Tag Archives: game industry

GDC Day 1

I’ve been in the San Jose area since Friday at this point, and spent the weekend visiting my cousins and getting a general feel for the area. It’s really hammered home how out of shape I am; after two days of hoofing it all over downtown San Jose, I’m hobbling around a little from a sore tendon in one foot and a raw spot on the other from where my sandal was rubbing against it. (It’s time for new sandals.)

I’ve been handing out business cards to everyone I chat with, so it’s possible that I will shortly have some new visitors (hello to any that come by). I’ve handed out probably about a dozen so far — not bad for being in a tutorial session all day (and it’s only the first day). People have been responding well to my ideas on putting together a development company focusing on narrative based games, so that bodes very well for getting Critical Games to actually get off the ground. (One of the individuals I was chatting with also gave me some suggestions on where to look for grants that would go quite far in getting started… potentially up to $100,000 for 6 months to develop a proof of concept, with a phase 2 portion that could potentially be somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000. This would be fantastic.)

I had just one session today, a full day tutorial about creativity. It was well presented and I had fun with it, though I must say it was pretty tiring and by the end of it, I was grateful to get up and stretch my legs. A lot of the information was fairly basic (stuff like “watch what you eat”, “get plenty of rest”, “drink lots of water” etc), but there were also some really useful exercises and suggestions on ways to help train your creativity and creative output. For the second half of the session, we broke into small groups and did a variety of design exercises to demonstrate the role of creativity in design. These ranged from some smaller scale design problems from case study games, to prototyping and presenting a boardgame given random provided puzzle pieces in about 30 minutes. Our group was comprised mostly of professors from Full Sail (good people, they were goofy and friendly, but also clearly knowledgeable in their respective fields), and ended up making a game called “Space Pig” (opting not to go the “Pigs in Space” route lest Henson sue us), since one of the game pieces we were given was a small plastic pig and the game board was a star field of sorts. The basic premise was that there was the Space Pig in the center of the board, and he’s hungry, so you needed to trek out in your ship to the edge of the map and collect a “water” token and a “food” token, and bring them back to the pig in the center. Of course, if you ran across another player’s ship, your path would be obstructed, and you’d have to battle (each rolls a die, the player with the lower number loses a health token and is sent back to his home point… if they have a food or water token, that is sent back into the resource pools at the rim of the board). To win, either kill all your opponents (that’d be an awful lot of lucky rolls, though, since each of the four players starts with four health points), or be the first to get both the food and the water to the space pig, and then return to your home base. (I’m writing it down so I don’t forget, and for posterity.) Overall, it was a worthwhile tutorial despite it occupying the entirety of my day.

Also on Monday, during one of the breaks, I went down to the GDC store they have set up and checked out their array of books and such. They were a fair bit overpriced, but that’s partially because a number of them were books that had not yet been officially released. I picked up The Game Design Reader, which is a companion book to Rule of Play. With that lovely sort of zen synchronicity that I’m so fond of, as I was paying for it, someone behind me commented “Good book”… turned out to be Eric Zimmerman, the editor of the book (The Reader is a collection of essays from various authors). So, now I have an autographed copy of the book sitting in a bag on my hotel table. Pretty neat.

I’ve put together a tentative schedule for the week, in case anyone is interested: Continue reading →

Games in the Social Tapestry

Leave a reply

In a country of just under 300 million people, current statistics suggest that roughly 60% of the population plays games on a regular or semi-regular basis[1] — that games have taken a central role in how we occupy our time is undeniable. What is still under debate, however, is how these games affect our lives outside the game, and how we interact with others in society. There has been some indication that video games temporarily increase aggression, but no more than watching an action movie or even a particularly rousing football game, with no long term corollary showing up to date.[2] Additionally, the role video games have on aggression is a relatively small element in the larger role games have on the social tapestry. The question that most interests me in this field is “How do games bring people together?”

One of the most immediately apparent examples of games serving as a coagulant for community building is the Massively Multiplayer Online style of game, which places thousands of players together within a persistent virtual world, where relationships with other players must be formed to survive. The most popular of these games is Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (WoW), which recently passed the 6 million player mark, making it more than twice as large as its nearest competition. World of Warcraft has even been alluded to replacing golf as the networking tool of choice in the realm of technology oriented business.[3] The comparison continues to gather steam, with exclusive guilds replacing country club memberships, and a number of celebrities playing together (notably Dave Chappelle, comedian and star of The Chappelle Show, and rumors suggest that Jon Stewart of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart also plays[4]).

