Archive for the ‘Video Games’ Category

Earlier today, my friend Richard Yum posted a Tweet saying that Starcraft 2 sold 3 million copies last month and that he “bet like 90% of those were sold in Korea.”

Its a smart bet for Richard if history is anything to go by. According to the infographic below, 50% of copies of the first Starcraft were sold to South Koreans, but that was ten-years ago. Since then, interest in the franchise has exploded:

I’ve never played Starcraft – how good is it?

-Parker

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

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

Apple introduced its iPad to mixed reactions: It’s not capable of multi-tasking, lacks Flash support, and has no camera. It was derided as a blown-up iPod touch. The enthusiasm that has surrounded other Apple launches was lacking.

I believe one of the main reasons for this is the iPad’s break with the dominant technicity of computers.

Technicity is that “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).

Technicities associated with the consumption and manipulation of digital technologies have become key characteristics of the preferred subject of the twenty-first century, which in turn means the marginalization of other kinds of technicity.

Particular kinds of skill with particular kinds of technology are privileged in the developed world. They were mainly born in a male environment, laboratories, the MIT Model Railroad Club, etc., and influenced by such popular myths as that of the “hacker”.

Accordingly, for a long time we associated computers with white males. Sure we moved on, but there’s still a particular skill set attached to it. It’s the ideal of being able to control the technology, to browse the net while uploading photos and chatting on an instant messenger.

“The ‘idealized modern subject’ has always been marked by an enthusiastic acceptance of their connection with machines—for instance, as a … gadget consumer. The contemporary version of this ideal subject is the digitally competent producer/consumer whose ‘technicity’ plays a key role in formations of taste and lifestyle” (Dovey & Kennedy).

The iPad, however, breaks with this form of “technicity”. It is not the site for the production of a culturally valued technicity. Instead, it is the kind of device you would buy your grandma or your elderly parents.

It is very easy and intuitively to handle, photos can be flicked by your fingers—something 2-year-olds as well as 80-year-olds understand. There is no distracting multi-tasking, no parallel processes which burden the user. You do not have to hook it up to the ‘net through a modem, but can get online with 3G. It does not get any easier than that.

Here a form of dominant technicity is challenged. The result of this threat of cultural capital is a lack of enthusiasm, ridicule or simply disinterest. The reactions would definitely be harsher if Apple and its other “cool” products did not simultaneously embody the pinnacle of preferred technicity. The Macbook and iPhones—these are what the modern person just have to have.

The thing is: all this happened before—with Nintendo’s Wii. The Wii likewise broke with certain notions of technicity. Games have been produced by very particular kinds of people who have developed very particular cultures and tastes which command a disproportionate amount of “cultural space”. This resulted in contents and marketing strategies which did not appeal to large demographics such as women or ethnic minorities.

Instead, the ideal gamer was white and male. Along came the Wii. Its Wiimote made gaming much more accessible. Suddenly your mum was playing tennis or a work out game. Nursing homes had Wii bowling competitions.

However, the hardcore crowd hated it. There were too many casual titles and seemingly unfulfilled promises. This was not the kind of gaming traditional gamers were used to, now their hobby was shared by a much larger demographic. But it was not shared on their terms.

It is doubtful that the iPad will ever be as successful as the Wii. However, if there is one thing to learn from Nintendo, it is that it pays to break with dominant technicities. By making it easier to access technology you will offend people, but you will win enough fans to make more than up for it.

-Jens

When I used to play dodgeball, I always found that my best games came after I’d ripped a few rounds of Armored Core for PlayStation 2. If you’ve ever played either, the similarity is obvious. In both, you’re primarily facing your opponent with nothing really in between. Shots are lobbed from shoulder level, and there is lots of sideways shuffling or jumping to avoid being hit. The only difference is that one takes place in a gym and is co-ed while the other takes place in your living room and involves controlling giant robots.

Now that I’m playing soccer, the guys on my team are urging me to start playing FIFA 10. “It’ll help you understand the game better,” they said, and they’re probably right. They are all huge soccer fans, and understand the ins and outs of the strategy. I just like to run, and I never watch professional soccer games.

In related news, there is an actual race car league that pulls its members from the top ranks of Gran Turismo players (Gran Turismo being probably the best, most realistic racing game ever). I’m willing to bet that within the next five years, there will be at least one professional race car driver that got his start in one of these Gran Turismo contests (and I’m also willing to bet that within 10 years a computer-driven car will be able to best the top human driver).

A few months ago, I read a great article in Esquire about the unmanned planes operated by the American military. Shortly after reading the article about the guys that piloted these planes flying over Iraq and Afghanistan from an air-conditioned room in the States, I started playing Modern Warfare: Call of Duty 2. There are scenes in that game where you are able to call in missile strikes from these drones, and your ability to control them is almost exactly what is described in the Esquire article.

While some might see the military applications as a negative impact, I’m urging you to look past that and see that video games will play an increasingly large role in our lives. Chances are, champion sports teams are going to spend part of their time reviewing strategy using an interactive system like games. People of my generation will probably have major surgery done on them by a doctor that has been trained primarily by video games.

-Parker

PS: My roommates, neither of whom really likes games, said they wished there was a game where you just sit and have coffee with your friends. “Call of Do Tea” was the name they eventually came up with.