And the fact that you feel you’ve been screwed. Here are the rules if you want to buy a good game:

– Do not trust screenshots, ever. They are more tweaked and photoshopped than models in FHM. During the 90s they were writing in small “arcade version” to sell a shitty Atari ST/Amiga/PC port over graphics. What a shame.

– Do not fall for concept art. Concept art is no game, it’s fantasy, it’s projection, it’s nothing that is going to be playable. Pre-ordering on virtual promises is nuts.

– Do not fall for trailers like you all did with Dead Island. Actually I think trailers somehow should not exist. It’s totally killing movies (Inception for me) and it kills game too. They are very powerful I know, but they are also very dangerous.

– Do not fall on tech demo. Yes it is OMG real time but in game development there’s real time and then, there’s real time. Everything will look fluid and beautiful for example because there’s no input or AI. Add them and your beautiful game engine stutters all of sudden. If nobody is playing with the real time footage you see, you can forget it. It’s bogus man.

– Do not fall on in-game footage where a developer is playing in an empty world. Again, add AI, NPC states and a whole other bunch of stuff the computer has to deal with while you are moving your sticks or mouse, and the game will be absolutely not as smooth as you think it is.

The only way to have a real taste of how good a game is is to try it out at your friends, at a conference or download a demo on your machine. Period.

You see, this is where I think that the awful term “videogame” created a focus on video/graphic in a bad way. People didn’t read about games but just looked at pictures in magazines back in the 90s. Today they watch Youtube videos. People are getting sold on that superficial shit whereas a game, a computer game, is so not about visuals. It’s not about video. It’s about games, systems, patterns, feelings, flow.

Dead Island I hope, will remind you of that.

When I was young, I was a bit jealous of consoles as they could run games that couldn’t run properly on my much more powerful PC. And then came DOS4GW. Suddenly, it seemed like programmers had finally access to the power of my machine and nothing will be the same ever since.

Doom, 1993

Today we desperately need a new DOS4GW paradigm. AMD released this summer a “low-end to mid-end” $150 processor which contains a quad-core CPU and 400 stream processors. To give you an idea the PS3 has an one-core CPU and 7 stream processors.

Also, PCs come today with a minimum of 4 gigs of RAM that is, eight times what the X360 has. And it’s the minimum.

I watched Carmack’s Quakecon keynote and I understand his frustration better. It’s not that Windows or DirectX are inherently bad, it’s just that they do too many things while taking priority over the game you try to run for various reasons.

We need some sort of DirectMetal so that the OS enters in über-compact mode, kills everything and gives the game full access to hardware. A lot of games don’t need that much of power but the point is to stop using programmers for optimization purpose (and stupid fixing issues) and more for creative, features purpose. It’s not just to access a tremendous amount of power that it would be great, it would also push people to try things, knowing that it would run smoothly. I don’t know maybe it’s just me, but it makes me cringe a bit to see developers sweating to optimize code so that some 3D -I didn’t say game- can run in a browser at 15 fps. Today, with the machines we have? Fuck me, this is ridiculous.

So:

– Full access to orders of magnitude more powerful machines compared to what we have now, without having to aim hardcore gamers either (remember, low-end mid-end processors).

– Performance scales better and is much more homogenous than what we have now with DirectX or SDL.

– Programmers regain freedom and they can once again have fun and create cool shit, leveling up skills for everybody.

– Designers can dream again and try to push things forward instead of staying in the comfort zone.

– If we have app stores, we shouldn’t be too concerned about security problems.

The only bad thing I see is that you wouldn’t be able to alt-tab to your browser to read the walkthrough. Yeah, less cheat!

So Microsoft, open source community, let’s do this.

It’s weird how it’s polarized: in one hand, mobile and social games succeeding at abusing players with psychological exploits, on the other hand AAA games that developers want to think as pieces of art that can’t be dissected on why they fail to make an impact.

Gamasutra’s huge philosophical article from last week generated 156 comments. Ian Bogost pretty much argues that to expand the medium, we should just do whatever we want in games, experiment etc. He somewhat opposes Raph Koster and Daniel Cook, who think that there are methods, systems, things that we can grab and tighten up in the game design process, leading to a road map to follow for success and long term viability.

