duncan@magnetargames.com

You’re talking directly into my brain. That’s hard to relate I guess. I guess I’m a wannabe game developer/designer. But I’ve had some ideas akin to what you’re talking about. I’m looking for web design work as I write this cause I don’t have the portfolio mustard to get into professional game design yet. I’d been neglecting my web development skills the past while so I’ve been doing alot of reading about Web 2.0 recently (currently learning Ruby on Rails and AJAX and what not)… which I guess is what I mean about “speaking directly into my brain”. I sort of have a constant background noise about game design running and since I’ve been doing so much web development reading I’m completely on the same page.

My own work has been more looking towards a higher level framework… but that fundamentally relates back to the groundwork it is based on… which at this point meant I was thinking from scratch because there isn’t a solid framework standard. As such I’d been pondering your points myself, but you’ve definitely woven them together (at least for me).

I think the meat of it is an absolute lack of standards. There just aren’t any. There’s no WC3 of game development languages that aren’t for the web. Standardization is a multisided die. You end up with benefits as well as restrictions in standards.

I think higher-level tools is where the empowerment comes from, but again what is a higher-level tool without a common set of standards to be built off of? Something very restrictive and not as useful. Flash can do some nice things for the web but it’s far from open. Sure I know how to use it, yes I can write basic actionscript, but most stuff doesn’t need it and it’s not ideal for all web development.

I think the problem is systemic. If we look at games from the base level: Hardware. We immediately run into a problem. Different hardware manufacturers start to support advanced features but don’t make those features commonly availible. They stick them in propietary API’s versus the painfully in need of updating OpenGL standard. Obviously graphics hardware doesn’t sport the actual gameplay, but it’s an example of part of the issue. If we move beyond hardware we get to platforms. Game consoles, computers (mac and PC), cellphones, handhelds. So many platforms!

Going back to the web comparison, now I’m only 22, but my impression was that the web was originally only intended for landbound computers and eventually home computers. So it originally only had to support a few operating systems. And even then it’s not untill recently that webbrowsers have actually started to HAVE standards that were reliable… even as short as 5-10 years ago that wasn’t the case at all. And then cellphones and other platforms now have to confrom to the established standards… but they came later. Now I’ve not followed game development for too many years, but I’ve never been aware of too much of a push to standardize much of anything in games. I feel it kind of stems from the same attitude that permeates most games traditionally: “I’m a teenage boy, and what’s mine is mine! Fuck the rest of you! Our’s is way better and bigger!”

There’s a handfull of dominant engines in the market and they’re all so proprietary. For example, I grew up modding HL, so I know HL’s tools… Hammer, a smidgeon of 3DSMax, proprietary scripting for their engince, and Photoshop (fortunately Photoshop is a nice standard). But Hammer and their scripting language aren’t useful elsewhere… and even 3DSMax to a certain extent… sure if you know them… you can apply CONCEPTS to other tools but it can be a bitch to learn the new tools because they’re the same…. but different… and sometimes COMPLETELY different. The tools that make content for games are even becoming propietary (at least in aligences: Valve and XSI for example) Games have their own engines for everything… and sometimes you need that… but what they make doesn’t contribute to the whole. There just aren’t enough people like us saying, “Wait guys! All this stuff is great and all but we’re specializing instead of standardizing!”. Some of that is obviously some of my person frustration, but I can only use my own expereinces as examples.

Getting back to my previous point, as the web was struggling for standardization… it doesn’t feel like gaming has tried to do that so much. There have been different efforts at different points and time, but it’s definitely not an industry trend. People have been building engines (as you poigniently noted – “browsers”) for a long time but the similarity ends there because as you duely noted there is no actual equivalent in games.

I think you’ve basically outlined a grocery list for the industry:

1) A standard upon which to base Games (“Browsers”) – DOM
2) A standard markup to relate the functional mechanical bits to the engine – XHTML
3) A standard markup to relate the aesthetic parts to the engine – CSS2

Whatever the DOM equivalent for gaming – Let’s do what the tech industry does best – MAKE AN ACRONYM – G.O.M. The Game Object Model needs to be flexible to allow the various languages out there to interact with it. We need to start to see more open engines based on a GOM. Frankly game mechanisms are standard and need to be standardized. You touched on this and this has been where my own research and development has been… the stanard mechanics of games. Games have common elements – UI Bits, Common Statistics, Common Controllers. The industry has spent a long, long, long, long time (all of it’s history) rewriting alot of the same code instead of building a standard framework of game mechanisms that can be expounded up and overridden for specific uses.

XHTML and CSS – They’re standard for web, but I agree that the lack of standard base prevents even the practical discussion of a game equivalent untill such a standard starts to take shape.

Anyways… alot of that is regurgitation mixed with fresh food… which I guess doesn’t always taste so great… but it helps me digest what you’re saying. Again… definitely on the same page.

Gonna keep this going upstairs in a “spin cycle”…

-C. Richardson