Ghost Razor

I was just reading an interview with Peter Moore (The head of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Division, and coolest ’suit’ of 2007) and came to two realizations.  Firstly, Peter Moore is really awesome.  He has a way of articulating answers to questions which is at once both professional and clear-cut, unfettered by marketing jargon.  Secondly, developers used to pay companies to obtain licenses to use their brand!

You’re looking at companies that are just lining up down the street to be involved in the game environment.  I look back at the old days in my previous life at Sega, when we were actually paying for licenses of consumer-product companies to put in the game. I think about Crazy Taxi [Dreamcast], things like KFC and Pizza Hut…. Boy, the shoe is on the other foot now, no pun intended. The ability for us to be able to have control of this demographic and bring that to consumer-product companies…it’s a powerful tool.

It’s somewhat ludicrous that a development company spending the millions of dollars it costs to make a game would fritter that money away to place brands inside their game… especially brands like KFC or Pizza Hut.  In theory, the only reason you want to do this is that in some way the inclusion of those brands will sell more of your game and earn you more revenue than it cost you to license those brands in the first place.  Nobody wants to buy a game just because they can deliver a tasty pizza to someone (although that’s not universally the case).  Product placement in a video game feels the same way it does in movies.  If done well, the fact that you’re essentially being marketed to doesn’t detract from the experience of immersion, in fact in certain cases it can add to it.  If, on the other hand, what you’re delivered is a garish, in-your-face product placement, my reaction is one more of disgust:  not an emotion you want tied to your product brand.

Two examples that come springing to mind of horrible product placement would be the iPod and iTunes in Blade Trinity, and Reebok shoes in I, Robot.  Blade Trinity contains a lengthy shot, what felt like around 30 seconds of Jessica Biel loading music onto her iPod, which she always uses when she’s killing vampires…

Yeah.  At this point in the movie you pretty much want to get up and leave.  The experience is so out of touch with what you’re looking for in a vampire movie that all suspension of disbelief is lost, and you’re irate at both the producers of the movie, and the product itself, causing exactly the opposite reaction intended.  This effect is so profound that politicians should place ads for their opponents in movies coming out near voting time.

In I, Robot, Will Smith is putting on some sneakers for an entire shot, in which one of his buddies comments on how nice they are, whereby Smith replies “Thanks, Vintage 2004 [The year the movie came out]”.  If ever you wanted to smack Will Smith, that was the time.

These pitfalls can just as easily happen with video games, if not more so.  There is a place for such ‘in your face’ use of brands, and that place is parodying the brands themselves for comic effect.  Sierra did this to great effect in the Space Quest series with Monolith Burger, satirizing the stereotypical behaviours and appearance of McDonald’s employees.  The effect, rather than bringing you out of the game, made you laugh, which was the whole point of the Space Quest experience.

It’s about time things have turned around financially, and that product companies have realized the huge potential of marketing through video games.  Video games are a particularly powerful channel because the target audience is generally of more narrow scope, and the brand exposure is more prolonged than a movie (hard to find a game only two hours long).  As a result, marketers can acheive a significantly deeper penetration with a target group that genuinely might want to buy into their product; and they should have to pay through the nose to for that privilege.

Tags: Marketing by Morphix
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Ryan Winterhalt has an interesting article about what it’s like to be a westerner working in the Japanese games industry over at Gamasutra.  Definitely worth a read.

Tags: Developers by Morphix
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In an interview with Home Media Magazine, Video Game Analyst Billy Pidgeon had some fairly interesting numbers (and, er, theories) to share.  Nintendo moved 259,000 Wiis last month, not a suprising development considering overall hardware sales for the industry have doubled from $659 million to $1.3 billion between Q4 2006 and Q1 2007.  According to Pidgeon, the sales on 360 and PS3 are stagnating, largely due to a lack of system-selling games.  This is due to pick up in Q3 when a number of highly anticipated titles are scheduled for release.  In the meantime during Q2 though, Nintendo has an opportunity to sweep with the Wii, that is, if they could keep them in stock.