Useless debate. Daniel and Raph are arguing that in the real world of making games for a living, you don’t go for single-player story-driven games because it’s extremely hard to do something good as it’s unnatural for games to be formatted this way and furthermore, people play more multiplayer games anywa. It’s in the blood of what games are. Ian argues that there shouldn’t be “a way” to make games. These statements are not mutually exclusive.

It’s just a matter of absolute or non-absolute and that annoys me a little bit because it’s debating for nothing. I think it pushes a lot of game developers out of design discussions, creating some kind of elitism that is not good for the game development community.

I feel more connected to Daniel and Raph stances. Gamasutra people are usually making a living, or trying to by making and designing games. Arguing that it’s totally fine to do what you want, like a huge single-player story-driven game is a very wrong message.

Again, if you don’t want to make a living, please do exactly what you want to do. I guess you can get any risk you want. But if you need to make some bucks, sustain yourself with your work, you will study markets, smell trends and try to minimize risks, at least a little bit. Multiplayer games with short play sessions etc. Today it seems to be the way to go. It doesn’t mean you want to exploit people. There are games out there which despite using “trends”, are respectful to players, like Realm of the Mad God.

Heavy Rain/Alan Wake are good examples of what is pretty much impossible today: being supported by a gigantic corporation like Sony or MS to do a game like these. These games failed at so many levels. High production value hiding game design shallowness. L.A. Noire is the last one in the series and didn’t do well. It doesn’t mean there’s no market or demand for that kind of games, it means for developers that it’s highly risky or suicidal to go this way. But I’m sure a lot more can be done with these story-driven games, starting by much better, stronger stories and characters (Heavy Rain’s Madison /o\).

Debating on the design front of what to do is really useless. We know we’re free to do whatever we want but we also want to kind of make money too, don’t we? Indies as big publishers (even more so, years of development to cover first).

And yet people get butt hurt with Raph’s views that single player games are doomed, despite having him explaining that he just looks around and doesn’t condemn or embrace the trend. They fear that he’s probably right so they say he’s almost insane.

People, just make your game and prove him wrong by making a single player game with as much impact socially and culturally than games like Go or WoW if you like challenges. I mean, it’s never been as opened as it is today to make games. I think Jon Blow might be able to pull a nice one off with The Witness.

It’s so tiring and exciting at the same time.

Which makes me think:

– Why everybody’s doing an iOS game or trying to, despite so many warnings about walled garden and platform power?

– Same question with Facebook and how G+ would be different?

– Why HTML5 still fucking sucks so much? It’s never going to be enough is it?

– Why when big indie names are going exclusive on a platform, nobody says that it’s wrong? How come a risky project would do better on ONE platform, let alone when that one is not the most used out there? I think both TGC’s Journey and Sound Shapes would kill it on “the Internet” so much more.

– Why nobody talks about the fact that “the Internet” is happening on computers which more often than not, run Windows? Is it that bad to aim at the biggest “Internet” platform when making a game is such a hard task or should we always say that we’re making a game for Steam?

– Why simple distribution schemes like Tricky Truck or Minecraft are not embraced?

– Why people forget about how ID and Epic made their fortune, selling disks through mail orders and how it’s even easier to distribute games today? Yes, indies could live without “the Internet”. They did, by making different games because carbon copies of SMB3 weren’t good enough.

– Why indie games are more often than not personal remakes of classics?

– Why so many indie games feel like developers just want to cash out with ads over a simple physics-based gimmick?

 

I think I will conclude like Tarn from Dwarf Fortress fame:

“The problem isn’t with indies or platforms so much as it’s with society.”

I’m always wondering why am I constantly going back to play some music instead of playing games. I have dozens of them on Steam, waiting for me, I have MinefuckingCraft, emulators with plenty, thousands of web games out there… But all I can do is grab my bass, my guitar or sit in front of my keyboard and play, toy, learn. This slide helped me to understand that.

Wideness

Music covers a bigger spectrum of the experience of gameplay. What is so great is that I can play music by following a song, doing exactly the same as the bassist does, following the rules. Or I can play music and improvise my own patterns, developing my own melodies and have the freedom fun. Both are great and needed. Going from end to end of the spectrum is awesome, I can’t stop doing that. Back and forth.

