Pag on Games

Distributing games online is an obvious thing to do, but what about dynamic pricing? You could make a website that sells your game at a price that varies according to its popularity. The first 100 buyer get it for $1, rewarding the early adopters, the next 100 get it for $2 and so on.

The system could look at sales in the last few weeks and base the game’s price based on that, trying to find the optimal balance between offer and demand. The more popular a game, the more expensive it is. Old games already get discounted, why not automate it?

While I have to live under the iron-fisted rule of the ESRB, I have to say I hate this secretive order of censors. Here’s why.

• The ESRB is a censorship body.
  There’s no way around it, their whole reason to be is to censor games. I’m against censorship in all forms and so I can’t support an organization that’s fundamentally against freedom of expression. Don’t kid yourself: games do get changed because of the ESRB and not just to avoid an AO rating — if a publisher wants an E rating, everything that could put the game anywhere near T territory is cut.
• The ESRB doesn’t prevent laws against games to be passed.
  That’s the whole job of the ESRB, isn’t it? It exists so the government doesn’t create laws to regulate gaming. Yet the American government does create such laws. It’s not the ESRB that stops them, it’s the constitution. The UK, Australia, Germany and other countries have their own rating laws. The ESRB does diddly-squat to stop anti-games laws to be created, they just add another layer of bureaucracy.
• The ESRB ratings don’t inform parents, they make decisions for them.
  It’s not hard to know if a game is for a mature audience — publishers don’t exactly hide this fact. Take Grand Theft Auto — how could you not know it’s for mature audiences? Just Google the name, ask the store clerk, read the box, or, hell, just read the name of the game. Parents who buy games based on ESRB ratings just let some anonymous moral authority make decisions for them instead of thinking for themselves what would be appropriate for their kids. That can’t be good.
• The ESRB is secretive.
  Who actually rates the games? Nobody outside the ESRB knows. They won’t tell us. Are they biased? Do they have conflicts of interest with the games they rate? Are they qualified to make decisions that affect millions of gamers? You’re not allowed to know — the identity of the censors is kept in strict secrecy.
• The rules for the ESRB ratings are vague at best.
  Do you know the difference between an E10+ rating and a T rating? I don’t, and no one can answer me clearly. Can a E10+ game show blood at all? Can a character smoke a single cigarette in a T game? If a character says “damn”, “shit” or “fuck” in a game, what rating does the game get? I’ve tried to get answers to those questions, but nobody can answer me. I’m supposed to make games that fit within a strict moral code, but no one will tell me what the code is.
• The ESRB makes stupid decisions.
  Dead or Alive 3 was rated T. It features sexy girls throwing each other off tall buildings among much violence and fighting. Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball features the same girls playing volleyball in bikinis. It was rated M. It seems Guitar Hero, a game featuring music that plays every day on the radio, isn’t suitable for players less than 13 years old. Neither are The New York Times Crosswords for that matter.

Books have existed for centuries and they work great without any kind of ratings. Why can’t games?

2007 has been the year of casual games: Guitar Hero 3, Rock Band, Wii Sports, Peggle, etc. All casual titles that had a big impact on gaming last year. Another way of looking at them is that they’re all storyless — none of them have the strong narratives that some game developers told us were so essential to reaching mainstream audiences.

Is that a trend or is that just coincidence? Are games without stories making a comeback?

Xemu has posted detailed notes on many of DICE’s presentations:

• NPD
• Tools & Middleware
• Narrative Panel
• NanaOn-Sha
• Electronic Arts
• Character Design
• Massive Black
• ESA
• Activision
• Tetsuya Mizuguchi
• Shane Kim Q&A
• Blizzard

I just came back from the Video Games Live show as I write this. For those who don’t know, it’s a show with a full orchestra playing video game music live. It was great fun — geekery of the highest order. Where else will you see a jam-packed crowd do a standing ovation to a guy who plays the Mario theme on piano while blindfolded? Where else would the crowd wave DSs and PSPs rather than lighters?

Lots of great music was played, from Metal Gear Solid to Halo, Kingdom Hearts to Zelda, Civilization 4 to Beyond Good and Evil. It really showed just how great video game music can be — that it has its place alongside any other type of music. I highly recommend that you check it out if it comes in your city.

Some games are really good at keeping you hooked: you start playing and the next thing you know it’s 3am. How can you make games that have that kind of effect? A big part of it is making sure you don’t make the player turn off the game because he’s bored or frustrated, but there’s more to it than that.

