Category: Audio&Games

Holy Shit.

Sony acquires the independent studio Media Molecule. After Nadeo joining Ubisoft forces, another “indie” absorbed by a big company.

Next one to end up first party Sony developer, I’d say Quantic Dream?

Programmers in Japan dev studios are working like crazy and get paid like slaves. Is it news? I don’t know but it gives a sense of what is going on there (around 1000€ for 60 hours/week) and gives us in the West, a sense of perspective.

Indie Fund is up!

“Indie Fund is a brand new funding source for independent developers, created by a group of successful indies looking to encourage the next wave of game developers. It was established as a serious alternative to the traditional publisher funding model. Our aim is to support the growth of games as a medium by helping indie developers get financially independent and stay financially independent.

We will soon be announcing the names of the projects we are already backing. Additional details about the need for Indie Fund and the rationale behind it will be shared at the Game Developers Conference in the talk titled Indies and Publishers: Fixing a System that Never Worked.”

Why is this so important? Well we have these days a good example of this, starring Infinity Ward the developer, Activision the publisher and Call of Duty the game. Rewind:

Infinity Ward created Call of Duty in 2003, a massive success. Activision published and bought the developer the year of their first game.

Activision of course bought the IP rights and developed some spinoff and expansion packs on every support possible, making as much as possible out of this guerilla game.

During that time we don’t know what is going on between the developer and the publisher but we can definitely guess how it must be a fight every second with the first one pressurized to do a sequel asap. They do two years later, in 2005.

Call of Duty works so well, Activision now wants to get one game each year. Infinity Ward refuses because they know they can’t output the same quality in a 12months cycle.

Activision doesn’t care and because they have the IP rights, they ask another developer to do a Call of Duty game (the third one) which is doing ok, but receives mixed reviews and is definitely not in the heart of the fans of the franchise.

Infinity Ward says nothing. They’re working on the next CoD called Modern Warfare, which is an even more biggest success in 2007.

Activision does it again and wants a Call of Duty in 2008 made by another developer. It’s Call of Duty, World at War which receives good reviews but not as good as the Infinity Ward games. Sales are good though.

Infinity Ward still says nothing. They are working on the 2009 CoD iteration.

The game is out in November last year: 4.7 million units sold in the first 24 hours. In five days the game grossed half a billion dollars. Fans know the Original Developer did it.

With Activision, it’s damn funky. *cough*

The thing is it’s all about people, not ideas. Infinity Ward has an incredibly talented team for sure. Now the Original Developer is mad. They created an IP, they did an outstanding 4th iteration of it, it seems that they want to develop another game (fuck, can you imagine working on a realistic war game for seven years??!!) and the publisher doesn’t want to listen to the developer who made them gross more than $1B, on one game. Crazy.

And like is noting Gamasutra about Activision:

“For example, now that Guitar Hero is no longer the cash cow it once was, it closed Red Octane and made cuts at Neversoft, despite the way those studios have performed for Activision in the past.”

I hate this war franchise and don’t want to play it. But I think I hate disrespect of people hard at work and greed over an already successful product even more. The laid off co-founders of Infinity Ward are of course suing.

So yeah, when I hear that a developer is bought by a massive publisher, I don’t think it’s that great. It often says that it’s the beginning of the End. Starting by the game.

I’m watching a couple of recent games on YouTube. There’s a lot of resource with walkthrough in good quality.

I can’t believe Uncharted 2 won 10 awards at the DICE thing. I totally respect the amount of work and polishing (but hey, it’s a sequel) and I think that Naughty Dog is a great company.

But ten awards and catch phrases like this:

“A new milestone has been reached in the videogame history.”

No. I’m sure Naughty Dog developers would not agree on that kind of claim either.

