shoelace shader guy

PVP vs PVE, an analogy to understanding both

2006-03-09T11:17:00.000-08:00

I've been a terrible blogger, hell I *AM* a terrible blogger. Too much hassle in getting stuff in order for GDC so here's a quick tidbit of something that more and more online games need to understand as they try to retrofit/bootstrap the latest "craze" feature, PVP into their games. People have written far more in trying to explain the same thing.

PVE is analagous to pursuing wealth trappings and needing something to quantify your wealth. A private island, Ferrari collection you name it. The process of obtaining all that money / grind is the hard part and the journey and when you're done, you want some way of showing everyone you did it. The quantification is in how much that island cost and how big your house is.How many storyline missions you beat etc.

PVP is like going up to the mountains and seeking enlightenment and perfection of self. The journey starts when you achieve basic mastery, or when you know enough to question. Similar to martial artists, PVPers don't need any external quantification of their worth, they're on a constant journey seeking and perfecting it, but just like a martial artist, the quantification is in their getting better. You dont need a title or a net worth to tell how good a martial artist is, the proof is in the way he moves.

That's really why the two will never understand each other.

Graphics != art

2006-01-08T16:16:00.000-08:00

It might be a sign of growing up (sadly) but I can be totally reticent towards a game unless it has good art. Not just good graphics. Art. Those games make me sit up and within 20 seconds I'll say DAMN! I WANT TO PLAY THAT! We are finally here, where flashy graphics have peaked and now "graphics" in games can be judged on their art direction. Here are some examples.

http://www.1up.com/do/slideshow?cId=3146225

http://www.artificialstudios.com/media.php

None of this Quake4 or F.E.A.R bullshit! :)

EDIT : Artificial Studios has been bought out by Epic. The Reality Engine features are going to be folded into Unreal Engine 3 (UE3). I'm hoping this doesn't impact the development of those titles. Almost all of them have incredible potential, I've never seen a better quality of lineup on any engine vendor's sites. Not even Epic and their bajillion licensees..

Looks like they'll get to use the engine until the same features are folded into UE3 at which point they'll get a discount on UE3. Hopefully they can ship before then, otherwise as much as I wouldn't wish it on them, they'd have to port to Unreal and likely have to do a complete rewrite. Their publishers must all be shitting bricks right now.

Episodic content? been done for years.

2005-12-23T23:29:00.000-08:00

As much as the hardcore and the hardcore/wannabe-casual-get-rich-quick-with-bejeweled-knockoff crowd keeps talking about episodic content, it's been done now for years. Nancy Drew . Most of the hardcore have undoubtedly never heard of Nancy Drew, eewwww girl games!

Actually these are fantastic adventure games, some have a bit of a girl slant but for the most part they are accessible to both guys and gals. Their history is also about as indie as you can get. They started off not being able to get a traditional publishing deal (ewww girl games? girl ADVENTURE games? ahahaha) so they ended up selling on Amazon where sales were large enough to garner some retail publishing interest.

13 games later and 5 years later, still using mostly the same engine with feature innovations throughout the years. Their job security is probably the highest in the industry outside of EA. The only thing that changes from game to game is the art and the stories. This is something a lot of us dream of, but yet can't quite achieve with Quake Mission Pack 5. While graphics get old, and get old quickly, stories are something that's timeless with a universal appeal. The games come out 2 or 3 times a year, quick enough to keep the level of interest high throughout the years. Not to mention the constant flow of revenue that most developers would die for. Each game can be beaten in the space of a day or in a weekend and despite the short length, we're eager for more.

Fans of Nancy Drew games await new games like new parts of a movie trilogy or tv mini series, with no care in the world as to whether each new game has HDR lighting or Anisotropic Specular Bumpmapping Plus Alpha Champion Edition. They've even achieved the publisher's holy grail. It's the same game yet different each time, for 13 games straight. We've got this "story" thing into our engine!

I'd love to see a comparison revenue wise between a traditional, bet the farm 3-4 year AAA title and these guys. It would be interesting to see if the picture is quite as rosy as I paint it. For now however, Her Interactive, I salute thee. 5 more Nancy Drew games to go, I'm having lots of fun :)

innovation == crap/small market crap

2005-12-23T23:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6141519.html

Reading something like this makes me realise gamers as a whole have just lost the point. Everyone keeps pointing to Katamari and Psychonauts whenever anyone says the I word. It's not just this article. Innovation has always meant, to do something new. To TRY. Who says there can't be innovation that succeeds on a large scale level.

