Discursions on Noteworthy Topics

Behave Yourselves!

Stage magicians/provocateurs Penn and Teller aimed their show, Bullshit, in the direction of video games this past week.  In their predictable yet entertaining anti-authoritarian manner, they cut a curse-laden swath though the public arguments that gamers have repeatedly endured/ignored.  Gamers, like all close watchers of the industry, already know the answer to whether or not video games influence behavior.  Of course they do.

It doesn't take a university study to understand the fact that a large barrier to managing illnesses in children is modifying their behaviors to aid in their recovery.  In the early to mid-nineties, doctors and drug companies turned to the Super Nintendo to teach life saving lessons in an edutainment manner.  Titles like Captain Novolin (for diabetes sufferers) and Bronkie the Bronchiasaurus (asthma) were developed and made available by mail-order prescription.  Independent research has shown that players of such games have:

[…]experienced higher perceived self-efficacy for diabetes self-management, increased their communication with parents about diabetes, and improved their daily diabetes self-management behaviors […] The treatment group had a 77-percent decrease in diabetes-related emergency and urgent care clinical visits.

Such success in modifying the behavior of gamers has led to a shadow gaming industry producing new medical games like Escape From Diab and Re-Mission for modern gaming formats.

Gamers are a valuable target to marketers.  In 2006, revenue from advertisements in games rose to over 77 million dollars, with no sign of abating in the coming years.  Despite the negative reaction that in-game ads receive from the gaming press and gamers, their continued existence indicates some level of efficacy.  In-game ads, like the ads on broadcast TV and print, are influencing their viewers by modifying their buying behavior.

There is an old joke among gamers that no one ever learned plumbing playing Super Mario Bros., so therefore the hysteria about games teaching people to kill is laughable.  Unfortunately, it’s also wrong.  While a rank of 65 in Call of Duty 4’s multiplayer won’t turn a gamer into a real Black Ops nightmare, you can be sure that he or she has learned the importance of taking cover, ammo management, enemy identification and other skills that every branch of the military teaches in their own simulators.  Nothing motivates behavior change like a drill instructor yelling in your ear or repeatedly placing last in an online Deathmatch.

Whether it’s remembering to take your insulin, being subconsciously motivated to switch antiperspirants, or calling in a recon plane to give you and your buddies a tactical advantage, games are used to educate, motivate and train their players.  What they do with that knowledge is up to them.

Episodes, A New Hope?

Every Tuesday is no different for gamers, but for the developer and publisher behind that game, every Tuesday is Russian Roulette with the livelihoods of hundreds.  Traditionally -- following the lead of home video and music-- Tuesdays mark the release of new video games.  Oftentimes, years of careful work and millions of dollars of investment comes down to a window of time that can be as narrow as a single week.  That Triple-A title or a cutting-edge art piece needs to be a hit with the public before it is shuffled back behind the next ‘new thing’ and forgotten.  For the good of the gaming industry, it’s past time to escape the age of the do-or-die blockbuster and fully embrace episodic gaming.

The biggest hurtle to moving gaming out of the niche it has sat in for over twenty years is a psychological one: convincing gamers to spend less to get less.  The former is easy; the latter requires the establishment of a new level of trust between them and the developer.  Despite the critical success of Sam & Max, the poor track record that episodic gaming has earned with the collapse of SiN: Episodes after just one episode and the dog’s age between the very high profile Half-Life 2: Episodes One and Two (and no sign of Three on the horizon) has not engendered any confidence in the gaming public.  

There must be a guarantee that gamers will not be ditched after an investment in time, money or even in the storyline.  Sam & Max’s initial monthly schedule of stand-alone episodes, and the pre-made parts of this summer’s Final Fantasy IV: The After Years stand as proof that episodic gaming can be done and done well.

