I’m now home from Seattle after my internship with Microsoft this past fall. I thought a good way to back into things, now that I have access to my server again, would be to run the best of query against 2007, and see what we pull up.
While we often hear about the best games, or the best publishers, rarely do we hear about the people who make those games possible. Go check out the top ten overall game developers of 2007.
Lewis Black has this good sketch about how the punchline to any joke can be “Michael Jackson”, but really, that’s all you need to say. Duke Nukem Forever is the Michael Jackson of the video game industry. What I don’t understand is how you can not make money for that long and still stay in business. It’s now over 10 years since the announcement, and most people have simply put it aside and waited for 3D Realms to eventually announce that they’re canceling it. Today’s teaser trailer brings it back into the spotlight again, but seems to be more of a desperate plea, saying “Hey guys, we still exist”, rather than a true indication that the game is on track for release. Especially since said teaser trailer looks more like a step up from Normality rather than a state of the art FPS. Which, I mean, I’m fine with that. Far be it for me to encourage a further development in the arms race that is video game graphics, but if that’s what you have to say for yourself after going dark for 6 years or so. Just, wow.
Eli Hodapp has an eye opening list of things that have occurred since Duke Nukem Forever was announced. I highly encourage you to read it, as it’s hilarious. Some Highlights:
World War 2, and the entire Manhattan Project, culminating in the invention of Nuclear technology happened in less time than the development of DNF. The entire moon-landing, from Kennedy’s challenge to the touch-down on the moon, occurred in less time than DNF has been in production, so far.
To say that there’s a debate on whether or not video games are art is rather disingenuous. There are those who feel that video games are not, but I think it’s been demonstrated that they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. The very question of “Are video games art” doesn’t make sense. One doesn’t ask if drawings or film are art, these things are a medium through which art can be expressed. Anything can be a medium through which art is expressed, but that doesn’t mean that everything created using that medium is art. I doubt that Mr. Ebert would deny film being a viable medium for art, but he’s not exactly advocating the artistic merits of American Pie either.
And so we could discuss what the qualifications are for artwork, but I could make an entire blog devoted to that. The reality of the situation is that those types of decisions are made by consensus of the art critic community. We currently have a lot of game reviewers, who are paid money to play games and essentially tell the world if those games are worth paying for. This is only a valuable service only insofar as you can trust the integrity and opinions of those reviewers. Likewise, this service could be performed by a community, but is only useful insofar as you can trust the opinions of that community (and if the community is primarily composed of the idiots you find on XBL making various homophobic references, I don’t have a whole lot of faith in that). This is, however, not the same thing as evaluating the esprit of the game, as a work. And this is an area where things get a little fuzzy.
I’ve written before about the separation between an action which is highly addictive, and an action which is personally satisfying. These things are metabolically separate functions within humans. Unfortunately, they are often confused, and this is evidenced by a lack of clear distinction in this concept within the language (i.e. A game is simply “fun”). Case in point: N’Gai Croal chooses desktop tower defense in Slate’s Gaming Club game of the year.
Is obsession a valid selection criterion? I’d say so. It’s certainly one that I apply to other art forms. Whether I’m thinking about my favorite song, album, movie, TV show, novel, or play, I generally pick the one that I’ve responded to the strongest, the one that I can’t stop thinking about.
- N’Gai Croal
We don’t have accepted vocabulary that marks the difference between an experience that stays with you after you leave it because of the profound implications it has (For a film example, Memento) or because the experience was psychologically addictive (Spiderman 2). My point is, you can do both (The Matrix, the first one anyway).
Popularly, Jonathan Blow has seized upon this idea and seems to have emerged as the apologist for the concept. Unfortunately, I don’t feel many people seem to understand what he’s saying. In the same Slate Gaming Club article, Seth Schiesel talks about how Blow hates on Bioshock because it pretends to be an emergent Sandbox, when really it’s a constructed reality. I don’t really think that’s the point. While Blow does seem to prefer the Will Wright-esque emergent concepts that arise from atomic game rules, that’s only because of the satisfying experience it can provide. What he is essentially saying is that most games feed upon artificial scheduled rewards - the drug pathways, in my lingo - while very few provide a meaningful take-away.
What Blow is really asking is this: If we are going to make meaningful art, what is the mechanism that video games afford art that are not done through film, painting, poetry, or music? In his mind that mechanism is the structure of gameplay; the rules of the created world, and the exploration of those rules, should be the source of a certain profound satisfaction. I would call this a ludological art fundamentalist viewpoint. Certainly I can’t think of better contender for what the core of that experience would be, but I would take a more moderate viewpoint. Much as film is a unique medium from stage theatre, to say that the essence of the art in film is only in the cinematographer is disingenuous as well. Much of what makes a truly great film overlaps what makes a great play. So it is with video games.