Dune 2 was innovative is one example of something that innovated and blew everyone away, another is The Sims (as innovation cliche as that is nowadays). Innovate for a small market? that also != success .

Something is fundamentally wrong when the first word that comes to mind whenever someone says "innovation" is not 'idea' but Katamari.

Product design as it relates to love of product

2005-11-16T02:08:00.000-08:00

I want to take a moment to speak about product design since this article has inspired me. A five step program to move beyond the game geek culture

It's been posted on slashdot and probably has a few game related blogs talking about it. One of the points he highlights, product design, really deserves a bit more space. Quote "Product design is a fascinating, successful field practiced by almost every consumer industry except game development. It deals with creating products for a vast and ever shifting spectrum of customers and seeks to meet needs that they may not even have expressed."

Anyone who watches the Apprentice will probably notice that a lot of the times the would-be-apprentices are given tasks in fields which they know nothing about, and yet if they succeed they do so based on basic principles of business, marketing, customer relationships etc. Often in our industry we believe that the love of games, and the belief in our product is enough. We'll make the games and then hope there's a market for it, since hell *we* like it (that is if you're not making something based on an established genre or IP). I don't think many people in game dev even look at the market at think hmmmm.. what would people like to play? I, myself didn't even really give it much thought before I read this article. Sure there were things I would love to try and make if I had a AAA team behind me, but never purely from the perspective of the consumer.

It is also the ability to divorce one's self from your product/market that has distinguished many great businessmen from legendary ones. I'm sure Bill Gates isn't much of a gamer, yet Microsoft is involved in games. One of the comments in that article talk about how people who like to make RPG's shouldn't go out and make Deer Hunter. This is a valid point. However there is usually a failure to at least understand if the RPG guys even like Deer Hunter. If they do great, they can bring many things to the table including a fresh perspective to the Deer Hunter umm *genre*, but at least ask. Just because someone has a proven track record in one area doesn't mean they can't do another, this is another basic tenet of business the game industry is ignorant of, if someone can make or like games, they can make any type of game since all games are the same? Most definitely not, but if the RPG guys don't like Deer Hunter or feel insulted that they get put on it then it won't result in a very good product, money gets wasted, time gets wasted, shelf space gets cluttered up, someone who isn't into games playing it for the first time will probably think all games are crap. You get the idea. In theory anyone with a modicum of business sense would realise that something like that is a bad investment from the get go.. again *in theory*...

Actually designing now. Woot!

2005-10-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

Okay enough ranting, I'm actually going to put my money where my mouth is and design a damn game. I now have the basics to make a 2D fighting game for the Gamecube (with logic abstracted away from draw code so I can eventually finish it for PC once my devkit access goes bye bye). I've decided to finally shut up and attempt it instead of a typical side scroller shooter which is easy because the art is easy. I'm mostly wanting to focus on the fighting engine which means that this project will be contingent on finding some dedicated 2D character artists/designers to take ownership of at least one character each. I'm going for two characters initially just to get a proof of concept up. No artists will mean, back to the side scroller which I already have some art for :(

I'm also a firm believer in strong character design, after all I never got into Guilty Gear despite the strength of the fighting engine because I couldn't get into the characters. However Melty Blood React is very similar but I like the characters a lot more and got pretty hooked last weekend :) I'm especially interested in hearing from anyone who has existing character sitting around where you might have once wanted to make a fighting game but couldnt find an engine or programmers to make it. Yes I know of Mugen, but I want this to be a coding exercise too, not just design :)

gameplay programmers saving the world.

2005-10-26T17:31:00.000-07:00

I'm merging two posts into one today. The first is.. I've come across a lot of blogs and various opinion pieces where we're all converging on the same concept. That design is stuck in a rut. Hell I used to find engine developments interesting too, and still study them even now but the difference is whereas engine and graphics improvements used to empower us to make better games and new gameplay concepts the cost has been that now the baseline for games is so high and complex that there's no way a programmer can build the whole game by himself. This has cost us the ability for the programmer to also be the design guy since he is the creator of the world. Being the creator of the world isn't enough anymore. All the worlds are the same. These days if anything the artists have a bigger hand in designing and populating the world if you will.

