Monthly Archives: January 2009

Where the posts be at?

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You may notice this week was sparse on the posts. Why is that you may ask?

Because I’m organizing the local site in my area for the Global Game Jam! Over 50 sites! Over 1,750 developers! Possibly hundreds of new games being shotgunned to our collective brains in a single weekend. For everyone doing this it should be a great experience learning the wonders of game development in abbreviated time. Game jams force participants to narrow their focus and do whatever it takes to pump out that small micro-experience in span of a few days (or in the case of the Global Game Jam, just 48 hours).

So I’ve been preoccupied with that. And you can follow the Global Game Jam live through a variety of sources!

Worldwide:
Official website
Twitter
Youtube
Flickr
Ustream.tv (all over the front page)

Triangle Site:
Twitter
Youtube
Tumblr
Flickr
Ustream.tv

You can also follow the jam on my personal twitter.

Like watching a trainwreck with a truck full of puppies plunging off a cliff

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Jon Blow’s recent blog post grabs excerpts Jeff Roberts and Casey Muratori (of Molly Rocket and the appropriately named Jeff and Casey Show) ripping into Microsoft on Visual Studio 2010 and the new Direct2D API. Both of these rants are worth a listen if for nothing else because Jeff and Casey are often times very, very funny guys to listen to even when you’re disagreeing with them.

And regardless of one’s views, something like this for the basic task of ultimately drawing a few simple objects is immensely intimidating code to be thrown into. I don’t envy the jobs of Microsoft programmers tasked with creating a new API with all the requirements Direct2D necessitated, but at the same time you sometimes wonder if they lost sight of the forest for the tree.

The Myth of the Perfect 10

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Media criticism is hard. Everyone’s a critic in some capacity (you’re reading one right now), but much like elbows or other body parts, having an opinion isn’t exactly revolutionary. There are precious few critics out there who manage to rise above the fray and illuminate their thoughts with clarity, ingenuity, and sometimes even wit. And while film, music, and other entertainment mediums have their fair share of good criticism out there, gaming’s critical landscape is pretty barren at the moment.

And a large reason why games criticism seems to languish (outside of academic circles thank you very much) is that the review is given no respect. And honestly, why should anyone respect game reviews? They’re a mish-mash of some of the worst aspects of games journalism. Reviewers are prone to hype, their criticisms are often jumbled, they focus on arbitrary aspects of the game, they treat games like software applications with checklists, they’re overly reliant on scores and numbers, there’s no sense of history or context, etc., and etc. The game review as a form of criticism in game is woeful to say the least.

Shockingly enough, the idea that the modern game review is fundamentally broken is not a new idea. When heavy hitters like Kotaku, N’Gai Croal, and Stephen Totilo have discussed this in far greater detail than this simple blog post. So the consensus is decided: game reviews suck and people know they suck.

Yet despite this apparent agreement on the sorry state of game reviews and criticism, the same old problems continue to persist. GameDaily’s recent fluff piece about 10 out of 10 scores they’ve come to regret is just another example of this phenomenon. All of the games on that list were given 10s not because of their quality, but due to a combination of reviewer preference, hype, and plain poor judgment.

There are a few publications notorious for being stingy with scores (most notably Edge). There are even fewer publications that effectively use the entire scale for reviewing (a complaint for another time). But to give a game at 10 out of a 10 review scale, the mark of perfection, is to ask what exactly makes a game a 10 rather than a 9. It’s obviously not perfection because perfection is to say that a game is without a single flaw or blemish which is clearly not true. When one rates a game a perfect score then, is it because that game was a complete execution of a particular vision or design? Was it because that game was in complete harmony with all its systems and elements to form an amazing experience? Was it because that game was a daring experiment with new ideas, systems, and mechanics never before seen in games?

There’s just no agreement on what game reviews are suppose to do in general. Some people grade each element of a game individually and others don’t. Some people value innovation over playability, some value polish over originality, some value the whole package rather than the individual game. And it doesn’t help that at least half the people who do reviews aren’t qualified to judge games beyond the veneer. Some reviewers admittedly don’t even devote a significant amount of time to playing the games they claim to judge.

This is why I welcome the rise of internet reviewers who are at least honest about their personal biases and honest about their views on a game. Reviews such as the Yahtzee and his Zero Punctuation series of reviews provide viewers with a certain perspective for critiquing games. Yahtzee is honest about what he cares about, he likes immediate feedback, he likes fun, he enjoys interactions with unforeseen consequences. He’s not a perfect reviewer and damn well I disagree with him about half the time, but at least he provides useful information amidst much reviewing noise.

Really, that’s all I ask for. Very rarely in any critiquing fields will you find a critic who is your essential voice. Instead, we tend to rely on an aggregate of people we trust (and sites like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic are shortcuts to this). Reviewers need to avoid trying to judge games in some faux software application for PC Magazine review and instead approach games, well, like games! Play the hell out of something and let loose on your (valid) critiques.

Without being Tim Roger though please.

