These are my notes from Brandon Jones’ onGameStart session on WebGL. Brandon’s the author of the awesome glmatrix. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are my own. My notes are in square brackets.

[I came in a little late to this session. Brandon built a Quake 3 level renderer.] Q3 demo had no serverside stuff. All clientside. It’s a horrible idea, not something you want to do with a real game because there are a lot of calcs that don’t have to happen on the client because you’re slowing things down. But I wanted it to be a “view source” type of educational resource so I built it that way.

To make the clientside parsing nicer, we do parsing in a Web Worker — same with the movement system. It’s a simple trace through the BSP tree in Quake where you pass off your position test vector to the Web Worker. I’m sending the raw BSP format directly to the browser — bad idea, but again, it’s for educational purposes. Normalized all the BMPs and PNGs to PNGs. Normalized textures to powers of two since it’s OpenGLES, not OpenGL. Shaders are parsed from the Q3 material format and parsed to GLSL on the fly.

There’s no geometry culling AT ALL in the demo. We render every triangle in every frame. At the time (Chrome 6) I couldn’t find a way to do culling fast enough that it didn’t kill the frame rate. There is now. But since everything is sorted by material on the scene and we do a single draw call on each material type. It’s very effective and so I didn’t need to cull.

The original game uses a test-and-failback system for their textures. The system tries to hit the hard drive multiple times to see if a “lava” texture is “lava.png” or “lava.bmp”. We don’t want to do that on the web, so we made everything PNG. Since we’re pulling down from the internet, we put all the materials into a single file by hand to reduce http requests.

Shader format was designed to do everything as multi-pass effects. We could get better performance if we took multipass effects and rendered them in one go using our modern hardware.

So what about the next demo? I was drawn to mobile games. They share a lot of the same limitations that we see on the web. The demo I ended up doing was the iOS version of Id Software’s RAGE. [Shows a WebGL demo of the iPhone RAGE running, shows that it uses the texture atlas technology. Video of the demo here.] RAGE is a really good example of the type of things that our early WebGL games need to be trying for. It knows its limitations and plays to its strengths. All the rendering and all the gameplay are built with mobile in mind. The controls are built to embrace the platform. The gameplay sessions are quick and gratifying.

I will make an admission: the RAGE demo is running on localhost. Pulling in all the texture atlases will not perform well on the web!

When talking about file formats for WebGL, you have two semi-competing goals: you want to download them fast, but you also want to be able to parse them fast. As far as fast downloads goes, the Google Body team has done a great job with their WebGL-Loader project. They compress the vertex stream in UTF-8 that creates some very small files that stream down to the file very quickly. There’s a great million-triangle demo out there.

But if you want better parsing performance, we recently gained a request for a typed array from an XHR request. [Holy crap!] For any model format you can break it down into a big vertex buffer, an index buffer, and some bone/materials info. But the big buffers take the most time to parse usually. You’re looking through a JSON file or whatever, and you have to loop and parse things individually. With the binary buffer that now comes back from the XHR request, we’re in a position where we can get all of our vertex data and index data into the GPU just using some subarray calls. Grab your data, bind it directly to gl.Bufferdata, etc. But that requires raw numbers. For non-binary data (elements that aren’t simple arrays of numbers), use JSON, it’s just better for handling that.

It should be theoretically possible to download everything as a compressed format, unload to the Filesystem API in uncompressed format, and load from Filesystem.

Please use requestAnimationFrame! Pretty please! Don’t use setTimeout. (For one thing, requestAnimationFrame pauses rendering when you’re not on that tab!)

For optimization, everything is pretty much the same as you have on the PC. The main difference is that the difference between GPU and Javascript is a little bit bigger than in, say, C++/GPU, so it can help a little more to push to the GPU. However, browsers get better and better (for example, I can now cull in JavaScript just fine). Also, you want to change state as little as possible. Sort draws by material as a pre-process if possible, reduce your total number of passes, pack multiple meshes into a singe buffer, draw everything that uses the same material/texture in a single call.

Don’t break up your draw calls based on visibility! In a lot of cases with WebGL, it’s cheaper to accept overdraw, and instead just reduce the number of draw calls you have to make.

Generally, you’re probably not going to be GPU limited. You can take advantage of spare GPU cycles instead of having a JS bottleneck. For example, if antialiasing is available on your platform, just go ahead and use it. You probably won’t lose performance. Don’t bother turning off texture filtering. Once anisotropic filtering becomes available in browsers, leave them on and crank it up. (Of course, benchmark any of this stuff as your mileage may vary.)

And offline precomputations you can do, do them! Make sure your file format already presorts objects by state, for example.

When you’re talking about cross platform support, we’re in a unique scenario, we’re trying to get things that run on desktop, iPad, iPhone. There’s competing limitations. It’s a unique opportunity that in most of the time with a standard desktop game it’ll send down tons of resources, and the machine picks at runtime how much detail to render. On the web we know what the client looks like (“you’re a mobile phone”) so we can then send only the appropriate data for the platform. Don’t send anything to the client they don’t strictluy need.

A good artist is always going to be more effective than any of the shaders that you’re ever going to have. Good art direction will make more difference in your game than all the performance in the world.

There are a couple things that make WebGL different from standard desktop. Uploading large sets of data (textures, vertex buffers, etc) to the GPU is expensive. For example, pushing a big texture to the GPU would block for a few frames because the texture was bigger than the command buffer. You need to be careful — if you’ll push large data, do it as a preprocess or in small chunks. Bandwidth is a valuable resource! A lot of internet connections are capped, you don’t want to abuse your users’ bandwidth.