There is not enough games going toward, designed for the play feel. The game I spent most of my time these past years is Tony Hawk on DS because I  launch a quick “free skate” session and I can do whatever the hell I want. Same with Test Drive III from the last century. Same with Deus Ex. Freedom, improvisation in games are so great too. People play GTA for the sandbox environment more than the stupid ass story that we watched in much better movies ten times already. It strikes me that people playing games LOVE freedom too. So much. And yet so many game developers hire a writer to come up with a story when it’s just not important (the theme however, is. More on that later). Anyway it’s changing, slowly (Flower, Journey from ThatGameCompany).

I think the “play feeling” auto-generates the ability to build our own challenges, our own goals. It’s pretty fun on its own and it teaches us independent thinking and not depending on external rewards. I’m starting to see that people born during the 90s, deep fried into the reward society we built (especially you old farts), are unable to make decisions and set goals on their own, they need help. Once they are set they’re good but the independent system in their brain is underexploited, poorly efficient and trained.

Games are learning systems and when I see the awful harassment –to me- that Facebook games are with their cortege of sweet meaningless rewards, I think we should push more, expand games to a bigger part of our human experience if we don’t want people to turn like pushing-buttons chimps. For now these social games are doing exactly that.

So…

2010-2011, when the game industry exploded. Again.

The Wii went down, hard. Guitar Hero died, the 3DS? Who really cares about this 3D fad. I can’t track the numbers of AAA games with bad to abysmal sales, cancelled projects and people laid off. The Wii2 has been announced and nobody really cares either.

Apple’s market is more than tough (huge competition, prices too low) and for some reason success is always based on birds. Android doesn’t generate as much money and is a development pain in the ass.

In 2008 I couldn’t imagine that three years later game development would look this way.

Future exciting games? Spyparty, The Witness. I can’t wait for these two and I admire the amount of sharing Chris and Jonathan are doing, along with great game designers like Daniel Cook. I mean these guys are sharing so much information and knowledge and being open about their development, it’s so great. It’s inspiring. It makes me want to play their games. L.A. Noire? 3D actors and missions annoy me. Six years of development for that, now you see how it doesn’t really make sense financially. Portal 2? Well I could have played this one but I didn’t because I know it’s a good game (and I don’t have a machine to run it, that’s true) but it is still a sequel and I can’t just get excited over a sequel anymore.

Still reading Gamejournos to persuade myself to not care about big computer game news websites.

I’m really happy to see success stories online, onSteam (yes, it’s a word now). Platform agnosticism is gaining traction. Frozen Synapse is out. Terraria sold 200K in nine days (Terraria Vs Minecraft). Of course word of mouth is better on a network like Steam or Facebook –automatic status driving attention- but we can think about making games that connect to Twitter/FB/IM accounts out of walled garden too. It’s up to us.

I see a trend where indie games are finally, giving up the 8bit-nostalgia-hardcore-nerd aesthetic. As one would say, ‘bout time.

The goal would be to provide a toolset a game audio designer could use to:

-Make him able to be free and creative by using his/her standard sequencer software and export midi/soundbanks/scripts in a convenient and efficient way to the game.

-Minimize the programmer’s work who would spend NO time on things he/she shouldn’t do like fixing sound fxs volume issues (remember, I am not talking about triple A business) and spend more time on better things like polishing.

What we have

The tools are a mess. Some tools do some extent of the job, some did it perfectly but are now dead, some survive but are dying… We’re almost there. And yet so far!

First there’s the MOD file (.s3m, .xm, .it). Yes, it’s MIDI data + samples/synths. It’s not crazily supported but Irrklang does as well as well as the ubiquitous Fmod.

Where it’s so weird is that it’s only for playback purpose: no way to interact at the lib level with channels and parameters of MIDI data! Why would you absolutely just play a mod file instead of any pcm stream, I don’t know.

To add to the mess there is the tracker, the most annoying and unnatural way to create music. I don’t want to argue about the fact that it can do great music, it does. But we shouldn’t have to deal with the tracker if we want something with MIDI + samples/synths. Like it or not, we don’t have to enter music on computer keyboard in hexadecimal anymore.

So because the MOD file while supported is definitely depreciated, because the tools are awful, it’s pretty much useless for game development.

