Category: Audio&Games

I wonder if I keep coming back to wanting to play Counter-Strike and old school shoot ‘em ups because those games taught me to be a much, much better navigator in crowded spaces.

I’m not in the mood of playing Bloodborne because oppressing atmosphere+dying every 90 seconds is not what I want when in real life it’s open season on black people. I can’t be in the mood.

Going from there, I feel like escapism is… Ambiguous. Games are so good at that though. We just “try” and then it’s three, four hours later. And then we’re just kind of confused and weirdly satisfied?

The Indie Soapbox this year had Jenova Chen wonder about what’s going on with games and if he is asking too much, wanting them to be more than what they are now.

You know something with a big, positive impact culturally and socially? Really memorable, across generations games? Are we doing this with or without competitiveness? How? Very difficult questions to answer.

Yes, computer generated landscape.

Raph Koster has been writing about Star Wars Galaxies development circa 2000-2003 and it’s a fantastic read (more).

First impression, the amount of challenges and design issues to deal with and solve is staggering. We’ve been spending a lot of time talking about polishing 2D “me-too” games on mobile the past few years and I had forgotten how complex and utterly insane -giving the technology available at that time- it was to develop a massively multiplayer game in 3D, for what is probably the biggest IP in the world. It’s mindboggling.

One of the best post mortem I have ever read. I now understand why he stayed silent on the subject for over a decade.

I started to work in games in 2000. MMOs were still fairly new but extremely promising in terms of game development in that they were demanding and that would be good career-wise: shit ton of work for years to come. I think that’s when the term game industry made sense. Video games had been a juicy business for decades but now they needed hundred people teams, which was quite a new thing.

For better or for worse, it didn’t happen this way. You can read in the post mortem how a couple decisions –tied to constraints- can destroy years of work real quick. I think Raph’s Jedi ideas were right (NPC only or “secret unlock”). I wanted to play SWG. But once Jedi masters were everywhere and based on grind, I didn’t even bother try the game.

Those blog posts show the intrinsic relationship between design, code/tech and intent and why you should stop reading game news websites and grab RSS feeds from developer blogs. Real shit is going on on those (Cliffsky about launching a game these days for example).

OK so I stopped watching a dude playing CS:GO on Twitch. Instead, I’m watching the best teams in the world going at it.

For those who don’t know the game, the yellow dots have to plant the bomb either at yellow A or yellow B. The blue dots need to stop them.

It’s within the first minute and you can see that the yellow dots are all together while blue dots are spreading. One is alone to get the information on whether the opponent is coming for yellow A or not. Looks like it’s going to be yellow B. Good read from the blue dots!

[THE MOTHERFUCKING HELL TO CREATE THAT GIF FROM A YOUTUBE VIDEO FUCK YOU 2015]

Counter Strike is so good. It’s kind of the perfect mix of Go and soccer. Everything can change at any time and it’s all about terrain control. I think soccer because US teams are playing like the US soccer team: very aggressive, very willing but totally lacking finesse which results in them getting their asses handed over. But it’s probably closer to basketball because well, five players and a coach. Five players to defend two zones means a 2/3 split which means one zone is weaker than the other. It’s all about that little advantage you can take over your opponent even though it’s not a guarantee at all. It’s brilliant.

Like in sports, all teams and players know each other inside out so they try different techniques, changes of pace to overcome their opponents at different venues and matches. Emergent stories popping out from a system of rules that’s the juice, narrative-driven folks.

It’s really good to watch, a map is about 45mn to an hour long. I definitely applauded the last action in the last round of the ESL final and last map between the two Swedish teams NiP and Fnatic. Insanely tense!

Two things that suck: I don’t like the fact that we use terms like kill and death. Too strong. And of course, the total lack of diversity in the scene. I can’t forget that I stopped playing that game online early 2000s because of all the inappropriate niggers thrown at the team chat and my headphones.

Too bad.

Two articles particularly interesting to me:

Toe Jam & Earl game designer Greg Johnson speaking at GDC about lack of diversity in games.

Ian Bogost writing about how games are better without characters.

I have always felt that games are better as system toy machines. I’m a designer I know people are scared of systems and think of them as not fun and cold. But to me as Ian puts it perfectly:

A game, it turns out, is a lens onto the sublime in the ordinary.

It’s the essence of what is so unique to computer games. But let’s go back to escapism.

For the lack of diversity with characters, let’s just have game engines give you the option to morph your avatar as you like.