Blow criticizes Bioshock for creating a non-authentic satisfaction. He argues that Bioshock’s marketing makes the claim that the game is about morality and choice, but this is not evidenced in the gameplay constructs (because your choice is irrelevant). I would say that Bioshock’s marketing as a game about choice is really quite brilliant. The game is not about choice, but rather the illusion of choice (Would you kindly agree with me). The fact that rescuing or saving the little sisters makes little difference in the stable state reinforces this concept, and it does it through gameplay.
Beyond that, I think the game is also a very powerful exploration of Objectivism, and one gets to literally explore the implications of that philosophy. Instead of through narrative and watching it occur, as one experiences in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, Bioshock literally allows you to explore the aftermath of an environment which had adopted that philosophy, through the use of audio diaries and your experiences with the characters in the game. Those are not strictly ludological concepts, but are borrowed from film, which is perhaps why Blow doesn’t account for them. That Bioshock is able to do this, and at the same time make it relatively straightforward to bypass if you’re interested solely in entertainment shows that this game is a shining star of entertainment and art fused together. No, it’s not perfect, but art rarely is.
I don’t think that many people have explored the dynamic of using the gameplay, devoid of artificial rewards, as this satisfying experience, and that may be why it’s difficult to discuss it. I also think that adopting only the use of gameplay would make a game far more sterile than it could otherwise be. There are parallels between film and video games, and while it is ultimately to our detriment to make games that are trying to be films, ignoring the lessons learned in that medium serves no purpose either.
That said, I think Blow has gone somewhat overboard (which would make sense, considering this fundamentalist position). People who are interested in meaningful, authentically satisfying material will seek it out, and if it’s not available in the medium of video games, it is available in other fashions. Most people are not interested in being enlightened, and seek only entertainment. Having the entire industry produce nothing but games designed to be fine art will only result in the abandonment of the medium, for that exact reason. How many of the novels sold every year are truly profound? How many pieces of cinema leave concepts that dance in your mind as you drift off to sleep?
Daniel Radosh may be hungry for real food, but the rest of the world is clamoring for whatever cheap drugs they can find. This is not new, nor is it a sign of the times. This behavior is endemic of our species, and frankly I suspect it is a requirement for a stable society that most people not be interested in that which is profound. Ultimately most people will continue to make that which is entertaining, and occasionally a visionary will create a profoundly meaningful game. Those games will appeal to a much smaller set of people, and typically have much smaller budgets (would Citizen Kane have been even better if it had a $200 million dollar budget?). That doesn’t mean that AAA titles should not continue to push the boundaries of what is possible to make in video games, to explore the possibility space of what can be done with games, but I don’t think we need to get really whipped up about whether or not our games are art.
Apparently Jason Statham has been busy remaking the Lord of the Rings making a Dungeon Siege movie. This is why I can’t have a real Hitman movie? Because you wanted to run around in the forest with elves? Shame on you Jason. For shame.
Read the press release here.
Exciting things:
Download it here. Go make games. Dream Build Play is happening again! Go sign-up.
Denis Dyack is an interesting character. While you have to respect someone who’s that vocal and passionately committed to his craft, I do have to disagree with his point of view on a regular basis. Electronic Arts and Dyack have both been quoted in popular press advocating for a single console that all developers can target without having to port their code.
Gamasutra published a summary of a talk Dyack gave at GDC Lyon 2007 this morning where he stated that not only was it desirable, it was inevitable. I have some major problems with most of the points he brings up. He implies that all technology will inherently become commoditized in the long run, distinguishable only by brand, and cites automobiles, cameras, and cell phones as examples of this.
Here’s a fun experiment you should try at home. Go to your nearest auto shop, tell them your indicator lights are burnt out, and you need new ones. Surely if automobiles are commodities, and are standardized, you should be able to do this. Except you can’t, in fact it doesn’t even help if you tell them the manufacturer of the car in question. You need to know the manufacturer, model, and year of manufacture to be able to nail down something as simple as indicator lights. This is true for nearly every component in your car.
Try buying a new lens for your DSLR camera. If you walk into a camera store and say you want a new 120 mm lens, but you don’t know the manufacturer and mount of your camera, you’re going to get some strange looks.
The entire industry of companies who’s sole purpose is to wrap existing software in their Java-based framework, and port it to every cell-phone known to man. This is not trivial, they need to maintain databases of all cell-phones they support, and adjust display sizes, input mappings, color depth, etc. to support this supposedly ‘open framework’. If you ever wondered why cell-phone games are such shit, this is a major contributing factor.
Nevertheless, all of these industries do have certain standards. These standards exist because it is beneficial to all of the manufacturers of these devices that they are inter-operable with each other. This is why cameras will all save in JPEG format, cars all run on relatively similar gasoline, and cellphones all connect to networks using a very small scope of protocols. There are infrastructural costs that are prohibitive for manufacturers to independently build on their own, so it behooves them to adopt standards for individual benefit. The fact that this happens to benefit the public is incidental.