OpenAL? No MIDI, bye. OpenSL? Just started for mobile, there’s MIDI, there’s a mapping of its data –I like to read SLMIDIMuteSoloIt– but there’s no designer tools (and what the fuck these profiles mean? 3D Audio for games? On mobile? Please). SDL? No MIDI.

There’s the BASS audio lib that is supporting the playback and manipulation of MIDI files and real-time events through soundfonts, it’s cross-platform but I’ve never been able to see a game using it. People use BASS to build their own little tracker or MIDI player. Soundfonts are pretty much dead too.

The Miles Sound System seems to do everything right according to this page… But it’s 4000$ so I never tried it.

That’s it. No widely available tool to help you create sound interactivity with MIDI. Microsoft had this amazing thing called DirectMusic Producer but they killed it when they shut down the MIDI part of Windows with Vista’s brand new audio stack. They did that to simplify APIs I guess and also because nobody wanted to use MIDI (I’ll get to that in part 3) but man, that was annoying to witness.

Since then, it’s all about 3D. I never really got this obsession with 3D audio. There’s way too much tools for it compared to the number of people or games actually using this feature (FPS and hardcore gamers, and? Who is playing with a nice 5.1 setup? People spent like crazy for their big ass TV and thought “fuck it” for the audio gear, for what I saw).

Main tools and audio engines like Fmod and Wwise are providing designer tools aiming for “volume” features, things helping to manage huge amount of streams and sound fxs, localization files etc. Which is fine but it’s now a very small part of the game development market! Teams, projects are shrinking heavily (for the best) these days.

What we need

My handwriting sucks, I know

I tried to get more specific about file formats.

The sequencer of your choice export data in .mid (ubiquitous format), the soundbank for the sampler is provided either with dls (industry standard and there are tools to edit them) or sfz (Cakewalk’s take on soundbanks), the advantage of sfz being that it’s highly flexible and completely free. Plus, you just need a text editor to change things, I know programmers would be really happy with that :-) I use this format all the time and it’s really nice.

Then, .mid/.dls/.sfz are mixed together and controlled by scripts. I’d go for Python in terms of readability but all of them would probably work perfectly. The output would be a Fmod-like pair of files separating data/content. It could almost be only done ala command line style!

I added a door in the synth/filter part of the engine so that if someone wants to throw in their own filters or synths they have already coded, they can (VST format).

Also overall, the GPU could be used to take care of heavy processing synthesis systems or shit like that.

I see many advantages with this MIDI game audio engine:

-A strong personality and interactivity: the game audio designer set up a “band” and makes it play –in every way- with the game.

-High scalability: the .mid can be reused with minimum efforts on any platform, only the “band” needs re-design. It’s the fun part, it’s like changing textures in an environment. You can have samples in 24bits 192KHz if you want or minimize to 8bits 16KHz for a small game on a phone, no problem.

-Efficiency: .mid are a few Kb, .dll are a few dozens of Kb and soundbanks are the size you want. Between the compression settings and what your “band” is, I’m sure an uncompressed 100 Mb soundbank –in RAM- would provide more than enough for a majority of games. Graphic cards have 1 Gb dedicated c

-Stability: editing scripts in a text editor or a free IDE is stable. Editing soundbanks in a text editor is stable. Exporting midi is trivial. Maintenance would be kept at the minimum, only the audio engine would need it. That’s huge!

Anyway, it’s just some thoughts.

Next time I’ll talk about the social-economics of the game audio engine.

There was something impalpable in the way game music and sounds were played through synthesizers and samples back in the 80s and 90s. Something that was telling you that the sound, melodies and beats were coming from the heart of the machine, something REAL was happening.

Now computer game music just feels detached or forced, especially with non AAA games. It doesn’t feel “natural”.

Let’s take the ubiquitous Mario on the NES. Los doggies (amazing music blog btw) deconstructed the sound of the game, music and sound effects. Here’s the example of the famous coin sound –2 notes-:

The B acts as an ornament to the E. Together, they form an interval of a Perfect Fourth. In relation to C Major, the tonal center of Mario, they are a Major 7th and a Major 3rd respectively. What kind of world has Major Thirds erupting out of reality? Oh yeah, our world has that. Major Thirds are found in car horns, bells, telephones, door bells, convenience stores, pop music, and every other kind of music. And now coins.