When I read books like Masters of Doom and look at old school games that I grew up playing, the joy of even discovering a scrolling routine that singlehandedly enables your game, and pushing the machines to the limit have been replaced with fighting complexity and just catching up to the Joneses. Half Life 2 did HDR lighting, so now we all have to do HDR lighting etc. It's always more fun when you are trailblazing than spending time reimplementing what others have discovered, that's why I had so mcuh fun with machinima. I didn't even used to think about design all that much, I just took it hand in hand with programming the subsystems, engine of the game etc, but it's obvious now that I'm just gravitating to what would *really* make games better. In the old days it was programming, but now I truly believe it's good design we are lacking.

Another problem is that, while good design is necessary to turn a competent game into a great or even legendary one, good design isn't necessarily appreciated and therefore is perceived as unnecessary. After all the game works right? that's like saying a film is good because it plays on the projector and people can watch it. Adam Sandler films exist sure, but we have the same problem as the film guys (again) in that taste has to be acquired and that only happens over time. I am desperately hoping that as we now have a section of the populace that appreciates films, including financiers that back them, that this will also (NEED) to happen to games.

Reflections on the magic of the dotcom era

2005-10-21T03:39:00.000-07:00

Yeah I realise this is a little out of the design league but things aren't as exciting as they used to be now huh? We're definitely well past the honeymoon period of the dotcom era and now into the malaise and the lot-less-sex period. I've been thinking about this a lot over the years and really it's not just that the stock options, money and dotcoms that are gone, there were a lot of other things that captured our techie imaginations during that time. It was the culmination of a LOT of achievements and barriers being broken all at the same time that led us into the new information age. There was so much we looked forward to, and eagerly devoured and the dotcoms were just the face.

1) DVD's, movies weren't just bummy VHS tapes that would wear out over time anymore. Special features, director's commentary, alternate angles, all of that stuff promised us a greater insight into the filmmaking process. Plus movies came on those CD looking things now! We have the technology. We can rebuild him. Smaller, better, faster..

2) CGI comes of age, we were astounded by movies like Final Fantasy and Dinosaur. How much more real could it get? Each new movie wasn't so much as a new movie but also a step further. We were looking forward to just how much better it could look each time

3) 3D accelerators become standard, then we got the GPU. Now we focused on the domains of even larger polycounts, complexity. No longer was fog and shitty draw distance the default LOL. We moved to a new era of physics, shaders, and particle/rain and water effects.

4) PDA's. Palm was the great white hope, here was a company that wasn't just any old dotcom, it also sold hardware with shades of the Apple of old. They carried the future dream of all our lives being seamlessly integrated with our minature digital brains in our pocket, and that we wouldn't blink at dropping $500 on any of these things. Not at all :) Would our mini laptops supplant cell phones? I defintiely had a lot of interest here.

5) The broadband revolution. The US really led point here, pioneering not only rollout, but with an ecosystem of applications alongside it. E-Commerce, on demand TV, gaming, prophets already screaming "FIBER TO THE HOME!". Streaming video, voice over IP, the next generation of bandwidth will have a much tougher fight, and arguably much less of an impact on our lifestyles.

6) Massively Multiplayer games. This was the era of Everquest, which set the standard for today and is still arguably undefeated. The dream of the virtual world had been realised. For me ever since I saw the crude avatars, MUSH's and early efforts with the Sierra Network, even Prodigy, AOL etc, I was hooked from that moment and was never more envious to not be living in the US at the time.

7) The peer to peer revolution, sparked by Napster. I think we all know what happened with this one :)

8) DiVX, that did for video what MP3 did for audio. Finally video was a first class citizen on the internet, no more matchbook sized undecipherable video on geoshitties sites. The size was small, efficient. The quality was amazing. Movie piracy also finally arrived, and with it a ballooning independent film scene online.

9) Along with DiVX to birth the indie film scene(and tv ads online :P) was the ubiquity of streaming video. Audio was dialup, video was broadband. One of the first things I wanted to see when I first came to this country was streaming video, no stuttering, no ridiculous buffering every 4 frames. Wow.

10) Webcomics. Simple, but can't be ignored. Userfriendly was my first love :) Webcomics(and Dilbert) did for us, what newspaper cartoonists did for everyone else. Userfriendly, and a few other comics at the time, summed up the day to day nonsense of our new dotcom era and gave us entertainment while we rolled around in our riches and camped at our stock tickers while pretending to work at the same time.

