Category: Games

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Game Development Games

August IGDA Presentation: Creativity Is a Dirty Word

The Chicago chapter of the IGDA flew in Lorne Lanning, of Oddworld fame, to give a talk titled “In a Walmart World, Creativity is a Dirty Word”. I took the opportunity to volunteer to help out by collecting the entrance fee and selling the occasional IGDA t-shirt. I got to meet quite a few people, if only to shake hands with them, including Dan Choi of Joystiq.

I only played an Oddworld game once at a friend’s house, and so I wasn’t familiar with Lanning, his work, or his history. I went into it thinking that it would be a fairly standard presentation.

I was wrong. His presentation was very humorous, including many classic pictures that anyone who has been online for any length of time must have seen in a forward or link. It covered topics ranging from the role of games in escapism to the cost of imagination realization to the barriers games have in a world where “creativity” equates to “high risk”. The whole time you could tell that Lanning has a passion for what he does, and it was very infectious. At least for me. I couldn’t wait to get home and start creating things. In the interest of full disclosure, I actually ended up eating macaroni and cheese and cookie dough ice cream with friends that night.

Lanning started off talking about what the culture was like when he was growing up. Basically, gloom and doom. Vietnam, fear of nuclear war, and all sorts of issues with trust in politics resulted in a very disgruntled population. Then George Lucas makes Star Wars, and people have an escape. Lanning notes that in some poverty-stricken countries, people go to the movies every night. Movies were a form of escapism, and the nation desperately needed it.

Lanning mentioned that the costs of realizing your imagination had been going up. He talks about how he used to draw and paint, and he would think of it as taking “Kodak images” of some other world and time. A pencil and paper costs very little when you’re a child. Paint sets start to cost money, but they are doable on student’s budget. A basic camera to create a film costs even more, and when you add up the costs of actually producing a movie, it starts to get prohibitive to do. Then supercomputers were used to make computer graphics in movies, and the costs were astronomical. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per month for cooling the machines. Computing costs have come down recently, however, and a personal computer for a few thousand dollars is a supercomputer compared to the machines that cost millions a few years ago. He basically makes the point that movies and games cost quite a lot to produce. When I asked if he agreed with EA that game budgets are going to go up as much as they say, he basically said yes, but he did acknowledge that not all games are trying to be incredibly realistic or flashy.

He showed a number of pictures portraying developers and publishers. That was hilarious. He displayed some movie clips from work he had done in the past, including some computer generated movies, Abe’s Oddysee (“Follow me.” “OK”), and the latest, Stranger’s Wrath. He talked about the importance of empathy in games, and that it didn’t take too much work to get people to love the characters in Oddworld’s universe.

He documented the downfall of the word “creative”. In 1994, it was good. Companies wanted creative. They might not understand games, but they understood that good, creative games resulted in cold, hard cash. Today, publishers want to be able to sell games that they already know how to sell. Creativity is still good, but only incrementally. They know how to market a first person shooter or a real time strategy game. New genres are scary. If an incremental improvement can result in profit, why risk so much on a completely innovative game?

Retailers and magazines will push those games that get the most marketing bucks in their pockets. Lanning mentions that Alexander was a terrible movie, yet gets an entire wall of shelfspace at a rental store. Meanwhile, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert MacNamara gets over 100 great reviews and an Academy Award among others, and you will find it buried on a shelf with a bunch of terrible movies. Similarly, you can have the greatest game ever, but if a magazine doesn’t think it will get full page ads from it, good luck getting on the cover.

At some point he commented on the political issues in the game industry. Interestingly enough, he warns that the political attacks have only just started. When I asked if he could comment on what he thinks it might look like, he simply answered that politicians are like game developers. Both are trying to cut through the noise and promote their brand. In the case of the politician, that brand IS the politician. Games are an easy target.

He concluded with a comment on the ability of game engines to create film-like experiences. Previously a computer-generated movie had to be scripted and pre-rendered. Now machinima is just being explored. Next-gen systems will only increase the possibilities to make compelling stories. While pre-rendered will always look better than real-time in movies, Lanning notes that it is getting to the point where it won’t matter to the viewer. Linear and non-linear stories will just become easier to develop.