The game is well done, how it’s edited is great, scripts are fun, voices are spot-on (definitely the thing that doesn’t work in Heavy Rain) but it’s a fucking Indiana Jones story (the heroes partner is not trustworthy? I didn’t see that coming at all!) with a Tomb Raider gameplay filled with classic dumb AI if I believe what I see. Cinematic are imposed every 5 or 15 minutes of gameplay. Actually it seems everywhere..

I mean come on!! There’s nothing about a milestone here, neither technically or artistically. Artistically if Uncharted 2 won everything, what is it going to be for No More Heroes 2 or Bayonetta? They are just going to be games of the century.

These are crazy. Of course they also are rather classic gameplay and limited too. But these are at least, pushing the artistic part so hard. Pushing aesthetics boundaries, pushing everything about the form to the point where something happens: you have to see Bayonetta snapping her fingers after kicking in the butt a giant monster, moving away from the sucker exploding behind her, in all her sexiness . Results a weird and amazing mix of power, humor and class, conveying an incredible sense of neatness. Like the shop with its beaten Morpheus and its jazz music. Awesome craziness, ultimate pop culture stew. That’s the power of the form in computer games: We. Are. Free. To. Do. Whatever. We. Want.

Uncharted 2 is just doing the opposite. Looking at the past (movies), being predictable, boring. All the time. In No More Heroes 2 you start by fighting a hip-hop assassin with a shapeshifting boombox.

How cool is that?

Anyway, then I realized what these games are: they are single player experiences aimed to multiple viewers. Watching people playing a shoot’em up, a fighting game, a fps or non-action games is no fun –unless you know what the experience is as a gamer-because all the experience relies in having the controls in your hands, it relies in the pleasure of multiple inputs/feedback at the same time: jump/crouch while reloading your gun and checking the map and your mates is not shareable. Getting ready to unleash your combo to finish an opponent after a counter attack is not shareable. It’s pure game joy and you can’t display, watch that.

Hanging around in a beautiful forest or walking on a wall with lava down the street is. You can play that and have people watch it and enjoy it, instantly. Like I do watching Bayonetta and Uncharted on YouTube. Except that the first one is hypnotic when the second is making me yawn like a 90s action movie.

These games are more like puzzle-less adventure games. Boosted with shaders and sound fxs. 3D point&click, without the Gilbert/Schaffer touch (the “Simpsons view” of games) though.

That’s why despite being pretty light on new gameplay features, they have success. You can enjoy them with people around.

[You Should Watch This Even If You Don’t Care About Game Dev] Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular "Facebook Games" era.

This is the thing in everybody’s mind in the gamedev world these days I guess.

Follow-up with Jesper The Ludologist, here’s an excerpt:

“Schell’s basic argument is that external rewards are an incredibly strong psychologically motivator.

Yes and no. If you think about the car that gives you points for a mundane activity such as driving fuel-efficiently, then certainly external rewards can work as a motivator.

But I think that Schell a.o. overlook that external rewards are also known to be strong demotivators. A famous 1973 experiment (“Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward“) showed that when nursery school children consistently received external rewards for drawing, they lost interest in drawing and began drawing less.”

I wanted to say that with activities requiring dedication and commitment, like drawing or making music external rewards are unnecessary and/or unproductive. External penalties work better: James Brown not paying his musicians if they were off the beat, making it the tightest band in the show business, still seen as a reference all over the world. Forcing yourself to only paint with fingers because you don’t have the money or the time to learn how to use brushes, is a motivation to get to something. Limitation in creative process is making you go somewhere, the “activity going well, triggering progress” is the ultimate reward.

But the point is, and it’s sort of sad that yes, rewards work extraordinary well with pretty boring tasks. Olivier in the comment thread is saying it better than I could:

“This sounds like “Punished by rewards” book by Alfie Kohn. It’s a whole educational theory based on the idea that external rewards are bad as a method. I dislike external rewards so I would like to believe that study but it’s just one study… And my empirical observation strongly contradicts it: just look at the millions playing WOW or Farmville … See More or for that matter, most video games. Or witness the unbelievable power of the external motivator called money that will keep people in jobs they hate all their lives just because it pays well. I think every game designer has had an opportunity to test how placing some external motivators in a weak part of his game just pulls players through. It ’s artificial, it can even be ethically wrong but unfortunately it works when done right.”