11) Finally, the dotcoms. I absolutely regret not being here when it was possible to order groceries online. I remember when it was so cool to be able to order *anything* online. This was another thing I was dying to try when I got here. That convenience as well as range of choice, things like pricewatch, amazon. All US only ARGH. The dotcoms were supposed to kill everyone on price as well as offer convenience. That was supposed to be the revolution. I think the true revolution was the UPS/Fedex model they pioneered when "e-commerce" gradually evolved from being a nationwide US only thing to truly becoming a global marketplace (courtesy of UPS/Fedex) today.

When I look back on it now. I look back fondly, and also regret. After all, I was still ultimately a spectator, I didn't get to actually live through the dotcom stock rush, and I was still a spectator for everything else. Arrived too little, too late. The bubble practically burst when I stepped off the plane. However looking back now, this *WAS* our generation's Woodstock/hippy era, we all had so much hope and so many dreams then. It's just a pity I didn't get to prospect for dotcom gold in time. Other countries may have had bits and pieces of this pie, but the US had it all, led point and showed the world how it was done and enjoyed its greatest prosperity.

I seriously do not think we'll see another era quite like that one until mankind starts colonising other planets, then it'll be new products (i.e new cures), new business models, new types of jobs, all over again. Hopefully I will position my kids (and maybe myself) to much better take advantage of the next one :)

Sequels work because of new gamers

2005-10-17T02:28:00.000-07:00

Despite all the grumbling from hardcore, old school and long term gamers about how games suck these days, sequelitis and knockoffs still continue to sell and we know it. That's why it pisses us off right?

Well for those of us that have been gaming forever, long before Sony made it "Cool" to the MTV generation, we've seen all this before, however the current generation hasn't. You know, those guys who think that Halo is the first FPS game EVER. Publishers may be conservative but they also would not continue to throw money into this pond if it wasn't making them money. Sequels work for this current generation because for them, this stuff is still new. Hell I attend a game school (my issues with the school aside) where you really have to be a game dork to be here and half these kids didn't really get into games or "get a computer" until it became mainstream. That's why it works.

For everyone that is on the USA sucks bandwagon and champions Japan as the land of originality and katamari, well here I got news for you. It's the same thing over there too! Sadly... Our best hope is that we burn out the Halo kiddies quick soon too and then maybe we can make some real games.

Fight Night Round 2

2005-10-17T02:01:00.000-07:00

EA gets a lot of shit from everyone these days, but I like to think that two original properties still managed to come out of them. The Burnout franchise and the new kid on the block, Fight Night which has demolished every boxing game made up to now and has set the bar. What Madden did in the days of yore for football...

Anyhow, ever since I first saw it a year ago to when I got my PS2 recently, this was the game that I was looking forward to playing most, even more than Metal Gear Solid 3, mainly because of the innovative Total Punch Control system. It successfully puts you in the place of throwing the punches yourself and even more importantly, has you thinking about where your hands are and where the opponents are. I have not been as hooked on any kind of one on one fighting game this bad since the original Street Fighter 2. No longer are boxing games glorified button mashing affairs.

I was up till 4 AM beating the crap out of other boxers on this thing, where during round 3 of a bout with Sonny Liston, his high guard had just opened up wide enoguh for me to pop in a straight, I get a knock on the door. I've completely forgotten to turn the volume down (at least that's what I thought it was going to be about), and I thought it was midnight and not 4 AM. A neighbour in the complex had locked himself out and mine was the only light on. When I first opened the door I asked if it was the noise, he replied "don't worry, I'm a gamer myself so I understand. I play City of Heroes". I'm thinking, what the FUCK is City of Heroes? FIGHT NIGHT!!!

Anyway he needs to use the phone to call his girlfriend to let him in, he tells me the number and I manage to dial the wrong number anyway TWICE. My hands are shaking and my mind is still purely on the Sonny Liston match, what combinations I'll be throwing after that straight, what if he does this etc etc that whole chess game. BOTH my thumbs are completely swollen. In just ONE night. I have never ever gotten this so called "Nintendo thumb" that everyone else seemed to have in my life, yet in the space of one night... FUCKING FANTASTIC!!