My favorite part of his presentation was the idea that in a few years the question “Are you a gamer?” will be as silly as asking people today “Do you listen to music?” No one today says, “I’m a movie watcher”. In the future, “I’m a gamer” will be just as silly a statement.

The IGDA Chicago chapter recently decided to try to create higher quality meetings, and if this one is any indication, I look forward to the next one.

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical Linux Game Development Marketing/Business

Quake 3 Source Now Under GPL

It’s been in the news for some time, but it is still very cool news: Quake 3: Arena Source GPL’d

id has been pretty good about releasing the source to their older game engines. It’s not a new idea for the company. Apparently you still have people who think that the GPL is about stealing someone’s work, as this comment shows:

A Shame
Why did not you buy this game ?

Quake 3 is a great game, it costs few bucks

You want games for free, so I ask you to work freely, without salary.
Give your goods for free if you ask the games for free !

Huh?!? id released the source code to their engine under the General Public License. The game data and scripts remain proprietary, so you can’t legally play the GAME unless you pay for the proprietary data . It isn’t like some GPL zealots hacked into their servers and placed the code under the GPL. It isn’t like Carmack will come out with a statement like, “It is with great regret that I must inform everyone that we’ve lost our source code to the scourge of the GPL; however, we will not give up. We will fight back, and we will win!” It was a conscious decision to release the source, and no one is under the delusion that it is a free lunch except for people who think that the GPL equates to legalized piracy.

The Complete Text of General Public License
The GPL covers whatever an author wants to cover. Some games, source code and data, are covered under the GPL entirely, but the terms are restricted to the engine’s source code in this case. Therefore, the GPL dictates the terms of copying, modifying, and distributing the Quake 3 Arena source code. Not how you actually use the program. Not what you can do to the art or music that comes with the game. Copyright law gives id exclusive rights to the Quake 3 Arena engine source code. If they want to allow people to read the code, change the code, compile the code, redistribute the code, etc, they have the right to do so. The GPL is simply one of a number of standard documents to express what rights they are allowing others to have.

Don’t worry. No one is ripping id off.

Categories
Games Marketing/Business

It’s Your Turn…Oh Wait…

I have a free account on itsyourturn.com, which is a great site to play games like Chess and Jamble (a Scrabble-like game) among others. Basically, you can play against real people without requiring them to be there in real time. You make a move and an email will be sent to your opponent if he/she does not move within a few minutes. It’s a great way to keep up with people, too. You can send messages to your friends, startup new games, or just talk about whatever. There are tournaments and multiple variations on games. I don’t play against many people, so I almost never hit the free account’s move limit, but you can pay a membership fee to get more benefits.

I always suspected that IYT was a small team. I knew it couldn’t be some large corporation, but I always wondered if it was just a few people working out of an apartment or something. It didn’t seem like an overly complex website, either, so it didn’t seem to require much more than maintenance. The site never betrayed any information. There was never an about page, never any info on the people behind it, etc.

Then disaster struck.

Friday August 19, 2005

We have experienced a major disk crash, and our backup is also unusable.

While we are trying to retrieve what’s left on the disk, the prognosis does not look good. We will be down for a few days at least, and this may be as long as 2 weeks. If it takes that long, your membership will be extended by a similar time.

It’s still down as of this writing. More updates were posted periodically, but the best ones weren’t the cold/professional “We’re working on this issue as fast as we can. Thank you for your patience”. The best updates were along the lines of:

When these things happen, some of you email us and ask us why aren’t we smarter or why don’t we work harder. We understand that this is a huge inconvenience for you, that you paid for this product, and any abuse we receive is well-deserved. Please understand that we do not do this intentionally. Given a choice, we would prefer not to have to go through this. We experienced what was almost a “perfect storm” of events that destroyed both our main disk and our backup file (which are on completely separate RAID disk units) at the same time.

We are working as hard as we can to get the site back online as quickly as possible. Please check here for more updates (I will try to post updates several times a day, but please understand that we are spending most of our time trying to fix the system).

“…any abuse we receive is well-deserved.” When was the last time your game company admitted to a fault and said, “Yes, we were bone-headed, and nothing we can say will make up for that”? They even opened up a blog to let people not only know what was happening but also let them comment about it!

