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Polygon And The Documentary That Cured Cancer

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by John Walker on Aug.23, 2012, under The Rest

If you don’t care about videogame websites, move along at this point. I don’t want to bore you. Really, this is mostly aimed at the Polygon team, in the hope that they’ll understand why their trailer for their documentary is not being well received. The entire team seems utterly bemused as to why not just readers but the wider games press is having such an adverse reaction to the two trailers that have been put out so far, and I want to explain it. Here are the two trailers:

Let me stress something from the start. I’ve met a few of the Polygon team, and they seemed lovely. I also happen to be a big fan of the McElroy brothers’ podcast, and as such have a lot of respect for how funny they are. I have nothing personal against any of them, and I want Polygon to be a site that produces fantastic content that I want to read, and becomes a huge success because of it. I’m writing this because I feel like reality has broken down a little, and I want to put the bricks back in place.

It begins with one rather large issue:

They created a documentary about starting their website.

Documentaries are traditionally filmed by documentary makers, interested in a particular subject and asking if they can film somewhere/someone and create a study of it/them. When the subjects themselves are the ones who decide the documentary should exist, well, that’s slightly different. And when it’s paid for (alongside some extremely uncomfortable Internet Explorer sponsorship) from the same massive pool of money that’s allowing a gaming website to take the best part of a year to build itself and hire a huge team of highly paid editorial staff, it starts to look like an act of vanity. Because – and I have to be extremely clear here – it IS an act of vanity.

Edit: According to a report on Ad Age, the suggestion from the documentary came from Vox’s business side, rather than editorial. But, you know, saying “yes” and doing it pretty much qualifies for the above.

It really doesn’t matter how great the documentary is, nor how worthy it might one day be deemed to be – just that this group of people who write about videogames thought that their project was of such worth and interest to the world that every detail should be documented in high definition can only be seen as just enormously egotistical. Being egotistical isn’t necessarily wrong, but you have to – HAVE TO – accept that other people don’t take kindly to egotism, and tend to want to at least question it.

They are taking themselves so incredibly seriously.

I’ve, along with three other colleagues, created a successful gaming website from scratch. I know how hard it can be, and I know what risks have to be taken. RPS has never had a penny of investment, and we’ve never had a penny of debt – we began the site by working in our spare time for a long time, working and fighting extremely hard to get established, get a reputation, and eventually become a profitable business. I don’t mention this because I think it’s more noble than having investment – not at all – but purely to point out that getting RPS going was a very serious business for us. But at no point did we ever become so enamoured with the process that we acted as though we were doing something so ultimately significant. RPS is, no matter how proud of it we are, and how enormously hard we work at it, a site writing about toys and the culture surrounding them. We think we’re one of the best sites out there about games, and we are extremely happy that we do not do a lot of what we don’t like about the gaming press. We know that games cost a lot of money, and our readers take the business of how they spend their money very seriously. But in the end, are we rescuing orphans from Syria? No we are not. Are we saving lives? It’s pretty unlikely. We’re writing about games.

We love games, and we love writing about games. We take it seriously, to an extent. But we also keep it within the boundaries of reality. Apart from when we’re actually shouting at each other, our meetings are never sombre-faced. We don’t sit at tables and ponder the existential nature of our project. We muck around and insult each other’s mothers and make up words. Yes, we get on with planning stuff, but if we were to (go insane and) present a documentary of such events, we’d not look like we’re just back from a funeral. And it’s that presentation of Polygon that is adding to the problems here. It doesn’t matter how much money they’ve got on the line here – to the rest of the world they’re making a website about games, and they need to get to grips with that not being a big deal for everyone else. This po-faced attitude, and the utterly ridiculous statements of the severity and Earth-changing significance of what they’re doing, makes them just look silly. The rest of the world has some perspective on what they’re doing, but they apparently do not. Most people who get into that situation with their personal project only wind up the people they meet – these guys have chosen to film it and show it to the world.

They have blown things entirely out of proportion.

Someone relocating for a new job isn’t a very big deal. I’m sure it’s a big deal for the person involved, and their family. But the idea that it’s of such extraordinary import that it not only merits filming for a documentary, but is cut into a three minute trailer, just underlines what’s gone so very wrong here. They appear to have confused what’s important to them with what’s important. They appear to have confused what matters to them and their lives with what matters. The whole production demonstrates such enormous inward-looking and insularity that it comes across as narcissism. So of COURSE people are going to react badly to that. When their teaser contains statements about how this site going wrong could “muck up entire lives”, it’s unavoidable just how loose from reality they appear to have become. Or are at least presenting themselves as having become.

The longer trailer’s content takes this to a new level, as the site they’ve not yet made public is described as being some sort of valhalla for the internet, a new-found promised land that will change everything, change the way we view the universe. It’s literally described as having been thought “impossible”, until they came along, until this group of maverick geniuses managed to solve the Internet’s Last Theorem and allow us to ascend as a people. It’s so ludicrously overblown, so unbelievable pompous, and it’s being presented with an utterly straight face and not even a glimmer of modesty or humour, let alone irony. And people are going to react to that.

They don’t appear self-aware.

The reaction to the negativity has, sadly, mostly been met by incredulity and disgust, rather than any demonstration of introspection. The tweets that have appeared in response to criticism, or entirely deserved pomposity-pricking, have been complete denial. Rather than taking stock, asking whether there’s a reason for this reaction, and questioning the direction, there’s instead been a wall of anger or self-pity. There’s no sense of their saying, “Woah, yeah, we did take this a bit too seriously, eh?” Instead there’s the sense that the idea that a documentary of this nature should be criticised is utterly unacceptable – how dare we?! And that only makes it worse. They’re a talented bunch, and they’re attempting something they believe will be special. That’s great. But oh boy, you need to think about how you present yourself to others. And when it’s to tell people that you are incredible, that what you’re doing is unsurpassed, in a documentary about yourself that you’re making yourself – people are going to take the piss. Because that’s when taking the piss is needed.

These documentary trailers are ridiculous. They are pompous, they are self-aggrandising, and they are utterly without perspective. That’s not reflective of the writers themselves (well, it might be, I barely know them – but I’m not making that accusation), but rather an explanation of why they are being so poorly received. And the trailers are also pretentious. And let me be clear about that:

I believe that the word “pretentious” has become warped by misuse on the internet. Mostly it’s now used to mean “confidently stating something someone else disagrees with”. That’s not it at all. It means to be pretending to be something you’re not. And that’s what these trailers portray – the pretence of saving orphans from Syria, when in fact they’re writing about console games on a website. And that loss of perspective, and the stupidly serious way it’s all presented, and the awkward fact that it’s presented at all, is riling people. And that should have been expected. And it now should be taken on board.

I’m going to watch it, because as someone who’s created a website, I’m interested to watch others doing the same. And maybe these daft trailers aren’t representative – maybe it will be great. I’m not making a judgement on that at all. But I do want to just bring back reality.

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Man wird nicht jünger

Ein Warnhinweis zu HD-Remakes

Veröffentlicht: 19.08.2012 | von: loess | Rubrik: Blog

Früher war alles besser. Da ist man im Bus noch aufgestanden und hat anderen seinen Platz angeboten, da war die Jugend noch nicht so verdorben und MTV noch ein Musiksender. Wer älter wird, der trauert wohl zwangsläufig irgendwann der guten, alten Zeit hinterher und beklagt die aktuelle. Es ist etwas überaus menschliches, in Erinnerungen zu schwelgen und sich Trost in der eigenen Vergangenheit zu suchen, wenn die Gegenwart nicht mehr den Erwartungen entsprechen kann. Kaum verwunderlich also, dass derlei nostalgisches Gebaren längst als ein branchenübergreifender Wirtschaftsfaktor erkannt wurde, von dem neben Hollywood mit seiner Remakeflut, der Musik mit ihren ’80er-Retrosounds und McDonald’s mit dem McRib nun auch endlich die Spieleindustrie profitieren will. Die gute, alte Zeit hält unlängst auch auf aktuellen Heimkonsolen Einzug und sie ist schöner als je zuvor, wenn man all den Werbeversprechen Glauben schenken darf. Kindheitserinnerungen gibt’s jetzt nämlich auch in HD!

Manche Dinge sollten einfach im Keller bleiben.

Die Liste der hochskalierten Remakes ist lang. Neben wirklichen Klassikern wie Ico oder Metal Gear Solid wird längst auch spielerische Alltagskost wie Jak & Dexter und Serious Sam in höherer Auflösung erneut auf den Spielemarkt geworfen, der dadurch nicht mehr nur stagniert, sondern in gewisser Weise sogar zu degenerieren droht. Ist es ja eigentlich  schon schlimm genug, dass dank einer unüberschaubaren Anzahl an ewigen Fortsetzungsreihen seit einigen Jahren eigentlich eh hauptsächlich bekannte Titel mit minimalen Modifizierungen in unseren Laufwerken landen, stellen die aufgehübschten Remakes nicht nur einen sentimental geprägten Rückschritt in der Zockerkarriere vieler Spieler und ein kreatives Armutszeugnis der Branche dar, sondern manipulieren sie auch unsere selektiven Erinnerungen an jene Titel, die uns einmal so viel Freude bereitet haben.

