Pag on Games

E3 is underway and Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have all presented their keynotes. Microsoft left the whole gaming community in shock by anouncing Final Fantasy XIII would be available on Xbox 360. Sony couldn’t match Microsoft’s anouncement, but did alright with a few interesting titles coming up — nothing earth shattering. And then there’s Nintendo.

It seems Nintendo has entirely abandonned their core fans. The two biggest titles at their keynote? WiiSports 2 (including awesome mini-games like throwing a frisbee to a dog) and Wii Music.

I don’t get Wii Music at all. As far as I can see, you just waggle your wiimote randomly while pressing buttons when you feel like it (no rythm necessary) to play bad Midi versions of hit songs like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and “Yankee Doodle”. I wish I was kidding.

When asked if core gamers would feel left out of Nintendo’s line-up, Regie Fils-Aime (president of Nintendo of America) had this to say:

“How could you feel left out?” Fils-Aime said. “The Animal Crossing that we’ve been hearing about that people wanted. Fully connected to the Internet, go to other people’s towns. Plus, as I said, Grand Theft Auto on the DS. How do you feel left out with those types of announcements?”

So their best anouncements for core gamers is Animal Crossing — a game more casual than The Sims — and GTA on DS. Now GTA for DS would be cool if it were presented as anything more than a logo at this point. They didn’t even go as far as showing concept art for the game. Take 2 — GTA’s publisher — had nothing to say about GTA DS at their own press conference.

If Nintendo’s E3 keynote is representative of their current priorities, then it’s obvious they do not care anymore about gamers looking for deep gameplay. They now focus entirely on the casual cash-cow. Will third party developers bring what core gamers want? One can hope, but so far third party Wii games have been lackluster.

After a long wait, Apple has finally enabled third party applicaations to be installed on the iPhone and iPod Touch. All applications are distributed through the iTunes store, where a lot of games are already available. What will be the impact of this on the gaming industry? Will the iPhone dethrone the DS as the portable gaming system of choice, or will it be forgettable, like Apple’s previous efforts at getting games on their systems?

From a developer’s standpoint, the iPhone certainly has a lot going for it. The hardware is surprisingly powerful — with 620 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM and 3D acceleration, it might even be better than the PSP.

Since it’s connected to Wifi and cellphone networks, the iPhone is essentially always online and since it’s a phone, users will carry it around with them at all times. I believe there’s a lot of potential for games using the always-on, always-at-hand nature of the system.

Finally, the distribution system for applications is really interesting. Contrary to console manufacturers, Apple does not consider applications sales to be its main revenue stream — they’re in the business of selling a platform. As such, they give back 70% of sales price to developers. That’s a much larger slice of the pie than what game developers usually get after distributors and brick and mortar stores take their slice. Getting rid of middlemen can only be good.

Still, the iPhone is not the perfect game development platform. One big question is whether users will care about games at all. They didn’t buy the iPhone to play games initially after all. Cellphone gaming hasn’t taken over the world, so it’s quite possible it won’t take over the iPhone world either.

Another problem is input. The iPhone is not a gaming device and has such it doesn’t have the buttons a typical gaming device has. The multi-touch screen is great and motion sensitivity is nice, but sometimes the best interface is pressing a button and you can’t do that on the iPhone. This limits the types of games that will play well on the system.

Finally, while the distribution system is nice, it doesn’t solve the problem of funding and marketing. Making a game takes a lot of people and time, which requires money. If you want people to know your game’s out and why they should care, you need marketing. Publishers are good at funding gaming projects and marketing them, so I don’t think we’ll get rid of the publisher-developer relationship just yet.

Overall I’m cautiously optimistic about the iPhone’s potential as a gaming platform. If good games come out and grab the public’s interest, it might be a very interesting system. On the other hand, it may become just another way to play Bejeweled and brain training games while on the bus, like the rest of cellphone gaming. Time will tell.

There’s a long and fascinating interview with Ron Gilbert on Gamasutra where he speaks about his next project, Deathspank, episodic games and the way the gaming industry works. Well worth the read.

Here’s an excerpt:

 You know, the movie industry certainly has its share of space marine movies as well. There are big blockbusters that are shallow, but they make hundreds of millions of dollars, and I think the movie industry is pretty good at taking that money and funding a lot of more indie movies, and smaller movies, and movies for niche audiences. And I think the game industry needs to move into that model.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with Halos and Half-Lifes, and all these other things being out there. But I would like to see companies like Microsoft, and EA, and all these people take some of that, and really start to support different levels of titles. And I think if the industry continues to be financially successful, we will eventually start to see that; so I think that’s actually a very positive thing.