While maintaining a rigid release schedule is paramount, the episodic format allows for the kind of flexibility that serial media like television shows and comic books enjoy.  Instead of the single development deadline that leaves many ideas cut for time or budget, an episodic game can explore story points, patch plot holes or bring in fresh talent to revitalize its progressive entries.  The developer can also respond to player feedback, tweaking the story or gameplay around elements that work and phasing out things that don’t.  Progressive and proactive fixes can not only satisfy current players, but also alleviate the concerns of critics, opening the door to growing the customer base.

In addition, episodic gaming has the potential to grow and stabilize the industry.  The prospect of a steady recurring revenue stream would make gaming a stable industry in the eyes of investors and ease the concerns of career-minded potential and current employees who would no longer face downsizing or the end of their contracts after a stand alone title is released. Gamers would too benefit from the end of multi-year cliffhangers game endings that might never get paid off, and the ability to stop playing an unsatisfactory game after spending only a portion of the money a full title would have cost.

A sea change in the way the gaming industry does business might be inevitable.  The all-or-nothing single release date has given birth to the specter of manufactured hype, pre-lash, and the risky temptation to buy good reviews.  Episodes can give a game time to build an audience while both reducing initial development time and creating a self-sustaining property.  A prospect that has already taken shape in one form, as the success of Sam & Max for Telltale Games has raised new interest in the dormant 'point and click' adventure genre, leading to their development of Tales of Monkey Island.   It's time for the end of the blockbusters and the beginning of the epics.

Escape from New York

In Radical Entertainment’s new title, Prototype, New York, a city that has suffered from among the greatest real and imaginary tragedies the world can deliver, takes it on the chin once again.  In the light of this most recent in a long line of opportunities to wreck sandbox-style havoc on Manhattan and its environs, and for the open world genre as a whole, its time to give The City That Never Sleeps a break.

Going back nearly to the beginning, New York was the product of careful engineering.  Long straight streets meeting at ninety-degree angles, with ease of movement in the plan, if not in practice.  A virtual version of this borough is a boon to developers.  Straight paths are easier for AI to navigate, and since no city has been more carefully looked over and documented, there is a wealth of ready research.  Both allows significant savings for cost conscious developers.

New York also features a wealth of landmarks: historic bridges, statues, parks and buildings, all of which resonate strongly with the gaming public.  Virtual versions of these structures give a powerful feeling to a gamer who is able to stand atop them, save them or even tear them down.

It is also a common fantasy for a layer of supernatural to exist along side reality.  Stan Lee knew it; the idea that where you live now is just a random spider bite away from being amazing.  A minute from Harlem to Battery Park by hijacked helicopter in Prototype, cars clogging Columbus Circle swatted away like plastic toys in The Incrediable Hulk, or Times Square de-Disneyfied by an alien symbiote in Spiderman: Web of Shadows.

These factors; the simple, iconic city plan, the historic landmarks and the fantasy of ultimate control over your environment are attractive elements that can boost sales by making a game more accessible to gamers, but it’s at the cost of vital originality that can dampen the experience. 

A key factor to the success of the open-world genre of games is the feeling that one is entering a living world.  In a virtual New York, you know you’re going to see the Brooklyn Bridge and Belvedere Castle yet again, but in an original cityscape, like the three burgs of GTA: San Andreas or InFAMOUS' Empire City, there’s always going to be something new to discover. 

Like moving to a new city, you start out by exploring the immediate neighborhood, and then the town at large. Soon your figuring out shortcuts and the kind of tricks to getting around that only locals know.  Landmarks you may have just breezed by while staring at the mini-map become signposts, priceless reminders in a virtual world if you are in the middle of a high-speed chase, or searching for a save point.  You can even begin to feel at home as you develop a pre-mission routine, or try out a new car on a familiar stretch of road. 

It is this learning process, one lost in the repetition of virtual downtown New Yorks, that enhances the gaming experience.  The Big Apple might be the greatest city in real world, but an original gaming metropolis is tuned to deliver the best gaming environment for that individual title.  It can be shaped to provide just the right amount of challenge and ascetics without a compromise to authenticity.

