Industry Growth

I apparently missed this article on SPOnG stating that the gaming industry will grow by 42% in two years.  To me this means two things:  Mucho dollars flowing into the land of milk and honey for those who have been creating the magic for years (I want to get in the fridge too), and as a corollary more amazing content in the years to come.  If the golden age of arcade games was from 1982 to 1986, we’re living in the Renaissance in console form.

Project Management in Video Games

Heather Maxwell Chandler wrote an article posted on Gamasutra this morning on the value of Project Management in Video Game Design.  I found this existence of this article somewhat suprising.  Video Games are from a development standpoint, complex on the level of Enterprise-level business applications.  Furthermore to make a really great video game, into the complex land of code must be integrated concepts of gameplay design, artwork, sound, music, artificial intelligence, and so forth.  In short, making a game is hard.

 So how can a large team of people, most of whom own a greatly varying supply of skillsets manage to possibly put togethera game worth half a damn without using project management techniques?  I understand that there is likely a history of “Business Analyst Style” Project Managers who feel that, in the words of Abraham Maslow, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail.  Obviously the management techniques which have been have been honed in the business world to deal with highly structured process models are not going to be directly applicable to a creative work such as a video game, but to go the complete other direction would, I think, also be madness.

This article seems to suggest that the latter is exactly the case in much of the industry, which I find difficult to believe (although it would explain why 80 hour work weeks seem to be so common).  Could anybody who’s had some experience in the industry comment on that?

Video Games as Art

I’ve never liked Roger Ebert.  Mostly because he’s a pompous ass who seems to think that if there isn’t something deeply profound about a movie (and even if there is, he’ll often miss the point), then the movie is a useless piece of trash.

Well, as you can imagine he doesn’t think much of video games.  I always find this point of view entirely frustrating, because the people defending it are almost always (and certainly in this case) highly unfamiliar with the material in question.  If you’re going to have an opinion about something, why not give it a fair chance, maybe even take a look at some of the premium examples of artwork that medium has to offer.  Comparing Clive Barker’s Undying to Romeo and Juliet is comparable to comparing Terminator 2 to The Tempest, but I’m not trying to tell you that Film isn’t a valid art form.

So essentially what I’m saying here Rog is shut the fuck up.

Videogame Style Guide

The wait is over. The Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual is now shipping and available for order on www.gamestyleguide.com.

The first volume to definitively catalogue the breathtaking multibillion-dollar game industry from A to Z, The Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual brings a new gold standard for writers, reporters and others working in today’s most exciting entertainment biz. Critics from leading publications ranging from Playboy to Kotaku are already hailing the manuscript as “excellent,” “long overdue” and “an essential read for journalists of any level.”

For paperback copies, please click here: http://www.lulu.com/content/922500

For hardback copies, please click here: http://www.lulu.com/content/922573

To claim your free electronic copy of the volume or for more information, simply visit: http://www.gamestyleguide.com

You can also contribute to the next edition of the guide on the Wiki, available at www.igja.org/guide/

Peter Moore Resigns

Microsoft announced earlier today that Peter Moore, Tattooed Vice-President of the Interactive Entertainment Division, which includes Xbox, has resigned for personal reasons.  Peter will be moving with his family back to the SF Bay area in Northern California when he leaves the company at the end of August.

This is something of a down note for me, as my internship doesn’t begin until September, so any chance I have of running into the man himself has dropped from low to zero.  Peter has certainly been a leader in the video games industry, and is certainly one of the most charismatic.  He will be replaced by former EA president Don Mattrick.

Sad Face.

Multiplayer and Minions

In the news post from yesterday’s Penny Arcade, Tycho talks about two things that I’m conflicted on:  Multi-player being preferable to single player, and the game Overlord.