So true that it’s hard to maintain a focus on where to go from that. But the thing is IMO, if rewards are making people who don’t usually care, care about stuff like recycling or being efficient on their health, I don’t see any problems. I know it’s just not as efficient as when you really believe in it because you know it’s important. I’d rather push people getting really involved than pushing them faking it for the goodies but you know, sometimes it’s hard to see that happen. If the “Reward Revolution” is making things better, I’m all in.

Now it’s going for sure to unleash a counter-culture of people who are going to shit all over the reward thing. Who are going to screw the game, the rules.

Hackers. Always a source of problems! (from the article: “Cheating is more of a serious threat than piracy”)

;-)

I have a dream, it’s a game. I have the concept, the audio part prototyped with input. It’s a game for multi-touch screens and nothing else.

You’ll see how behind being a [insert your brand/philosophy] fan, sometimes it’s not as easy as it seems when creating games and applications to choose a platform.

So from the start it’s pretty easy. Target: smart phones with touch screens. But then:

It gets messy.

Each point is important though the multi-touch and audio lib are obligatory ones: the gameplay relies on multiple input points and all the audio feedback is powered by the crazy awesome Fmod audio lib, which I feed with Fmod Designer. I’m still trying to figure out how to do the same as this tool does without it but it makes it so easy and perfectly well that I’m already discouraged. And not audio programmer enough to code my own engine. I can’t reinvent the wheel and maybe that’s a good thing. Firelight Technologies, creators of Fmod are doing it for 8 years now, making it better. I want to use their experience.

Performance/feasibility is virtually green for everyone but Android is changing so fast and by using the Java machine, it can be smooth, it can be awful. For extensive and advanced audio use Java is not that much recommended to say the least. On MS side well the new line of phones starts with high specs so it should be ok.

Ease of dev is critical. It provides the iteration loop, the faster you see what’s happening in the end-user scenario, the better. Apple is hard. Dealing with provisioning profiles, phone IDs and shit like that almost made me regret the buggy Nintendo DS tools. Also, Objective C. Also, iTunes and XCode. Awful. Android seems painful too and it’s hard to tell if it’s really easy, but in any case it’s getting better (NDK, Python/Lua bindings). Microsoft is marked as green because all we know is that the dev on Windows Phone 7 is going to be powered with XNA/Silverlight, both already used and tested for years. And yeah, they are easy and productive tools. Still, for the audio part Fmod is way ahead, but could be ported on MS phones easily I guess.

Freedom of content. Well Apple said it all last week. Let’s see if the competition is going to behave as sheep or not. They know this freedom is a big argument in their favors so I don’t think they’re going to.

Freedom of distribution. Well Apple said it all last week. Let’s see if the competition is going to behave as sheep or not. They know this freedom is a big argument in their favors so I don’t think they’re going to. Though, Microsoft is luring on this closed business model (ZuneHD apps). Please MS, don’t. I know you love to screw things up at the very end but please hold on to yourself on this one.

So basically for now I’m fucked even if my game idea is ready to live for real (so frustrating to play it with the mouse!!). I could change the input of my game but it would not be the same at all. Try to switch the audio lib but it’s not getting me anywhere, I’m relying on it so bad. I could still do a full prototype on the iPhone but I don’t own one/can’t develop on and I don’t want to have something that works and not being able to release it or worse, make it ship it and die unknown, between two farting apps.

It’s really frustrating. When Warren Spector is talking about how we so need the equivalent of camera and theatre screen, it’s not about copying the movie industry.

It’s about letting creators fulfill their ideas faster than once every two or three years at best. In 2010, it’s still a dream.