Barring catastrophe, New York will always be with us as a unique artifact of civilization.  Sacrificing gaming’s power to create new worlds for the sake of familiarity should be a disaster easily and perpetually avoided.

Gaming's Building Blocks

In an age where games are forgotten as fast as then can be released, this month Tetris celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary.  This simple game’s complicated tale is the history of the industry in microcosm.

Tetris was developed by Russian Alexey Pajitnov, and others, in the government controlled Soviet Academy of Sciences as a part of a larger suite of games and productive software for MS DOS.  Not meeting with immediate success in the business-unfriendly climate of the USSR, the game, ported onto IBM compatible PCs, spread across Eastern-Bloc computer enthusiasts in a mid-eighties version of viral fashion: floppy disks and handed to friends, then friends of friends.

In 1988, non-fiction CD-ROM software developer Robert Stein noticed Tetris playing on a personal computer in Hungary¹.  Seeing potential, Stein sought to license the game for Western PCs, and published the game for PC from Spectrum HoloByte.  Later that same year, game designer Henk Rogers saw the same promise that Tetris held during that year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.  With the blessings of Nintendo, he touched off a landmark gaming intellectual property battle. 

Due to the Soviet Union’s dim view of IP rights and the fact that Pajitnov developed the game at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the rights to Tetris were deemed never to have been officially sold.  Instead, full power belonged to the Soviet Ministry of Software and Hardware Export (Electronorgtechnica or ELORG for short).  This ruling made the license now held by Atari spin-off Tengen invalid and a well-timed trip to Moscow by Rogers allowed Nintendo to outmaneuver their competitors and secure the license from ELORG directly.  The gaming industry learned from this the importance of having a sound legal footing in the new global gaming community.

What did Henk Rogers see in Tetris? As we now know, a killer pack-in title for Nintendo’s upcoming Game Boy portable console.  In negotiations with Nintendo of America head Minoru Arakawa, who was initially in favor of Super Mario Land as the pack-in, Rogers was credited as suggesting Tetris instead.  Noting that while Super Mario Land would bring in the current gaming market, Tetris’ simple and addictive gameplay could attract everyone.  (Sound familiar?)  Thirty-five million units sold later, the Game Boy and Tetris, a game by then six years old and enjoyed by the cloistered world of PC gaming, gave birth to the casual gaming market.  Casual gaming became a key plank in Nintendo’s platform, and the revenue generated by it funded both new software and hardware, keeping the portable industry going to this date.

Alexey Pajitnov who saw an industry grow up and around his creation, didn’t see any money off of it until the Soviet Union’s collapse.  Intellectual property and licensing arrangements not only seen now as part of the cost of doing business, but to this day are a point of friction between all segments of the gaming industry from hardware development to user-created game mods.  Casual gaming brought millions of people and billions of dollars into the industry, but the lure of that ‘easier’ money that simple games bring threatens the level of quality that is key to retaining loyalty.  Tetris wasn’t the first video game, but its story is gaming’s story.
_{¹ (2009, July) Interview with Alexey Pajitnov. Game Informer, p. 28}

It’s Dangerous To Go Alone

The greatest enemy of artist is not the censor nor the critic; the greatest enemy is just simple discouragement.  For the artist there comes a time when that niggling self-doubt grows full bore into panic they might have to just give up and get a ‘real job.’

The cliché goes that one must suffer for their art, and through those trials unthought-of possibilities can be realized.  However, the clichédoesn’t say that those who’ve blazed their own trail can’t help those who plan to go even further.  This drive for advancement serves the higher purpose of staving off an art form's stagnation.  New ideas can not only enliven a medium, but drive the larger culture:

...the [Great Depression era] Works Progress Administration didn’t just create murals, it subsidized enormous leaps in graphic design, in theater (including America’s first all-black production of Macbeth), and in fine art. One painter lived off the WPA’s Federal Art Project for eight years before finally getting his first solo show in 1943. Maybe a similar program today could produce America’s next Jackson Pollock.

