h. Play

Raph Koster going to town.

People don’t get it. This is not about being right or wrong about business models. This is about sustainability, the most important thing for just about anything you care about.

First Raph demonstrates that yeah, games are cheaper now. And yes, they cost more than ever to make and we are reaching market saturation. I know, a lot of companies are profitable and the market is still growing. But that’s a short term, under-a-decade view. The long term is way more grim (people already have forgotten about the dozens of studios closed in the past years, just on the US west coast). A few more years and we are done, we will crash hard. So we should, we have to reduce costs, right? Especially when we know that the correlation between production value and success is not that strong anymore. In fact, it’s never been weaker.

Raph argues on Twitter: Consumers demand more; more sells graphics cards and computers; new tech comes out and it’s cool; pubs need to compete with other pubs… there’s lots of reasons to keep upping the ante.

The thing is we’re reaching saturation on hardware too: Moore’s law is not driving prices down and performance up like it used to. We’re struggling now. This is good! CPUs and GPUs from the past three or four years are powerful and under-exploited. Raph talks about servers being under-utilized, we can say the same with a lot of hardware in people’s homes.

All of today’s most successful games are not the most demanding games. When Ultima 8 or Wing Commander II came out you really needed the top of tomorrow’s machines. Today you can play LoL or PUBG or GTAV, Minecraft, The Sims on $700 laptops and will have fun. This is great.

If being technically more advanced than competition used to work, it doesn’t anymore thanks to hardware stalling and game engines being the same everywhere. So where can we or should we differentiate ourselves and how to grab those players?

– Community and multiplayer

As Raph says, this is costly and not easy at all. It also means certain types of games are out.

– Systemic content instead of static content 

I would argue that fine-tuning systemic content on a large scale might cost as much as creating static content, with much less predictability of said content “working”. Procedural audio for example, is quite tricky. Still, it should be used in game development as much as possible and we’re not doing a great job at that.

– Revise our game habits

I think this is a viable option. We need to loosen up. We have a tendency to follow a strict monoculture. Take bosses for instance. If you make a metroidvania, you automatically have bosses to fight. It’s a convention. Maybe some people would play your game, enjoy it and want to finish it without having to stress out about a boss battle. It’s the kind of things where we are legit stubborn. Let it go! If that means a lot more people will play, then embrace the change. Player customization is becoming the norm, demonstrating that it does bring more people to try a game out. We need to carve an experience that most people will enjoy, from mechanics to aesthetics.

– Much better accessibility

Playing games is still a nightmare in terms of logistics: do we have enough controllers? Is the system up to date? Let me configure those sixteen buttons to fit my playing style. Let me re-configure those movements on the keyboard and I need my inverted y axis on my mouse, etc. It’s a pain in the ass to play new games. I think operating systems should get on that and integrate gaming a lot more. I should be able to log in and have my game input preferences saved and ready for me to use. Regardless of the hardware I’m using. No, consoles don’t cut it because they’re fixed hardware and tend to destroy interoperability, a crucial and essential need in technology. Agnosticism, all the way.

Accessibility is a very tedious and annoying problem but streamlining gaming more would benefit our medium so much. People wouldn’t stress out the technical details of having fun. Login, grab your favorite controller, done.

There’s so much to do.

Right now, we have some of the best tools ever made to build game audio and computer games.

The duopoly FMOD and Wwise as well as all the custom audio engines and older ones allow us audio designers around the world to integrate audio with input, game mechanics, animation, interactivity and so forth.

We have great tools. The question is: in the experience of playing the game, how much control audio has? How much audio is kind of central to a core mechanic, to an experience?

The answer is: we need game engines to listen to players and audio! How many games are listening? Why NPCs in FPS are so impossibly deaf? Someone screaming like a pig cannot not be heard by someone a few stairs away. Why? We’ve all watched and listen to the making of of Inside’s game audio. The biggest takeaway being that the game runs on top of the audio layer. That is, audio happens and the game waits for it or acts accordingly. Most games don’t. Most games will stream some music or soundscape and cut it like someone unplugged the speakers, just to load the next level. In 2018 with the amount of storage, memory speed and all those CPU threads, we have very, very few technical excuses. It’s all about decisions.

