Category: Audio&Games

A quote about a professional game reviewer and writer’s feeling about games these days:

The time passes pleasantly, maybe even thrillingly at times, but it means nothing, there’s no sense of achievement other than Achievements. Maybe it’s more compulsive masturbation than Disneyland (or maybe Disneyland is masturbation? Discuss) – make the itch go away, risk a faint sense of guilt and self-disgust afterwards, then do it again anyway.

I’m perfectly happy for these things to exist, and even to spend some time with them myself, but I worry a) that this model is taking over, that the hollowness of Farmville is creeping into games on an intrinsic level and b) that I’m too lazy to resist playing them. I don’t want to miss out, and once I start playing I struggle to stop until most of those icons go away, because some reptile voice at the back of my skull tells me that cleaning up the map is essential to my wellbeing. That’s not what I want for myself.

Me neither and that’s why I block that reptile voice and don’t even start playing those games. As a commenter rightly says:

Unfortunately (?), that means I’m drifting away from mainstream gaming (and mainstream gaming culture) more and more with every passing month. I’m starting to look at itch.io with more interest than I look at Steam. Not that I don’t find some great gaming experiences anymore, among more “traditional” games. Transistor and The Talos Principle are wonderful, and Dreamfall Chapters is a thing. (just 3 games of 2014, off the top of my head) But they’re handpicked and unique games in a sea that mostly looks… uninteresting and unappealing, when not downright manipulative (Skinner Boxes, achievements, bars to fill, collectibles to find) and dedicated to the pursuit of escapism beyond repair. (Hollow is a good word for it)

Gaming is the only environment in which “addictive” is used as a positive term.

I’ve only played and finished KRZ last year and it was a really great experience.

We need so much more distinct look and feel to existent game designs and we need more risks taken but the vibe right now between political correctness, me-too behavior and development costs is not saying “it’s happening” at a large scale, sadly.

Last year has probably been the most challenging ever for most people working and living in the game development world. I mean hell, it’s been awful and I’m trying to see what’s the deal. Let’s go back.

Games on computers have been a boy’s club for the first three decades of their existence (70s 80s and 90s). Boys, not adults.

Then 2000 happened. For the first time of the existence of games and consoles it was hype, cool to be in your mid twenties and play games like GTA after work.

Then things got faster. By 2004 games were really entering mainstream with Popcap killing it in the PC downloadable business with their puzzle games for moms. WoW reaching out like crazy. The Nintendo DS. The Wii at the corner of 06-07.

In 2004 ten years ago I felt that game culture was maturing and finally showing to the world its tremendous power. But a major crowd –commercially speaking- was still a boy’s club.

Boy’s club means sexism in some form. It’s not tied to games, it’s everywhere like that. White boy’s club adds racism.

And we in the industry we fed them with everything they wanted, guns titties no diversity you name it. Those guys have enormous pockets and buy tons of games game developers have been making billions thanks to that crowd.

I thought that game design would change, cater to more different people but production costs rising exponentially meant that we had to make money instead of making the medium progress, smarter.

Don’t get me wrong for the past ten years the medium progressed and tons of interesting and different games that I couldn’t have thought being possible have been made but game culture still relies on the Original Gangsta game culture: the boy’s club. The videogame boy’s club, hardcore games and questionable aesthetics.

Like a fan of a band always prefers their first album, a lot of people in games players or developers value that OG side, we grew up with this! But that’s where I didn’t stick with it. It’s the past to me. I want something else badly.

Nintendo tried to avoid that crowd after the Wii, thinking that the market was big enough. They at first presented the Wii U as just an evolution of the Wii but sales made them quickly go back to cater to the boy’s club: big guns, pads with 4562467 buttons etc. Those guys have money. However Nintendo knows they nail the kid department so the boy’s club is just additional revenue. The blue ocean is a mirage, it’s more like millions of swimming pools and the boy’s club one is still the biggest and most reliable revenue-wise. Publishers have issues though.

I look at Watch Dogs by Ubisoft, 28 weeks to pull 3.4M units sold. That is bad. In 2010 they would reach that amount in 7 weeks. And it’s their only game in the top 20. By comparison Pokemon for 3DS, 3 weeks in the charts 5M units sold. That’s what all AAA publishers want and basically outside two publishers and two games (GTA and CoD), no one is making that kind of money with the boy’s club anymore. There are too many games out there and gamedev costs are insane in the brain. 20 gigs first day patches are the result of extremely complex game development scenarios.

