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Data entry, risk management and tacos: Inside Halo 4’s playtest labs
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Rab Florence contemplates “a tragic, vulgar image”.

By Rab Florence Published 24 October, 2012

There is an image doing the rounds on the internet this week. It is an image of Geoff Keighley, a Canadian games journalist, sitting dead-eyed beside a garish Halo 4 poster and a table of Mountain Dew and Doritos. It is a tragic, vulgar image. But I think that it is the most important image in games journalism today. I think we should all find it and study it. It is important.

This might be an image of Geoff Keighley if we’re allowed to do that. If not, it’ll be Dark Souls again.

Geoff Keighley is often described as an industry leader. A games expert. He is one of the most prominent games journalists in the world. And there he sits, right there, beside a table of snacks. He will be sitting there forever, in our minds. That’s what he is now. And in a sense, it is what he always was. As Executive Producer of the mindless, horrifying spectacle that is the Spike TV Video Game Awards he oversees the delivery of a televisual table full of junk, an entire festival of cultural Doritos.

How many games journalists are sitting beside that table?

Recently, the Games Media Awards rolled around again, and games journos turned up to a thing to party with their friends in games PR. Games PR people and games journos voted for their favourite friends, and friends gave awards to friends, and everyone had a good night out. Eurogamer won an award. Kieron Gillen was named an industry legend (and if anyone is a legend in games writing, he is) but he deserves a better platform for recognition than those GMAs. The GMAs shouldn’t exist. By rights, that room should be full of people who feel uncomfortable in each other’s company. PR people should be looking at games journos and thinking, “That person makes my job very challenging.” Why are they all best buddies? What the hell is going on?

Whenever you criticise the GMAs, as I’ve done in the past, you face the accusation of being “bitter”. I’ve removed myself from those accusations somewhat by consistently making it clear that I’m not a games journalist. I’m a writer who regularly writes about games, that’s all. And I’ve been happy for people who have been nominated for GMAs in the past, because I’ve known how much they wanted to be accepted by that circle. There is nothing wrong with wanting to belong, or wanting to be recognised by your peers. But it’s important to ask yourself who your peers are, and exactly what it is you feel a need to belong to.

If I was to accept any kind of bribe to promote a game, I’d take the bribe to promote the amazing Hotline Miami.

Just today, as I sat down to write this piece, I saw that there were games journalists winning PS3s on Twitter. There was a competition at those GMAs - tweet about our game and win a PS3. One of those stupid, crass things. And some games journos took part. All piling in, opening a sharing bag of Doritos, tweeting the hashtag as instructed. And today the winners were announced. Then a whole big argument happened, and other people who claim to be journalists claimed to see nothing wrong with what those so-called journalists had done. I think the winners are now giving away their PS3s, but it’s too late. It’s too late.

I want to make a confession. I stalk games journalists. It’s something I’ve always done. I keep an eye on people. I have a mental list of games journos who are the very worst of the bunch. The ones who are at every PR launch event, the ones who tweet about all the freebies they get. I am fascinated by them. I won’t name them here, because it’s a horrible thing to do, but I’m sure some of you will know who they are. I’m fascinated by these creatures because they are living one of the most strange existences - they are playing at being a thing that they don’t understand. And if they don’t understand it, how can they love it? And if they don’t love it, why are they playing at being it?

This club, this weird club of pals and buddies that make up a fair proportion of games media, needs to be broken up somehow. They have a powerful bond, though - held together by the pressures of playing to the same audience. Games publishers and games press sources are all trying to keep you happy, and it’s much easier to do that if they work together. Publishers are well aware that some of you go crazy if a new AAA title gets a crappy review score on a website, and they use that knowledge to keep the boat from rocking. Everyone has a nice easy ride if the review scores stay decent and the content of the games are never challenged. Websites get their exclusives. Ad revenue keeps rolling in. The information is controlled. Everyone stays friendly. It’s a steady flow of Mountain Dew pouring from the hills of the money men, down through the fingers of the weary journos, down into your mouths. At some point you will have to stop drinking that stuff and demand something better.

And just in case we did use that image of Geoff Keighley, here’s this week’s Dark Souls repeat.

Following receipt of a complaint from Lauren Wainwright, Eurogamer has removed part of this article (but without admission of any liability). Eurogamer apologises for any distress caused to Ms Wainwright by the references to her. The article otherwise remains as originally published.

Standards are important. They are hard to live up to, sure, but that’s the point of them. The trouble with games journalism is that there are no standards. We expect to see Geoff Keighley sitting beside a table of s***. We expect to see the flurry of excitement when the GMAs get announced, instead of a chuckle and a roll of the eyes. We expect to see our games journos failing to get what journalistic integrity means. The brilliant writers, like John Walker for example, don’t get the credit they deserve simply because they don’t play the game. Indeed, John Walker gets told to get off his pedestal because he has high standards and is pointing out a worrying problem.

Geoff Keighley, meanwhile, is sitting beside a table of snacks. A table of delicious Doritos and refreshing Mountain Dew. He is, as you’ll see on Wikipedia, “only one of two journalists, the other being 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace, profiled in the Harvard Business School press book ‘Geeks and Geezers’ by noted leadership expert Warren Bennis.” Geoff Keighley is important. He is a leader in his field. He once said, “There’s such a lack of investigative journalism. I wish I had more time to do more, sort of, investigation.” And yet there he sits, glassy-eyed, beside a table heaving with sickly Doritos and Mountain Dew.

It’s an important image. Study it.

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News - It takes all kinds: Video game culture's weird identity crisis

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October 25, 2012   |   By Leigh Alexander
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Amid a variety of heated discussions online in recent weeks about the role of awards and of the games media alike, Gamasutra’s Leigh Alexander wonders why the discussion is so reductive — and argues that it takes all kinds.
The GameCity festival is on this week in Nottingham, and Journey took home the big prize. Unlike many game awards this one’s not selected by industry insiders, but instead is determined by a jury of people not traditionally acquainted with games.

The jury’s chaired by Lord Puttnam, and includes juror Lucy Kellaway, who wrote in the Financial Times about how she dug into some video games for just about the first time ever.

Disinterested generally in game conversation but curious to connect with her son, she gamely investigated a medium that had previously been foreign to her. Jurors convened in London to play Johann Sebastian Joust together (except for Lord Puttnam, for whom, as a chairman, the highly physical game would have been undignified).

Her feedback on many of the games was surprising to gamers, who bristled to hear Mass Effect 3 called “boring sci-fi tosh,” or that her view of the relatively-complex Fez was generally limited to an appreciation of the music and colors. Kellaway struggled to make progress in Mario 3D Land, a game that focuses on being quite forgiving to beginners, and could hardly even move her hero in Mass Effect 3.

How can someone who doesn’t play games award a prize? Even those who accept the basic idea that it’s valuable to have games judged on how they appeal to new audiences — especially alongside countless other awards from reviewers, designers and indies alike — feel a little skeptical. One designer whose work was also in consideration for the prize suggested you wouldn’t have a literature prize awarded by people who are unable to read.

Analogies between games and other media don’t generally hold up. Still, it’s interesting to think of games as requiring “literacy”, and about what that literacy might look like. The insularity of games in general is a threat to their economic health and cultural relevance, and it’s hard to argue that art and industry alike could benefit from the inclusion of new kinds of players — who in turn help form the next wave of new creation, ideally.

At the same time, a specialist culture — multiple molecules of specialty, even — is not only valid but equally essential to art. Maybe we can’t force a middle-aged mother who struggles with games to enjoy Mass Effect 3, but that doesn’t detract from the value of BioWare’s work and the massive community of fans it creates.

The culture of appreciating games has a strange and pervasive problem: This idea that only one sort of thing can exist.

Why are we like this?
Like the goal of making some kinds of games more accessible will necessarily eliminate all complex and specific niches; like a prize awarded by non-gamers can’t exist equally alongside prizes selected by game developers or critics. As if one way of looking at games somehow threatens or invalidates other games. Like we need to choose between ambassadorship or insularity, like it’s impossible to have both.
Part of this probably comes from the early shape of game consumer culture, which had a much narrower range of products specifically targeted toward only one major demographic. Magazines existed to rate these products by the numbers in crude categories and numeric scales, and enjoyed a close advertising-oriented relationship with the industry.

Media on games has long straddled an uneasy line between “product guide” and “fan culture,” and the idea of journalism in games surfaced relatively more recently, with the idea of proper “criticism” even newer in the past decade.

We struggle with how to move on from that past, when there was no game that couldn’t be viewed as a simple commercial entertainment product to dissect only in basic terms. A complex cultural environment has since spawned around games in a fashion that’s only accelerated rapidly alongside online and social media, digital content and platforms for casual games. Game developers have negotiated this seismic shift admirably — media, marketers and fans less so.

Why are we so bad at this?
The game industry has grown faster than our understanding of it, and most people who do any stripe of writing on games often wear many hats — a reviewer stretches to cover industry events, a fan blogger feels obligated to wear the mantle of “journalism,” and roles and definitions are frequently in dispute.
Marketers are little help, still keeping an incredibly close relationship with those on the frontlines of consumer writing so that many game blogs still act as participants in the preview-review-sales cycle even as they struggle to present a front of objective coverage to their persnickety, passionate readers. Games journalists most frequently “retire” to community management roles because it’s not that much of a stretch.

And even though the game industry has diversified, rich with festival and indie culture, art games, experiments, social games and an entire industry of so-called “casual” titles that appeal to everyone, the traditional commercial industry still exists, of course. In fact, it’s doubled down on blockbuster commercialism, and is viewed with increasing unease even by people who’ve been gaming fans since childhood.

Can a writer who’s a fan of a commercial franchise and fervently evangelizes it be trusted as an objective source of information? Moreover, do they need to? Can a reviewer whose job is to score games also be qualified to publish investigative, objective work on the company that makes those games?

These are the kinds of questions we wrestle with — and just like the discussion around the GameCity prize, the discussion is reductive. Like one must be all or nothing, like gradients can’t exist, like the work of a fansite somehow owes an explanation to game criticism or trade writing.

It happens in the media, too
The early game industry itself has trained us to be reductive, to look at any problem and ask how you “win,” or what score it gets out of five, whether it was worth our money or not. The attitude of the media shapes the outlook of its readership and vice versa, in an ongoing struggle to comprehend the simple idea that it takes all kinds.

A picture’s been circulating of a bleak-faced Geoff Keighley sitting among Mountain Dew and Doritos advertisements to discuss Halo 4. It kicked off discussion on the face of games writing and whether some of us have become glorified shills, too close to the marketers that soothe our desire to be treated as important voices.

I myself wrote in Edge about how a professional press corps should be more circumspect and maintain better distance from marketing’s preview-review-sales cycle — should grow up, if you will.

Now in Eurogamer, Rob Florence critiqued the UK’s Games Media Awards as a display of cronyism and amateurishness, and he was not necessarily wrong. At the GMAs, a minor scandal broke on Twitter when so called “professional” media were encouraged to try to win a PlayStation 3 by tweeting some corporate hashtag — and like a bunch of fanboys, some did.