Not that Koji thought about it this way but he certainly made sure that sound fxs were matching the music tune, then iterated to hear in which interval it was sounding best. Yes, you can do that with non-MIDI game audio. It’s just so much more tricky, annoying and tedious in the work flow and production process to do so. Plus we need multi-platform support business wise so it’s even more complicated. I did it for SideFlip but it was painful and I could have done so much more with a MIDI engine.

It is frustrating because visual designers have such a wide array of rendering solutions and graphic output with great control over them. We don’t have shit. The analogy with graphics is that MIDI is vector-based, sampling is vector and bitmap-based and streams are full bitmaps. We only have access to the last one, which is not the best in every case, far from that actually.

When you think about sound, music and fxs as tones that you can control through an engine and manipulate with gameplay, MIDI is just the way to go. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time we need this functionality, it’s stable it has everything we need. We need an audio suite with an editor to create extremely interactive audio and awesome stuff.

Basically

Game audio designers feed the engine with MIDI, feed the sampler with uh, sample banks and/or adjust synths and filters through a few scripts and the final audio stream happens in RAM, in the game. The important thing is this:

This is where the fucking magic happens

We can control everything here. We can cut the bass line if the player is low in energy or add a clap on the snare when the player is doing great. We can accelerate music and sound fxs as the player moves faster, we can filter and sweep out a jump fx made with a synth to match the exact length of an analog action, we can send a note off if the combo is not perfect, we can make musical transitions, cuts and breaks to match the action… Things we can’t do or are so tedious with audio streams and one shot samples. Loop. Fade out/fade in. Cut the ambiance or music. Repeat. Streams are so limited.

This is how professional audio software like Reason are working, MIDI to computation to RAM. People associate synths and samples with bad quality because for some reason (ha ha) they think about it as the NES sound, the 8bit sound, the lame 90s Internet music (powered by 2 or 4Mb built-in soundbanks) and nothing else. They don’t know that a nice 64 Mb soundbank and a few synths can be used to make great music and soundscapes like Nintendo is doing since ages (people often can’t even tell the difference with streams since the Gamecube/Wii). They don’t know that computers are so powerful today that they can emulate with extreme accuracy a dozen if not dozens of complex synthesizers on the fly with real time input under 2ms without sweating. I mean, in ten years it is really ridiculous how much power we gain in audio rendering and computation (cheap ass netbooks ship with 1Gb of RAM and 24bits audio output).

This interactivity opportunity needs to be deployed into game development. Not in a back to the old school way, but more as a rebirth. After ten years making audio and music for computer games, I haven’t been convinced by the stream road we took, at all. In a lot of cases, especially for small and medium-sized games, a MIDI engine would stimulate the gameplay and make it more alive than a 2 channel soundtrack looping in the background with stock sound fxs. But yes it means you really need a musician/designer/scripter on that part of your game!

Next time I will talk about the tools we have now, the tools we need and the weird situation with programmers.

Imagine if Sword & Sworcery EP had been out on Windows Linux Mac. Yes, no fancy number 3 in the charts –charts and grades… I think we could live without them- but the same amount of buzz on Twitter and at least, EVERYBODY would have been able to buy it and play it.

I realize that there’s this idea that the gameplay needs a specific device. But as we’re seeing more and more because we have a lot of ways to control a game available on multiple platforms –joystick, gamepad, mouse, touchpad, touchscreen, stylus, keyboard, remote, nothing- the idea doesn’t really hold up.

Magical experience that I could get on my laptop, on my couch.

I don’t really believe in the “unique experience” of a device. I played Braid on the 360 and on my laptop, it wasn’t different. The mechanics, the ambiance are still here and working. Same with Everyday Shooter. I think that you should be able to play a game using whatever you want to control it, at some extent. I don’t like the “put your finger on the screen” in a game that really doesn’t need this to be enjoyable, like Sword & Sworcery EP. It’s just a matter of creating an artificial scarcity when software can be virtually available anywhere. The scarcity is that you need an iPad to play this game. It profits Apple and nobody else.

