Month: March 2015

OK so I stopped watching a dude playing CS:GO on Twitch. Instead, I’m watching the best teams in the world going at it.

For those who don’t know the game, the yellow dots have to plant the bomb either at yellow A or yellow B. The blue dots need to stop them.

It’s within the first minute and you can see that the yellow dots are all together while blue dots are spreading. One is alone to get the information on whether the opponent is coming for yellow A or not. Looks like it’s going to be yellow B. Good read from the blue dots!

[THE MOTHERFUCKING HELL TO CREATE THAT GIF FROM A YOUTUBE VIDEO FUCK YOU 2015]

Counter Strike is so good. It’s kind of the perfect mix of Go and soccer. Everything can change at any time and it’s all about terrain control. I think soccer because US teams are playing like the US soccer team: very aggressive, very willing but totally lacking finesse which results in them getting their asses handed over. But it’s probably closer to basketball because well, five players and a coach. Five players to defend two zones means a 2/3 split which means one zone is weaker than the other. It’s all about that little advantage you can take over your opponent even though it’s not a guarantee at all. It’s brilliant.

Like in sports, all teams and players know each other inside out so they try different techniques, changes of pace to overcome their opponents at different venues and matches. Emergent stories popping out from a system of rules that’s the juice, narrative-driven folks.

It’s really good to watch, a map is about 45mn to an hour long. I definitely applauded the last action in the last round of the ESL final and last map between the two Swedish teams NiP and Fnatic. Insanely tense!

Two things that suck: I don’t like the fact that we use terms like kill and death. Too strong. And of course, the total lack of diversity in the scene. I can’t forget that I stopped playing that game online early 2000s because of all the inappropriate niggers thrown at the team chat and my headphones.

Too bad.

Two articles particularly interesting to me:

Toe Jam & Earl game designer Greg Johnson speaking at GDC about lack of diversity in games.

Ian Bogost writing about how games are better without characters.

I have always felt that games are better as system toy machines. I’m a designer I know people are scared of systems and think of them as not fun and cold. But to me as Ian puts it perfectly:

A game, it turns out, is a lens onto the sublime in the ordinary.

It’s the essence of what is so unique to computer games. But let’s go back to escapism.

For the lack of diversity with characters, let’s just have game engines give you the option to morph your avatar as you like.

It’s something funny: in any story in games, how the character looks like doesn’t matter at all, never did matter because the story is lived by one person, the player. The notion that you need character consistency across players experiences is weird as hell, if not totally stupid. What a brake on what can be possible, it’s a shame.

The only limit is technical: allowing players to shape their avatars means that some stuff can’t be done in some games (memory print). That is quite vague and the Saint Row series showed to the world that you still can do a lot with a custom avatar creation tool.

So technically it’s doable –if you take that into account from the start-. Also characters are such a small part of culture diversity. Black culture is way more than just having black characters.

What is bad with how we handle diversity is the notion that it’s not worth it. Now that’s ridiculous because it couldn’t be further from the truth.

White dudes don’t care so much about avatars, so used to have them mold to them for decades. Everybody else likes having avatars looking like them. It’s not just in games.

On TV Empire just exploded and demonstrated that a massive black and brown crowd exists. And that this crowd leads interest:

I would imagine that an Empire mobile game or adventure game would be widely successful. And yet I don’t see that happen anytime soon. So frustrating. In the meantime as again Ian puts it perfectly:

What if replacing militarized male brutes with everyone’s favorite alternative identity just results in Balkanization rather than inclusion?

I don’t know what to think!

It’s a little sour article on turning 50 and making games. I’d like to point some things out that I think we all take for being normal or the default setting and shouldn’t at all.

Game development has always had an uncomfortable relationship with age and experience.

Let’s just ask ourselves this: where in the world a really complex field is overlooking experience? Age shouldn’t even be an issue, experience means you’re going to be older because that’s how it works.

Game development, a really hard and complex field, has a culture that almost bullies experience (I remember people making fun of Chris Crawford, have some respect young, pantless padawans).

This shouldn’t be OK at all. This is so fucking weird and needs to stop. In other “passion-driven” industries, people seek experience and people respect experienced people. That’s how the craft progresses but whatever.

So when I read the conclusion that  “hey, I still love what I do” as the pinnacle of 22 years of game development, it kind of breaks my heart. Laralyn, you know you could be feeling way better than that. You should receive Lifetime Achievement Awards and have younger game developers come to see you at GDC to take selfies with you and buying your games and design books.

instead we have a panel at the GDC this year talking about ageism. At 35 I’m entering the “old age” which is some serious bullshit but yeah, that’s the market. I hope this will shift as quickly as possible.

I also really hope for broader games. I talked in the past (back in ‘08) about games for seniors. Tons of room for innovation and steady, sustainable game development. I would be thrilled to work on that. We’re just getting started.