JS does make it easy to build inefficient data structures. Your data locality can be all over the place with even a simple tree. It can be worthwhile to store all your data in a TypedArray, which will have good data locality and you can iterate quickly. Don’t go crazy with abstraction layers (long prototype chains, callbacks, recursion). My demos are fast because the render loop is a simple for loop over every material in the game.

[Ended it with a crazy demo. Showed TwoFort from Team Fortress 2, rendered in a browser at 60 FPS! It apparently can run as fast as 120 FPS.] What you’re seeing on screen is an accumulation of 1.2 million triangles for this level, approximately 200 MB of resources that get thrown to the browser. Realistically that’s not feasible for a web game, for now, but it is possible! We were talking yesterday about ‘when do we get to do hardcore games in the browser?’ I can say that rendering is not the limitation for the web. The real bottleneck is going to be getting the content to the player.

These are my notes from Scott Jon Siegel’s GDC session, “City of Wonder: Postmortem.” Any mistakes or misinterpretations are my own.

Feels odd to give a post mortem on a social game, especially one that’s still live and active. This is more of a post mortem of the dev process leading up to the launch of the game.

CoW is an entry in the city builder genre of social game, modeled after Playdom’s own Social City. Released Aug 2010, 6 months of development time by Studio 24 in Mountain View and Bangalore. It has monetized very well, exceeding expectations. 10.7M MAU peak. Studio 24 also did Tiki Farm (6.4M MAU). Also did Fish Friends (1.2M MAU), shut down earlier this year.

Like a lot of Playdom projects, started with a pitch. The game as originally conceived was about expanding the city across military/economic/cultural power, guiding technology, and interacting with NPCs. That was a little grand. We were building off the Social City engine. We wanted to incorporate PVP and maximize on monetization through customization and PVP.

Social City helped establish Playdom’s post-RPG game titles, but we wanted to exceed the success of Social City. The problem is that we didn’t know if the CoW direction was good. I considered the pitch to be a crazy idea when I first heard it. I had very little interest in working on it. Social City defined a genre, and many other city games popped up with high-quality competitors. The market was saturated on city games.

Studio 24 learned about market saturation the hard way. Fish Friends launched to a saturated market of aquarium games and did not do well.

The concept itself was also pretty niche; not widely accessible and the original pitch sounded like a pretty hardcore game. We knew from Social City that city builders appeal to a nice, even, wide demographic. If the average gamer is a 43 y/o woman, I like to ask myself: would Nicole Kidman play our game?

So why did we go ahead anyway?

Well, the first reason was that we were combining the PVP of text RPGs and isometric builder games. In RPGs people buy stat boosters for player on player combat, but they don’t appear in game so they only really appeal to PVP players. In builders, people buy stuff to customize, but it’s only for the kinds of people who want to make pretty cities, the rest of the people stick with the free content. So CoW was a chance to do both of those things in one game.

The second reason was why I got involved in the first place: we can casualize the more “hardcore” elements. It meant making PVP almost optional, and that complex features scale with the player’s own interest.

The key mechanic of Social City was its city building loop. For SC, three metrics matter to the player: currency, population, and happiness. Currency increases population, but to expand you need more happiness which means you buy leisure buildings, which lets you increase population, etc. The core is a virtuous cycle.

We took the base mechanics of SC and made one tiny change: instead of gating the unlocking of new buildings by experience points alone, we added a technology tree that you needed to research.

Research as a mechanic was not arbitrary based on the source material. Tech tree lets us create additional long arcs for the player, and a path of progress for the player. Branching paths allow players to create diversity in their city layouts. The problem is that tech trees are very complex, usually. Balancing and tuning our tech tree was AESTHETICALLY driven just as much as it was SYSTEMICALLY driven. We designed the tech tree with different varieties of buildings in mind, with fewer options available at a given time, and and untangling the web of dependencies.

Still, even a simple tech tree visualization could incude panic in a player. We made the tree a power user feature, and we made the tech tree look like a standard purchasing UI. And if that was too much, we created advisor NPCs who would recommend specific research with some flavor text. For players who wanted depth, they could run research directly from the tech tree if they wanted to.

Tech tree gives a sense of progression to the player. It goes left to right, and you see the evolution of your tech. We also added events that trumpet the oncoming of the Bronze Age, etc etc. The thing is, many players didn’t understand that the game was about progressing through time. Most people thought it was permanently set in the stone age, so adding the events was an important way to get people clued into the fact that this game is about time progression. Even our loading screen shows the progression of time.

The most important thing we did was a “back of the box screen” that pops up and tells you what the game is about, complete with a slide show that shows the city evolving through the ages. But that animation wouldn’t work if the buildings themselves didn’t change. We drew inspiration from Children of the Nile (PC game by Tilted Mill) and how it changed the flavor of buildings between the ages. We kept our post-launch buildings adhering to the same flavor guidelines.

About the name: we ran tests to see what names got clicked on more in advertising scenarios. We were called Social Civ internally for a long time, but the clear winner was always City of Wonder. It’s not rhyming, it’s not a pun, it’s not clever… turns out there’s a Rihanna song, Disturbia, that says “city of wonder” in the lyrics. My new theory: name your game after a Rihanna song.

Embassies were way to deepen the relationship between neighbors in social games. We wanted adding friends to not just be a one-time bonus, but something that is a long-term benefit.

PVP expeditions: we have a second major system in our PVP game. There’s cultural, trade, and military “attacks”. A player is aided by the buildings they had. We had to think about ways to convey to the player how different buildings affect PVP but there were a lot of variables so it had to be very communicative. We went through a huge number of iterations (about a dozen major ones) until we landed on our final version. We did a clear visual/audio distinctionbetween win and loss. Prior to the player attacking, the advisors chime in to casualize the expedition experience.

