Jon Blow interview, widely shared all across the internet. Once again feeling so close to his vision and processes, I would have probably done what he did after Braid except buying an electric car: I would have made me a prefab green house instead. But, same idea.
What the article and comments highlight one more time is the complete lack of understanding of how games are made and what is important when building them. The Witness’ dev blog doesn’t spend a lot of time on the story but quite a lot describing the world editor, cube map filtering techniques, puzzle count and architecture. Full-on game design.
I think people freak out on him talking about the juvenile, silly and intellectually lazy state of the game culture because the hardcore market is shrinking pretty fast and that makes a lot of people cranky. Less and less people are enjoying the juvenile and silly on consoles. So many mobile games are silly and juvenile but people play a few minutes here and there, it’s less embarrassing. I much prefer when people say “yes, it’s juvenile so what” than people feeling offended by this statement, kind of in denial.
Today’s game culture is silly but it doesn’t mean that you can’t have fun with it, nobody said that. I bought Just Cause 2 and I’d like to get Saint Row the Third because I know I’ll have a good time but that doesn’t mean that I have to love it to death. I still haven’t play these games and don’t feel like I failed at life not playing them either. Chill.
I didn’t like everything in Braid, haven’t finished it but I liked a lot of stuff. Brilliant stuff. Synapse-creating stuff.
I don’t get that part of the game culture where you have to vouch for everything or otherwise you are pointed out as a complete pretentious douchebag. If you like and search for different games, trying to expand this game culture, you are a complete pretentious douchebag too.
If it doesn’t show how juvenile we are, I don’t know what does.
And everybody writing about games for a living, fucking please: stop focusing on story in games. Just stop. That’s not what it’s about.
I left Paris right when it was getting effing cold. Jumped into the warm L.A. spring and then for a couple of days into summer, in Desert Hot Springs.
Now back to some Los Angeles rain and clouds, it’s totally uncool, man. Winter to end of spring to summer to start of spring. In terms of timeline it’s pretty disturbing, actually.
Still coding, learning through Unity. It’s fascinating, frustrating as hell, it really feels like I can do everything but everything is so tedious. Welcome to coding, I guess. I’ll write about it soon, showing how much game tools are shaped to create universes and worlds, not games. I just can’t give up but holy molly shit, it’s quite hard for a designer.
I’m thankful to be able to follow the sun as I want to.
I finished Ice T’s book (the terrifyingly cold but also warm heart of an orphan, I dig) and attacked Fred Wesley’s biography (this dude wanted to play bebop and all he got was James Brown and inventing Funk). I can’t really create music here but I make sure to stay in it, reading, listening and playing guitar.
“Instagram is a free photo sharing program that allows users to take a photo, apply a digital filter to it, and then share it on a variety of social networking services, including Instagram’s own.”
I never understood the appeal. Never. I mean I use filters and share pictures on the internet too but…
“With Instagram selling for $1bil & Draw Something selling for $200mm, why would any innovator bother trying to solve real world problems.”
@tomkrieglstein
Instagram became successful because they were exclusive. In one week, the Android app and the FB announcement made it everything but exclusive. Exclusivity brings power users, stars, fans and envy from the rest. The problem today is that it’s a little like privacy, exclusivity is dead. If it’s successful it can’t afford to be exclusive. Power users and big fans hate not feeling special.
Instagram grew fast because people somehow constantly want new stuff to make things easier, like an app with built-in filters and social network. Users just don’t care enough about giving their pictures away to a company with no business plan at all.
I thought Dys4ia was great. I have to my surprise been thinking about it days and weeks after playing it.
I’m with Danc and Raph Koster on thinking about games in terms of systems, mechanics, feedback and loops more than anything else. The fact that I started to prototype, design and code my game mechanics makes it even more clearer to me that it’s all about that.
But the story-based Dys4ia touched me because of its original story, a story that I rarely encountered before –except by reading the fantastic story of Lynn Conway or Rebecca Heineman’s– it gave me something new to understand. The everyday struggle, the mindset behind humans complexity.