Wenn er fällt, dann schreit er!

Das Gedächtnis ist jedenfalls in den seltensten Fällen lückenlos und gerade im Bezug auf vergangene Liebschaften und erste Videospiele häufig romantisch verklärt. Man vergisst sehr leicht, wie unvollkommen und technisch unausgereift ein Spiel war, da die Vergleichsmöglichkeiten fehlten. Es war eben alles noch so neu und aufregend, etwaige Probleme oder Unzulänglichkeiten waren durch die rosarote Brille nicht sichtbar. Die Tatsache, dass sie freitags nicht kann, haben Smudo und Thomas D ja auch sehr lange gepflegt ignoriert, bis schließlich heraus kam, dass sie von dieser Frau nur finanziell ausgenutzt worden sind, damit diese eine ganze Reihe dicker Pullis tragen konnte.

Und wo ist jetzt die Taste für die Auto-Kill-Funktion?!

Ähnlich wie einst die Fantastischen 4 sind in den vergangenen Wochen auch viele Käufer der HD-Version von Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater aus allen Wolken gefallen. Unpräzise Steuerung, Glitches, Bugs…das ist nicht das Tony Hawk’s, was sie in ihrem Kinderzimmer mit den Schulfreunden bis zum Erbrechen gezockt hatten. Wer jedoch die Möglichkeit hat, die alten Teile noch einmal anzuspielen, der wird feststellen müssen, dass spielmechanisch tatsächlich keinerlei Hand angelegt wurde. Grund für diese Fehleinschätzung und den Bruch mit dem einst geliebten Spiel dürften nicht zuletzt die vergangene Zeit und der gestiegene Anspruch an ein Spiel sein. Als im Jahr 1999 der erste Teil der Tony Hawk’s Reihe erschienen ist, da waren auch gerade die Ö La Palöma Boys in den deutschen Single-Charts ganz weit oben. Und so wie an diesem Öhrwörm der Zahn der Zeit genagt hat, so betrifft der Faktor Zeit ein Videospiel oftmals noch viel stärker, da der Stand der Technik sich in diesem Bereich noch wesentlich zügiger wandelt. Nachdem also viele Skateboard-Fans sich mittlerweile eher an die Mechaniken der Skate-Reihe von EA gewöhnt haben, kann es praktisch kein mentales Zurück in eine Zeit geben, in der man diese Spiele nicht kannte. Gleiches gilt für Titel wie Splinter Cell und dem kommenden Baldur’s Gate, deren ursprüngliche Spielmechaniken, beziehungsweise deren Genres, sich im Laufe der Jahre so stark verändert haben, dass diese damals so hochklassigen Spiele auch nach der HD-Kur heute antiquiert und hölzern wirken. Nach wie vor großartige Spiele zwar, keine Frage, aber völlig aus der Zeit gefallen.

Ob sie nach dem Mörserangriff noch so frech grinst?

Erschwerend hinzu kommt, dass nicht nur Nostalgiker zu den HD-Remakes greifen, sondern auch der ein oder andere Serien-Neuling. Jemand, der für Shadow of the Colossus zur PS2-Ära noch zu jung war und der mit der aktuellen Konsolengeneration seine Videospielsozialisation erlebte, der wird vermutlich zunächst ein wenig ratlos dreinschauen, wenn ihm plötzlich nicht mehr jeder notwendige Tastenbefehl oder die genaue Richtungsangabe zu seinem nächsten Ziel auf dem Bildschirm vorgekaut wird. Selbst mir fällt es mittlerweile schwer, den Zeitpunkt zu erinnern, zu dem ich das letzte Mal tatsächlich ein spielbegleitendes Handbuch gewälzt habe. Es ist einfach so, dass man bestimmte Entwicklungen im Bereich Videospiele nicht mehr rückgängig machen kann, da sie, so lange man nicht tatsächlich die letzte Dekade in einem von der Außenwelt abgeschotteten Bunker nur mit Civilization zugebracht hat, längst in unser Fleisch und Blut übergegangen sind. So sehr auch immer auf die Casualisierung geschimpft wird, ihre Komfortmechanismen sind Gewohnheit geworden und gerade jüngere Gamer, die nie die “gute, alte Zeit” kennengelernt haben, werden kaum nachvollziehen können, warum sich so manch einer der alten Hasen diese komplizierten und unspektakulären Videospielrelikte zurückwünscht. Schließlich wirken Splinter Cell: Conviction und Tomb Raider Underworld im Vergleich zu ihren Vorgängern auch nach deren HD-Lifting noch wie Scarlett Johannson im Vergleich zu…na, im Vergleich zu einer 80-jährigen Version von Scarlett Johansson, von mir aus. Die mag dann einmal ein heißer Feger gewesen sein, aber wenn man die Wahl hat, spielt man doch lieber mit der jüngeren. So eine schöne, ausgedehnte Runde Worms Armageddon beispielsweise.

Wem seine schöngefärbte Erinnerung an die Anfangstage seines Zockerlebens lieb und teuer ist, der sollte also besser einen großen Bogen um die hochaufgelösten Kopien jener glorreichen Tage machen. Und wessen erster Videospielkontakt auf einer PS3 stattfand, der sowieso. Wer will schließlich schon einem solchen Jungspund erklären, weshalb das vorherige Durchlesen eines hundertseitigen Handbuches fast genauso viel Spaß gemacht hat, wie das Spiel selbst? Oder warum im Regal noch eine angestaubte Eiffel 65 CD steht. Oder was überhaupt eine CD ist. Ich versteh’s ja selbst nicht mehr.

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What makes a game indie: a universal definition « sinisterdesign.net

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What makes a game indie: a universal definition

I’ve been content to stand on the sidelines of the “what is indie” debate for a number of years now, satisfied that whatever the outcome, it wouldn’t really matter.

I no longer think that. When a multi-million-dollar game with a team of nearly 50, created with the backing of a major publisher, can get into an “indie” bundle with nothing more than a collective shrug of indifference, the indie community is in deep trouble. This article is an attempt to address a root cause of the problem.

“Indie” is not beyond hope

There is power in a definition. The indie community has had ample opportunity over the years to define itself, to shape its own boundaries. But at some point, it seems we all just gave up on reaching a common, workable definition of “indie.”

Earlier this year, certain games journalists essentially declared the term dead, or at least so incoherent that it doesn’t matter anymore. This process heated up with a Eurogamer article quoting numerous developers providing largely incompatible definitions of “indie,” then came to a head shortly thereafter with Nathan Grayson’s announcement that “the word ‘indie’ has become effectively meaningless.” And now, the carrion birds are circling.

The problem is, “indie” isn’t actually dead. Not just yet. Take the Grayson piece, for instance. He seems to confuse denotation with connotation:

Indie is cool. Indie is hip. Indie is smart, chic, and sexy. Indie isn’t pretty, but it gets the job done. Indie is down-to-earth, the work of tireless blue collar DIY craftsmanship. Indie is pretentious, a haven for over-inflated egos and introspection with all the depth of a sun-dried puddle. Indie is big on head-in-the-clouds dreaming, but it crashes and burns in terms of execution. Indie is mechanically sublime – not a wasted input or animation. Indie is the future. Indie is stuck in the past.

That’s 100% connotation there; it has nothing to do with the core meaning of the word. If I were to say, “Michael Bay movies are stupid; Michael Bay movies are exciting; Michael Bay movies are well-produced; Michael Bay movies are trash,” at no point am I actually defining what Michael Bay movies are. To the contrary, I’m just saying random things about them, throwing out a word salad of tangential associations.

People can have different opinions about the category “indie games” without disagreeing on what indie fundamentally is. As we’ll see below, a significant chunk of the definitions indie developers have advocated for are merely connotative, and pose no obstacle to coming up with a definition that has some actual substance.

Toward a good definition

Everyone has an opinion on what “indie” means; contrary to what the articles above seem to suggest, however, not all of those opinions are equally valid.

We define words for practical reasons: to be able to easily categorize things with similar qualities, and to delineate the boundaries of those categories. Defining a word is not an opportunity to be a special snowflake, or to show just how badly you want to get rid of the star-off machine. Definitions have to make useful distinctions, or else they serve no purpose.

Developers seem to have a hard time understanding the collective nature of this enterprise. We’re a group used to coding, where we sit by ourselves and name variables day in and day out. Ultimately, what we call the variables doesn’t really matter, so long as we can remember what they do. They’re just placeholders for a fixed, largely arbitrary meaning that we define on a whim according to our individual needs.