Legends system: we added these originally because we wanted consumable item boost. We found that tying boosts to historical figures helped add personality to our game and tie it history more closely. Some legends affect reasearch, population growth, etc. As we grew the game’s features, we added new legends.

I’ve had the privilege of being in the social game industry for a “long” time, about as long as it’s been an industry. CoW has been the best experience I’ve had in this industry. But no project is without its low points as well as high.

What went right: the decision to be casually focused. We had a very even gender split in the game (53/47 M/F in the first week). I think we democratized our game like Apple democratized the MP3 player with the iPod. Steve Jobs insisted it would be the flattest user experience possible, fewest button presses to find a song. We democratized by minimizing the number of clicks you need to access the core features. More complex features were kept optional.

Iteration went very well. For example, we iterated a lot on the starting configuration of the city, using a lot of A/B testing immediately after launch. We had a system of continuous integration which made iteration possible, instant deploy of new features. We don’t have to wait until the end of the day for QA to test. You should also always have a stable build available for people to play. We did a lot of scrubbing on the builds: every single day we’d sit down and critique the build. As time went on these meetings went from long (3 hours) to short (<1 hour) as the game got better and better. We also ticketed every single issue that came out of the build scrubbing.

The team was great too. We’re called Studio 24 because development occurs 24 hours a day between Bangalore and Mountain View. CoW was blessed with some of Playdom’s best resources.

Things still went wrong, of course.

Our legends system was not the huge win that I hoped it was. Because the characters were so engaging, we were asked by executives to double down on the feature. We wanted to expand legends into a baseball card style system: collect, trade, redeem your legends for exclusive objects. On paper it looked great. Unfortunately the collection feature was implemented last minute. It lacked the iteration we were able to give to the other core features, so collections were poorly balanced and difficult or impossible to complete at launch. And only counted a legend as collected once you’ve USED it rather than OBTAINED it, which just confused players. The feature also didn’t have the same UI polish time. Many players didn’t realize we had a collection system. Our most successful legends were ones that we offered at certain pinch points in the game and popped up in players’ faces. Obfuscating boosts with charm may have done more harm than good in the end!

Another feature that could have used more love was embassies. These were one of the last features we implemented, a side effect of putting off platform integration and virality into late in development. The feature was solid but there was a side effect that we could have predicted: embassytown. People with tons and tons of embassies cluttering their city because they were really great buildings from a systems perspective. The problem was widespread, especially for the people who really liked our game and were active players! We added bulk embassy buildings to solve this problem.

We iterated very heavily on the PVP interface, but even then things weren’t perfect. People didn’t like that the system puts very heavy preference on the culture system because the rewards keep you gated by cultural points. We did like the idea of players coming across the gate and having to build their city more, but if it makes users angry, it’s not ideal. Also, PVP awards don’t really scale, not with overall experience, nor with risk-taking on the player’s part. There’s also no narrative to PVP so more casual players may not be interested.

Lucky for us, social games are a live service. So the problems addressed here we’re able to improve. Our roadmap is robust. We’ve introduced a colonization aspect where players can explore an island and find new buildings. It allows us to grow the game without changing the core. It allows us to reevaluate the PVP with things like naval expeditions, etc. This is a way for us to iterate on a feature without upsetting players who might like it just the way it is.

These are my notes from Naomi Clark and Eric Zimmerman’s GDC session, “The Fantasy of Labor: How Social Games Create Meaning.” Any mistakes or misinterpretations are my own. This was my favorite session at GDC so far. Essentially they posit a third addition to the usual games of skill/chance dichotomy: games of labor, which reward persistence above skill or luck.

[I arrived at the talk a few minutes late. They were discussing the limitations of metrics and A/B test-driven design: you need to know the right questions to ask, and beware local maxima. I missed some, I'm sure.]

Empirically based A/B testing incorporates models of humans that are embedded into that methodology. One way of understanding design is that is an investigation of what it means to be human. As we design we model and react to ideas about what people are and how they behave. As we sculpt and create we don’t want to fall inlove too much with our creations like Pygmalion and lose sight.

When we talk about fun we mean engagement or motivation — in other words, desire. Neuroscience can tell you what part of the brain activates during excitement. Psychology can tell you about basic motivations. Economics can be useful though models are simplistic at times.

But we’re game designers, creating meaning and understanding within interactive systems. What does a player’s action mean within our game system and how do they understand that meaning? At the formal level we are desigining actions and their outcomes. Formal quantification is the level at which A/B testing happens. Formal models can give us mechanics, interactions, and tools to measure.

We have to put those interactions inside the model of a human being’s brain. We can apply theories from psychology about intrinsic/extrinsic rewards, reward schedules, etc. But psychology also tells us about the interaction between the formal and the inner world of the player. But also individual players do not exist within a vacuum. Even softer science doesn’t offer much to tell us about this; we need to start to analyze on the cultural level and become anthropologists of fun.

Games work on the level of desire because they frustrate desire. The friction between desire and what the game gives us is the heat that makes games good. In the gap between what we want and what we can’t have, that’s where desire springs up. It’s not something that simple A/B testing can explain.

Let’s talk about the desire for chocolate cake. Okay, humans want sugar because it gives us certain energy reserves so our taste buds evolved, etc. But that doesn’t explain excessive chocoholism. Maybe it came from a childhood experience, or the taboo of chocolate that causes the desire. There’s an idealized version of chocolate out there that causes a deep bottomless pit of desire for chocolate. Anyway, this goes way beyond biological needs.

Some players use Farmville to make pixelated art. But would this be more fun if it were a paint program? Part of the virtuosity is that it takes so much time to acquire the raw materials to paint with.