Sigh.

EDIT: by writing this post, I just found that someone has made Fmod available for Java, which means I could prototype, release and do my shit on Android. Maybe not (is it going to work perfectly as in C/C++? Way to make it native on Android?) but it reopens the problem!

Damn I love the internet. And the Open Source :-)

EDIT2: Shit, I just thought about it: a lot of Android phones don’t have the FPU unit needed by Fmod..What happens if I call the lib on the phone? Atrocious performance?

Welcome to one of my world.

What would be the perfect game? We already know what makes a good one:

• Simple rules (so that everybody can join)
• As many possibilities as possible (so that we don’t get bored)
• Rewards (so that we can think we’re great)
• Multiplayer (because we are social animals)
• Emotions (so that we can feel alive)

I would add that I need a physical activity. I prefer a gamestick, standing up and moving my ass than a gamepad, on a couch thumbing slowly. Looking at the success of the Wii and Wii Fit, I’m not the only one.

I don’t play a lot of computer games because an awful lot of them don’t have the second point (like every games about killing/looting). If they have it, they don’t have the first one (like batshit crazy complicated real-time strategy games or rpgs).

That’s also why some FPS are attractive to me ( go from A to B the way you want; first two points checked).

All games have the third or the fourth in some way (they are actually tied together) but unlocking an achievement or an item on Steam or whatever doesn’t deliver a real joy for me.

The fifth point is so rare.

I realized that some of my favorite activities ever match these 5 points. There’s a pattern.

It’s called having fun and playing.

MUSIC

12 notes, you can go anywhere. If you think music as a road moving in time, you can go in dark places like bright ones or both at the same time. It’s almost infinite. The multiplayer part is obvious. Emotions are too: music is one –if not the definitive one- of the most powerful machine ever created to make you feel sad or happy or whatever in-between. Rewards are here too but they need a lot of time and dedication. Wait, don’t you have to play hours regularly to unlock stuff in your favorite mmo? Yes you have.

Friday, it’s time for butt sex. Why just friday?

SEX

Well I don’t need to show you how it matches the 5 points, we all play this game. I’d say the single-player game is pretty awesome too (don’t forget the second point)! I so freaking love this game, it’s insane sometimes. From the time I discovered I could play with my body to now I’ve never stop. Did you?

Do want. Forever.

SKATEBOARD

It’s so simple to put a foot on it and push to move. And yet there are countless tricks out there and years of practice before knowing how to do half of them. Because it defies physic laws, because it defies the city and urbanism, landing tricks and skating areas not designed for it are so enjoyable. Riding this deck like it’s part of your body, moving while standing up with the sun going down is so great. You can’t really skate alone, you need friends because it’s so hard you need people around you. Cooperation. Emotions. It’s more about mastering them, mastering your fear, mastering your doubts, your joy so you can do this treeflip anywhere, anytime.

Finished Go Game. Obsession’s over.

GO

I love this game. So much that I don’t play it, it obsesses me. I’d start a game and stare at it until my mind made every move possible or tried to. I had a two weeks game against the computer and it was so close and so hard. I forgot about it because I already had the three activities above going on, so.. Emotions. Because all stones are equal, you care about all of them, they all have something to do. In Chess you can sacrify a less important piece, because the game is designed about making one piece fall (the king). In Go it’s about space. It’s all about being together, stones support each other to avoid capture. And yet you have to conquer the space by placing single stone around. The conflict in your mind is infinite. Tragedy and drama coming from mechanics, suck it stories!

We definitely don’t value Gaming and Play enough in our societies. Games and the act of play are older than culture as Huizinga said. They are really part of us at a sub-level that culture can’t reach (yeah, animals are playing too). Culture is like history: learn from it and then, screw it like said Frank Lantz to Jesper Juul at The Art History of Games conference.

Play. Re-invent rules and systems. For that you’ll need time, skills, cooperation. These are values we should push more in this world and games are so good at simulate, stimulate and enhance them.