But back to the input in games. It’s a matter of personal preferences. Some people can’t play a fighting game without an arcade stick. Some play with the “insane” Reverse Mouse setting in first person shooters (the variety of configurations from people jumping with the thumb or with the pinky is remarkable). Some people are comfortable playing a driving game on the keyboard etc. I didn’t really like Crayon Physics with the mouse but with a Wacom it’s perfect, even more than with your finger on the iPhone. Same with World of Goo. I love playing shoot’em up on a keyboard and I’m really bad with a gamepad. It’s endless.

So why would developers absolutely try to make people believe that you need the “real” deal? There’s none. It isn’t a meaningful goal for most players to quote Daniel Cook again. It’s like music or movies, even if there’s a “perfect way” to enjoy them –the bigger the better?-, people listen to mp3s in noisy environments or some watch movies on their computers. But you know what? They’re happy. It’s not that I don’t want to push them to have a better experience but if it fits for them, if it fits their lives then I’m happy that they listen to my music in any circumstance, even at a funeral with shitty headphones.

In the case of games, devices are damn expensive. Comments about game exclusivity are telling these days. People are like “dude, I can play Street Fighter IV on my netbook, why couldn’t I play your 2D game on it too? I need to buy a useless 600$ tablet to do that? Seriously? Well no then”. Some people do everything on their laptop, it’s a really convenient device, it’s quite expensive. The next digital expense will probably be a newer laptop for them, not a device that is going to cost the same price just to play a few apps and show off to their friends how cool it is. And developers I know it’s hard but learn to say no to the hype, snobbery and the platform diktat. Sword & Sworcery EP is exactly in this case, Mashable interview:

Why iOS and not PC?

I go way back with Apple. After messing around with things on the Commodore 64, I really got into art and animation on the Mac Classic with Hypercard. When Jobs got things back into gear and they launched the iPod, I really dug it. I remember thinking, “this is the form factor and these are the designers to create the mobile video game console of the future.” When they launched the iPhone, I was in the video game industry doing PS3 type stuff, but I was conscious that the iPhone was “it” — a design that would last — and their high level approach to the App Store was a revelation compared to the licensing, publishing and distribution headaches on other platforms.

I don’t see where it’s a nightmare on PC. Geez, people are not even afraid to sign up for Minecraft or worse, pay obscure strangers for items on eBay. There is no business justification. It’s just a matter of personal nostalgia mixed with grabbing attention by releasing a game exclusively on the iPad. Further in the answer:

Personally, I don’t spend any entertainment time on desktop machines or laptops, and of course, the expectations are quite different on those platforms.

Personally, I know a lot of people spending their entire entertainment time on computers. Personally, I don’t know a lot of people owning an iPad. People are like “the iPad sold 15 million units in a year” but it’s nothing compared to the amount of other devices. Laptops are selling at about 250 million units a year. Developers need to not be dependent on one platform and yet everybody falls into this trap. If now Superbrothers can’t satisfy people asking for S&S EP to be released elsewhere because of their contracts with Apple, I think it’s hurting them. Developers need to be strong.

IF YOU ARE A GAME DEVELOPER YOU NEED TO READ THIS SHIT BELOW UNTIL YOUR NOSE BLEED. THEN PRINT p 53 ON YOUR FACE.

I get the bet of selling less at a higher price within a walled garden for an overhyped device. It doesn’t last long, usually.

Fuck elitism. I want games to spread out, not to be intellectual products for rich people. If a game absolutely needs a device to be playable then fine: golf games can be kind of Wii exclusive, I understand. But if it doesn’t and that you’re snubbing me with a point & click retro-nostalgia game at 5 bucks that would still work perfectly on my laptop experience-wise, I’m like no.

ps: nothing against this game at all –I hope it makes them rich, great AudioVisual design, indie game love etc-, it’s just that it’s in the news and a perfect example of how game developers don’t think long term and are driven too much by their nostalgia (platform, art-style, theme, game mechanics, retail-like business) rather than innovation. S&S EP is a great example of execution done well but I fear that it’s going to make other young game developers believe that there’s a future in exclusivity.

There isn’t son.

The industry is facing the biggest crisis I’ve seen since I’ve been involved making games. And more, there are giant conflicts and generation problems within the crowd of game developers. I don’t need to be in SFO to see it. For now it was quite always the same: games for consoles with teams of people doing crunch time.

