h. Play

• Platform agnosticism

I wish developers would be much more on the side of not giving a fuck about the platform except in terms of input for their games. Yes, you make RETRO 8BIT looking games because you grew up with these, I get it. Yes you make a game focused on narrative because you always wanted to be a movie director and that the Playstation brand is your 20s forever in your mind, I get it too.

I wish we would not be emotionally tied to a console, a manufacturer, making us wanting to develop for it, even if it’s not a good business decision. Ultimately games should work on any platform input-wise without that kind of subjective bullshit that is getting these games out of people scope. We should not push people wanting to buy a machine just for a game or two even if in terms of masturbation about how good a game is, it must be heaven. That’s how we missed the rise of the netbooks (imagine your great game packed with each one sold)  and the Android market right now (I’m too busy doing an iPhone me-too product!zomg iPad with wings!). We need to make good games, providing money as directly as possible while being free, independent as much as possible. Ban any other reasons to choose a platform for. Fuck exclusivity. Fuck the “console war”. Fuck the AppStore. We are the creator, we are the people adding value to a goddamn machine. Never forget that.

• Change for real

In ten years, two generations of machines and in some way some progress too. Tools are better, we know the gamedev Dos and Don’ts.. I know doing games is hard and unpredictable every time but still, when I hear or read stuff around that it’s still a mess, it’s still the crunch, it’s still the same milestones shit and people burning under it. In fucking 10 years we’re still having these problems, thanks to the massive turn-over with fresh and new blood every five years when the undead are escaping this crazy business. The same with games topics. It’s just insane how much we can eat of Mario, the lambda hero punching bad guys with crates around or the obligatory car race game (coming en masse on smartphones). The computer world is so fast, the difference with how damn slow/dumb we are to change habits/topics/themes of our games is driving me crazy.

Dev people still don’t give a damn about games. Sound designers and visual designers want to jump to the movie stardom, coders dream of big pay checks with less working hours in some big corporation and they all do when they got the experience from the hard world of the game industry. This trend has to stop.

• Diversity

18 250 people at the 2010 edition, biggest GDC ever. Robin Hunicke said the population of female developers is about 5% since years which is totally awful and depressing (putting pressure on the few who stand out, also accused –sometimes maybe for good reasons too- of playing the diversity card in a white/asian male hegemony). The Women in Games conference has been canceled due to “low delegate numbers”. Then I tried to get some black people pictures from the conference.

Hey a black game developer! Oh. Nevermind.

I found some others but I can’t say if they’re developers, game journalists or party people.

Nah. Not this one.

The only one I got for sure is Scott Anderson from Shadow Physics fame.

Steve Swink and Scott Anderson, Indie Developers.

Man, I had to browse FIFTEEN pages on Flickr to find my first black man and almost the double to find Scott. 18 250 people. Let’s not even start on the skin shades. It’s fucking creepy. I live this shit and it seriously hurts if I look too much at it. Sometimes I feel that everything that goes wrong in the game industry comes from that fact, that absolute lack of diversity, in every way. The tragedy of it is that I don’t know any industry with as much good and open-minded people so how the fuck does the gamedev world end up with the square glasses/lumberjack shirt/beard nerd fest all over GDC stairs and rooms and nothing else?

• Who are you

I did a few parties in LA and the photo booth is part of the thing, usually. How a big event like GDC doesn’t have an official Flickr stream (there is one, filled with pretty boring panelists pictures and random group of people at parties) with a photo booth of attendees? I can’t believe how it’s still so damn HARD to get pictures of creative and smart men and women who are stealing people time more than sex or drugs ever did or will. Maybe it’s related with the diversity thing, it would show to the world how something is fucking wrong. Or push developers to be careful with the pizza diet (that would be good actually), I don’t know but I regret that you have to search in a hardcore way to see their faces AND knowing who are the people providing THOUSANDS of hours of play, sucking hundreds of hours of millions people’s life.

Indies are obviously more playing this card for marketing purposes and that’s great. It makes me more willing to pay for a game. Sending my money to a bot in a basement or a mega corporation in a store is less satisfying, human.

the good news is that if we solve just one of these point, the others are going to be so much easier to manage and make them trivial. Anyway. I’ll be there next year. Fuck Yeah.

 
Seriously.

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.