From the programmer to the player everybody is like “fuck this”. We truly reached a point.

I think it’s going to give tons of people some room to redefine game culture and game business for real this time. I hope.

Following my rocky year, I started to launch Twitch from time to time to watch games without commentaries.

Twitch is rather big. 35+ million viewers a month, fourth largest source of Internet traffic during peak times in the United States. Not rare to see people have over 30,000 people at once watching them play a game. Those players have endorsements, sponsors, sales, subscriptions. They sell in-game skins, give them away, accept donations and it’s not just about a dollar or two you can see people getting a couple hundred pretty often. Yes, to play a game in a bedroom.

It’s fascinating.

So at first I was just watching new games being played but then I switched to watching a game I know quite well. Very addicting. It’s my TV in the background. I’d rather not know how many hours in six months but uh… I’m only watching a dude -playing left handed- and you start seeing his style, his progress. You become the coach a little bit. I don’t interact but sometimes I kind of want to give him a buck for entertaining me.

What? Yeah. No wonder Amazon bought Twitch for a fortune.

With linear games, I don’t know if it will last it gets boring pretty fast. With competitive games however it never ends. The problem is fragmentation: very few people can understand and appreciate five different games one or two already probably means that you have spent hundreds, thousands of hours in them. On TV an average viewer can decipher plenty of ball-based games and enjoy a bit any of them. With computer games it’s not the case at all. Any novice is disturbed and thrown off by one game’s complexity. For enthusiasts though Twitch becomes the only place to go to, for years to come.

Of course while I’m writing about that Valve launches Steam Broadcast.

A couple future games that look worth the time to dive in and explore.

Volo Airsport by Ramjet Anvil

Just a simulation of that thing where you fly in a wingsuit. To me that’s one of the great thing about computer games, simulating things you can do in real life but are out of reach for various reasons (cost, dangerousness). I can see myself flying from time to time listening to some music. Playing with physics, trying to hack those rules (can I fly closer to the ground?) is a thing I really like.

Miegakure by Marc ten Bosh

A 4D puzzle game made by one dude. I applause his brain, capable of dealing with insane problems for years just so that our brains go “ha ha!” for a couple hours. 4D is a scary concept but I can’t stop wanting to master that extra dimension. For fun.

The Witness by Jonathan Blow

A first person puzzle game. Last time I checked, I was kind of put off by the running and footsteps sounds but I’m really intrigued by the depth. Jon Blow can’t just ship a real time Myst copy, I don’t think it stops there and I want to see the big picture.

Elite: Dangerous by Frontier

Ultimate Space simulation game. I now have tried the Oculus DK2 and with this game I mean, it’s going to be a before/after moment in games. The potential to kill any social life has never been this big. I just wish the spaceship design would allow me to pilot this or that.

No man’s sky in the same category seems so amazing I’m going to wait a little bit before getting excited. Rebel Galaxy from the Torchlight dudes with its sea-like ship gameplay looks really fun and White Space from Curve Studios looks promising but far from finished.

Future Unfolding by Spaces of Play

Intriguing, that 2D Journey like game. Finally some fresh aesthetic and great push on doing something unique.

The analogy with food and cooking always works well: making a game looks like making food, everything is possible, there are some loose rules and an infinity of flavors possible. Like food it’s about chemistry. Like a good salad dressing, it all depends on ingredients and how to mix them. Cooking and making great food is about all that.

The game industry has always been obsessed with hardware. If cooking was treated the way we make games, it would be like:

Or

It would be terrible and not make a lot of sense. And yet, this is exactly how the game industry reacts all the time.

And yet, the market is showing how generic computers –yes, Windows PCs- are all you need, ask Notch, ask Valve and Steam, ask gazillions of developers who ship their games on everything they can. Generic tools as long as they do a correct job are enough to make absolutely divine things or consume those divine things. Gordon Ramsay’s food is still probably amazing in a paper plate.

Chefs don’t obsess over how many burners they have, what brand or how they wouldn’t use that brand. They just cook.

The game industry hardware obsession is connected to machismo, who’s having the biggest one, which in turns correlates the super lack of diversity (dudes dudes dudes). It’s less and less the case but damn, it’s been for so long it’s still a backbone of game culture.

Somehow it’s worse now because young dudes have no idea of what they’re talking about when comparing and “fighting” over which machine is the most powerful, when those machines never have been more equal or barely different. More pointless than ever.

There’s this inextricable conservatism in game culture that really brings us down.