There’s a fascinating read on Paul Graham’s website about how to find and do work that you actually like for a living, rather than just work because you have to. You can read this very insightful essay here.

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn’t—for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.

Somebody at work asked me today for a list of good book recommendations for game designers, so I figured I’d put the list here to help as many people as possible. All of these books have taught me important things about design or have helped my work even though they’re not directly about games development.

Creativity and Innovation

• A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger von Oech: a classic book on how to be more creative
• The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley: How IDEO, a leading industrial design firm, keeps innovative and creative

Project Management

• Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass: Quick overviews of lots of interesting topics on software development — nothing really in-depth, but you’ll get a lot of information in few pages
• Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timethy Lister: A classic on project management. The only management book I’ve read 3 times — it’s that good.
• Patton on Leadership by Alan Axelrod: Leadership methods based on General Patton’s approach to leading his troops

Interface Design

• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman: Essential tips on creating interfaces that are easy to use
•  Emotional Design by Donad A. Norman: Going beyond interfaces that are easy to use, how do you make people have an emotional reaction to your design?

Writing Well

• The Elements of Style by William Strunk jr. and E.B. White: A small book with a ton of tips on improving your writing.
• Creating Unforgettable Characters by Linda Seger: How to create believable and interesting characters for any kind of fiction.
• Story by Robert McKee: Learn how to be a great screenwriter

Communication

• Presenting to Win by Jerry Weissman: How to make great presentations. A must-read for anyone presenting at GDC.
• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie: It’s a classic for a reason. It does what it says on the tin.

Marketing

• Made to Stick by Chip Heath & Dan Heath: Learn what makes ideas stick in people’s mind.
• Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout: Essentials of modern marketing
• The Anatomy of Buzz by Emanuel Rosen: How to create word-of-mouth marketing
• The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell: More on word-of-mouth marketing and the effect of social networks on the popularity and impact of things.

PC Gaming hasn’t been doing so hot the last few years, especially for traditional games sold at retail. Here are a few causes for this and some thoughts on avoiding those pitfalls.

• Piracy: That’s a huge factor. Sales of PC games have fallen faster than the number of actual players. It’s easier than ever to find pirated copies of games on P2P. I believe DRM and other rights restriction systems are pointless and only annoy legitimate users. There’s a number of better solutions:
  • Games as Service: Give the game away but sell the experience. Subscription games like World of Warcraft and the Korean model of free games with extras at a cost both avoid piracy very well.
  • Advertising-supported games: It works for TV, why not games?
  • Pay what you Play: Some “real world” games like Warhammer and Magic: the Gathering only make players pay for what they play — you don’t need all the Warhammer figures or Magic cards to play. Casual gamers pay a few dollars, hardcore players pay a lot. This model hasn’t been used much in video games, but I think it has potential if done well.
• Complexity: PCs have become a commodity. Hobbyists aren’t the only ones to buy them anymore and most “ordinary” folks can’t tell the difference between an Intel Core 2 Duo and an AMD Phenom, between a Radeon HD 2900 and a GeForce 9800. Making games that run fine on a 500$ computer or a cheap laptop is more important than ever. Games that only run on the latest generation of hardware are shooting themselves in the foot. That does mean focusing less on fancy graphics and finding another way to distinguish your game from the lot.
• Cost: Cheap PCs are more expensive than consoles — you’re not getting much of a gaming PC for the price of a PS3. This brings us back to the previous point: target lower-end PCs because that’s what a lot of people have.

So that’s for the problems. PCs do have a number of strengths over consoles for gaming:

• Openness: There are no gate keepers for PC games. You don’t have to please Nintendo, Sony or even Microsoft. That means space for edgier content, but also lower distribution costs because there are fewer middle-men.
• Unparalled Connectivity: Only the PC has full access to the internet, with no restrictions at all. There’s a lot of experimentation that can be done that wouldn’t work on console manufacturers’ limited networks.
• Unique Input Devices: The mouse and keyboard allow many things that consoles just suck at (and vice-versa). I’ve yet to see a RTS that’s easy to play on consoles for example.

Gamasutra has an interesting opinion piece on why talented people end up making poor games, especially when it comes to licensed games:

Specifically I’ve been thinking recently about why good people make bad games. It’s amazing to me that I can go and speak with someone working on a movie licensed title, and they’ll be full of legitimate enthusiasm, real ideas, and almost convince me - OK, this time they’re going to get it right.

Then the game comes out, releasing day and date with the movie, with under a year of development time, and totally flops critically.