The more interesting question to ask, however, is not how World of Warcraft reached this position, but why it did. It clearly is filling a role that society felt was needed; the game has largely operated on grassroots advertising and gamer-centric marketing, so the fact that it has garnered a wider market appeal suggests that it is fulfilling a role that was lacking in society. In The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg discusses the essential role a “third space” that is neither home nor work plays in the health of a community, and decries the destruction and devaluation of these places with the growth of suburbia and a commuter culture. I have a strong suspicion that the appeal for WoW, and other online games, is in its ability to create a virtual third space, a place for people to have shared experiences and garner a sense of comradeship. While it is not necessarily a perfect marriage, since it still ultimately keeps individuals physically apart and isolated, it is a stopgap solution the larger social organism has created to fulfill this necessary role in culture.
Continue reading →

Critical Eye: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Leave a reply

Released in October of 2004, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the latest installment in the Grand Theft Auto series of games, developed by Rockstar Games and distributed by Take Two Interactive. This installment outsold its already best selling predecessors (Grand Theft Auto III, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City respectively), taking place in a fictionalized variant of LA in the early 1990âs. The game’s encouragement and emphasis of in-game violence had already caused a considerable amount of uproar from several advocacy groups, but did not receive its true level of infamy until early July of 2005, when a “mod” was discovered called “hot coffee” that allowed the player to participate in a sexual act, which was construed as a violation of its Mature game rating (instead of Adults Only), and has sparked a flurry of lawsuits, media attention, and reactionary legislation against video games in general.

Before I discuss the game itself, let’s address the Hot Coffee scandal a little more directly. The content within the mod is overtly sexual, though nothing is actually seen beyond the player’s character behind his in-game girlfriend, making sexual movements. Because of this, it is true that the game should have received an Adults Only rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), had the content been available to players. The only way to access this content is through manually altering the code through external means (on the PC, this involves physically altering game files; on the Playstation 2, this involves using another device such as a “Game Shark” to manipulate the game data or downloading and installing a patch on a system that has no direct method of downloading or installing patches). Insisting upon an Adults Only rating because of this content is roughly akin to insisting that a movie be given an NC-17 or even X rating because of a scene that was filmed but then cut from the final version of the film. Given that the game’s rating was already Mature, which has the same requirements for purchase or to watch as an R rated movie (age 17 or higher), this uproar becomes even more ludicrous. It has unfortunately caused a flood of knee-jerk legislation[1] and use as a political tool by those seeking re-election,[2] despite clear first amendment violations within the proposed laws that have already shut down early attempts at similar legislation.[3] The overwhelming amount of bad press and shoddy handling of the situation on the part of Rockstar Games and Take Two Interactive has caused company assets and stock value to plummet, inciting an additional string of lawsuits by the companies’ own stockholders.[4] Regardless of whether or not any of this furor is merited, it may well mean no more Grand Theft Auto games, and potentially hard and restrictive times for the game industry as a whole.
Continue reading →

Taking Back “Literature”

Leave a reply

Video games are a category of creative work that deserves consideration and respect as an art form, and to be valued as literature. For nearly as long as there has been art or literature, there have been those who have tried to restrict the terms to only define the works that they have deemed worthy. This has become particularly prevalent in culture since the early Renaissance, with the sanctification and elevation of art and literature as the province of the refined and privileged, a method to further segregate the masses from the intellectual and social elite.[1] In modern society, however, there is no excuse for this segregation to continue. Art and literature can take many forms, and exist on a variety of levels throughout society, yet we continue to delineate only a few “classics” as qualifying for such a lofty term as literature or art. This needs to stop: art and literature are everywhere; art and literature are as varied and colorful as the individuals who create them; art and literature cannot be pigeonholed, categorized, or rigidly defined within a free society. We as individuals need to stand up for creative expression, and take back the language that has been subverted for so many years.

According to the Oxford American Dictionary, literature can be defined as, “written works, esp. those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit”. Given this definition, it is hardly a surprise that there is so much difficulty in defining what is or is not “literature”, and rightfully so: the definition is fluid, and ultimately subjective on what is of merit, as well as in what fashion it may be worthwhile. I believe that it is ultimately the individual’s decision on the merit or worthiness of any given work. Whether or not a work is considered “literature” by some arbitrary group should not dictate the social, intellectual, or legal value of that work. I believe that it’s possible to rephrase the current definition such that the intent of the term remains, but the terminology becomes less restrictive, and I feel that doing so is necessary towards doing away with segregational labels. I believe a better way to think about literature is that it is verbal art.
Continue reading →

Games Are Art

Leave a reply

I recently discovered that a website working to put forward the belief that games are (or at least can be) art was shut down with no prior notice for an erroneous violation of terms of service by Network Solutions. The link for more information is here: Games Are Art!: Censorship.