Anna’s game worked for me, pushed the message in a better way than reading would have.
My point is if you want to do a story-based game, it needs to be different if you want a game to work around something as static as narrative. Because really, narrative is not a game mechanic (I’m totally going to make this t-shirt).
Dys4ia is so personal. We need real things to come through our games, too. We have a pretty high level of polish today (thanks to better and better tools) but people don’t throw themselves in, they don’t try to express anything, they call their game “Pew Pew You’re Dead” or “Robots and Bologna”. We shouldn’t just play around nostalgia with a twist in 2012 because hey, “they’re just games”. They are more than that and it’s a 35 year old culture now.
There are mangas about wine (I mean, “The sale of fine wines in South Korea has increased significantly as a result of the popularity of the comic”) there are shows on TV about stuffing animals, dancing moms and thank god we have Octodad and some weird truck simulations but we are so bland compared to other mediums. Big lack of flavors and diversity. The other day I watched the 4D whale Futurama episode, it was brilliant. Just in one episode you had enough material, themes, funny shit to create multiple games on.
To me it’s not just about games being immature by really trying hard to be movies, it’s that even the immature part is not great or inspired.
Games are a thing onto themselves. They are human processes. They are loops. They illuminate complexity through hands-on mastery. They author artificial systems to generate culture. They can (and will!) advance forward to encompass a vast breadth of human interactions with the world.
We def should aim for that but those concepts are hard to grasp. Systems are annoying to most people, systems are the opposite of what a writer likes. Talking and writing about systems will never interest the public, it sadly, barely interests game developers. They’re busy with shaders :p
On the other hand, if you go the “narrative” way for your game, please reach for something wicked, interesting, personal, poignant and stop spreading generic fiction stories (I seriously can’t stand anymore any story about gods and mysterious civilizations and what not). We have enough of them.
Back in the 90s, at least in France they were pretty rare. My dad bought a huge one in Canada in ‘91 and I would totally use it a few years later because it’s great when it rains and in Paris, it rains often. I still have this hoodie and still use it to skateboard.
Hoodies are much better than any umbrella, especially on crowded sidewalks. I think a tight hoodie is super sexy on women.
But anyway, I was walking in the suburbs of Paris, in Champs sur marne (East Paris, a bit shady, projects around etc). Winter, rainy, 6 or 6:30pm. Dark. I’m wearing this hoodie and I remember thinking how neat the sound is inside the hood and how when rain is fat like it was, water was going through the hood like it was a piece of paper. I was a little lost and I needed the time.
I approached this woman who is trying to enter her car. Nobody around but me and her. I already feel tension as I’m getting closer. She tries to speed up. I try to get there before she jumps in and can’t hear me. I use my best white voice possible, avoiding the scary “HEY!” and ask her “excuse me madame, what time is it, please?” and she freaks the shit out of her before I end my sentence.
She’s scared, she’s a middle aged white woman who doesn’t know what time it is, she gradually sees a creepy black dude under a hood. She’s not surprised and going on with her life, she’s fucking scared. Frozen until I leave.
That day, I sadly understood that wearing a hoodie and being a black dude was socially incorrect, unstable. Annoying because I loved me some hoodie. Especially with no hair. It feels so good. But as it’s also used by thugs to hide, I’m screwed. Can’t wear them. I realized later that whatever I wear, I’ll be suspicious. A suit will make me suspicious. A hoodie too. But a suit is better.
This year, I bought my first two hoodies ever. Everybody is wearing some so I figured fuck it, I’m doing it too. I’m a musician/developer, not a criminal.
And then Trayvon.
Now I look at them and I kind of want to cry. Anger. Desperation.
The only constant between me scaring this woman with a hoodie 15 years ago and Trayvon Martin is the stigmatized young black man who’s simply wearing something convenient. Yes, at the end appearances are deceptive.
Meanwhile the shooter is free, and defended to death . Oh god, the anger.
