Richard Garriott’s Asteroids as seen on the Colbert Report. I knocked this up in Mockingbird in about 10 minutes. Very hackish, just downloaded a Garriott picture from Wikipedia and an Asteroids screenshot, cutting out the various pieces. Dead simple.
Game Dev
13
Sep 08
Games are too expensive.
This came up in a recent OMMA Gaming Insider post (see comments): I argued that games are too expensive ($50 video games, that is, not $10 XBLA titles). The article’s author countered with the old cost-per-hour-of-entertainment rebuttal.
Hey, I’ve made that argument myself in the past. But I see the err in my thinking now. The argument is flawed by relying on a wrong premise: I pay $15 for a DVD and it gives me 2 hours of entertainment; I pay $60 for a game and it gives me 40 hours of entertainment; thus, games are a better value for your entertainment dollar.
Well, you could maybe make that argument in comparison to buying a ticket to a movie theater (where you do get 2 hours of entertainment for $7.50, or $3.25/hour). So, for a $60 video game, I’d need to put in 16 hours of gameplay to equal that. Not unreasonable, though definitely beyond the time investment the industry should expect in order to grow its audience (for most games).
But the real comparison is to DVDs or CDs. The gamer always seems to argue that, for some reason, DVDs and CDs don’t have replay value (or perhaps it doesn’t count?). I have CDs that are 10 years old that I’ve easily listened to 100 times. So, that $15 investment yielded at least 100 hours of entertainment or $0.15/hour. The last DVD I bought? $20 for a 2 hour movie I’ve already watched twice and will probably watch a dozen times during its lifetime: $0.83/hour.
So, how about we drop that argument as we’re really just trying to justify to ourselves why we spend too much on games. Because it is too much. *Most* video games are made for less than *most* movies, but because they *appeal* to a smaller audience they have to charge more to break even. But I’m not arguing for a dumbing down of games to appeal to larger audiences… the real solution is a dramatic overhaul of how games are made, marketed and sold.
I think it’s ironic how conservative our business is. And shameful. XBLA is the closest thing out there to a “better way” of selling and distributing games. As XNA improves, production costs will go down. As developers worry less (and audiences demand less) in regards to poly counts, production costs will go down further (as team sizes and schedules shrink). As distribution goes digital, those costs will drop. With free demos and social recommendation engines, marketing costs will drop.
And best of all, if consumers are only paying $10 for a product they won’t be upset if it doesn’t deliver 40 hours of entertainment. They’ll be happy with 10, or even 5 if they’re really good. Which further drives down production costs (and testing, and distribution). Which means that $10 has more and more room for profit.
And it also means that there’s more and more people who can afford it. My $50 game budget just got me 5 different games (variety, the spice of life!) instead of one game. That means 5 different developers got my vote of confidence. 5 different ideas got legs in the marketplace. Variety thrives. The medium evolves.
There’s also less pirating because it’s easier and faster to pay $10 for the real thing. And because pirating is no longer a big worry for developers their costs go down (no SecuROM licensing, for example, or extra time spent developing counter-measures).
I believe that if games cost $10 – $20 each the industry and its audience would grow dramatically. I’ve never seen any evidence that challenges that theory, but I’ve seen an incredible amount that bolsters it.
28
Jul 08
Mockingbird selected for Austin Indie Game Fest Showcase
Mockingbird: The Game Making Game has been selected for the Austin GDC’s Independent Game Festival Showcase. Looks like we’re in a pretty good crowd as well. I’m a bit curious about the inclusion of a few titles that are published by Gamecock (and, as far as I know, funded by them as well). It raises (again) the question about what’s an indie game/developer and what’s an indie that’s simply “new”. I’d love to hear what people think (in the comments), in particular if anyone has any links to good discussions on the subject.
23
Jun 08
Spore’s Brilliant Trick For Uploading/Downloading Creatures
Will Wright’s Spore is coming soon. I’m looking forward to it. I still think SimCity4 is one of the most perfect games ever made (and still looks/plays competitively with the latest games out there), and there’s no debating whether or not The Sims franchise was/is a significant game design (and commercial) milestone. I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that Spore will be joining that illustrious crowd, though the missing “people” element (you know, homosapiens, actual human beings) will probably keep it from realizing the scope/breadth/depth of audience that The Sims has seen.