Bernard Suits has a term for the state of the mind of the player: the lusory attitude. Players take on obstacles just for the pleasure of taking them on. Suits uses the example of golf. I have a desire to put a ball in a cup in the ground. If I really had that desire, I would just put it in the cup. But instead we go really far away and hit the ball with a stick. It’s an interesting relationship to desire. [But I think golf players realize it's not "about" getting the ball in the cup, right?]

The idea of what desire means forms the context for these engines of desire that are games. So these cultural fantasies that lie outside of the game and the player that create meaning.

So now we talk about the cultural fantasy of labor. If we think about game mechanics,we may divide them by chance and skill. We propose a third category: games of labor. We’re not just doing this to talk about mechanics, but the cultural fantasies that power the mechanics.

Chance: what is the promise of chance? It’s a very ancient idea that you can submit yourself to supernatural forces from beyond; that fate will smile on you on by virtue of that you will be successful. You’ll be the lucky one, not all the other folks.

Skill, whether physical or intellectual, means that the game eliminates everything but the skill that is being tested. And players come in on a level field and have a contest with each other, and your own virtuosity results in your own success.

Obviously many games cross both of these categories, like Poker.

Labor: games that rely on labor mechanics are tied to the industrial fantasy: keep working hard and eventually you will earn your reward. Put in hours of work so you can get something out.

RPGs: the level grind is going through the motions of combat, laboring to level up.

Some designers see it as a pernicious trend. Dave Sirlin doesn’t find it fair that a skilled player who just started WoW can be defeated by an unskilled player with a lot time invested. The sim genre is driven by time investment; there’s skill involved in budgeting and strategy, and there’s a fast-forward that allows you to kill the time investment. In Facebook the game IS the time investment, with no fast forward button. The investment of time is attenuated, you don’t need to babysit the game, you can do other things and come back and collect your reward.

Back to games of chance. They tend to rely on extrinsic rewards to keep htings interesting: real money. But you also need to have money to put up. Skill games are also elitist: there are very few people at the top and there are few people who can compare to them.

The fantasy of labor is a completely level playing field; as opposed to real labor where there are class differences, unpredictable disasters, etc, that make it hard to even make a basic living.

Why is there a rise in games of labor? It is linked to contemporary culture. In industrialized 21st century cultures there are new lifestyles that are mirrored in these games of labor. We are taught to want and to work for the fantasy of labor. You don’t really have a desire to make a virtual farm until the game explains to you that that is what you want.

Games are defined by the edges of their worlds. In GTA you hit a wall at some point where you can’t do things. Labor games are defined by the moments where you have to stop and do real work, or when they make demands on you extrinsic to the game. The most common form of friction: come back later, you have nothing left to do. There’s no more work for you today, we can’t pay you overtime. There’s the rotten crops mechanic, and in the fantasy of labor this is what happens if you fail to show up for work on time. The need for help from your friends: you need people to click a button to make your labor driven enterprise a real success.

What about some alternative forms of friction? Some are classic, like chance. The fantasy of chance is different than of labor. The idea that you are going to be selected, the special one. Skill mastery is another thing that is left out of the fantasy of labor. Even the PVP mechanics you see in some FB games are less about skill and more about perserverance and optimism. But what else is there?

There are games that combine chance and skill, with a risk/reward scenario. How about rule-breaking and misbehavior? A hoax is a game where not everyone knows they’re playing. One of Frank Lantz’s favorite sayings is that a good game should make you feel like you’re cheating, that you’ve figured out how to slip your own strategy past the watchful eye of the system (which goes back to the chocoholic taboo). We can break the level playing field of the game. Give players asymmetric roles (SpyParty). Then there’s the idea of players as creators. Players make intensely interesting design decisions about their decks in magic. Not just user generated content but giving players the ability to be designers in a deep design space.

We want to dive deep into a particular mechanic: gifting. Gift giving is an ancient part of human culture. Gifts are expected as part of relationships and they come with expectations and pressures to reciprocate. Western culture gifting is one example. A potlatch of NW coast native Americans is competitive gift-giving to redistribute wealth. Honor goes to the people who can give away the most. This is not just about gifts themselve but it’s about status and special relationships and honor that you get through being a gift giver. Can we use these ideas to deepen gift giving?

These are not just alternate game mechanics. They are alternate fantasies and desires that we are offering players. The danger is that like a pickup artist, we instrumentalize our players and get results that impoverish what it is to be human. Both the pickup artist and the person being picked up are instrumentalized. It does not leave to long term relationships. (Some maxima are more local than others!)

When I think about cultural traditions like the potlatch and compare them to gifting works on FB where you can shotgun gifts to friends and you get hundreds of requests, clicking “yes yes yes” to give things to them. We are impoverishing something that could have more meaning and value and hooks to compel and engage our players.

We need to expand the vision of the way designers think of desire beyond the formal level. If we don’t do this, games will not become the predominant cultural form of the 21st century. We are architects of new social systems using technology that carry with them forms of social meaning that draw on things from the past. But as designers, what are we going to do with these systems? How can we make them more meaningful? Let’s not choose to be pickup artists. Let’s choose love.

What follows is the notes I took on Corvus Elrod’s panel discussion on indie obstacles at LOGIN 2010. Any mistakes are my own!

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Corvus Elrod, moderator: We have four panelists who are extraordinary in their own right. Andrew Stern of Stumptown Game Machine, released Touch Pets Dogs and also worked on Facade. Charles Berube has released an extraordinary number of quality Flash games, storytelling games, shmups, sidescrollers. Dylan Fitterer produced Audiosurf, available on Steam and on the Zune. Brian Green kept Meridian 59 alive for 9 years, bought the rights to an MMO that was being shut down and kept it alive for almost a decade.

