This is the everyday sexism witnessed in game and software development cultures, cultures I’ve been less and less comfortable to deal with because I like to work with women. What makes me crazy is that they were supposed to be fields where women and men are totally equal as they are all about brains. But these cultures still have a hard time to get it, if at all.
For the first time in the press people stood upagainst E3 and its ridiculous show. Look, E3 was great when I was a kid: getting the three or four magazine summer issues with all the last games, last hardware and here and there some boobs was the SHIT. When I was twelve.
12 years in the game industry and 20 years later. E3 still rolls on a mix of explosions, female curves and cute overload aesthetics and you think I’m going to enjoy that? Fuck no. Of course I feel embarrassed. Like a lot of developers do, especially older developers. In twenty years on TV we went from Dallas to Breaking Bad. What did we do? We went from Mario to Mario.
Computer games don’t need no trade show, I don’t know why we still pretend. We have the GDC, internet, selling. Consoles are getting so irrelevant, they are computers with updates as PCs and TVs now. There’s no need for a trade show like that. Just tweet a YouTube link and if your game is awesome this will spread.
Now I feel sorry for all the teams crunching for E3 demos -I’ve been there- and working their ass off to deliver what the publisher wants, but at the same time I’m not going to get excited for another kind of retarded third person shooter. I’m not going to get excited by another iteration just because I know it’s a lot of work. It doesn’t work this way.
I have like forty games on Steam. I finished maybe three and played about ten of them?
I love to play games of course and that’s the problem. I manage to stop myself from doing it. Good games are addicting. Go, poker. It’s almost by definition.
“Pleasure without learning only creates an empty experience that can be dangerously addictive.”
These days you don’t learn a lot with games, that’s for sure. There’s pleasure, a lot of it (“particles!!!!!!”) but I know I’ll end up playing them too much. It becomes the new TV the thing you do at night, mindlessly for more time than you should.
I already spent 40 hours in Torchlight and I kind of am falling into it again and want to play the second (engineer class!) despite knowing that I will just click a lot and watch visual effects rendered in real time on my computer.
I love computer games. I love them so much that I transformed a lot of things to games. Like following the tech industry and predict where it goes or how it works or riding bikes in the Car City or escaping people’s patterns on the sidewalk like I’m in Ikaruga… Quick, fun challenges.
I grind on my bass instead of grinding in a MMO. I don’t know, it never really stops.
I mean if fun is about learning and exploring I like to do so in the real world more, it’s more satisfying. Escapism is better achieved with music and movies, I feel. Not because of their passive nature but because content-wise games are lagging as I wrote a million time about it.
Right now it rains, it’s Saturday afternoon and I don’t know if I want to play some music -that is, grind on hand positions and keep the rhythm- or Torchlight. But I know which one will be more valuable.
But I think consoles are dead. The game console market is dead. Media peeps continue to think that a new generation will arrive and that they will be invited to events like E3 and stuff but everything is saying “no, no and no” to that.
First, profits. Making and selling game consoles isn’t making a lot of money and never really did except for Nintendo. It’s costing a fucking lot of money to make ship and distribute these machines, look at the state of the industry: MS leads and makes money with the 360 but the Xbox division is still in the red from a decade of losing money. Sony is bleeding billions from PS3 and now Vita disasters. Nintendo printed money and it stopped so abruptly that a year after a huge drop of Wii/DS sales and the 3DS mistake, Nintendo loses money. Of course Apple doesn’t want to get in this game. No 25% margin and huge costs? Bye. Uninteresting. And they all want to make money like Cupertino.
Second, market. Devices everywhere, quad-core, 4”, 7”, 13”, 32” inches displays we are surrounded by powerful things that can run games. It’s the first time ever. Before we had big computers in the office room or small consoles in the living room. Now we have a wide array of game-capable devices anywhere and in the context of our economy, people buy Swiss-knife like devices because they’re great (smartphones). The dedicated, game-only devices would work if they were dirt cheap. They are not. You know what I see kids play the most these days (I have a good sample in the park outside my place everyday for lunch)? CARDS. They play cards, take pictures or play some quick games on their phones, send 300 sms in half an hour and that’s it. Handheld consoles are out.
