h. Play

Wow. GDC annual rant. I started reading Chris Hecker report and saw Heather Chaplin’s more important one.

You see it’s really funny. Her under reported rant has many points and yet all I can find on the web (interestingly enough, I found more with twittersearch than with google) is people whining about snippets of what she said.

They totally prove her point. We’re a bunch of fucking adolescents that can’t take some critics especially from a woman without yelling YOU BITCH. Reports and responses on the web demonstrate that.

I often complain about the immaturity of the industry. People want to see that as elitism but it’s not. It’s just a view that I don’t want to have something like sex+violence=fun for all the games we make, as a value we absolutely need to fullfill our fantasies with. I did enjoy this shit since when I first could, I enjoyed it from like 86 to now so yeah I’m kinda fucking fed up with especially with nine years in the industry. When I see Wolfenstein3D on the iphone I don’t care, RE 5 is the same etc I don’t believe I’m the only one. Peer pressure is at it.

Others medium have a large and wide panel of tastes and feelings, we don’t. This is the damn point people.

So the first search result about Heather is at David Jaffe’s blog. He knows her so that’s a cool rant.

“The two children whom I spawned and whom I support and love and nurture every day would beg to differ. Even when dog tired, even as a divorced dad who is trying to figure out his new life, I still am an amazing father who shows up for those kids every day. And I do so with joy and love and a strong sense of gratitude that they are in my life. To me, this is the measure of a man, not an adolescent.
The employees who work for the company I co-own and co-founded, the employees-who after years of working at it have become some of the best programmers and artists in the business and who previously created simulations for the government in order to train the troops that protect our country-are clearly adults, not adolescents.”

Well I don’t want to criticize –just debunking- but spawning kids is not an adult stuff, it’s a mamal thing we all can do even as teenagers. Plus sorry but only a long time will let you know if you are an “amazing” father. Founding a startup after ten years or so in a big company with a multi year deal with that big company is not a hard adult choice, it’s a good and quite safe challenge. Nothing to brag about as a ballsy adult thing.

Heather’s point is still valid with that kind of arguments. They may even prove it.

“Sure, I think our industry CAN do better at making games more impacting by mixing meaning and entertainment.”

This is the POINT!! We CAN et we SHOULD ffs. We should push more on it because that’s what games that count are: Deus Ex, Ico, Fallout Katamary Damacy etc have all that damn sense, it makes games stronger no question about it. So stop dodging this fact all the time saying that only bloody gory fun counts or that YOU as a game maker or a player don’t want to care about this stuff and so that it’s crap. It’s childish.

We should have more and more shades of themes and ideas behind our games than only power fantasy as says PixelVixen707:

“It’s eerie how rarely the qualities she ticked off find a place in games. This is important not just to the girls, but to the boys who don’t dream of being a marine or a quarterback. In music, boys can listen to boys who aren’t macho. If balls-out, cock-out rock ain’t your thing, you can listen to Belle & Sebastian. There’s a spectrum of masculinity and femininity, and endless ways for both boys and girls to respond to it. But in games, aggression is the default, and relationships are usually as clumsy as a third-grade dance.”

We absolutely don’t have that. We don’t search for it because we’re not really trying to for a question of paycheck and market but more seriously because the industry lacks diversity: with a 88,5% male 83.3% white 92% heterosexual population (GDC 09 pics make me sad) how the FUCK could we be able to build shades of fun based on values like responsibility, introspection, intimacy, or intellectual discovery that would appeal to a LARGE and DIVERSE population?

We can’t so we rely on the same old shit that sells well and then we blame Heather and people like her for not being able to understand us? It’s childish.

Of course we can’t really compare with music and movies in the 30 years of our existence because we don’t have the same tools history: microphone technology was up really early and never really changed. Movie camera is the same. Game engine? Oh boy.

Still, Heather is right. In thirty years or more we should have done better.

I think I’ll let Jason Della Rocca who did a great job at IGDA before resigning from it finish this rant about people ranting about Heather’s rant with this post:

“Sorry for not having the leadership skills to beat the barriers of participation inequality. Less than 1% of the IGDA membership are truly active in driving the org forward. Sorry for not doing a better job building up a strong pipeline of community leaders and volunteers. Sorry for not overcoming your general apathy and laziness.

Sorry for not getting you to be more serious about the profession of game development. You are no longer a bunch of hacks. This is a real art and science. We need to be way more deliberate and control the path the profession takes as it evolves into the future.

Most of all, sorry for not doing more to help you realize your power! Both, collectively as a profession to tackle industry issues, and as creators of culture. You are all having a massive impact on society. You are transforming the world day-by-day without even realizing it.

Oh well, fuck you, it’s not my job anymore!”

• Social responsability.

As every year, Alice does an awesome job when it comes to panel translation. Lorne Lanning said interesting things:

“I think a lot of us are so full of shit. Most action gaming is really sociopathic. What we do we do, we love blowing shit away, that’s sociopathic.”