Let something be what it is
However, the problem isn’t that the kind of writers he discussed are unethical; it’s that they’re trying to be something they aren’t, and failing to reconcile that with what they are. Games writing has terrible self esteem.
Instead of trying to crown enthusiast writers as “professional journalists” worthy of awards for some unknown purpose, it would be better if it were somehow possible to accept the validity of the work they do even if it’s different from reporting, or trend writing, or games criticism or whatever one’s definition of “journalism” is.

Whether awarding games or looking at our press, why do we still feel the need to be all things to all people? Geoff Keighley’s work on Spike is mainstream pop culture in the most basic sense, but that doesn’t mean it can’t exist alongside other approaches to covering the game industry, other perspectives thereupon.

It’s when we start trying to hold an incredibly diverse game industry and an incredibly diverse array of voices to the same uncompromising standards we run into problems — especially, as Florence points out, because the standards are still relatively little-understood in a rapidly-changing landscape.

According to the GameCity prize, Journey was the game that non-gamers best understood, an admirable achievement; Fez was the game most-acclaimed by the Independent Games Festival at the Game Developers Conference. Neither is “correct” nor excludes the other.

A fan writer who’s always the first to post screenshots of her favorite game does not do the same work as a trade reporter, but neither discipline is mutually exclusive. Writers shouldn’t struggle with mixed success to wear a mantle of “professionalism” or “objectivity” if it doesn’t suit them — if they could just admit they’re cultural enthusiasts and that such work doesn’t need to be explained, defended or elevated, it’d be healthier for everyone.

The game industry offers something for everyone now, and it’s time the rest of us caught up.

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Wider die Paywall: Lernt von der Gamesbranche — Carta

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Wider die Paywall: Lernt von der Gamesbranche

Lorenz Matzat | 4 Kommentar(e)

Es gibt eine Branche, die im Netz überaus erfolgreich ist: Die Gamingindustrie. Niemand macht es besser, wenn es um digitales Storytelling geht. Und ums Bezahlen.

21.10.2012 |

Beim Verkauf von digitalen Produkten kann die Branche auf 40 Jahre Erfahrung blicken. Sicherlich sind Konzepte wie “Micropayment” nicht eins zu eins zu übertragen. Aber es gibt viel “best practice” dazu, was es zu beachten gilt, will man im Netz etwas verkaufen. Stichwort “Usability”. Dazu später mehr.

Im deutschsprachigen Nachrichtenmarkt geht es zur Sache: Vielleicht täuscht der Eindruck, aber mir scheint es so, als ob die Scheitelwelle der “Zeitungkrise” hierzulande erst noch kommt: Die FR wird vielleicht ein rein digitales Produkt, bei der FTD wird ebenfalls darüber nachgedacht, die WAZ will erneut 20 Prozent der Mitarbeiter entlassen. In Nürnberg stirbt eine kleine, alte Tageszeitung. Eine Presseagentur schmiert ab (obwohl das wohl auch einer gewissen Hybris geschuldet war).

Viel anderweitig benötigte Energie wird durch den Irrweg namens Leistungsschutzrecht vergeudet. Doch die Gretchenfrage für Zeitungen im Internet lautet derzeit: Wie hältst du es mit der Paywall?

Kostenlosmentalität vs. Zahlschranke

Verfechter der „Zahlschranken“ argumentieren mit genuinem Content, der nicht einfach kostenfrei abzugeben sei. Denn Rechercheleistung, überhaupt journalistische Arbeit sei in ihn geflossen, ganz abgesehen von der redaktionellen Infrastruktur, die dafür notwendig sei.

Es ist erst einmal völlig richtig: Journalismus kostet Geld; und vor allem exklusiver Content lässt sich gut verkaufen. Andererseits ist es ein Irrtum, dass die kostenfreie Abgabe von Content einer “Kostenlosmentalität” geschuldet sei, die erst mit dem Internet Einzug gehalten hat: Privatfernsehen und -radios senden seit Jahrzehnten ohne Bezahlschranken. Und die Idee, dort eine solche einzuführen, hat bislang mässig erfolgreich funktioniert (siehe Premiere/Sky). Und sie ist im Radio meines Wissens noch nie ausprobiert worden.

Vor allem im Lokal-/Regionalzeitungsmarkt bringt die Paywall folgende Gefahr mit sich: Qype, Yelp, Foursquare, Facebook, Ebay-Kleinanzeigen usw.  ersetzen schon längst Teile der ursprünglichen Dienstleistung der Lokalzeitungen. Hier Terrain wiedergutzumachen, indem man sich zuschließt, kann nicht funktionieren – außer man hat wirklich etwas Einzigartiges zu bieten.

Durch eine Paywall schafft man überhaupt erst eine Nische für eine Konkurrenz, die ohne Beschränkung Zugang zu lokalen Inhalten anbietet. Diese Konkurrenz tritt dann eben auch in den Kampf um die lokalen Werbetöpfe ein. Wenn dann noch ein großer Player die Chance sieht, in den Lokalmarkt vorzustoßen, und bereit ist, einen langen Atem zu behalten, wird es eng. Der Axel-Springer-Verlag wird sich bei dem Kauf des Städteportals meinestadt.de etwas gedacht haben.

Auch ist kaum zu erahnen, ob neue Technologien und Geräte,  Dynamiken, durch neue Social-Media-Trends und neue Dienste entstehen, die dann etwa dem hyperlokalen Bloggen Schwung verleihen. Und somit eine Lokalberichterstattung entsteht, jenseits der Verlage, die für viele ausreicht und den Lokal/-Regionalzeitungen weiter Wasser abgräbt.

Preispunkt ist entscheidend

Wenn es aber nun schon einmal eine Paywall sein soll, ist der Preispunkt entscheidend. Die Druck- und Vertriebskosten einer Tageszeitung dürften etwa 60-70 Prozent des Endverbraucherpreises ausmachen. Rechnet man dann noch Margen für Kioskbesitzer und verschenkte Exemplare ab, bleibt nicht viel von jedem verkauften Titel übrig. Selbst, wenn man die Anschaffungskosten von Redaktionssystemen, die Entwicklung von Websites und Apps sowie Serverkapazitäten einrechnet: Die mittel- und langfristigen Kosten für die Onlineausgabe einer Zeitung dürften signifikant unter dem finanziellen Aufwand liegen, täglich ein Wegwerfprodukt in jeden Winkel seines Verbreitungsgebiets zu liefern. (Ganz abgesehen, was das an Umweltverbrauch bedeutet: Papier, Wasser, Farbe/Chemikalien, Strom, Treibstoff – wer dazu Zahlen hat, für einen Hinweis wäre ich dankbar.)

Hier vier Beispiele (Mo-Sa.) – ePaper meint Webzugang und ggf. iPad-Apps etc. inklusiv:

- FAZ Print: monatlich 44,90€ – ePaper 29,90€

- SZ Print: monatlich 48,90€ – ePaper 29,90€

- NZZ Print & digital: monatlich 49,50€ – ePaper 34€

- Ostsee-Zeitung Print: monatlich: 22,95€ – ePaper 13,95€

Die Preisvorstellung für die digitalen Produkte liegen bei dieser Stichprobe also bei mehr als 50 Prozent des Printpreises. Anreize, wie online vor den teilweise unwürdigen Werbeformaten verschont zu bleiben, gibt es nicht. Das Webmagazin ars technica bietet das z.B. an. Problematisch ist, dass sich in den Preisvorstellungen die Missverständnisse über das Netz und das Wunschdenken auf den Verlagsseiten wiederspiegeln. Doch den Leser im Netz interessiert nur ein kleiner Teil der gedruckten Ausgabe. Und entgegen anderer digitaler Produkte wie Musiktitel, Apps und Games hat ein Zeitungsartikel nur einen geringen Gebrauchswert: Er wird in der Regel nur einmal gelesen und veraltet rapide. Das muss sich im Preispunkt widerspiegeln, und der liegt am ehesten in einem niedrigen zweistelligen Centbetrag für einen Artikel.

Demographische Faktoren

Paywalls schließen aus – vor allem die potentiellen Kunden von morgen. Guy Lucas fasste es neulich so:

“Most of the forward-looking paths to prosperity work better with a larger audience, and paywalls (or meters or whatever you want to call them) limit your audience. Most of the paths to prosperity demand that we reach a younger audience, and paywalls continue a model in the comfort zone of newspapers’ aging and dying audience.”

“Komfortzone” – das trifft es. Die Paywall ist eine Idee, die nicht auf morgen weist. Für manche spezialisierten Titel oder großen Marken kann es auch auf Dauer funktionieren, doch ist das vor allem für eine jüngere, webaffine Generation ein anachronistisches Modell, vergleichbar mit dem Zwang, ein ganzes Album kaufen oder ein rein lineares Programm im Fernsehen sehen zu müssen. Wer in 10 bis 15 Jahren noch Geld mit Nachrichten verdienen will, sollte sich heutzutage ein Bild von der Medienrealität Jugendlicher machen. Etwa durch die JIM-Studien des Medienpädagogischen Forschungsverbunds Südwest. Die Erste stammt von 1998 – prä-Breitbandinternet und prä-Smartphone – die Jüngste von 2011.

Die Forscherin Dana Boyd befasst sich ebenfalls mit dem Medienverhalten junger Menschen und schreibt an dem Buch The Social Lives of Networked Teens. In einem Interview sagte sie dieses Frühjahr:

General news is not relevant to young people because they don’t have context. It’s a lot of abstract storytelling and arguing among adults that makes no sense. So most young people end up consuming celebrity news. To top it off, news agencies, for obvious reasons, are trying to limit access to their content by making you pay for it. Well, guess what: Young people aren’t going out of their way to try to find this news, so you put up one little wall, and poof, done. They’re not even going to bother. That dynamic ends up really affecting those who already are ill-informed. I’m passionate about news. I pay attention to it obsessively. So of course I pay for it. But if you’re not passionate about news — if you don’t care about it — you’re not going to pay a cent for it.

Das ist auf lange Sicht ein fundamentales Problem. Durch Paywalls verliert man einen Teil der Jugendlichen/ jungen Erwachsenen an den Boulevard und visiert wohl nur den Nachwuchs des Bildungsbürgertums als potentielle Kundenschar an.

Best Practice

Also, was sind die Alternativen zur Paywall? Konzepte wie Micropayment funktionieren im Bereich von Gaming so gut, dass Spielefirmen ihre Basisprodukte freigeben – Valve veröffentlichte nach vier Jahren ihr Spiel Team Fortress 2 als “free to play” und vervielfachte dadurch seine Einnahmen: In einem Shop können Spieler für kleine Beträge Extraausrüstungen für ihre Spielfigur kaufen; Valve fungiert als Zwischenhändler und gibt eine Provision an die externen Entwickler weiter. Valve ist übrigens eine Ausnahmerscheinung: Die Firma hat eine äußerst flache Hierachie, funkioniert eher wie ein Kollektiv und beschäftigt neuerdings auch eine Ökonomen, der im Sommer über die Firmenstruktur lesenswert gebloggt hat.

