Jogosity

10 Things We Need from the New Consoles

Tue, 21 May 2013 06:45:00 -0400

It’s an exciting time. As I write this, the Xbox 720 reveal event is just a few hours away. And no, I don’t expect it to be called 720 either. But with that and the PS4 on the horizon, I thought I’d blog a wee bit what I think we need from these new consoles. I’ll probably get into trouble by not including the WiiU in this list. I sort of apologise, but not much because that console is already out so doesn’t qualify for a speculative post such as this.

To set this up a bit, I love console gaming, most of my most cherished gaming experiences live on consoles. And as much as I love mobile gaming, I expect more of my favourite experiences to only be possible on a console, on a whacking big telly, with a perfectly designed controller in my hands. But consoles need to change, and it’s not going to be poly counts or shader support that will make the difference.

Let’s start with some hardware bits to get that out of the way.

Graphics : Some – We’ve learned over the past few years that totes-amaze-balls pictures aren’t really necessary for a great game experience. But I concede that you probably will need “some” graphics so I won’t complain too much. You’ll probably want terribly shiny cars, I’d like human faces that don’t weird out on me when they are talking.

Sound: Yes Please – And if you could put an optical output somewhere sensible that would be nice. Thanks.

Console Hardware Configuration: Properly tested this time… Yes. You know what I mean. No more of that!

Right, now let’s talk about games. Frankly, I don’t care very much about all the big showcase, $100 Million productions that you’re all going to show us at E3. I want interesting, unusual and innovative games that will come from all over the game community, not just from your 6 bezzie mates in the dwindling Old Publishers Society. Most importantly, I want to be one of the people creating those interesting, unusual and innovative games. So my “games” section looks like this.

Game Marketplace: Open – Look, you can’t compete with the mobile experience by trying to curate every single fucking pixel that goes on your machine. The world is heaving to the gunnels with genius game creators who aren’t allowed anywhere near a console. Let the small, medium and indie devs create games for you. Sony appear to be learning this lesson and are making very positive steps to opening up. Microsoft would do really well to follow this lead.

This is even more important in a world where the $50-$100 million dev budgets may well be either a dead business model, or one that is so restricted that it chokes the whole console business to death. Release games from the grip of the Old Publishers Society. They can still be there, but along side us, not instead of us.

Secondly, let the vendors set the prices, don’t police this yourself. Apple have got a better system here. Loads of tiers for all sorts of price points and the capacity to change tier with ease. Give US the power, you can just relax and make more money for doing less.

Oh, and one more thing. I will be paying in real money. That thing will cost me £4.99. CLICK.

Do you understand this?

Development: Seamless – This I write from the point of view of a game dev. Traditionally, getting your game to work on an Xbox has been easy. It just worked, it really did! Conversely, getting it to run on a PS2 or PS3 was… difficult. If both of you could just give us great SDKs and dev environments that would be great and we wouldn’t have to think twice, thrice or eighteen times about the infrastructure cost or extra programming overhead when deciding whether to develop smaller titles for your platform.

A corollary to this request is less nobby, and less-nobby TCRS. Sometimes using a console is like being walked to school by panicking grandmother. I won’t turn my console off and expect it to still work. I get it. Stop talking to me like I’m some sort of experimental chimp.

Game updates: Free – This is another game dev point. For heaven’s sake, STOP FORCING US TO PAY TO UPDATE OUR GAMES! Devs should be able to freely, seamlessly update their games, adding new stuff and improving the experience. Pass the responsibility on to us to make sure it has been adequately tested, don’t worry if some people screw it up, it won’t be your fault, it’ll be ours. This is fine. We are grown-ups, making games is our business and our livelihoods, we’ll do EVEYTHING to ensure they work for everyone.

Once again, look at how mobiles games and apps have coped with the anarchic wild frontier of updating games without daddy overseeing every step.

Now I want to make a few points about the wider experience of using the console.

User Interface: Clear, and Customisable – But consoles are supposed to be baked experiences, perfectly optimised for our pleasure and not needing any of that complicated faffing with icons and menus that you need to do on a PC!!!

Utter, utter, poppycock.

Even my phone lets me put the most important things TO ME in the most accessible place FOR ME. Let’s assume for the second that I don’t want 75% of my screen taken up with movie and TV entertainment content that I WON’T BUY, but would be happy to see game content for which MY WALLET IS OPEN AND BEGGING. You might, y’know, sell me more shit?

This relates to business in some way but I can’t quite figure out how.

Online Services: Excellent – This is an area in which Microsoft have a clear advantage. Despite the improvements in the PlayStation Network in recent years, XboxLIVE remains a better experience. It is more usable and its personal and social features are far more visible and accessible. Friend lists, online play set-up, all of this stuff is really important.

Having little funny men and women computer-people representing each of my friends is sort of silly and arguably pointless, but it is still fun and I like it. The ease of seeing what my friends are playing and how far they have got via their achievements is a nice experience.

Admittedly it is one that has become harder to reach in recent, movie/music oriented firmware updates, but putting my friends back at the heart of the platform is something that will leave me feeling a bit more connected after each game session. It’s not a tangible thing, but it is important.

Mobile Integration: Perfect – MS are making some useful steps with Smart Glass and their XboxLIVE apps, but this could go further. The XboxLIVE app in particular I have found a bit awkward to use, but the idea of having a “social screen” by your side when playing a game is really nice. How about letting me do any menu and options config for my console system on my tablet or phone. The interface is probably more suited to that sort of thing than a game controller or, god-forbid, physical gestures and voice control. (About that - Kinect is brilliant and a huge part of the future, but keep it in the games and don’t massively compromise the core UI to support it.)

How about giving me a notification about new firmware updates and letting me remotely power-up and install the update when I’m on the bus, not when I get home and want to play? Sony in particular need to make massive improvements in this area.

I am expecting flip-to-screen gaming between Xbox and Windows Phone and vice versa. Can we get this on other platforms too? How about the Xbox running the game and streaming the video feed to my iPad over wi-fi? Sounds unlikely but that is the holy grail. (Some games probably wouldn’t work because of controls but that’s no reason to support the ones that would translate perfectly.)

And if you do do this, let devs decide if they want to support the feature, don’t enforce it – remember what I said about less nobby TCRs?

Finally

Stereoscopic 3D: Don’t bother – You really don’t need to me to explain this one, do you?

First Impressions – Nimble Quest

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:13:00 -0400

I’ve done a few First Impressions posts about high budget console games, but in many respects, the notion of a first impression is more appropriate to a mobile or web game that can actually evolve and change after launch.

And this week, Nimblebit (Tiny Tower, Pocket Planes) release their latest title, Nimble Quest – iOS/Android. Like lots of popular iOS titles, it is a hybrid game. It is a collision between the very smallest game design (Snake) and the very biggest (the RPG).

The Gameplay

So what we have is a very cute auto-walker seen from a top down perspective in classic Zelda style. Your character moves at a constant speed, and you simply swipe across the screen in the direction you wish them to walk. You start every game with a single character but are soon adding to your party by collecting characters and suddenly the Snake reference becomes clear. Each character has a specific attack mechanism, be it projectile, explosive or sword based and they all attack automatically. You just tell the conga line where to go!

Each level is a small, arena, a few smooth scrolling screens across and as well as encountering single enemies, you’ll soon be engaged is fun jousting battles against short conga’s of enemy warriors!

The whole thing is wrapped in a cute, pixelly artstyle reminiscent of Tiny Tower and packing loads of medieval fantasy charm. Control is responsive and easy to learn. The pick-ups are well thought out and occur at pleasingly regular intervals, thankfully never threatening to overwhelm the game or make you feel weak or boring in your default state.

The game is good. A lovely, simple 2 minutes that gradually becomes tougher and ultimately leads to your doom on the point of an enemy lance or in the web of a giant spider.