Network Solutions is hardly one to be trying to take the high road, given their previous actions including wildcarding all .com and .net domains so any non-existent or typo’d domain entered goes to THEIR site, among others. I’m glad that Games Are Art have moved away from Network Solutions (and had I known that’s who their provider had been previously, would have suggested they leave earlier), and hope others will take this as yet another sign that you shouldn’t give Verisign/Network Solutions your business.

Virtual Economies within the Real World

Leave a reply

As much as we might hate to admit it, a major element of social interaction is based around commerce; social hierarchy and structure has formed around it since the days of hunter/gatherer societies, and does not show any sign of changing any time soon. Whether capital based or commodity based, commerce is simply a part of the human social organism. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that commerce has migrated into the online world as well. We are already familiar with using real world finances to purchase real world items via the internet (such as eBay and Amazon, among many others); what has become a hot topic for designers and scholars alike is the purchase of virtual goods with real or even virtual money through virtual worlds.

Virtual worlds is a term that has grown out of a need to describe the communal aspect of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) in a manner that delineates it from the ludological elements of the game. “Virtual World” and MMOG are used relatively interchangeably at this time, though they will continue to diverge as more research and study is performed: a MMOG is by nature a virtual world, but a virtual world needn’t have any ludological element to succeed.

As virtual worlds have grown in complexity and popularity over the past several years, they have begun to take on more and more elements from daily life, including that of commerce. Most virtual worlds have methods for sale and trade of items and virtual currency between players, most often based around the auction house method of sale: you place an item up for bid with a minimum asking price; players bid on the item until the minimum asking price (or more) is offered, at which point the item is sold. Alternatively, player to player private transactions can also be performed. These capabilities have enabled a new type of commerce: trade of real world currency for in game currency or goods. This originated via eBay, with early MMOGs such as Ultima Online and Everquest. These prototypical sales tended to be either in-game currency, or a high level character, selling for anywhere between $100 and $700. As time went on, the trend gained popularity, until it reached a point that people were collecting in-game cash for real world sale as a profession, primarily in parts of Southeast Asia where the exchange value would be maximized. These individuals have become known as “gold farmers,” and are considered a nuisance to players as well as the designers. (According to most End User License Agreements, the sale of in game assets for real money is not allowed, and justification for denial of services.)
Continue reading →

The Role of Writing in Games

Leave a reply

[S]ince the games are generally about power, control, and those other primitive things, the stories tend to be so as well. This means they tend to be power fantasies. That’s generally considered to be a pretty juvenile sort of story.

The stories in most video games serve the same purpose as calling the uber-checker a “king.” It adds an interesting shading to the game, but the game at its core is unchanged.

Remember: my background is as a writer, so this actually pisses me off. Story deserves better treatment than that. (Koster 86)

I would be hard pressed to state this thought in a more clear or concise fashion. Put simply, the stories in most games tend to be weak compared to their media counterparts (novels, comic books, movies, television). Over the years, there have been a few exceptional stories that span larger issues, or address the nature of power and control itself; a modest number of games have alternatively succeeded in refining the “power fantasy” into a more engaging telling, but the underlying principles have remained the same. Stories are tacked on, extraneous except in providing a context for player empowerment. While certainly not the sole issue, this is a fairly damning point when attempting to defend games as a valid form of creative expression.

So what can be done to improve the situation? The short answer is to hire professional writers. The vast majority of companies currently have their dialogue and story written and developed by the game designers, programmers, and artists themselves, rather than spending the money on a professional writer. Take the hint from the media that have come before: games are not that far different from comics, books, or movies, all of which have had significantly more time to develop techniques to tell a compelling and nuanced story, techniques that are effective across media.
Continue reading →

The Next Generation Industry

Leave a reply

GDC is behind us now. We’ve all heard so much talk about the future of video games that it’s beginning to frazzle and run together. So many things, new developments and new ideas and new technology, all in the milieu of rapid political and social change. The idea of predicting the future seem hairy at best. There’s all these factors at work here, and somehow they’ll play off each other. So what are some of the issues and developing trends we’re facing?