Beyond games as art

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Are games art? It’s a question that’s been discussed and argued and torn apart and put together countless times. Every game from Super Mario Bros. to Braid to Metal Gear Solid 4 have been used as positive (or negative) examples of games as a legitimate artform. And a new wave of developers interested in pushing the medium of games have reopened this age-old question with new indie games that probe and explore and provoke.

But this question is completely silly. Of course games are art, by most modern definitions art is a immensely broad and open categorization that encompasses nearly anything and everything in the proper context. And its not the advent of newer games that have pushed games into such lofty air, games are just as much art 30 years ago with the Atari 2600 as they are today (although much like other embryonic mediums games have become hugely refined from such humble beginnings).

Ian Bogost has written an interesting article on Gamastura about going beyond the now tired “are games art?” argument. Instead, after dealing with the issues of that monolithic question he dives into a more pressing issue. If games are art then there must be styles that we can define, movements and their responses. To this task Ian Bogost finds one which he defines as proceduralism, a style found in games like Braid, The Passage, and The Marriage. His definition of this movement as follows:

Proceduralist games are process-intensive. In these games, expression is found in primarily in the player’s experience as it results from interaction with the game’s mechanics and dynamics, and less so (in some cases almost not at all) in their visual, aural, and textual aspects.

These games lay bare the form, allowing meaning to emanate from a model.

It’s all good weekend reading here as Bogost goes on to work out what aspects would define such a movement. And while you can quibble with some of the definitions, it’s a start to what I feel can only be an immensely fruitful discussion. Something I may like to talk about in greater detail in a few days…

Evert! Evert! Evert!

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Continuing a theme of cool games in tiny packages, I present for your consideration Eversion. Eversion is a great little platformer created by Zaratustra for the TIGSource Commonplace Book Compo. It’s a short game that should take on average a half-hour to complete. And much like another recently discussed game to read about Eversion before you played it would ruin a pretty important aspect of the game and compromise the nature of the work.

So go on and play it! No accompanying review today, but there’s not a whole lot else to talk about. It’s a indie platformer with a few flaws such as overly demanding pixel perfect positioning for the platforming (say that three times fast) and a few puzzles that can be quite frustrating (but the constant checkpoints help a lot). But the flaws are insignificant to the ingenuity displayed throughout the work. Just go ahead and play it with no expectations and I think you’ll be pleasantly… surprised.

GameTap and failing to find a new revenue stream

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Word is spreading that GameTap, the once promising alternative distribution service, is pulling 97 titles from its free service. It’s not a surprising move as the struggling service has changed its distribution methods and altered strategies multiple times trying to find a sustainable business model. And what GameTap likely found is that the ad revenue from providing free games never approached anything close to sustainability.

It’s all a bit unfortunate since the videogame industry desperately needs more alternative forms of revenue outside of first sales and DLC. Much in the way Valve views piracy asa symptom of a problem rather than a problem itself, publishers have been trying to find ways for a while now to get new revenue from any possible source. Giving older games away for free and earning money through ads is just one out of many possible ideas how to monetize products that would otherwise be gathering dust.

And really, a more sustainable business model is beneficial for everyone involved. Steadier streams of revenue would promise more stability for publishers and developers who would then no longer need to worry about every last milestone payment and could pursue more original games. And then gamers would have greater variety and would increase the size of the gamer audience. Which would then bring in even more revenue. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of goodness!

I mean, ideally that’s what would happen. So let’s keep on seeing how to make more money from games. Because in the end I would like to get paid too.

Female gamers and the Wii

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From this article on the Wii and female gamers comes this quote courtesy of Ubisoft.

“What’s driving the Wii sales is the use of Wii by women, girls and families,” Hamilton said. “It’s a really female-driven platform.”

As of May 2008, according to Nintendo 79% of the people who buy the Wii are male which means that 21% of those people who bought the system were female. As a household playing figure, the numbers are a little more charitable for Ubisoft with 45% of players for the Wii’s audience being female.

The point isn’t that the Wii doesn’t have a high number of female gamers compared to other platforms (it does) or that Ubisoft isn’t right to be making games targeted towards females (they are). It’s just a little sad to see the media and everyone else get so excited that we are even approaching a state that semi-resembles gender parity in games for one or two platforms. Females are still highly underrepresented in just about every facet of the industry and the mountains of Imaginez software are not exactly tipping the scales back here. There’s a long way to go before publishers, developers, and gamers can claim with a straight face that the game industry is open equally to both genders.

Before we go, one last gem from the article.

“Girls have a very high impact on how we interact with each other. As a human race, we have men and women — and we all communicate together.”

Yes, Mr. PR man. Girls do have a high impact on how we communicate. This might be because women make up over 50% of the world’s population. Yes, I can see the logic of this statement.

Quote-a-rama: Metal Gear Solid 4 vs. Grim Fandango

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Via Chris Remo’s blog Procedural Dialogue:

I find it somewhat sobering that in a decade of astonishing progress in rendering, physics, interface, scale, and complexity, the high watermark for video game storytelling (at least, according to one particular site, notable for being both highly ubiquitous and read, and extremely long-running in internet time) has gone from being exemplified by elegance, breathtaking creativity, and amazingly sharp dialogue to being exemplified by overblown melodrama, ludicrously cumbersome plotting, and cheap tragedy.