CE: Andrew, what are some obstacles you’ve faced?

AS: one obstacle is the idea of staying indie in the first place. Actually my studio is in the process of being acquired so that’s an obstacle I’ve failed to overcome. There’s a whole host of challenges trying to make indie games. I began in the industry at PF Magic working on Dogz, Catz, in the 1990s. I learned how to develop games in a small startup kind of environment, and in 2000 I quit and went indie, self-funded, it was an ecstatic experience. Developing indie games and watching your bank account drift downward is an emotional roller coaster. One big obstacle for me was how to be able to fit indie dev into your life. I did a blend of consulting work as well as my own indie work. How you pay the rent is important.

CE: How does being acquired present challenges?

AS: One of the reasons we went along with the idea of being acquired was that it would give more resources to the group to build more stuff. Now the group is going to have to grow. I’m a designer/programmer DIY person. The idea of managing a team and being more hands-off is going to be a big adjustment for me. It remains to be seen how much freedom I’ll have although you definitely lose freedom once you start taking funding. It comes down to the relationship you have with the people who are funding you. I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to keep going in that indie mode.

CE: Brian, you’ve done development under non-indie positions at 3DO.

BG: It was different from being indie, although when I was at 3DO I was on a small team of one or two people. Since we were such a small team we were kind of ignored, but there’s still the hierarchy and the bosses and being given resources. It was a learning experience working for a publisher. When I went on my own I didn’t have a safety net. I know how things are supposed to work but there are lots of business details that I have to know about: taxes, payroll, etc.

DF: I had an acquisition offer before Audiosurf was released, and it was a good offer, but I didn’t take it. I didn’t want to be a manager and I needed to see the project through.

Audience question: So the acquisition offer was more than you expected to make on the game and you turned it down?

DF: Yes, but I knew that there was the possibility that I could have made more money.

Audience: Did you get advice from a lawyer on the music IP issues around Audiosurf?

DF: Yes, I did.

BG: Not that I encourage anyone to break the law, but a lot of times people get paralyzed by legalities. On some level you need to barrel forward and hope for the best. You run some risk but risk is part of running a business.

CE: Charles has done a lot of Flash games and has tried to turn that into a living.

CB: The whole thing is one long terrible obstacle. I want to focus on the terrifying pressure that’s happening in iPhone, indie, etc. There’s a pressure to not cost any more than $0.99 or be free, and to be the best game out there, and to provide new content every week, and customer support, all financed by NOTHING. I’m concerned from a point of view where I’m trying to make a living, but also from a philosophical point. It troubles me that games are considered less valuable than a cup of coffee. I don’t know yet how to overcome that. I think microtransactions are an option.

Audience (Kim Pallister): What pressure? If you’re indie you set your own price.

CB: It would be nice to believe that you can set your own price but to compete in the app store you need to sift through an enormous number of cheap apps.

Audience/KP: Differentiation is hard, but a majority of the top grossing iPhone games don’t sell for $0.99 so it seems like the price drop is a last ditch tactic.

BG: Well the race to the bottom is about getting more sales to get on the top selling list. M59 was one of the first monthly subscription fee MMOs. The going price for a lot of games was $12-13/month. We went for $10.95/mo and we had continuous feedback from players that it was too much. I think there is that pressure that if you’re making a game that isn’t AAA you should charge less and somehow magically make money.

Audience/KP: I get the pressure to make that top 10 and not be below the fold. But all the guys dropping to $0.99 aren’t magically appearing on the top 10 list either.

CB: I agree with that, some of this pressure is perceived and may not be real on final analysis. But it’s a difficult thing to overcome when your bank account is hang gliding towards 0 and you see a community discussion that nobody is going to get something for free. And that I’m deleting an app without a weekly update.

Audience/KP: The latter part of your argument sounds like an issue people haven’t been talking about enough, that you’re selling once and acquiring a relationship that you need to turn into a business model.

Audience: Hi, I’m an independent developer, me and my boyfriend are the two people in the company. We released our first app and it was successful but it’s on Facebook and customer support alone is a full time job. Has anyone found a solution for this?

BG: Yeah, that’s a big obstacle for indies is turning something into a real business. We hired a co-founder’s brother to work for cheap on customer service. You have to find people who will work for you. Find interested game developers at your local IGDA meeting who want to get into games or are tired of the corporate life.

CE: This is an uneven playing field. We have individual developers who see the potential to make quality apps on iPhone or portals, who are competing with companies that have venture capital and full staffs. They’re putting 10 $0.99 apps out there and supporting the ones that do well. It’s both remarkable and terrifying that a two-person team can compete with Zynga. I know an iPhone developer who’s developed a great puzzle game and can’t even get people to review it. It’s tough to get over that barrier of perception.

AS: Even though the iPhone app store lets you self-publish, these perception problems are still there. Innovation plus promotion are what you need to do to get noticed.

BG: Or just dumb luck. A friend of mine sent an email to Rock Paper Shotgun and the person who read that email happened to like it and get front page featured. For indies sometimes you can get in on the ground floor of a new platform and find success. Timing is really important, sometimes good or bad things happen to you that you have no control over.

AS: My motto is I’ll try and make stuff, work part time as needed to fund it, can’t worry too much about whether the game will make any money.

CE: Touch Pets Dogs was one of the biggest budget iPhone games. It was featured in the OS 4.0 announcement.

AS: Our marketing was handled by ngmoco, so we had a big venture funded company trying to capitalize on the same marketplace indies are trying to compete with.

CE: In the day when games were all PC-based there was a variance in price. With consoles there are only a few tiers. Is there some psychology where people on iPhone will want to see a flat tier?