We’ve heard many words about procedural game design, player-created content populating the massive environments. There’s that group of people off shouting about middleware and open source gaming cutting the costs that everyone says is gonna blow open with the next generation. Meanwhile, there’s real good reason to look at unionizing the big publishers, but that’s just gonna blow the costs up even more. At least unionization would create some real financial incentives for a growing independant games industry. Next thing you know you’re not a “real” gamer unless you eschew everything from EA “because it’s over-produced crap” and the “artistry” is entirely to be found in indie games. Indie gamers start thinking of GameSpot what indie rockers think of MTV– something for the uninformed masses. Maybe GameSpot is smart enough to capture the zeitgeist and they’ll have an “indie” subsite, maybe not. Regardless, the split between casual and hardcore gamers has already begun. A few years ago, you could reasonably purchase every truly fantastic game, and lots of us did. Yeah, myself included. That is no longer a possibility. You couldn’t play them all. You probably can’t afford to play them all. We’ve got a situation where people are increasingly having to decide where to put their money.

Continue reading →

My Bibliography for the Upcoming Semester

1 Reply

Bartle, Richard. Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders Games, 2003.
Bates, Bob. Game Design: The Art and Business of Creating Games. Muska & Lipman, 2002.
Crawford, Chris. Chris Crawford On Game Design. New Riders Games, 2003.
DeMaria, Rusel; Wilson, Johnny L. High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, 2003.
Freeman, David. Creating Emotion in Games: The Craft and Art of Emotioneering. New Riders Publishing, 2003.
Friedl, Markus. Online Game Interactivity Theory. Charles River Media, 2002.
Glassner, Andrew. Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction. AK Peters, Ltd., 2004.
Graham, Paul. Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age. O’Reilly, 2004.
Herz, J.C. Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds. Little Brown & Co., 1997.
Koster, Raph. Theory of Fun for Game Design. Paraglyph, 2004.
Laramee, Francois Dominic. Game Design Perspectives. Charles River Media, 2002.
Miller, Carolyn Handler. Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment. Focal Press, 2004.
Mulligan, Jessica; Patrovsky, Bridgette. Developing Online Games: An Insider’s Guide. New Riders Games, 2003.
Poole, Steven. Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. Arcade Publishing, 2004.
Ray, Sheri Graner. Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market. Charles River Media, 2003.
Rollings, Andrew; Adams, Ernest. Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams On Game Design. New Riders Publishing, 2003
Rollings, Andrew; Morris, Dave. Game Architecture and Design: A New Edition. New Riders Games, 2003.
Sheldon, Lee. Character Development and Storytelling for Games. Muska & Lipman, 2004.
Tufte, Edward R. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Graphics Press, 1997.
Tufte, Edward R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Graphics Press, 2001.
Zimmerman, Eric; Salen, Katie. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. The MIT Press, 2003.

I’m also planning to subscribe to The Journal of Game Development and Game Developer’s Magazine.
It’s going to be an awesome semester. Hard, but awesome. It’s an exciting time to be getting into games, as anyone who has been following the GDC proceedings will attest. I can’t wait.

The Cost of Enlightenment

2 Replies

There is an adage that states, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” It is meant to remind monks that true enlightenment is not something that can be purchased or even given, but must come from within. It is somewhat ironic, then, that we consider our society enlightened. While it is true that we have made significant advances in human wellbeing in the past century, it has come at the cost of the only true freedom that exists: personal responsibility.

Rather than holding the individual accountable for their actions, we mitigate and deflect that responsibility by blaming those actions on the ideas and words of something or someone else. This offense is further compounded by efforts to use the actions of the individual to dictate the rights of everyone. The moment a book, song, movie, comic, or game is censored or banned, we have sacrificed an essential liberty, and hammered another nail in the coffin of personal responsibility.

The logic behind censorship is fundamentally flawed:

Censorship protects no one; ideas are rooted in the culture that spawns them, they cannot simply be turned off like a faucet.
The only truly free society is an informed society: if you’re worried about a new idea taking over, maybe you should re-examine your own beliefs.
Personal beliefs do not equal law: the sacrilege of one person may be the gospel of another.

Despite these flaws, people continue to try and censor others, with increasing success rates. We have found our roadside Buddha, and he’s offering censorship wrapped in the pretense of enlightenment. We need to collectively realize that it’s a false promise; cultural enlightenment, like spiritual enlightenment, begins and ends with the self. The true cost of enlightenment is personal responsibility.