I can see why a person might be more interested in playing with other people, the dynamics of the game change, the challenge is higher, but I’ve always personally preferred to play by myself.   Why you ask?  Because most people I meet are ass hats.  Some games are just made to be played in multi-player because it’s too difficult to make a reasonably good AI (e.g. Real-time Strategy games).  Joyfully one does not have to listen to their opponent whilst playing RTS, but the folks you find playing on-line are usually addicted like crack to that particular game, and have honed the art of micromanagement down to a laundry list of moves to make on a per-millisecond basis.  Needless to say, this removes much of the enjoyment from anyone who is forced to leave their house from time to time.

The only FPS game I’ve managed to tolerate any kind of online time in is Gears of War, and this is only because the game is that exceptional.  It does carry the rider of most shooters though:  Half the time you play, you hear the belligerent moaning of what can only be a frat-boy, pissed that you’ve blown his skull off yet again.

Tycho, having rather the opposite opinion, was surprised to note that he had blown 6 hours straight playing Overlord (an interesting game basically being a cross between Dungeon Keeper and Pikmin).

Now, don’t get me wrong, I liked Overlord, a lot in fact.  The game is funny, and there’s something about swarming a horde of 50 minions over an oncoming throng of halflings that just tickles you the right way.  I do however note there is a major problem with this game that causes me to be seethingly irritated with it.

Essentially the entire game is spent killing small fuzzy things which occasionally will drop lifeforce - small glowing orbs which increase the size of your pool of minions.  On my first play through the game, I accumulated somewhere between 1500 and 2000 units of lifeforce total.

Now, I’m one of those guys who really likes to get the achievement points.  And some of the achievement points in this game are insane.  One achievement is gained by at any point in the game having over 10,000 lifeforce in your pool.  Think about that, it’s possible to beat the game, accomplishing almost all of the possible accomplishments, and only accumulate 1/5 of the lifeforce needed for that achievement.  One gets achievements for full upgrading each of the three armor sets, a feat which cost you several thousand lifeforce per armor set.  A third achievement for completing the game at maximum corruption is only possible after killing over 1,000 peasants, only accomplished by continually going to a city, running around slaughtering everyone, and repeating over and over again.

A game which I initially quite enjoyed has been associated with a mindless grind in my inner psyche.  There is nothing more depressing than sitting in the same spot, killing the same guys (usually trivial to do so), over and over again just so that you can continue with your life.  It is, as a developer, an easy way out, but it lowers the value of your game,  please stop doing this.

World of Warcraft, another of my past addictions, eventually turned me away because of both of the above issues.  Once reaching the maximum level, the only possible tasks are to schedule several nights of your week, consistently week after week, to hang out with 40 people or so, and grind a raid dungeon.  Just put a gun in my mouth right now.

Can we just make a rule where nobody is ever allowed to put grinding into a game ever again?  Or at least make it such a taboo that only the most sadistic developers do so?  This is not a practice that we should be encouraging folks, and if anyone out there is a developer, I would encourage you to bring that message back home.

Transparency

In the interest of transparency, I felt the need to make a personal note.  While I do in general attempt to make objective commentary on the industry, I’m beginning an internship at Microsoft this September for the subsequent four months as a Program Manager on Visio.

While I don’t imagine this will sway my point of view, I feel the need to share this information so that I’m not posing as a Microsoft Astroturfing plant.

MMOG Economies

Ryan over at EyesLikeOurs reports that the creators of EVE Online have apparently hired a full-time in-game economist to act in a similar manner to the chairman of the federal reserve.

I think that’s awesome.  Primarily I think that’s awesome because it indicates that virtual environments are increasingly being seen as analogous to real environments, and require similar control mechanisms.   Worth a read.

Brand Confusion

There’s a phenomenon that seems to be emerging of late. I’ve never noticed this to happen earlier than a couple of years ago, but if anyone could point out an example of it, I’d appreciate it. This phenomenon is a scourge on the industry, and any gamer who’s interested in playing a certain type of game near release is liable to be sucker-punched by it.