CB: You have set values you can choose for most distribution channels, not the same flexibilty where you can charge $17.98 or whatever. You have to pick a price point which defines everything you’re going to compete with.

BG: There’s a whole field of pricing psychology. One example from M59 was we came out with a daily/monthly/weekly subscription thing and little CDs that you put next to the checkout at game stores. When the CDs were free nobody touched them. When we started to charge for them people actually decided to pick up the CDs.

CE: You were one of the earlier indie games on Steam. Now there are tons of indie titles there. What light can you shed on your price point decision?

DF: They advised me to sell for $10 when I wanted to do $20, and convinced me on that price point.

Audience/KP: It’s interesting that you say they’re probably right, because you might have been an experiment to see how you would have worked at $10.

DF: I think everything with Valve is an experiment!

Audience: Our game was free and we made tons of money. We gained a loyal community of people we know on a first name basis who like to throw in $5 or $10.

CE: You leveraged the culture of being indies to play on that ethos.

Audience: We are very active on our discussion forums, it’s worked really well with the personal relationship aspect.

Kim Pallister: There’s a book called This Band Could Be Your Life, about how SoCal punk bands created their own distribution channels. All the zines and so on were fans they enlisted to market their games.

Audience: I’m curious as someone who’s a complete newbie here. What do the panelists think is the importance of festivals? Any tips or war stories around this?

AS: Festivals are a great place to meet other indie developers and potentially get your game noticed.

Audience: Have you been to PAX? The Behemoth sells so much merchandise directly to fans.

BG: One problem I’ve found on the indie side of things is that it feels more lonely. There’s no office for you to hang out in. The more opportunities you get to talk to other indie people, the better. I have a blog that I keep at psychochild.org that’s a great opportunity to talk with people.

CE: I know several people who have been IGF winners. It’s more than just submitting your game to a festival. There’s a culture around people who submit to IGF and you have to be a part of that culture. You need to not just design a game, but also talk about your philosophy of design, etc, so that when your game gets to IGF people know the developer and what you stand for. You’re building outreach to an audience beyond the game itself. The indie games that go on to win IGF are invariably people the community already know about who have an awesome game.

Audience: How do you incentivize people who are working with you?

CB: You offer them giant boxes of endless ramen noodles.

BG: I had a terrible time with that. I had M59 and wanted to work on my own projects for a while. I tried to incentivize people to work on my stuff. You find people, everything looks great, they’re part time, you ask them to not drop off the face of the earth. Two weeks later you just don’t hear from them ever again.

CE: I know some small studios who use internships and work with local schools. But you want to find someone who will seriously benefit from being in your creative culture, so you need to enrich volunteers or interns.

BG: You need to be careful about volunteers, you can be sued for minimum wage pay if the work is intrinsic to the company.

What follows is the notes I took on Osma Ahvenlampi’s talk at LOGIN 2010 about the last two years of running Habbo Hotel. Any mistakes are my own!

Most people know us from Habbo which is an international community, 32 countries in the world. We’ve been around for 10 years and gotten a lot of traffic. 172M registered characters, 16M unique browsers/month, 2M visits/day, 45M hours of play/month.

I’m going to talk about a combo of: basics on why we’ve focused on one single product for 10 years, a technical transition we made converting between platforms, and measuring player economics and secondary markets. Mostly will be talking about years 8 and 9 of Habbo.

Habbo is an environment where teens create their own environments and meet there to play with each other. Centered around “social play” which we coined before the big social game rush. It’s something other than goal-oriented gaming.

Two years ago I was talking about how we converted the company to do Agile development. Continuous reinvention on tech, design, and business. There was one major problem: we required Shockwave Player at the time, so we had to switch technologies. Exactly two years ago we started the project to switch platforms. We evaluated platforms based on easy-access, easy-play, had to browser based. We also looked at developer productivity and labor available. Finally we did care about performance of the platform on modest computers.

We considered Java (which is our serverside), Unity, and others, but in the end we went with Flash because of its install base and penetration. Certainly two years ago Flash was the only really viable platform.

Then we asked: are we going to do something else or are we going to continue with Habbo? We decided to replicate Habbo Hotel with new tech and convert our userbase. But aren’t we just risking our entire business by switching away from something people are already happy with? At the end of the day we figured that improving what we already have will be a much bigger payoff even though it would take a while to develop. In the first year, sticking with Habbo has the best results since we don’t start with 0 users and high risk.

We measure conversion rate, retention rate, and monetization rate. Conversion rate is “new returning users / new traffic.” Typical conversion for a new user to becoming returning traffic is 10%-40%. This metric is simple to measure.

Retention rate is a complex metric to measure because it’s not a ratio or a rate, it’s a flow metric. Superficially speaking it’s “of the people that visited your service in the last month, how many visit this month as well?” This helps you determine how many new users you have to get every month to replace who churned out last month. If the retention rate changes in a good or bad direction even a little bit it will make huge changes in your revenue. We expected to see a higher retention rate with Flash.

Monetization. We have ARPU which is average revenue per player, or per paying player (ARPPU). The bad thing about ARPU is that it reduces a number to an average, which hides the shape of your bell curve. In a free to play game your median player spends $0. Average revenue is higher than $0 since some people are paying. Anyway, changing the tech platform did not change our revenue distribution, but we didn’t expect it to.

Simple math: new traffic x conversion rate x (retention rate / months) x monetization rate = revenue. This is our forecasting tool for how much we need to spend on traffic acquisition. 2009 was a better year than 2008 for us in terms of a 21% traffic increase year-on-year. Our blog on sulake.com will have some numbers on revenue but 2009 was worse for us until we introduced some new monetization-focused features.