So perhaps it isn’t surprising that every developer seems to have their own, self-serving definition of “indie.” Developers with little money insist that it means “a poor developer living on Ramen noodles”; developers who work with publishers insist on a definition that conveniently leaves out “independent of publishers.” It’s time to demolish these transparently flawed definitions and move toward something that benefits the community as a whole.

What Indie Isn’t

In the interests of helping narrow the field a bit, let’s reject some of the untenable definitions people have been bandying about.

6) “An indie game is a game made with a small budget.”

This is perhaps the least objectionable of the bunch, but I’d argue that it still fails as a proper definition. To begin with, it confuses connotation with denotation. Many–if not most–indie games have a small budget, it’s true, but that’s a consequence of eschewing the financial support of publishers. It’s a symptom of being independent, in other words, not the root cause.

Let’s try a simple thought experiment: Bob and Jim are friends. Bob is an artist and designer; Jim is a programmer. They decide to take their meager savings and make a game together. They work seven days a week, living off the cheapest food they can and avoiding any semblance of a social life. They use free tools and royalty-free sounds and music. Even then, they are barely scraping by. In the midst of development, Jim wins the lottery! They continue developing the game between the two of them using the exact same methods as before, but now can pay themselves enough money to eat well and occasionally go out with friends.

Question: did their game suddenly stop being indie when they got that influx of cash? Definitionally, the answer has to be “no”: their development process didn’t change. The game continued on its previous trajectory. If the answer were “yes,” then we’d have to be prepared to jettison every game that has a successful Kickstarter out the indie airlock.

Now, don’t get me wrong: a big budget can certainly impact the way in which a game is developed. “Can”–it doesn’t have to. Budget size is, at best, a factor to be considered; as the core definition of indie, however, it is a red herring.

5) “An indie game is any game made by an indie developer, and an indie developer is any developer that is independently owned and operated.”

This definition has two parts and world of problems. For one thing, it’s massively over-inclusive. Infinity Ward, for example, wasn’t owned by Activision until after it shipped Call of Duty back in 2003. Under this definition, Infinity Ward was an indie studio back when it developed CoD because it was independently owned and operated, thereby making Call of Duty an indie game.

In case that doesn’t give you pause, here are some other studios that are independently owned and operated: Ubisoft, Epic, Valve, and Bethesda. These companies are so big that they publish other studios’ games, own the distribution platforms other studios use to publish games, and/or flat-out own other studios. Calling them indie is like calling Exxon Mobil Corp. a gas station.

There are still more problems with this definition. Regardless of whether “independently owned and operated” is a sufficient criterion for indie (it isn’t), one cannot consistently, sensibly determine whether a game is indie by reference to its studio. Many independently-owned studios take different tacks with each game. One game might be a contract job for a publisher or another studio, while the next game might be their own independent work.

Suppose for a moment that Fictitious Studios–an independently owned and operated game developer–takes on a job from EA creating a first-person shooter. The game is called Modern Duty: Call of Warface: The Gunnining. It’s derivative tripe, sure, but they need to keep the lights on and the air conditioners running. EA gives Fictitious millions of dollars, Fictitious hires a huge team, and they begin to build the game under EA’s close supervision.

EA Marketing interferes constantly during development. Game mechanics are cut to add new graphical flourishes; whole sections of the game have to be remade every few weeks to add in cut scenes at EA’s whim. Finally, the exhausted studio launches the game. They’re not happy with it, but that job allowed them to survive while they plan their next project: a platformer with a time/physics gimmick and black silhouette graphics, with a central metaphor about the alienation of man in modern society.

Two questions: (1) Is this studio indie? (2) If so, does that make Modern Duty: Call of Warface: The Gunnining indie? If you answered “yes” to both of these questions, congratulate yourself: you just killed indie games.

4) “An indie game is a game where the IP is owned by a developer that is independently owned and operated.”

This has all of the same problems as the definition above it. Name a huge, multi-million dollar developer, and I’ll show you a developer that is independently owned and operated, with ownership of its own IP. Ubisoft, Epic, Valve, and Bethesda–all of them are indie under this definition. This definition is worse than useless.

3) “An indie game is a game that innovates.”

This definition provides a great example of confusing connotation with denotation. It mistakes a thing commonly ascribed to indie games with the definition of indie games themselves. Michael Bay movies are frequently loud and shallow; however, “loud and shallow movies” is not the definition of “Michael Bay movies.” Likewise, though many high profile indie titles are known for innovating, “innovative games” is not the definition of “indie games.”

This definition is also much too vague, or else too overinclusive. Every game ever created that wasn’t just a straightforward clone of something else did something different. Whether or not that difference was “innovation” is entirely subjective, and not a firm foundation for defining a category of games.

Finally, this definition is ahistorical: it completely casts aside any pretense of maintaining a connection to the word’s origins in “independent.” Given the source for this particular definition, I also feel obliged to point out that the omission of “independence” seems a touch self serving.

2) “An indie game is a game that was made with love.”

This definition, too, suffers from a variety of problems. It suffers from the same ahistorical problem as the definition above, as well as the fact that it’s really really vague. Made with “love”? Could you imagine having to determine whether a game gets into the IGF or Indiecade based on that standard? We could guess at what “love” means here, perhaps, but the fact that we have to guess at all is clearly a problem.

Even worse, this definition sets forth a standard that is completely unverifiable. It depends entirely upon the motives of the creators. How, exactly, does one determine whether a game was “made with love”? Must we sit down and interview the members of every team that develops a game and ask them? What if only 50% of the team says “yes”? What is the threshold for determining that a team possessed sufficient “love” while creating the game?

The best case I can make for this definition is that it means “the developers put a lot of time and care into developing the game,” but this puts us in an ugly position. Either everything is indie, or we have to go around assuming–without any real evidence–that certain developers who poured months or years of their lives into developing a game didn’t really care about what they were doing that whole time. That’s a pretty nasty assumption to make, no matter how you feel about a game.

In short, this definition is a muddled mess that could never be put to any practical use. It’s impossible for me to imagine that the people who say things like this are really trying to think of something practical and workable–it seems they’re just offering a sound bite that they think will sound good in the gaming press. Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing that any self-respecting games journalist would treat an answer like this as a serious contender for the meaning of “indie game” in the first place.

1) “An indie game is a game that has the indie spirit.”

I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve heard this one, despite the fact that it is probably the worst definition of a word ever offered in recorded human history.

Everyone, please listen up for a second here, because I am about to invoke a general principle that applies in all situations, not just with the word “indie”: you cannot define a word using that same word in the definition. Suppose I were to tell you that I bought a brand new Thingymazoozle. “What is a Thingymazoozle?” you might inquire. Suppose that I were to reply, “A Thingymazoozle is a thing with the spirit of Thingymazoozle.” You might rightly wonder if I had sustained some kind of traumatic brain injury.

Saying that indie games are “games with the indie spirit” is about as helpful as saying that a Thingymazoozle is “a thing with the spirit of Thingymazoozle.” It doesn’t actually mean anything, because you haven’t yet defined the word you’re using as the crux of the definition. You’re just spitting the same word back at the person. Stop it.

What Indie Is (Independent of Publishers)

So now that we’ve cast aside the most common unsatisfactory definitions, let’s lay a foundation for a definition that is actually useable by–and useful to–the game development community.

At the outset, indie absolutely has to indicate a game developed independent of any publisher intervention. This is how the term first originated, and it remains absolutely core to the concept of being an indie developer today. Publisher intervention is notorious for killing the creative and experimental spirit that we value in the indie community. (In case you’ve somehow managed to avoid catching wind of this fact, here are some examples to read about.)

Because these nasty effects on a developer’s creative process take place during the course of development, we’re mostly concerned about developer independence during the course of development. A publisher spontaneously coming in at the close of development to handle marketing and distribution in exchange for a cut of profits is largely inconsequential as far as its effect on a game’s artistic integrity, as the game is already done. Thus, the game completed while indie remains indie.

By that same token, if a game is created under a publisher’s thumb and the creators somehow regain exclusive control of the IP and development process after development is over, the game does not somehow transform into an indie game. Again, it’s the conditions during the course of development that impact the game’s final shape; that is the only time period in which a developer’s degree of artistic freedom impacts the game she creates, and thus, it is the only time period that matters for purposes of determining whether the resulting game is indie.

But what about post-release content? After all, Double Fine added some extra content to Psychonauts after they regained the IP. Does that transform the game from published to indie? I think the answer to this has to be “no.” After all, mods are almost exclusively the work of hobbyists and groups independent of publishers; if that sort of additional post-release content were sufficient to change a game’s definition, every major published game with mod support would turn “indie” shortly after release.

What Indie Is (Independent of Licensors)

It is generally thought that an indie game must employ intellectual property owned by the developer. This is primarily a business consideration when working with publishers, however, and is therefore not especially helpful to the definition, given that we’re already assuming no publisher relationship.

There is a related issue that’s worth talking about, though: IP licensing. When licensing a game’s IP from an external source, the IP owner will typically have the right to meddle in the game’s development as a condition of the license. As with obtaining funding from publishers, licensing external IP means ceding creative control to an outside party.