The Sporepedia, which serves as a clearing house for the most popular creatures created by players, employs a very clever (and very user-friendly) means to upload/download creatures: they embed the data in the PNG thumbnail of the creature. Instead of having some custom data format that’s opaque to the user (and basically worthless after it hits their desktop except for importing straight into Spore), the user has a traditional PNG that they can trivially view on any modern browser/OS. Embedded in the alpha channel data of the PNG, though, is a bunch of data (about 1K according to some estimates).
Now, this is an old trick, and you can do it “officially” with PNGs in custom chunks or in JPEGs, etc. It’s possible in almost any well-structured format. But it’s a very clever, modern, web way of handling it. It allows for trivial sharing by the user through whatever means they’re accustomed to because sharing an image is an almost universal feature of any collaborative software. So, user’s can attach the thumbs to their e-mail, or post them to their Flickr account, or put them on Facebook or their MySpace page, or send them in an IM.
Consider this inspiration! I’m now officially on the look out for how I can apply this technique to Mockingbird. Embedding the game’s description in its screenshot? Encoding ActionScript into the action icons? I don’t know, but I’m going to find something. And you should, too! Incorporate this feature into your products today!
15
Jun 08
Mockingbird in the News
We showed up in the Austin American-Statesman for Tech Monday (out on the web this evening). Digg it. Spread the word. Check it out. Pretty good write-up.
UPDATE: I didn’t notice this, but there’s also a video clip. Interesting…
6
May 08
Are you making a game, or are you making a game?
An oft-encountered problem when discussing “games” is that we don’t have a fully-developed, universally understood terminology. We’re getting there… we’re much closer than we were just a few years ago, and lightyears ahead of where we were ten years ago. But there’s still a significantly sticky term that we seem to be permanently stuck with: the name of our medium, games.
The term “games” has been around for Really Long Time&tm; (I couldn’t find a reference indicating the date of the origin of the word, buts it has its roots in Olde Englishe&tm;). When we use it today we’re generally referring to video games, board games, card games, sports, etc., i.e. structured (however loosely) activities with interaction, rules and goals. There’s a ton of academic writing on the specific definition that I don’t care to go into… we all know what we’re talking about.
Or do we? The problem with the term games is that for 99% of its history it referred to a formal structure of rules with some goal. But we use it far more liberally these days, particularly in the indie or academic game circles, meaning more generally interactive entertainment (as opposed to films/books/music being passive entertainment).
Randy Smith (EALA) raises this issue in a recent Next-Gen column. Actually, he doesn’t directly raise this issue, instead he raises the issue that we used to have games where the player was allowed to fail, didn’t have a clear path for success, and in general had a much “grayer” experience. He cites Ultima V, which to be honest is cheating, as that game is much more the exception than the rule in regards to “gray” games.
His larger point is that “modern” game design, borrowing heavily from the good designs perfected in the casual market, dictates clear paths to success, objective scoring, concise rules, etc. (you can read his article). His question is whether or not we’re losing something by focusing on these things exclusively, i.e. have we overcorrected and lost something powerful?
The problem is the definition of what we’re doing, what we’re making. If you’re making a game that’s similar to a sport (Quake, practically any FPS with a military-theme, practically any RTS, virtually all casual games, all arcade games, etc.) then all of the elements of modern game design are totally appropriate. On the other hand, if you’re making a game that’s more akin to a simulation or a toy, then all the tenets of good usability, user interface design and accessibility (all different ways of saying the same thing) are critical.
But what if you’re making a game that’s like Ultima V, or Passage, or Super Columbine Massacre RPG, or the Olympic Torch Relay Game? These games are more about the message than the mechanism. The mechanics aren’t elements of structured play, but rather the necessary elements in order to get a specific emotion or point across to the player.
So, we’ve got serious games, casual games, hardcore games, just plain ole games… and message games? These are really our “art” games, games that focus on message or mechanics. They don’t dispense with mechanics, the mechanics are just secondary to the message. And as a result, they often have unoriginal mechanics because it’s not the point.
Note that I’m not dismissing mechanics as important in a “message” game. Cinematography is still critical to good film even if it is secondary to a message in many instances.
What are some examples of message games? I’d love to hear them in the comments. I’m looking for games where the point was the message they conveyed, not the mechanics with which the user interacted with them. I’ll start with the obvious ones I’ve already mentioned: Ultima V (and IV), Passage, SCMRPG… Planescape is probably one, though I’ve never played it. Others?
3
Apr 08
The Craft of Gamemaking
I presented this evening at the ACC. I think it went well. I’m definitely out of practice. The slides probably won’t be interesting without the talking, but in case anyone is curious: The Craft of Gamemaking.
If you saw the presentation, I’d love to hear from you in the comment section.