Here’s what happens:

A developer licenses some Intellectual Property, which has a fixed cost.  They come to the conclusion that the best way to maximize their return on the investment of these fees is to distribute the title they’re working on across as many different platforms as possible.  Some developers (I’m looking at you, Ubisoft) have IP internally that is powerful enough to compel them to make games for many platforms as well, presumably to sell more titles and thus earn more income.  This is all well and good, certainly I don’t have any qualms with releasing titles on multiple platforms.  However, not all platforms are created equal.  We can therefore expect a certain level of negotiation with respect to things that are affected by the limitations of that particular platform.  Obviously a game coming out for PS3 or 360 would need to have its graphical capabilities, etc. scaled back if it were also being released for Xbox.  A game coming out for the Wii might need to have the interface modified somewhat to accommodate the Wii’s unique controller.

What should NOT change, however, is the overall game experience.   When a game is publisher and has a certain name, but is released on multiple platforms, customers assume that regardless of which platform they choose to purchase the game for, They are purchasing the same game.  When this fails to be the case, if the different versions of the game are significantly different from each other, but all have the same cover art, same name, same advertising campaign, you are creating brand confusion.  Perhaps some examples will better illustrate what I mean.

The year is 2004, Spider-man 2 comes out.  Despite the fact that most games based on commercial blockbusters are complete critical failures, everything I heard about this game is that it’s phenomenal.  Metacritic gives the PS2 (and Xbox) version of the game 80 out of 100, a reasonably good score.  The game is acclaimed for having the free roaming nature of GTA, but in three dimensions.  Swinging around Manhattan, freely exploring the city sounds like a great deal of fun.  I buy the game for PC, because at the time I was travelling and didn’t want to drag my consoles around when I could play on my laptop.  One would at this point assume I was buying the same game.  After all, there’s certainly nothing you can do on a console you can’t do on a PC.  If one wanders over to Metacritic and looks up the score on the PC version of this game, the score of 42 might come as a bit of a shock.  Why is the score for the PC version of the game nearly 40 points lower than the console versions?  Because it’s an entirely different game.  One is no longer free to explore the city at will (the major selling point of the first game), in fact, you’re restricted to where you shoot your webs by little floating web icons which hang inconspicuously in the air.  The entire PC game can be finished in two hours, and there is absolutely no reason to backtrack.  Why Activision decided to release a PC game which is entirely different from the console version (and much, much shittier), and throw it under the same brand, when it would have been much simpler just to port the console version over, is beyond me.

Case two.  Splinter Cell:  Double Agent.  I’m pretty sure this title is an inside joke, because there are actually two different versions of this game.  Version 1 was developed by Ubisoft Shanghai, the folks who brought you Splinter Cell 2, and was released for PC, 360, and PS3.  Version 2 was made in Montreal (Splinter Cell 1 and 3), and came out for Xbox, Gamecube, PS2, and Wii.  The general storyline is similar, but major sections of the game are changed.  A big feature in version 1 were levels where Sam is instructed to perform some menial task by the terrorists, who will return in a given timeframe.  In each of these levels, Sam must complete the task, but also use the remainder of his time to discover new plot information, and to perform covert tasks for the NSA.  Version 2 completely omits these levels, but instead has entirely new levels which are not present at all in version 1.  The plot in version 2 is also much more throughly fleshed-out, so many gamers playing version 1 may complete it and be left scratching their head.  Despite this, there’s no real indication that the PC version of the game might be significantly different from the PS2 version of the game.

I’m completely fine with having two studios create similar but not precisely the same game for different platforms, simultaneously, but please, brand the game differently.  Brand identity is the sole discriminating factor game developers have to identify their organizations and products.  By creating multiple products which are similar, but fundamentally different, and branding them identically creates confusion which erodes the value of your brand.  This is especially true when one of the products is extremely inferior to the other.  Understandably one would want to leverage the cost of their licenses to get the most profit out of the equation possible, but if you have to mess your brand up to do it, you’re selling a piece of your hard-earned soul that you may not be able to get back in the long term.