The next morning, I get up in 4 hours and go to fencing lessons, and since my thumb is swollen I can barely work pistol grip... and I demolish 5 guys in a row. The 5th guy doesn't even try, he just let's me take my points and leaves. After playing Fight Night and looking for openings and so on all night, it seems that everything else was moving in slow motion and I read everyone like a book. Or maybe they suck *Shrug*

This was almost a month ago now, and sadly ultimately Fight Night was still a boxing game and there's only so much to master in it, say compared to Street Fighter, but for that one night. I was 14 again. Nothing else has come close since then, until now. Great fucking job EA Chicago, well done :)

Inventing new game styles

2005-10-17T01:54:00.000-07:00

Greg Costikyan has linked to this very interesting powerpoint, tip of the iceberg really that traces the lineage of how game styles dating back to early board games were conceived and evolutions of different gamestyles up to the current day and the impact that some have had.

http://www.costik.com/presentations/Imagining%20New%20Game%20Styles.ppt

I saved this as reference since although I have gone through the same exact thought process myself, this one nails it really concisely and I think I will be looking at it many times over the years whenever I run into "game designer's block"

A real gamer girl/developer

2005-09-30T15:00:00.000-07:00

LOL this is the last thing I was expecting to post, especially first off but this was a pleasant surprise.

Clicky here

There are few enough female gamers(altough less of a problem these days) let alone ones that actually want to work in the industry and have that kind of critical thinking about it. I see a lot of female game writers or artists but very few female game designers or the sort that play the shit out of games and knacker themselves out doing it like guys do, would be a better way to explain it. The others used to be guys i.e. Dani Bunten. Anyways, this gets a "you go girl" from me :)

Where have I been?

2005-09-28T07:07:00.000-07:00

Oh I just got a PS2 FINALLY after 4 years!!

I accidentally came across a vga box for xbox, ps2 bla bla and smacked myself in the head. Wheer have I been for the past... 2 years? I had one for the Dreamcast years ago and thought it ended there. I don't own a TV and basically don't plan on it until next gen (and just for games :D) so I've been catching up on console games. It's obvious to see why I stopped playing PC games and where all the games went.

I have a couple more things I want to post later but I'm about to step out the door now :P

Soul Calibur 3 + what Namco has done right (fighting games)

2005-07-28T08:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3142254

After reading this I'm jumping up and down lol. This is one helluva rabbit out of a hat that they've pulled. I've been wondering for a long time now that 3D fighters have pretty much evolved as much as they could in their current state. How many joystick/button combinations for oves/multiparts havent been used yet? Out of a (still) discrete 8 directions, 4 or so buttons. Some double tap + hold can give you an extra couple of moves for the nexe sequel but you will also get to a point where you will hit diminshing returns for more moves added and more moves memorised. Unless the lifebar ends up growing bigger or the damage being drastically reduced, there's only so many moves that you will use per fight and some are more effective than others.

Looks like the designers realised this and took a different approach instead of the usual sequel route. Giving context to why people fight as well as giving them multiple options and variety to learn different facets of the game beyond memorising a movelist was a stroke of genius. Learn by doing. The more variety and fun to spice up the fighting the better. Memorising the movelist in practice mode is the only "artificial" barrier to a fighting game nowadays.

I've loved seeing the Namco fighters, but especially the Soul Calibur series grow from being dial-a-combos to fighting games where one can literally figure out the combos or evolve new ones just by paying close attention. For example, the move being abstracted away so you can focus on where you want to hit, someone wants to kick low, they press down and kick, the kick that you get may be different depending on stance, posture, position but it will be aimed where you want. Another example is that the dial-a-combos are just the beginning, variances in falling speed, juggles and positioning are just some of the factors that can create opportunities to string together more combos and moves together, again things that you can figure out yourself instead of looking at a faq/movelist.

I suspect the fighting system hasn't changed a whole lot, but I'm looking forward to all the other goodies they've added. I'm so damn excited to play this, I may even buy a PS2 for it lol. Yes right before the next-gens are due out :P

Discuss

Disconect between graphics, meaning, purpose.

2005-07-28T07:54:00.000-07:00

This is observation on a lot of game art these days. There is a lack of connection between what the viewer observes and what the viewer connects with and attunes them to your world. Taking for example the Myst clones that never caught on. This is a case of artists making things pretty first but not questioning why. I like sources like anthropology when say designing the houses or the clothes of my races, why are the roofs constructed the way they are, or why the fabrics are used (not just for a look). That should clue you into what kind of weather they have to deal wtih, natural resources available to them etc. Try to avoid stereotypes. Again my beef with most pulp fantasy novels is that they just replicate what was done previously without thinking of the why (or the need). Instead of dressing up your world, it's about what you can observe about the graphics that help tell the player about the world.

