Category: Audio&Games

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.

Austin explains why he wishes Arkham Knight’s Gotham was more populated and analyzes the relationship between superheroes and cities.

Giantbomb is running this article that is perfect to explore the big issue with writing about games.

I know what Austin wants. I love it too, wandering in a virtual place that has a life is sweet. For some. For others, it’s not that interesting and when you make a game you have to compromise really quick. Why? Because really quickly when you have your prototype and your systems running, your characters on screen, assets, you realized that having a “real” city running in the background might be too much if not possible at all.

That’s really the core here. Writers so often think that design stuff is fluid in the build process, it is not. High level design (“make the city alive”) is attached to real things like machine performance, how good your code is, how many people work on this, and how much is already happening. Design is very fragmented at this point, fragile, dependent. And most people have no idea most of the time. Batman Arkham Night is a thick sandwich, there’s a lot going on. Making an open world game gorgeous with almost no loading is some serious achievement. It’s a performance and game writers often just don’t see it this way they think we can just put more stuff in front of the camera, that we just need time. Wrong.

Then, we always have this kind of dumb argument: “but game developer X did it before!” Please, never use that argument that’s the worst. It’s like saying “you can’t run the 100m under 10s? It’s been done before so often!!”. It is a dumb argument.

It takes a lot to make a city feel like it’s alive in a computer game. Taking GTA V as an example of how to do it is oblivious: everyone knows Rockstar is the only company that can/financially afford to do that. Stop being coy! GTA V is five years of development, half a decade with according to Wikipedia over 360 people. Austin goes on with The Witcher 3 doing the city well: four years of development with 230 people in Poland.

Rocksteady is 160 people in the UK. They had four years too but probably way more pressure (it’s the godamn Batman), even just financially (London is far more expensive than Warsaw).

I know, that producer shit is not fun. But when I see people complain –and I’m on Austin’s side, I like wandering in digital cities that feel alive- I’m always annoyed that people don’t realize that it’s not JUST design decisions. It’s not just TOP DOWN, there’s a lot of BOTTOM UP in game development and when an engineer is telling you “we can have an open world but forget about making it alive without HUGE issues” you don’t tell him “but I really want  that” you find ways to mitigate that aspect. Make the player drive that Batmobile a lot for example.

Welcome to game development where you can do anything while you can’t at all.

This week, I’ll be discussing abuse and toxic behaviour in the CS:GO community. Before we get to it, let me reiterate that I am madly in love with Counter-Strike. It’s simply one of the best team games out there. This piece, however, is meant to highlight one important issue that I think we can overcome.

RPS is running that article by Emily Richardson on abuse in CS. I have no idea why people freak out over freedom of speech being taken away or how anonymity allows abuse because there’s no accountability. I’m like what the fuck is wrong with you people?

Oh I know the problem, I have pretty much never played that game outside LANs because of all the racial slurs online. But now I’m a grown up and I still like this game very much. I play with bots and can’t wait for that next LAN that will happen someday.

“The problem stems from the lack of consequence in these games for what would be arrestable real world conduct.”

No, the problem comes down to the fact that we’re talking about teenagers. Maybe early twenties, you know that time when you don’t know shit and you think you’re smart and sleek but you’re still testing boundaries. It’s an age issue to me, by far. When I read this:

No one likes dying, and dying for something that was the responsibility of another player gets to people generally

It gets to you when you’re young and have no patience. When you’ve been married, pay taxes, saw real death hit real friends and that you just want to have a good time strategizing on a Counter Strike map with people who share the same kind of life, none of that gets to you unless you have other issues that are not the game’s problem. Isn’t it obvious?

I don’t care who you are, I just know that if you’re sixteen to almost thirty I mostly don’t want to play with you. It’s fine, you don’t want no grumpy old gamer, I don’t want none of your ignorance and lack of self-control.

Now a lot of games are still played by young people and if games like LoL or DOTA2 have everlasting abuse issues, it’s because early 20s+stardom+insane cash prizes leads to people losing their shit online and getting nasty.

So Two Things To Save CS:GO and multiplayer games:

– There’s a Steam ID and FB connection? Let me filter by age and report age cheaters.

– Let’s log off. Let’s have WAY more LANs. That’s ultimately far better (hearing an opponent shout “fuuuck” across the room is always so satisfying) and if you want to fistfight on the parking lot, there’s that too.