Solche Wege der Monetarisierung sind selbstverständlich nicht einfach in den Journalismusbereich übertragbar. Dafür unterscheiden sich die Produkte wie Artikel und Games / Gameextras zu sehr. Die Debatte über Micropayment als Erlöser des Journalismus wurde in den USA schon 2009 geführt – da ging es gerade los mit Firmen wie Zynga & Co. Und gerade Zynga hat wohl seinen Zenit überschritten.Glaubt man Techcrunch, liegt das vor allem daran, dass die Firma nicht in der Lage war, adaptiv genug zu sein, und nicht verstanden hat, dass ihre Zielgruppe erfahrener geworden ist und nach anspruchsvolleren Games dürstet.

So oder so: Was die Zeitungs-/Nachrichtenbranche von der Gamingindustrie und der schmerzhaften Geschichte der Musikindustrie im Internet lernen kann, sind zwei Sachen:

A. Schafft Plattformen und Kataloge

Die Gamingplattform Steam hat Valve reich gemacht. Von Napster zu iTunes, von dort bis zu den App-Stores, und weiter zu den Napster-Enkeln Spotify, Rdio & Co ist viel passiert, falsch gemacht und gelernt worden. Alleine die Menge an Titeln und die vielen Verlage machen es in Deutschland nicht so einfach, wie in Slowenien und Polen eine gemeinsame Contentplattform zu etablieren. Anderseits gibt es hier Strukturen wie den Bund deutscher Zeitungsverleger, BDZV. Warum erhält der nicht das Mandat, eine gemeinsame neutrale Content-Plattform aufzubauen?

Eine Plattform, auf der ich einzelne Artikel erwerben kann. Zu einem angemessenen Preis.  Auf der ich einfach eine Flatrate oder ein Guthabenkonto bezahlen und verwalten kann. Auf der ich einzelne Artikel, Themen, Autoren, Artikelserien, ganze Ausgaben oder bestimmte Titel erwerben kann. Diese Plattform liefert mir, nach meinen Vorgaben, automatisiert in den für meine Endgeräte optimierten Formaten die Inhalte – egal ob für PC, Tablet, Smartphone oder Kindle.

Zudem sollten spürbare Mehrwerte als Anreize geboten werden – dazu lesenwert der Text “Business Class: Freemium for News?” von Oliver Riechenstein (Information Architects).

B. Usability, Usability, Usability

Ein große Hürde beim Verkaufen sind Verfahrensweisen und Bedienkonzepte. Usability ist bei Software – und mit ihr kommt man im Internet per se andauernd in Berührung – einer der wichtigsten und vielfach unterschätzten Aspekte.

Dabei geht geht es nicht nur um die Bedienbarkeit durch ein gutes Interface, sondern auch um Prozesse. Wenn ich etwas verkaufen will, muss ich

1. klar kommunizieren, wieviel das kostet und

2. es so einfach wie möglich machen, zu bezahlen, sowie

3. Alternativen anbieten: Neben einem Abo vielleicht ein Volumenangebot, 50 Artikel für 10 Euro, Zugang zu diversen (Extra-)Services etc.

Wenn ich dem Nutzer und potentiellen Kunden fünf und mehr Schritte durch Registrierungen und kryptische Zahlungsverfahren abverlange, steigt der längst vorher aus. Warum nicht Verfahren akzeptieren, die viele User kennen, oder wo sie schon einen Account inkl. Zahlungsangaben haben  und dem sie vertrauen: Paypal, Amazon (Payments), ebay? Dieser Vertrauensaspekt ist relevant: Deswegen (und wegen der Jugendlichen, die noch keine Kreditkarte haben können) bietet die Gamesbranche zudem noch Guthabenkarten an, die am Kiosk oder an der Tankstelle erworben werden können.

Schluss

Das iPad und der App-Store haben sich bislang nicht zu den Heilsbringern für die Zeitungsbranche gemausert, zu denen sie ausgerufen wurden. Meiner Meinung nach wird es darauf hinauslaufen, dass manche Zeitungen in Deutschland sterben, andere zu ein oder zwei Ausgaben in der Woche wechseln oder gänzlich auf eine digitale Variante umschwenken.

Warum die Errichtung einer Paywall in der derzeitigen Situation strategisch meist die falsche Entscheidung ist, habe ich versucht, darzulegen. Zuvor hatte ich vor wenigen Wochen auf meinem Blog (Das Medium ist eine Baustelle) für neue Formate im Onlinejournalismus plädiert. (In dem Zusammenhang siehe auch die jüngst gestartete iPhone App “Circa”.)

Der hier vorliegende Text schließt daran an: Er ist ein Versuch, prinzipiell über Ansätze der Finanzierung jenseits von Werbung nachzudenken. Letztlich geht es um – ich bitte, das Wort zu entschuldigen – Ganzheitlichkeit: Qualität des Contents, Darreichungsform, Usability, (demütiger) Preispunkt. Diese vier Punkte sollten stimmig sein, wenn man Nachrichten im Netz verkaufen will.

Crosspost von Datenjournalist

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Data entry, risk management and tacos: Inside Halo 4’s playtest labs

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Halo 4

Data entry, risk management and tacos: Inside Halo 4’s playtest labs

By Matt Leone on October 24, 2012 at 1:26p EDT
We spend a day in Microsoft’s User Research labs to see how the company uses public feedback to polish its most important game.
Before going home tonight, Eric Schuh will watch Halo 4’s ending 16 times. It will be under less-than romantic circumstances, on blurry six-inch screens with no sound. The code won’t be complete. He’ll gloss over cutscenes. People will walk in front of him and talk in the background, surgically criticizing the smallest details. He’ll watch players guide series star Master Chief in his fight against new enemies the Prometheans, never once touching a controller.

Schuh doesn’t mind. He’s done this before.

“We like to keep this as scientific as possible”

Eric Schuh, senior user researcher at Studios User Research

As the Halo lead in Microsoft’s Studios User Research and Central Analytics department, he’s spent the past two years collecting data on the much-anticipated sci-fi shooter. He and other team members recruit players, sit them in front of Xboxes, then watch, record and analyze everything that happens. They learn what confuses people, and turn their data into advice to the development team on what to babyproof and what to amputate.

Then they speak in numbers. Out of a database of 60,000 volunteers, Schuh says his team can fit 60 in the three rooms in front of him, 18 are playing Halo today and each will answer 884 survey questions before leaving. He’s wearing a shirt with “10 years of consolidated research” on the back, in the form of a word cloud showing survey results, and points out $20,000 worth of art on the walls, showing abstract representations of data.

“We like to keep this as scientific as possible,” he says. What some companies call “playtests” he calls “studies,” what some call “game rooms” he calls “labs,” and what some call “players” he calls “participants.”

To date, Schuh has run 40 tests on Halo 4’s highly secretive single-player campaign - totaling, as he tells it, 1,252 players and $2,750 in pizza.

Today, July 15th, is the last one.

Ready at Midnight
Ready at Midnight

Schuh’s road to this point began in 1992. Enrolled in the University of Washington, studying to be a social psychologist, he “almost but not quite” got his PHD when a friend turned him onto a job opening at Microsoft.

Since 2002, he’s been in the Xbox group, touching most games that have come through. Collecting and analyzing data, managing risk and limiting player confusion and frustration.

Schuh’s done well for himself. After working on Halo: ODST, Schuh graduated into a management role to oversee many of the projects in the User Research department. But when Halo 4 came around — then known under the codename “Midnight” — he stepped down from that role to focus on it.
ASKED IF IT’S THE MOST EXPENSIVE GAME MICROSOFT HAS MADE, HE SAYS, “ABSOLUTELY. NOTHING’S EVEN CLOSE.”
That might seem counter intuitive to an outsider, but as he explains it, for someone who works in data collection and user research analysis, it’s tough to find a better gig than Halo 4.

“The allure of not eating Top Ramen was pretty high,” he says.

On the surface, it’s Microsoft’s most popular game. In an interview with Polygon, Microsoft Studios head Phil Spencer says it’s a three billion dollar franchise and the “most important entertainment product in the company.” Asked if it’s the most expensive game Microsoft has made, he says, “Absolutely. Nothing’s even close.”

But it’s also a franchise that has grown up with the User Research department, leaving behind 10 years of legacy data. It’s a franchise that spills into other media, like comics and short films, each providing their own data for the group to analyze. It’s a game made down the street, so development team members can easily visit the labs. And perhaps most importantly, it’s the first game from a new development studio looking to mimic much of a blueprint established by another team over the past 10 years.

One of the most important tasks on Schuh’s plate has been helping smooth over that transition. Gathering player data on what feels like old Halo, and what feels different. Seeing what players think of the changes. Assisting with making the new Halo feel enough like the old Halo, and enough like something new.
It’s a franchise that spills into other media, like comics and short films, each providing their own data for the group to analyze.

Today, he says, he’s just watching for final tweaks and hoping it all works. Though really, he already knows. He’s seen the close-to-final survey results, and knows how Halo 4’s aggregate user scores compare to those of previous Halo games. He just won’t tell us.

Perfecting Bungie’s blueprint
Perfecting Bungie’s blueprint

Microsoft’s developer transition program for Halo 4 goes back many years.

In August 2007, when the Games User Research department made its first public splash in a Wired magazine cover story, the wheels were already in motion. At the time, developer Bungie Studios used the labs to massage Halo 3 with high tech methods like automatically tracking where players went, what weapons they used and how they died.

In September 2007, Bungie and Microsoft released Halo 3, which according to a Bungie press release was, at the time, “the fastest-selling video game ever, achieving $300 million in global sales its first week.”

In October 2007, Bungie announced plans to leave Microsoft and become independent, stating a desire to develop a new franchise.
Microsoft was setting up a long runway to make Halo 4 feel like a natural evolution.
“[Bungie] was weening itself, either consciously or subconsciously, from Halo for a while,” says Spencer. “They started a couple secondary projects while Halo 2 or 3 were going on that we didn’t complete. Bungie never equalled Halo.”

Enter 343 Industries. Around the time of Bungie’s departure, Microsoft began to funnel money into a homegrown team that would oversee all parts of the Halo brand — from licensing to fiction to new game development.

Bungie would stick around as a partner until 2010, developing two more Halo games in the transition, but Microsoft was setting up a long runway to make Halo 4 feel like a natural evolution. To hit the hard-to-define target of making the game feel new enough for those wanting something different, and familiar enough for legacy fans.

The kind of thing that one person can’t determine alone, but a group of a thousand testers can decide in aggregate.

Five years after Halo 3, we’re here to see how things have changed.

Getting comfortable
Getting comfortable

At 10:00 a.m. on July 15th, Schuh sets up in “the lounge,” a control room where the User Research team and 343 developers watch live tests, for the second day of this two-day weekend test.

Down the hall in the labs, you can hear a hair drop on what looks like daily-shampooed carpet. The walls run neutral colors from floor to ceiling, everyone wears headphones, and the cubicle dividers are large enough so no one sees each other. It’s a doctor’s office.
“Just turn to the left! To the left! To the left! … or just fall off that cliff.”
The lounge is a frat house. Unevenly glued posters stick to the walls. Stacks of fighting game joysticks spill out from a storage closet in the back. In front sit two 50-inch TVs, each showing feeds from eight Xboxes running the game. Behind sit developers watching how players react. Back at the 343 office across town, more team members tune into live feeds.