Seven artists over a few years, inspired by video games as a culture phenomenon. The overused and terrible term that is “video games” doesn’t carry a lot of sense today but during the 80s it meant the future. The dirty, rasterized future with dark video arcade, cigarettes, beers and people shouting. It was street. No parents playing Wii Sports or Kinectimals.
Black music has always been really good at capturing what’s going on and arcade cabinets hit the 80s hard. I counted a dozen R&B funk songs with “video games aesthetics” from 1980 to 1985.
Sampled by Daft.
That’s a lot, there isn’t a single music genre hitting on the computer entertainment like that.
Beyond the obvious will to cash in on a new trend, the themes brought by the arcade culture -obsession, high score, science fiction, humor- seem to have sparkled a lot of ideas within the US black music community and I can understand why: obsession? love and drugs (it’s the 80s, crack startin’), high score? Black people struggling and aiming for better lives (also, NBA spreadin’), science-fiction? Yeah, the 80s were like a bad science-fiction movie for all of them. Humor? That’s how black people deal with things since forever.
Black culture and video game culture were totally understanding each other. That’s why there’s about 2% of black people in the game industry today. /trollface
Street Beat album. The Deele is a funk band from Ohio which will give Kenneth Babyface Edmonds something to do after playing with Bootsy Collins and before becoming a hugely successful producer during the 90s. It’s totally my jam. F.U.N.K.
“Don’t hold back, don’t give me no slack, how are you gonna party with Donkey Kong on your back?”
The Chilly Kids – At the Ice Arcade, 1983
“Hey everybody! You’ve got it where? At the Ice Arcade!” Very early hip-hop band on Sugar Hill Records. They only released this single, which talks about not caring about anything but video games and rocking the Ice Arcade, scoring on all these cabinets. The music is probably composed by the Sugar Hill in-house band. Silly, very 80s.
“Don’t push us cuz we’re close to the edge, we’re trying not to loose our head!” *at the Ice Arcade*
The Gap Band – Video Junkie, 1985
From the Gap Band VI album. It starts like a Japanese classic music rip-off video game music straight from both the Genesis and the Super NES sound chips. Huge synth bass, atmospheric and anxious feeling (playing 80s games, you bet), hypnotic beat that’s the Gap Band in action right here.
“Every time I call her on the phone, that Space Invaders got my girl and gone.”
The end of the song is a nice jam. Bluesy guitar solo, distorted trumpet and sampling experiments, it feels like The Gap Band can just link the oldest form of US black music with the most recent in a song with cultural allusions to video games. In 1985. I love them.
George Clinton – Computer Games, 1982
“Hello! I am the computer game Dracula! I’d like to suck necks”. Pure and perfect P-funk jam with big slap bass, infectious fuzz guitar lick and blips and blobs. Also, Junie Morrison’s and Bernie Worrell’s keyboards controlled insanity.
Ozone – Video King, 1983
“People wonder where I get my speed, I tell ’em I, get another breakfast on the Centipede.”
From the Glasses album. Ozone is an early 80s Motown funk band with a heavy jazz tone (Jazzfunk, that’s it). This is their last album ever and they thought that would be cool to talk about being the Video King. Biggest name-dropping ever: Batman, Space Invaders, Centipede, Astro Blaster, Tron, Donkey Kong, Missile Combat, Frogger, Defender, Asteroids, ???, Zaxxon, Battlezone. And always this mix of synthetic sounds and live instruments. Also, humor.
Dazz Band – Joystick, 1983
From the album Joystick. You can’t represent Funk without a band from Ohio and here’s another one! Dazz Band and its heavy melodic bass lines. The lyrics mixing video game culture and sex are rather smart, considering what we sometimes hear these days:
I can prove that love
Is just live a video game
Just take control of the stick
Of the stick, of the stick
I’ll let you play your game
I know what you’re looking for
And all I want to do is score, yeah
I just want you to be mine
Just take control I’ll let you play me all the time
Take control of the stick
Of the stick, of the stick
Of the stick, of the joystick, baby
The creepy bridge with robotic voice makes me think about a final boss. Would the one you want to be with, be The Final Boss? I’ll let you answer that.