Stop making a game for 8 different systems, giving it the same name, but having it be a totally different game.

All that is good in the world

Yesterday I attended a recruiting session given by Denis Dyack and some of the team from Silicon Knights here at the University of Waterloo. I don’t think I made a complete fool of myself, but it was definitely one of the first times in my life I’ve managed to stutter and ramble in anxiety, so I guess I must have liked what they had to say. While I’m not interested in writing a plug for SK, I will say that many of the things they said over the course of that two hours resonated strongly with me. There’s a lot of issues with working the games industry that are hard to judge without actually working in it, despite the amount of blogs you read or development magazines you might subscribe to. SK strikes me as a place where they strongly and fundamentally understand a lot of these issues in a way I agree with, and I thought I’d go through a few of them.

Employee Recognition

Much of the games industry has a reputation for being essentially a meat grinder: taking fresh graduates, putting them into high-stress, long hour positions and running them until they burn out, at which time they’re replaced by fresh employees. I really believe that if you’re going to create great games, you need great people. Game design is an incredibly complex and sophisticated process, and much like any other medium that pushes the boundaries of what is possible, the people in the company are the ones that make it happen. If you don’t make those employees feel like what they do matters, and that they are valued, you’re going to lose them. You might be able to make money churning shit out the door, but nobody is going to celebrate it. Why not reach for the sky.

Lateral Movement

The baby boomer generation has been known for finding a company and sticking with them for their entire lives. Generation X is characterized by the opposite, hoping from company to company and job to job as suits their fancy. Generation Y, the current generation of new graduates and the one I happened to belong to is characterized by a mix of the two. Gen Y wants to stay with one company, but they want to do different things. Gen Y wants all the advantages of changing up your job, keeping it fresh, while retaining the benefits of staying in one organization long-term. Making it easy to move around in the company will attract Gen Y, help keep your employees interested in what they do, and at the same time groom people who are familiar with the whole of the game making process.

Continuing Education

Once upon a time, it was very rare to get a Bachelor’s Degree, much less a Bachelor’s Degree in a field such as Math or Engineering. In Canada, there are approximately 65,000 Professional Engineers. Presently, there are around 27,000 students in an accredited Engineering program. Clearly, the marginal value of the Bachelor’s degree declines significantly when the market is flooded, and a large number of us for these reasons, as well as the joy of learning, are interested in pursuing a Master’s or PhD. Supporting your employees in pursuing higher education, and arranging it so that their jobs are open when they finish can help infuse the organization with much more rare and sophisticated talent, and when your business is making compelling content and pushing hardware to its limits, there’s no way that can be a bad thing.

Games as High Art

It’s been said that games may one day be the dominant form of entertainment. Certainly as the generations who grew up with video games age, console systems will become as prevalent as cable subscriptions. However in order to truly bring video games into their own, developers will have to start making more games which are on par with Hollywood blockbusters, as well as classic critically acclaimed films. There’s a lot of mumbling about this going on right now. Certainly some developers have made piles of money and games which are really fun to play, while largely ignoring story. To me, this is similar to making movies like ‘The Wedding Crashers”. The movie made a lot of money, and was hilarious to watch, but you’re not really pushing the medium forward, it’s not the type of thing people will write about for years to come. If you want high art, you’re going to have to have solid writing. John Carmack once said that story in a video game is like story in porn, it’s expected to be there, but isn’t really important. I think Carmack has done incredible things for the Industry, and he deserves credit for that, but that quote definitely speaks to his games. They’re fun to look at, maybe even fun to play, but they don’t touch you on an emotional level the way something like Ragnar Tornquist’s The Longest Journey does. If we want games to be high art, they have to be more than eye-candy, you have to feel something when you play them, you should be left thinking about them while you’re falling asleep at night…

Anyway, these are all thoughts that popped into my mind while I was listening to the Silicon Knights team talk. I hope that they manage to drive in that direction.

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