Even before the Great Depression led the government to pay artists directly, fortunate artists could attract patrons, wealthy individuals or groups willing to support promising artists. Gaming should look to cultivate a WPA-like form of patronage as well.  Not one sponsored by the government, but by the larger gaming industry acting in their own self interest.  

Funding would be need-based and awarded by gaming experts based on the prospect for innovation and probability for success.  Successful games produced through this system would in part fund future projects from other new developers, ideally and attractively minimizing the funding output needed from the industry.  A difficult proposition, but a better alternative than the challenges inherent in the current climate.

For game developers, especially of the independent variety, the challenges that are faced by other artists are multiplied by several degrees.  Months, sometimes years, of expensive, challenging work can go into a single project, mostly likely incurring for its creator massive debts that can go unpaid if the project fails after release, if the project even makes it that far. 

Jonathan Blow’s Braid was a game two years and two hundred thousand of his own dollars in the making.  Blow made this sacrifice, as he’s repeatedly said, to preserve not only his vision for his game, but for how all games should be, uncompromised in design for the sake of mass-market appeal.  Luckily for Blow, the critical and commercial success that followed the release of Braid empowers Blow with the kind of clout that will help him make his next project possible without the incurring of this degree of personal debt.

Founded by two ex-employees of Electronic Arts, 2D Boy minimized their risks by utilizing as much open-source software as they could get their hands on, free coffee house wi-fi, and the lack of production expense that comes with digital distribution, and were able to produce the popular downloadable puzzler World of Goo with ‘just’ $20,000 of their own money.  However, like Braid, the risks were all theirs until they could show not just a ‘work-piece’ or a journeymen level effort, but a commercially viable product, a feat practically impossible for developing talent.

Rather than have creators suffer through years of penance or poverty, we can identify talented game developers and cultivate them as they build their ideas. In the textbook case of development foresight, Valve hired the entire team behind the DigiPen Institute of Technology student title Narbacular Drop and aided in its transformation into Portal, one of the biggest hits of 2007.  Valve took a small financial risk, and the Narbacular Drop team was able to fully flesh out the themes from Drop and make a critical and commercial smash.

In independent game development, the successes are legendary but failures are the norm.  History is replete with examples of lives spent in failed pursuit of art before a breakthrough, and it's the responsibility of the gaming industry at large to support struggling independent developers until they can produce the kind of masterpieces that make gaming the most enveloping of art forms. 

Large-scale game mills should not just absorb independent developers after a successful first release, but support them beforehand.  Large publishers can become patrons of smaller developers, acting like a modern version of the Medici of Florence, who called by some the “Godfathers of the Renaissance” with their frequent and generous support of the arts from the fortune amassed through their own ruthless banking and accounting practices.  An independent game development fund would spur the new ideas that are vital to the continued success of a medium where technological development must always be tested by human development, and not the other way around. 

The Middle Children of History

This past week saw the release of Volition’s Red Faction: Guerilla, an ‘open-world’ third person shooter that continues the story about a rebel movement on the Red Planet that started in the original Red Faction, an FPS released on home systems in 2001.  While there is nothing unique about a new game continuing the story of past title, the issue at stake is the very definition of the word “sequel”, as in this case Red Faction: Guerilla is not the second game in the series, it’s the third.

Red Faction 2, another FPS that used the terrain deforming Geo-Mod engine, was released a little over a year after the first Red Faction. However, outside of a few token references, Red Faction 2 had very little to do with its predecessor.  Instead of continuing to tell the story of a workers’ rebellion on Mars, the game featured a betrayed squad of enhanced soldiers on Earth, discarding almost all of the mythos set up in the first game.  It was the first sequel, but one in name only.  For reasons that can vary from economic to aesthetic a developer can take an established or, in the case of Red Faction, a nascent franchise and spin it off in a new direction, taking fans on an unexpected detour from the experience they had anticipated.