For more modern settings, your cities, industrial settings etc should be connected to the ecosystem or economy, if your design does not stretch so far, think of the real world. A good way to think about it would be an "alternate earth" to start with. i.e. recognisable elements that players can easily connect with or extrapolate a what-if scenario from that help give meaning to the fancy art. This is also what draws me to a genre like steampunk or a game like Arcanum. We've taken fancy graphics for granted, we expect them. I'm not saying every game needs to be Tolkien-esque in its level of detail, but an analogy to this would be just slapping paint onto something without thinking why you want that colour.

Every designer should at least think about this approach, it would help combat the current malaise of every game looking the same and the player audience having an overwhelming feeling of "been there done that" with all but the most uber-graphics of games.

Discuss

Original IP, licensed IP, are they so bad?

2005-07-28T07:32:00.000-07:00

On one hand I'm pretty disgusted at the current state of affairs where new games and ideas that were once the norm, have now slipped into "novelty"/foolhardy status. On the other hand I think we should be grateful that our industry has evolved to the point where we have the movie equivalent of "money flicks" (the flicks you do, to get the money so you can do the film you want/art flicks for charity pay/no $$$).

If you look at the fundamental business model of a typical video game company, especially a startup, there is the usual severe lack of incoming cashflow. I don't think any other business has a model where we work our arses off for 2-5 years for a giant crapshoot where our product may sell for only 1-2 months at best (assuming we get shelf placement) before being heavily discounted or forgotten. Developers are meant to be smart people yet we don't see the flaw in this plan? Don't blame the publishers for having you over a barrel when it's partly our own fault for accepting such a weak cash/bargaining position in the first place.

Anything we can do to bring in incoming cashflow while the giant epic Half-Life 2 clone is being worked on the better, especially if it can be done with fewer resources. Merchandise, mobile games that may have a 6 month dev cycle, licensed games with a 1 year dev cycle etc. It's rare that you get any studio large enough to have several concurrent projects running at the same time. I think by now we've established that certain franchises, Star Wars, Sims, Marvel tie-ins sell irrespective of quality. This is a boon and an opportunity to strengthen the studio. It is only a negative if the industry chooses only to focus on milking these cash cows for the short term. Which brings me to...

Original IP. This is what we should all be aiming for. Star Wars? Marvel chars? they were all once "original IP" (this also means investing in more writers, designers and treating them seriously). Who would not want to create something that could stand the test of time and (oh hell) milkable in the long run. Rare as that may be, I think we all have the potential to reverse our current (pitiful) fate, and I dream of one day seeing the established other forms of entertainment, tv, movies, music, even comics be licensing our stuff and have it be the rule not the exception.

Discuss

Gamemaker

2005-07-26T16:44:00.000-07:00

Big flurry of posts coming :D

First up.

http://www.gamemaker.nl

This is what Kilk and Play should have been all these years ago lol. This is extremely powerful, drag and drop, events, behaviours, simple callbacks. Looks like you can make just about any kind of 2D game you want although I haven't seen much about being able to define animation cycles.

It can even do Doom-like and isometric games, platformers and scrollers are extremely easy with this

Ludology vs Narratology

2005-06-27T21:36:00.000-07:00

Well apparently this is a war lol. For newcomers to the discussion, Ludology was originally a name (psuedonym practically) for game studies which is a new field taken up by some universities to try to create a more formalised view/structure for studying games. The usefulness, rigor and legitimacy of such a field or whether there is a need for one has yet to be proven and what such study may yield.

When I first heard of ludology, I was intrigued and briefly enthralled. There was already a lot of talk of story/narrative and I think at an unconscious level this is because of a distinct lack of story/world/meaning in today's games compared to those of yesteryear. I know I certainly felt an unconscious reach towards it at the earliest stages of coming up wtih this site. I originally intended this site not as a forum but as a hall of fame of past games and to also honor game industry greats that I admired and looked up to growing up but have since moved on i.e. Al Lowe

As the idea eventually morphed into something that attempted to tackle the problem instead of just waxing about the past, I realised that an attempt at a serious game study forum/site would have to take into account games in all its forms not just ones with a strong narrative backbone and story.