Now it’s much more open. We know innovation comes from little team and that it’s the blood of our activity. We know this generation of consoles –as it was predicted back in 2004-2005- while creating a need for extra specialized people with great skills, killed thousands of jobs. There’s Minecraft. There’s Angry Birds. There’s Steam. Facebook. It’s almost overwhelming.

Themes that seemed to be big.

Game Developer Conference. Fuck you “Video Game”. Fuck you.

Gamification

I don’t care at the end.  It’s good and not good at the same time but users will see how they will feel about it. This debate is useless, people will go for it or might find at some point that will and motivation are stronger when not linked to superficial and kind of meaningless rewards.

Socialization

My problem with Facebook games for now is that they’re not really interesting –I’m trying MouseHunt, meh- and make people having boring jobs something that we, as game developers, enjoy because we can use all this time to make them click and share. Games always have been inherently social and for now, I haven’t seen a game I wanted to play on Facebook. Maybe it will change but with their recent moves about in-app games or how Facebook is getting greedy by being the biggest platform in the world, we’ll see. But for sure, numbers don’t lie and people are playing a lot (half of the 500+ million people on the network). CityVille seems to be much better than the last generation of games. The social network as a platform is definitely interesting and a huge trend.

Mobile AAAfication

Good news everyone! You’re going to experience unprecedented high technology mobile games! It’s not so good news for developers as the price of entry to make games for 3DS/NGP is going to be 2 to 3 times more expensive at the very least.  Gamers can expect a shitload of ports from this generation of consoles. Not so interesting.

This is where I don’t get the game developers fanboism who should be damn concerned about these cost problems, especially after seeing what this generation did to us. Guys, are you blind? 17 years studio dies, a game selling more than a million units with layoffs a few weeks later, hello?? I’m more and more amazed at the lack of maturity on the business side which is totally connected to what we do guys. Iwata had some really true words about generalist and craftsmanship gone away in the industry and the fact that so many people today are specialized makes them forget and not care about the general aspect of game development. That’s not a good trend and I think game developers are in denial on this subject.

Distortion of realitification

Walled garden. They smile at you, promise to make a room for you and then screw you and your work, most of the time. Ask SuperMeatBoy with MS. Ask developers working for Nintendo, Facebook or Apple. Trip Hawkins warned people about that and I still can’t believe how game developers just go for the “I always wanted to make my game on the last generation of machines from my favorite manufacturer of all time”. I am inclined to make games mostly for Windows not because “I love Microsoft and started with a PC in 1991” but because it seems to me, as a developer, that it’s where I can do whatever I want, distribute it and develop easily at about no cost. Nobody, no manufacturer, no hype machine matches that. I don’t care about the aspect of fragmentation –think Minecraft and stop thinking about making complicated things that are not going to work on graphic cards with pixel shaders 1.2-, ease of development, freedom of creation should be I don’t know, praised! But no. Let’s just let these platforms fuck us hard at some point or fill our lives with endless stress we don’t need. That’s how a REAL game developer does!

Despite really nice successes like The Sims, Half Life, Garry’s Mod, Dwarf Fortress, Bejeweled and so many others, people strike for this game that will outsell Mario and GTA combined so they become the next Miyamoto on the console of their dream. There’s a ridiculous distortion of reality. For a very few games using and in need of a specific platform, a lot should be done on computers, desktops or laptops or mobile. Being platform agnostic should be the default because you should focus on your game and people playing it, FIRST. That’s still too rare. Fuck.

Indiefication

On the good side, a lot of great, polished games. More than ever and it’s awesome. But the dark side is coming now, which is elitism. Indie has never been for me just a way to describe people who are making games professionally without publishers. Nothing more or less. But of course now it’s a 1337 Club where if you haven’t been coding since the age of 4 while drinking beer or doing design from a trailer park well you’re just not indie at all. That’s not great for the community of people making games and I’m starting to see some strange tensions.

Hollywoodification

Awards, red carpet etc It’s good to see games getting media attention and all but it’s just a way for the traditional AAA business to show off its voice-over actors and receive awards so that people can forget about quality of life issues, crunching for weeks to release a game of the year. Guys remember: everybody in the industry knows who Notch is, what he looks like and that he made Minecraft. The team behind Red Dead Redemption? Nobody knows who the fuck you are. For the same amount of work, I’d rather be Notch any day.