I would argue that there already exists an ‘open-platform’ for game development. It’s called Microsoft Windows, and it runs on a PC. Using DirectX, you don’t need to care specifically what hardware a user has, you just write it such that it can handle a certain spectrum you’re willing to tolerate. Dyack dismisses the PC as a standardized platform, I assume he means that all PCs do not have the same hardware, and thus are not standard. This seems to be at odds with his previous statements regarding the standardization of cars, digital cameras, and cell phones, as none of the above have the same hardware either.
He’s right about one thing though. In a one console future, the publishers, the developers would win big time. This is probably why you only hear about this kind of thing from developers like Dyack who are feeling the portability pain, and publishers like EA that have to pay for it. While consumers would theoretically win, I would argue that they largely don’t give a shit at the moment. Most people are not going to buy more than one console, and certainly not all three. Fortunately for them, most games are available on multiple consoles, so it doesn’t affect them (and Dyack argues that exclusive content is becoming more rare anyway, thus making this a moot point).
Unfortunately, the people who don’t win in this scenario are the manufacturers. Nintendo’s entire business strategy is built around differentiating their hardware in unique ways to spawn entire genres of games that only work on their systems. A one console world is not a good place for Nintendo to be in, and they will fold up shop before they agree to that deal. The ‘economic realities’ don’t snuff up against real innovation, and Nintendo has been taking innovation to the bank since the release of the Wii.
If you believe the reports on hardware pricing, Microsoft and Sony both lose money on hardware. The method by which they regain profits is then by issuing licensing fees against developers who want to make games for their console. Selling commodity consoles completely undermines this business model. Game by their very nature push the boundaries of what is possible with hardware, so unless studios stop being interesting in creating beautiful photo-realistic graphics, this medium is going to require some expensive hardware, and that means licensing costs.
Unlike in the car industry, the cell phone industry, and the camera industry, console manufacturers have nothing to gain by adopting an open standard against which all game will run, and certainly have no interest in becoming a commodity - trust me. Nokia doesn’t want to be a commodity either, it’s just an unfortunate artifact of adopting standards due to prohibitive capital costs of not doing so. The console industry does not suffer this problem, and thus I wouldn’t be advising Silicon Knights or Electronic Arts to be holding their breath for the arrival of the one true platform. I know it sucks gentlemen, but unless you have a way to force the market conditions in a different direction, I would suggest focusing on making great game experiences and leave the economic talk alone.
As a disclaimer, I was not at Lyon GDC 2007, and so I may be misinterpreting the reports of what Dyack actually said. If by some bizarre artifact Denis ends up reading this, I would encourage him or anyone else who was at the talk to set me straight.
The press release for the Dec. 4th Dashboard update has some cool stuff in it. Major Nelson has released a couple of new tidbits that we’re in the press release.
One of those two features fixes a major longtime problem with Xbox Live, although it’s not expressly stated in the release.
Previously, if you decided to move to another country (I hear people do that sometimes), you were screwed to the nines. The Live Passport framework locks in the country code when the account is created, and that country code cannot be changed. For things like webmail, it doesn’t really matter. The only result is that the advertising that you get is irrelevant to you in your new country.
But because an Xbox Live account is tied to a Live Passport, this has serious repercussions. Firstly, you need to pay for your account with a credit card who’s billing address is in the country your passport is linked to. What this means is that you would need to maintain an active billing address and credit card in your old country, just to be able to continue to pay for the service.
Secondly, you’re locked out of any content you might normally have access to in the new country (e.g. if you move from Canada to the USA, you would normally now have access to Xbox Live Marketplace TV and Movie content, something which is forbidden in the great white north).
The work around in the past has been “Start a new Xbox Live account”. Yeah. That means you lose all your achievements, your gamerscore, and any months of paid access you might have had left on the account. Additionally it means that you can no longer access any games you’ve purchased on XBLA from any machine, only the console you specifically downloaded them on in the first place. If that machine should happened to, oh, I don’t know, fail in some way, you’ve lost the title.
The potent point in my opinion is this. Starting today, you will be able to re-associate your Xbox Live account with a new passport account. The question is does Xbox Live retain a separate copy of the country code, or do they simply follow the pointer to the one used in the Passport account? If it’s the latter, all problems are solved tomorrow, and ye who change countries can rejoice in the streets.
On a related note: Canada (and some of Europe) is movie rentals on Xbox Live Marketplace on Dec. 11th! Yay for being slightly less of a second class citizen.
Much of the available tools recently provide more assistance to artists who need help programming (e.g. Torque Game Builder, Adventure Game Studio) than to programmers who need help getting artwork. Daniel Cook has a great article on his blog to help you out if you fall into the latter category.