There is another reason I phrase this as “being independent of licensors” rather than “owning one’s own IP,” however. Developers sometimes choose to develop games based on IP in the public domain. For example, indie Cthulhu games abound despite the fact that the developers do not own (and cannot own) the Cthlhu Mythos IP. The key here is creative freedom, not IP ownership; thus, a game need only be free of IP license agreements to be indie.

What Indie Is (Small)

The size of a developer has to be a factor as well. If size were no object, then every massive publisher that develops its own in-house games with teams of hundreds and budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars would be indie. Gears of War 3 would be indie. Skyrim would be indie. The results are self-evidently absurd.

I stated above that budget is not determinative; that remains true. However, a huge budget is usually indicative of a huge number of full-time employees working on a game. Unlike budget, team size has an unavoidable impact on the way in which a game is developed. I quote from my previous article on this subject:

When you command a team with dozens (much less hundreds) of employees, you inevitably limit the amount of creative input each can realistically add to a game. The game becomes less a work of authorship, and more a product that each team member sees only a limited piece of.

Big team size also sabotages the system of direct give-and-take between developers and fans that indies are known for. Once a team grows past a certain size, there isn’t just one or two people required to implement ideas and listen to feedback anymore—there is a whole group of people who need to be coordinated, and by someone who probably doesn’t have time to interact with the community him or herself. Thus, the so-called “big indies” hire community managers, and the people actually developing the game vanish behind a veil of anonymity.

The key thing here is an intimacy of connection–of the developers to their game as a whole, and of the developers to the community of fans–that is lost along with the diffusion of responsibility inherent in a large team. The larger the team, the smaller a piece of the game any given team member is responsible for fashioning. The larger the team, the less authority each individual has to speak for the team, and the less capacity each member has to respond to feedback from the community.

I’m hesitant to put a solid number to this part of the definition; that task seems much better suited to people with access to empirical data about how the dynamics of game development change with increasing team size. For the sake of starting a discussion, however, let’s say that as a team reaches two dozen people, the participants lose their intimate connection to the game as a whole, and to the fans who follow it. (I’m willing to be convinced that a different cut-off point makes more sense; or alternatively, that a different way of approaching the size question works better than a strict numerical cut-off.)

Conclusion

We thus arrive at a workable, core definition of “indie game”:

A game that is both (a) developed to completion without any publisher or licensor interference, and (b) created by a single developer or a small team.

By adopting this process-focused definition, we tie “indie” to the material conditions that consistently permit games to be created with a degree of authorship and artistic integrity. This focus on material conditions during the course of development avoids the absurd results of highly formalistic definitions; and simultaneously, it allows us to sidestep the problems of inconsistency and vagueness that plague definitions dependent on the beholder’s subjective opinions or the developers’ perceived attitudes toward their own games.

There is a special reason why we use the word “indie”: it is a way for small, independent developers without ties to publishers to effectively market and distribute their games. It doesn’t matter how many developers publicly claim not to care whether a game is indie–that’s not the measure of the word’s value. The measure of its value is in the existence of XBLIG. It’s in the success of games on the Apple App Store. It’s in the ongoing crowdfunding revolution. “Indie” empowers the smallest and the freest of game developers. It is a declaration of creative freedom. It is a declaration of creative control. The day that changes is the day that “indie” must be set alight and left to drift to the horizon, buoyed along on the sea of forgotten words.

Craig Stern is an indie developer currently working on the multiplayer turn-based tactics game Telepath Tactics. He is the founder of IndieRPGs.com, and can often be found rambling in short, 140-character bursts on Twitter.

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How To Make A Game: learning through play - Edge Magazine

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How To Make A Game continues with a look at the games that are encouraging players to tinker under the bonnet.

-

The game industry has never been more interactive. Not just in terms of the new frontiers of input methods – from motion controls to breakthroughs in haptic feedback and virtual reality – but the very means by which games are being created and distributed. More than ever, it’s players who are being empowered to become the designers, developers, programmers, artists, and so forth. Games such as Endless Space and Miner Wars are being shaped by online communities during their development. Valve’s Source Filmmaker invites us all to become machinima auteurs, manipulating its character models and telling our own stories with them. Then there’s Gameglobe, which is aiming to become the user-generated content equivalent of YouTube for games.

These creative environments are feeding a powerful desire among players to make and share digital media, which was the sole domain of experienced professionals a few years ago. User-friendly in every sense, such tools are honed to inspire absolute newcomers to get stuck into making games within minutes. Whether they’re powerful and flexible level editors for existing games, such as Bethesda’s Creation Kit for Skyrim, or full game creation tools like GameMaker, they tend to hide great swathes of the complexities of what’s really going on beneath their interfaces in a bid for user empowerment, but usually offer the chance to dig into the code, too.

After a long period in which most games were closed to picking apart and tweaking, then, a new generation of players is growing up with viable avenues  to create and share its own games. “In a way, we’ve lived in a kind of 20-year lull where stuff was not really hackable or understandable,” says Alex Evans, co-founder of LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule. “Preceding that, there was the concept of the tinkerer; everything was mechanical, cars were things you were allowed to tinker with – think of Dad in a garage. Then we went through this sort of ’80s and ’90s period where it was all miniaturisation and you can’t touch it.”

LBP players can share objects, aiding creation

Evans, along with his colleagues at Media Molecule, was of the Spectrum and Commodore generation (“Well, I was Spectrum, [Mark Healey] was Commodore”), in which the prime interface to the computer was a programming environment. “That generation where programming was built in and almost assumed, and we kind of missed that.”

That’s what inspired LittleBigPlanet, the series that’s done a huge amount to take the craft of making games to the mass market. It has compressed and condensed the language of design into a simple and inviting set of tools and widgets. Given physical properties, they are often awkward to use, but being so they encourage experimentation and can be powerful for those who engage with their technicalities. “What made LBP special, and there are others now that have done variants [of it]”, explains Evans, “is [we] packaged up the distribution with something accessible. But we’re just one data point, there’s this massive spectrum of ways you can give out the tools.”

Evans’ hope is that we “get to the point where kids in the next generation after us have this expectation of things to be hackable, customisable,” and LBP has proved that we may do so. “One of the funny things about LBP,” says Evans, “is I expected it to be timid and take time to grow – and it has, virally, in terms of the number of people playing it. But actually, within 24 hours of the beta going out for the first game four or five years ago, it was almost instant that people were making great stuff with it. It was much more rapid than any of us had ever expected, where people just leapt on the potential of it. It’s so terrifyingly fast these days – that’s so exciting. You put something out there, and [you know the expression] ‘You give them an inch, they’ll take a mile’? Well, in the internet age, you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile within ten seconds of launch, or even before launch, and that is something I’m not quite used to yet.”

Today, there are many other projects that are carrying on the same techno-liberal ethos, hoping to put the power to create in the people’s hands. On one end is hardware, with Raspberry Pi, the $25 computer, at its head. With its low price, it’s designed to be accessible to all (if you can stomach the waiting list). Ready to run Linux and supplied without even a casing, the device is also designed to help its users understand what a computer really is, from the chips on its tiny board to the programs that run on it. It’s turned out to be an enormous success: after opening up orders in February, its founders aimed to ship 10,000 units in its first year, but now expect to send 500,000 to schools, parents and – this is a large proportion of its market, we’ll wager – to aging members of that Spectrum generation. It’s a group hoping to get their hand in again as their consumer electronics get more and more beautiful, and harder and harder to hack.

On the other hand is software itself. There are the level-editing kits, and there are also the likes of 3D game engine Unity. The latter, by the nature of being free to use (though it requires a licence to sell the games built with it), has made making complex games accessible, at least financially. But what about the knowledge required to harness it? Well, many aspects of Unity are editable in a graphical user interface (GUI), rather than a text window for lines of C++; YouTube features many useful video introductions to using Unity; and its helpful community can coach newcomers.

Then there’s Code Hero, which is currently in beta following a successful Kickstarter campaign, has players shooting lines of Javascript and Unityscript to manipulate its environments. You can raise a bridge to access a new area, for instance, using the statement ‘transform.position’. When enemies attack, you can add a rule to ‘destroy’ statements that attacks all objects of a specific type, so you need only type one line to take out each type of attacker. It gives new meaning to ‘smart bomb’.

Code Hero raised $170,954 on Kickstarter in February

You’ll find these snippets of code at tutorial screens dotted around the levels, which give you the ammunition you need to complete them, but the real key is employing the flexibility of programming to, for instance, move any object around by tweaking values associated by that transform.position command. In a sense, it’s a game that’s all about exploits.

“I intend to teach kids how to use this,” Alex Peake, founder of developer Primer Labs, tells us. He explains that when Unity went free to use in October 2009 with version 2.6, Code Hero found its real purpose: “to give people the power to code the game they wish to see”. Indeed, the game features a sandbox mode that gives you free rein to modify the levels. And since you need Unity to play Code Hero, you can export your levels out to it to continue working on them.

