Category: Audio&Games

Helvetica’s proposal about the IGF. I love it. I love the fact that this way we don’t dissect games through weird lenses. Like visual art and design: everything is design and art in games from input, code to audio to graphics. Those categories always felt way too blurry and stuck in an old way of looking at games as “content sandwiches”.

Games are a whole meal, they’re not sandwiches. They are something different. Choosing to separate games based on their length is more inclusive than anything other criteria. We need that and we should try those IGF category changes right away.

Me when I find some fascinating charts:

It’s a great one showing a few things:

– Social Media exploded. We all know when this happened and how we can’t stop.

– Audio (music and podcasts) is still huge. We forget about it because music is so everywhere for free.

– Games are last and barely grew in terms of consumption. Game production on the other hand, exploded.

I am still asking here and there what people play and it’s clear that 25-35 people don’t play games that much, social media is the main game. And if they play, they don’t want to mention it. Saying that you’re using [insert favorite social network] a lot is fine though. It’s interesting.

Slow gaming growth with supply exploding (500 new games a day on iOS, over a billion games available on Steam) means we’re going to hit some harder truth soon.

So when I see a vast excitement about VR, that is demanding a $2K investment upfront to properly enjoy it, cutting you off from the real world and even digital social interactions… Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, social media is making money thanks to games:

Interestingly it’s mostly in Asia. It’s confusing to see all those trends kind of cancelling each other out. The West is not into games like that so I wonder where revenue for WhatsApp and others will be coming from.

One last one that I find interesting:

The sharing experience doesn’t need to improve, it’s easy to share music. It’s just that people don’t want to do it. Why? I think because music is deeply personal. I might listen to the same song for an hour. I might listen to that very, very silly song by a very big artist. I might listen to something you can’t listen to for more than ten seconds. I might be listening to that artist because I don’t know her/him while everybody knows the lyrics to those songs. Music is personal. You share music with people in real life, live. In a notification center? It adds nothing to anyone.

I Miss Watching Other People Play Games.

Me too. I have so many games on Steam, playing them alone. Online gaming? Nah. Latency drives me nuts and the all voice chat thing no thanks.

I remember watching my cousin play that French RPG on my mom’s brand new IBMs. Taking notes on paper. I was amazed. I couldn’t understand shit but it was exciting, he was telling me what was going on. I remember learning the word “to bribe” (soudoyer en français) as you could do that with NPCs. I was like 7.

Then the 16bit era was entirely a bunch of dudes sitting on a bed/couch passing the controller experience. I didn’t have any console at home so I sucked at most games and watched my friends play. Cheering them up “man you were so close next time you’ll have it” following the story unfold together… During the boring parts I would grab a game magazine and talk about that next game page 43 with my dude while he was doing that boss again and again.

I hate bosses in games. Fuck ‘em.

Consoles were awesome at that time. Switch on, boom. These days it’s horrifying. I remember last year trying to play some MarvelVSCapcom on a PS3 with a friend… Controller issues, updates to discard, reboot. After 20 mn of shenanigans I was over playing.

Watching people play ultimately led me to making games because seeing all those smiles and passion during all those years made me want to do that: make people happy through interactive stuff.

I watched the new Unity5 audio system stuff, it’s pretty cool. They don’t dig so much in how performance is when you use a granular synth and sub mixes on top of an actual game with AI and input though. They are going full native avoiding the managed code part so it’s promising but even “offline” audio processing using native plugins is heavy on recent CPUs, I don’t think we’ll be able to use those effectively in-game soon at 60fps.

They are a bit if not a lot overlapping with well known and used third party solutions like FMOD and Wwise.

Miyamoto once said:

A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather solve multiple problems at once.

I like this quote because advanced audio features tend to solve one single particular problem while adding tons of complexity while simpler solutions can not only solve a sound problem but also a game design, UI feedback problem at the same time.

My focus as a designer is not to use fancy tools to the max. More features doesn’t mean it’s going to make things so much better. Two things make me think that:

– Most game audio that people remember is not related to anything technical, it’s usually from games where audio is played or stopped. No convolution reverb or complex variables to make something duck –4.5 dB in the background.

– As Iwata, a fantastic programmer said after working with Miyamoto: “it’s about content”. Even though technical mastery is useful ultimately it’s about what people will hear, the content.

And that works for me: I’m enjoying Else Heart.Break() made in Unity which has basic audio integration but the content is great: the music is awesome, the foley and little sounds are cool (I really like the fake TV show sound). Content first.

GunPoint has some clever FMOD layering going on but if the music was bad, it wouldn’t have mattered. And the layering (happening when you switch to hacking mode) can actually make it tiresome from time to time.

Kentucky Route Zero is the master of the past few years in terms of ambiance and mood, achieved by fantastic audio design with about zero fanciness or parameter-enabled function. It’s just a great sounding game.

With time I feel like people enjoy and remember two things from game audio: music they can hum, and sound/voice effects they can remember because they heard them a billion time (“KAY-O” and other “the bomb has been planted”). It seems like the loop/repeat paradigm is part of game audio’s DNA and we can’t escape it.