In the first couple of entries, comments were VERY negative; however, very supportive fans arrived in force. A number of people expressed anger over a number of a issues over the years (and some very personal attacks were made as well), but most of the people informed the company that they will be patient and will renew membership.

Wow. You can’t buy that kind of loyalty. Something goes wrong, and the team of IYT are honest and open about it. No hiding or trying to be “professional”. Some people get turned off by the company, but most people stand by it. IYT may have had a huge disaster, but they did the right thing by being open about it. It’s actions like this that result in the real fans standing up and coming to the rescue. That’s passion.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical General

PWNED!!!

I don’t play WoW, but I thought this thread on their forums was hilarious: Son owned by Mother

Categories
Games General

Women Gaming Restaurants?

This topic is kind of related to my post on making girl friendly games. Apparently, Nolan Bushnell announced plans to found a new chain of restaurants designed to lure women into gaming. Bushnell is pretty much famous for Pong, usually incorrectly credited as the father of video games. He also created Chuck E. Cheeze series of restaurants.

I actually remembered going to a restaurant that had table top arcade games with my family when I was younger. The idea of arcade games that you play sitting down was pretty cool to me. Apparently Bushnell wants to make a restaurant that has games that appeal specifically to women. And of course, if women go, men will follow. And alcohol usually helps.

Of course, that’s the theory. Dave and Buster’s and Gameworks already fulfill the “gaming with food and alcohol”, but they don’t try to appeal to women much. What will Bushnell’s new restaurant actually do differently to bring in women? Will it actually bring in other non-gamers as well?

Categories
Games Politics/Government

Truth About Violent Youth and Video Games

Maybe I am late to the party, but I just now read the article that talks about the decline of violence in recent years: The Truth About Violent Youth and Video Games

First off, I have absolute proof that video games are not the cause of this epidemic of youth violence in America. No, really, I do. Ready?

There is no epidemic of youth violence in America.

It shows that data from the FBI itself indicates a decrease in youth violence over the past few years. If GTA 3 and other violent video games are supposedly training kids to kill, wouldn’t the FBI have data that shows an increase instead?

But don’t confuse the politicians and media with the facts. Their minds are apparently made up.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical

Machinima

The Escapist’s Casual Friday for issue #4 featured the article Machinima by JR Sutich. It started out alright. It talked about how cool some video game movies, like Red vs Blue, can be. It also talks about how much poor quality work is out there that passes as Machinima but is really nothing more than some kid trying to show off how skillful he is at a game.

Sutich talks about how the issue of copyright infringement hasn’t come up very often for these videos. If not for the games themselves, why not for the popular music that gets featured? Especially since MTV has decided to play machinima music videos, it would make sense that the RIAA might decide that unauthorized machinima should be stopped to protect “creative artists”.

And then Sutich says that it would be a good development! While I understand the idea that there is copyrighted work that should be protected and I understand that strict enforcement of copyright would get rid of a lot of the crap out there, I also think that if the only people who can make machinima are the people who are given approval by the game companies, it would stifle creativity rather than promote it. He says, “often the best way to get something legitimized is to have it come under such intense scrutiny that it becomes regulated.” So now machinima isn’t legitimate? Microsoft has embraced Red vs Blue, and EA clearly must approve of Rooster Teeth’s Sims 2-based series The Strangerhood.

People make some pretty good quality machinima out there. It isn’t always easy to find, but it is one of those things that makes the Internet so cool. If people become afraid to make it for fear of copyright infringement lawsuits, there will only be that many less people making it. Maybe the RIAA, MPAA, and other organizations would prefer it to be as controlled as possible, but I know I don’t.

Categories
Game Design Games

Power of Myth in Video Games

Awhile back, Gamasutra had an article on the Hero’s Journey that I’ve already touched on. More recently there was an article on story in games. Now, I am reading The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers to help in understanding game development and design. The introduction already had some great points about the existence of myth and ritual in modern society, and even touched on Campbell’s discussion about Luke Skywalker as the typical Hero.