Sit in the lounge for more than a few minutes and it feels like watching horse racing or NCAA basketball in a casino gambling pit, with Microsoft employees calling out players by their station initials.

“C04 knows what she’s doing.”

“B06, what are you doing? Oh my god no … no! What are you doing?!”

“Don’t go over there! Yes, keep doing that! That’s what that blip means.”

“Just turn to the left! To the left! To the left! … or just fall off that cliff.”

The 343 team members in the room claim they don’t place bets on players, impossible as it may seem with all the data that gets thrown around. They’re impressed with the diversity in today’s test because four of the 18 participants are female. They note that, on average, a game’s overall survey score goes up two-tenths to three-tenths of a point when the developers add music.

And they cheer for specific players — in today’s test, B03 is the fastest, running towards enemies, using lots of quick melee attacks and at one point flying past enemies in a Banshee [one of the game’s aerial vehicles] to save time.

“He’s our rabbit,” says Schuh.

At one point, a 343 designer notices B03 miss a weapon he wanted him to pick up, so he plans to move its location to make it more obvious. Most tweaks the team calls out are similarly straightforward.
“We didn’t have completely working waypoint markers to drive people to the right place.”
“A lot of the stuff has been ironed out already,” says Schuh. “This is sort of the final cruise. But yeah, we’re definitely looking at a bunch of specific small things in each of the missions [today], and we’re also just looking at how people are interacting with the Promethians, just to make sure that those are working perfectly.”

“One of the things we’re going to be looking at is a mission that’s fairly late in the game, and it’s had some issues with people understanding what the goals are, what they’re trying to achieve,” says Schuh, keeping things vague to avoid late-game spoilers. “It’s one where it’s not completely clear. We didn’t have completely working waypoint markers to drive people to the right place. And so last time, we saw a lot of people wandering around being lost. We’re trying to see if — we put some wav points in; we added audio — to see if that actually solved the problem.”

Schuh with Scott Warner, lead designer at 343 Industries
Dan Callan, mission designer at 343 Industries
343 employees watch tests from the lounge, with live video feeds from 16 playtest sessions displayed across two monitors.

Way back when
Way back when

In the early days of Halo 4 testing, Schuh and team spent less time ironing out kinks, and more time looking at new features.

“One of the first steps was making the game feel like Halo,” says 343 executive producer Kiki Wolfkill.

“We did a bunch of iteration and test on different ideas really early on, experimenting with new mechanics — many of which didn’t make the cut because of that process,” says creative director Josh Holmes.
“One of the first steps was making the game feel like Halo.”
One of those was an attempt to evolve the game’s jumping system. Historically, Halo’s slow player movement has led to what many refer to as “floaty” jumping, and one of the team’s initial ideas was to make player movement feel more athletic.

“We played with a higher jump; we played with a smoother jump; we played with being able to go over small jumps without actually needing to physically jump,” says Wolfkill. “A lot of things around, ‘How can we get some smoother movement there?’”

“The unfortunate side effect of that, though, is it became unpredictable,” says Holmes. “Let’s say 95% of cases it would do what you expected it to do, but having that 5% be unpredictable [wasn’t good enough] … eventually we just came to the conclusion that ‘no matter how hard we work at this, we’re always going to have 1% of the time where it’s not going to do what the player intends, and that’s going to be frustrating to the core user.’ And so we ultimately made the decision, after a lot of work and investment in that system, to pull it and to go back to the more conventional jump.”

“So you’d raise the blast shields, you’d see this mysterious planet, but you’d also see a Covenant fleet, and then the planet would open and start pulling you in, but at the same time the Covenant fleet would start boarding the ship. It was super exciting.”
Josh Holmes, creative director at 343 Industries

In general, Holmes says, the Halo team values polish and consistency over features that may be exciting but only work 99% of the time.

“I think for Halo in particular, because there’s a competitive aspect to it in multiplayer, it’s really important to us to keep that consistency,” he says. “So players can learn a skill, pick it up, and know that they can apply that skill without the game sort of overriding their expectation. And so philosophically, that is something that we really held very dear.”
“We thought we were having this amazing bombastic moment, and it just turned into noise.”
That same philosophy came into play when the team set out to balance the game’s first mission. Internally known as M10 (where each level follows the convention: M10, M20, etc.), the mission initially threw more at players than they expected from a Halo game.

“We had all these different beats and events that were occurring simultaneously,” says Holmes. “So you’d raise the blast shields, you’d see this mysterious planet, but you’d also see a Covenant fleet, and then the planet would open and start pulling you in, but at the same time the Covenant fleet would start boarding the ship. It was super exciting.”

But players weren’t able to follow what was happening.

“We thought we were having this amazing bombastic moment, and it just turned into noise,” says Wolfkill.

So the team broke the scene into pieces, and spread them across different parts of the level, and the survey data came back higher in both ‘comprehension’ and ‘user enjoyment.’

From Schuh’s perspective, a job well done.

Kiki Wolfkill, executive producer at 343 Industries

Fire in the hole
Fire in the hole

“It looks like he’s feeling really compelled to shoot. Is there any reason to shoot those things, or are they just there for flair?”

Around 2:00 on July 15th, Schuh and the 343 team members run into an issue that gets a lot of attention in the lounge. The same one Schuh mentioned he’d be looking at earlier in the day.

Over the course of the morning, the group identified plenty of minor bumps, most of which they say are easy fixes. At the top of a ramp, a player tried to throw a grenade through translucent glass, signaling a designer to change its opacity. At the end of a mission, another player got lost in thick fog, so the team plans to thin it down. Most of these tweaks have to do with changing the lighting, adding waypoint markers to point players in the right direction, and moving weapon locations.

The one that gets the most attention comes in a part of the game many would consider a spoiler, so we’ll leave out specifics. But late in the game, player B03 — the player the team noticed rushing through the game earlier — gets lost and doesn’t know where to go to reach the end of a mission.

“Did B03 turn around again?” asks one developer. “Did he not go in there?” asks another “He didn’t figure out the wall.”

“Is he back there again?”

“Did he die? Wait, what just happened? He just popped. Did he teleport forward?”

“He’s died a bunch of times.”

Then the 343 comments calm and shift towards solutions. A designer notices that when B03 turns around, he runs into oncoming fire, which isn’t supposed to happen — one of Halo’s long held subtle design traits is that if a player sees someone shooting at them, they know they’re going in the right direction.

“It looks like he’s feeling really compelled to shoot. Is there any reason to shoot those things, or are they just there for flair?” asks a developer.

“They’re for flair.”

“They’re there because everyone likes to shoot them.”

Another designer notices that the lighting isn’t properly pointing B03 to the exit, and doesn’t dim to subtly suggest he’s going the wrong way once he gets lost. Something that the team would only notice once a player finds themselves lost, and something that most players would never need. But it hits the 99% barrier that Holmes and the team want to avoid.

“Once the [geometry] got more complicated in there, it got harder to navigate,” says a team member. “And then lighting is also an issue.”

Ultimately, Schuh says, this issue is as fixable as most of the others they’ve discovered, but it tends to stand out both because it happens during an important moment in the game and because it lasts longer than most of the other hiccups in the test.

“I was feeling for [him] as he was going through it, and it wasn’t his fault,” says Schuh after the fact. “We just need to draw players’ attention to the place that they need to go, which we’ll be able to do with lighting, and then sort of turn off the lights behind him so that he knows, ‘Hey you’re going the wrong way when you’re going backwards,’ and it’ll be all good.”

The test subject
The Test subject

One of the playtest participants samples the game in the labs.

After finishing his test, B03 reveals himself to be Steven Peluso. And after Microsoft reps deem him clean cut enough and make him promise not to curse, he agrees to an interview.

Peluso says he almost missed his chance to be here. He remembers getting the call while jogging.

“I’m all really sweaty, and I’m trying to answer my phone, but it’s a touch screen so you can’t really answer it,” he says. “And I’m just like, ‘Whatever. I’ll call them back later.’ And I think it wasn’t until like two days later that I called them back. And then, just kind of the questions they asked me, I had a thought that it was Halo, but I didn’t necessarily know.”

This is the second time Peluso has been called into Microsoft’s labs, and his first on Halo. He doesn’t live nearby. He drove out for the weekend to stay with a friend because he wanted to play the game.

So what does it feel like on the inside?

“Before I did it, I never really had a problem sitting down and playing games for a long time,” he says. “A game would come out the night of release; you’d go home and play it for hours. But then you come here, you sit down, you play it and … I don’t know. It’s like seven hours that you sit down and play it. And you kind of forget that when you’re playing at home you can get up sometimes, and you go get something to drink, to eat. Here’s it’s just you and the game.”

He says he tries to forget people are watching when he’s in the room but feels pressure to play quickly so he can finish the game before the test ends. “You wouldn’t go into a movie and leave three-fourths in and be like, ‘I’ll wait ‘til it’s out on DVD,’” he says.

He seems relatively understanding of the time he got stuck in the spoiler section. “There was distinctly one point where, from as far as I knew, that’s where I was supposed to go. And it took me a few tries before I realized it was just this little small thing, and eventually I got it, and I was just like, ‘Huh, well maybe someone should have pointed that out for me.’”

What does he think of the game?

“I think it’s much more like Halo 1 than, say, Reach or 3, and to me that’s a good thing,” he says. “That was my favorite one … I felt there were more open areas. Granted, there were a lot more closed-in ones, but the open areas have always been what I enjoyed out of the Halo games.”

For Schuh and the rest of the team hoping to make the game feel like a natural transition from previous Halo games, this is the kind of thing they want to hear. Something that references old Halo, without being too familiar.

With that, Microsoft gives Peluso his four gratuity items (a year of Xbox Live, an Xbox Live points card, Forza 4 and Alan Wake) and sends him on his way home.

Never ever mention outside
Never ever mention outside

Thanks to non-disclosure agreements, Peluso’s Polygon interview marks the only time he’s contractually allowed to talk about what he saw before the game releases. Even now, as this story goes live before the game ships, he can’t repeat the things we just quoted him saying. Such is Microsoft’s security for Halo 4 testing.

Since before 343 Industries existed, Bungie and Microsoft have long been paranoid about keeping Halo’s story a secret until each game ships. And the User Research team is similarly security conscious — everyone who enters its labs signs a non-disclosure agreement in the lobby, gets reminded by staff that these things must stay private, and has an individual camera film them while they play.

Even the glass doors to each of the labs have “Studios” logos cut into them in such a way that no one outside can see what’s on the screens. Much like in Halo missions, the rooms are positioned so you can see what the designers want you to see.

“Over the 12 years of this group, we have run over 100,000 people through our labs,” says Schuh, again reciting the numbers off the top of his head. “We’ve had seven leaks that we know about.”

