Author Archive

While Parker is wasting away his time I entered the workforce. Last month I started a job at a recently-founded game design studio in Berlin.

Currently, my main job is writing the design document. A design document is basically communicating the overall vision of a game to each and every team member. It’s goal is to describe the overall concept of the game, target audience, gameplay, interfaces, controls, characters, levels, media assets, etc. In short, everything the team needs to know about the design of the game.

It gives programmers an idea of what modules are going to be used, artists know how interfaces will look like and so on. Basically, as Tracy Fullerton puts it in “Game Design Workshop“, a “good design document is like sound blueprints for a building. Everyone on the team can refer to and add comments while they do their separate tasks and understand how their work fits into the game as a whole.”

The documents ensures that everyone is directing their efforts towards a common goal and not interpreting what they know about the tittle in their own unique ways.

Accordingly, I have to communicate with the whole team. As we’re still preparing the prototype, I mainly talk to the main game designer (my boss and the founder of the studio), the artist responsible for the characters and visual design of the game world and the author of the game’s story. This is to agree on the fundamentals of the title.

At the same time, this document will also be the basis of a pitch to the owner of the platform we are planing to release the game on and publishers. As such it also needs to be concise and very visual, containing concept art, flowcharts etc.

The document will end up having between 50 – 100 pages, and it may also include subsections or sub-documents on certain aspects of the game which need a more detailed explanation. There’s still a way to go but the job is actually quite fun.

One of the reasons this is so fun because although this document is traditionally written by the main game designer,  this work was delegated to me. This means that I also have some input in regard to the game’s design. Yesterday, for example, I spent most of my day trying to think of possible achievements and how they would influence the game play. I loved it.

Of course I’m quite curious  to see how the final product will develop. I can’t wait to play the prototype!

-Jens

Turbonegro was a Norwegian rock band that exploded onto the scene in the mid-1990s. Jello Biafra even called their 1997 masterpiece Apocalypse Dudes, a wild mixture of glam, rock’n'roll and classic 1970s US punk, possibly the most important European record ever.

Yet there was something else that set the band apart from the rest, their denim-mustache-Tom-of-Finland-look, basically a move to piss of the Norwegian metal scene which couldn’t be shocked by much. Except homosexuality.

During their 1998 Darkness Forever tour the mental problems of singer Hank von Helvete became such an issue that the band broke up in the waiting room of a psychiatric emergency ward in Milan, Italy.

After their split they slowly developed into a cult phenomenon. A tribute album was recorded and the momentum from their old records would continuously grow. Part of this resurrection was the blossoming of the so called Turbojugend (Turbo youth), a fan club with chapters all over the world.

What started as a joke became the Turbo equivalent to the Kiss Army. My dentist was in it (seriously!).

A Turbojugend member can be recognized by their specially-made denim jackets with the Turbonegro logo and “Turbojugend [name of chapter]” stitched on the back. In the late 1990s Turbonegro’s German label Bitzcore would print up Levi’s jackets with the “Turbojugend Oslo” logo on it, but eventually changed Oslo to St. Pauli.

After a while these jackets became so sought-after, so that Bitzcore-run Turbonegro mailorder would start printing up Levi’s jackets with different chapter names on them.

The jackets are also known as a “Kutte”, a German word originally referring to denim jackets/vests worn by metal fans. There’s one crucial rule about the Kutte; it must never be washed. The only exception is when someone pukes on it, then the owner is allowed to clean it with lukewarm water and cover the smell with a fragrant.

I got mine at a festival in Germany about seven or eight years ago. I hasn’t been washed ever since (but then again I haven’t worn it in the last… three years or so).

-Jens

Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was ousted by his own party this week; he increasingly lost support because of backflips on election promises, badly implemented policies and the suggestion to introduce a super tax on mining profits.

The polls began to worsen and the power hungry, poll-driven Senior fraction of the Labor Party decided to waste him. His successor is Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female Prime Minister.

“Why should I care?”, you might wonder.

Under Rudd Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, tried to introduce his much criticized internet filter, an issue I covered on this blog before. I won’t repeat what’s wrong with it but just would like to point to this video as an example of Conroy’s competence.

