h. Play

And when I say character I mean avatar. Usually developers fail to:

• Think ahead of time that this, avatar representation, matters.

And usually developers never miss to:

• Argue that it doesn’t fit the settings/theme/story of the game.

I think the first point is easy to solve.

Especially if your game aims at youngsters and kids, the right thing to do is allow customization. It really counts, it has a tremendous positive effect. You know about the black astronaut who became astronaut because she saw a black woman in Star Trek, right? Tons of stories like that. I remember vividly seeing a black Iron Man and thinking in my little 7 year old head “fuck yeah!” or something. If you are a game developer and believe games can change things, this is a way of doing it.

For the second point, it gets more complicated: no, I don’t think it is a good argument to dismiss skin tone customization in games in which players will spend dozens of hours looking at their avatars by implying that that heroic-fantasy themed game is trying to be realistic or historically accurate.

Guys, there is no “real” accuracy in fiction, never will be. We can do whatever we want. Lara Croft could be Asian and black. Shit is mysterious? So be it. It’s fiction, it’s imagination. Imagination is personal, triggers your own world. You need to leave parts open in your design so that players can enjoy “building” their own interest to characters and stories according to their lives. That’s how you make things inclusive.

Now, I’m a grown ass man and I don’t necessarily need things to match me all the time. I can enjoy a movie and get engaged following the story of a Mexican woman or I can play Just Cause 2 for hours without thinking one second about character customization. In this game it doesn’t matter, the spectacle is the environment.

I need my black people but it’s like water and being hydrated, I don’t need an IV 24/7 for that.

Anyway as often, it’s a case by case thing. How long are you going to look at your character? All the time? Allow customization. Is the game going around your character or is it more about the rest? About the rest and your team is too small to afford to spend time on this? Have no customization.

You can of course make the game exactly like you want, for you and your friends first but if people buy and enjoy your game BUT want/wish they could customize their characters and that you tell them to go away, that’s not very nice. And kind of plain stupid.

Austin explains why he wishes Arkham Knight’s Gotham was more populated and analyzes the relationship between superheroes and cities.

Giantbomb is running this article that is perfect to explore the big issue with writing about games.

I know what Austin wants. I love it too, wandering in a virtual place that has a life is sweet. For some. For others, it’s not that interesting and when you make a game you have to compromise really quick. Why? Because really quickly when you have your prototype and your systems running, your characters on screen, assets, you realized that having a “real” city running in the background might be too much if not possible at all.

That’s really the core here. Writers so often think that design stuff is fluid in the build process, it is not. High level design (“make the city alive”) is attached to real things like machine performance, how good your code is, how many people work on this, and how much is already happening. Design is very fragmented at this point, fragile, dependent. And most people have no idea most of the time. Batman Arkham Night is a thick sandwich, there’s a lot going on. Making an open world game gorgeous with almost no loading is some serious achievement. It’s a performance and game writers often just don’t see it this way they think we can just put more stuff in front of the camera, that we just need time. Wrong.

Then, we always have this kind of dumb argument: “but game developer X did it before!” Please, never use that argument that’s the worst. It’s like saying “you can’t run the 100m under 10s? It’s been done before so often!!”. It is a dumb argument.

It takes a lot to make a city feel like it’s alive in a computer game. Taking GTA V as an example of how to do it is oblivious: everyone knows Rockstar is the only company that can/financially afford to do that. Stop being coy! GTA V is five years of development, half a decade with according to Wikipedia over 360 people. Austin goes on with The Witcher 3 doing the city well: four years of development with 230 people in Poland.

Rocksteady is 160 people in the UK. They had four years too but probably way more pressure (it’s the godamn Batman), even just financially (London is far more expensive than Warsaw).

I know, that producer shit is not fun. But when I see people complain –and I’m on Austin’s side, I like wandering in digital cities that feel alive- I’m always annoyed that people don’t realize that it’s not JUST design decisions. It’s not just TOP DOWN, there’s a lot of BOTTOM UP in game development and when an engineer is telling you “we can have an open world but forget about making it alive without HUGE issues” you don’t tell him “but I really want  that” you find ways to mitigate that aspect. Make the player drive that Batmobile a lot for example.

Welcome to game development where you can do anything while you can’t at all.

This week, I’ll be discussing abuse and toxic behaviour in the CS:GO community. Before we get to it, let me reiterate that I am madly in love with Counter-Strike. It’s simply one of the best team games out there. This piece, however, is meant to highlight one important issue that I think we can overcome.

RPS is running that article by Emily Richardson on abuse in CS. I have no idea why people freak out over freedom of speech being taken away or how anonymity allows abuse because there’s no accountability. I’m like what the fuck is wrong with you people?

Oh I know the problem, I have pretty much never played that game outside LANs because of all the racial slurs online. But now I’m a grown up and I still like this game very much. I play with bots and can’t wait for that next LAN that will happen someday.

“The problem stems from the lack of consequence in these games for what would be arrestable real world conduct.”