14
Jan 08
Used Games
Collin Campbell recently wrote an editorial on used games. He makes the argument that used games sales at stores like GameSpot hurt the game industry as a whole because publishers (and by extension developers) don’t receive a dime of used game sales. I think he makes a poor argument, though.
He neatly dodges the question of why the used market doesn’t seem to be the ruin of other industries, such as books, movies or music, or as one commenter suggested, cars. He says this about these other products:
Unlike books and other media, games have a short life in the hands of consumers. Books, DVDs and CDs are keep-ables, sometimes for years. Games, once they’re played out, are often not.
Here he actually reveals the problem, and it’s not with the used game market. The problem is that “games have a short life.” Which is horribly ironic considering how games compare as a medium to books, music or movies. Games are interactive and dynamic, the others are passive and static. Games are generative, the others are fixed. To “complete” a game ranges from 8 to 10 hours (for “short” games) to 30, 40, or more (for “long” games). Compare that to 1 hour for a CD, 2 hours for a movie, or 6 to 8 hours for a book.
The use game market is so strong because games are so expensive. I’ve got a large collection of DVDs, three or four hundred last time I counted. I could easily have twice that if I actually had a decent place to stick all of them. I’ve got a similar collection of CDs. I can look at these large collections and calculate how much money I’ve dumped into them: $6,000 on DVDs, $5,000 on CDs, roughly speaking. Considering I’ve been collecting them over the last decade, and many of them have been gifts, that all seems pretty reasonable (relatively speaking).
Now, what if I had 200 PS2 games that I had bought new? $10,000. And that’s assuming a $49.95 price point. And how many of them would I want to pop in and play today? I’ll let you guess… and then compare that number to how many of my movies I’d want to pop in and play today, let alone next year or 10 years from now.
I can only justify spending $60 on a console game because I know I can trade it in and recoup half that. I didn’t do that for a long time: I only bought new and I kept all the games I bought. At one point I realized that I simply didn’t care to play 90% of those games ever again. I traded them all in to a Gamespot and I’m sitting on nearly $400 in credit… credit that I’ll most likely spend on new games, though honestly I’ll spend it on a used copy if its available.
Because of the way our industry creates games we create the “problem” that Collin is arguing. We create sequels, we create derivatives in a genre, we create clones. I’m actually all for that: games are tricky design problems, and they’re software to boot, so all of this copying and cloning and making of sequels is simply evolution at work. Call of Duty 4 is a spectacular FPS, why would I go back to Call of Duty 3 (except for the WWII themes)? SimCity 4 is a near-perfect rendition of SimCity in my opinion, why would I want to play SimCity 3000 or SimCity 2000? The opposite is most often true in movies: “the only sequel that doesn’t make money is the last one,” therefore would can conclude that movies “devolve” with successive generations (of the same movie, not the medium as a whole).
All that’s too say is Collin’s comparison to other used markets is false, or at least using the comparison to bolster his argument fails. All it does it point the finger right back at the publishers. As one of the comments points out, the used game market forces publishers to create the best “first run” title, i.e. titles that demand to be purchased the day of release. Or, titles that demand to be kept long enough to dry up the used games market.
That’s the real problem. Publishers think that “units sold” should equate to the number of people who play/own their product. That’s why they hated rentals. It’s exactly how the “business” software industry likes to think, and it’s exactly what every DRM solutions attempts to enforce (including digital distribution). But this market perspective is only true for “consumables,” i.e. products whose purchase leads immediately (or nearly so) to their consumption, and thus removal from the market. Examples would be food, gas, printer ink, paper, or more abstractly (contractually) movie tickets, rent, utility bills.
Publishers want their market to be one of consumables. But it’s not. It’s a product-oriented market, like toys or cars or houses. Ownership is invested into something tangible and (relatively) permanent. Ownership only ever changes hands, even if it’s to toss the product into the trash. It’s property.
Basically, you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. If you want your product to be “property” then you can basically charge a very high cost beyond manufacturing, basically whatever the market will bare, but your market size is based upon how many people at any point in time want to own your product. So for example, if 500 people want to own your product today and a year from now 500 people want to own your product but it’s a different 500 people, your market size is still 500 people, and in an idealized market economy you may end up with only 500 total sales, even though 1000 people at one time or another “owned” or “used” your product.