Transition to new tech was difficult. We had about 10 man-years on the client only, so we estimated about 6 man-years to write the new client. We usually only planned for a few months out so it was difficult to estimate for a year-long project. We had to do a new core client with a basic architecture in place, but it wasn’t so bad since we could copy the architecture from our old client. We had to write every feature again, create new tools for testing, a new asset pipeline that was compatible with our old assets, and a new deployment pipeline with new tools there. We expected to gain significant production efficiencies down the line from tool development.

We had a very small team for the core client, 3-6 people. Then we transitioned people out of the shockwave teams into developing more features in Flash. We left a small maintenance team for Shockwave during the transition period of a few months.

We decided to use the same server and protocol for both clients, which meant that we needed to rewrite part of the old Shockwave client. This wasn’t obvious at the beginning. There was seemingly a lot of waste in having to rewrite both clients just to ditch one, but the payoff was in testing. We had players in house testing on both clients playing on the same server, and we could verify that both groups of players could play with each other and that the clients looked the same and it didn’t make a difference which client was being used. We were able to test the Flash client against the live server as well.

Finally we decided to make no new features during the transition. Only UI improvements and some performance improvements (rendering scaled in high resolution). But no new game features.

Schedule-wise we were expecting 8-10 months of dev and launch in Q109. We shipped in 13 months launching in May 2009 on an invite-only beta launch. Open beta in June/July. At the end of October 2009 we shut down the old client. 18 month transition. At the end of the day it was the new features for the Flash client that sold things to the customers. We still do get complaints that people want the old version back. But they’re still playing and complaining, so that’s not all bad!

The final evaluation is that even though it took longer than planned it was a resounding success. This was due to deciding to do it iteratively and not planning it via waterfall, which allowed for many reprioritizations during development. We pulled devs off the Flash project onto Shockwave several times for needed work. Also, parallel development was very helpful. Of course, we had a skilled team as well.

We did another platform shift in addition to our tech platform shift.

What’s a social game in the FB context? People don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook — even if you have 100 friends logging onto Facebook every day you’re still likely to miss them. Successful social game on facebook is the parallel single player experience. You never see friends playing or play with them, you see the results of their play.

Habbo is a social structure with games created by the users. Showed us this Habbo room. Our users come up with the weirdest stuff. The cinema thing is extremely popular in Brazil and nowhere else.

Habbo was a walled garden, so we started taking steps to connect Habbo to the social graph. We have a Habbo FB application, but what we are doing on FB right now is really primitive. Most of the game companies succeeding on FB are way more sophisticated than we are. We’ve been focused on merging our international communities together into common language services so we haven’t had enough focus on the FB application. It does seem that FB is reaching a saturation point. We have about 400k-500k MAUs which makes us mid-sized, and even the big games aren’t growing much anymore. Also, if you’ve been following the news it seems like tying your game to someone else’s platform is not the best idea.

The real question is not how you host your game on FB but how you use the web to support your interactive experience? The most important thing to me is that you no longer need to register to play a game and play with your friends and have an identity. Games that use SNS identity responsibly are going to be better than games that don’t.

Economics of Player to Player Markets

In the early years we allowed people to transfer items between accounts. At first it was via premium SMS. Then we introduced Habbo Coins, but it wasn’t possible to move Coins from one account to another. What happened was people would invent their own currency. Some common item would become the currency of the world. We had a subscription feature that gives gifts to members where you’d get a sofa every month if you were a member. Players started trading for stuff using our subscription club sofas. It happened early on — google “habbo furni values” for some player economic analysis of furniture markets!

We introduced a marketplace where you can post for-sale notices and allow for unattended trades, so we’re training people to run shops. I hope that at some point we can publish enough data to even train commodities traders among our users.

There are business implications of a secondary market. The player-to-player trading volume is several times larger than our direct sales to players. We estimate that US$0.5B in goods are exchanged between players of Habbo yearly, internationally. Items stay in active inventory even after an owner quits Habbo. If traffic growth slows down, then the world “fills up” with old abandoned items that people can use instead of buying new items. This means we need to do some design tricks to account for this.

Three ways to deal with this: 1) don’t allow trading. But then there’s no economy. No collectible value for items, makes items less interesting. We do use this in very selective cases. 2) Make items wear out after use. Essentially renting items to players, destroys trade value. We use this a bit, we basically rent clothes to players. 3) For most of our items they are durable and ageless. We created a system that gets tiny fees out of the secondary trading. It could be a cost on a for-sale notice on the marketplace, could be a comission for secure trading. We take 1% of the value out of the system on every trade, and also manage inflation which is the really important bit. Now there’s friction moving items from account to account so we stop the “filling up” that happens.

We’ve found that your high-spending customers spend the most amount of time in game by far. A very small percentage of your player base does most of EVERYTHING in your game, not just spending but any activity you look at. Again, this is why averages are not good to look at.

Conclusions

If you’re doing big changes on your tech base, do parallel deployment and iterate.

If you’re doing a service model game, focus on conversion/retention/monetization.

If you have a secondary market in the system, try to model it and understand the economics of who your big spenders are. Look for emergent behavior you didn’t think of when you designed the system. Invest in analysis resources!

Q: Is there a correlation between number of friends and amount of money spent?

A: Not a strong correlation, but there is an interesting correlation between number of friends and a person’s influence on what their friends purchase.

I attended a talk today given by my friend Professor Nina Huntemann of Suffolk University. She is co-editor of the new book Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games, and she was invited to give a WPI IMGD Seminar on militarism and video games.

This is my best attempt at a transcription of what she said. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine and mine alone! My comments are in square brackets.