Many of the game design decisions play into the player’s favour. If a member of your conga is hit and killed by an enemy, only that character is lost. The only instant game over comes from having your Lead character killed. All of this feels fair and I have never come away from the game feeling cheated.

The Meta Game

Most short session games need a good meta game to give you some reason to keep coming back and to having some larger goals to aim for. Nimble Quest features a character unlock and upgrade system. (with a smaller Power-Up upgrade chain running in parallel.)

The game is also level based, with a number of levels (arenas) to play through. Completing a level usually rewards you with a new character. And the number of characters you have unlocked is also the max number of characters you can have in your conga. So, completing higher levels is important – but rather tough because every single game cold starts you on level 1.

Monetisation

The game is free to play, with the usual IAP options alongside. You can buy characters – negating the need to play to unlock them, and you can buy one of the game’s two soft currencies – Gems (also earned in relatively high numbers in-game) and Gold Coins (rare in-game).

A final cash purchase introduces high value Red Gems (each worth 10x) into the game alongside the Green (1x) and Blue (5x) values you start off with.

So, from an IAP perspective, you can pay to circumvent the level structure to get characters, or you can use gold to skip one level per coin to get back to the level you want to start on. Or you can buy a bulk of Gems to save grind time when upgrading your characters and pick-ups.

Does it Work?

Right now, the game itself works well. It is lovely to play and offers a good few minutes of gaming per session before your inevitable demise. That is fine, it really fits the few-minutes-between-stuff slot that iOS games serve so well. The meta-game is a lot less successful and that means that the retention (and hence monetisation) may suffer.

From my perspective, too many of the IAP options are consumable – and offer little benefit when used. I don’t intend to pay to skip a level on a single game. I just won’t.

Similarly, if I pay to unlock a character, what happens when I next complete a level? Is there no reward? I don’t know, to be honest, but that lack of knowledge is not encouraging me to shell out.

The most attractive option is the 10x Red Gem unlock. However at £2.99 this “feels” expensive and the presence of 10x gems in the game is impossible to quantify. Are they going to be common? Or even rarer than the 5x gems?

I simply don’t know what my £2.99 is going to get me – and once again – that lack of confidence is stopping me from converting from a free player to a paying punter.

In fact almost every aspect of the monetisation leaves me nervous and safely insulated from making a purchase. The upgrade cost of the characters is relatively achievable for their first stage (1000 Gems for level 0 to level 1 – easily earnable in 3 to 4 good games) but the next upgrade costs 10000 gems.

So I’m looking at 30-40 games to upgrade 1 character? Even with the presence of “some” 10x gems in the game, I can’t see my earnings-per-game hitting much more than 1000 gems. I could be wrong, but my confidence is lower than needed to make an investment.

And let’s say I do buy the Red Gem unlock, what then? I might be able to reach higher levels, but that will take longer and longer to do, and perhaps I don’t want a longer and longer game session? And although I can achieve a few upgrades to one or two characters, after that I can only see the upgrades becoming bafflingly unattainable. That’s likely to deter me even further.

Overall

Nimble Quest is a great play experience, right now. A clever, elegant game that But I am very unlikely to become a paying customer as the game stands. I’m already getting a lovely, enjoyable 2 minutes, and digging further into the game looks to offer a longer and potentially more difficult experience. That isn’t what I want.

I love iOS games that offer a tweaked or differently directed 2 minutes as I dig deeper into the game – whether free-to-play or paid downloads.

Jazz music gets better that more difficult it becomes, not iOS games. (Unless you set out to make an eye-melting challenge, and that simply doesn’t feel like Nimble Quest or Nimblebit.)

However I think that there are many ways for Nimblebit to balance the numbers and the content of the game and the IAP to make it much more attractive. They’re a great outfit and I do have faith in them. Or, it might becomes the highest grossing game ever in the universe in which case I was probably wrong.

I don’t think I am though.

But you should definitely try Nimble Quest. If only to see how much you disagree with me.

Tomb Raider – First Impressions

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:44:00 -0400

So here we are, once again leaping across chasms and picking off wildlife while discovering ancient artefacts and suffering occasional plunges to an unforgiving death on the rocks below.

But of course, it is far from business as usual in the new, rebooted, Tomb Raider. As things stand I am around a third of the way into the single player game so any spoilers can only be relatively limited in their impact and my conclusions may shift as I progress further.

What do I want from Tomb Raider?

Perhaps more than any other game, Tomb Raider comes with a vast litany of demands and expectations. The weight of history on Lara Croft’s shoulders drives a near unprecedented level of personal player investment in the game. Everybody knows who “their” Lara is and what “their” Tomb Raiding must entail.

For my part, I feel relatively comfortable with whatever Crystal Dynamics want to offer me. I don’t have many demands on either Lara or the Raiding, so we’re all safe from yet another blog post about how this Lara isn’t MY Lara and waaah waaah waah!

First First First Impressions – The intro and start of play.

Well this is pretty. A well executed cinematic that cuts to the chase and worries about situation more than characterisation. When control does revert to me, it’s the tense, oppressive atmosphere that takes centre stage, the game activity is fairly standard and stays focused on scene setting rather than decisions or skill-based gameplay.

This is all fine and I’m enjoying myself. The first puzzle room presents a nice, simple physics puzzle that sort makes sense in a real-world setting if you grant it enough latitude (which I do).

The first problems set in as soon as the Quick Time Events have been wheeled out. QTE’s are usually a lowpoint of game design and I have failed SO MANY of them in the past 10 years that in truth I wouldn’t be upset if I never saw another one again. Tomb Raider makes the same mistake as all of its predecessors by making the time window for the button inputs way too short, and hence easy to fail. This makes the Big Dramatic Moments (the whole POINT of QTE’s) a lot less dramatic because you end up having to play all of them three or four times.

As I emerged from the first cave into the gloomy half light, the atmosphere is joined by a new mechanic in the shape of Experience points. Indeed the game swiftly reveals a fairly extensive range of old-skool RPG elements, including unlockable skills, upgradable equipment and multiple experience meters that (I think) lead to Skill Points.

This is one of the odder decisions in the game. I don’t dislike it per se, but I do find it a very odd match for the emotional adventure that seems to be the heart and soul of the game. By the end of the first hour I’ve had relatively little to do apart from thrash my way through irritating QTE’s and try to figure out what all these experience meters are for. Hmmm…

Deeper under the surface

Over the second hour, the game lets you off the rails a lot more and starts to exhibit both its strengths and weaknesses. The discovery of a bow accompanies the first open environment to clamber around and explore, and your special vision mode “Survival Instinct” is introduced to give you better clues about where to focus your attention.

Once again we see this mix of realistic adventuring (at least within the diegetic sense - shooting animals and building a camp to survive) with very “gamey” aspects such as a special vision mode and the need to poke your nose into every corner of the world to find salvage and other hidden collectibles.

Of these, I actually rather like the Survival Instinct. It somehow explains Lara’s natural ability to cope in the awful situation in which she finds herself. Basically, the girl is built for this! It’s the game’s way of giving you her natural observational prowess without needing to put massive glowing arrows permanently in the game world.

Every Nook and Cranny

Less successful are all the hidden objects. Salvage, diaries, Geo-tags, ammo, relics and challenge items litter the landscape. Against my better judgement I find myself a willing participant in this insane easter egg hunt. Half of my brain lighting up with glee at every discovery, the other half wondering why the hell I am spending so much time poking my nose into every corner when my friends are dying and I’m freezing to death?

This is the contract the game makes with you. If you accept, or tolerate, this weird hybrid of narrative compulsion and tick-box obsession, then there is a fine game to be played.

The First Third

So I reached the second Tomb, around a third of the way through the game. And I have to say that the game gets stronger as it goes on. The notorious camp-site attack sequence would not have been notorious had it not been for some very stupid comments from a producer who should have been gagged. (Although guess what – yep – I had to do it four fucking times until I got the button timing right!)