Conroy also called Google’s Street view snafu “the single biggest breach of privacy in history“; however, this did not stop his department to craft an Orwellian scheme that may require Australian ISPs to log and retain details of all people’s online communications and Web browsing activity.

At the same time no one really knows what’s going on because the government imposed secrecy provisions on all the parties with which it is negotiating in this matter.

“[T]he process remains completely opaque and we are being asked to agree to the imposition of a generalised surveillance regime with nothing but the vaguest reassurances about its scope, intent and the potential hazards of abuse, misuse, maladministration and outright oppression. (Well, actually, we’re not being asked at all. It’s just happening.”

It gets even scarier given the government’s intention to link the information gathered from monitoring internet activities to identifiers such as pass port numbers.

This opens up…

…the real possibility of mashing together all of the personal information available in your data matching matrix to (your income, your tax history, you bank account details, your medical records for starters) to your online life – your tweets, your Facebook account, your email, your Chatroulette history, your 4square tracking data, your blog entries, the link you clicked not realising it was taking you to a snuff porn site, the link you clicked knowing it was taking you to a celebrity porn site, the comments you leave here today, all of it.

However, now that Rudd is gone there is a chance that things might change. 

Under Gillard the Labor Party is likely to look to move on from all the unpopular policies that have been driving down its popularity; accordingly, rumours are rife that Conroy will be replaced by Senator Kate Lundy.

As Thenextweb points out this is something also Internet users outside of Australia should appreciate:

You should care because of the precedent it creates, and the global flow on effect such a precedent would create.

After all, similar schemes were considered in other countries, one of the being my native Germany.

However, the question remains in how far Lundy is really able to achieve a change in policies and in how far the Labor Party is willing to distance itself from previous policies.

Explains Thenextweb

While the opportunity to replace Conroy may be too good to pass up, the reality for the electorate is that no woman is an island, particularly in Government, and without support for a radical departure from the existing strategy, Lundy will be as effective as the man who preceded her.

At the same time she does seem more competent than Conroy and has history of engaging with new technology and its role in Government. So there’s hope of Australia getting over its traditional conservative censorship hangover – something we should all be grateful for.

-Jens

I like my Android phone. It was the first phone on the market to use Android, and might be a bit outdated, but so far it always served my needs—at a fraction of the price of an iPhone. And I’m not the only one; in May, Android’s first quarter US sales surpassed that of Apple’s platform.

However, Testfreaks argues an excess of choice could cripple Android’s future potential: a variety of phones with an increasingly fast product cycle is causing “hardware envy”. Moreover, all these different devices run several Android versions (from 1.5 to 2.2) which makes it difficult for developers to create apps which fit them all.

As the article points out, given that all manufactures have access to the same Android OS, in order to stand out in a crowded market place, they must tweak it, with either hardware refinements, operating system supplements, or both. This leads to increased competition, even within some companies; can you actually name all of HTC’s Android phones?

On top of that, this already confusing competition is made even more complicated by the phone carrier ecosystem it is tied to. Once you buy a phone, you’re locked into a contract and have to keep it, at the same time new devices are coming out that you can’t have (unless you break the contract).

The smartphone maker, if they do want to update their device lineup, has to work with the carriers to determine who gets which device. The drive for each manufacturer to shine in the market creates a short device turnover period, and this is in contrast to wireless carrier contracts. The end result is that each new Android phone “style”, if you will, needs to be tweaked for each carrier.

The result is even more confusion on the customers’ part and a watered down brand. The Nexus One for example was not “the” Google phone but just another Android device. Moreover, developers find it increasingly difficult to develop apps, because each tweaked phone potentially means an incompatibility issue.

Google is aware of this. They ask developers to accurately list their apps’ requirements, and then try to make sure that the app won’t be accessible to a device on which it won’t run properly.

That certainly makes things easier; however, as the Testfreaks piece continues, a lot of apps rely on taking advantage of new features to achieve popularity (e.g., a higher screen resolution). Games are a good example, and so far the choice of games for Android phones has been pretty slim.

The iPhone, on the other hand, managed to establish itself as a major player in the mobile game sector. It is, more or less, like a console, offering standardized hardware and software. Of course there were changes, but compared to the multitude of Android devices, they were rather minuscule.