And herein we see a problem.  Why are Wiis so hard to come by?  Pidgeon believes supply won’t reach demand until 2009 (Personally, I find this difficult to believe).  So far this year, Nintendo has managed to sell more gaming systems than everyone else combined, along with a heft chunk of peripherals to boot.  Since its release in November 2006, the Wii has sold over 2.1 Million units in the USA alone (Nevermind in Japan, where the Wii has consistently been the top selling next-gen system).  Sony can’t even close to match these numbers, and Microsoft, who’s had the 360 out for a year long than the Wii has only managed to sell 5.3 million units. 

So it’s possible that the appeal of the Wii to an audience outside of mainstream gamers has resulted in an insatiable demand for the system.  Certainly there’s been no mention of supply chain problems such as the ones Sony has suffered with its PS3, in fact, Nintendo reported in October that Wii production had exceeded expectations.  Even so, five months after the release of the system, one study showed that of 100 American game stores visited, only one had a single Wii in stock.  It’s basically impossible to order one from an online retailer, as all the major brands show the Wii being out of stock.

This is not a good scenario for Nintendo.  Despite rumors that Nintendo may be artificially constraining supply to ‘generate demand’, economics don’t tend to actually work like that.  They are in a position to take advantage of a low point in the year as far as game releases go to sell their system, but in order to do so, people need to be able to get their hands on one, and Nintendo will want them to do so before the fall line-up starts pressuring people to move towards PS3 and 360.

Even if Nintendo had not anticipated the rampant demand their system has created, one would think given five months they would be able to scale up production to accomodate it.  I suppose it takes some time for the reality of the situation to make it up to the decision makers.  Nintendo did announce recently it was going to increase production line capabilities, but no specifics were mentioned. 

I just want to play Zelda without having to wait in line all morning.  Please?

Tags: Platform by Morphix
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The XNA Team is proud to announce the availability of XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 Refresh.  This release is an update to the 1.0 product which contains improved functionality along with new features.

Some of these new features include Bitmap-based fonts, 3D Audio, Windows Vista Support, and the long awaited ability to share binaries with other users without having to share the source code as well!

As always, if you want to share your work with other Xbox 360 users, you still need a Creator’s Club Membership.

Check out the “What’s New” section of the product documentation for full details.

Tags: Online, Platform, Releases by Morphix
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I was going to write an article musing about why so little attention is given to developers who make games for mobile devices.  We get endlessly barraged with news story after news story about developers for high end console systems, and what the newest PC game of the week is, but the mobiles don’t get such lovin’.  That article is never to be though, because the answer is too simple.

Mobile games suck.

I’m sure there are those who disagree with me on this point, and that’s fine, you’re wrong.  Yes there’s the Nintendo DS, and the PSP, and even the now long-toothed Gameboy Advance.  I’m not talking about those systems, although it is a useful exersize to ask yourself “If I were sitting at home and had the choice between playing something for console system X, or playing on my handheld, is there a scenario where I would choose the handheld?”.  The systems I’m talking about are the true cesspools of mobile gaming in the form of the cell-phone.  

Think about some of the best Super NES games you ever played.  Chronotrigger, Final Fantasy, Super Mario World.  Mobile systems these days easily eclipse the raw power of the super nintendo, and yet it’s impossible to find a game as memorable as these classics on any of them. 

At the University of Waterloo’s 50th Anniversary Dinner, Mike Lazaridis remeniced about the “Red Room”, a room once present on campus which held what was at the time some of the most powerful computing equipment on the planet.  He then proceded to pull out his Blackberry and stated that these devices now have many times the computing power of that entire room.  I don’t think processing power is the issue here.

If you really want to hate yourself, spend some time looking through the pathetic offerings available to cell-phone customers.  What you will find is a large number of puzzle games, card games, and some form of billiards.  There are companies about who are spending relatively tidy sums of money to convert the code from 70s classic arcade games like Pac-man and Spade Invader into Java to run on cell-phones.  These games are thirty years old, and while there may be some nostolgia from those of us old enough to have cut our teeth in video arcades, very few such people have the time or inclination to play them on the way to work.