When things leak, Schuh helps track down the person then hands the name to Microsoft’s lawyers. “We’re really good about tracking them down, and a lot of the security features that I’m not going to talk about that are subtly here are as a result of things that we’ve done through tracking them down before.”

For Schuh, the frustration comes when leaks make it harder to convince developers to do more user research testing. “Leaking, although it’s exciting — it actually ruins the ecology for games, because it makes teams not want to do this type of research, and this is what makes the games better,” he says.

Testing for intent
Testing for Intent

Ultimately, according to Schuh, it’s up to the developer how much they use the feedback from the User Research group. And 343, he says, is one of the most active teams involved.

When Schuh talks about User Research testing making games better, he says it with confidence. There’s no doubt in his mind that it significantly improves games to use data to smooth out experiences.

Not every experience wants to be smooth, however. Creative types often cite a desire not to get too much outside input on their ideas. The directors of the recent Indie Game: The Movie documentary bookended their film with a quote from Braid designer Jonathan Blow — the only central quote to appear in the movie twice — highlighting this divide.

“[Big companies] create highly polished things that serve as large of an audience as possible,” he said. “The way that you do that is by filing off all the bumps on something; if there’s a sharp corner, you make sure that’s not going to hurt anybody if they bump into it or whatever. That creation of this highly glossy commercial product is the opposite of making something personal.”

Blow’s comments refer less literally than they do creatively, and few would claim that Halo is trying to be a game about one person’s vision, but his overall point carries over — too much external input can sometimes push developers into areas they would prefer not to go. Changing the geometry of a level to make it more user friendly, for instance, may make it less attractive. Like the thicker taco shell, fixing a problem doesn’t always create a better product.

Schuh and the designers at 343 make a clear distinction here, saying they’re trying to perfect a creative vision rather than change its substance, noting that ultimately the design choices come down to the design team. They use the phrase “confirming intent” to point out that this process is not about challenging creative ideas so much as discovering whether those ideas resonate.

“It comes down to what the intent is,” says Holmes. “There are moments where you want the player to feel that sense of being a little bit lost and disoriented. And then it’s more about finding the balance of, ‘How long do you want them to maintain that sensation before giving them the information that they need to drive forward?’ So a lot of it just comes down to testing against intent. There’s no magic set of metrics where you’re like, ‘OK, you’ve just got to tick off these boxes and then you’ve got yourself a great experience and a great level.’ You go in with a very clear intention, but then you’re testing to see that you are actually achieving that intention.”

Ultimately, according to Schuh, it’s up to the developer how much they use the feedback from the User Research group. And 343, he says, is one of the most active teams involved.

“This was my first experience really working with this sophisticated user research process and group, and it’s been a godsend,” says Holmes. “I’ve worked in the past at companies that put a lot of effort into testing at the concept level — doing focus testing, and trying to figure out, ‘OK, is this idea resonating?’ But not really having a formalized process for testing how players experience the game and whether you’re getting the clarity you want.”

“One of the big reasons I came to work here was this department,” says lead designer Scott Warner. “I’m not joking when I say, top three reasons I came to 343, one was user research.

“A lot of people would say, ‘Well we’ll watch people play and see how things go,’ but there [are] ways of doing this [that work better than others]. And Microsoft has a really long history of doing this kind of testing, not only through games but also obviously through applications and [everything else they produce].”

How Halo testing has evolved
How halo testing has evolved

6:00 p.m.
6:00 p.m.

Schuh looks relieved. Nothing big went wrong. Which is what he expected would happen. Which is what usually happens at this point in the cycle. But also which was necessary for the game to comfortably hit its November 6th release date.

By the end of the day, everyone in the Halo 4 test has finished the campaign.

Without audio in many cutscenes, it’s difficult to say whether they understood exactly what happened in the story, but they got their gratuity and Schuh’s team got its data.

As Schuh and team clean up the Papa John’s pizza boxes and plates scattered around the lounge, Schuh looks relieved. Nothing big went wrong. Which is what he expected would happen. Which is what usually happens at this point in the cycle. But also which was necessary for the game to comfortably hit its November 6th release date.

Just a bit ago, he gave a quick mission-by-mission preview to the 343 team of what his report on this test will include. And now he’s ready to call it a day and head home for the last few hours left of his weekend.

“It’s been a long journey,” he says. “It’s exciting to get to this point — long day, long weekend, but exciting.”

Schuh’s job isn’t done, but as he says, it’s “winding down.” Next on his plate: a report summarizing this campaign test, meetings with 343 team members to discuss what the data means, a final pre-release multiplayer test, a “formality” look at the campaign to check the team’s work, and ongoing support once the game is released.

As companies have evolved to treat certain games more like services than products, so has Microsoft’s User Research group. On a high profile title like Halo — especially one with a significant multiplayer mode and an episodic series of “Spartan Ops” missions planned — that means Schuh’s heavy lifting is done for the moment, but his job on Halo 4 will continue into next year.

“We’re keeping it alive,” he says, “so there is always an understanding of how players are playing our maps. They’re always going to feed into the next version of the game. They’re going to help us tune for any title updates and tuning passes that we do. So we don’t stop once the game is over. This is just the start of the next phase.”

Ask when he’ll be 100% done with Halo 4, and Schuh can’t commit to an answer — though it’s hard to say if he’s being cagey, or legitimately doesn’t know, or if there’s even much of a break before the next Halo comes around.

“We stop when … it just keeps going,” he says. “That’s the great thing about this franchise.”

Design: Warren Schultheis

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Significant Other – Gender Signifiers in Video Games

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Depictions of gender in video games generally don’t work. Actually in most of geek culture they suck – yeah, I’m looking at you comic book industry. Why? Because they create hostility between two parties who really don’t need to be at each other’s throats.

Feminist critics and gender issue aware members of the gaming community decry the blatant sexism in video games, while growing in numbers and in relevance. On the other side, not so gender issue aware game devs, gamers and journalists feel threatened, blame it all on those who speak up, get defensive, retaliate or engage in preemptive attacks.

Female gamers and LGBTIQ gamers are here to stay, which is wonderful, enriching, progressive… and admittedly – for male caucasian heterosexual 29-year-olds like me – also challenging. We need to drastically reform the way we depict gender in our oh so mature and oh so progressive medium, people.

Here is my long excessive attempt at analyzing how character design around gender works, how it currently fails and how to fix it. Let’s discuss!

Signifiers In Character Design

Let’s look at characters and what their design tells us about them and about the intellectual property they belong to. Every design element of a character – every sign, which tells us something about the protagonists or NPCs and the games they appear in is furthermore referred to as a signifier.

Signifiers are used by designers to articulate a character’s ethnicity, age, personal style, psychology, past, occupation, social status and much more… including gender. But the thing with signifiers is – though designers aim at using them effectively – they emerge in the eye of the beholder. Designers simply can’t control how a viewer reads their design…
… they can only somewhat guide it.

The implosion of the Hitman Absolution killer nuns trailer is one very prominent example of this miscommunication. And while many folks feel like they should tell the gender issue aware members of the gaming community to suck it up and be happy with what they get… … you know, stop ruining games… I see the onus on the shoulders of the designers to listen to feminist criticism, learn, and work hard to get their gender depictions working again.

Gender Signifiers

When it comes to signifying a character’s gender and also their sexual orientation, designers can dig into a big library of signs to do so. In most cultures clothing is gendered, hair cuts are gendered, there are clear expectations of what a male or female body looks like, even going as far as common expectations what role a person of each respective gender should play in a society.

In short, gender signifiers come in two forms:

- artefacts of gender norms and stereotypes
- or simply displays of male or female body parts.

Cisnormativity Heteronormativity

All those kinds signifiers are usually easy to read but not always valid or accurate. They are based on ideas of gender normativity. And lets be real here: there is no such thing as a definitive visible feature to determine a person’s gender identity in real life. There are women with penises and men with vaginas out there, cross-dressers, tom boys, androgynous people and so many more.

When it comes to LGBTIQ issues, games are horribly normative. They don’t reflect those issues very much or when they do, it’s played for effect. For example gender ambiguity seems to be in general a total no go:

I understand that this paragraph does not address the issue as much as it deserves. I’d like to reserve the issue and expand on it in another article maybe. Unfortunately, there is more than enough to resolve for one article, when just looking at the design of cisgender and heterosexual characters.

Dynamics At Play

Like mentioned, the actual meaning of a signifier (and therefore it’s existence) gets ultimately created by the viewer. Signifiers get recognized, attributed with importance and interpreted depending on the preconceptions and cognitive habits of the individual audience member. Looking at some of the factors that influence the meaning of a gender signifier for individual players, no wonder there is so drastic disagreement about what’s a proper way to depict a gendered character:

There are many methods to guide the average member of a designer’s target audience to the desired understanding and emotional response and many dynamics to keep in mind. I’d like to highlight three of those principles, because I see them to be at the core of most botched gender depictions.

Dynamic 1: Exposure Versus Unequivocal Signifiers

If you give a character some amount of exposure, the player has time and opportunity to get to know the character. You don’t need to bomb the viewer with first glance information, you can roll it out slowly. You can be subtle and organic with your visual signals and in addition express the characters personality via her words and actions. Games characters are most of the time not so lucky.

In games, many characters don’t get much exposure. Most NPCs are confined to their roles within the game’s mechanics and narration. Shopkeepers are just shopkeepers, palace guards are just palace guards, pedestrian are just pedestrians. They never leave their designated area, have no names, sometimes no faces, no background story. Enemy units just appear in the player’s view to get popped and disappear again. Knowing friend from foe in games is about unequivocal visual signals, which allow the player to react in an instant.

This goes as well for many protagonist or related characters. They need to click with the audience on screenshots, cover artworks, trailers or within the limits of a demo. They need to sell themselves to the target group before the individual player invests money and time.

Like with any strong visual medium (comics, tv shows and films included), games have taught their audience to be satisfied with first impressions and move on. This goes as far as even if you plan on giving a character proper exposure, satisfying the player by covering the character in unequivocal signifiers will drown his interest in getting to know the character.

Rule of thumb here: If signifiers of a character are more unequivocal and therefore satisfying, the viewer will look for less information beyond those signifiers. And vice versa.

Here are a couple of common female signifiers (mostly displayed on distaff counterparts), which tend to limit characters to their femininity aspect, especially in combination. Ribbons, flowers, hearts, girlish mannerisms and a lot of pink:

Dynamic 2: Symbolic Creativity

Every signifier in a character design is an artifact of that character’s self-expression. Everything you see at a person – no matter how much a result of outside forces – is influenced by that person… We can expect, that a character did not choose to lose a leg for example. But we can derive information about that character’s self-image and how he wants to be seen by the way he either hides, shows, compensates or decorates his prosthetic limb. We can derive information from his posture, his choice of clothing, level of hygiene, and so forth.

Even if the person did not choose his physical gender features, he or she decides how to deal with it. So when a character has breasts for example, it is a matter of self-expression how they are displayed, how much the character wants them to dominate the overall appearance. Does the character not want them to be part of self-expression (dismiss), accept them as one of many aspects of own self-expression (adopt) or does the character make them a central part of own self-expression (present)?