The combat is satisfying enough. The bow being a particularly welcome mechanic. This is the most natural feeling weapon for the Lara with which we are presented both the most enjoyable to use and the most unfamiliar in the modern games scene.

Importantly, so far I have found a game with well judged balance of combat and exploration. Yes, the combat is a familiar, cover based form, but the game is not very punishing. It seems to want you to win and allows your perma-health to regenerate swiftly between attacks. (This is welcome but makes the merciless death-loop of the QTE’s even more of an incongruity.)

Overall

What we have is a finely crafted game with some unnecessary mistakes. (And in fairness, it is a very long time since I played a game without a few of those.) Yes, it borrows heavily from Uncharted, but perhaps this is simply Naughty Dog returning the favour since Nathan Drake did borrow as much from Lara Croft as he did from Indiana Jones.

Lara herself is an interesting character. She takes as much of her character from game mechanics as she does from the narrative. There is no question why she killed that first human or why she continues to kill. However it is best not to ask where she suddenly magicked the ability to snap a human neck like it’s a breadstick or became a genius level weaponsmith.

Where the game excels is, as ever, Lara, alone against an environment. Climbing, leaping, exploring and discovering. Control is excellent, the set-pieces are thrilling and there is a strong narrative compulsion that really makes you care about the game and its cast. Where it falls down is in consistency and all those gamey conceptual non-sequiturs. Did the level designers and system designers ever talk to the writer, or to each other?

So what we have so far is something of a modern curio. So many ideas have been flung at the game that, ultimately the final product doesn’t make much sense. But it is entertaining and well crafted. With two-thirds of the game to go, I’m very much looking forward to seeing what else it has in store.

Writing in the Clouds

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 11:30:00 -0500

Given that this is the Year of Writing (for me anyway) I thought I’d best start off with a post about some of my writing. Specifically, about the writing process for my game, Kumo Lumo.

I was actually quite surprised to end up writing anything at all for the game, because its original vision was to be a pure gameplay experience - entirely driven by control, interaction, discovery and feedback. But about a third of the way through the development (about 8 weeks in) we discovered that the game was lovely to play - but had a massive gap when it came to caring about the game. Everyone knew what the game wanted them to do, but nobody knew why. The solution lay in a new game structure, and an emotional heart that came from a slightly surprising place.

Originally, Kumo Lumo had an infinite run game structure. A single level, with procedurally populated events and challenges. It was definitely fun to play, but lacking a decent macro-loop and really struggling for a long term meta-loop. The solution was to shift over to a 36 level structure, each with its own population balance and a loose, but important narrative flow.

We also made the change from full screen flash card tutorials (very boring and unsuitable for the task) to in-game messages that introduced each mechanic and element as you used and encountered them (much better and more engaging.)

The benefit of this system is that the player is playing the tutorial sections, hopefully even enjoying the process - which massively improves learning and knowledge retention. In fact it all stops being a tutorial and simply becomes the game. If you’ve ever played a Valve game, you’ll know what I mean.

Finding a Voice

The problem was, I wanted the narrative messages to come from some game-related source, not from an abstract, cold “Info” voice. So, I designed the overlay panels, and on a whim, used this icon (see image below) as the “voice”.

That icon started life as the Twitter icon for the project’s art lead. (We’d all created Twitter identities to help promote the game.) However the icon had also found a home in the centre of the game world. At the end of the game, the view zoomed out to reveal the entire planet and that face revealed to be the face of the planet itself.

Thematically, this fitted very neatly with the ethos of the game (helping life to flourish and protecting a planet) but most importantly, that little icon had lots of personality. The crazy expression just seemed to have an energetic, slightly desperate feel to it and that immediately started influencing the writing style.

The game had found it’s voice.

Don’t think… Write!

Being an iOS game, the schedule was short and team tiny. This meant that, as the designer, I was also going to be writing all the dialogue alongside designing the levels. Perfect! That made life much easier.

It also meant that I had very little time to relax or go off on a research writing expedition - I had to write the game NOW!

I spend a lot of time writing in my spare time, so in some respects Kumo Lumo was a “side project” away from my usual writing style and environment.

Although some of the early lines were written in a storyboard with the game visuals and face icon alongside the words, the majority of the writing took place directly in the string table. Spreadsheets are traditionally not the most creative of forms, but I was in no mood to mess about. I needed words on screen. Fast!

All of these factors lent a tremendous energy and spontaneity to writing. Something that had a dramatic influence on the very spirit of the game itself.

The Comics Connection

As a comics fan, it was probably quite predictable that I would rely on comics techniques to tell my story in a visual medium. (The overlay object presets in the game editor are actually called comics_overlay_happy etc)

The small panels worked well because they imposed a specific restriction on the number of words I could use. This is really important in a form like the freemium iOS game - generally players don’t want to read, so keeping the dialogue both short and valuable was incredibly important. (And that “value” had to come from the quality of the writing itself. Being funny, clever or charming became an actual job requirement.)

But more importantly, I really started creating a lot of meaning by using different expressions for the World Face. I’m so used to providing prose descriptions of expression and speaking style in my writing that I didn’t quite wrap my head around effective use of the expressive face icons until halfway through the writing process.

Thankfully, I was able to create the icons myself and get them into the game very quickly. So, retro-fitting the game with new icons and creating new ones as and when they became necessary was a relatively smooth process.

For a planetary body, the World has a surprising grasp of Pop Culture

Looking back, it’s clear now, that a lot of the charm and warm humour of the game comes from the personality of the World - and that is wholly derived from the combination of the dialogue itself and the facial expressions. (Take out the faces and the dialogue would probably feel very flat indeed.)

By changing from one expression to another in a split second, I could really draw out this needy, mood-swing prone character. One moment he is playful, the next philosophical, the next panicking.

I don’t think I would have written the part anything like that had I not had those visual tools to help convey the meaning.

It’s gratifying experience reading reviews that pick up on the personality of the World character. “Needy” and “paranoid” are two words that have cropped up a few times. Exactly what I was aiming for. It’s an unusual step to write a mentor character in this way. Normally characters in this position are authoritative and knowledgable. By the end of the game, I realised that the World was actually rather childlike, desperate for your help and terrified of being left alone.

He had become a lovely character to spend a few hours a day with. Each day, I was learning more and more about writing. I sometimes think that he might be the best character I have ever written. In brief moments of terror I fear that he may be the best character I ever will write. Then I relax and think…

“I like hats…”

and everything is fine.

Putting Theory into Practice with Kumo Lumo

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 18:19:00 -0500

Since it has been a very long time since my last post, I thought I’d go some way to explaining where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing. Thankfully, I’ve not been in prison or helping the CIA with unfinished business, I’ve mostly been making a game. This isn’t that unusual because I am a game designer by trade, but this game is special because this one is my first original title. I came up with the original idea, and then worked with a fantastic team at Blitz Games (where I am employed) to build and complete the game.

For those who have read the game design articles on this blog, you might be interested to see what all this theoretical fluff looks like when you turn it into a game.

Well, the game is called Kumo Lumo. It’s an iOS game and you can download it for free from the App Store now. Slightly nervously, I glance back over my previous posts in the hope that I’ve not gone and contradicted myself mahoosively somewhere along the line. Having put my money where my mouth is, do I now look as though I am full of shit?

Phew.

Looks like I actually get away with it.

Working backwards, Kumo Lumo is a great example of cheerful game design, so kudos to getting it right there. Incidentally, that post was written long before I came up with the idea for the game, and I’d forgotten I’d ever written anything about Happy Clouds!

As for the Hypothetical Design Bastard, he was a really useful tool in the production. We didn’t want any difficulty spikes or points where the game was too hard for the player so I constantly checked with my inner HDB to make sure he was kept out of harms way.