Klymaxx – Video Kid, 1984
“Hello baby, can I play games with youuu?”
From the Meeting in the Ladies Room album. All girl band playing some hard and tight funk. I saw them live a few years ago, they are bad and have irresistible grooves. I love this innocent and easy one. What not to love about a girl singing straight “I’m in love with the video kid”. My nerdy heart from the glory days of the Arcade feels it.
It’s also funny to realize that some of the synthesizers used in all these songs (totally unheard new sounds at that time like the Prophet 5, Oberheim OB-8, Moog or Jupiter8) use the same CPU as our beloved arcade machines, C64, Game Boy or Neo-Geo: the mighty Z80.
The relationship between funk and games goes further. Listen to this 1985 Stevie Wonder’s song and tell me you don’t hear some of the future Genesis tunes in every way. Or listen to Yuzo Koshiro loving him some Soul II Soul. Later on, Michael Jackson himself will get involved with Sonic and Space Channel 5. Funk is fun, fun is a heavy part of games if not the core and so Japanese composers naturally, rationally used its power from illegal James Brown samples in 90s arcade games (I can’t remember which ones, sorry) to Jet Set Radio soundtrack.
Going back to this mix, the 80s video game aesthetic -sharp, synthetic, weird sounds, silliness, anxiety feelings- is incorporated into the music, it’s not just some lyrics saying “I play videogames on the couch” as we have today.
Almost like a love declaration to the “video game” medium or at least acknowledgement of its legacy, early on.
As the medium is still fighting to be truly recognized as a cultural force in 2012, I think it’s cool to witness that it hasn’t always been the case.
I never thought I would hear about Mass Effect 3 that much.
The interesting point is that after reading different point of view, fans are right. Game developers have a long history of promises they can’t keep and the “sixteen different ending” was one for Mass Effect.
Mass Effect is a hardcore game, the business model is based on fans buying on pre-orders or day one. Fans immediately shove 60 bucks or more to satisfy their addiction to stunning spaceships, war and alien sex.
People miss the point comparing a game to TV shows -again-, TV shows producers don’t talk about what’s going to happen or what you should expect, they’re very vague. TV shows are financed by ads, indirectly from people watching, not directly like games are. Movies? It’s not comparable, they use Hollywood accounting and other obscure financing methods. Forget about them. I mean John Carter is a massive flop and Disney is like “it’s OK”, how the hell is this happening? We can’t afford that in the computer game industry.
Arguments for the artist and his masterpiece are biased. Mass Effect 3 and Bioware are not that, they’re the big blockbuster. They aim to please people and listen to fans feedback, nothing auteur-like, really. I guess they didn’t have enough money to polish more. They had to ship the game and make money too.
I don’t buy the argument that the artist is free to do whatever he wants and that you need to bow to his vision. I mean of course, but then there’s no discussion, ever. Games are art, fine but it’s a totally different beast and the discussion between creators and players is unique to this medium. Players interact, they don’t just shut up and watch. The personal investment is far bigger. It creates a very different feeling about what’s happening on screen, or not. Even more when these fans know they are the guys financially supporting their favorite game developer.
Which is the reason why Bioware is probably going back to work on all that.
So the rules would be: Don’t promise shit. Deliver real stuff. Build a community with fans, don’t encourage them to think their wet dreams will come true.
“Mr. Sarkozy may think it is smart politics to pander to racism and xenophobia. He has done it before. And, sadly, his harsh new tone has given him a quick boost in the polls.”
The quick boost means that French people agree and are kind of pretty racist in general. That’s much more scarier. Sarkozy knows he can use this angle. Just visit France and listen to discussions outside Paris. It’s pretty clear.