The weird thing about Satoru Iwata is how much he’s praised and how much we have been following none of his advices, as an industry. Almost a decade ago, this is what Satoru was talking about:

We frequently compare ourselves to the motion picture business. We are fascinated with the movies. Hollywood is like an older brother who’s already succeeded; we race to measure our success against his.

Our method of content creation is modeled on the studio system. We measure the popularity of our virtual stars against Hollywood’s real ones. Over the years, we have frequently created games based on the movies’ biggest names — and we now take pride when a movie occasionally develops a script based on one of ours. Angelina Jolie starred in two "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" movies, which were based on the video game adventurer.

But in terms of reaching a mass audience, we are not quite ready for our close-up. Although video game sales and movie box-office receipts are similar in the U.S., movie sales, rentals and pay-per-view keep them far ahead of us.

We may even be headed in the wrong direction. A recent survey of U.S. high school students shows a trend: Young people who used to say they played games weekly now report they play only monthly. Sales have been declining for several months.

When we gather for the Electronic Entertainment Expo at the L.A. Convention Center this week, we may want to blame outside factors. But I fear we are doing much of the damage to ourselves. Most of us who create, publish, sell and consume video games see ourselves more as a tribe than representatives of society as a whole. We adopt our own beliefs and behaviors, and we often disregard those who don’t conform — not a prescription for market health.

Throughout recorded history, playing games has been a natural form of entertainment, practiced by all ages, all cultures and both genders. Our challenge is to bring more people to our modern version. In this sense, Hollywood can be a role model. The film industry welcomes all consumers, creating content with a wide appeal.

On the other hand, there are two significant ways in which we perhaps would be wise not to emulate the movies. First, video games have decisively adopted the high-risk business model of the blockbuster. For some new game machines, development budgets will reach $20 million, perhaps even $30 million — plus marketing costs. Even if retail prices rise, it will be increasingly difficult to recover costs if the audience is not growing.

Second, we would do well to consider what Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, describes as "the innovator’s dilemma." We are an industry that has spent many years "improving" our product along a single performance vector — in our case, graphical realism. But we are reaching a point of diminishing returns. Like Hollywood, which in the past has focused too heavily on special effects, we need to find other ways to improve.

Through the years, motion pictures have benefited from several significant technical advances. They added sound, then color … and air conditioning inside theaters. Only one of these — color — had to do with what was actually seen on screen. The other two enhanced the nature of how movies were enjoyed by stimulating other senses.

It’s funny how game developers keep getting confused about the fact that you can be inspired by something (Hollywood mass appeal) and simultaneously reject part of that something (studio business model). The bits on how we game developers are a tribe rather than representatives of society as a whole rings true today. Where are the elderly games, you know they’re going to be a majority in all countries pretty soon right? I’ve never seen any game developer besides myself on my blog wonder about computer games for elderly. The tribe.

We haven’t really moved on and that’s worrying.

Thank you for the inspiration. If you don’t know why Mr Iwata was so important here’s why from the LA Times:

Shortly before Iwata became Nintendo president in 2002, the company launched what became one of its bigger flops: the GameCube console, a successor to the Nintendo 64. The GameCube failed to outsell Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox, compelling Nintendo to rethink its direction.

Enter the Wii.

The Wii was instrumental in ushering in the modern era of casual gaming, as it was heavily based on motion controls and family-centric entertainment. The system, as well as Iwata’s corporate mandate, was drastically different from those of Nintendo’s competitors in the home video game console business.

Rather than focusing on technological achievements or becoming an all-in-one home media center, the Wii broadened the audience by enabling just about anyone to easily pick up and play a game. Games such as "Wii Sports," which lets people play virtual tennis with the wave of an arm, captivated the public.

In an opinion piece Iwata wrote for The Times in 2006, he argued that the game industry was becoming too closed-off to new consumers. He wrote that the industry should worry less about graphical enhancements and high-tech wizardry and instead look for ways to enhance “the emotional ways people interact with our games.”

Such a big influence. He’s the guys who made my parents play games on their TV, that’s the biggest feature ever. Even though I wish it had gone further, the Wii changed everything.

Badass programmer, project manager and Big Boss. I can’t help but think that this extremely high stress made him skip a good decade of life. RIP.

If there’s a part that always disappear in the computer game history, it’s the European scene. Americans don’t know anything about it, Japan the same. However a couple gems from the old continent like the famous Another World or Flashback changed the game and influenced tons of renowned game designers.

