h. Play

So Infinity Ward loses more staff after Jason West and Vince Zampella created a new studio, Respawn Entertainment. Lead game designer, lead software engineer, senior animator, not everybody is joining the new game studio but the thing is, Modern Warfare as an IP is sort of dead now. It didn’t take long.

So Activision, biggest game publisher in the world is in trouble: Guitar Hero is going down, DJ Hero has never been a success and Modern Warfare is no more existing. Developers, be prepared for more layoffs.

About the iPad. I think it’s the endless Apple pattern: they hate games. They don’t understand gamers. They sell and unveiled their new product as a thing to read digital stuff on it while everybody go crazy for the game possibilities. 2/3 of iPad apps are games. They unveiled (at last) the social gaming network and claim they have 50 000 games against 2 500 on the Nintendo DS.

Well, as a consumer 2 500 games is already a hell of a lot. I have like, ten of them. As a developer battling against 2 500 others is hard, battling against 50 000 other games is just not interesting. The noise is gigantic and you can’t really find a niche market on an appstore like Apple did (there’s not even categories for iPad games).  And they want developers not being able to do cross-platform? Did I say that they don’t give a shit about developers? It just makes sense: developers, as musicians for iTunes are just appealing products to sell more Apple hardware. They don’t care about developers making say, a living by producing apps. They don’t care about the software economics of today where any app needs to be on as many platforms as possible (except for three or four lucky early iPhone developers) to make money. They just want to dictate you and screw you.

For the sake of innovation and freedom, no thanks.

Hi Robot!

Beatnik Games launches their first game, Plain Sight. They’re working on another game about Ada Lovelace (amazing story!), produced by Channel 4, english TV.

Please take note, France.

Market wise, Nintendo announcing the 3DS is really smart. No useless Wii HD that would confuse consumers, no Wii motion controller add-on that would say that they are scared by Sony/MS upcoming Move and Natal. No, something new and hot like mobile 3D screen, setting a new trend in discussion and putting the motion control and touch control (iPhone) so last year while staying true to the good old gamepad scheme that millions of people know.

Now, let’s see what it’s going to be in real world. Maybe that.

 
24 minutes about Sid Meier and his career.

Music Master: Chopin is sort of a Romantic Band or Piano Hero I guess.

That is all for today.

• 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”)

;-)