“Times are tough in France, but Mr. Sarkozy could have run a more elevated campaign. He has domestic achievements (pension reform) and international achievements (Libya). His main opponent, Mr. Hollande, has vague ideas and unrealistic economic proposals.”
But French don’t care about achievements. They never really do. It’s like normal, somehow. Sarkozy also knows he can’t really play on that because French culture is not about celebrating victories and the dude is on everybody’s nerves so all he can have is play on xenophobia and racism, knowing that there’s demand for that. Mr Hollande, I don’t even fucking know what he’s doing here. A snail is more fascinating than he is.
It’s terrifying. Race is everywhere. Race is everywhere. It jumps in my face, constantly. Freezes me. I try to punch it in the face, throwing angry bears and frustrated black mambas at it but it doesn’t work. I’m still frozen, and angry.
They talk over and over about same sex marriage? I go crazy and want to talk about weed and the ridiculous amount of black men in prison for this shit since decades. Where are all the white liberals on that? They all smoke weed, eat pot cookies and can’t shut the fuck up about gay marriage. Less than 4% of the US population is gay. 12% is black.
The ESA releases a paper on 2011 US computer game market demographics and guess what, they don’t say anything about race because they know that it’s going to be like 70% white, 10% Asian and all the darker skins in the rest. They always release that kind of information. They are very reluctant to do so for the computer industry. But the worst is Jesse Schell’s quote: “There are games now for pretty much every age, every demographic.” No, Jesse (love him, watch this). And you know exactly why, it’s because there are no freaking diversity whatsoever in the game industry. Seriously, how the fuck can we have games for every demographic when the vast majority of them are made by a single one demographic? It’s the elephant in the room and everybody is ignoring it.
Google “Skyrim black people” and enjoy Humanity with the first four links. Nothing fucking changes.
I’m now pretty convinced that shows like Mad Men, Downton Abbey or the other thing with dragons and raw sex are here to satisfy white people with fantasy worlds without black people, now that black people are everywhere (same goes with sexism, women gaining access to everything and shows broadcasting the idea that women should stay in the kitchen, avoiding trouble).
I’m sometimes pretty convinced that people can’t stop joining new “private clubs” on the internet like Path or more obscure shit just to feel this little edge over others, like all these retarded black people on Twitter. Same cities/suburbs mechanics that we witness in real life.
The Race In Western Societies In The Early Twenty First Century system is a system that I can’t escape. I’m in the non-weeee! category. I’m also part of this demographic called “black dudes”, this demographic that invents the hip and cool since the USA are born. The world copies black men from the West, they can’t stop: music, vocabulary, bad English, pants, groove, bling, style. Everything. Meanwhile black people struggle to integrate a white-dominated world and especially black men are pointed at for doing bad things. Yes Chris Brown is fucking terrible, so are all the non black people beating their girlfriend or wife in silence. Everyone prefers to focus on and on an angry and violent black man rather than on the perverted and abusive white religious uncle.
What really freezes my brain to absolute zero I think, is the fact that all the smart black people I know are making a career or setting a big milestone in their lives around race issues. Would it be through a book, music or a blog or stand-up comedy, smart black people are talking about it. It’s in our faces all the time how could we even not think and build something on it? It’s also cathartic.
Should I too and make a “career” or a name at showing how the game industry is absolutely not diverse and never got diverse in the ten years I have been involved with it? I don’t really want to do that. I’d rather move on.
I need to. I’ll try not to write about race in the next months and will try to solve it through other outputs than text.
South L.A. For the first time, I saw black people in Los Angeles. Not just here and there, entire neighborhoods. People nod, smile, wave at us. Everywhere. Some neighborhoods supposedly “bad” aren’t bad at all. They might have been. Segregation is so strong. I felt bad sometimes, like I’m in some sort of safari with 25 white people despite the fact that I wanted to hang out for a while with every black person seen there. Always confronted to the same thing: I’m in the middle, on the edge crushed and quartered by how society works today.
Deep and profound experience. I was more tired from emotions than from riding 50 km.