In Red Faction: Guerilla, it's fifty years after new college graduate Parker, deceived into a life of indentured servitude in the mines of Mars became, through skill and luck, a key figure the Red Faction's exposure of the Ultor Corporation's crimes to the Earth Defense Force, who, by declaring martial law saved the workers of Mars and ended Ultor's rule.  Now it's seasoned demolitions expert Alex Mason coming to Mars to start over, only to find that the military never left, and had now become the oppressors. Now there is a new Red Faction, one with Martian independence from Earth as their goal. This subversion of the outcome of the first game, and sharing of the concept of a working man's rebellion makes Red Faction: Guerilla the 'true' sequel to Red Faction, leaving the second game out as more of a wild tangent, a rare but not unique occurrence in gaming.

Take the well-worn story of Super Mario Bros. 2 for the NES.  If it was ever a secret that it was just a revision of the Japanese title Doki Doki Panic, it was not well kept, even in the pre-internet age.  Nintendo, thinking that the actual Super Mario Bros. 2 (the 'true sequel' released in the US a generation later as “The Lost Levels” on the Super NES collection Super Mario All-Stars) would be too difficult for a western audience, performed an act of digital plastic surgery and produced a game that, while it sold quite well, was so radically different from even the primitive gameplay and storyline of the original, that it in the end introduced very little into the series' canon.  So much so that critical gameplay elements from Super Mario Bros. 2 (pulling up vegetables as weapons, character selection, heath meters, Sub-Space) disappeared from the core franchise forever.

In another case, Nintendo airdropped Fox McCloud into the unreleased Nintendo 64 title Dinosaur Planet to make Star Fox Adventures for the GameCube, another commercial success, but a disappointment to fans of the traditional Rail Shooting Star Fox series.  Legendary Nintendo developer Shigeru Miyamoto was quoted in 2001 as saying about Dinosaur Planet that “it looks really nice, doesn't it? I wish they would use Star Fox characters so that they could use the title Star Fox Adventures," he said jokingly. "Maybe I should call the team and talk about it."  It was an idea that came to pass a little over a year later, to him, and to Nintendo, a universe of anthropomorphic animals was "Star Fox," not just the gameplay.  However, the franchise returned to its roots in the very next title, Star Fox: Assault (again for the GameCube), taking only the female lead from Adventures along, and abandoning the adventure-style and item collection gameplay.

Another contemporary case of radical franchise alteration was done by Ubisoft. Completely abandoning the topical locals, their hero Jack Carver, and the ‘feral power’ mechanic from the first-person shooter Far Cry for its first ‘true’ sequel, this past spring's Far Cry 2.  In the original game’s place is instead an open-world title taking place in Africa, with a new protagonist, a new foe and no hint of genetic enhancements. Although it may have never been taken to this degree in a game that is branded as a sequel, the jettisoning of concepts that don't work can be a constructive enterprise.  Smart developers like Valve have paid close attention to feedback from gamers, creating both invaluable goodwill and generating the kind of critiques that create improvements that only an outside observer can notice. 

 

It is difficult to make a significant change to a franchise without even the average consumer, let alone a long time fan seeing it coming.  Springing such a change unexpectedly can invite a massive backlash, as was the case of Metal Gear Solid 2.  Everything was in place to build on and develop the Metal Gear Solid franchise for the PS2 era, graphics improved, core gameplay enhanced, storyline continued, only for gamers to discover that about an hour in, the protagonist changed from rugged veteran hero Solid Snake to the insecure ‘handsome’ rookie Raiden.  Largely, the mood of gamers after this reveal was more one of betrayal than disappointment at what was seen as a ‘bait and switch’ move.  Raiden quickly became the poster child for what not to do with a sequel. The repercussions were so lasting and powerful that the developers placed a stand-in of the Raiden character to be widely mocked and derided in Metal Gear Solid 3, a title that made no secret that its protagonist again wasn’t Solid Snake, to avoid the stigma attached to Metal Gear Solid 2. 