Third, development. We hit a wall, we’re at the max since the last generation. Games like MGS4 have budget around 100 million dollars and it’s insane to develop something for years and sell it for a couple of weeks. This was the model the AAA business was following, thinking that we would create a new Hollywood. Making games is way more complex than movies and despite better tools, we still need years to output one forgettable AAA game. And that’s why they’re so dull these days: there’s no time/it’s too risky to go for something new, let’s just make things pretty and overly fucking scripted to oblivion. That’s a testament of how hard it is to make games using all this graphic goodness, not that publishers are (that) lazy. This is unsustainable.
Also, game developers can make some bucks from being independent. Would you rather aim for this unknown dude who worked on GTA 5 like a slave or aim to be Notch? People move fast today, they do a game at a big name publisher, leave, do some consulting while working on their own game etc. The all 30-years-in-the-same-building Nintendo-ish dream is not happening anymore. And that’s a good thing!
So instead of being “I don’t understand what’s going on with the industry, can’t wait for the next gen!” let’s just move on from caring about machines and manufacturers, let’s focus on games and apps. Let’s reward people making good stuff.
Edit: just watched E3 confs and trailers… So dull, so lame, so hideous, so douche-y, so tacky, so gimmicky, so WTF. The list goes on.
I think the game industry is following the music industry.
I heard digital sales could also be contracting but I don’t think it’s true. I think it’s going the same path music did that is, what and how people consume games is getting under the radar or more accurately, the radar is oversaturated: people play more and download, stream more games than ever. It became near impossible to track what’s going on.
Today, we have an insane amount of choice when it comes to games. From quirky free funny 5 minutes games to huge 100$ special edition productions where people play 75 hours on average, there’s something for everyone on every single support you can think of.
Exactly like music. You can totally love the last John Mayer and also enjoy an obscure artist on the rise. Charts don’t mean nothing today. The ocean is way too big.
So yeah, NPD is irrelevant like the top 40 for music was ten years ago.
The bad news is that it makes it difficult to predict a game’s success. Nothing can predict it, at all. Before we had some tools to push it in the good direction. Today marketing, budget, huge license, nothing can guarantee a game’s success. Activision, EA and Ubi are clueless and so are indie peeps (less, of course).
The good news is that it’s going to push game developers to disrupt to gain attention and sell. The bad news is that it’s going to make people copy and get rich with it. Like in music.
FEZ is out. I followed everything since the day they won the IGF in 2008 which feels like three decades ago.
The game is out and there are bugs. 5 years, one programmer and pretty nasty bugs -corrupted saved data, reboot and stuff-. I’m at the same time amazed that that kind of bug is making it to a finished and approved product on a console (MS, what the hell?) and at the same time, Renaud Bedard did a fantastic job at coding everything, even a complex audio system (we really need a realMIDIengine instead of reinventing the wheel each time). Chapeau bas.
It’s funny because Polytron/FEZ make me “love them and hate them” at the same time. Love the indie, hate the 360 (I hope nobody ever releases a small game as a console exclusive, ever. Oh shit, Sound Shapes). Love Phil’s open mouth, hate his open mouth. Love the colorful artistic direction, hate 8bits, old school platforms.
Like Jesper Juul says, “Fez is surely supposed to be interestingly old-school & challenging, but I think this type of puzzle worked much better when you were 12 and only had a single game – and you were playing it with your friends on long afternoons.”
Then this article (or this one) seems to nail what a lot of players find as a negative with FEZ: meh platforms and mind-fucking puzzles so hard that people wonder what’s the point.
FEZ was like the next Braid, the next “indie sensation”. Five years later, it seems like it’s not. It’s OK, making games is hard but I feel that winning the 2012 IGF Grand Prize, shouldn’t really had happened. Antichamber or Botanicula seem so fresh compared to FEZ, I don’t get why they didn’t win, they could have used some PR. I know Polytron is friend with IGF judges and game journalists and they all have parties together and stuff so when I hear that really, it doesn’t change anything with judging games I can’t help but think are you fucking serious?
And then it hits me: we are an incestuous micro scene focused a little too much on the past, our achievements and our limitless nostalgia.
Anyway, if you have a kid and live where rainy days are the default, FEZ might keep you warm. And busy.
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 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.
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.
