Month: September 2015

Bad voice acting has been part of games for so long.

First off, we need to get rid of the Creative VS Technical debate. In gamedev both are equally important and usually dealt with by people who are both creative and technical. That’s the default state.

No, your motion capture performance ain’t shit until someone spends hours cleaning it up and integrating “your animation” in the game engine. Your voice acting performance ain’t shit until someone picks the best take, minimizes your mouth noise, makes it sound like you’re in space and integrates it in game.

Do not create classes. We’re all in this together. Flatten that stupid pyramid, please.

Second, union VS non-union and how game developers to this day don’t have any, like VFX houses. Two factors:

   – People are drowning in work and don’t bother dealing with this. We all work insanely hard –we all do but bear with me- at finding solutions to problems that didn’t exist before. People completely forget that: game development really is Research & Development. TV or movie technicians or actors, they swim in a pool of “been there done that”, we are not. Even when things look the same and that we think that we can use an old proven method to do something, it turns out that we still have to write some new code, maybe change an entire wall. It’s fucking nuts, I’m not exaggerating. VFX houses do the same, creating 3D that you have never seen before, dealing with mad constraints etc.

I stand by this distinction: we all work hard in the entertainment industry, but game development is the craziest. Look at cycles: 2, 4, 5+ years of development. Hollywood can churn out a massive Marvel movie employing 1,000 people every 1.5 years. So no time –and by that I mean brain time- for game developers to negotiate and meet with companies which will not help to establish unions, not their interests. Which brings us to the second factor:

   – Not enough older people. In TV and movie production in Hollywood where unions are very powerful you see people of all ages, early 20s to late 60s all the time. We all age and we need more security and less snacks, that’s how it is. But the game industry really enjoys people from 20 to 35. Especially before 30. Obviously young people will never care about unions. In TV you’d BETTER have your union card to get good work so when you start, you don’t see it as a thing that drags you down but as an opportunity to be treated fairly (yeah unions bring socialism all over the place, job stability, nice healthcare etc).

That is a weird thing: if game development is so much R&D, why would you not create a pool of veterans and use them to mitigate risks? Because they could unionized and sort of demand stuff? That might be one of the answer. Unions in Hollywood can shut down any production at the blink of an eye, I’m sure most big game companies are not looking forward to that.

But yeah as a veteran game audio designer who can barely use his skills outside game development, I feel so overwhelmed by the work (sound design, implementation, new tech showing up etc) that unions –despite looking good on paper- are so not in my head. To be fair in a game studio with a good reputation, salaries are usually good and relationships are flat enough that there’s no need for unions VS bosses.

I tend to think that’s progress. I wish it was expanding and that game culture wasn’t so stubbornly aimed at the youngest, things would change in developers’ favor more probably.

Blizzard’s Overwatch. Competitive shooter, fast paced action.

Bosskey’s Lawbreakers. Competitive shooter, fast paced action.

Epic’s Unreal Tournament. Competitive shooter, fast paced action.

They all are coming soon. After being all the rage around 2000, the arena shooter is back. But there’s a problem: people watch people play now, and it’s a big deal.

I watched Overwatch’s 16 “heroes” and you have to appreciate Blizzard’s surgery at work, how things are readable in a chaos of green, blue bullets, force shields, particles and so forth. It’s amazing how good they are at manipulating color palette.

It is also super fast. It’s pretty much unwatchable for 90% of people if not more. This is what Twitch most watched games are, most of the time:

Those games are slow. If not reaaaally slow. Titanfall is really good and doesn’t appear here. No Quake. No fast paced games. People compare Team Fortress 2 to Overwatch but TF2 is far slower.

Game design wise, what makes Counter Strike far better at being watched is the fact that you can be eliminated in one single bullet from any weapon. Therefore you can’t be running around and you can’t be sloppy in your retreats. You have to be always careful and that creates tons of mechanisms: always move with a teammate, be silent, secure a zone with a flash grenade before entering it,  think how you can surprise your opponent etc.

We watch this, we witness this incredible tension that doesn’t exist in arena shooters because everyone is running and blasting everywhere. It’s fun to play but there is virtually no strategy or tactics compared to CS. It’s too fast! Just kill everybody without getting killed. It’s like a football –soccer- game with only the penalty area and only one side.

The absolute beauty of Counter Strike is its high dynamic: you can rush and play like an arena shooter or you can meticulously form an attack/defense. Everything can work and everything can fail equally. The economy makes every mistake count –if you lose, you can’t buy good weapons-. Which means that watching a match means you never know who is going to win (when teams are about the same level, obviously). I can’t count how many times I watched a game and thought that it was over no way the other team comes back from that oh shit they are fuck that’s awesome they might win!!!!!

Sports fans know what I mean. That’s the core element in watching skill-based entertainment: DRAMA. Automatic, endless respawn kind of kills it, by design.