Those are decisions that need to be made at the game design and game engine level. It’s not about audio technology, generated or authored content. It’s about deciding that audio should and would be treated as an underlying layer orchestrating the rest. It is extremely efficient at enhancing a game and polishing it.

Nintendo has been doing that for so long with enormous success. Many 80s and 90s games have “smart” audio. Martin Stig Andersen had a full session at GDC in 2016 on how Inside is a game that listens. It’s a bit embarrassing that we’re not making this a common practice across our industry, a standard for game audio.

Making games listen is crucial to our craft. To our polish. In a world of very expensive game development, audio could… *puts sunglasses on* change the game.

Book by Jesse Schell. Great stuff, I can’t read it without hearing Jesse’s voice. He’s a great orator. I had already gone through quickly. It’s always good to re-read academic books years later. There are points though, that I think are changing quite dramatically.

On demographics

Jesse pins the 25-35 bracket as peak family formation, which is pretty far from what is going on these days. I’d say this is the bracket where people stop playing games because life is stressful as hell or it’s when they play 24/7 because life is stressful as hell.

That’s quite a change. the 35-50 bracket is the peak family formation now. But it is also a bracket that has other properties that it didn’t used to have, like a much higher number of single people or couples with no kids. It extends into the 50+ bracket. Those people want games that last, games with legs. Games you can come back to anytime without feeling left out. Games that are more about mechanics than stories because after over three decades on earth, if you consumed a decent amount of entertainment, you already have experienced most stories. Games that are almost more like adult toys than games.

On males and females

Jesse starts straight up by affirming that males and females are different. Man, do I disagree. The only thing that makes us different is appearance, a bit of extra muscles for men and a bit more fat for women. That’s it. We all love different things. Woman or man, it doesn’t matter. Some women adore competition, some men don’t give a damn. Sometimes it even depends on the time of the day. I might be very competitive at 10am but will just say “nah I’m good” at 930pm. Unless I’m on a dance floor. Shit varies.

On the physical front, women have been closing the  performance gap since they can train as much as men now. Tennis women serve as fast as men these days. This is really new. But it’s that simple. More similar training, closer physical performance.

I think it’s weird to claim “we’re different, duh” on the basis of what society has created, our old habits and traditions. If you take all of that away, humans are quite similar. That is, we’re diverse. Gender doesn’t really matter. I think it alleviates some designer pain: not thinking about women VS men when designing is liberating. But it requires more work: it’s harder to encompass a much bigger, mixed crowd. This is good for the future I think.

On architecture

Jesse writes “the human mind is very weak when it comes to translating 3D spaces into 2D maps.” I guess I’m pretty good at that. I can navigate and translate 3D to 2D and 2D to 3D in my head quite easily. I’m always one of the first in a group of people looking at a map in a mall to understand where to go. I never get lost. I can go somewhere once and remember how to go back years later. I navigate my future house in my head as I’m pleased. It’s cool! But how to monetize this though… I digress.

On audio

“audio can be incredibly powerful”. No, audio *is* powerful. It definitely is. It’s a physiological thing. Your eyes go to sleep, your ears are on 24/7. Ears and being able to listen and survive are deeply connected. Ears are wired in ASM and eyes are like some weird mix of shaders and C#, whatever. That’s why audio feedback is more visceral than visual feedback, and why we should spend a lot more time on audio than textures but anyway. As Jesse is saying, sound brings life to touch interfaces, making them a lot more enjoyable. The problem is battery life: yes, playing a sound on a speak every single time you touch a screen drains a battery like crazy. Nonetheless, audio y’all.

On curiosity

Jesse goes “in a sense, curiosity makes you “own” your learning”. That’s how I feel too. I’m curious as much as I can, wondering about many things. I think curiosity is something that you’re more or less born with but does the environment shapes us. I nurtured curiosity by growing up in the 80s and 90s, when you didn’t have a choice but wait for tiny bits of knowledge to come once a month, through a bunch of magazines.

Kids and teenagers today don’t know what’s like to be curious, they’re constantly overwhelmed. Not their fault, all of our screens are busy. They used to be black with a few white characters. Now new generations rarely know what’s good in owning/groking something, because they don’t even know the feeling. Abundance is a bitch.

The Art of Game Design.