A Dark Day For Gamedevs

An article over at gamesindustry.biz is painting a horrible picture of what's just gone down at Sports Interactive. In summary: a leaked pirate copy of Eastside Hockey Manager has killed legit sales so badly that they've had to can the game. Not any pokey little game either, we're talking a critically acclaimed game. They didn't make their money back and they can't afford to pay the hockey team licences in the game.

Real devs just lost real work. This isn't a theoretical discussion about piracy, it's real actual people who work to make games who have had their livelihood directly affected. No sales means no recoupment, means their investment down the drain. Thank goodness the company can survive the blow and the guys haven't been laid off.

To the pirate to hacked this one: hope you're proud.

The Moral Combat trailer and Jumbled Jack

It's a trailer, and I'm absolutely not going to comment on someone's work without having seen the entirety of it. Suffice to say that I'm looking forward to watching it and seeing how he's pieced together this hot button topic.

No, this post is to address a specific quote from the trailer: Godverdomme, but I’m tired of hearing Thompson’s pearls of wisdom. We don’t recognise violence as a virtue? Really? Quick someone tell the military where the “will to kill” is a prime learned virtue, or sports fans who egg on boxers.

It is precisely because society is filled with violence-is-a-virtue memes that we find so much entertainment in fulfilling that self image. We want to be badass action heroes because we grew up being told that badass action heroes were bad as. And we’ve done that ever since David badassed Goliath.

I’m all for changing that culture, but it’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s certainly not going to happen through censorship, soft, self imposed, morally outraged, outright stamped, enforced or otherwise. Censorship doesn't challenge anything, it's just plain head-in-sandery.

If you really want to change our culture of violence, you need to create media that presents a different world view. You have to tell a different story, and a more compelling one at that. But no, Jack. Being against something is a whole lot easier than being for something, isn’t it? Being a destructive force rather than a creative one comes naturally doesn't it? Can’t charge if there are no windmills, eh?

Meanwhile, the least damage I can think of anyone causing while trying to live up these pervasive violent memes is acting them out in a video game.

Novelty: when did this become a dirty word?

I've persistently heard the oddest disparaging comment made about the Wii recently: "It's all just novelty. The Wiimote is just a gimmick"

WTF?

When did being new become a sin? For some reason I thought it was the goal: show people what they haven't seen before. Is "Racer X Part 4 Autumn '07 Tournament Edition 1.74 Extreme" really the path we want to go down? Is it really OK that the main attractions are the minor refinements instead of the mad gambles?

I say viva novelty. I, and others I've queried on the matter, have conversely found that the Wii's novelty is making everything old... new. Zelda is for all intents and purposes still Zelda, but everything feels so fresh with the new controls. Every little movement is a joyous discovery. It's almost like getting to start all over again, and Lord only knows how many times everyone's wished for that.

Whilst perusing the gaming shelves, I find myself furtively glancing at games in genres I would normally not give the time of day to. Like some sort of gaming pervert I'm now bloody flirting with anything I can shake a Wiimote at.

Luckily though, I don't really need to defend novelty much: the DS happened. It received the same disparaging comments about its dual screens, microphone and pen input. Despite that, this past Christmas it was the tearaway lead in sales.

Stop fighting it: Novelty is where it's at.

Why I make games

So someone I know in gaming has been having a rough year and is getting to the point where he's asking "Why?, Why do we do this?"

A little background. Working in video games is hard. Not grave digging hard or saving lives hard, but it is hard. I don't know many people in games who work a normal day. Invariably the day leaks an hour, and when things are going bad it's common to be at work for 12 hours a day, and on the weekends. And none of it is ever a cakewalk.

Why? Well, making games is currently a difficult proposition. The industry is young enough that despite the fact that there are some absolute gems, we really don't know how to do this yet. Every day we're inventing something new, and usually still something rather primitive. For all the power in the newest toys, we're still scraping the performance barrel just to move things around.

But beyond that, and just like any other creative industry, gaming is a gamble. We take people's money, somehow, somewhere, and bet that we can make something entertaining. The large pile of filer dross on the shelves should tell you that the odds on that are pretty long.