Like LittleBigPlanet, Code Hero uses the language of games themselves to reveal their inner workings, showing players unambiguous links between their constructions and the results, and allowing for trial-and-error exploration. While in the 1980s Spectrum users had a simple computer but the inaccessible blink of the BASIC cursor, today they’re faced by the dizzying complexities of the computer, but Code Hero and LBP offer software environments that allow them to play with their workings.

Not that you would expect to make a full game in either, but that’s not really the point. They’re introductions to understanding a little more about what goes on under the surface of games, and there are almost innumerable cheap toolsets you can move up into with that knowledge, including GameMaker, Valve’s Hammer editor and many more. But the limits of the likes of Code Hero aren’t a problem. “It matters if you use a ballpoint pen or a fountain pen for the look of an image, but you can still do amazing stuff with both,” says Evans. “In the end it comes down to someone who’s got an idea and has sat [down] and made it. The tool matters to them, but it doesn’t matter in the bigger picture. Just talking about LBP, I’m so proud that there’s a bunch of people who wouldn’t have dared pick up a fountain pen, but we gave them a ballpoint.”

- 1

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My Horse Is Immortal: 'Free-to-Play' Is Killing Death in Gaming - Game

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Image: Shutterstock

Before Moshi Monsters, before FarmVille, even before Neopets, there was one name that to this day remains synonymous with the term “virtual pet”: Tamagotchi.
Hatched in Japan during 1996, the Tamagotchi became a historic success story. In its first five months on sale in Japan, it sold 1.5 million units. When it launched in the U.K., the goal was to sell another million to Brits by that same year’s end. Today, the total sales are in the tens of millions and the franchise continues to be exploited by creator Bandai.
Yet there was something dark about the Tamagotchi pets: They could die. In fact, death was a chief marketing hook. For the U.K. launch, journalists invited to a party to pick up a Tamagotchi were warned that if they failed to attend they would be sent a funeral bill. Children, afraid that neglecting their pet during school hours would cause it to die, started having to literally send the toys to daycare — a cottage industry of “Tamagotchi creches” rose to accommodate this need, and it achieved mainstream TV documentation. Stories about bereaved children needing counseling as a result of a dead Tamagotchi helped keep the toys in the public eye.

The threat of death was an addictive property of the Tamagotchi; kids became so emotionally invested in their pets they would habitually return to check on their well-being, to go truant in the name of animal safety. No doubt the ability of these digital animals to die from neglect or old age was fundamental to their success. Yet death is a feature all but absent from modern virtual pets, the vast majority of which exist as smartphone apps or Facebook games. Despite the well-established precedent that “death equals devotion,” modern developers file the feature under “dangerous: do not use.”

My Immortal Horse

Today’s virtual pets are evergreen. A recurring theme is that no amount of neglect will cause the digital critters to expire. “They get sick but never die,” Mindcandy CEO Michael Acton Smith tells Wired.co.uk, describing the popular Moshi Monsters pets. “Introducing more realistic threats like these would probably not improve the game.”

Instead of sickness, Eevamaria Halttunen took a different approach for the creatures in her game, Petra’s Planet. “If their carers are not available to take care of them for some time they will get bored and go for a little vacation,” explains Halttunen.

“The emotional vested interest a player has for their animal means death or illness would be very upsetting.”

How sweet. Yet when you consider the role death played in the Tamagotchi success story, one could also say of this strategy to keep pets alive forever, “how counterintuitive.” That isn’t the case though. Developers didn’t forget this fact — they deliberately ignored it. “We decided from early on in the development of Petra’s Planet that the virtual world’s pet toys shouldn’t die,” says Halttunen. “It would be highly stressful for children this young.”

Acton Smith had similar feelings for leaving death on the Moshi Monsters cutting room floor: “It would be too unpleasant for kids,” he said.

Barclay Deeming, VP of Games at NaturalMotion, creator of the popular iOS game My Horse (which, no, cannot die), agreed: “The emotional vested interest a player has for their animal means death or illness would be very upsetting.”

However, speaking to Wired.co.uk, all three explained they did contemplate adding death to their respective games. “We did consider threats to the horse as part of our initial design review,” explains Deeming, “but ultimately we chose to promote a sense of reward for improvement and good ownership of your horse, rather than the negative effects of the opposite.”

The semi-proverbial “think of the children!” response on all three counts. The trio of teams appreciated that no matter how glued to their brand the threat of death could cause children to be, that was no excuse for causing emotional upset — something Tamagotchi historically didn’t appear to agree with. Instead, games such as My Horse make creative use of pop-up notifications and reminders on the iPhone, for example, to explain that their pet “misses them” if they’ve been away too long.

It raises a question: is this simply symptomatic of a cultural difference between Japan, home of the mortal Tamagotchi, and Europe, home of the immortal Moshi Monsters, My Horse and Petra’s Planet?

Day of the Dead

To find an answer, we must consider Mexico, a country in which children are very aware of death. The annual Day of the Dead holiday, although not exclusive to Mexico, is a time of year when ancestors are honored by surviving descendants. Sometimes somber, sometimes humorous, the Day of the Dead is often celebrated by families. Death is not shied away from. So it may seem surprising that even here, the death of virtual pets is avoided.

“Parents will be less inclined to buy their child another Neonato doll if they just saw the last one die.”

Developer Dubit is producing a virtual world for Distroller, a Mexican toy company. Children get to look after a digital version of a their real-life Neonato doll, which Distroller manufactures. But it can’t die. “We did consider the doll dying in the game if it wasn’t looked after,” Daryn Fillis, general director of Distroller told Wired.co.uk. “However, after looking at the company’s values we felt it would be better to give the child opportunity to bring the doll back.

“We didn’t want to punish children who may not be able to look after their doll if they go on holiday and don’t have Wi-Fi access.”

Even in a culture that embraces death with a national holiday, virtual pets are blessed with immortality. It answers the question of whether it is a cultural issue at heart here. The answer is that it is not. Fillis had the real answer: it’s about the money.

“We don’t want the child or the parent to feel they’re not getting value for money, as it’s an investment,” explains Fillis. “We want to ensure our customers are having a great experience and want to buy more dolls. Parents will be less inclined to buy their child another Neonato doll if they just saw the last one die.”

It makes sense: Tamagotchi was paid for in advance. It didn’t matter if it died — Bandai had already cashed in, and kids could hatch a new pet anyway. The landscape, thanks to the internet, casual games, Facebook and iPhones has entirely changed this for new businesses. Moshi Monsters, although a free-to-play game, has a paid-for membership model for gamers who want a richer experience. My Horse, also free-to-play, sells perks using in-app purchases on the iPhone. Why would you let your customers kill the only reason they have to give you money?

Animals Have Evolved

It has made for a radically different landscape for virtual pets, and by extension all casual games. Perhaps, eventually, more hardcore games, too. Given the rise of the free-to-play model (Electronic Arts’ Peter Moore recently stated, “Ultimately, those microtransactions will be in every game, but the game…will be free,”) we must expect that threat, risk and the concept of “losing” will go the way of GAME, the DVD and the Sega Dreamcast.

The shift from pre-pay to post-pay in the gaming world can be likened to pre-Tamagotchi and post-Tamagotchi, from a time where death and threat was a positive PR hook, to a time where its inclusion could be commercial suicide.

One has to hope that if all games go free-to-play — to a post-pay model — the threats and challenges that make games interesting in the first place remain. Developers must ensure that a balance is kept, that the risk of kids abandoning their free game because they “lost” doesn’t hinder their confidence to make a game challenging or emotionally charged.

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Go Hard or Go Home

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In this sunken hell, the idea of an area being “secured” is relative, but I’ve cleared out the lobby, the stairs, the shops on the level above and dealt with that crazy son of a bitch who was throwing around Molotovs. Some joker had even set up an automated turret in the toilet. Around here, a guy can’t take a piss without risking his life. This particular corner of hell is mine now and so I set about resupplying from the wrecked remains of the shops and my enemies. Everything is broken here. The walls, the floors, the plumbing, the power supply, the people. All broken.

I put the butt of my weapon through the glass front of a cabinet, wincing at the crash that advertises my presence. It’s necessary, the ammunition inside is vital to me if I want to continue. And I do want to continue.

Shit. From directly above comes the hulking great thwack-thomp of enormous footsteps. My eyes lift upward to watch little rains of dust that dance back and forth across the ceiling, marking the steps. Their path leads directly to the stairs. The stairs lead directly to me. Shit.

As they descend she natters at him, high-pitched and sing-song nonsense he almost certainly doesn’t understand. All she gets in reply is his great creaking yawn, more like a house about to collapse than any language. The voice of a child is violently out of place here.

