Pag on Games

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!

Video games are the first form of art that lets the audience express itself — other forms of art are about the artist expressing herself. This is what makes games unique and so I strongly believe more efforts should be put into giving players ways to influence the games they play. Ideally, each player’s experience should be unique to that player.

Some people say that for games to be art, the creators must express themselves through their game. Some people claim that we must create games like movies, defining the experience precisely for the audience. I dislike those approaches because they deny the very thing that makes video games unique.

Here’s an interesting talk by J.J. Abrams, creator of Lost and the upcoming Cloverfield, where he talks about the importance of mystery in entertainment and his experience working on various projects. (It’s about 20 minutes long)

To get results that are out of the ordinary, you must act out of the ordinary. If you do the same things as everybody else, you’ll get the same results as everybody else and you’ll be condemned to mediocrity. That’s why geniuses are eccentric: if they acted and thought like everyone they’d get the results everyone get.

The challenge is getting extraordinarily good results and not extraordinarily bad results. That’s why being average is so popular: it’s safe.

An article I wrote for Gamasutra is now published. Here’s what it’s about:

Everybody in the gaming industry has a great idea for a game. The desire to see that idea become a reality is what brought many of us to this industry. Sadly, the quality of this idea – or even of the game itself – isn’t enough to guarantee a commercial success: critically acclaimed games like Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil have sold far fewer sales than they deserved.

How can you tell if a game has the potential to become a huge hit based only on its design? Marketing executives at major publishers have sophisticated tools to evaluate that kind of things, but you don’t need all that complexity to find the potential of your idea. With just a few questions, you can evaluate the marketability of your game. I compiled these questions in a simple test that you can use in 10 minutes.

I’d love to hear what you think about the article!

So, I’m playing Zelda Minish Cap on GBA these days. It’s standard Zelda fare — indeed, there’s barely anything important that’s new. The presentation is good, but if you’ve played recent Zelda games, you’ve pretty much played this one. It’s also one of the most frustrating Zelda because of cheap design decisions: health is incredibly rare and you have to find areas that would be secrets in other games to go on. I would have given up the game early if it weren’t for FAQs, because some important elements are incredibly hard to notice.

Much to my surprise, this game got very good reviews, with an average of 91% on GameRankings. Mind you, it’s not a terrible game — it’s pretty decent, but it’s certainly not a 91% game. If this game didn’t have “Zelda” in its name, I’m pretty sure its score would be at least 10% lower. This kind of preferential reviewing really annoys me…

It’s not the only game that’s like that. You rarely see sequels of successful games get a low rating — it basically doesn’t happen. I’ve never seen any review score a game badly because it’s just more of the same. Game reviewers seem to believe that being formulaic is a strength, not a weakness.

Why is that? Is it because reviewers don’t consider originality as important, so if the sequel is a glorified expansion pack they find it worthy of as high a score as original creations? Is it because they let their nostalgia overcome them? (”Oh! I love Zelda! This will be great!”) Is it because reviewers are fanboys at heart who can’t rate hyped titles low? (It’s amazingly rare that highly anticipated titles get bad reviews, especially sequels — they can’t possibly be all good, now can they?) Or is it simply because reviewers almost only care about production value, and successful games have bigger budgets?

It’s even stranger because the opposite phenomenon happens in movie reviews. It’s very rare that movie sequels get rated as high as the original, even if they’re very good. It seems movie critics put a lot of emphasis on originality wheras game reviewers don’t.

Take this review of Just Cause by Gamespy. The reviewer didn’t like the game. Why? Mainly because it’s not a straight clone of Grand Theft Auto. Being different doesn’t seem to have any value for this reviewer: he spends a whole 7 lines talking about what’s different from GTA, then the rest of the review talking about how it would be better if it was identical (It should be in a city! The music should be licensed! There should be more GTA-like side-missions!)

Now, I’m not arguing about the actual quality of the game. I’ve played the demo and liked it, but I haven’t played the full version. My issue isn’t that the reviewer didn’t like the game, but rather that the main reason he disliked it is because it’s not a simple clone. That review sounds like a word processor review, where the tester goes through a list of features of the competitor and verify if this title has it. This isn’t a productivity app, it’s a new game — the reviewer should evaluate the game as it is, rather than as what the genre dictates.

Shouldn’t reviewers value difference more highly in the game they review? If game reviewers don’t go above base fanboyism and ask for more creativity, who will? I have a hard time taking the gaming press seriously, game reviews in particular, if the reviewer’s standard are lower than mine. I can get the opinion of a Zelda or GTA fan by going to any web forum — reviews should go beyond that.

Gamespot reports on a presentation by venture capitalists Stewart Alsop and Gilman Louie in which they discuss the “next billion-dollar opportunity in gaming“. Their point of view is that the next big thing in gaming is a better usage of the internet and a development model closer to TV than to movie-making.
It seems these venture capitalists believe gaming needs more creativity:

“It fundamentally revolves around new gameplay,” Louie said in closing. “Without new gameplay, shinier and shinier graphics will reduce and evaporate larger and larger amounts of shareholder value.”

Atari’s having terrible financial problems. Bruno Bonnell, CEO and Chief Creative Officer was quoted as saying (emphasis mine):

The Atari brand has stood for innovation and pioneering spirit for more than 30 years. As Atari executes on its strategic objectives, we must recapture what made Atari an iconic brand. During fiscal 2007, we will focus our efforts on established franchises, new major motion picture licensed IP with significant marketing campaigns, online products and titles for portable devices.

“Innovation” and “pioneering spirit” — you keep using these words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

(via Intelligent Artifice)