The genius of Gravity Bone

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Before you read this post I stress that you go download and play Gravity Bone by Brendon Chung. Do it, it should run on any old computer (it uses the Quake 2 engine for crying out loud) and a typical playthrough won’t take you more than half an hour. Use your lunch break or something. So stop reading this now and go play it. Or stop reading this now, play it later, and then come back.

Alright, have you played it?

Good. Because if you were anything like me you enjoyed the hell out of Gravity Bone. And don’t feel like you’re alone, everyone from Destructoid to Rock, Paper, Shotgun to TIGSource has also loved this game. Gravity Bone would be the first indie darling of 2009 if it wasn’t released in 2008. And the praise is well deserved.

It would be easy to say Gravity Bone fits into the recent mold of games like Portal or You Have To Burn The Rope, short-form games that seamlessly integrate a humorous narrative and gameplay into one memorable ride. But that would be selling Gravity Bone completely short. Yes, Gravity Bone on the surface matches well with these other games and other comedic games before it. But in its short two levels, Gravity Bone jams in not only a ton of humor, more than a few memorable game moments, and a semi-cohesive story, but it also creates a comedy that’s inherently ludic in nature. Gravity Bone is humor that only works because it’s a game.

Let’s review. In Gravity Bone, you play some sort of secret spy (maybe a galactic secret spy) who is sent out on two different missions. The first mission goes easy enough, it’s a short tutorial level that teaches you the basics of movement and navigation for the game. The second level seems to continue the tutorial trend. You learn new skills like using items, you have another relatively simple objective (outside the one misstep in the game, the pole-to-pole jumping puzzle) that seems routine enough to complete. It’s the sort of beginning any gamer with a modicum of experience knows by heart now. Games must begin with a slow learning curve, a series of simple levels that teach the basics for any player who may have chosen this as their first major game experience. Gravity Bone is no exception on initial glance, the game even hammers FPS basics such as using the spacebar to jump luring us into a false sense of security.

It’s one of the tropes of games that all of us have resigned ourselves too. So we work our way through the 2nd level of Gravity Bone with nary an incident. As we approach the exit button for the second time in the game, our Pavlovian conditioning has already set in. We ignore the lady smoking a cigarette across the hall, after all the first level in the game has taught us that NPCs don’t interact with the player. We’ve completed the mission objective, do our spy thing, and await another humorous mission debriefing.

And the first fateful gun shot rings out.

There are many forms of humor and perhaps the most classic of these is your standard setup and punchline joke. Gravity Bone is about setup. The little details in the introductory moments of the game are all put in place to set us up, to teach us certain “truths” about the game world that are reversed in those final moments of the game. The punchline is everything after that first gun shot: the shock as lie motionless on the floor, the chase sequence that climaxes as you run across the banquet table shattering the glasses, and of course the ending. As you slowly fall to your death and moments of your heretofore unexplained life flash before your spy’s eyes the game delivers the punchline. The end.

Not to be forgotten is how much love and style has been put into Gravity Bone. The big band music that perfectly fits every scenario, the boxy-papercraft art design that sells the retro spy theme, the humorous little pieces of writing that make up the “tutorial” for the game are all factors in making Gravity Bone a comedic masterpiece in games. But in the end this isn’t Portal where the dialogue of GLaDOS drive our laughs. This isn’t You Have To Burn The Rope where the pitch-perfect credits song is the joke. This isn’t even World of Goo where we laugh at the crazy misshapen creatures and people that populate the world. This isn’t even a game like the Lucasarts SCUMM adventures where the writings of the characters are responsible for the humor. Gravity Bone is hilarious because as a game it lays a trap of expectations on how games are played and pulls the carpet out from under our feet. It uses our collective knowledge of games against us with comedic consequences. You laugh at Gravity Bone while you play it, but I daresay you wouldn’t be laughing nearly as much if you were watching.

To end, I say to all those clamoring for more Gravity Bone to not ruin a very good thing. Gravity Bone is a full and complete game. A full, complete, and short game. But it’s short with a purpose and it only leaves you wanting more because it ends on such a high note. It’s just long enough to tell the joke, whacks us with the punchline, and leaves us. A longer Gravity Bone or a return to it would be incapable of matching the same highs simply because we are now in on the joke. And a joke is never as funny the second time around.

The myth of the pure, true game

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From Smart Football:

Is there some pure, true, Platonic-ideal football? If not, then why? The answer is that there is not such a pure, true, ideal football because football is a game; all the rules – except ones designed around safety – are arbitrary. They might have in mind competitive balance, but this doesn’t make it “true” or “real” in any meaningful sense.

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[There] simply is no such thing as “real” or “true” Platonic football. The next time someone next to you says, upon seeing someone successfully employ a double-reverse pass or some next-wave offensive system, that what you just saw was not “real” football (this group includes many football coaches) you can safely think to yourself that this person has no idea what they are talking about… Football is a game designed for fun and its rules are designed for no other reason than to promote fun and safety for players and spectators.