They reach the ground floor facing away from me; she in a tattered pink dress and he in one of those massive old diving suits they all wear. All thick metal and tough leather. Just like the others, the lower half of his right arm has been replaced with a huge drill bit. I see flecks of my brain and flesh sprayed across the walls, punctuated by shards of white skull. Nauseous.

They have to go left or right. If they go right, I can use the stairway for cover, slip upstairs behind them. No trouble. Left leads straight to me. Go right. Go right! He turns right and takes a lumbering step. She goes left. He follows her. Shit.

He sees me before she does and goes defensive. Makes a noise like a whole herd of threatened buffalo. Stands ready. She slips back behind him and the whole scene reaches that moment at the top of the rollercoaster right before the drop. Silence. Weightlessness. Equilibrium. But something has to give, like the pressure rising in the rusting pipes all over this underwater city. I inch right, keeping a respectful distance, looking to get the stairway between me and that drill. If he snaps and comes at me, it’s game over. For all that bulk they accelerate at a hell of a rate and once they’re going they’re like a freight train, nothing I could do to stop that. Just stand there and die. Messily.

Back to the wall, I make my way around the room. I have to remind myself to breath. I don’t blink. Once I’m past the next corner I’m moving away from them, he likes that. Easy boy, good boy. I keep my weapon pointing down, wouldn’t do a bit of good anyway. Good boy. Finally, the foot of the stairs and I can’t help it, I break into a run and take them three at a time just to get me to the top. When I turn, they haven’t followed. Fine.

Fine. Safe for a moment. But here’s the rub. I’m going to take my last four grenades and drop them on his head and up here we’re going to fight. I’ll use every last bullet in this machine gun and then fire from the flamethrower and at the end I’ll throw electric bolts from my very hands. Up here it’s all walkways and no cover. In a straight line he’s got me every time but up here I can circle around corners and never get trapped. In the end he’ll fall, gradually, like an oak tree. A little wisp of smoke rising from his corpse. Then I’ll turn to the girl and I’ll have to decide what to do with her, because she’s got something I want. Something I need.

Or…

I polish off the Molotov guy with a shotgun to the face and then set about looting the area. As I grab some ammo from a glass cabinet I hear a Big Daddy moving around upstairs. I head up, pop a couple of heat-seekers his way to get his attention and then switch to grenades to whittle his health down. On the way down the stairs he catches me with a charge and my own health takes a hit, but nothing to worry about since I’ve peppered the whole damn downstairs with proximity mines. That does it and I stop to loot the corpse before turning my attention to the girl. I select X to save her; I’m going for the best ending.

–

Once, my housemate strolled in and sat down to watch whilst I was playing BioShock. He saw me take on Splicers and traverse Rapture without much in the way of comment, but when he saw me eyeing up a Big Daddy with some degree of caution he spoke. “Oh they’re not so bad, go for it!” he said. He’d been surprised, he explained, by how easy they were to bring down, given all the build-up. After a prolonged and ammunition-expensive battle the Big Daddy fell. “How the hell are your weapons doing so little damage? And how were his doing so much?” We quickly came to the answer: I was playing on Hard Mode. He’d played on the game’s default Normal Mode.

I’ve been playing and enjoying First-Person Shooters for a sizeable portion of my life to date and, false modesty aside, I’m pretty good at them. Above average at least. Certainly I am annoyed with myself when I fall outside the top 5 players on a Battlefield server, which happens pretty regularly, but I’m still annoyed. (In our flat, Losing-at-Battlefield-Jim is accepted as a separate but not entirely welcome 4th member of the household.) Many modern games give a little advice with their difficulty modes, usually related to the player’s previous experience and familiarity with the genre. So, as someone experienced in and familiar with the FPS, when it comes to the single player portion I will often select one of the higher difficulties.

The point, I guess, from a design perspective, is to give a similar level of challenge to each set of players, from the brand newbies through to the FPS veteran. The point from my perspective is to create an experience I engage with, take notice of, without gliding through half asleep. A game that’s too easy might as well be one long cutscene, gradually revealing the plot, since nothing requiring any player agency is going to break up the progression of the experience.

Becky Chambers approached a similar topic last week on The Mary Sue, writing primarily on the subject of flow. Like me, Chambers finds a certain dissatisfaction with the experience of a too-easy game. I couldn’t agree more when she writes, “Easy games are forgettable. The moments that stick with us are the ones that were hard won, things that required experimentation and patience.”

This is a view we find taken to extremes with all sorts of self-entitled fury on various websites and forums, where people sound off over the dumbing down of mainstream gaming. In the quest for inclusiveness, games have become too easy and too casual, apparently, and therefore pointless. Whenever I hear such complaints I find myself wanting to hook the individual by their nostrils and scream in their face, “There’s a hard mode, you reprobate, did you select it? WHY NOT?!”

It’s all relative, of course. Perhaps my Hard Mode play through would be impossible for you, particularly if you’re not familiar with the hallmarks of First Person Shooters. Previous experience means that I start the game with some idea of what the gameplay is going to involve, perhaps you lack that prior knowledge. Similarly, I wouldn’t skip straight to the hardest setting for an RTS or RPG because I’m not confident in my ability to take on those systems at that level. Perhaps you would be, and if so, more power to you, buddy. Games are a two-way experience, developed through the existing product and your interaction with it. Likewise, what we’re talking about here is challenge, which is produced through the interaction of your capabilities with the difficulty mode you select. Different strokes for different folks. Game developers have the unenviable job of attempting to cater for an increasingly experienced and skilled core set of gamers whilst also making their games accessible to those who’ve never picked up a controller before. This is reflected in the gradual inclusion of extra settings on which to play, variations on Easy, Easier Easiest, Hard, Harder, Hardest. Every now and again we’ll even get a Don’t Even Bother To Select This Mode! Games are easier than they used to be, but players are involved in the creation of the gaming experience and must therefore take some degree of responsibility for that experience by doing a bit of self assessment before selecting the context in which they will play.

Why, then, in the vast majority of cases, do experienced gamers approach a new game on Normal Mode, or the local equivalent? Sometimes, of course, the Hard Mode is locked behind a Normal Mode play through. Finish the game to prove yourself capable of taking on such a challenge, and all that. Like many aspects of game design, this is a leftover from the days of arcades, where every game fought to hold your interest and offer profitable replayability. And like other such arcade leftovers, gradually that type of design is disappearing. And then there is the problem that you often need to select the difficulty before you’ve even played the game which, when you think about it, is pretty bloody stupid. How am I supposed to know which mode suits me? The Hard Mode of Battlefield 3 is significantly harder (and more broken) than that of BioShock, so what’s it going to be like on this brand new game I’ve just bought? Both of these factors, the locking of Hard Modes and their mysteriousness before a play through, work to railroad the player away from selecting them. Even the language involved is telling. The word “Normal” invokes not just a sense of being between Easy and Hard, but also of being the standard or preferred mode. It appeals by identifying itself as the “correct” way to play.

But have another look at those stories above. In one, I experience and use the game world, assess the risks, note the terrain, identify with my character, engage with the atmosphere. In the other, I blast through what could be any old FPS. BioShock’s primary failure (and, while great, it does have some failings) is that what is supposed to be a meaningful decision – what to do with the Little Sisters – actually lacks the intended ethical punch because the “Rescue” or “Harvest” choices lack proper repercussions. Harvesting gives you a small advantage, but not a game changing one, and certainly not one required by even a semi-experienced FPS player to progress. On its harder modes, (Hard or Survivor) with ammo, money and healing items scarcer, repercussions are magnified. Taking on a Big Daddy becomes a risk; Little Sisters pose a viable moral question. On Easy, even Normal, one plays a meta-game, often going for a particular ending, without identifying with BioShock’s internal world.

Likewise, Uncharted’s Hard Mode somewhat alleviates an infamous negative quality of the game. The horrific phrase “ludonarrative dissonance” is often leveled as a charge against Uncharted, the ugliness of the phrase perhaps hoping to take the shine off the game’s pristine beauty. Essentially, what this dreadful grouping of words seeks to represent is a mismatch of narrative and gameplay, in this case pointing out that Cutscene Nathan Drake’s charm and light-hearted wit is completely at odds with Gameplay Nathan Drake, who is, essentially, a mass-murderer. This is somewhat (only somewhat, mind you) alleviated when the player finds Drake genuinely at risk in Hard Mode. Ploughing through an area with headshot after headshot is less involved than a steadier paced duck-and-shoot route in which being hit by bullets actually matters. The gunplay becomes more a case of self-defence on the way to one’s goal, something you feel you and Drake would avoid if possible.

And to give one final example, moving through God of War on God Mode requires you to learn, as Kratos, your enemies’ weaknesses and tells. No longer can you walk into a room and start slashing at random, you take a moment to count and identify your enemies, considering who needs to be eliminated first. You cannot mash buttons until everything is dead; instead, you time your attacks and learn when to block, when to roll away, when to take to the air. You learn that in thinning out your enemies’ ranks by killing off the many undead soldiers first, you can minimize the number of simultaneous attacks that come at you, and thus the combos you use on the bigger enemies are less likely to be interrupted. As your expertise grows you might allow yourself a wry smile, mirroring Kratos’ own, because you understand just how challenging this next room is going to be. You learn to understand and appreciate the brutal recipes the designers create, using various enemies as ingredients.