It’s common and should be expected, that the player will conclude, whatever the character shows on the outside correlates with what’s inside. Except when told otherwise, the player will expect, that the character wants to look like he does.

Dynamic 3: Patterns Versus Distinctions

Signifiers aren’t just seen and interpreted on their own merits. They dim or shine in the framework with other signifiers. Looking at a group of characters within one game or when looking at all characters of a genre, the audience responses to patterns and distinctions. When multiple characters share a strong signifier – creating a pattern – this signifier is no longer representative for the individual character but for the whole group. On the other hand the signifiers, which are exclusive to each character – creating a distinction – become extra-relevant for the assessment of the individual character.

The same goes for derivative characters like clones, sons, daughters, evil twins, successors, and so on. All signifiers which are shared between the original character and the derivative character are representative for the qualities of the original character. But the signifiers, which help us distinguish the new one from the old one are now extra-representative for the derivative character and basically provide the justification for its existence.

Gender Signifier Imbalance

Now those dynamics can work in both directions. Designers could utilize them to either make gender an issue or non-issue for characters of both genders. Unfortunately they don’t. There is a severe imbalance between the ways the genders are depictited.

Dynamic 1: Exposure Versus Unequivocal Signifiers:
The dominant use of unequivocal gender signifiers on characters – therefore the reduction of those characters to not much more beyond their gender – is with female characters way more frequent and severely stronger than with male ones. Most of the time these signifiers limit the respective character either to the concept of femininity or to a sexual entity. There are also by far fewer female protagonist, which puts female characters at a severe disadvantage, when it comes to exposure.

Dynamic 2: Symbolic Creativity
When it comes to characters presenting their gender signifiers – therefore putting them at the center of their self-expression – female characters do it also way more often and more excessively than male ones. Female characters put their femininity or their sexuality at the forefront without demanding attention for qualities beyond that.

Dynamic 3: Patterns Versus Distinctions
In most groups, female characters just appear as one single member or as very very few members of that group. This is referred to as the “Smurfette principle”. It makes the gender of that female character a distinguishing factor, drawing special attention to the character’s gender or limiting the character to her gender.

The same goes for derivative characters. There are little to no instances where there is an original female character spawning a male one. On the other hand, on the subject of “distaff counterparts”, there are tons and tons of popular male characters spawning female counterparts.

For Example…

Here is a common example of the imbalances taking place in mainstream games. Not only is the female character the only of one a kind (dynamic 3), the designers made sure we have unequivocal gender signifiers (dynamic 1) and that we understand how much she herself considers her gender to be the most defining thing about her (dynamic 2):

Absolutely the same imbalance applies to the Koopakids. Wendy O’Koopa is the only female, wears pink, make-up, a ribbon on her head, lush lips and lashes, jewelery, high-heels. She makes distinctively feminine poses and blows kisses. On the other hand, her brothers almost have no gender signifiers at all. You can count Morton’s and Ludwig’s eyebrows. But that’s it.

Super Meat Boy is only a boy in name. Nothing about his character design includes any sort of male signifier. He is just a red square with stumpy arms and legs and a smiley face. His derivative character Bandage Girl on the other hand gets pink coloring and a flower on her head. Here again the makers felt they needed to articulate her gender far more explicitly than his.

Virtual Patriarchy

This imbalance and its manifestations add up to strong implied ideas, which are prominent in a dominant portion of popular games and the surrounding popular cultural (advertising, licensing, journalism, conventions, memes). No matter if intended by game designers, writers, culture makers or fans… these ideas are here and they are misogynistic at their core.

I. It’s A Man’s World, Women Just Live In It

-Groups mainly consist of men, but for some reason one or two women are there too. -Whatever these women do or are is what it takes to be welcome in that group. -That woman is burdened to singlehandedly represent her whole gender. -It’s ideal, when a woman has no female peers. Doesn’t need them or want them.
-It’s ideal, when she is forced to only relate to and interact with men.
-It’s ideal, when women have only male leaders, reference points or role models.

II. Men Be Everything, Women Be Women

-Men need to distinguish themselves from the mainly male rest of the group with their personality, interests and skills. Women don’t. They are already special because of their gender. -It’s ideal, when a women is satisfied with being a women and only works to play that out instead of acquiring any sort of skill beyond that. -It’s ideal, when women actively promote their gender, so they add the female element to the group. This is what they are there for.
-It’s ideal, when a woman is only demanding to be viewed and treated as a woman and nothing beyond that.
-It’s also completely okay, if the woman has not much skill. Men are there to get her out of trouble.

III. Women Are A Subspecies Of Men

-With distaff counterparts, the men was there all along, the female is just a derivative.
-It’s admirable, when a woman tries to be like a man. But the man will always be the original.

IV. Women Are Easy

-Due to heterosexual normativity and the fact that she is the only female in the group, members of the group have only one person to be attracted to and to make a move on. -She therefore can not be part of the group without also being a potential love interest. -It’s ideal, when she accepts that role and plays her female sexuality out.
-It’s understood, that she is always and constantly desiring a man’s sexual attention.
-Therefore, no matter how inappropriate for the moment, she shows of her hot body and sends sexual signals at all times.

V. Women Owe Men

-Women are dependent on the skills of men, since they themselves are too occupied with being women. -Women thrive on being a distaff counterpart, an imitation, of a male original. -Women need male approval, because there are no female peers to get it from.
-Women need to be accepted in male dominated groups, because there aren’t much other types of groups.
-Women need to accept that and contribute to the group with what they can do best, by being feminin, hot and available.

How problematic are those ideas?

Well it depends how much power you ascribe to those ideas. When you consider them just qualities of an entertainment product, you at least need to see, that there is not much reason for female audiences to jump in. I personally have a hell of a lot respect for geek girls, who find a way to be passionate about games, despite the fact, that games are generally not made with them in mind.

You could also consider games to be devices for escapism. A collection of virtual spaces, scenarios and activities to flee to from reality. Enticing fantasies. Then it get’s kinda creepy to contemplate, that these ideas about women represent mainstream desires of the gaming community. The key word is mainstream here, we are not talking about niche interests or kinks. And here as well, there is not much incentive for women to join such a community.

I suspect that some female members of the gaming community are able to draw parallels to their own real life experiences to the ideas promoted by heavily unbalanced gender representation. How they are treated like they represent all women. How they need to prove that they are more than pretty faces. How they are expected to conform to be accepted in the male dominated culture. How they have to deal with male entitlement. How male geeks treat females like imitators. How they are treated as fair game, when it comes to uncalled for sexual advances. How they per default are considerate less able.
How women who are good looking and play that out get more attention.
And how they get ostracized, when they publicly reject and criticize the standards above.

If you think that ideas in media, explicit and implicit, do not influence our thinking and behavior… you probably never ever bought anything because of advertising and Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are just wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on campaign ads, just for shits n giggles.

Fixing It!

The most important thing to do is get more women into the industry and into the community. I’ve learned in my years of teaching and working with people, that women are much better at coming up with fair and women-friendly scenarios and concepts, than the guys are. And the kicker: Those concepts are super interesting, refreshing and a total enrichment for the art form.

Many botched gender depictions are a result of male designers aiming at including women, but somehow just adding one female character and then overcompensating with female signifiers or falling into the trap of listening to marketers, who told them, that all women actually have pink as their favorite color.

Develop some appreciation for female critics, stop being surprised by the mere presence of women in your interest group and have some courtesy. And make sure you support gender inclusive efforts, like female centered conventions, education and projects.

Now on the design side, here are 3 simple rules to follow:

1. Pass the fucking Bechdel test! Pass it magna cum laude. 2. Design female characters as interesting and able persons first and as females later. Just remove female signifiers until the personality of the character is uncovered.
3. Add female characters with non-idealized body types, add old ones. Don’t make good looks a raison d’être.
4. Tilt the scale. Be equal by the numbers. Both genders get the same amount of characters, the same amount of sexuality, the same amount of respect and relevance…

Of course not every game needs to be like that. There is room for male-centered exploitation and porn (be honest thats what mainstream games are, just without the maturity to actually show sexual acts). But we need some diversity on the shelves. Just imagine what Mass Effect would have been like with this gender signifier overload bullshit:

Benchmarks

I asked my twitter and facebook friends to send me female characters, which were memorable to them. I gave no additional qualifiers. I just wanted to know which characters impressed them or stuck with them for any other reason. I got roughly 300 responses from women, men, gay and straight and a few transgender people.

Here are the ones that managed to get at least three mentions:

Ellen Ripley (13 mentions) Buffy Summers (6 mentions) Sarah Connor (5 mentions) Faith from Mirror’s Edge (4 mentions) Jade (Beyond Good & Evil) (4 mentions) Pippi Langstrumpf/Longstockings (4 mentions) Starbuck (Battlestar Galactica, reimagined) (4 mentions) Alyx Vance (3 mentions) Amelie Poulain (3 mentions) Arya Stark (3 mentions) Commander Shepard (3 mentions) Hermoine Granger (3 mentions) Juno MacGuff (3 mentions) Lara Croft (3 mentions)
Major Motoko Kusanagi (3 mentions)
Ronia the Robber’s Daughter (3 mentions)

How many of them fit into the narrative of the virtual patriarchy above? Not many and none of them cleanly. Many characters maintain their gender as an integral part of their identity, while never valuing their gender over their personality and skills.

Thanks for reading. Please share, like and add your thoughts in the comments below.

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Are racing sims treading the right path? « Race and Vehicle Simulations

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There has been a trend emerging in vehicle simulation software over many years now, where a simulator is seen as a “platform” and thus an ongoing project that never ends. This allows many benefits; not only can media portals not review a sim without being told that “it isn’t finished yet”, but it also allows developers to completely redefine the word “beta.”

It strikes me that nearly everything is a beta these days, for a very long time, and those betas, unlike the betas of old, are very much public, and very commercial.

Racing simulators like to think of themselves as separate to other simulation platforms, and in many ways they are. For a start, they are rarely as focussed when it comes to vehicle systems, and for a finish they present a competitive environment that brings in a wholly different type of user.  Nonetheless, there are similarities between the various vehicle sim platforms out there, and maybe some things to learn.

For those that don’t know, the long running “Microsoft Flight Simulator” (MSFS) series, that has been around just about as long as PC’s have, is done and dusted.   The development team that had worked up to the release of Flight Simulator X (FSX, that’s ten by the way) were all laid off as Microsoft had to “align resources with their strategic priorities.”  Thus, the biggest and most popular platform for flight simulation was to come to an end. Countless modders, experienced in MSFS products for many years, were left wondering why.

MSFS, including the most recent product, FSX, has always been an open platform for modding, and over time, the creation of payware mods of a level of detail often far and above the main product has become the norm.  The software was made this way, much like rFactor was back in 2005.  Where, for rFactor, we have a vast array of cars and tracks and entire race series available for free, we also have commercial add-ons that licence the ISI engine to implement and produce their own full game. Often, and I’ve heard this before somewhere, of a level of detail far and above the main product.

Pass me the manual!