In an interview with Guardian’s Games Blog, Jon Hare of sensible soccer described the mobile games industry as follows:

“Mobile games are the most licence driven pile of shit you’ve ever seen. You can’t sell a mobile game unless it has a license attached. Mobile is the worst format for gaming. The DS and PSP have far more potential. The PC, certainly in online gaming. already offers original games. Live Arcade? It’s all about getting money out of them.”

So this is a call to the mobile games industry.  Stop making Pool simulators.  Stop making variations on Bejewelled and Hold em’ poker.  Stop porting games that, while good at the time, have no particular lasting appeal over the generations.  Stop making games that have no gameplay value whatsoever, but cost thousands in licensing costs from some brand (as a matter of fact, that goes for all game producers).  Start making new content, it doesn’t have to be on par with the best of the best in the PC and console world, but make something compelling that might actually interest me in buying your product.  The same principals of game design apply on mobiles just like everywhere else, and it’s a shame the world seems to have forgotten that.

Tags: Industry, Mobile by Morphix
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This is kind of old news, but it’s the first I’ve heard about it.  Last august at the 2006 Leipzig Games Convention, Sony was handing out snap shot cameras, branded simply with the Playstation 2 logo.  These cameras turned out to be an innovative marketing technique for the upcoming SCEA survival-horror game Siren 2 (Forbidden Siren 2 in Europe).  The film in the cameras had been pre-exposed with ghastly images, thus giving the appearance of ghosts the foreground when the actual photos were developed by the individuals taking the photos. 

 The final shot reads only:

The horror is closer than you think.
Forbidden Siren II
Out now for Playstation 2

This campaign was the brainchild of TBWA (The agency responsible for the iPod commercials).  Shortly after the end of the GC event, traffic to the Siren website tripled.

This further prooves that these types of guerilla advertising which can be quite inexpensive (compared to billboard or TV ads, a la Gears of War 2), can also be remarkably effective. 

I’ve posted on Guerilla Marketing Techniques Previously

via [I believe in adv]

Tags: Marketing by Morphix
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Genetic Programming is an automated method of generating code by leveraging processes similar to the ones which are in effect in reality, namely natural selection.  Essentially what you do is create a bunch of components, mix them up in various ways, and measure the result of each.  Initially it’s very likely they don’t do what you want at all.  You cut out the worst of each generation, recombine them (programmatically, using some technique), and try again.  The idea is that eventually you will programmatically generate a technique that works as well or better than something that you would engineer from scratch.  It’s a very interesting technique, and I encourage you to read about it if you’re so inclined, but what I’d really like to talk about is the limitations of it.

When applying Genetic Algorithms, the key factor is that you need to have some kind of fitness criteria to measure each iteration with.  In the real world, the ‘fitness criteria’ is ability to survive long enough to breed, and it is enforced by the universe itself (which kills you off it you don’t make the cut, so to speak).  When employing this technique, you generally need to be more specific, and have a goal in mind that you’re trying to accomplish.  In generally this is HIGHLY specific, (e.g. a circuit which raises the output of the input signal to the third power) but this is mostly because determining the fitness criteria is one of the hardest parts about Genetic Programming.  And so far, we’re not very good at determining fitness for vague things.

This is an area of active research, and there’s probably a lot of room in this field to get yourself a PhD if you’re interested.  One of the possible uses for GP which always immediately comes to mind is to develop AI.  Efforts at doing this have met with little success so far, certainly none that are commercially viable.  Part of the problem is that AI is designed to be flexible, and many of the GP techniques are designed to solve specific problems.  What I propose is that instead of developing a general AI, we confine the problem a little bit, and attempt to develop a better AI for computer games. 

While GP is often used to develop parts of the AI, it’s usually the more esoteric parts which are really Optimization problems such as Path-finding.  The type of AI I suggest is more of a “Strategic AI”.  Video Games, like all games, are defined by what are called a “Possibility Spaces”.  This possibility space is structured around the rules imposed by the designer of that game, and thus creates a world with limits.  Playing a game is fundamentally about exploring the possibility space, and there are all sorts of ludological theories about the mechanisms that occur when you do that (If you’re interested in that sort of thing, I might recommend Daniel Cook’s Blog at Lost Garden, or an except from a talk with Will Wright).  Because these possibility spaces are in most games very highly defined and structured, it means the AI only needs to understand how to operate within the context of that space, and to come up with strategies in which to operate depending on which ‘area’ of that space it is currently occupying.