As far as photographs of trees and mountains go, well, some of the artwork in the game includes some of my mountain photography. Looking back, it’s probably no surprise that trees and mountains and clouds feature so heavily in the game given my taste in photographic subject matter.

Finally in terms of design theory posts, there was this piece about Achievements and extrinsic motivation. Well, Lumo doesn’t have any Achievements (with a capital A) and the game’s whole design ethic is the Joy of Play so there’s definitely no worries there.

There’s tons more background and design theory on the official Kumo Lumo blog, much of which I wrote. So if you are interested in game design theory then try this post, or maybe this one about testing the game, or perhaps even this one if you want a lot of made-up academic nonsense.

——————————————————————————————————-

Next post, writing for a game when no-one wants to read. How comics and reckless disregard for professionalism influenced the writing in Kumo Lumo.

Bleak Atmosphere 0 - Happy Clouds 3

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 05:44:00 -0500

A lot is said about emotion in games these days, and with good reason. Emotion is the absolute heart of all human experiences. None of us would do anything if it didn’t have some emotional feedback so of course we want to find it in the games we play.

Atmosphere is also intrinsically linked to emotional resonance, although I would still see them as two different components of a piece of art/media/design/whateveryouthinkgamesaretoday. The problem is that many games, and many game designers, have got an exceptionally wrong headed idea about what emotion and atmosphere in games actually means.

We’re going to take the player to new places, places they may not wish to go!

Here’s my beef.

When game people say “Our game is extremely atmospheric” they usually mean “We turned off most of the lights.”

When game people say “It’s a deeply emotional experience!” they usually mean “We had a female character but we threw her off the top of a building.”

The problem is that the term “atmospheric” comes with the unspoken pre-fix of “oppressive” or “gloomy”. This is in the same way that the word “emotional” lands pre-supplied with any number of hidden adjectives, but usually it means “a bit angsty, a bit negative, oooh dear she died” (and yes, it usually is a she). I’m not going to go into the generally poor treatment female secondary characters receive in video game narratives, (there are many good articles and blog posts on the subject) but cheap deaths are an all too common occurrence to make you feel sad.

Both of these issues reveal the stunted emotional range to which games often aspire. A linguistic shorthand that actually serves to skip a critical part of the creative process - that being the question, “Just what type of atmosphere or emotion should be created through the game.”

Atmosphere is not inherently gloomy, atmosphere can be fun, or surreal or chaotic or childlike. Similarly emotion can be positive, cheerful, surprise, amusement, fascination, sometimes even confusion. There’s plenty of funny, lighted hearted, joyful games out there. From the wonderful Loco Roco to the delirious Whale Trail. These are games with exceptionally well honed atmospheres yet they’d never crop up in discussions of the most atmospheric games.

Work the Player, not the Character

There’s several interesting things going on here, first off is the poor use of narrative in games. I say poor use as opposed to simply poor because it is perfectly possible for a good narrative to be mishandled by a game and for a poor narrative to be used as the backbone for a surprisingly enthralling game. (I’d look at Infamous in this instance, it’s a clichéd, hackneyed plot but provides a framework for a really entertaining game.)

We often forget that the emotion of the player is the true prize, not the emotion of the characters within the game narrative. Yes, use of narrative is a great and obvious way to manipulate the emotions of the player, but we should always remember that we are trying to get the player to feel, not to observe. This is how poor use of narrative can affect a game. If the designer fails to appreciate that the emotions of the player are the most important factor, then the game can fall flat on its face. Instead of passive narrative we should be talking about the emotions of play itself. The delicious pleasure we get from simply moving that little red dot around can be just as satisfying, if not more so, as watching Sniper Wolf spend twenty minutes moaning about how her jacket doesn’t button up at the front.

I think that because a lot of the fun, bright, unapologetically cheerful games forego the epic cutscenes and put all their effort into the gameplay itself, the emotional content is overlooked.

Yeah, man, it’s like really DAAARRRRK!

I don’t know if this is simply a semantic issue, where people actually mean dark when they say atmospheric or emotional. Or perhaps it actually reveals a slightly dismissive attitude to positive feeling games. Is there some barely concealed belief that all this Goth-up-trees Emo nonsense is somehow more sophisticated and culturally valuable than cheerful squirrels and smiling clouds?

Personally, I think it’s a little from column A and a little from column B.

To those in Column A that just use the wrong words, I won’t judge you too harshly, unless you’re a game journalist in which case - please leave games and writing alone for the rest of your life.

As for the column B-ers. You lot need to grow up. Seriously. I have no intention to disparage the power of loss, pain and tragedy in art, but there are countless wonderful, relevant and culturally important games, books, films and works of art that are cheerful, funny, warm hearted and pleasing.

As game designers we should be proud to create experiences of all kinds. To dismiss positive feelings as being inherently less valuable than gloomy angst is a stupid, foolish mistake. Getting a player to feel happy, excited, hopeful, surprised or bemused is just as great a goal as getting them to feel scared, sad, angry, vengeful or frustrated. And getting the player to feel those things while they are actually playing the game is perheps the greatest goal of all.

———————————————————————————

Here’s some games that I think are atmospheric or emotional. Some are in the traditional acceptance of the terms, some are significantly less so. (Add your own in the comments.)

Loco Roco - Everything smiles at you. Or sings to you. One of the defacto standards in cheeful atmosphere games.

Halo: Combat Evolved - Clearly a traditional piece of atmospheric game design, and a good example of “good use” of narrative rather than strictly a “good” narrative. There’s an unforgettable sense of isolation and desperation when standing alone on the beautiful hillsides of the Halo. That isolation is gradually replaced with hope as you reassemble the UNSC corp, then crushed as the Flood emerge and leave you in an even worse situation. It genuine emotional dynamic. More interestingly, hope is rarely used as a key gameplay dynamic in video games.

Tiny Tower - Those Bitizens pack a tremendous amount of character into those chunky little pixels. Their posts on Bitbook and the general feeling of busy lives coupled with the constant demands made on you as the player make you really feel part of this little community. It all combines to lend the game a startlingly tangible atmosphere.

Lego Star Wars - There’s a wonderful warmth and humour present in every game in the Lego series. The Star Wars games succeed by creating a completely fresh sense of fun on top of the romantic adventure of the source material.

Tiny Wings - A wonderful combination of sweet music and the strange sense of isolation in this almost entirely lifeless, windswept landscape. The inevitable loss to the fall of night and the perfectly realised graphical style make Tiny Wings actually one of the most atmospheric games of the past few years without even trying. (Limbo - I’m looking at you and shaking my head)

Portal - Again, one of the more conventionally atmospheric games, but one that adopts a more sophisticated approach to most of its Myspace-haircut-wielding brethren. The emptiness, the sterility and the marvellous drip feed of the mystery behind the Enrichment Centre builds to a truly exceptional piece of atmospheric game design.

——————————————————————————————

Jogosity loved Ico and thinks that it is clearly one of the most atmospheric games he’s ever played, but enough has been written about Ico and the whole point of this post was to highlight the other side of atmosphere. Please add your own alternative-atmosphere games in the comments!

What Kind of a Game Designer are You?

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:39:00 -0500

Way back in the mists of time there was effectively only one type of designer. And that was someone who knew enough about an obscure programming language to make a few dots move around a screen in an interesting way. Spin forward a few decades and you have game designers, level designers, narrative designers, weapon designers, social designers and quite possibly owl-based-hat designers.

These can all be considered job roles. And as the Earth shifts beneath the feet of the games industry, some of those categories are ceasing to be important as teams rapidly downsize from several hundred to just several, and game designs shrink back down to something you could write on the back of a napkin, and still leave room for an amusing drawing of an owl in a hat.

Job roles aren’t important to this post. The different types of people are!

There are, of course, many types of personality in game design, and job does seem to accentuate certain traits, good and bad. Here are four archetypes, you may recognise yourself on the list.