People have forgotten things like Ocean Software fighting Imagine Software which spawned Psygnosis, a legendary studio that created WipeOut and published Lemmings, made by DMA Design aka, Rockstar North aka the OG GTA developers. Digital Illusions making pinball games and ending up being DICE Sweden, creating Mirror’s Edge. Frederic Raynal and Alone in the Dark, Capcom says thank you very much. Lankhor capable of making a blazing fast Vroom and a slow paced non-linear adventure game like Maupiti Island at the same time, as Coktel Vision was capable of making an adventure game like Bargon Attack and ESS (European Space Simulator).

From 1985 to 1995 Europe produced tons of games, some being groundbreaking like Kick-Off by Anco Software, a soccer game where the ball wasn’t glued to players or Captain Blood by ERE Informatique (future Cryo), first person adventure game where you would try to communicate with aliens through icons or Starglider, a Starfox-like shooter in 3D seven years before Nintendo’s IP (Starglider, developed by Argonaut which is the company that will create the Super FX chip powering Starfox). In that period of time we went from 8 to 16bit. At that time optimism was high. Computer games were a couple years old and people thought it was for kids. In that decade developers were dreaming of maturity, already. Barbarian was inspired by Frank Frazetta’s work, not He-Man. I guess we always had that complex that play != kids. We have a lot of manchildren now I’m not sure we wanted that but anyway.

Germany is completely absent, which is weird for such a big force and big country in Europe. Well during the 90s Germany didn’t exist, culturally. We were not talking about German board games –huge there- or their love for simulations like the Settlers. All I could hear was how they were censoring blood in beat’em all and making Doom illegal. I wish I had had the internet and not have to listen to the media at that time.

Sports and cars games were immensely popular in that decade. But only in Europe we got to get games that were just plain weird and often bad. Some were too connected to one’s culture like most French games of that time. Some were just honest copies of something better (like Zool vs Sonic). But they had character when today’s games are mostly good, but all feel the same.

Bad games, wrong audience, US/Japan killing it, total lack of funding compared to US/Japan, massive hardware shift (N64/DC/PS1): the European gamedev scene collapse had to happen. Nonetheless, learn about it. The best ideas and the best code has been produced in this weird melting pot of different countries and cultures that is Europe.

If there’s something weird about games is that we never include people making them. We talk about budget, marketing, art and most of the time what it takes to have a pretty game. We talk about platforms but we forget people. Hundreds of dedicated humans are working hard for you to blow stuff up in open worlds but we only will talk about the publisher or console maker.

I believe people are center. Which is why I’m not satisfied with the state of the industry being either you work in a big studio making a nice living or on the other end you work on your game and you are not doing well at all. In the middle are a few lucky bastards. They shouldn’t be lucky bastards and there should be more of them. We’re hitting $100B of revenue a year soon, worldwide. The pie is big enough.

Another aspect that the news and game journalists narrative doesn’t cover: we’re all the same, we go back and forth between small companies and big ones. We freelance, we consult, we chat with our friends launching  small ventures or in big studios etc. Seasoned game developers like me have been through all company sizes, we work on games and it doesn’t really matter if it’s AAA AA indie mobile etc.  All that marketing talk doesn’t matter once you’re in the middle of making games. Then you think systems and teamwork and deadlines.

But game people are starting to own the discourse: in the past days and weeks, I saw a wave of “real talk” around game development and I think it is a good sign: The very last one on time spent on optimization. People talking about how Shenmue was overrated openly and how the kickstarter for the number III is a sad trend. Andreas Papathanasis telling the truth about graphic prowess, this article on the cultural fit shenanigans to Game Oven closing shop as well as ToT giving up on making games and an article on where and why Sunset failed.

Failures in games –art games to classic AAA- are people’s failure and organization failures that we could sum up this way: small teams are overworked and can’t do everything, big teams are so specialized that focus is lost.

Sunset would have needed some technical-design adjustments as much as the last Batman should have been tested more thoroughly. And both don’t really have excuses: Tale of Tales, veterans, knew that. There’s no way Rocksteady didn’t know about terrible framerate issues and how PC gamers would lose their shit.

If we respect players by giving them at least the minimum of what they want –a smooth running game-, they will respect us by buying our stuff. That’s how it works for everything else. And that’s how you achieve sustainability too. Hype or not, your mission is to deliver. And delivery means no bullshit.