–

What quickly becomes clear when we run through gaming experiences like this is that Hard Mode offers the purest form of the game you’ve bought. On Hard Mode, the enemies will attack and defend more intelligently and realistically, and you will have to learn and adapt to progress. On Hard Mode, your game isn’t just an interactive storybook where you progress from cutscene to cutscene. Rather, you’re as immersed in the world, vulnerable to its dangers and invested in its progression, as any other character in it. On Hard Mode, you track your prey, defend your base, build your character’s skills, gamble with your time and their life. You watch your corners and identify exits, subconsciously strategize and memorize the previous couple of areas you were in. On Hard Mode, you find the challenges that force you to evolve.

So, if you don’t as a rule, give it a try sometime. You’ll probably be frustrated, scared, tense and annoyed. Hell, you might lose or give up. But success on Hard Mode is unlike success in any other mode. It’s well-earned.

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On Ultraviolence in Games and the Lessons of Porn - What Games Are

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The gaming sphere (myself included) debated about whether E3 had gone too far and had the ultraviolent kinds of game on show were representative of games any more. Many a journalist reflected on their personal feelings of depression in the wake of the show, thinking that for all the high talk games had not really moved on. All fair points, but studios go to the extreme like that for a reason.

They need the coverage, even if bad, because obscurity is the enemy of all creative endeavour. If you’re not remarkable then you’re not remarked-upon, and that means you’re invisible - so nobody buys your game. Ideally game makers would all love to be talked about for their design, technology or aesthetics, but those attributes are often unreliable. A splashy, gory, over-the-top video though? Money in the bank, or so they think.

The problem is that that kind of extremity eventually gives way to apathy, and from there it’s a short hop to commoditisation. The approach of being bigger/better/faster/harder than the other guy ultimately results in a bland white noise where even the most shocking act is no longer really that shocking. In this, the E3 games industry may find itself traveling down the same sorry path as the adult entertainment industry.

When Sex No Longer Sells

Ethical debates about adult entertainment aside, one of the most interesting things about it as an industry is how often it has been at the forefront of trends that affect all other digital media. Its producers were among the first to figure out how to deliver video content online, how to monetise content, outsource and market it. The industry has proved endlessly inventive in how, where and by what means its content is delivered, and it tends to have a very bottom-line approach. In adult film it’s all about user acquisition, retention and conversion to customers at every opportunity.

So in these times of analytics and measurement you would think that it’s boom times. Not so. According to Louis Theroux, the adult industry is in dire straits, with many performers unable to find work and sales in many genres having collapsed. The problems seem to stem from three main areas: Over-supply (it doesn’t cost much to produce a film), a lack of sociality (not many people really want to share their proclivities with their Facebook friends), and the proliferation of free sites.

This last in particular is often blamed because it commoditised the product into a free video, which - when combined with oversupply - means that there is so much product available that nobody ever needs to pay. And they have no reasons to share. (This is also why many musicians are terrified of Spotify).

What always happens in any market where there is a glut of over-supplied average content is that some producers decide to try and differentiate. They look for an angle that will get them talked about, regardless of the tone of that coverage, so that they won’t be invisible. That can take many forms, from the slow building of a tribe and a marketing story to the over-the-top push to extremity to try and create shock and awe. And this is largely where porn went.

Adult content today is much harder than it used to be, according to many former performers. It’s meaner, more violent and brutal. It’s also much more functional, with many of the pretenses of story (such as in the Boogie Nights era) washed away in favour of identifying the product by genre, act, performer and so on. The various genres have diversified and diversified some more, to the point that the product is thoroughly atomised.

And yet even despite all of that pushing to the edges and forking of content into sub-divisions, the industry continued to hollow out from within. In the end of the day even the most extreme content became freely available (legitimately and illegitimately) and the places where extremity could go ran out. And so the industry as a whole shrank. Porn (like games, music, books, movies etc) has never been more widely available, and yet has never been less valuable.

Bigger/Better/Faster/Harder

In the Kano model of customer satisfaction there are three kinds of attributes: threshold (stuff that users expect to be there), linear (stuff that users consider useful, if predictable, improvements) and delights (stuff that users didn’t expect).

Another way to think of linear attributes is the urge to be bigger, better, faster or harder. It’s things like the the razorblade industry’s push to have 3, then 4, then 5, then a strip, then 2 strips and so on on their blades. Bigger/better/faster/harder also represents the overwhelming tone of marketing in the PC industry, with numbers like processor speed and RAM and graphics chips and so on all buzzing about the vast majority of products. It’s always about who has the biggest number.

The problems with linear attributes, however, are twofold. First: they often become threshold attributes. PC customers now expect a lot of functionality in baseline machines, which means that a manufacturer has a lot of bases to cover. Second: the numbers eventually become meaningless when the user cannot tell the difference. 6 razor blades and 3 strips is beyond the point of nonsensical, for example. And PC sales have stalled as users no longer really feel the difference between cheap and expensive products. When that happens, prices drop.

In the adult entertainment sector this is what the free sites effectively did. Going free was the only way to meaningfully compete as oversupply and a lack of new ways to be extreme took hold. In supermarkets the Wal-Mart effect does the same thing with food, clothing and other products. PCs, porn and packets of gum have all simply become commodities. And the risk in that model is primarily to the producer whose prices can’t drop.

Enter AAA E3 big bad console game mega-publishers.

It’s easy to point at social game makers and paint them in the equivalent role of the free video site, but actually the threat to the mega-publisher model comes from all sides. Jonathan Blow is every bit as much a problem for AAA games as Mark Pincus, as are tens of thousands of app developers. While those markets have their own oversupply issues, they also have vast capabilities of cheap distribution and either free, freemium, or pretty darned cheap retail business models. They can do this because their team sizes are generally much smaller than a AAA team.

AAA teams are not simply over-staffed, they operate in markets where the audience is driven more by a desire for perfection rather than innovation. Activision can look at ways of making Call of Duty a freemium product, but not if that means dropping its production values. Those production values have become threshold attributes, and thus far attempts to streamline that process (such as with procedural content) have largely failed. So the only option they have is to be even bigger/better/faster/harder than before, which means more manpower.

When this cycle started in the early 90s, bigger/better/harder/faster was easy. It was better graphics and physics, who had the most cars, the best water effects, the most licensed sports stars and the biggest game world, the most game modes, the most weapons or the biggest explosions? These and other questions have been answered linearly by game after game for decades.

While some new inventions have also appeared during that time, in the main the formula continued. Big budget games tend to exist within a narrow set of genres (racing, shooting, sports, real-time strategy, platform and roleplaying games mostly) and are littered with conventions of form. We also have a matured audience, whose expectations are defined by cultural as well as functional attributes. So bigger/better/faster/harder went on and on, but it started to run into some limits.

The Uncanny Valley steadfastedly refuses to budge no matter how much money is thrown at it, and so perceptible improvements in animation have slowed to a crawl. Physics and other simulation elements likewise are now indistinguishable. Level design, open world structures, different doll modes and so on all also hit a natural point beyond which they don’t seem to be evolving.

Bigger/better/faster/harder has become harder to define. With every feature considered a threshold feature and every competitor having the same roster of features, the sense of commoditisation grows. Some game makers try to make less obvious attributes into those which can be expressed linearly (such as using storytelling as a way to talk about better animation systems), but the market often finds those harder to relate to. Bigger explosions are easily demonstrated, but better character development? Not so much.

And that’s where the need to shock comes from.

Shock and Yawn

Competitors who can’t differentiate on product often try to do so on message. Cars, for example, are mostly identical machines with little meaningful difference in how they operate, their mileage or their reliability. So car manufacturers have taken to producing expensive adverts which try to sell the car on experience, and this too becomes an exercise in extremity. How many car adverts do you see these days where the act of simply getting into the vehicle is portrayed as stepping into some sort of hyper-reality, for example?

What was frenetic and kinetic the first time becomes bland and apathetic the hundredth time if it always follows the same formula. What was shocking in the year 2000 is now barely worth mentioning. What was considered very violent in the days of Carmageddon is now just blood and pixel effects in a game trailer whose name you can’t even recall.

So this is why the art industry is not really about paintings and statues any more, but of installations, graffitti and diamond skulls. It’s why fashion houses often produce bizarre outfits that nobody would actually wear. It’s why videos are so important to the music industry, the more controversial the better. It’s why Lady Gaga wore a dress made of meat. All of these activities are attempting to rise above the norm, to be bigger/better/faster/harder and more extreme. So that the viewer, reader or player will remember.

For AAA publishers, the equivalent is the ultraviolent trailer.