Culture is great but there’s a problem: it is stuck. It doesn’t move, it’s a point in time, it’s not dynamic. It’s not about systems and flow despite the fact that life is. Games are all about systems and flow.

Life is moving, we need activities that match that and that’s exactly what we do with games, all the time.

We need to value them more. Even more than culture.

I’m thinking about something. I’m looking at my laptop, blowing the shit out of its fans when I’m playing a big 3D game or when I launch an effing Flash player.

I’m looking at these crazy powerful graphic cards we have now. the last ones are selling at indecent prices but it has to: when you think that a PS3 has 7 stream processors while the last high-end graphic card has 1440 of them, is capable of feeding three displays at a ridiculous 2560×1600 resolution each, is built with 4,3 billion transistors, you quite easily understand why.

Then I’m looking at the OnLive Beta preview. It’s working pretty well but it’s still laggy and not playable on games requiring fast action. But servers are not a home.

See where I go?

Go away from me. Compute the hell out of you and make me a sandwich bitches.

Why don’t we have a sort of OnLive Home System? Imagine a box with these graphic monsters, in the basement. Everytime you launch a game or a heavy application on your laptop/netbook/tablet/phone/fridge, the box would use this processing power and send it to your device. The latency issue is almost solved on servers outside your home, I guess on a LAN it would be fine or really close of being real time (less than 10ms).

Instead of that, manufacturers are trying to squeeze HD capabilities into netbooks. Who the fuck cares to watch a HD movie on a 10 inches or less screen. What is the point to have a mobile device that is going to burn your thighs. Manufacturers, stop following enthusiasts who want everything and would sell their mother for it. Aim for sustainability and mass market. Look at Nintendo ffs!

Playing at 60 frames/second on my favorite games on my devices without feeling that my machine is going to take off would be crazy awesome. I want that so bad actually. Yes, consoles sort of do that. Look at how the powerful 360 is having so many overheating problems: designed in early 2003, they didn’t have a lot of options except having the power brick out of the console. Still too hot.

I want the engine to be far away from me using the computer. Like we did with cars, making the engine less and less intrusive in terms of noise or/and space. Hiding it while enjoying its power.

Maybe Steve is going to announce that with the iTablet. “Use your Mac Tower Power to have amazing 3D games on your iTablet thanks to the Airport Turtle! You need an iTunes account though”.

Of course, We knew it all.

Third-party games not selling well on Nintendo consoles? Check. Always has been the case. I think it’s terrible because I’d still buy a Wii now (especially with NetFlix coming on it!). Innovative and leading console making nobody wealthy but Nintendo…

Nice couch!

Budgets getting ridiculous? Check. The average development budget for a multiplatform next-gen game is now around $18-$28 million, according to new data. When you think that a MGS 4 is around $80 million just in dev costs maybe more. And it’s still the same fucking gameplay: Gran Turismo whatever the beauty of the cars will always be a driving game. The experience doesn’t change as much as the budget exploded.

People being fired and studios closing because of the complexity of changing and re-building tools for the current-gen consoles? Check. It has been said so much these years and last year we really saw the effect. Not just the manufacturers fault though, a lot of people in this industry just don’t really get it: look at Duke Nukem Forever. 12 years of development, no finished game at the end. All because of this crazy fast mutation of game machines and bad business decisions. Really, really bad. The immaturity on the business side of this industry is painful to watch.

Work abuse in the game industry? Check. Bo-ring. Six years ago it was exactly the same with Electronic Arts and I guess it’s the same in every big studios. Nothing has really changed, people get hired on the passion they have for making computer games which means to work until you starve in front of your screen, which means a mob mentality that makes you a soulless game developer clone. This is not a life I want. When I see Rockstar San Diego problems, all of that for a GTA-in-the-far-west game, it’s just sad.