Ultimately where I stand on the debate is when the language of ludology becomes more about academic references and english academia then it has effectively splintered which is what I believe the solution to this war is. It is one of the reasons why I stopped reading Grand Text Auto too.

The essence of gaming is about play, being in the story, performing actions. This may or may not have anything to do with the story. Ultimately gaming is an interactive medium and that is where it is rooted. Interactive fiction or an interactive narrative may be a story where you can make decisions but ultimately you are still relying on a storyteller to tell it for you. Narratology really should be a new branch of literature studies or english I am not quite sure there.

Even though my preference leans towards games with a story most definitely, for example adventure games or the C&C and War3 games captured my imagination because of the story, games are still interactive, functional and formal systems. You can still have a game without a story, as in the game as a toy approach of Nintendo, or world as dollhouse/sandbox ala Will Wright. Narrative is only one aspect of a game albeit a very important one. I may be less involved with games that lack a story or a purpose for me to invest in but that doesn't make them any less of a game for somebody who just wants to *play* and ultimately that's what games are for. To be played.

As a PS to this, one of my guiltiest pleasures are FMV games, I have loads of them and I liked quite a few of them. Some I did not appreciate the lack of gameplay but what they did bring was a better sense of storytelling and even closure to an experience. Maybe an FMV game article is in the wings

Discuss

Cognisant Game Design - why? and the mission statement

2005-06-27T21:34:00.000-07:00

I founded Cognisant Game Design because I feel that with all the technology and tools we have at our disposal, our biggest deficit in games currently is design. This site was inspiried someone over at Greg Costikyan's blog who posted in a comment that he wished/was looking for a place to discuss serious game design issues, and *only* game design.
I was getting increasingly bitter, even resentful of the current game industry I realised that there are a paltry number of game companies and games that inspire me enough to want to work for/on them compared to when I was a kid and growing up. It wasnt just a symptom of getting older and more jaded (well not as much as I'd thought).I realised we are missing something nowadays and design is close as an approximation . In order to better study and understand the subject I created this site.

The main problem I see with today's world is that we try to make a game that fits into a specific genre, or in a specific way whereas in the old days people came up with the idea/the concept first and then tried to figure out how to build it. By not having 3D engines or to have to worry about pixel shaders, physics etc they worried about what was best about the game. Now often, concepts are fit into engines or 3D, or worse, what you think the publisher would like you to pitch.

The best example was a friend of mine who asked me to start and MMO company with him and I asked, "well do you even know what kind of game you want to make? and what about it would it make a good MMO?". He hadn't thought it through, he just wanted to make *some* kind of MMO since that is "Where it's at" these days. Or the funding/development hurdles of doing one

Lastly I designed this site so that it would cover all aspects of design, not just a vague statement, and also to move away from the current state of ludology and acknowledge existing genres, study them, learn from them or to evolve them as well as studying abstract new representations of narrative, virtual societies etc. We are forgetting gameplay and what games can offer, past, present and future.

What is holding back gaming from being a spectator sport.

2005-06-27T17:21:00.000-07:00

I'm going to break this down into a couple of chief reasons then actually offer some solutions for a change

Chief Reasons

1) Gaming skill cannot be commonly appreciated or understood unless the game or at least its controls are familiar. Games do not deal with the physical plane of reality like sports do. Or the limits of human endeavour. That is the main reason why everyone can appreciate michael jordan taking off from the free throw line or someone winning a NASCAR race is because even on a vague level any human being can understand why a feat like that is difficult. With games, to an average laymen or someone who is unfamiliar with the game they are watching, you dont know what part of a combo move is preprogrammed, what level of speed/physics is unusual to the game, nor any understand of controls that would allow you to understanding of why one series of actions is more skillful than another.

2) Games are not about real people. At least not the way we present them. They are about models flying about the screen, sprites, caricatures, cartoons at best. How many attempts of game videos have there been that have focused exclusively on the game action. You're not going to watch a football game beginning to end from the one angle on ESPN, why would watching a game like that be anymore exciting? which brings me to..

3) Rest breaks. The best spectator events are ones which allow people to appreciate the feat that they are watching. Lots of sports have timeouts where a broadcast will use as time to replay the last touchdown or goal, or talk to another commentator, spectator, player. Games are ridiculously fast, with lots of flashing lights, effects and explosions that have no meaning other tahn a lightshow. A commentator could use the time to then explain why something was paritcularly skillful or not.