The Auteur

“I am an Auteur, The creative lightning behind the world’s biggest games. I occasionally collaborate but ultimately the only designer I need is, Myself!

I am respected and adored by my minions and my fans in equal measure.

Would you like me to sign your copy of Edge, now?”

The Artiste

“I am an Artiste, I meditate on the Aesthetics of Gameplay. I understand every fault with every game – and go to great pains to tell the designers what they did wrong via internet forums!

If EA offered me riches beyond my wildest dreams I would turn it down because they’d probably want Robbie Williams to sing the song.

I write game design essays on my weekend because at the moment I work in Shoeworld!”

The Clicker

“I am a Clicker. The Ronin of the design world. You can put me on any game in any capacity and I can make things work on screen. I do what I am told and won’t bother telling you if you tell me to do something that won’t actually work. I don’t know what the game is all about because I’ve only played MY levels.

I don’t need creativity or invention because the world editor is my sole domain.”

The Focus Groupie

“I am a Focus Groupie, I have no creativity and a congenital hatred of the human imagination. The only creative process is asking people what they want.

Actually asking people is a flawed process cos they might not understand the question so I’ll just look up the Christmas top 10, pick the word that turns up on the back of those boxes most often and slap the word “Ville” on at the end.

It’ll be shite but the people in Asda won’t know any better.”

So, now I’ve insulted 90% of my readership…

It’s not that I want to make game designers look like a bunch of dicks, well, maybe I do. But then I’ve been one for well over 12 years so I know what I’m talking about, and being a dick does sometimes go with the territory with something as subjective as “good” game design. Yeah, I’ve been there, done that, and I’ll almost certainly go back and do it some more. I’m not massively proud of that fact, but I digress…

Each of these 4 characters do have some extremely valuable qualities.

The Auteur – Direction and Command. This guy/gal may be the biggest idiot of them all but at least there’s a bit of drive and ambition there. Sure some of their big, pompous ideas might suck, but at least they have big ideas and some of them will be new and exciting.

The Artiste – Passion and Commitment. She (or he) is almost impossible to have a basic discussion with about what colour a pick-up is supposed to be because they are more interested in the meaning of resource hoarding in a post capitalist world or the emotional state of the ammo-pack than whether or not the player can actually see it. But these people remind us that games can be so much more than switch flipping platform idiocy or violent death matches. If games can be beautiful, these are the people you want creating them.

The Clicker – Pragmatism and Practicality. You can make a game without an Auteur or an Artiste, but it’s bloody hard to do it without a Clicker. These people do the actual job! They know how the tools work and will actually get stuff into your game. They can solve complex production problems and see past your intellectual ideals to the purest core of interaction. So you need to listen to them as well as the guy with the nice cardigan and expensive scarf.

The Focus Groupie – What People Want! To view consumer research and analytics as little more than a race to bottom of the un-sophisticated mass market is to massively miss the point. User testing of new, exciting ideas does not stop those ideas being new , exciting, creative or wonderful, it actually makes them better. The more people that understand your wonderful new idea then the better for everyone.

The fact is, that every game team actually needs all of these archetypes within it. In fact, I would go further than that:

Every designer needs these four archetypes IN THEIR HEADS to a greater or lesser degree.

The job of “Designer” changes as the game evolves and the production rolls on. This puts an increased responsibility on the designers involved to adopt and adapt to the prevailing stage of development. And having even just these 4 ways of thinking in your head will be a vital step in seeing each game issue from a variety of perspectives.

Almost every massive, stupid mistake I have made in the last 12 odd years of being a designer has come from taking a single, narrow view of the issue. And every time I’ve tried to bring a few different viewpoints to the table… well, they don’t provide memorable moments of conflict, because things roll along so much more smoothly.

4 heads are better than 1

No matter how large your team, you need a wide range of viewpoints and creative approaches. And particularly if you have a small team, getting each designer to use a few of these heads will be an invaluable boost to your productivity, creativity and ultimately to the success of your whole game.

So tell me, what type of designer are you?

Jogosity admits to being a mix of Artiste and Auteur with an increasing slice of Focus-Groupie to keep that nonsense in check. He used to be a pretty decent Clicker, but these days it’s rarely useful for him to get his little hands dirty with all those state machines and condition lists. <shudder>

The Hypothetical Design Bastard

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 09:25:00 -0500

“The player is the enemy. An invading force that needs to be controlled, to be trained like a dog. Mete out the chocolate drops and the whip with equal abandon. If they make a mistake, let not pity stay your hand, kill them, punish them, send them back and erase their progress. Without punishment there is no risk; no risk, no reward. No tension, no gameplay. It’s a waste of time.”

Really? REALLY???

Surely not.

It’s Easy Being Mean

No, no, of course I don’t believe a word of it. I hope that you don’t either. Actually, I don’t really care if you do, just make my life easier and leave your name and the names of the games you work on below, save me a few hours of frustration and maybe a few quid.

I’m not suggesting that people actually do design games from this point of view. But do any of you actively try to avoid such meanness? It’s so easy to make your game too difficult or unfair. Maybe you punish the player too harshly, or reward them too lightly. Not because you’re trying to be a Design Bastard but simply because your perception of the game may be very different to a player.

The Hypothetical Design Bastard is a way of thinking about your game. It’s a sanity check and an invaluable yardstick. Each decision you make in your design, compare the result against your own Hypothetical Design Bastard. What would he do? And is it any different to what you’ve just done? If so, do you need to rethink that design and maybe give the player a little more help?

I’m finding myself using this technique a lot on the game I’m currently designing. The game itself is still under quite heavy wraps so I can’t go into details yet, but we’ve been looking at punishment and penalties in the resource management element of the game. If the player misses a scheduled resource gather, do we delay their progress until they make the collection, or set them back to the start of the resource spawn timer if they miss the window of opportunity? Well, both would be viable alternatives, but in 2011/2012 design ethics dictate the former as being the right thing to do. The HDB would definitely reset the clock to zero, sorry pal, you’re gonna have to wait till next time! Thinking with an HDB offers you a frame of reference and the decision becomes much easier,

The Bastard in Action

Here’s some other potential examples. And in keeping with the theme, these examples are hypothetical. It’s the end of level boss fight, the boss down to 10% health and the player gets killed - what do you do? The HDB immediately drops the poor player off at the start of the whole level. Serves them right for not actually being the designer of the game and knowing that that particular attack pattern was coming. That’s a bit 80’s so you dial in the year 2012 and ask your HDB for another idea?

Okay, so this time he’s much nicer and simply makes the player start the whole boss fight again. Good old, soft hearted Bastard that he is!

But this is still pretty harsh, personally I’d tell the HDB where to go and save numerous checkpoints throughout the fight. This might mean that the player gets their progress saved in a very vulnerable position, but maybe the guy who didn’t put any player health regen in the boss fight was the HDB anyway, so fix that while you’re in there.

Platform game designers, seeing their renaissance in the indie and smart phone scene may well be tempted to go for those epic 16 jump ascents with a few lateral missiles near the top. Is it really necessary to allow the player to be knocked from the top to the bottom of the whole ascent? Yes, the player should have known that the flame jet was going to be there but is this not another case of the HDB winning over a more modern design ideal? The soft hearted HDB puts a safe platform halfway up, the truly kind designer takes away the missiles as well, allows the player to find their own physical rhythm to the play with no added pressure from spiky death.

Being extra nice

It’s not just the negatives you need to check. Keep an eye on the positives. Are you handing out enough Shiny Pebbles and Flanian Pobble Beads? Do you only ever give one type of reward for a single action? You might be worried about spoiling your player or unbalancing the game, but sometimes it’s just a case of Why Not? Why not spoil them on occasion. You very rarely hear the word Generosity in a game design, and I think that’s a shame.