Dissed Digital Distribution? Check. Yeah right, NPD says 90% of games during holiday seasons were purchased on retail. Of course they don’t track digital distribution because between the main services like Steam and the fact that it’s the default way to get apps on smartphones, their tracking doesn’t mean anything about trends: digital distribution is growing faster than any distribution scheme. It’s alive and kicking Gamestop in the balls. The number one game retailer lost almost 9% of sales during this holidays despite the fact that they multiplied stores across the US. They have plenty of cash and want to open 200 stores in 2010 *facepalm* They fail to understand that the switch is going to be brutal, they don’t understand the exponentiality side of it. 2009 was a huge start in this aspect.

Nice rope!

Look at the iPhone and games like Zen Bound, totally weird and original, totally successful because EVERYBODY can find it on a digital distribution model, effortlessly. Word of mouth is working very well if the availability is a no-brainer. Zack and Wiki would have done better without the retail problem, like so many good games. As publishers are big business partners with brick and mortar retailers, they’re now in a really weird position where developers, creators of the products they publish, can reach their audience and make more by minimizing the publisher’s role.

Publishers bad results like EA? All of them are announcing reduced revenues and earnings. It’s not the worldwide crisis fault first because on that decade overall computer games sales are up (except Japan I think), and december 2009 has been the best sales month ever in the US. So how do they do? They all are bleeding because of wrong strategic decisions except for Activision which relies on two milk cows: WoW and Modern Warfare. Yeah, it’s called being Fucking Lucky. For the rest it’s le big fail (DJ Hero, Guitar Hero going down, Tony Hawk board joke). Even a franchise like Rock Band isn’t profitable, even a big launch and game like RB: The Beatles has not break even yet.

Dylan Cuthbert says that game funding model is "fundamentally broken" and he’s totally right. It was already the case when I started in this industry and ten years later this problem is still not solved.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe in the future of computer games, even if it seems pretty bright on the creator-side of it (more platforms, more inputs, easier distribution).

I’ll be honest, watching things moving that slow on the biz part while at the same time I could not imagine that in 2010 I could be able to stream about anything to my computer (*possibilities*) is fucking me up real hard.

When I read a bit my last posts on games I really feel I’m hitting a wall. I know things now, more than I search answers or develop points of view as I was doing previously.

I think I’m pretty sick of the game industry. I go backwards into my rss game feeds folder, just looking quickly.

This is so wrong:

– The awful and crazy stupid story about Edge, the lawsuit and everything. It’s still on.

– The massive layoffs everywhere in the game industry while an ultra realistic game about current wars around the world is making shitload of money with more than 6 million sales in three weeks, proving that behind the marketing and the robust production value, despite a horrible setting and theme, a well paced and balanced game mechanic (linear but freedom is here, hard but life regeneration is here) in an involving view (first person) is just crack cocaïne.

– Seeing that after the bullshit about physics cards they’re trying to bullshit us about the 3D glasses that seem to always sprout headaches.

– About that, seeing the pain in the ass that is to design a game WITH multitouch for anything else BUT the goddamn iPhone (because of that). Android doesn’t support it officially in the US, Win7 is fully multitouch ready but we still search for good devices using it (Zune HD?). And I don’t talk about the console manufacturers and new interfaces. Oh and this year thanks to SF IV and classic vintage game pr0n, the Stick is back for good.  It’s an input mess after a pretty stable period of 10 years (gamepad, keyboard/mouse).

– Seeing how this young creative industry is getting as stupid as the others.

– Closer, seeing some talented people thinking (or doing it) about leaving the game business, the game creation and the game design is sort of depressing. People like Jonatan Soderstrom, Olivier Lejade… Valuable people staying in the dark of this crazy industry or people like Petri who as talented and young as he is, does not want to work in the game industry as it is now.

I don’t know where and what to do about it. To quote a wise man,

"How often do you get to be there for a new art form? It’s less than once every hundred years," "It’s ours to fuck it up, and it would just be such an incredible shame for humanity if we did."