The only games that require massive audio systems and tech are the CoDs and Halos of this world: big battles, hundreds of sounds being played, the need for a robust system to control what’s going on is inevitable.

But for most games? Nah. Audio designers, focus on making great sounds. That’s what will make the game better.

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.

Reading about how this game came out to being made makes me realize how much the Japanese game industry was gliding and surfing at  high speeds in the last years of the 90s.

But despite taking an induction course in development and being deployed on a few prototyping projects as an artist, he struggled to summon an interest in flagship Namco franchises such as Tekken, Ace Combat and Ridge Racer. He found those games formulaic and uninspired, and floundered for two years before realizing that what was missing from Namco’s lineup was a flowerpot goat.

You get hired to create assets for successful franchises and you say fuck that for two years, I want to make my own game?

I mean, who has that kind of power because in studios I’ve been in you would have been hired for three-six months and bye Keita the Weirdo.

The Japanese creative freedom inside mega corporations (At that time in 99, Namco was HUGE) is to this day still unbelievable.

Keita pitched the game to his bosses and they were like “alright, here’s $800,000.” I mean we live in a world where developers are literally begging for budgets. Imagine being unhappy in a big structure and they allow you to be creative director of your own game:

Also, it never happens. On the soundtrack:

At the time, Shibuya-kei – a genre of pastiche-pop born in Tokyo that was typified by artists such as Cornelius and Pizzicato Five – was just about passing, but it left in its wake a post-ironic fusion of leftfield electronica, bossa nova and jazz that meshed perfectly with Katamari Damacy’s anything-goes humour. Unusually for a game, most of the music had vocal melodies.

“I thought it would be fun to sing along while playing the game, which is why we decided to use vocal music,” Takahashi says. “But we didn’t have much money, so we looked for artists who weren’t on a major label, more like B-grade musicians, to make the music.”

B-grade musicians!!?? Who shops for not the best ever?? As a composer I have seen so often studios aiming to get the best musicians they can for their soundtrack, not realizing that good music can be made by millions of people. No, really.

There’s this elitism going on in game culture, it comes probably from the needed coding excellence and game inherent competition aspect but still, when we produce we are like other productions we have to make it work and go for the “good enough” that actually might be much better than what you thought.

Especially with music and audio, the biggest bang for the buck in game development. One last quote:

As he speaks, he denounces the industry, both the majors and the burgeoning indie scene that is so reminiscent of the PS2’s golden era of weird Japanese games, while developments that you might expect him to embrace, such as Nintendo’s GamePad and Kinect, do not interest him at all. “Gaming hasn’t been around very long, so devices like that are unnecessary,” he says. “They’re nothing but a diversion, created for business reasons.

The problem to me is that it’s adding complexity more than anything else. It’s this fallacy that is all over the tech world: more tech will solve our tech problems! No. People are working super hard to get VR controllers right but as Jesse Schell wrote, people like VR experience with mouse –it sounds bad right?- because they know how to manipulate a mouse by now. It’s hard-coded in their brains. Gamepads with 16 buttons are not. Moving in front of a camera is not and new input schemes are being made.

I’ll talk about input in games in another post.

And when I say character I mean avatar. Usually developers fail to:

• Think ahead of time that this, avatar representation, matters.

And usually developers never miss to:

• Argue that it doesn’t fit the settings/theme/story of the game.

I think the first point is easy to solve.

Especially if your game aims at youngsters and kids, the right thing to do is allow customization. It really counts, it has a tremendous positive effect. You know about the black astronaut who became astronaut because she saw a black woman in Star Trek, right? Tons of stories like that. I remember vividly seeing a black Iron Man and thinking in my little 7 year old head “fuck yeah!” or something. If you are a game developer and believe games can change things, this is a way of doing it.

For the second point, it gets more complicated: no, I don’t think it is a good argument to dismiss skin tone customization in games in which players will spend dozens of hours looking at their avatars by implying that that heroic-fantasy themed game is trying to be realistic or historically accurate.

Guys, there is no “real” accuracy in fiction, never will be. We can do whatever we want. Lara Croft could be Asian and black. Shit is mysterious? So be it. It’s fiction, it’s imagination. Imagination is personal, triggers your own world. You need to leave parts open in your design so that players can enjoy “building” their own interest to characters and stories according to their lives. That’s how you make things inclusive.

Now, I’m a grown ass man and I don’t necessarily need things to match me all the time. I can enjoy a movie and get engaged following the story of a Mexican woman or I can play Just Cause 2 for hours without thinking one second about character customization. In this game it doesn’t matter, the spectacle is the environment.

I need my black people but it’s like water and being hydrated, I don’t need an IV 24/7 for that.

Anyway as often, it’s a case by case thing. How long are you going to look at your character? All the time? Allow customization. Is the game going around your character or is it more about the rest? About the rest and your team is too small to afford to spend time on this? Have no customization.

You can of course make the game exactly like you want, for you and your friends first but if people buy and enjoy your game BUT want/wish they could customize their characters and that you tell them to go away, that’s not very nice. And kind of plain stupid.