parents drew a little closer to the door to make sure no funny business went down. I felt like some mobster in a movie handing over a wad of cash. Part of me wanted to complete the role and toss the cash on the table so some of it slid out of the bag in dramatic fashion, but instead I just handed the Seller the money and he started counting. 30 seconds later we opened the door. We all shook hands and the Seller left with his security detail on both sides. All the worst case scenario’s that had wracked my mind for days were wasted anxiety - the sale was complete without a single hiccup. Rick, his girlfriend, my brother and I walked back to the room and hooked the two PowerFest cartridges to two TV’s and played a couple rounds head-to-head. Rick won both times we played. We took a few pictures of the cartridges and even played Nintendo Campus Challenge 92, which Rick also owns. Then we parted ways. I put the cartridge in the hotel safe and wrapped up the transaction with an hour to spare before the wedding.

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