I’m in no way advocating the removal of penalties or pressure or difficulty, i’m just arguing for the right proportion of pressure and penalties applied in the right way. Even if you’re making a point with deliberately high difficulty, running The Hypothetical Design Bastard test is still an exercise worth doing. Your players are still the most important thing in your game, so look after them. And if I’m one of them, look after me!

Jogosity really doesn’t like difficult games, so quite why he plays 80’s scrolling shoot ‘em ups in his lunch hour is anyone’s guess. And don’t get him started on just how amazing Gradius V is. It’s all an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a I’ll stop now.

One more set of tree photos. Two of these shots are obviously of...

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 19:40:36 -0400

One more set of tree photos. Two of these shots are obviously of the same tree. I have never seen so many berries on a single tree. I’m not sure this particular tree ever recovered from this state, it has never blossomed so richly ever since.

This is another set of some of my favourite photographs. Just...

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 19:34:45 -0400

This is another set of some of my favourite photographs. Just like the near monochrome set I posted a little while ago, this set are also framed and displayed in my home.

Tomorrow I’ll feel inspired. Today, I think I’ll...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:49:08 -0400

Tomorrow I’ll feel inspired. Today, I think I’ll just feel sad. We will miss you, Steve Jobs. #sentfrommyiPad

Photography - Monochrome Series

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 05:27:00 -0400

I’m a keen amateur photographer so I thought I would share some of my favourite shots on my blog. I hope you like them.

These particular 3 photos (Scroll down) were taken over the past few years, all will have been taken on a small Sony compact. They are all, in fact, full colour pictures, and have not been desaturated at all in Photoshop.

The top shot was taken in Les Deux Alpes on a snowboarding holiday in March 2008, on a piste called Jandri which was my favourite run in that resort.

The second shot was taken in Wales in 2007. My then girlfriend (now wife) were visiting my Mum and Dad, and they took us to a cove on the Pembrokeshire coast called St Martin’s Haven, where we could see, and indeed hear, the seal pups. It was a wonderful few hours and whilst walking around that headland I saw this particular view. I loved the wonderful, rigid geometry of the rocks and balance to the whole composition.

The final shot was taken in beautiful Newquay in Cornwall on a windy day in 2007. With the winds so high and the waves so explosive there was a huge amount of water spray in the air, and that is what helped give the shot so much depth as even relatively nearby headlands faded into the haze.

(I did want to put them all three of these shots in a single...

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 13:02:00 -0400

(I did want to put them all three of these shots in a single sequential post but my Tumblr skills are still lacking in use of images at the moment…)

Photo

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 13:01:45 -0400

You know when you are off work, feeling poorly and something...

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 05:26:53 -0400

You know when you are off work, feeling poorly and something happens that makes you feel 100 times worse.

Yeah. That.

Space Marine - First Impressions

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 07:30:00 -0400

[Spoiler Threat: Medium - some details on the opening few hours of gameplay. Rumours about later developments]

As someone who spends as much time as humanly possible making fun of big manly men games, I have a surprisingly soft spot for the Gears of War series. This is partly because they are really well crafted games, but also because they are basically the Warhammer 40k games that we’ve always wanted but Games Workshop didn’t really want to give us. Big meaty, old fashioned, dirty trench warfare. Fat, nasty bullets and blood drenched chainsaws. Most importantly, it was mud and shoulder pads.

Lovely.

What the GoW universe didn’t have was a bunch of neo-Catholic nut jobs in charge of everything and a gloriously idiotic faction of green skins that could be dispatched with the twitch of a finger just because slaughtering massive hordes of bad guys is still the most fun you can have without getting told off by your mum.

When the Space Marine game was announced I was both thrilled and nervous because it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d been waiting for since 1987.

1987… That 24 years.

Oh lordy..

But that’s not important right now, what is important is that Relic made a game where you get to be a Space Marine and run around turning orks into sausages In The Name of The Emperor. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what kindness looks like.

First Impressions

I like it.

I like this game. Relic have done us proud and we should all sacrifice a few dozen psykers in their honour. Thanks guys, you Got It.

The most important thing about the game, is the sheer bloody 40k-ness of it all. And this is where the Warhammer universe, especially it’s far future incarnation can outpace almost any other new universe found in fiction today. The incredible detail, the astounding scale and combination of majestic magnificence and utter, dystopian despair. The deep, religious iconography and zealous beliefs held by the main factions. The cold, sharp threat of Chaos lurking just beyond every horizon, pitted against the oily, churning hardware of the Imperium. The awful truth of the first world war flung into a breathless imagination almost beyond our own comprehension.

That’s the big stuff.

Drill down a little further and 40k is basically about the a bolt gun. A good friend of mine summed up Space Marine in a far simpler way than I ever could.

“It’s bolters done right.”

Perfect.

Starting with a near suicidal dive from orbit through a fleet of gothic battleships, this is the first game in many moons that has really hooked me with it’s opening cut scene. It perfectly captures the essential Awesomeness of the Adeptus Astartes. Practically superhuman, one man armies. The Space Marines don’t need a series of chest high walls because they are already wearing them. They don’t need a drop ship, they don’t need a commander to give them orders, they don’t need a hug or to moan about their dad. Space Marines are war itself, and it is liberating to take to the destroyed courtyards and ruined cathedrals of the 40k universe in their colossal boots. There is a clarity of purpose, a fundamentalist knowledge about who you are and why you are doing all this. If every game hero was as narrow as Captain Titus, the world would be a dull place. But right here, right now, he is everything we need him to be.

It’s all terribly serious, but the cockney orks do add some much needed levity to the situation. Let’s face it, any race that called their officers, Nobz, has to be doing something right.

Gameplay

The game itself is an action shooter/chopper. Since you are basically wearing a wall, the user of cover is a tactical choice rather than a mechanical requirement. The strong melee mechanics positively encourage you to wade in to combat, hacking away with your chainsword. This gives the game a much more circular combat motion than, say, Gears, whose linear grids of cover lend that game a very Space Invaders play style.

In some respects, Space Marine occupies a middle ground, somewhere between the rigid tactics of Gears and the creative emergence of Halo combat. The controls are very responsive, inflicting no undue reduction of agility for your extraordinary bulk. Titus can charge and roll in and out of scrapes rapidly and the seamless transition between ranged and melee combat fully facilitates the war-machine ideology of the Marines. Weapon switching is very fast and allows you to make very quick decisions on how to deal with each evolving threat, be it a horde of ork boyz or one of the charging Nobz.

In some respects, the weapon system is one of the less impressive parts of the game. A seemingly fixed 4 usable weapons, with a few upgrades and swapouts available along the route. This narrows the tactical choices to those guns currently in your arsenal. Fortunately the weapons are well designed and ammo is plentiful even to the more specialist guns.

The Vengeance Launcher, essentially a sticky grenade launcher, is surprisingly versatile thanks to its relatively low explosive power. Far from feeling gimped, the weapon remains highly valuable because of this, allowing it to be used even in rather tight confines.

The game’s sniper analogue, the Stalker Bolter, fires not a thin, elegant flechette but a fat, brutal slug. Low tech and ugly, but only with a relatively short zoom and rapid reload that befits its status as a specialist bolt gun rather than a wholly new class of weapon.

Whilst this relatively narrow focus of weaponry does reduce the fun and range of tactics on offer in, for example, Halo and maybe even Resistance, their ubiquity does allow you to genuinely play with the weapons and enemies. I feel that his is certainly a better proposition than having to conserve your specialist kit for the few specially designed sequences where enemies are sufficiently far away to bother with grenades or sniper shots.

Bad Boyz, too!

So far, and I think I am about a quarter of the way into the game, I’ve encountered a relatively narrow range of enemies and scenarios. Fortunately that base scenario is very good and the orks are huge fun to fight. We have the melee orks who just run idiotically into a hail or bolts or fling themselves onto the teeth of your chainsword in a way that games foolishly forgot about after Doom 2. The Ork gunners need a bit more attention but also drop sufficiently easy for a big horde of them to be lots of fun, particularly if you nail a few head shots.