Apple’s phone is just one flagship product, which in a lot of countries was only available with one carrier. There is the AppStore and its near-infinite offerings over which Apple rules with an iron fist.

Yet consumers love it.

It is a smartphone that is successful because it breaks with the technicity of a smartphone. It reduces choice to a point where it can’t even multitask. I’ve used the comparison before with the iPad, but the iPhone is the Wii of the smartphone world. Your two-year-old kid can use it, not because she’s so smart but because of a break with a technicity that previously made smartphones appeal mainly to competent males.

To stretch the comparison a bit further, the PC used to be a successful game platform, but lost most of its momentum to consoles. Games on PCs are cheaper, they can easily be modified, etc., yet consumers stuck to consoles. Why? Because on the dedicated platforms, the games just work, there’s less choice, less hassle, less confusion.

However, the PC also offers a very good counter-argument to the claim that a plethora of hardware can cause problems in the marketplace. Microsoft was able to establish Windows as the market leader despite it being available on a variety of devices with a variety of processors, RAM choices and peripherals.

Steven Johnson quotes New York Times writer Robert Wright:

The more models of Windows computers, competitively priced, the more people would buy Windows computers. And the more Windows computers people bought, the more programmers would write their software for Windows, not Apple. And the more Windows software there was, the more attractive Windows computers would be. And so on.

And even though the changes in variations of the operating system are faster with Android, Google ensures that it works by adding forward compatibility (apps written properly for older versions also run on the newest versions) and asking developers to list their app’s requirements.

At the same time you also have to ask yourself what choice Google has. This is a company that, within the constraints of a corporation, is committed to democratic conduct and, as such, fuels innovation. This innovation is furthered by Android’s self-competition and a less esoteric app policy.

I believe that this is a model that can work. As a more “classic” tech consumer, I feel at home with Android; I appreciate the choice, the fact that (potentially) there’s something on offer for all sorts of consumers, and the chance to use a physical keyboard. I’m also pretty confident that if I bought a premier Android handset today, like the HTC Incredible, I won’t really need another device for the next two years.

What do you think? Where is the phone market heading? And what will Microsoft’s role be with their new Windows 7 phone platform? (Which handset manufacturers won’t be able to personalize to suit themselves or their customers.)

When I came back from my trip to Australia, I hadn’t played video games in about six weeks. Before I went, I started playing Mass Effect 2 for a little while—basically just enough to get an idea of the gameplay and sense why it got rave reviews.

Then when I came back, something funny happened. I was reluctant to pick it up again. Instead I played Wario Land on my Virtual Boy. Mass Effect, as brilliant as it is, seemed too much of a commitment. I arrived at a stage where I was asked to scan planets for minerals and cross the universe for quests. Hours upon hours of gameplay lay ahead of me. I refused; my time budget would have been blown.

The next game I played was Heavy Rain, which I got for cheap during my stopover in Hong Kong. I bought it because I was curious about its adult content; but I also bought it because it is linear, it is divided into shorter chapters, and because I could finish it in 10 hours or less.

One thing I liked about Modern Warfare 2 was that the single-player campaign was brief but sweet. It was an intense action-filled six-hour experience with no pause. I loved it. For everyone else there was the multi-player.

The thing is: I’m the norm.

Yes, games get bigger, and yes this ambition is hailed by a vocal part of the gaming public and critics. And really, why wouldn’t we want more?

However, John Davison at Gamepro says:

The problem is, the vast majority of gamers don’t really behave the way they say they do. How do we know this? Because an increasing number of games incorporate telemetry systems that track our every action. They measure the time we play, they watch where we get stuck, and they broadcast our behaviour back to the people that make the games so they can tune the experience accordingly.

Every studio I’ve spoken to that does this, to a fault, says that many of the games they’ve released are far too big and far too hard for most players’ behaviour. As a general rule, less than five percent of a game’s audience plays a title through to completion. I’ve had several studios tell me that their general observation is that “more than 90 percent” of a games audience will play it for “just four or five hours.”

Moreover, as Davison points out, the game business, unlike any other part of the entertainment business, is maturing at roughly the same pace as its most influential (or at least most affluent) consumers. Not only the players are getting older, but also the designers.