4) Rules - There is no easy solution to this. Games wildly vary even within the same genre. Being able to understand the rules of what someone is watching is key to drawing them into the action and investing them into it. After all most people understand the universal rules of soccer, hocket, basketball, all of which involving getting some kind of ball thing into a hole right ?

Factors to consider

1) Replays. Well we are starting to build these modes into games like Counterstrike which is a start, but most game developers don't know the first thing about broadcasting. We have the freedom in 3D to have as many cameras to cover the action as we want and to switch between them freely or to even make cuts ont he fly, but this has to be built into the game. These alone would not be enough unless there would be heavy editing time spent afterwards on each replay, if you are designing your game to be spectator sport friendly then the design has to take into account the above as well as camera controls and placements that would be more suitable for broadcast outside of the basic game view.

2) Cameras - In considering camera placement we forget that a camera view that is not one that a player would normally be able to play a game in, and if partciularly captures the action better is pretty new and exciting especialyl to someone already familiar with the game.

3) Human involvement - This is stepping outside the realm of your traditional video games but it is a huge reason why otherwise simplistic games like DDR took off. This is also a good example.

I also think there is something to be relearned from the near extinct arcades of yesteryear, it can be very awe inspiring and attracting to see a skillful match or get into parts of a game that others typically couldnt. Anyone remember the crowds?

4) Advertising - Along non existance of arcades these days people are forgetting the simple draw/advertising/stickiness of value of seeing other people play a game and how much fun it is and wanting to get/play it for themselves.

Can making a game that is also exciting to spectate really be ignored?

Discuss

A pessmistic/business view of casual/puzzle games

2005-06-27T15:08:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been reading a bit bout the casual/puzzle game market. The pros that are stressed are the low cost and time of development, and the low price/low barrier to purchase. These are all great points but I see one big thing that has mostly been forgotten. Passion and that ingredient x that makes you actually want to buy. There's no great hook to many of these games, and most are not much better than free flash games that you can play for free around the place. Some puzzle games can be pretty addictive i.e. tetris, puzzle fighter but these were easily the creative equals to many other original concept games. Short of a few one offs like Bejeweled, Beezly's Buzzwords etc my opinion is that the mass majority of casual games are just too thin/uncompelling to make anyone really *want* to buy them. Sure they might be enjoyable but if something is just fun for me as a 5 minute diversion or to kill time waiting for a meeting to start etc, does it provide enough entertainment for me to actually shell out? A magazine can do the same job and still be cheaper for example. No matter how cheap something is, someone still has to spend and in order for the transaction to be fulfilled, the product to be purchased must have value. With many other things to spend your money on, food, gas, triple AAA titles, all of which have *arguably* greater value and priority, I dont think a slightly diff version of Tetris or Super Pang will be high on my buy list.

I think the bigger root problem is as always, the large cost, team and time involved in development nowadays. Indy or casual doesnt necessarily mean small or niche market. It always ultimately pains me to see someone basically resign themselves to failure or something smaller when I see someone demoing their small scale puzzle/just for learning game at IGDA or elsewhere. It's been a great learning experience for that person or team no doubt and I am still proud of anyone who has made that journey as I think we all are, but classics like Civilisation or Super Off Road did not have to deal with AAA budgets or teams in the first place but they all had that magic "hook" which if you resign yourself to making a clone you will have an unlikely to no chance of having.

Ultimately I'm not much of a puzzle game man, with the above few Ive mentioned being the few that have had any impact on me. Ive read about all this mobile gaming business too, resurgance of 2D etc too. Hopefully we can remember whatr made some of these 2D games the masterpieces they were, gameplay and fresh concepts and trying to make something that is a must have

Discuss

Hi :)

2005-06-27T14:38:00.000-07:00

Well Im redoing this blog after starting it almost a year ago.

I'll be posting any opinion or discussion posts that I've posted on my other game design community. Cognisant Game Design

This is so that you can still read my thoughts as a blog if that is more of what you are interested in, or drill down to the individual areas that interest you on the board. The initial bunch of posts will be a flurry since Ive had a LOT of these thoughts kicking around/gestating in my head for awhile, I'm planning to post as many of these in one day in fact since I have other stuff to do ;) Mel Brooks was another guy that had a pile of ideas in his head that might have never seen the light of day if someone had not seen this and hired someone to write them down for him. Well I'm cheap :)