The specialist orks, shield bearers and Nobz offer a few more decisions and tactics but even so, you don’t ever have to think too deeply about how to tackle a scenario or which enemy to prioritise.

This is a strength and a weakness of the game. The sheer fun of running pell-mell into the thickest bunch of orks is going to last a long time, but it also largely removes the satisfaction that a carefully executed combat plan can yield.

More tactical, and therefore helping to balance things out a bit, is the charge-up Fury mode. You know the drill, engage in melee combat to earn Fury Power, then when the gauge is full, click both sticks to become a golden glowy force of Imperial Vengeance, dealing extra damage and recovering health. This mechanic works very well, offering both amped up melee combat and a focussed, bullet time mode for the long shots.

As far as the health system goes, it’s certainly effective, but not outstanding. Combining a recharging shield gauge (a la Halo) and a more traditional health gauge that is only depleted when your shield drops. The visual feedback on the shield recharge is very subtle, and esily missed, somethwat reducing the prominence and usability of the system. The only way to recover health is to execute enemies in melee combat - but you have to stun them first - or by killing in Fury mode.

Sometimes it can be a bit odd having low health and having to hunt around for the next batch of enemies, but so far I’ve not experienced any actual play problems and it does up the tension when you know you must engage in order to recover your health. It feels a little “gamey” to me, a trifle artificial, where most of the other mechanics feel at least true to the diagetic universe.

What next?

So, after the first few hours, I like Space Marine very much. The atmosphere is great, it all feels so wonderfully authentic. The controls and core mechanics are successful and chopping up orks is lots of fun.

I’m hoping for more “stuff” in the rest of the game, those rumours of Chaos Marines sound intriguing. But, ideally, I would like a broader concurrent mix of enemies rather than just swapping one faction for another. Some big, memorable set pieces would be nice. So far the level design is perfectly effective, if not as glittering as some of the competitors in the FPS/TPS genres.

Most importantly, I hope the fun sustains and things don’t get too unpleasantly difficult. I’m always nervous about brick-wall difficulty spikes on the first play through. So far, Space Marine has been generally on my side. Hope it continues.

Oh and a ride on a Titan wouldn’t go amiss… (don’t tell me, don’t tell me…)

Jogosity sort of prefers the original mouse-cone face armour of the Space Marines. Only a little bit. Oh and he loves the way the artwork in Space Marine does capture the quality of those wonderful Citadel miniatures. Ah, games, sometimes you can be so nice…

Photo

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:41:00 -0400

Photo

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 12:34:00 -0400

The Problem with Games.... Is gamers.

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:25:00 -0400

There. I said it.

Gamers are the root of the problem. They’re my problem because I’m a game designer and I’m part of the problem because I’m a gamer myself.

It’s a terrible state of affairs.

Here’s why gamers are such a problem. It comes in the form of this quote, a tweet passed on by a friend of mine. The origin doesn’t matter.

“New Syndicate - now I’m excited. Syndicate FPS - Go fuck yourself”

Sigh.

We really need to talk about this…

Deeper into the deep damp hole…

Forget that this is about Syndicate, it isn’t. And forget that this is a tweet, 140 characters is more than enough space to be articulate. The problem is at this comment is far too representative of the tone and sophistication of gamers in general.

It is terse, it is inarticulate, it is aggressive in tone. It reveals a deep, deep fear of change and an almost childlike level of assumed ownership over games-we-have-loved.

Check out the user comments following the reviews of Space Marine. We have complaints that it’s not more like an RPG and plenty of whinging that the dev studio are not a 3rd Person studio so how could this be good?

Mind boggling.

To be honest, you can check out just about any review, preview, interview or news story relating to video games and they they are, the gamers, covering themselves with glory. This game isn’t like that game and I like that game so this game MUST be awful, they squeak. And thus runs the basic template for so many comments and posts.

Template 2 follows a converse system. This game is almost identical to that game, and I like that game, which means that this game is awful. The corollary being that this game is by different people, people who WOUNDED MY FAMILY HONOUR, or something… You know the score.

Yep, as a group, gamers are a pathetically conventional bunch. Terrified of new ideas or unusual twists on old ones.

It’s not just Gamers are that are idiots

Now, a swift spin through any comments section on the supposedly enlightened Guardian news site, and we swiftly see that this sort of infantile foolishness is not the sole preserve of the game sites. It looks like all internet commentary attracts a healthy dose of viscous,vacuous, aggression and ill-considered simplistic extremism. So that puts video gamers back on same playing field as everyone else, yes?

Well, no. The problem is that there is very little counter balancing to this extremism. It may be because this sort of internet output has grown up alongside the games as an industry itself. Worse still, when you indulge in online gaming, you discover that far too many XboxLIVE players are a bunch of honking, furious, homophobic nut jobs. A fine advert for gamers? Not really.

Okay, so some gamers are almost reasonable…

The true counter balance lies quietly in between the foul mouthed lunatics. Posting quiet little thoughts that lack incendiary sentiment is no way to get noticed but thankfully they are there. Those idiots that attacked Relic for not being a 3rd Person action studio did get a fair amount of grief in return. And actually, much of that was reasonably articulate. The furious old fuddy-duddys who simply couldn’t bear the thought of a Syndicate game that wasn’t EXACTLY like the one they played as furious teenagers were balanced by some far more interesting retorts like the one from Danthat at SizeFive games who noted that the brilliance of Syndicate was that incredible setting and atmosphere, not the bloody viewpoint.

It’s a first world problem. You give people a game they’ve been clamouring for for over a decade and the first thing they do is explode in hilarious apoplectic rage. Everything is amazing and is no-one is happy. The fear of change, the fear of something different. Just give me something just like something else, squeak half the people. No! Yelp the rest, you’re copying the wrong thing! Copy my favourite thing instead. Sometimes a few crazy fools ask for something new or surprising, or simply offer their trust to the creatives making the game but they tend to get ignored. The cranks.

In search of The Good Gamer

We need some wisdom. Something to help us out of this hole, I’ve got two quotes.

“You could say that the audience is the enemy, but any general that ignores the enemy is doomed to defeat.”

It was my animation teacher that said that. Thanks Chris, it helped me start getting my head in something of the right direction in university, animating short films by myself. Ultimately, I’ve come to believe that although this is true, it’s not a great attitude to have. We need to do better.

The second quote is more valuable to me today. And it also comes from the film world.

“No, people are dumb, a person is smart.”

That was Tommy Lee Jones in the lovely movie, “Men in Black”. You might think that this is a strange place to find wisdom and inspiration, but I don’t care. It makes a lot of sense to me and is a reminder that you should not confuse the underachievement of a population with the potential of a single person.

You don’t have to like them, but you do have to love them

I’ve had a few experiences that have really helped shape my feelings of gamers in a far more positive direction than those unfortunate internet opinions and vile, online aggression. The first came from a photograph (sadly one that I can no longer find). It was a shot from E3 the year that the Xbox first launched, Fuzion Frenzy was one of the launch titles and I was having a frankly wonderful time working on the game. And this photograph showed someone playing Fuzion Frenzy, probably Sumo, although I can’t be certain. This player had his fist raised in triumph, his grin broad, eyes gleaming with the thrill of winning the round. He was, quite simply, loving it!

I remember the tingle that shot down my spine. The pride of seeing someone genuinely enjoying a game that I was a big part of creating. We do all the work in the hope that this is what happens at the other end. The player is the most important thing we have.