As designers are deciding that they want to make different experiences to indulge their own lives, they can be fairly confident that their audience is in the same boat.

So what could this mean for the future of games?

For once they are going to become more modular, offering a (shorter and cheaper) core experience that can be expanded by downloadable content (DLC) or episodic content, which can accommodate different tastes.

This is something Namco recently recognized:

Namco Bandai’s Vice President Olivier Conte has said that game companies should diversify videogame selling in the future. He even went as far as saying that videogames are “too expensive for the audience” and that “a good price of a game should be around £20.”

He suggested making games cheaper by shortening them to around “four or five hours” and using additional DLC to increase revenue from the titles. “Games just have one model, the sale of the product either as a box or a digital download. So we need to think about how we can develop a secondary business model”.

Of course one of the dangers is that in the long run this gateway to micro-transactions will come with a hefty price tag.

The other change could be to accommodate players’ tendency to, as calls Davison calls it, “dick around”. How did you spend your time in GTA IV? Doing all the missions or having fun with its open world?

Games could increasingly reward this behaviour and become more of a playground. They might be based on actual player behaviour and not misguided assumptions about it. You don’t have to follow certain structures; you will get something you can enjoy in small doses, something that feels less like “work”—follow the rules, get rewarded, move on—and liberating. This is why the GTA series, for example, has a reward system for spectacular car crashes.

What do you think? When was the last time you completed a game? How many unfinished games do you have lying around? What games do you want to play in the future?

-Jens

As John “Wardrox” Kershaw observed on his blog:

Google is about to release Google TV, a software platform for set-top boxes and HDTV. It will also feature a browser, remote control, and keyboard interface.

Google also released an app shop which allows you to play PC games in a browser.

The interesting question is:

Does this mean Google is entering the console race in the same way the iPhone entered the hand-held race?

Details on the app shop and the integration of games are still light. In any case, this will have huge implications for the industry; here we have Google getting behind cloud gaming with its own console.

-Jens

Roger Ebert did it again: after watching a recorded lecture about games’ artistic potential by game designer Kellee Santiago, he once more stated how he remained “convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art.”

The overwhelming reaction: Ebert is passing these judgments because he knows games. Surely he based his criticism—and his vision of the future of an entire medium—on an intimate understanding of the subject matter. Right.

Ebert has never played any games. He isn’t familiar with the medium. He doesn’t like it, play it, understand it. He has merely watched videos of different titles. As the Globe and Mail points out:

That’s akin to judging a movie’s artistic worth based on stills and trailers. … For him to weigh in on the artistic value of interactive entertainment is like someone who believes the work of Jackson Pollock has no merit or meaning talking about the lack of artistry in splatter painting.

What I find fascinating about Ebert’s standpoint is that it also seems to be closely related to a generational conflict. He belongs to a generation which simply lacks the instruments to make sense of a new mass medium. He doesn’t even attempt to acquire them.

If someone as knowledgeable and outspoken and competent in terms of (more established) mass media such as Ebert is already affected by this generational gap, you can’t really be surprised at the resistance games have to face from parts of mainstream society and media.

While they paint video games as an unwholesome leisure pursuit and idle waste of time (“Murder simulators! Violence! Deviance!”), Ebert is just able to express his misgivings more eloquently.

-Jens Schroeder

A couple of weeks ago, Destructoid’s Jim Sterling wrote an article in which he took issue with people who defend (bad) art games:

McGarvey’s comment ["I'll take a 'pretentious artsy-fartsy indie game' over creatively bankrupt bullshit any day'] was but one of many that shared similar sentiments, but it was a perfect snapshot of the big fallacy among those who stand up for art games—this idea that art games cannot be creatively bankrupt themselves, and that if you are against the indie crowd, you are against originality. This also leads onto a further incorrect but all-too common assumption—the idea that because something is innovative, it is automatically good.

He continues:

We seem to be stuck with this incredibly false idea that indie games = originality and AAA games = uncreative garbage. This is simply not true, and I think it allows indie developers to be incredibly lazy and slapdash with their ideas, safe in the knowledge that their game will get a free pass for innovation, when all they did was follow all the other indie games out there.