What’s depressing about this scenario is that nobody wonders why. Everybody on the team already knows! The schedule was too short, the demands from the licensor were unreasonable, and the project wasn’t well managed.

Some of the comments at the bottom of the page are very insightful:

The environment is not conducive to risk-taking:
A lot of developers feel that because the industry (especially the console industry) is such a stratified and approvals-ridden space that there is not much room for creativity. The average would-be game developer these days has to put a lot of muscle and reputation behind an idea to get it approved the 47 required times by different parties and still have it see the light of day.

Personally, I believe it’s often because quality is at the bottom of the list of priorities for the developer, the publisher and the licensor. Releasing on time is more important than making a good game because missing, say, the release of the licensed movie would cost a lot of sales. Not going over the budget is a higher priority because the name of the license is seen as influencing sales more than reviews. Putting a good bullet-point on the back of the box is a higher priority because more people read the back of the box than read reviews. I’ve heard of all of this from many people working at many companies. It’s hard to make a quality game when the people with the most power over the project see quality as a “nice to have”.

Still, there are ways to make quality licensed games. The best approach I’ve found is to find a fun and simple core gameplay and focus on it, removing everything that’s not essential to the game. Making a simpler, smaller game results in a better title at the end because you had the time to do it properly. You’re better with a few good features than a lot of half-finished features.

Have you ever wondered why a popular game like the original Phoenix Wright was so hard to find in stores? MTV has an interesting article on the business behind how many copies of each game get made.

“The sales life cycle of a product is shrinking,” said Svensson. If a game undersells its first month at retail, it’s finished at retail. Often, though, it’s quicker: if a game underperforms its first week, it is more than likely “dead on arrival.”

Over the last few decades, a number of video game genres have come in and out of fashion repeatedly: turn-based strategy games, fightings games, RPGs, etc. There seems to be a pattern to this process.

1. Birth: An amazing new game comes out, creating a whole new genre. It’s simple and clever and everybody loves it.
2. Sophistication: Different teams create games in this genre, adding new features to differentiate their game. The new features make the games broader and deeper and at first they don’t make the games much more complicated.
3. Complexification: Competition increases, forcing teams to add more and more stuff in their games. The new features please the fans of the genre who have played those games since the birth of the genre, but raising complexity makes it harder for new players to join the fun.
4. Death: Old fans of the genre start playing other games, while very few new players try the overly complicated genre. The number of players drops and publishers don’t dare create new titles in the genre. Some established franchises can do somewhat good business, but otherwise the genre shows few signs of life.
5. Rebirth: An amazing new game comes out, reinventing the genre. It refreshes tired gameplay by putting a new twist on it, bringing it to a whole new audience. The new game is simple and clever and everybody loves it. And competitors start figuring out what they can add to the genre…

Genres can stay in each stage for years, even decades. Western-style RPGs were born very early in the history of video games. They started very simple, but grew more and more complicated until they dropped in popularity. It took Diablo, Fallout and Baldur’s Gate to bring them back to popularity with a new point of view and a new way of playing (top-down point and click instead of first-person turn-based).

A number of modern games seem to be getting far into this process. FPSs are getting more complicated rather than more sophisticated. They got a new life by being introduced to console players, but even then I believe they’re getting into the “complexification” stage. RTSs have long reached the complexification stage and are going toward death. A few years ago you couldn’t throw a stick without hitting a RTS, now I can’t name a single one that came out in 2007. Turn-based strategy games may be having a small rebirth on handhelds: Advance Wars is doing great on the DS and the PSP has many Japanese Tactical RPGs.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve stumbled into an alternate universe. When I was a teenager, admitting to liking computers was social suicide, now fancy computers are created specifically for fashion-conscious women. Going on a BBS was the height of nerdity, now all the cool kids use Facebook. Computers were big beige boxes that cost the price of a used car, now the tiny EEE PC costs a few hundreds.

PCs have become a cheap commodity. They’re not really exciting anymore, you buy one to browse the web and hope you won’t have to buy another one for as long as possible. Price is what matters for most  people, not performance.

Buying a 500$ video card doesn’t make much sense when the rest of the computer costs less than that. The enthusiasts who are willing to get an expensive PC to put that card in are also technologically knowledgeable enough to pirate games — and chances are they will if they want to save the money to buy their next PC.

As PCs become an inexpensive commodity, it makes less and less sense to target the most powerful computers on the market. Indeed, casual games are booming while hardcore games have a hard time becoming hits.

PCs will still be good platforms to put games on, but I expect they’ll get fewer high-performance games in the future. The most successful PC games will make creative use of the PC’s unparalleled network access and openness.