Author: harold

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that the cause of violence is ourselves in the first place.“ says a Gamasutra comment.

Exactly. That’s why the game industry needs to look at itself and deal -internally- with the fact that we build violent entertainment. Of course there’s no correlation with murders per se, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that we participate into that violent culture, and that we are the most efficient medium at it.

So everything goes wrong. Publishers and lobbies meet with the president when they shouldn’t have (hey US government, how about you meet with gun manufacturers and enforce some shit on them) game developers are not a majority to think that maybe we should think a bit more about the cultural impact we make with our games. Meanwhile, more tax dollars spent on useless “research” that is going to do nothing.

Frustrating.

If you own a Jazz Bass, you’re pretty much set for life in the bass department.

You see, in the audio world we are used to things that last. Technologically once we achieve something, we don’t change it.

A hundred years ago a company invented the microphone, allowing us to record anything, we pretty much never changed it.

Thirty years ago a company invented MIDI, allowing us to control instruments via data, we pretty much never changed it.

Seventeen years ago a company invented the Virtual Studio Technology format (VST), allowing us to have perfect clones of real world instruments. Guess what? We pretty much never changed it.

The VST format is beautiful: you can download the SDK, can build whatever you want with it, distribute it as you want. If you sell your plugin, you need to pay Steinberg back. It is supported in every single audio app on Windows and others, completely and it happened really fast (we still have issues to create and modify Adobe’s PDFs in 2013 ffs). The ease of use is awesome: just drop a .dll in a folder and you’re done. Want to use another sequencer? Just redirect the plugin path to your VST folder.

Imagine if it had been like that with Max, Maya, Toshop, Flash since 2000. That’s right.

So that’s why to me going full open source open format is not so obvious: if companies are not acting like a bunch of dicks, things are smooth. After all, they are people too.

There’s a very nice thing about a format owned by a company or a consortium, its stability (3 versions of the VST format in almost 20 years). No fork, no weird stuff compromising and breaking apps legacy because someone just started to see the Light, none of that. The bad part with companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google or Apple is they break/close stuff and don’t give a shit (probably because they’re so big). That’s why a lot of people believe that we can’t trust companies to do it right.

But some like Steinberg or Flickr do, and we all benefit in the fairest ways possible. I wish Nintendo would share their 3D camera system in a SDK like Steinberg does with its VST interface. Game developers would spend time on more important stuff and know that moving the character around would be perfect on day one. Quality goes up. Nintendo gets royalties if the game sells. Developers and enthusiasts can use it for free. Everybody wins.

Let’s go back for a moment. The Wii introduced and made this thing successful:

Non-hardcore gamers were delighted. It was easy. My own parents who never wanted to use the classic gamepad, played.

Then we got this:

Non-hardcore gamers were delighted. It was easy.

Then this:

Non-hardcore gamers liked it, kids loved it it was easy but a bit early and awkward: no physical feedback on moves will always feel weird even if full body control is neat.

We are now completely going the opposite way.

i

Controllers-that-only-hardcore-gamers-like everywhere: Wii U, Android consoles, this Nvidia thingy. Because hardcore gamers spend ten times more money, it makes sense to appeal to them.

Competing for the same small crowd with more competitors though, doesn’t. Nintendo/Sony/MS bleed money to stay in the race, with “free” competition from manufacturers and “easy” multiplatform from developers, it’s going to be pointless for everyone.

It’s pretty simple: touch is for everyone, gamepads are for hardcore gamers, keyboard and mouse are for both. Developers should keep that in mind and as I always say, aim for the PC/tablet where you can have every kind of input.

I don’t think having multiple $100, $200 boxes doing one thing is going to be the best deal compared to having a big PC and a tablet on which everything is compatible, even the past (I still can play my games from ‘85 on Windows 8). We don’t think so much about it now but legacy support is becoming incredibly important, culturally speaking.

As Electronic Arts prepared to market Medal of Honor Warfighter, the latest version of its top-selling video game released in October, it created a Web site that promoted the manufacturers of the guns, knives and combat-style gear depicted in the game.

NYT.

I’m just saying and I’m going to go with one example,

Call of Duty makes a billion dollars of revenue every year. Hundreds of dudes and dudettes but mostly dudes line up when one of the main Activision franchise comes out. This core target of young males spends time online sharing a lot of interest in guns through discussions about the game or real life weapons. Guns that are accurately modeled and simulated by armies of engineers, sound designers and 3D artists. 40 million monthly active players. in 2011 alone, 21 new “First Person Shooter” games. The army itself uses them for training.

We game developers can’t disengage our responsibilities with the old freedom of speech trick while we know how powerful learning tools games are. We can’t say games build skills and then say of realistic shooters that no, they’re just “for fun”. Imagine 40 million players playing Sim City trying out solutions to make our lives in cities better.

If shootings are so wrong and we want to fix that problem, everybody should get onboard and be ready to change. Game industry included.