Sure, there are examples of beautifully crafted indie games which have helped to widen the means of expression of the medium. But I do believe that Sterling has a point: just because a game purports to be indie does not mean it is automatically good or innovative or some sort of contribution the industry was not able to make.

However, we are much more inclined to regard it as such. I believe the reason for this lies in differences in the attribution of value.

In relation to cinema, Tom O’Regan explains that national cinemas can be evaluated through a limited number of conceptual means. These include a relation with the dominant Hollywood cinema in which the national cinema is situated under the sign of culture and Hollywood under the sign of the profane economy; a division within the national cinema between its mainstream and its peripheral or independent cinemas; and a positive evaluation of Hollywood and its legacy in local markets, which simultaneously values and devalues the local national cinema.

Considering the distinctiveness of the game industry, there is no such thing as an explicit national game culture in the Western world (in the sense of a national cinema). It is a thoroughly international industry, a prime example of a globalized, post-fordist field that hardly knows any localism. However, indie games come close to it in the sense that they belong to a prestige “minor stream”. As such, they are situated under the sign of culture.

They are products that were produced in response to the dominant international game culture and dominant industry patterns. They are akin to an international art cinema vehicle that is associated with cultural values—aesthetically and in the sense that they promise a game-making ecology separate from or to the side of the market; they stand opposed to an ecology which promises the utility of the market itself as the conferrer of value.

They might operate in a supranational space but like national cinemas are often attached to larger aesthetic movements and styles or the foregrounding of different agendas, be they related to minorities, environmental issues or other causes. As could be expected, such games find their greatest assertion of value in the festival circuit or on specialized blogs.

They are the games all the cool kids play. However, this does not tell us anything about their actual qualities.

What they do is help a certain milieu with its self-actualization. As something that claims to be counterculture, avant-garde, nonconformist, and edgy, these games dare to not submit themselves under the logic of the market as the conferrer of value. This makes them more “authentic” which in turn suits their players’ narcissism way better than “creatively bankrupt mainstream bullshit”.

These games contribute to their players’ philosophy of life—the perfection of one’s self—in two ways: they are “anti-barbaric” in the sense that they are constructed against the “popular”, “low”, “vulgar”, and “common”. Their distinctiveness lies in them being “contemplative” and involving reflection upon their object. This is more than just the crassness of Call of Duty.

At the same time, art games are anti-conventional. Not only do their players set themselves apart against the undeveloped and crude, but also against a standardized, deformed psyche which is not identical with itself—a psyche that is as standardized as the mainstream media it consumes. Art game players have a desired perception of themselves as people who are interesting, exciting, and unique. This narcissism tells them that there is nothing more important than oneself. This is a claim that is difficult to support by playing Halo.

By being anti-barbaric and anti-conventional, art games first of all contribute to the social distinction of their players and their self-perfection; this is their main project in a society in which even the most simple, mundane product becomes an “experience” that lets its consumers know just how unique they are. Your breakfast is not, say, bacon and eggs, but made up of some exotic European-style bread and coffee from a country no one has ever heard of but whose farmers are now better off not just because it’s organic but also because of the fair trade, etc.

Does this mean it tastes automatically better than Starbucks? No, of course not. It’s the same with indie games. Just because they derive their value from something different and therefore they make people feel better about themselves (as in more interesting and unique), this does not make them better games.

Of course these are extremes. It should be pointed out that, similar to the cinema, indie games’ relationship to the mainstream is not clear cut as, for example, they are sometimes distributed via the platforms of the big three console manufacturers (Xbox Live, WiiWare, PlayStation Network), making for a fuzziness that is also characteristic of film.

-Jens

As you may have noticed, I haven’t contributed much to blogcampaigning lately. The main reason is that I was organizing a trip to Australia. Now that I have finished my Ph.D. thesis about the differences in perception of digital games and mass media in Germany and Australia, I’m going to introduce it at several Aussie universities.

If there’re any Australian readers out there, I’d love to meet you!

I’ll be in Queensland from 1 April to 11 April. I’ll be giving a presentation at QUT on 7 April (Z2 Block, Level 3, Room 306, Creative Industries Precinct, 2pm – 4pm). Later that day, I’ll probably be at the Mana Bar.