I fell.

Steam got me. Steam is awesome (I don’t get that people are afraid of this platform while they use iTunes and don’t see the problem with it). With the release of Left 4 Dead 2, I ended up playing the games I bought and didn’t play like Half Life Episode One and Two. Pretty great. Of course I’ve downloaded L4D 2 Demo and of course now I want and I am waiting for the L4D/L4D2 pack at 39$.

About Episode 2: crazy how npc like Alyx are emotionally bringing something while I totally didn’t care about the story. It’s boring. Aliens. Portal. Rescuing whatever.

Also enough with these corridors, especially when they look like intestine. It’s boring, it’s not really scary it’s just gross. I don’t like having the feeling I’m running into a giant sphincter. you find it funny? Okay..

The part outside with the car and the Striders is great though. But the last part when you can’t run with the gravity gun and some bomb you have to throw while you have like, 7 weapons including a rocket launcher is just plain annoying. I know it’s for balancing the gameplay but it’s not logical at all. Against Striders you really want to run.

Nothing like a gameplay flaw to put you out of the immersiveness.

Alyx Vance, hacker, scientist daughter, chatterbox

On the other side L4D 2 is making sense. Not a lot of weapons, only two to carry and tough choices (long distance riffle with a fried pan or shotgun and unlimited gun?). The AI Director is great. I don’t know how many run I did but they were all feeling different and that’s pretty much the point of it. It works, even on a solo game offline, even if the level design is quite linear.

But still, it’s classic fps. Watching cutscenes in HL2 I could not help but think about some fps with HUMOR! Why do we have to get this seriousness in this type of games I don’t understand. I want to laugh and move my mouse to look at the sky before having some action, not listening to a discussion trying to be mildy amusing in a dark corridor, waiting for the next dark mission in an alien belly (or worse, a missile silo).

Modern Warfare 2 is out and it’s the biggest game launch of the year. I watched a lot of footage and the fact it’s connected to wars from now with this uber realistic aesthetic makes me feel I don’t like it. Not funny at all.  

And this is it, I feel fatigue: last week headlines were about Zynga –Farmville, Mafia Wars, YoVille!- using scam practices to get revenue.

Also this inner interview of Keita Takahashi at Gamasutra:

“There are two main reasons for it, I think. Firstly, I‘m just frustrated with the industry as a whole. I can’t seem to predict where it’s going, which makes me feel uncomfortable," he says. "Or maybe I just don’t like where I think it’s going. I’m not sure."
"That’s probably related to my second frustration. I just can’t perceive where the fun is in recent hit video games. I see nothing in them that resonates with me and, their success leaves me feeling confused. The things I find interesting and enjoyable just aren’t reflected in the popular games of today and, I feel like there’s not much room for my voice because of that.”

I sort of feel the same way, even if I’m enjoying a good fps. I feel I could be addicted as a user. I could be addicted to some Facebook scam games easily too.

But as a developer I don’t think it’s great. It’s complex but I feel what Keita means, especially with games like music games or something as bad looking as the last Tony Hawk game. On the indy side, I feel fed up with the retro 8bit aesthetic, or platform games.

So the game market either seems like it’s not fun or it seems like you have to dig the addictiveness, especially with leaderboards and online rankings. Like this report said free-to-play game developers are using the social weaknesses –like peer pressure- to gain audience and money.

It’s not that it’s shocking in itself. It’s more like we’re basically doing the same shit that casinos and pachinko machines are doing for decades.

This is not good. It’s a sign that we’re totally in the mainstream though. But fuck, I don’t want computer games to go this way. I mean, not THAT much. And when I see EA rushing for this business instead of doing costly AAA, it’s not a good sign (they said that they would invest on quality and innovation; no more the case I guess).

I hope you guys at Project Horseshoe found some hope. Please share it!

That’s what basically stories to games are.