More recently, I have spent some time at the Vertical Slice user testing lab. It’s a great service and I recommend it very highly. We were taking the Kinect version of Yoostar through its paces. I spent many hours watching people playing the game, sometimes having a great experience, sometimes struggling, sometimes being completely stumped. This is something that every designer should see. A player stuck, frustrated, becoming angry, becoming bored, probably wishing that they could get their hands on your throat. It is a humbling experience. See this, and you don’t think, “Bah, what a dick…” you just think, “Maybe I screwed up there.” And when you see numerous players make the same mistake you know that you have made a mistake and you HAVE to change that part of the game.

There is no sharper way to focus your attention on the player than to watch them with your game. And when you do, this is when you realise that the player is everything. The most important piece of the puzzle. Your intellectual aims, your theoretical arguments and your own dogmatic beliefs about challenge melt into nothing when you see a player just wanting to walk the fuck away. All that matters, is simply making game better.

Just a Human, nothing more

So gamers can be foolish, boorish, mean spirited and wilfully biased against years of your hard work. Often ungrateful, conservative and terrified of change, but without them, your work is meaningless. They say some ridiculous things, but, just like most people, they often don’t really mean half the stuff they say.

And we need to paying greater heed to those quieter, more thoughtful and intelligent commenters. People who might wish a game was different, but don’t express outraged hatred. There are even players who may love your game, but who can relate their experience with appreciative articulation, not just zealous interweb superlatives.

Extract a gamer from the war zone of Call of Duty or the NEOGAF forums and what’s left is a normal human. And when they are in front of your game, they are your audience. And the audience isn’t the enemy, it’s the most precious thing in the world.

Jogosity would like to remind you about the wisest thing he ever read about being a author, and he thinks this is just as applicable to games.

“When your audience tells you what’s wrong, listen to them, for they are almost certainly right. When they tell you how to fix it, ignore them, for they are almost certainly wrong!”

Wise bloody words!

Why I left Facebook

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 13:28:00 -0400

There. Done it.

Account deactivated.

Cookies deleted.

Bookmarks removed.

178 Friends dispatched to the electronic ether.

Hysterical fit of fizzing pique… didn’t ever really start.

I’d imagine that there’s going to be a lot of articles and blog posts about Facebook this month. For the record, as I write it is the 23rd of September 2011. That it 2 days since the latest redesign - the one that introduced the Top Stories system and the sidebar Activity Feed.

It is also one day after the F8 conference saw Mark Zuckerberg announce the probably massively controversial Timeline.

This is day 2 out in the cold. And I’m not feeling angry, or lost, or abused, or anything negative. I’m actually not feeling very much at all. I have merely unsubscribed from a single web service.

An egg. That’s about the size of it.

There are several reasons behind my actions. Some intrinsic to the human relations that social media facilitates and some specific only to the FB service itself. Depending on your interests and background, you will probably find one of those two areas much more interesting so I’ll deal with them in turn.

Firstly, people are bastards

What? Your friends these are!

Maybe but this is the longest running reason behind my departure. It started during the English riots a few weeks ago, a lot of frightened, panicking people started behaving just like frightened people always do. Suddenly rational, thoughtful, non-violent friends turned into terrifying monsters. Screaming for blood and desperate to see the young rioters gunned down in the street. “You stole a pair of trainers! Death, death, DEATH to you! You young, hooded-top clad, socio-economically under privileged human being!”

Words are just misdirected bullets

They didn’t mean it.

None of them meant it.

But they still FUCKING SAID IT! And I still had to fucking read it. Day after day of shocking, tabloid fuelled, feeding frenzy. The dark mirror of the post-Diana mass hysteria, only this time we wanted more blood, not less. And no, nothing had been learned from the horrifying events in Norway mere weeks before, where youngsters being brutally slaughtered by combat weaponry seemed to be rather poor form…

It wasn’t everyone. It was probably a minority. But from that moment I found myself resenting my Friends list, and from there it got worse. As the reality of those disgusting events in English cities faded to a memory, Facebook continued to show my friends in a worse and worse way. Complaining about work, obsessing about TV. Moaning about their shameful 1st world problems. It wasn’t everyone, it wasn’t all the time. But there was a sense of attrition. A build up of toxins that was poisoning how I felt about my friends.

The problem was, I was seeing too much, and interacting too little. Every daft little thought was writ large, ripped out of context and embalmed for posterity in the Facebook newsfeed. Those comments that a conversation would have justified or corrected or argued over in a warm and fair manner just sat there like a rotting apple on top of the fruit bowl. It’s not fair to judge people, especially your friends on such superficial output. I would be no different. I bet that enough of my own posts were sulky complaints or glib nonsense.

No more. I don’t want my relationships to be led by such crude mechanisms. The distorting prism of thoughtless comments is no way to base a friendship. The time was ripe to pull out. And when the latest design changes arrived, I knew that the quantity of whining would be all but intolerable. The time had come.

Your life, your whole actual life!

And about those new changes.

I’m not a fan. The ongoing erasure of the chronological newsfeed was increasingly irritating. I didn’t trust or believe that the algorithmic version could possibly predict my actual taste. The subscription system led me to believe that I would have to manually edit the settings for every single person on my Friends list. It looked like hard work.

Then I saw the new Activity feed. A comprehensive list of everything that the people I knew were doing, whether they wanted me to know or not. I felt uncomfortable, voyeuristic, and not in the catholic girls sixth-form changing room kind of voyeurism. (Still reading? Good, carry on..)

These people didn’t choose to share this stuff with me. I didn’t want to know. And I don’t want to broadcast my every single click to everyone I ever met.

We have entered the black hole of Facebook privacy

As I write, the full implications of the Timeline are still unknown. It could be a magnificent tool for social communication, it could be a horrifying exploitation of your every mistake. I’ll stay away from the needless hysteria and simply say that I don’t want it. Simple as that.

Mr Zuckerberg, it’s a great idea, but no thanks.

Maybe if I had control, maybe if I could set visibility privileges. Maybe if I trusted Facebook to respect my privacy and maintain my right to control my data then I may say yes, please.

Into the nuclear sunset

Is this the end of FB? Or at least the beginning of the end? Anti-hysteria demands that I say, “No!”

But there is a tiny corner of my rational mind that is feeling irrational. It thinks that maybe this is a day that we will look back on and knowingly nominate as the day *it* started to go wrong.

Here’s why.

People are fickle. Populations are capricious and unforgiving, and technology moves quickly. New approaches and new technologies can have seismic effects on the establishment.

Right now, Facebook are bulletproof, bomb proof. But their unwavering, completely obsessive company philosophy that information wants to be free could be their downfall. They are too obsessed, they are actually fundamentalist on this point. Nobody really wants privacy, is their true agenda.

Everything must be exposed, to everyone, all the time.

If there is a swing in user belief away from this notion then Facebook will be as unable to cope with the implications as the old media companies have been with the digital world. And right now, the mass public have no idea about online privacy. You and I, we’re plugged into the fucking Matrix in comparison to the true mass populace of FB users. And when I say “no idea” I mean that very specifically. They have no idea that it is even a concept. I’m the one bleating from the sidelines as people look on in confusion. People don’t have the wrong belief about online privacy, they don’t even know there’s something to believe in at all.

And when the user base does catch on, if they come down on the side of privacy, then Facebook will be sunk. Torn to pieces on the iceberg of dogmatic hubris.

Chances of this happening?

Yeah. Very slim. But to be honest you don’t really know much more than I do so we’ll agree to disagree and go the pub to laugh it off over a pint.

Not an electronic hermit

So what’s left? Well, I’m far from being an electronic hermit. I still have my Twitter account, my Google+ account, this blog, that LastFM. I’m out there, baby!

I still have a mobile phone, I still have a TV, I still read books and buy clothes. I’m still part of the 21st century. I’ve just unsubscribed from a single web service. That’s all.

Jogosity doesn’t know how long the Facebook exile will last. Right now, the account is Deactivated, not deleted. Maybe the break will do him good and in a month or so he’ll be back with the quips and sarcasm. The negativity forgotten and the privacy tools better understood. He really, really doesn’t know.