So it's hard, and we're more than likely not going to make it. Why do we keep on keeping on then?

When people ask "we" questions, they're really trying to find "me" answers. By looking at people with common ground, you're really hoping to find a mirror you can relate to, something you might have lost the ability to summon up. So I'll answer why I do this, and make no claims about anyone else's motivations.

I do this because I have to. I do this because doing anything else would require me not to be me. Religious people call this belief, and I supposes there's something to that. Being less of a mystic myself I'm inclined to dig deeper, and what I find is that the belief that I must make games comes from from the belief that I can make a good game. So where does that belief come from?

As it happens, I think it's always been there. As a child, I loved video games. Along with reading and music, that there is pretty much my childhood in a nutshell. In my mind, I formed over time an image of what gaming would be like some day, what the ultimate game would be. This has gotten re-contextualised and experiences along the way have pushed and pulled the image in all manner of ways, but principally I'm still trying to get to play the games I dreamed of.

Somewhere along the way I realised that I might be an artist, and still later yet I picked up programming. Now I'm pretty certain that I have something to offer and co-workers seem to agree, but the core belief, irrational though it may be, must still belong to that child staring at Combat on the Atari 2600.

What I thought Zune might have been

So the holidays are over and the Zune hasn't really made much of a dent. Having had a play with the device, I can see why this is. It's not actually bad, it's just not great. It doesn't do much that any other player doesn't already do, and what it does new immediately feels like it misses the mark.

Here's what I assumed they were going for and, in contrast, why I'm not interested yet.

Wifi access to the store from the device. No brainer really. Can't for the life of me see why they didn't wait until this was a go.

Intuitive media sharing. The current sharing interface on the Zune is awful. Never mind the policy, the actual act of sharing its self is limp. I envisioned something that worked like a very local radio station, with Zunes able to tune into each other and see/hear what the master is doing. To the lay person it would make more sense to tune into things like this, and then initiate a local copy request that can jump through the DRM hoops or just bookmark a purchase for later.

Not to mention that the act of being able to broadcast to a small audience like that would be a killer app, and much more in tune with the viral marketing function that music sharing has. Plus, it's actually even more rights friendly: you can only listen freely while the other Zune is nearby, and you have no control over the playback. Adding their 3 or 3 sharing on top of that would be golden. I could see a future in which such sharing was so ubiquitous that indie bands would practically have to be able to "zunecast" to get anywhere.

With that logic in place, I wanted to see intelligent systems that you could preconfigure to tune into your particular Zune automatically. When I get home from the morning run, I'd like my PC to pick up on the device and pump the music I'm listening to out its speakers. Fancy hifi wireless headphones would do the same when I get to work, heck so would my car and the phone headset, if asked to. Little standalone speaker setups I could dump around the house would be neato as well.

It'd also be a more natural way to share photos. Scrolling through your slide show, narrating while other people look at their Zunes seems logical to me, with your audience able to pick and choose what they might like to archive for later viewing.

Tagging these shares with additional metadata would be icing on the cake. Indie bands would have links to their webpages and latest blog excerpts travel with their songs, which media player would happily load for its now playing screen. Notes for pictures would explain them, and carry a link to a flikr collection for the full set. Viral funny video marketing efforts on the net would carry coupons that you could redeem by having the video present on your Zune when you walked into a store.

But no. What we actually got was a big fat media player with a so so battery life and what amounts to little more than gimped local ftp. Bizarrely, despite its features, this leaves it ill suited to displace the current Creative Zen V I carry around: it's small, robust, completely non intrusive and plays everything under the sun. Sorry Microsoft, maybe at version 2?

A bit of online coverage as background for the above post.

Pet names for projects

I really like giving any personal project I'm working on a title. No matter how large or small the project, I feel compelled to.

It doesn't have to be a permanent name, but it does need to say something about the project. Often times that thing gets dropped or evolved out of recognition, but I just gotta have a name. There's something important about names, even if I can't quite articulate what.

Occasionally this'll carry over to work as well. I just get so turned off when faced with "Mesh Converter 2.5g.01" as an app, that when I'm working on a really problem specific small tool I'll revert to character with some naming silliness.

Does anyone else feel the same way?