The ‘excuse’ for this phenomenon can be found inside the collision of creativity and marketability.  Developers, frequently seeing themselves as auteurs always looking for a new way to express themselves, are more than willing to shake off ideas that for them were years in the making for something fresh.  At the same time publishers can’t resist the financial benefit of a sequel: a built in fan base doesn’t require a costly marketing outreach that new titles need.  Careless gamers are left to be deceived, but this is not a case of ‘buyer beware,’ but an exploitation of a real desire by fans of any media to return to the feeling that the original bestowed or to learn just a bit more, even if it’s just a crumb, of the story that takes place after the credits roll.  Gamers learn fast and soon it won’t be as easy to forgive the ‘dab of paint’ sequel or the fake follow-up and stay around long enough for the true return to form.

Gestation and Generations

Microsoft may have let themselves think they are on the verge of opening up gaming to a wider world with their just announced “Project Natal” full-body motion tracking someday-ware, but it’s easy to forget that even from the beginning gaming has always been about doing just that.

It goes to show that Microsoft and Sony, with their magic wand announcement today during the newly scaled-forward E3, have been watching what the cagey veteran Nintendo has been doing with their less powerful, and (crucially) less complicated Wii.   The stories about artificial demand creation aside, there is no way that Nintendo sells eighteen-million-plus Wii Balance Boards without its competitors taking notice.  Why the Wii has been so successful isn’t a big secret; it’s the so-called casual gamers, the people who have been intimidated by the complexities of even console gaming, let alone the perpetual hardware nightmare that is PC gaming, for over a decade. Learning how to make your avatar respond by just waving your Wiimote around and pressing one of the big friendly buttons is both very cool and very easy.  Compare that to the 11+ button layout of the 360 controller, or ask anyone who’s had to try and explain to a newcomer the difference between the left bumper and left trigger and where the “R3” button is. 

Both Microsoft's Project Natal and Sony's enhanced Eyetoy + Motion Controller promise to make gaming totally intuitive (and a little tiring), and deliver on some of the promises "the future" has been making for decades now, ever since another piece of new technology made that same promise, failed, but ended up saving gaming anyway. 

To say that the gaming world in 1985 was different than it is today would be an understatement.  The Great Crash of 1983 did much more than dig a hole (so to speak) for Atari so deep that it has yet to crawl completely out of, it made retailers across the country gun-shy for getting back into the game business and threatened the nascent gaming culture with extinction.

Nintendo, with a move that would cement its legacy as a canny operator, came to the shores of the United States with a guarantee to buy back from retailers any unsold units of their redesigned and renamed version of their “Family Computer,” the NES.  It was a risky venture, but they had a secret weapon.  A piece of optional hardware that separated the NES from any game system yet produced, one to be featured in advertisements as a signal that things have changed, one that promised to revolutionize how video games are played: the Robotic Operating Buddy. 

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that the R.O.B. and its two games were ultimately a flop (although one a flop that has since become kitschy cultural touchstone).  But at the time, the R.O.B. was the future, the most memorable early attempt to bring more people to gaming by doing something different.  It’s possible that gaming would have developed into the phenomenon it is today without R.O.B. and the curiosity it inspired, but maybe not.  Is Microsoft’s “revolutionary new way to play” Project Natal the next R.O.B.? 

Natal and its compatriots, the Wii Motion Control Plus and Sony's we-probably-should-have-given-it-a-name, have their eyes on that remaining sizeable, unindoctrinated population of potential customers.  People who are too old or too not born in 1985, never built a loyalty with gaming and got scared off by two decades of increasing complexity are the same people that the R.O.B. was targeted at oh-so-many years ago.