Since 2005, the number of racing sims released based on the ISI platform, I suspect is higher than any other platform, and thus it’s fair to suggest that rFactor is the most successful racing sim platform of recent times.  Whether it is the best is neither here nor there, for many.  There are a huge amount of simracers that will take quantity over quality, and if you can get five million tracks and ten billion cars for the price of a single game, why go elsewhere?

The same has applied for many moons in the flight sim market. I bought FSX in 2007, and since then the platform has developed well beyond its original scope.   There are a huge amount of users worldwide and some will boot up their sim with a hanger of hundreds of aircraft, with thousands of airports to travel to, all of which could well have been free.  At the same time, some will have commercial add-ons that replicate a given aircraft at a level of detail that racing simulators seem terrified to imagine, that could cost up to £60.

What was that?  £60 for a single plane?  That’s madness surely?  Well, I am not sure, the add-on I refer to is “Concorde X”, and with the huge manual provided you can accurately operate one of the world’s most iconic aircraft ever, and spend hours and hours learning it’s systems to such a degree that if you were to sit in the real thing you’d know which switches to flick to have her in the air.  Thus, the flight sim hobbyist that shells out for a given aircraft will be working around a simple equation of cost versus fun.

Where this comes back to Microsoft, and their all important strategic priorities, is that they must be wondering why all these commercial  mod teams are making money when Microsoft need cash for the new moon that they want to put up (cue: “That’s no moon” quotes, etc).

So, before long, and ignoring the petition signed by 100,000 people to bring back MSFS, Microsoft announced their new foray into Flight simming: Microsoft Flight.

“Putting the fun back in flight sims” was the line.  I paraphrase, but this new release aimed to stop the keen hobbyist in their tracks and bring in a whole new audience by pushing more “game” than “sim” into their product. No more checklists and being serious about handling aircraft, this was to make flight sims less daunting and complex and more a jolly fun time gambolling around in the skies.  Of course, we didn’t know this in the beginning, but when MS Flight was released, in February 2012, the reaction was….  well, mixed.  Microsoft flight is free to play, a favourite move in modern gaming, with promised commercial add-ons provided by the development team in the form of DLC as the product develops (does this mean it’s a beta, who knows).  The sim offered a graphically pleasant rendition of Hawaii to fly around in one plane, thus providing quite a lot less than FSX’s thirty aircraft and the entire world.  Suffice to say, the keen hobbyist felt short changed, even when it cost nothing!  What of the casual gamer?  Well, chances are they read a review on EuroGamer and wondered where the guns were.

Now let’s imagine this whole thing in our cosy world of simracing, where we rashly assume that the only type of simulated racing in the world is in cars, and the whole community has become so insular that amazing ruckus can be caused by people using the wrong word in a sentence when English is their second, third or ninth language.

When developers licence the rfactor engine from ISI, they take it wholesale, so unlike FSX add-ons, there is no requirement for the base product to be installed. If someone released a free to play version of rFactor, licenced legitimately from ISI, we would get a full working product with the potential functionality of the rFactor product, and maybe more.  Then, if, say, they provided DLC car add-ons, of varying prices, and potentially varying levels of quality, what would you think?

This seems to be more or less the direction being taken by SimRaceWay.  A free-to-play sim based on rFactor 1 technology, with integrated multiplayer and online events and series run by the organisers in very much the theme of iRacing.  So rFactor meets iRacing?

It’s a leap.  Where iRacing charge us, sometimes quite high costs, for add-on tracks and cars, you are getting tracks that could arguably be called the most detailed and accurate available, as well as cars, which, we are told, are 100% accurate to their real-world counterparts.  We don’t get manuals for them or system modelling or the chance to get under the bonnet and poke around, but at least we get a pretty solid car model.  And everyone tells me no one wants all that anyway.

Cranking along a British country road in a Lancer Evo… Never done that before, honest officier!

So what of SimRaceWay?  Well, many of the tracks come for free, which is good considering some of them look decidedly ropey compared to what some of the best mod teams have managed for rFactor. And what of the cars?  Well, some are cheap, and some less so, based, possibly on the cost of licencing, but marketed as a replication of a real-world buyers’ market.  Prices are directly proportional to real life.  So, in real life you would pay less for an Alfa Romeo Mito than you would an Alfa Romeo 8C.  Reasonable, I guess. But where does the quality equation come in?  Do we get a nice PDF manual with each car, giving us background details, specifications, setup and driving tips?  Oh no, of course not, simracers don’t want any of that.  Silly me.  What do I think this is, a hobby?

Driving the cars is largely a good enough experience, in much the same way that rFactor is with a good mod.  But then one car and the next can be notably different in quality. The accuracy of tyre feel, body control and overall vehicle dynamics seem to vary car to car, like the QA team sometimes take long holidays.  There are, fortunately a few cars in the sim that I have driven in real life, and while some of them do a reasonable job (Mitsubishi Lancer Evo), some seem to feel very much like one of those rFactor mods you uninstall after ten laps of confused pedalling.  The variance in quality is exactly what you expect from community made free mods, many of which are made by someone or other who is just giving sim-car building a stab.  But when you’ve forked out for a car, even if it is just seven or eight dollars, you kind of expect a professional job. When you are asked to pay nearly forty dollars (!) for a McLaren-Honda MP4/4, well, I want Concorde X levels of detail.

Now, I am not really here to slate SimRaceWay, I’ve just been ranting out my opinion.  But on the whole I have to wonder where SimRaceWay fits into the simracing arena.  I am not one of those that thinks simracing is “too crowded” and I encourage new simracing products entering the marketplace, especially those that enrich the genre by presenting new features and a different slant on the hackneyed “here are some tracks and some cars, go and crash… <ahem>.. race on them.”  But is SimRaceWay doing this?

Of course, just like seemingly everything in the world now, it is in beta, and so is easily defended with a “Well, when it is released it will have magic, and spoons, and jumping monkeys and simulated cars that drive at least a bit like real cars.” But if you take this stead then iRacing is still in beta, for the last 5 years!  The PC gaming industry is tied into an “always on” web-connected world with every sim being developed, be it a flight, train, bus, lunar lander or ice cream van sim, it is touted as being in constadev.  How many developers, in the last few years, have you heard say upon release: “Well, this is it, released, it’s done, no more patches, no new features, just get on with it and shut up?” Not many I will wager.

If we wait for everything to be complete to pass any kind of opinion or judgement we are left wondering if there is such a thing as an opinion anymore. In fact, maybe all of my opinions are in beta and could well be developed or changed as my life moves on through the development process.  There’s a novel idea.

SimRaceWay seem to be doing one thing different, and that is appealing to the motorsports enthusiast, and not the existing simracer (who might compare their sim to other products on the market!) or the “Where are the guns?” casual gamer.  They have put in sponsorship at sites like Radio Le Mans, which is practically the global voice of sportscar racing.  They turn up at race events and tout their wares to people that love motor racing, but may not have driven a sim.  An open minded market, in other words.  They also sign up famous stars like Dario Franchitti and Allan McNish to issue some marketing bumph… <ahem, sorry, it’s a Tourette’s thing>… expert opinion on the driving physics of the sim.  The oldest one in the book, of course; doubtless old Mario had plenty of kind words to say about the realism of “Mario Andretti’s racing challenge” back in 1994 when that venerable sim was released.

I don’t know if this approach is working too well or not.  SimRaceWay have more “likes” on Facebook than any other “serious” racing sim, but on the occasions I have gone online in the sim this is not really reflected by the sparsely populated races.  I may never have found the right time of day or week, but I would imagine that over five hundred thousand keen “likers” would manage to spread out over a fair range of times.

What this makes me wonder is whether this whole “free to play, expensive DLC” plan is really for the best.  If you offer simracers cars and tracks of a quality below that which is available for free in other platforms, they will turn away.  If you offer any casual gamer the chance to pay more for a single car than they would for a full game, they will turn back to Gran Turismo (where they can get 500 cars for the same price!), and if you provide a few cars that you can drive for free to an uninitiated audience, the natural expectation, for me anyway, is that this free try would pique their interest.  That piqued interest would lead them to forums, the simracing community, and the wholesale realisation that there is better out there for less outlay.

Where can this lead SimRaceWay in the long run?  Well, I can’t be sure, of course, because it is being constantly developed. Maybe next week a new release will come out that will make every other sim on Earth redundant, but to see where this could really end up, maybe we should look back at Microsoft Flight and its poised focus on strategic priorities.

The reviews of MS Flight were up and down.  Many a hard core simmer chastised the flight modelling, and many a casual gamer chastised the half-arsed attempt at gameplay.  Having someone come along and ask you to fly a packet of cheese across Hawaii does not really change the fact that you are simply flying from one place to the other, and, without a narrative or any variance completing “missions” becomes repetitive and tiresome.  Plus there were no guns.

So the casual gamer turned away, bored, after their free try, and the hard core simmer turned away because the sim offered so much less than sims such as FSX or X-Plane.  The people that were left were offered the chance to buy a few single plane add-ons, for a snip at £5-10, many of which lacked a cockpit view and were of a standard well below many free FSX add-ons, let alone the payware.

On July 25th 2012, just less than six months after release, Microsoft announced that further development on MS Flight had been cancelled as part of “the natural ebb and flow” of application management.   A few more add-ons would be released in the coming months, but in the long run, this sim is done.

The PC gaming industry seems to have a history of bandwagoning on various design concepts. How many games have tried to replicate World of Warcraft?  How many publishers will tell developers that every sim must be multiplayer or else it is doomed?  This leaves very few developers following their own path.  Concepts such as free-to-play with commercial DLC are seemingly a way for developers to be their own mod groups.  Where modders in the past kept games going for years with updates and add-ons, the developers want that pie to themselves. When you start asking people to pay for these add-ons, when they are professionally made, they need to be up to scratch with, if not better than, everything else out there.

Offering up a product that adds no depth, no innovative features, and nothing to separate it from the racing sims of five to seven years ago should not be satisfactory to this community.  Dumbing down of simulation or just finding new ways to make people pay more money over a longer term is not an answer to increase the audience for simulators.  A free-to-play sim will be played by people, for free, once.  They won’t like it any more whether it is free or not.  Compromising the serious simulation hobbyist, for the casual gamer is a tricky road to take, but just making a sim more accessible and less complex does not mean the casual gamer will jump at it.  Simulations need to look more deeply into the “game” aspect of their product for this, and create something that is immersive and engaging from a perspective beyond just the driving of a vehicle.  That game should then carry the depth of simulation and gameplay to give replay value to both the sim nutter and the casual player alike.

Something new please.

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The Escapist : Mind Games: Multiple Personalities in Videogames

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Can videogames help us understand mental disorders? Certainly an alarming amount of commercial games use generalized “insanity” as a trope, but usually just as an opportunity for wild level design. It’s easy enough to list off examples of madness in the games we play: the whispers and disorienting camera angles of Eternal Darkness, Batman’s gas-induced hallucinations in Arkham Asylum, the weird inner mindscapes of Psychonauts. Text adventures like Andrew Plotkin’s Shade are even more adept at warping perception to devastating effect. But is there any connection to be made beyond the merely aesthetic? Does the interactive element of a videogame lead us to think about mental illness in a useful way, or can it only sensationalize and exploit?