At the GDC 08, Ken Levine creative director on Bioshock told the audience something that would not please everyone:

“The bad news for storytellers is that nobody cares about your stupid story”

It’s still a point that hurts a lot of people but it’s totally true, even if we see a lot of game to movie conversions. It’s not for their stupid stories, it’s for the money. Because without interaction, Doom or Dead or Alive are just awful, plain bad stories.

In Edge’s Death Of The Author article Clint Hocking sums it up pretty well when comparing storytelling in games and other medias:

“[..] I’d rather play a game and then read a book than play a game with a story that isn’t as good as a book – particularly when it’s wrecked by the difference between what I’m doing and what I’m told is actually happening. I’d rather have two distinct experiences than one that feels like a bastard child.”

Storytelling is as old as the humanity. It works well on linear medias (books movies comics, thousand years of polishing) and doesn’t with non-linear medias such as games.

So is it really important in the interactive media?

I think that it’s not. Games stories are good for one thing: setting up the world.

SW theme + live setting: massive WIN. Of course Vader is on bass.

I asked myself why Monkey Island or Grim Fandango was so much good memories despite the fact of being adventure games, heavily storytelling focused. It’s not because of their stories, it’s because of their themes and world settings. Look at the story of Monkey Island:

“The game starts off with the main character Guybrush Threepwood stating "I want to be a pirate!" To do so, he must prove himself to three old pirate captains. During the perilous pirate trials, he meets the beautiful governor Elaine Marley, with whom he falls in love, unaware that the ghost pirate LeChuck also has his eyes on her. When Elaine is kidnapped, Guybrush procures crew and ship to track LeChuck down, defeat him and rescue his love”

It’s sort of a super cheap story you encountered in other medias millions of time. This is not really what stayed in my mind after playing it. What stays is the setting of evolving between Caribbean islands day and night. What stays is the humorous overall setting. What stays is hanging around doing my thing and trying to solve puzzles in this crazy world, mix of old golden age of piracy and contemporary US culture.

Same for Grim Fandango. But crazier.

And I really feel that a lot of games with “stories” are just appealing to people the same way those two games did on me. The fantasy setting of WoW appeals to people, the social interaction appeals to people. The story comes at the end. It could almost been removed (though hardcore people read all that quests shit), it’s not crucial to the quality of the game.

The Fantasy setting is strong because it relies on the roots of storytelling:

“Fantasy games have one unique feature that has not yet been duplicated in other genres: they are approachable and easily understood by the player base. If you say a game is “fantasy,” then you know it’s going to be roughly based on medieval technology, with some magic, probably some elves, and monsters to slay. This is because fantasy games are based on legends and fables that we’ve been telling/reading to our children for hundreds of years. Fantasy stories are part of our culture, and just about everyone has been exposed to them. Because of this, fantasy games are easily understood by the player base.”

That’s why SF is a niche for nerds (don’t take it personally, I prefer science to supernatural stuff in a medieval world). That’s why Eve is Eve. I mean, empty (300,000 accounts compared to 11 millions in WoW).

The same with Final Fantasy and japanese RPGs. Stupid and boring stories, outstanding and unique world settings (character design is a big part of it) that makes you want to dig and dive into it, thanks to the complex and deep RPG game system. Story is the cherry on the cake. And most of the time it stinks.

Anyway the thing is, these world settings are terribly missing the point that we are FREE to have any world setting we want. The recent Brutal Legend is a good example.

And believe me if you haven’t read One Piece, this picture is pretty normal.

I always think about mangas and animated movies as a crazy source of world settings. They always have something particular, a twist you didn’t see anywhere. Just thinking about FLCL or Mind Game and I have sparkles in my eyes figuring out something playable in that sort of… Mmh, maybe they are too crazy.

Instead we go the safe path providing classic, over-used settings trying to be as cool as the next action movie. Is that all we can do?

I’m sure it’s not.