But in real life how developers live is kinda sociopathic too: playing action violent games, gathering in small dedicated crowd, stuffing themselves with junk food.. Sometimes it’s necessary I’m ok on this, but do we really have to make it as “the true” game developer lifestyle? How can we make games be more responsible when we aren’t? With lifes as healthy as they were when we were in college? No wonder that our field is lacking women or that game developers girlfriends don’t really exist. No wonder why we don’t try to adress society problems like aging fast population and elderly market (man, it’s gonna be so huge in a few years). Our medium is powerful we all recognize this. Time to fucking grow up. We can be responsible AND childish. The second has been done for years now.

“The other thing is how well do you sleep at night. [When making Oddworld] we were told several times ‘you know, I feel great, I’m publishing a game that I can go home and show my kids.”

This is only true with non-sociopathic gamedev peeps, like a very few are. People don’t give a shit about responsability in the industry, it’s not something we’re searching for sadly. I tend to, trying to respect myself, having a normal life. That’s suppose people to get better at what they do, there is room but guess what they don’t. They want to do games as we make movies. 3D modelers often can’t stop dreaming about the big black screen for example. They move triangles all day and night long while having breaks watching Pixar trailers and playing sociopathic games.

See?

the panel was apparently dodging a real good question:

“There was a last question about how the panel was dodging this idea that games can teach good, but at the same time can’t be held responsible for provoking realworld violence, which seems to be a paradox to many.”

It can be held responsible for provoking realworld violence, no question about that, we just don’t want to acknowledge this because we fear others medias would kill us all talking shit about how we badly influence young people with violent games, as they already do everytime they can.

Eskil’s Love game. Dude it’s code, we can do everything. Every. Things.

Madworld is all about destroying people but the visuals are meant to translate a dreamy world, like it doesn’t really exist. GTA IV plays the “it’s almost fucking real” card and no matter what people think, it’s not helping the medium.

But it makes large teams work for years on that kind of game production.

If we want less of that, less technical updates of games, less social responsability dodging BS we need people to get better at making games like suggests Eskil.

“Making games is a little like being a fashion designer. Fashion is not about making beautiful clothing, Its about making beautiful people. A successful designer is not the one who is in the center, but some one who makes the wearer the center. The story isn’t yours, its the players.”

This is why I totally focused myself on games, forgetting about movies. Forgetting about stories. Digging books on game design, stuffing my head with technical coding stuffs etc I don’t see a lot of designers doing so. They’re “artists” you know… Eskil wrote:

“Concept art stems from the idea that you need to quickly pre-visualize your game before you get to the expensive task of actually making it. Our goal should be to cut the cost of making the content so much that Concept art is no longer needed.”

I think that’s really true. Concept art is friggin’ slow! While I understand the “wow” effect for the old publisher-brick and mortar way to do business, designing ingame as soon as possible is way better to make it effectively in-game. This is why I just can’t stand the VIDEO before games, it makes people focus on the visual part of the medium instead of the game experience. Drives me crazy, it’s as stupid as saying bio vegetables.. Oh wait.

We live some stunning times don’t we? We need to put the obvious in front of things. This is not a mark that we are getting smarter if you ask me. Like the rest of the society, the industry has made a terrific job at making posers famous and all. But making games is hard and you can’t really fake it it’s almost automatically translated in a bad experience or something gamers are going to feel as wrong like a bad balance or heterogeneous assets.

This is where ease of developement is critical.

• On ease of development.

Iteration. This word I really learn about reading Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun, is the main thing: we have to iterate things, assets, stuffs, ideas, everything in the real game engine. As soon as possible, as often as needed.

For that coding and tools should be fast and efficient. And this is where open source is limited right now and still, because there is two cases from a game design point of view:

-You are not efficient on these technologies and you’re having hard times to tweak things that should work by themselves because they are just trivial from a gameplay perspective.

-You are super efficient on these technologies. For that you are digging so much tech that you are no longer working on a game, you are working around a game.

When technology is hard to work with, specialists are needed to do things. When technology is easy, generalists are better at achieving that. In small teams with rapid iteration process, the latter is much more useful.

With that in mind, it’s not difficult to understand why Capcom loves the 360, why Keita prototypes Noby Noby Boy on 360, why a polished game made by a dude alone is possible in one year and a half and a good framework, why the IGF winner is a game made by one man with MS tools (XNA once again), why a lot of GGJ games were done in Flash or DirectX, why Fmod rules the game audio world etc

Of course we tend to prefer open solutions, that’s a no-brainer. But being able to do stuffs extremely fast or with limited ressources (like on the game I work, toolchain made by one man in one month, full .Net C#) is the real key there.

Eskil-like people are way too rare, as he said on his blog.. But they are the real game designers. I do my best to be like that.

It’s like OnLive makes people angry. Of course it’s kinda revolutionary. Let’s look at arguments. Like this one:

“Let’s say tens of thousands of people sign up for the launch of Run, Shoot, Kill, Repeat 10. That’s the sole reason they’ve signed up for the service, and it’s their first impression. They, like a ton of other people, want to play the game the first second it’s available. Good luck managing that demand spike without having crap performance and pissing everyone off.”