When it comes to mental illness, commercial videogames generally stick to the same generic myths common in other forms of media, particularly film.

What used to be known as Alternate or Multiple Personality Disorder and is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder has been misunderstood almost since its first diagnosis, often getting confused with schizophrenia. This is largely due to semantics: The word “schizophrenia” literally means “split mind,” but the split is with associations, not personalities. Schizophrenics may have delusions or hallucinations but do not have multiple identities. In popular culture, DID is sometimes similarly misconstrued. Real people with this disorder have often been psychologically fractured by some serious trauma and require these different personalities to accomplish the life of a whole one - they do not switch between fully formed identities. True cases are rare and often misdiagnosed, and the disorder itself is not entirely understood or even acknowledged by some doctors (it doesn’t help the believers that Shirley Mason, the real-life subject of the book Sybil which popularized the subject and the disorder, was recently revealed to have lied about her condition).

When it comes to mental illness, commercial videogames generally stick to the same generic myths common in other forms of media, particularly film. American McGee’s Alice and its sequel use a sort of vague idea of madness as a plot point, taking place largely in a corrupted vision of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. In this version of the story, Alice is the survivor of a fire that claimed her family and Wonderland is not just an escape but a representation of her ever-changing mental state. The grotesque creatures she encounters embody aspects of her own personality, and frequently harken back to the helplessness she feels while hospitalized. The most obvious example of this comes in Alice’s fight with the Jabberwock, who here is an incarnation of her self-hatred and guilt. In an arena reminiscent of her old burning house, the horrifically gaunt semi-mechanical creature paces around menacingly while blaming her for her parents’ deaths. Through it all Alice’s condition is not specified (though how could it be?), and despite the symbolism, it’s hard to say we get much out of this in the end other than vague ideas about “facing yourself.” There is food for thought here, but ultimately Alice’s true personality remains an enigma, her trauma little more than an engine for the plot, and the player never really deals with her struggle outside of those scant sequences.

But some games are more ambitious. A prime example is the infamous Deadly Premonition, the bizarre cult horror/Twin Peaks-inspired thing that features an FBI agent with an alternate personality as its protagonist. Throughout the game, Agent Francis York Morgan refers to someone he calls “Zach” for help. The player assumes this role, acting as the benevolent voice in York’s head. When York asks Zach for guidance or tells Zach to look at something, it is the player he’s talking to and the player who responds. But later, as York confronts the game’s grotesque final villain, he realizes that he, York, really is Zach, and that witnessing the death of his parents at an early age caused him to split in order to cope. With this realization, the player loses their own identity, which is no more secure than York’s. Yet, even though we are no longer really Zach or York, we must be someone, as we can still control the character onscreen. The game forces us to consider the implications of dissociation firsthand in a way no other medium could.

Suda51’s psychedelic, cel-shaded cult classic Killer7 seems, at first, to be wholly exploitative, full as it is of in-your-face violence, disturbing images and unsettling black humor. Wheelchair-bound assassin Harman Smith exhibits something called “multifoliate personae phenomenon” (according to the game’s supplementary materials) that allows him to absorb the souls of the dead and switch between them at will. These different characters make up the Smith “family,” who are called upon to take out different targets in a world dangerously close to nuclear destruction. Throughout the course of the game’s complicated, surreal narrative, the player swaps between these personae like the different attachments of a Swiss Army knife, picking the right Smith for the right job: Kevin Smith (no relation) can turn invisible, Kaede Smith can open barriers with her blood, and Dan Smith has a special, super-powerful Demon Shot. This seems to play into the inaccurate idea of split personalities giving the possessor powers, as if each break were to bring with it something new and useful.

To mention Killer7 in the same article as an actual psychological disorder seems woefully inappropriate. Yet the killers are all limited in different ways. Each has only one real weapon: Kaede is stuck with her sniper scope and automatic pistol. Kevin is good with throwing knives but useless against large groups of enemies. The burly luchador Mask de Smith is armed with twin grenade launchers but is imprecise and cumbersome. As opposed to the more typical FPS hero, who can switch from a rifle to a rocket launcher with ease, these characters are all fragments of one protagonist. They are not an army. In the world of their genre they barely add up to the capabilities of one person.

We may not gain any real understanding of Dissociative Identity Disorder from playing games like this, but we are encouraged to understand.

The goal of most DID treatment is unification, meaning the incorporation of all of the patient’s extant identities into a whole. The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation has specific guidelines on their website that detail the treatment process. Usually, there are three “phases”: establishing safety, confronting the patient’s memories, and merging identities together. The guidelines describe it this way: “Integrating traumatic memories refers to bringing together aspects of traumatic experience that have been previously dissociated from one another … Integration also means that the patient achieves an adult cognitive awareness of his or her role and that of others in the events.”

The climactic mission of Killer7 takes the group to a school and former training ground for young government assassins. Here the smooth, white-suited “cleaner” persona, Garcian, who normally handles all of the group’s business arrangements and revives fallen Smiths, discovers that he is in fact the host, and that he killed all of the others, including Harman, years ago when he had a different name. This involves a series of flashbacks showing each of the group getting murdered, traumas Garcian has suppressed and is now revisiting. In a chilling moment, the game forces the player to control each of the Killer 7 as a series of grinning, invulnerable shadowy enemies leap off of the stage in the school gym and destroy them one by one. None of the squad’s attacks are any good. The player is helpless, forced to watch as each character is overtaken and dissipates into the air.

Stripped of all his defenses, Garcian must climb to the rooftop of the building alone in order to face his target, who is not a mangled grotesque, but a young, confused boy with a third eye, which he shoots off. Dropping to his knees, covered in blood, Garcian finally opens the long metal briefcase he’s always carrying and discovers all of his team’s weapons inside. He is the core persona, the one who did all the work: the briefcase works as a neat little symbol for the multitudes he once contained. He has rejoined with all of his previous parts and is left as one individual, combining the others into a coherent whole. As with Alice, the ultimate goal is assimilation, and the journey leads back to himself.

Needless to say, Killer7 does not intend to provide a realistic portrait of DID (it doesn’t even intend to provide a realistic portrait of the human anatomy). “Multifoliate Personae Phenomenon” is not real and might not even be a disorder. Deadly Premonition makes no claims to medical accuracy. But these games do dramatize identity and consciousness from the perspective of the mentally ill and (however accidentally) mimic clinical approaches to such conditions. We may not gain any real understanding of DID from playing games like this, but we are encouraged to understand. We are asked to consider what life with multiple personalities might be like. That’s an important distinction, though it may not seem like it: It’s the difference between empathy and a cheap thrill.

Andy Hughes is a blogger, gamer, pontificator, expounder, and general poor person hailing from Boston Massachusetts. He is co-editor of the hip new gaming blog Item Crisis and can be reached at itemcrisis@gmail.com.

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Brainy Gamer: Emotional experience through a gameplay world

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The nature of our terms affects the nature of our observations.
—Kenneth Burke

We need a better way to write about games. I don’t mean a new form of journalism. I’m not seeking the Lester Bangs or Pauline Kael of video games. My point is much simpler.

We need more words.

For a long time we’ve tried to make games align with our critical sensibilities. We’ve focused a dramaturgical lens on narrative games; we’ve applied film theory to cinematic games; we’ve examined games as rhetorical systems; and we’ve tried to understand the systemic principles that define games. These are worthy efforts, not a waste of time. We each shine the light we own.

But as we’ve waited for games to “grow up” and claim their cultural place in the sun, the medium has broadened and deepened beyond our ability to discern it. In other words, as we’ve struggled to affix labels like “art game” and “experiential game” to a broad stylistic spectrum, game makers - mostly, but not exclusively, in the indie space - continue to push ahead, challenging us to keep up and find new ways to critically engage.

I’m talking about designers like Jonathan Mak, Mark Essen, Christine Love, Jonathon Blow, and Jenova Chen, among others. I’m talking about studios like Molleindustria, Capybara, and Tale of Tales.

I’m talking about an indie movement bigger than games, driven by what Paolo Pedercini (Molleindustria) calls a “soft-rebellion” of artists with “an excess of creativity…a creativity that exceeds the ability of capital to commodify it.”

We’re no longer waiting for designers to produce games worthy of critical scrutiny. The situation has reversed. Creative designers are building games, inviting us to find a language or critical approach to convey their essential meaning…or if not meaning, then what they are. What they do. New tools (or refined tools) for new games.

We can go about this in several ways, but maybe the best place to start is to think about our critical lexicon. We need new words. Or better words. Or simply different words. We’ve worn out the old ones. I’ll show you what I mean.

Focusing on three “artsy” games released this year - Journey, Papo & Yo, and The Unfinished Swan - I collated review and analysis texts from a range of outlets (Edge Magazine, Joystiq, Eurogamer, PopMatters, Wired, plus ten others). I chose these games because they were widely reviewed, but more importantly because each invites critical assessment on its own terms, outside traditional genre boundaries. If any games can provoke a fresh supply of words, these are the ones, I thought.

Next, I generated a word cloud for each game, filtering out game titles, articles (a, an, the, etc.), and terms like “game,” “Playstation,” and “review.” Here are the results. (Click to enlarge any cloud.)

JOURNEY

PAPO & YO

THE UNFINISHED SWAN

What emerges is a stark and narrow collection of terms, none of which goes very far describing the essence or, dare I say, soul of these games. There’s nothing wrong with words like “emotional” or “experience” per se. Most games do convey a “world” and deliver “gameplay,” but too often these terms function as generic placeholders. They communicate a vague sense of something richer, more vivid and complex. In a mush of overused terminology, they’re essentially meaningless.

Some critics excel at structural analysis, digging for words to characterize hard-to-convey elements of games like dynamics and variation. Richard Terrell has been plowing this row since 2007, nobly wrestling with the limits of language. On the academic front Juul, Zimmerman, Bogost and others have built theoretical frames that help us understand how games communicate meaning. Frank Lantz and his gang at the NYU Game Center are contributing mightily, exploring game design as creative practice.

But we continue to see a disconnect between scholarship about games and the critical community charged with writing about games for a broader non-academic audience. Worse, we struggle to capture the more elusive, expressive dimension of games. Their poetic and sensory qualities are too often wrapped up in the kinds of generalities the word clouds above illustrate.
So, what to do? I believe Susan Sontag’s charge to critics in her seminal “Against Interpretation” has relevance today:

Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us… Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

I disagree with Sontag’s belief in the futility of “meaning.” A good critic can “read” a work of art without prescribing a definitive point of view or ignoring “what it is.” I’ve enjoyed reading various responses to the ending of The Unfinished Swan, for example, but not even its author’s explanation can determine my own sense of its meaning.

But her main assertion sticks. If we are to see games clearly, we must show how they are what they are. Part of that work is structural and systemic, and part of it sensual and aesthetic. We’ve made inroads to the first, but little progress with the second. We need more words. Different words. Better words. Finding them won’t get us all the way there, but it’s a good start. In my next post, I’ll give it a shot. You can let me know what you think.

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