From 11 April to 15 April I’ll be in Sydney. On 13 April I’ll give a talk at the Centre for Independent Studies. It’s not game-related, but it’ll deal with the question why Europeans often see Australians as the plebeians of the Western world.

On 15 April I’ll arrive in Melbourne. I’ll be at the University of Melbourne on the 16th, at Monash at on the 19th and at RMIT on the 20th. I don’t know the exact times yet, but let’s hope I’ll be able to get to sleep in.

I’ll continue to Adelaide on the 21st. No talks this time, but I’ll meet Melanie Swalwell who has done a lot of research on the history of digital gaming in Australia. I’m looking forward to some exciting talks with her. Maybe I’ll also get to meet the people behind the Gamers4Croydon party.

On 24 April I’ll fly to Perth. My presentation at Murdoch University will be either on the 27th or 28th. Again, some details still have to get figured out.

In the first week of May I’ll give a talk at my alma mater, the Gold Coast campus of Griffith University.

And that’s pretty much it. For further details check my twitter account, as I’ll be posting updates about the times and dates of the talks.

-Jens

When I was writing about the iPad and technicity, I noticed that the notion of technicity can also be applied to the scourge of the game world: Fanboys, and their hatred of other people’s choices.

To recapitulate what technicity means: it is an “aspect of identity expressed through the subject’s relationship with technology. Particular tastes and their associated cultural networks have always been marked by particular technologies, e.g., rockers with motorbikes and mods with scooters” (Dovey & Kennedy, 2006).

Technicity comes to stand for identities that are formed around and through technological differentiation. This is even more true for the confusing 21st century where these new allegiances—based on attitudes towards or adoption of technology—seem to offer more critical purchase in representations of technoculture than the old more fixed sureties of class, ethnic or gender identities (ibid.).

Gamers in different countries might have more in common with each other than with other groups in their own country. This is because being a gamer is associated with certain skills and styles:

“The significant aspect of the term of ‘technicity’ is to encapsulate, in conceptual terms, the connections between an identity based on certain types of attitude, practices, preferences and so on and the importance of technology as a critical aspect of the construction of that identity. To be subjects within the privileged twenty-first-century first world is to be increasingly caught up in a network of technically and mechanically mediated relationships with others who share, to varying degrees, the same attitudes/ tastes, pleasures and preferences” (ibid.).

To make this notion a bit more palpable, the aforementioned mods and rockers make a very good example. Mods rode scooters; rockers motorbikes; and they were dead serious about it. To the outsider, both seem like a mode of transportation that will get you from A to B; just like to the outsider there is not much of a difference between an Xbox and a PlayStation. However, as everyone who has seen Quadrophenia can testify to, scooters and motorbikes were serious business. They were an extension of one’s personality.

Within a dominant frame—e.g., youth culture, digital culture—different forms of technicity clash. This clash is not about which mode of transportation is better or which graphics are prettier. It’s something personal, it’s about one’s identity expressed by one’s gadget choices.

Additionally, and this is something that makes the arguments surrounding game platforms even more intense, games force you to invest much more of your personality. You need skills, you need to decode a game’s structure or system—of levels, architectural organization, scoring systems, timing of events, non-player characters’ actions and interactions, etc. Without you, there is no game.

Accordingly, by questioning the purchase of a console you question someone’s self in two ways: not only is the person’s choice an expression of a “wrong” technicity, and therefore a “wrong” personality, but also the person’s investment his or her self in the games is a waste of time. Their practices, their preferences, their skills, their decoding abilities, they themselves are doubted. And they don’t take too kindly to it.

This also explains the clashes over platform exclusivity, and the accompanying notions of superiority and disappointment when a title is made available on other platforms. It also accounts for the tendency to compare titles which have been released on several platforms to the very last details. “Yes, it may be the same game, but my technicity is still superior to yours!”—Uh, I mean, “Yo gaylord this game iz much better on PS3, faggotbox cant do shit cuz its de gheyz!”

Kinda makes you long for some good old bank holiday clashes, doesn’t it?

-Jens