It’s something funny: in any story in games, how the character looks like doesn’t matter at all, never did matter because the story is lived by one person, the player. The notion that you need character consistency across players experiences is weird as hell, if not totally stupid. What a brake on what can be possible, it’s a shame.

The only limit is technical: allowing players to shape their avatars means that some stuff can’t be done in some games (memory print). That is quite vague and the Saint Row series showed to the world that you still can do a lot with a custom avatar creation tool.

So technically it’s doable –if you take that into account from the start-. Also characters are such a small part of culture diversity. Black culture is way more than just having black characters.

What is bad with how we handle diversity is the notion that it’s not worth it. Now that’s ridiculous because it couldn’t be further from the truth.

White dudes don’t care so much about avatars, so used to have them mold to them for decades. Everybody else likes having avatars looking like them. It’s not just in games.

On TV Empire just exploded and demonstrated that a massive black and brown crowd exists. And that this crowd leads interest:

I would imagine that an Empire mobile game or adventure game would be widely successful. And yet I don’t see that happen anytime soon. So frustrating. In the meantime as again Ian puts it perfectly:

What if replacing militarized male brutes with everyone’s favorite alternative identity just results in Balkanization rather than inclusion?

I don’t know what to think!

It’s a little sour article on turning 50 and making games. I’d like to point some things out that I think we all take for being normal or the default setting and shouldn’t at all.

Game development has always had an uncomfortable relationship with age and experience.

Let’s just ask ourselves this: where in the world a really complex field is overlooking experience? Age shouldn’t even be an issue, experience means you’re going to be older because that’s how it works.

Game development, a really hard and complex field, has a culture that almost bullies experience (I remember people making fun of Chris Crawford, have some respect young, pantless padawans).

This shouldn’t be OK at all. This is so fucking weird and needs to stop. In other “passion-driven” industries, people seek experience and people respect experienced people. That’s how the craft progresses but whatever.

So when I read the conclusion that  “hey, I still love what I do” as the pinnacle of 22 years of game development, it kind of breaks my heart. Laralyn, you know you could be feeling way better than that. You should receive Lifetime Achievement Awards and have younger game developers come to see you at GDC to take selfies with you and buying your games and design books.

instead we have a panel at the GDC this year talking about ageism. At 35 I’m entering the “old age” which is some serious bullshit but yeah, that’s the market. I hope this will shift as quickly as possible.

I also really hope for broader games. I talked in the past (back in ‘08) about games for seniors. Tons of room for innovation and steady, sustainable game development. I would be thrilled to work on that. We’re just getting started.

This.

Game journalists analysis skills

This article bothers me so much for two reasons I think:

1/ You game journalists are so, so bad at connecting the dots. When you hear stories about crunch time for decades now, you should fucking investigate the why and how and see that behind that crunch is insane complexity. Developers haven’t been that shy about it. I remember hearing about how it took a couple months to create 3D models for Gran Turismo cars. Months for one car made by a highly skilled artist, guys. And that’s the easiest fucking part of making a racing game.

If you keep destroying game developers in reviews while being well aware of those facts, you’re a mean idiot and a liar to your readers. You participate into creating a culture that thinks that things are simple and easy on computers. You enable and vouch for stupidity.

Worse, with this article some game developers are saying thank you, I shit you not! Yes thank you game journalist for being a dumb ass dick for years, it really helped all of us. Fuck me.

2/ You game journalists are passionate enough about the medium to totally forget how it operates. Which makes subtlety impossible in your critics: if it’s technically perfect it’s fine for you while you don’t really connect to what extent it is, it’s fine. How can you have recognition of a medium when its media are unaware of why shooters are cool programmatically speaking because we can debug that gameplay easily (has the target gone down? No? Debug) compared to heavy simulation a la Sims where you don’t know what the hell the computer or the player are going to do and there are dozens of variables at play. Tons of shit happening in games are happening for a technical reason. We’re dependent, we’re working around tech to create gameplay.

With your ignorance you foster a profound lack of knowledge within your audience. The amount of horseshit or entitlement I read from gamers, it’s mind blowing. As if people were like “I saw the boom in this movie shot, 2/10 will not watch again”. You game journalists nurtured that bullshit. You participated into creating a world where 2D games are inherently not as good as 3D games. It’s sad.

Passion isn’t about clearing 100% of all Nintendo games or playing the most obscure and obtuse shit around, it’s about understanding processes, the craft, the tools so that you can judge accordingly the collaborative work of developers and teach your readers about the most complicated medium in the world, enjoying it more and more importantly, make it progress.

This article should have come up in 2000 if not 1995. In 2015, it’s a disgrace.

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.