No, the problem comes down to the fact that we’re talking about teenagers. Maybe early twenties, you know that time when you don’t know shit and you think you’re smart and sleek but you’re still testing boundaries. It’s an age issue to me, by far. When I read this:

No one likes dying, and dying for something that was the responsibility of another player gets to people generally

It gets to you when you’re young and have no patience. When you’ve been married, pay taxes, saw real death hit real friends and that you just want to have a good time strategizing on a Counter Strike map with people who share the same kind of life, none of that gets to you unless you have other issues that are not the game’s problem. Isn’t it obvious?

I don’t care who you are, I just know that if you’re sixteen to almost thirty I mostly don’t want to play with you. It’s fine, you don’t want no grumpy old gamer, I don’t want none of your ignorance and lack of self-control.

Now a lot of games are still played by young people and if games like LoL or DOTA2 have everlasting abuse issues, it’s because early 20s+stardom+insane cash prizes leads to people losing their shit online and getting nasty.

So Two Things To Save CS:GO and multiplayer games:

– There’s a Steam ID and FB connection? Let me filter by age and report age cheaters.

– Let’s log off. Let’s have WAY more LANs. That’s ultimately far better (hearing an opponent shout “fuuuck” across the room is always so satisfying) and if you want to fistfight on the parking lot, there’s that too.

The weird thing about Satoru Iwata is how much he’s praised and how much we have been following none of his advices, as an industry. Almost a decade ago, this is what Satoru was talking about:

We frequently compare ourselves to the motion picture business. We are fascinated with the movies. Hollywood is like an older brother who’s already succeeded; we race to measure our success against his.

Our method of content creation is modeled on the studio system. We measure the popularity of our virtual stars against Hollywood’s real ones. Over the years, we have frequently created games based on the movies’ biggest names — and we now take pride when a movie occasionally develops a script based on one of ours. Angelina Jolie starred in two "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" movies, which were based on the video game adventurer.

But in terms of reaching a mass audience, we are not quite ready for our close-up. Although video game sales and movie box-office receipts are similar in the U.S., movie sales, rentals and pay-per-view keep them far ahead of us.

We may even be headed in the wrong direction. A recent survey of U.S. high school students shows a trend: Young people who used to say they played games weekly now report they play only monthly. Sales have been declining for several months.

When we gather for the Electronic Entertainment Expo at the L.A. Convention Center this week, we may want to blame outside factors. But I fear we are doing much of the damage to ourselves. Most of us who create, publish, sell and consume video games see ourselves more as a tribe than representatives of society as a whole. We adopt our own beliefs and behaviors, and we often disregard those who don’t conform — not a prescription for market health.

Throughout recorded history, playing games has been a natural form of entertainment, practiced by all ages, all cultures and both genders. Our challenge is to bring more people to our modern version. In this sense, Hollywood can be a role model. The film industry welcomes all consumers, creating content with a wide appeal.

On the other hand, there are two significant ways in which we perhaps would be wise not to emulate the movies. First, video games have decisively adopted the high-risk business model of the blockbuster. For some new game machines, development budgets will reach $20 million, perhaps even $30 million — plus marketing costs. Even if retail prices rise, it will be increasingly difficult to recover costs if the audience is not growing.

Second, we would do well to consider what Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, describes as "the innovator’s dilemma." We are an industry that has spent many years "improving" our product along a single performance vector — in our case, graphical realism. But we are reaching a point of diminishing returns. Like Hollywood, which in the past has focused too heavily on special effects, we need to find other ways to improve.

Through the years, motion pictures have benefited from several significant technical advances. They added sound, then color … and air conditioning inside theaters. Only one of these — color — had to do with what was actually seen on screen. The other two enhanced the nature of how movies were enjoyed by stimulating other senses.

It’s funny how game developers keep getting confused about the fact that you can be inspired by something (Hollywood mass appeal) and simultaneously reject part of that something (studio business model). The bits on how we game developers are a tribe rather than representatives of society as a whole rings true today. Where are the elderly games, you know they’re going to be a majority in all countries pretty soon right? I’ve never seen any game developer besides myself on my blog wonder about computer games for elderly. The tribe.

We haven’t really moved on and that’s worrying.

Thank you for the inspiration. If you don’t know why Mr Iwata was so important here’s why from the LA Times:

Shortly before Iwata became Nintendo president in 2002, the company launched what became one of its bigger flops: the GameCube console, a successor to the Nintendo 64. The GameCube failed to outsell Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox, compelling Nintendo to rethink its direction.

Enter the Wii.

The Wii was instrumental in ushering in the modern era of casual gaming, as it was heavily based on motion controls and family-centric entertainment. The system, as well as Iwata’s corporate mandate, was drastically different from those of Nintendo’s competitors in the home video game console business.

Rather than focusing on technological achievements or becoming an all-in-one home media center, the Wii broadened the audience by enabling just about anyone to easily pick up and play a game. Games such as "Wii Sports," which lets people play virtual tennis with the wave of an arm, captivated the public.

In an opinion piece Iwata wrote for The Times in 2006, he argued that the game industry was becoming too closed-off to new consumers. He wrote that the industry should worry less about graphical enhancements and high-tech wizardry and instead look for ways to enhance “the emotional ways people interact with our games.”

Such a big influence. He’s the guys who made my parents play games on their TV, that’s the biggest feature ever. Even though I wish it had gone further, the Wii changed everything.

Badass programmer, project manager and Big Boss. I can’t help but think that this extremely high stress made him skip a good decade of life. RIP.