It is in the nature of gameplay to destroy, and arguably death is the meta-subject of all games. In fact, it has to be this way. Killing a zombie, taking a bishop and digging through the Minecraft dirt are all change-making acts, and that’s why players play games. A game helps you feel successful by causing lasting change, and so death is always nearby.

Sometimes that death is visibly violent, but for a reason. Though outwardly shocking, pulling off a special move in a game which results in a lot of carnage is often also the move needed to beat the level, unlock the door or defeat the boss. However sometimes games include violence just to be violent, which I would call ultraviolence. Far from arguing over appropriateness (it’s the right of game makers to make what they want and players to play what they want, just as in every other medium), my point is that ultraviolence is often boring.

Ultraviolence is largely just an aesthetic addition to a game, from over-the-top car crash cameras to headshot/zoom angles. They can be pretty exciting or sickening, but even the most extreme example seen 20 times in a row is just another cut scene. It becomes humdrum, yawn-worthy and acquires the air of the threshold feature, just another commodity. A bit of carnival freakshow theatre. That’s all.

The real subtext of E3, AAA games and the swerve into ultraviolence is this: It’s one last desperate throw of the dice to shock-and-awe players back into becoming premium customers. It’s saying “Don’t look at all that free gameplay out there on phones and Facebook. It’s cheap, but we are premium.” in a shower of gore. Just like the adult film producers they are feeling the need to punch through the fog of over-supply before the industry grows holllow. This is also why they want new consoles, a new platform story, and a new hype cycle to start. It’s why they hate the very idea of the Ouya.

The big fear is that the Spotify-ification of games will become permanent, that between cheap Steam sales, freemium content and app pricing the markets as we know them will evaporate. It’s already happening to handheld games, and so consoles will inevitably follow. And you know what? They will. But bigger/better/faster/harder is not the answer.

Delight

Recently, the biggest successes in porn have not come from some new even harder or more ultra-violent content. It is the return of the parody. The industry, it seems, has rediscovered its Boogie Nights sense of humour. Story, character, costumes and bad acting are all making a comeback in a big way and interested fans are buying. When it seemed that there was nowhere linear left to go, someone figured out a way to go at right angles to everyone else, to think orthogonally.

Orthogonal thinking is where delightful attributes come from, and delightful attributes are the ones that tend to prove most remarkable. Delightful attributes surprise users out of their normal expectations. They are where the next genres come from, and they generate loyalty rather than shock and awe. Delightful attributes are shared, whether that means some very humourous aspect of the game or some bold design decision.

Dear Esther is every bit as much a delight as Draw Something, Minecraft or The Walking Dead because all of them are orthogonal to the games surrounding them. Each deliberately forgoes one or more attributes that the expectant audience might consider linear, or even threshold, and that creates room for the new. Delight is not about bigger/better/faster/harder, nor extremism. It’s about difference.

Where extremism tends to fade into apathy, delight endures because it is well remembered. A year from now 95% of the violent trailers of E3 games will no longer be remembered, but Media Molecule’s new game Tearaway? That you’ll remember.

To be at the front of the wave is to be risky, experimental, small and scrappy. The explorer game maker often does not have a big budget, and even if he did would not really know what to do with it. What he needs is room to feel his way into an idea, to be left alone to see where it takes him. He will often fail, but every once in a while (largely dependent on talent), he’ll stumble into something amazing.

To be behind the wave is to be calculated and permutative. This kind of game maker knows the general shape of the game that he’s going to make, whether by genre or market, and is figuring out how to make his either best in show, or cash in on a passing trend. Often this kind of game maker is better funded (after all, he can explain what his game is to a potential stakeholder) and can achieve better production values, but is virtually guaranteed never to do something orthogonal.

But all waves die out, and new waves usually have a different shape to their predecessors. So being behind the wave is great as long as the wave is strong, but when it’s gone there’s no guarantee that the next wave will carry you along like the last one did. Ironically when that kind of threat does present itself, behinders will often just double-down on whatever it is they are used to doing (extreme, bigger, better, faster, harder) until they drown.

Changing from being behind to being ahead of the wave is really hard because it means giving up something. A company like Natural Motion moving over from making high-end console animation systems to a relatively lean game like CSR Racing is not easily done, but the new direction seems to really be working for them. Imagine what kind of effort it takes to change Sony’s direction.

Conclusion

Since the turn of the millennium, the number of big game publishers has dwindled. It is conceivable that in five years time there will only be five mega-publishers worldwide, that the average console in the home will be a low-powered Ouya (or Apple TV or something else). The price of gameplay continues to decline, just as the price of filmed sex has. The business model of games marches relentlessly toward providing free gameplay and monetising around it. Again, just like adult entertainment.

So the reaction from mega-publishers to amp up their value is understandable, even if they likely have a limited lifespan. Shock and awe is seemingly the only idea that some of them have, but if so then their time is likely limited.

Time to get ahead of the new wave.

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it's time game journalism grew up - Edge Magazine

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To hear the gaming press and hobbyist writers tell it, now is the winter of our discontent. There’s been a din of disillusionment – the commercial industry is giving us little to talk about beyond simplistic and repetitive genre conventions, clumsy sexualisation and the fetishism of violence wherever we look. Gaming refuses to grow up.

You’d think the summer season’s new trailers were part of some kind of contest to see who could pack the most curses, bare breasts, explosions and blood founts into one video. Thoughtless provocation tries to pass for adulthood; the creators of the newest Hitman and Tomb Raider games struggle to apologise for using violence against women as a plot point, even as it seems they don’t quite get why they were wrong to do so.

In some respects, this isn’t anything new. What’s changed has been the way the media confronts its frustrations. For one thing, the social landscape online spent months decrying the booth babe renaissance we saw earlier this year at E3, symbolic of a little-boys’-club culture where women aren’t welcome as equal participants. And we’re increasingly unwilling to tolerate the palpable hostility many women, myself included, experienced at the event.

Gamers and writers online have been rushing forward in greater numbers to tell personal stories in the hope of changing the wider perception of what ‘mature’ really means. Any day of the week you can find someone’s gut-wrenching account that illustrates rape isn’t just a plot point or a word you bandy about on Xbox Live; marginalised people and groups constantly speak out about how the oorah culture around triple-A games childishly refuses to include them.

Yet amid all of this incidental complaining, most of the gaming press still hands forward each publisher’s marketing message – wearing innumerable fingers to the bone to publish impressions, screenshots, trailers, podcasts, the all-important ‘best of’ scorecards – while its members vent their disillusionment on social media and in private. Plenty of writers do try to dig up interesting angles, concerned with bypassing the ‘negativity’ in favour of the ‘real’ story.

The problems with the commercial industry are bigger than incidents of harassment online, or discomfort at an event such as E3. These things are symptoms of a cultural sickness at the heart of the commercial game industry, tied to how releases are marketed and covered, and we are all complicit in perpetuating it.

It’s harder than ever to gain a career making games or writing about them. The ones who do make it are those most devoted to the obsession, those on a desperate chase to regain the magic of childhood or college at all costs. That’s part of why the commercial game industry clings doggedly to familiar, juvenile constructs – celebrates them even – and resists welcoming evolution and diversity.

Yes, the late console cycle and the risk-averse triple-A economy play a role. But it’s as undeniable as it is unbelievable that there are adult men who think breasts and swearwords are the ticket to grown-up land; who believe the best way to make a tough, inspiring heroine for the modern age is to drag a sex object out of the 1990s and pump her full of trauma; or who are proud they’ve made a game where you shoot all the people who talk funny.

And they’ve become sportscar-owning millionaires. The economy appears to have rewarded a certain childish egocentricity and refusal to self-examine. There’s disdain for those idiot journalists who lack appropriate respect, whose clueless yapping might get in the way of sales, and whose tireless demands for more are hypercritical and entitled.

Yet we in the press are complicit. When most of us reach a certain age and gain families to support, we transition to communications-oriented industry jobs because this seems sensible. That means the bulk of longtime writers are those enough in love with gaming that it doesn’t occur to them to question it. Fearful of alienating or offending our volatile audiences – or worse, our heroes, those famous game developers – we nod along, obediently transcribe. The best is when someone whose games you played when you were little likes your interview with them. It’s nice when a marketer praises your article; it’s nice to be first with a picture of a controller.

No wonder that when the industry’s most successful creators hear of the demand for maturity and sophistication, all that results are teen-boy tropes. And we gripe in private, but we accept this. Stagnant, emotionally arrested culture isn’t anyone’s fault, it’s just how things are. What do we know about the complex craft of game development, anyway? Let’s stick to what we can comment on: at least the graphics look good, at least someone is trying. The problem is the audience, the marketers, anyone but us. Let’s be positive; we have to respect everyone’s hard work and be positive.

Come on. Growing up means responsibility. Isn’t journalism supposed to be about holding people accountable? We need to try harder. For a while, we were all so happy to be here we’d put up with anything. But what happens when only rich guys are happy to be here any more?

Illustration: Martin Davies

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