Now, if you want your product to be a “consumable” it basically, or inevitably, becomes a commodity, i.e. it’s cost is driven by incredibly slim margins on the manufacturing cost, not the research and development cost. In the case of video games, a “consumable” cost would be very close to what CDs, DVDs and books cost, roughly $15 to $20. Instead, publishers try to factor all costs into the product cost, including research, development, marketing, manufacturing and distribution. It’s simply a luxury that the market will no longer tolerate.
Publishers will argue that there’s no way they could develop games if their retail price was $15 or $20. And they’d be right, if they continued to do business as usual. But as we should all realize — and if the web hasn’t taught you this I don’t know what will — the only constant is change, and if a business doesn’t change when its market changes it will become irrelevant (see music industry). The industry must change. Either the budgets have to be smaller or the market has to be larger. Pointing the finger at used games is no different than the music industry pointing the finger at a housewife sharing music on a P2P network (other than the strict legality of the respective practices): something is wrong with either the business model or the product if the market doesn’t desire one enough to put up with the other.
25
Sep 07
Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics, Metrics
I first came across a discussion of mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics on King Lud IC. Patrick adds metrics to the equation (no pun intended). His metrics are an interesting idea, essentially measuring aspects of the dynamics then using those measurements to modify the other three systems (mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics). What he’s describing is basically a fitness criteria for the game’s DNA (mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics). I can see how this could be considered the “fourth layer” of MDA.
Patrick keeps asking how one would actually balance it. You could see it as a linear optimization problem (where you’re solving for n variables given m equations/relations). There’s a ton of mathematics research in this field (using computers to analytically solve the systems of equations). The beauty of any matrix of values is that you can run them through transformations (such as neural nets, or min/max algorithms, or even edge detection). It’s just important to remember the relationships. Take values as nodes in a graph, with edges representing relationships between the values.
I’d like to present my own definition of mechanics. I don’t think of it too differently from what Patrick presented; I see mechanics as the tangible, literal, immediate actions (or verbs) the player executes in the game. Classic examples would be run, jump, shoot, move, push, pull. Dynamics would be the effects of the mechanics on the world and the “strategies” that combine multiple mechanics. That may be exactly what Patrick and everyone else is saying, but it helps me grok it better in those terms (so maybe it’ll help someone else as well).
Of course, I may just be being pedantic about the term mechanics, but I see interactive storytelling, or drama games, as simply being more sophisticated dynamics on top of existing mechanics. I really do feel like we’ve developed a healthy enough palette of mechanics for our games; it’s the dynamics that are really too shallow and uninvolved, particularly considering that that’s where the meat is.
I’m sure this is exactly what the academics would say if I was better versed in their writings, but I see mechanics as the necessary instant gratification of interactivity, with the dynamics being the longer term satisfaction of interactivity. That’s why I thought Facade was a failure as a whole: the mechanics were not at all gratifying. How is real-time-typing-hoping-the-parser-understands-and-waiting-for-a-hit-or-miss-reaction a gratifying mechanic? It’s not. Sure, the longer term dynamics of the drama that plays out may be satisfying (when you reflect on it), or the anticipation of what may happen next (when you anticipate it) may be interesting, but the actual mechanics were piss-poor.
Of course, that short term vs. long term “satisfaction” was best summed up recently in this article on the short and long game.
25
Sep 07
Some brief thoughts on metaphors and genres…
Culture: Games and Metaphor is, very simply, superb. My only problem is its tired insistence that the Wiimote will magically improve things. A very odd supposition, as the author stressed metaphor, yet the Wiimote is far more literal (at least, when used intuitively) than the as-abstract-as-it-gets buttons on a gamepad. Even the example used of the Wiimote in Castlevania: what’s less metaphorical than holding a whip and swinging it at the screen? Furthermore, the more literal use of the Wiimote (argued by others to be its benefit!) almost requires a more literal player-centered perspective on the game world, i.e. FPS, the thing that the author complains about immediately proceeding the Castlevania comments.
Beyond those few errs, the article perfectly hits home the metaphor point. Particularly the discussion of Shadow of the Colossus, the most succinct explanation of that game as art.
Here’s an interesting article on genre from the Escapist that lead me to make this note in my notebook: “Genres help eliminate unnecessary exposition, they provide a known context for author and audience. Genre is economy.” And by “economy” I meant that genres are an efficient mechanism to reduce the overall information burden on the user (just like metaphors!). They help the user “chunk” across content in a given medium (and even across mediums).
Also, in regards to games being “representational,” the article points to a problem with more realistic looking games… the higher quality, “realer” representation implies to the user a higher fidelity interaction (which never scales as quickly). That’s why old school games feel “right” … their representation equals their interaction.