I was thinking about how the Hero’s Journey and myth in general would apply in game development. I didn’t want to focus on how to write a good story for a game so much as how to make the game itself better. When reading the passage about the Hero above, I thought about my experience playing Darwinia by Introversion Software. Campbell mentions that the journey doesn’t end for the hero with access to heaven or escape from suffering. It ends when the hero changes or finds a way to serve others. In Darwinia, I thought that the game seemed to reflect this idea. When you start to play, you are there trying to fix what went wrong in the world. By the end, however, you find that your job has changed. Your role is now to help the Darwinians fight for themselves. You can’t just blast your way through the level. You need to help get the Darwinians to take control of the different areas.

And doing so is, I think, much more emotional. Their failures are your failures. You win only when they win. If the game hadn’t made the Darwinians such an important aspect of the gameplay, they probably would have been seen as annoying and in the way, like some AI sidekicks in FPS games have historically been. As it was, they played an important part of the game. They were the Others that you were supposed to serve. They learn and grow as you progress through the game. They aren’t just mindless NPC characters in a game at this point. They’ve become characters you actually care about.

I have no idea if Introversion consciously designed the gameplay around the Hero’s Journey. I may also be full of it or overanalyzing the game. Still, I think that by making use of motifs and ideas from myths, good game experiences can result. There are a number of rituals that happen in real life that people don’t relate to myths. After all, the word “myth” usually makes people think about Greek gods, so thinking of funeral or wedding services as just extensions of modern day myths is difficult. Still, that’s what made Campbell so important. He was able to relate myths to modern life. So I don’t think it would be a stretch to think that consciously working aspects of myths into game play can serve to make better game experiences for the player.

Darwinia could have just been a game where you progressed from one area to the next blasting viruses. Instead, it centered around the Darwinians and their destroyed world. Your role is not diminished. On the contrary, your role as the Hero is made all the more real to you when you know that your actions have an effect on the inhabitants of the world. You don’t just think of it as a game. You’re thinking, “They’re counting on me!”

And there are countless examples of games that evoke similar emotions when playing. Original War by Altar Interactive is a real time strategy game that concentrates on the people involved. You don’t just churn out infrantry whenever you want. If you have 10 people at your base, that is all you have to work with. There is no way to “build soldiers” the way you can build tanks. Human resources is important. When one of your people gets killed, it hurts a lot for practical reasons. That’s one less gun firing, or one less tank maneuvering, or one less mechanic to help build machines faster. But it also feels emotional. You don’t just lose Solider #42. You lose Joan, or Cpl. Frank Forsythe, or 2nd Lt. Lucy Donaldson. They won’t come back later in the game. What’s more emotional than knowing that your leadership decisions resulted in lost lives? Or saving them all?

I’d love to hear any ideas or comments from other game developers. How important a role does a specific myth play in your games? What general ideas from myths do you try to keep in mind?

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical

I Knew Something Was Wrong With Wind Waker!

I love the Zelda series, like most people. I even liked Zelda II: The Adventures of Link, but it could be because I bought the game with my own money back when I was too young to get a job.

So when I played Wind Waker for the Gamecube, I was a bit put off. After all, I liked Ocarina of Time and expected that the Gamecube version would be very similar. And I’m not complaining about the graphics like a lot of people did when it was first revealed. In fact, I think they look great.

I’m complaining because things aren’t as obvious as I think they should be. Now, I’ve played the original, The Legend of Zelda for the NES, and I remember being confused as to where I was expected to go. I only knew about things because friends of mine had already been there. I played a significant portion of the game on my own, but the experience was kind of ruined for me. And the game never told you where to go really (or if it did, I was too young to understand it), so it was entirely possible to discover the entrance to Level 4 before finding Level 2. But I played through A Link to the Past for the SNES and Link’s Awakening for Game Boy and loved them. Ocarina of Time for the N64 was also an incredibly great experience for me. Everything flowed in these games. I never felt like something was missing or that I was fighting against the game’s programming.

So what happened with Wind Waker? Don’t get me wrong. I think it is fun to play…most of the time. Fighting is incredibly fun, and the puzzles are a staple in Zelda games. But as I go through the game, I periodically find parts of the game that do not seem well done or polished up.

For instance, after you manage to destroy the boulder and allow the spring to flow, you can swim across to the other side. What you see is the entrance to a cavern, but there is lava preventing you from going inside. I see that there are some Bomb Flowers, so I think that maybe I have to throw them at the statues. So I tried. I threw the bombs at the statues. I threw them into the walls. I threw them into the lava. I tried to throw them across the lava. Nothing. And after some time, I decided to give up and stop playing that day.