You guys remember the launch of Steam? Ask Valve people how many players were puking on the service when it launched. It was in 2003 after being revealed at the GDC 02 and digital distribution was exactly at the same point that cloud computing is today: something nobody is arguing against that it is the future and yet nobody is doing it.

Now Steam has 20M+ user accounts and they’re the big fucking beast, the leader of the games digital distribution that everyone is trying to compete. I think OnLive is ready to take the risk to piss off users on day one. No problem.

Second argument I read a lot:

“The problem is in the nature of the task.  Games are inherently compute intensive.  There’s a reason that you need a behemoth of a machine to run Crysis.
For a service of this kind to make any money, you need to be able to support tens of thousands of users at the same time.  Halo 3, for example, has 80k users online as I write this.  Granted, this is across the entire world, but the hardware to support the  simulation, rendering and video compression for each of those games would be staggering.”

Who said it would only be Crysis and über heavy demanding games that people are going to play? What about a game like GRID running on a little 8.9” netbook screen? It sure demands a lot less power than on a 24”. Who said people are going to play games which need extreme reactivity? World of Goo can be played with a big latency I guess. If I look at my software synthesizers, “real time latency” –below 5ms- is not needed for a lot of things (even if for some like drums it’s mandatory). SF IV is running smoothly online and frankly I’m impressed. A few years ago it was still a dream plagged with issues.

I think people are a bit jealous :) Of course publishers have already signed up otherwise they’re really going to die: developers could push their game on the service without worrying about publishers, exclusivity shit deals. Noby Noby Boy and Flower would totally benefit from a service like this (remember the spectator value). Instead of that, they’re stuck on a platform and nobody cares about them despite the fact that they’re really cool games. Go OnLive, go. And make room for game developers, they’re going to make you successful.

I’ll do a third post on GDC about ease of development and social responsability.

Last week was my first time with Madworld on Wii. Disturbing, assumed and viciously joyful.

 
COME HEEERE

Man, I could say I knew it! for a lot of things from this GDC year.

First, the OnLive thing. It’s everywhere on my game feeds. As Gamasutra says:

“The ambitious venture, which hopes to revolutionize the gaming world by removing the need to continually upgrade PC hardware or buy new gaming consoles every generation, makes use of cloud computing — doing all of the game’s video and audio processing on remote servers, then streaming the resultant images and sound back to the user quickly enough to play games in real time.”

You can watch the conference here. It demoed a Crysis play session on a Dell studio 15, the one I use to type this post. When I play some Valve stuff, the laptop is getting like a hoover and I just can’t stand it.

Some days ago I was talking about Asus and cheap PCs. For those platforms I was thinking about casual and not heavy raw power demanding games of course. But with a service like OnLive, it could be every games.

Imagine playing games from the eee keyboard, co-op mode with eee sticks, unplugging and plugging  from screens to screens without worrying about technical shit.. The NAS could be a great memory cache for the service etc At last, an open/closed easy and limitless platform to play and develop for. From the double consumer/developer view, it’s heaven.

There’s still a lot to solve from a technical perspective for the heavier games but it’s very promising and sure is the future.

The main attract for me is the spectator value. I love to watch people play, I have countless hours of HLTV with SoGamed –when the site was red and black-, or on the couch analyzing my buddies playing consoles. For the spread of the medium, of the gameplay experience of the game culture it can’t be done more easily than with channels to switch like on the familiar TV set.

It’s really exciting.

One famous analyst said that it would be the last console generation. Sorry dude, I said the same a year ago (can’t show you my archives are still broken). Now I guess Nintendo would move to the cloud as soon as they can –in Nintendo terms, when it’s making money for them from day one- with a new Wii, competing OnLive. MS/Sony would follow. Look at how the giant of the electronic is doing well thanks to the N1 number crushing beast aka DQ:

here are the February NPD’s:
Wii–753,000
360–391,000
PS3–276,000
PS2–131,000
There are plenty of ways to look at that data, and if you’re Sony, they’re all bad. PS2 and PS3 sales combined, which have been a hallmark of post-announcement PR spin, were down 35% compared to 2008. PS3 sales were roughly flat (276k vs. 281k in 2008), but in February of 2008, PS3 unit sales accounted for 29% of next-gen (360, PS3, Wii) console sales. This year? 19.4%. So Sony’s PS3 sales stayed flat in a month with much higher next-gen unit sales overall.
Oh, and PSP sales? Down over 18% in February compared to last year.
Combined, and there’s only one word to describe that: freefall.

I mean the two monsters consoles are struggling to make money. For real. At a big, big expense. Software is moving so fast, it’s quite sure they can’t keep up with PCs and cloud computing. So.. Yeah. Good news for everyone that counts in the equation: this generation is going to last very long, and developers should be free to go for the digital distribution on computers called personal computers.

In an older post I was writing:

“This year once again north guys are at it (meanwhile they were around for years): Erik Svedäng from Blueberry Garden fame which has never really had a fame BUT the game always seduced me (audio atmosphere, physics, simplicity I’m sold!), here’s the trailer.”

Blueberry Garden won the IGF! Awesome. I knew this game had something especially charming. Good luck for the full production Erik! And really, these guys from the north ROCK.

More on GDC after grokking more.