Platforms, tools are just  game utensils. Stop obsessing about them, it’s mostly irrelevant today.

One of the most amazing aspect of Minecraft to me is to have become so big with a first-person view.

Early 2000s speaking of a first-person view game without a focus on shooting people was really crazy talk.

Game developers underestimated people’s ability to move inside a 3D space for some reason because if you think about it, we do that all the time.

Game developers forgot something bigger: first-person view is the perfect camera that people own. This way, movies, clips, funny stuff are made and create the meta culture needed to forge an IP into timelessness. It is clear to me that games are not about narrative but narrative is the most powerful culture engine, still.

Third person “movies” make it look like you’re playing with dolls or Lego characters. There always will be something anchored in childhood with third-person view.

Diversity in games. How to think about how a game can reach a diverse crowd? By having characters that represent you. I would most of the time take Adam and my white friend would take Axel and that just made fucking sense and felt good.

“Why is it important to have different characters?” likes to wonder the industry today. It’s because it is important. We’re telling you, you don’t need to and shouldn’t question us for telling you. Do the work.

90s Japanese developers didn’t ask, they just did. It made sense to have a diverse representation when making and marketing a game for the West. Note how it wasn’t a feature to have a black guy and a woman in the cast, it was just normal iteration from anonymous dudebros in previous beat ‘em all. Realism and broadening audience worked in pair at that time. Shit made sense.

Music is the most powerful medium for thought, mood and movement control.

Heard that somewhere on the internet, totally true.

Which is why music and sfxs are important in games because they are ART. They emotionally connect you way more than pixels ever will, it’s deep son. There isn’t a game forum out there without a “favorite music?” thread going on for pages and pages. You can hear Sonic’s ring sound and you’re immediately excited.

Yuzo Koshiro demanded to have his name on the main title screen. As a kid I was like, “sweet, that’s what I want to do too!”. I learned two decades later that he had to fight Sega very hard (and pretty much killed his career) for this because they didn’t want artists to become famous, but that single line on that start screen made me think music in games was a beautiful thing to craft and super important. Funny how things go sometimes.

Game designers and programmers are usually pretty happy to show you how they don’t know anything about music and sound, it’s a little disheartening. I “know” how shaders work or what inverse kinematic is even though they don’t add much to a game except sucking up all the budget. So a game developer should definitely know about the most powerful medium for interactivity and feel, me think.

That Streets of Rage game set up my expectations and dreams for game development and nothing went right. It’s so weird, it looked so promising.

To me, the very first thing that made me smile playing Monument Valley was that I touched something and it played some sound effect/music. It’s a very raw connection. It’s not to annoy parents that we have toys with sound effects, it’s just that they create that smile, they validate the feedback loop: I touch/pull/scratch this, I get audio feedback. It’s a very real life mechanism, it makes things alive. It is not weird science or an obsession from my part, it is key in the process of enjoying a tactile experience.

It is sad that even the developers don’t really see this as part of their game’s experience. I wouldn’t say as a first point “beautiful, intuitive visuals” but more like “playful, intriguing audiovisuals”.

For da love of da game

High skill level is great to watch, whatever it is. It’s showing us what can be done, it kind of expands our knowledge of an activity by adding those incredible moments in our heads.

It’s always funny to hear US people’s frustration about football because nothing happens for 120 minutes. The ones who like it, know how hard it is to control a ball with your feet on a field wider than US football ones for 30 minutes more.

You just need to try for 5 minutes to extrapolate at what level the world’s best players are playing at.

It’s what I’m going through with EVO. I don’t understand everything at all but I have played some fighting games and I can see how high level those matches are.

So it’s weird to see game designers think football is lame or football fans think video games tournament are ridiculous.

But also people get mad when two players or two teams are so close. That’s what is good and intense, people.

You don’t know who’s going to win. There’s friction. Competitors both analyze, try to read the other, trying to find a way through them, it’s the meta game that is so interesting not so much the outcome and which country/team or player wins. It’s the story inside their heads at the time they play that is so beautiful, from having the advantage to having doubt about it, from redemption to revenge, from “controlled randomness” to perfect ace, from despair to perfect execution. Invisible narrative, that’s classy as fuck.

I love to see how games are such a big thing, worldwide. Now I really wish there was more women because I want to see more meta game shit going on like an old woman playing with a pad and fucking the shit out of a dude using a big ass arcade stick. I want to see what a super tight mixed team can do too. Mind games.