Second thing that makes CS so good for TV purposes: you don’t have to know classes, there are no classes. Overwatch’s 16 different characters with each different abilities is a lot to remember (and I can’t even imagine the work to balance them out). It’s overkill for anyone not heavily involved in the scene. I don’t want to understand all that. Baseball has classes and like four countries in the world like that sport.

I showed a friend a CS game the other day, it was his first time and in 5 minutes he was into it. Very easy to understand and visualize yet, it’s already borderline pace wise when things get hot.

Arena shooters were the shit and disappear for a reason. Counter Strike is continuously in the top 5 sellers on Steam. They sold over a million copies in August, when the major competition took place in Cologne. 1.2 million people watched the finals (and probably another million watched them later) that’s the score of a modest, successful show on TV. No other FPS comes close to those numbers. It took Counter Strike fifteen years and billions of hours played to be that balanced.

If I was a big company trying to get into esports with a shooter, I would copy the fuck out of CS. Just change the anti-middle East theme and you good for years if not decades.

You know, I never watched FemFreq’s videos because I agree pretty much with everything Anita has been arguing about computer games and culture. No need to reinforce my beliefs.

I watched the last one though:

I knew about this 80s/90s sexism. I played those games. I thought at that time –being between 10 to 20- that it was kind of amusing and lame at the same time. Whatevs, we’ll grow up. I didn’t realize how far we had gone rolling the same stupid ass sexist shit all the way up to 2015.

Damn Capcom and your Resident Evil DLC, damn Kojima and MGS IV. And MGS V (thanks RPS for doing the work).

Quiet’s depiction doesn’t intrude on what I love about the game, and I’m accustomed to accepting and acknowledging a certain level of unnecessary bullshit or tone deaf unpleasantness in the pop culture I enjoy.

Fair enough. I think it’s sad that it’s the only thing in that game that is unacceptable and that could have been changed easily, with just some common sense. But they keep it. It’s deliberate and it’s stupid.

Two decades of graphic arms race, we’re still drawing boobs and shoving them in our faces. Half the population doesn’t care. Imagine dicks in your game, every year more bouncy, for that long. You’d be tired too.

The argument that it’s all just fun and silliness is the oldest trick in the book. To me the issue is not the male gaze so much –I’m a dude and I like boobs- it’s more the childish, boy side of it that annoys the fuck out of me. I am passed that, even when I am entertaining myself I want something that talks to my 36 year old me, the average age of someone playing games in 2015.

I had totally missed that story this week. For those who didn’t hear about it, there’s a game on Steam called Playing History 2 – Slave Trade in which there’s a mini game of Tetris where you have to put as many slaves as you can inside the boat. Slave Tetris. The game is 2 years old but a recent video put it on the Internet front page.

Obviously, it escalated quickly.

Serious Games Interactive is a Danish studio and it’s not difficult to understand that they probably don’t have access to a lot of black people in their lives because about the mini game any sane, not self-hating black person would have been like:

The main issue here is a lack of diversity in the game development world. Gamasutra is quick to be verbose about ludo-narrative dissonance but I’m going to go ahead and say that it’s not the fucking point, the point is that the very white game industry lacks subtlety about non-white stuff. Simple.

I wouldn’t try to make a serious game about Poland or Ukraine without having at least half the team connected to those countries and that history (which is complex and insane and painful).

You can make games about everything, no doubt. However you can’t use a mechanic like that on a subject that is far from you –I suppose you are a Danish game designer up there in Europe- that is just too easy and displays a lack of empathy. SGI has apologized and removed the Tetris bit.

Guys, that’s the thing: you tackle sensitive subjects that you’re not involved in, for which you are pretty much total strangers. That’s the problem. Using Tetris in a game about slavery when the country with the biggest black diaspora born from slavery and what followed, is still talking about reparations. Over a thousand black people have been killed by police or others as of September 2015 in the US. We witnessed a dude kill people in church being escorted to get a burger. Hundreds of African refugees trying to reach Europe, dying.

Think a little bit. Think about black people’s mindset and feelings when they see that Tetris game. That’s not censorship, that’s just being smart and human. You wouldn’t have a rape simulator using a Track and Field mechanic in a serious game about sexual harassment and present it to rape survivors. You don’t need that gameplay to pass the message across. We can make games about everything, it doesn’t mean we have to.

I think the all going towards a closed society made of plenty of communities who can barely bear each other, is a problem we are already in. We might find that it’s a nice short term solution but it’s not helping us. It doesn’t develop empathy, it does create entitlement. Like Danish developers who sincerely think that they can make a game about black slavery, make a not so good game about it, and not have to be that accountable for it because people who take issue with it are too sensitive and/or eager to jump on the bandwagon.

TL;DR: we really, really, really need more diversity in game development.