It was announced earlier today that Activision is merging with Vivendi Games (the interactive entertainment division of Vivendi that includes Blizzard) to create what is now the largest console video game publisher - Activision Blizzard. Jean Bernard-Lévy, CEO of Activision was said to have stated: “Blah Blah Blah, Share-holder value, blah blah significant opportunities, blah blah Growth Prospects”.
Every gaming blog in the world responded with “OMFG… merger… what does this mean for WoW?”.
I’m going to put in my vote for “not really a whole lot”. As far as Blizzard is concerned, despite the fact that their name is now on the publisher as well, it’s really just a changing of the guard above. Blizzard has over and over again proven itself to be massively successful and profitable, and any new executive management would be foolish to screw with that.
This is interesting news, but shouldn’t be really suprising. As in the music and tv/movie industry, video game publishing is what’s referred to as an oligopoly - a market in which there are a relatively small number of firms who control the majority of the market. Oligopolies tend to emerge in areas where the costs and risk are extremely high, but barriers don’t exist due to ownership of capital assets (e.g. telephone, power distribution) or intellectual property (e.g. operating systems). When an industry meeting these characteristics begins, the market is very fragmented, and usually dominated by several start-ups who understand the particulars of that business. As the industry as a whole grows, more traditional investment companies will begin forming merges and buy-outs to conglomerate the small players into a larger, more financially stable whole. We have observed this happening in the music industry with record labels, and in the tv and movie industry with film studios.
Our industry is much younger, but already is dominated by six major publishers: Electronic Arts, Nintendo, Ubisoft, Take 2, Activision Blizzard, and THQ.
What I find interesting is that when you’re in an industry like these three, where the costs to distribute content are so high, and the risks of success equally so - management gets very risk adverse. They’re responsible for profit to shareholders, and they live in a very financial world. As a result, you begin to see trends towards blockbuster hit titles. This is the nature of action movies, highly paid brand name actors, top 40 pop music, sports games and high visual fidelity first-personal shooters. Publishers like these things because they’re safe, and any portfolio requires some safe bets to hedge the rest.
Which isn’t to say the people on the ground floor don’t put their heart and soul into these titles, it’s just that they’re primarily a business construct designed to appease the shareholers, and so creative control is somewhat removed.
Now, here’s the shakeup. What we’re watching unfold in the music industry right now is going to happen to film and is going to happen to tv and is going to happen to gaming. Once upon a time, production costs for music were extremely high, and the distribution channels even more so. Technology has completely eroded the first, and the internet the second, and now an oligopolistic industry is watching their barriers to entry come crashing down. A further kink in the puzzle is that music piracy is rampant, and there’s no real way to deal with that in a model based around selling individual units of content. Every single publisher in the music industry today needs to completely revamp their business model in order to compete, or be destroyed, plain and simple.
Piracy is also rampant in the film industry, although it hasn’t gotten quite as bad as the music industry. As bandwidth availability continues to rise, the film industry will be even more screwed than the music industry is now. The production costs for tv shows and movies haven’t dropped at all, and in fact, for those ultra-safe blockbuster titles, they’re increasing massively every year. The home theatre experience becomes more and more accessible and continues to equal if not surpass the cinema theatre experience in nearly every way. Today it is still possible to throw a quarter of a billion dollars at a blockbuster title and triple your money. That multiplier is shrinking on both sides every year. Television networks are also slowly sliding into irrelevance as it become possible to watch commercial free versions of all the content they deliver through digital delivery. This alternative becomes more popular every year.
Video games are a little further down the road than both of the previous. Production costs for video games are an order of magnitude lower than costs for film production. Additionally, pirating of console games is much harder than pirating music or film because it requires hardware modication of your system - a modification that could be detected by the manufacturer through online connectivity. On the PC side, piracy is a nightmare for traditional retail channels. Digital delivery mechanisms can aliviate this to a certain extent through the use of non-intrusive DRM (such as Steam). Attempts to shoehorn DRM into retail delivered copies of titles (using such abysmal tools as Stardock) has largely met with outrage.
The content sales model is not long-term viable. The internet enables piracy too easily, excessive measures to curtail it harm your legitimate customer experiences as well. Mergers like the one announced today are not exciting. It just means we’ve moved to the next chapter of the same old story. I’ll be excited when I see those top companies merging with companies who know how to change the business model. I want to see reductions in the cost of production, massively if possible. I want to see seamless end-to-end delivery models that enhance the customer’s experience, not detract from it. And I want to see people really innovating what you can do with the content, coming up with brand new genres of gameplay and game mechanics, and for publishers to see those as a necessary portion of a balanced title portfolio as well.
So when that merger happens, put it on the front page of Joystiq, and I’ll be reading.