My suggestion for how to implement this is to start by making the basic building blocks of the AI atomic bits of code that represent verbs.  “Move forward” “Move back” “Look for X”, “Hide”, “Shoot”.  Mix these in with various inputs that the character motivated by the AI would encounter, these being the other tokens in the game, including the human player.  These objects can then be programmatically combined and used to generate a more complex AI through the process of GP.  The trick comes in when it comes to defining the fitness function for the AI. 

This is the more tricky part.  It depends on what the character behind the AI is trying to do.  Let’s say we were talking about a FPS, in which case it’s fairly simple.  Kill the people on the other team, don’t get myself killed, protect people on my team.  Almost every FPS on the planet has mechanisms to determine this kind of data built in.  If you had a sample population that were reasonably intelligent, you could just have them play off at random against each other, and continue the process that way.  You could, in fact, continue to do this after release and offer AI patches perodically when you had major improvements in your AI behaviour.

But how to seed the populations of AIs in the first place?  Simple answer:  XBox Live.  Take several thousand copies of your AI, and work with Microsoft to set them up with XBL accounts, and just dump them in the player pool.  Offer free beta testing for regular users, and let them kill off your AI population.  Every couple of days during the beta period, while the rest of the team is responding to non-AI issues, the AIs can be regenerated and use the same accounts they had before.

It may be the case that an insufficient number of iterations would go by in the time period to get a successful AI.  Typically the fitness function is very simple and it takes thousands of iterations to get a reasonable result.  In this case the fitness function is replaced by real human players and the performance of the AI against those players, which takes several minutes.  On the other hand, by having many games going in parallel, the time it takes to run through an entire generation may only be those minutes.  If the regeneration process only took an hour or so, one could do several generations in a day.  Additionally, by seeding the population with heavier verbs in the first place it may be possible to get a reasonable result in only a few hundred generations.  It would be an interesting experiment to try with a simpler game, perhaps in flash, online.  If that game were played by thousands of people online, we would be able to get a feel for how many generations would be required, based on a feeling of the complexity of the possibility space in question.  Anybody interested in pursuing such a project might be well advised to check out this site for some resources on GP and Game AI.

Tags: Game Ideas by Morphix
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Many of you may be aware of a lovely little enterprise called Metacritic. Essentially what they do is compile reviews from sites they feel are respectable and speak with a certain level of knowledge regarding their particular subject matter, and aggregate these reviews into a single Metascore. This theoretically averages out any individual biases to get a better feel for what the general concensus is on any particular medium (the one we would be interested in being, of course, video games). They’ve been doing this for some time, and this will not be new to many people. Many organizations use Metacritic as their main scoring mechanism (most notably, Steam). While this is all good and wonderful for figuring out what the best games are, or how good any given game is, I propose a ‘more different’ use of the data.

Convieniently, Metacritic has a giant list of every game they’ve got reviews for, on each platform. Each game on the list links to a page about that game, which contains various information, such as the developer, publisher, release date, ESRB rating, and so on. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be interesting to know what the best Development shop in the world is. For PC. For PS3. Overall. If you only count games made in the last 4 years. If you count all games ever. Best Developer of the 80s. Best Developer who makes Mature titles.

Want to mash up those names with MobyGames? Best Developer based in Canada. Best Game Designer.

I think it would be a project of academic interest, and as far as I can tell, nobody has ever tried to come up with who the best studios or game designers are based on anything but personal opinion. Arguably using Metascores is also personal opinion, but it’s averaged out personal opinion based on the final product of their labors rather than any emotional opinion about the studios themselves. I’ll post a link on here when my Proof of Concept is done, and feel free to send me a line if you have any ideas about neat uses for this information, or good ideas about how it should be done.

Tags: Developers, Industry by Morphix
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