Here are four tips to help you keep players hooked to your games:

• Give multiple objectives.  In a game like Civilizations you always have multiple goals at the same time: you’re trying to develop the city you just founded, you’re invading your neighbors and you’re developing new technologies relentlessly to be the first to get firearms. Because of that, every time you achieve an objective, you’re close to achieving another one too. So you keep playing until you reach that objective, but then you’re close to another goal, so you keep on playing — and so on until the small hours of the morning. By giving multiple simultaneous goals to players, you keep them constantly interested in reaching the next goal, so they keep playing.
• Eliminate Loading. Long loading time are a natural time to stop playing. You’ve just reached a new location, often reached a checkpoint, so it’s natural to stop playing at that point. The loading time also gives you the time to look at your watch and realize it’s time you did something else. If there’s no loading time, you don’t get that feeling of a pause so much: you’re instantly ready to keep on playing and you don’t have that time to think about the rest of your life that’s waiting for you.
• Change goals during levels rather than between them. That’s one of the things that was great about Deus Ex: you didn’t get your objectives at the start of levels, you got objectives in the middle of levels. You’d get in the middle of the secret base to talk with one guy, who would tell you to go find somebody else at some other place — but to reach that other guy you’d first have to leave the base you’re currently in. When you finally escaped that base and ended the level, you’d be halfway there to meeting the other guy so you might as well keep on playing… Giving objectives in the middle of levels is a simple way to get some of the advantages of the two previous points. First, you have two simultaneous goals: finish the current level and reach your official objective. Second, you diminish the problem with load times (if the game can’t avoid them) because it feels less natural to stop playing right in the middle of an objective.
• Restart seemlessly after failure. When you die in a game and have to replay the last bit of gameplay you failed in, you’d be excused to just stop playing and decide you’ll try again another day. Some games are more clever than that. In Grand Theft Auto, you don’t reload when you fail, you’re just immediately brought back to a nearby hospital or police station. Since you keep on playing, free to retry what your previous objective or do something else entirely, you’re less likely to just stop playing.

Why is the “Start” button not named the “Pause” button? No really…

Greg Costikyan recently gave a keynote presentation at Game Focus Germany. I didn’t attend this conference, but the Powerpoint presentation is available online here. It’s a great overview of possible business models outside of the typical developer-publisher relationship.

via Intelligent Artifice

An experiment I’d like to try someday is to create a website to make a truly collaborative game design. The idea is to let the crowd of visitors to the site decide everything that’s going to be in the game.  At each step you first ask everyone to send in ideas and then have visitors vote on their favorite ones. The winner of the vote is kept and the design moves on to the next step.

For example, you would first ask visitors to vote for the genre of the game. Say “RPG” is selected, you then ask visitors to submit short “high concepts” for this RPG. Once you have enough high concepts, visitors can vote for their favorites. You keep the most popular concept and move on to the next step and so on. You could even do that with concept art, with visitors sending their drawings to be voted on as enemies, characters or environments.

I think it would be fascinating to see what comes out of a project like this. Since everything that go into the design is voted on by a big crowd, you automatically validate every concept — everything is focus grouped before it’s even designed in a sense. If you can get enough interest in this project, with a big community around it, you could probably show a publisher that there’s enough interest in the game to finance its actual development.

I don’t have the web development skills to make a website for this or the audience to get it started with bang, but if somebody has those things I’d love to help setting up a project like this!

In what I hope will the first of a series of interviews with game developers, I’ve sent a few questions to Magnus Alm, CEO of Muskedunder Interactive and good friend of mine. Muskedunder is a rapidly expanding Swedish development studio of advergames, but you may be more familiar with their indie game Ninja Loves Pirate which has won the Four Elements contest on Gamedev.net. Last week they announced their acquisition of Free Lunch Design, giving Muskedunder a good library of browser-based casual games.

Most of the games Muskedunder has worked on can be played in a browser. What do you think is the future of browser-based games? What will they be like 5 years from now?

I think the future of a major part of ALL games is browser based actually. The trend is that they’ll be free to play, very social centric and loaded with ways for the users to generate their own content, such as levels, replays and movieclips/machinima etc. In five year I think we will start to see really good looking 3D-games in the browser, the things worked on by Garage Game’s InstantAction.com looks very promising, and that is being released this year!

How much freedom do you have when making advertisement games? Do the advertisers know what they want precisely or are you free to create what you want, as long it fits their brand?

It depends. After working some time with many advertisement agencies, they’ve started to bring us in at an earlier stage of the campaign planning. I think it is a matter of trust. New clients still tend to want to decide a lot about the game first and then hire us to make it good for them, rather than asking us to make a good game for them in the first place.

What’s the biggest challenge when working on advertisement games and how do you handle it?

I would say that the biggest challenge is often time. Or rather the lack of it. The development time frame is often narrow and therefore we need to work with our own framework of reusable code and a very strict development structure. Therefore our most important resource is our organization.

A lot of people ask me questions about what to do with game ideas they have. Since you’ve had success as an indie developer, do you have any advice about what it takes to succeed as an indie? What would you recommend to a team just starting?

Make sure to finish what you start. It may be only a demo, but make sure it is something you can show off. There are a lot of wanna be developers with unfinished stuff in their drawer, the ones who actually see that their projects go all the way, even if they aren’t financed, will be the developers of tomorrow. I would choose “productive and reliable” over “talented and enthusiastic” any day when hiring new staff. You don’t need to be best when your getting started, you need to get the job done.

A lot of PC games in Asia are based on subscriptions or micro-payments. Do you think this model has a future in the west? What are your thoughts on this business model?

I’m 100% sure it will come strong in our markets, and sooner than many people think. Even the CEO of EA recently admitted that anyone thinking that they can keep charging $60 for a game will find themselves overrun by the massive free-to-play wave that’s coming. The wind of change is blowing, and for good and bad, the future of games can be summarized with one word: Free. The ones who can monetize on that opportunity will be the winners of that era.

Thanks a lot Magnus!