When I came back to it, I still struggled. Then I threw a bomb at a statue, and apparently it hit it just right, because then it fell over! I later found out that you were supposed to hit the bomb on top of the pot it is holding, but I had thrown it there before, or so I had thought. Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and Flower Bombs (losing hearts because you didn’t stand far enough away is proof), and yet these statues needed precision hits?

There were other inconsistencies and frustrations that I can’t remember at the moment, but the point is that I kept feeling like Wind Waker was not developed with the same care as previous games in the series. While some parts of it were really well done, other parts were sources of confusion and frustration. I still don’t understand the Flower Bomb precision thing.

And then I find that Shigeru Miyamoto admits it. Later parts of the game were being made while working against the clock, with features being approved without enthusiasm. I am kind of shocked because I would think that you would give a person such as Miyamoto as much time as he feels necessary to make the game great.

I still like Wind Waker, but it is pretty sad to find out that the game was made in a way that didn’t even please the creator.

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical

Escapist Magazine

A friend of mine recently emailed me to ask if I had heard about The Escapist, the new weekly magazine about video games and gaming culture. I hadn’t, even though it was covered at some blogs and gaming news sites…and Slashdot, the productivity killer which I’ve successfully been able to avoid for some time. Apparently this magazine is not just a new competitor for PC Gamer or Electronic Gaming Monthly. From the first issue’s letter from the editor:

The Escapist is an ambitious magazine, written, edited and styled with a fresh approach to communicating with gamers. We are the complement to the current gaming journalistic efforts. While the others give you up-to-the-second news coverage, we give you broad looks at news over time, discussing trends and proffering glimpses into the future. While the others provide previews and reviews of the next big thing, we give you a taste of the Cinderella game that might just steal the spotlight, plus a look at why. And while others ask developers about their latest projects, we delve into the masterminds’ thoughts and histories to find out what makes them tick.

So it is meant to be a magazine for mature gamers who don’t want hype and juvenile humor to litter their gaming literature. It’s for people who want to read about game culture instead of just news on the latest titles.

First impressions: I like it.

The magazine is free online (there are syndication feeds available), and there is a high quality PDF version to let you print out the magazine yourself if you choose to do so. I think I would like to actually order a subscription through the mail, but they don’t seem to offer that option yet. Also, their website apparently doesn’t work too great with Firefox if you increase the font size, and IE doesn’t let you change it at all. They hard coded the text to match the images, so the small font size isn’t fun to read, and increasing it makes it difficult since it will cover or get covered by other elements on the page. They tried to copy the print magazine (which doesn’t really exist!) look and feel onto their website, and that just doesn’t work well. Luckily, XFree86 (I use Debian so I don’t have X.org yet) lets me zoom in on the screen, but it is a silly thing to require this workaround.

Still, the content is good. I may not agree with the opinion of everyone who writes for it. For example, I don’t think “gamer” refers only to people who play games exclusive to everything else, and I don’t think that definition is as commonly understood to be the case, as claimed by one author. I also don’t think that games should be considered “crack-like” and “addictive”, as the article on Greg Gorden described them. But it is refreshing to read an entire magazine that discusses the topics in a mature manner that I’ve generally found exclusive to blogs.

It’s also quite informative, as Max Steele’s article on mobile gaming in the 2nd issue shows. Being American and fairly isolated from international news in general, I didn’t know that the N-Gage had sold so well in the rest of the world, but Steele’s article touched on that platform while talking about the upcoming Mobile Platform Wars between Sony, Nintendo, and Nokia. Until then, I didn’t even know Nokia was involved! And the article also described who each company is targeting. I don’t know if Nintendo will end up the clear winner and I don’t know if I agree that Sony’s system will be disgarded as just more-of-the-same-but-smaller. I also don’t know if anyone likes reading an author talk about himself in the third person. But it was definitely a high quality article that made good arguments. A different article in the same issue focused on that video feature for the PSP while another complained about the loooooong load times for it, so there was plenty of depth and breadth to the magazine.

The Escapist is definitely staying in my RSS feeds, although I wish that the website version wouldn’t be so badly “ported” from the PDF. At the very least make the text larger. Ideally, the web version should be made for the web.