—-

Opening remarks by Jon Sanbonmatsu: The context of the talk today is that the country is at war. We have been at war since before 9/11, and since 2002 when we invaded Afghanistan and in 2003 when we invaded Iraq we have had 100s of thousands of forces committed overseas. We have killed 600k people. How does killing happen? Policymakers send troops into action, but before that we need to have a culture of consent. The people need to consent to our government participating in war. To do that, we need a whole process of teaching us from childhood that killing is a legitimate mode of conflict resolution.

This talk is about one of the most powerful media, video games, and what is going on in the political sphere and how it is connected to video games.

Nina Huntemann:

What I’m going to talk about it how we reconcile or understand the video game in relation to things that are happening with our foreign policy.

In addition to being a professor, I have been a gamer since 1978 since my dad brought home an Atari 2600 when I was 8, had a TI-99, Colecovision, NES, SNES, and now I have all three major consoles. So while I have a critical perspective on video games, I love video games.

Questions of power around video games as cultural products influence my work today.

I want to talk about the relationship between the military and video games in my talk. I want to look at this question from several different entry points. First of all, we’re going to look at it as a semiotic phenomenon: what is the relation between the language of war and the language of play, and how does that set up a context for ideological messages?

Second, the concept of pedagogy. We have a very long history of teaching the art of war through play.

Third, we’ll look at political-economic relationship between military industries and entertainment industries.

Then we’ll look at the ideological relationships between culture and military action.

So interrogating signs and symbols is a way we can learn how our culture creates meaning. Signs and symbols create a cloud of meaning — there is not one sign or symbol to look at, it is a whole system of signs. One sign you can look at is 4th of July fireworks, which are simulated rockets and bombs that symbolize our freedom. The scouting movement was started by a British general who saw the value system of the military as helpful to youth, so being a Boy Scout or Girl Scout you participate in many military traditions: salutes, oaths, uniforms, etc. The marching band, which was a military development, has been adapted to the field of sports.

The language of war and sport has infiltrated our culture for years. We talk about sport as if it is war — a battle on the field, etc. Offensive and defensive lines, sudden death tie breakers, coach is the general, players are soldiers, long passes are called bombs, short passes are bullets, a blitz = blitzkrieg. These are a few examples of how semiotics can show us connections between war and play. Which sets the stage for video games.

It goes the other way too. Wars are often described in play metaphors. Vietnam War was called “Operation Linebacker.” Nuclear arms “race,” and Rumsfeld described the WMD mission as a “slam dunk.” The semiotic connections go both way. There is historical precedent for militarism and games.

The teaching of war through play is especially powerful in Asian history. Play spaces are places to train soldiers and teach the culture about what it means to go to war. Chess is an abstract, simulated battlefield. In the 6th century, the concept of chess was based on the 4 divisions of the military: infantry (pawn) cavalry (knight) elephants (bishop) chariotry (rook).

Go was used by generals to study war strategy. It’s a different kind of war than we fight today, but at the time it was a more accurate simuilation.

More modern examples, in Germany in 1812, the kriegspiel (war game) was developed by the Prussian army. It was required for leaders to learn strategy.

Even more contemporary: Risk and Axis & Allies. Far less abstract, and another example of playing out war as a precedent for video games.

There was a popular culture in the ’60s and ’70s of paper and pencil war games. Two companies, SPI and Avalon Hill published many paper war games. These were not only popular with consumer war enthusiasts, but also used by people in the military themselves. It is rumored that the Pentagon would play AH and SPI games as a way of thinking through potential cold war conflicts.

These games were popular until the computer came along. Many of these games were ported from tabletop to PC.

In terms of computer games and the military I’m going to look at the military-entertainment complex. Quick history, and an arguable history, is that video games came out of the Hingham Institute Study Group on Space Warfare, funded by the Pentagon. The PDP-1 showed up and in 1962, and the Institute was told to do something with it. One of the students was Russell, who created the now infamous SpaceWar. The precedents of tabletop battle simulation led to a simulation of battle on the PDP-1. It was essentially a pretty good missile simulation. What Russell said of the game is that the most important feature of the program was that you could simulate a reasonably complex physical system. This was very interesting to the Pentagon at the time.

What happens after SpaceWar, over the next 10 years we have students stealing time on mainframes around the country — eventually we end up with Pong, which some consider to be the first commercial video game that launched the modern game industry. Not so much connected to war in theme, but in its industrial relations it IS connected to war.

We have a whole selection of current platforms that the military is using that is borrowed from video games. PEO STRI is the place in the US Army that is where video games and the military meet. (“All But War is Simulation” is their motto!) [Short video with someone from that office talks about how being near theme parks in Orlando helps them with military simulation. "We employ entertainment principles and technology, but what we make is meant to train soldiers."] From his language you can see how there is a formalized relationship with the military and entertainment. They literally moved to Orlando to be near Universal and Disney. The needs of the Army has direct correlations to laser tag, FPS games, and strategy games. Entertainment principle are correlated to military objections.

Some games that are being developed: Asymmetrical Warfare Environment (AWE) based on MMO tech. DARWARS: Ambush! is based on Operation Flashpoint. Virtual Iraq, a PTSD therapy game, is based on Full Spectrum Warrior.

Virtual Iraq: the US Army and its units work with THQ and Pandemic Studios, and then the ICT at Univ of Southern California to make Virtual Iraq. ICT is funded by entertainment and the Pentagon for two purposes: to create products that fulfil both the needs of the US military and can potentially be sold at retail.

Lockheed Martin is working on air attack simulators with SEGA, and they also manufacture SEGA’s arcade board for games like Virtua Fighter! [I did not know that. Crazy.]

So we have a history of industrial relationships and pedagogical strain along with this cloud of meaning and symbols.

[some Q&A]

Question from audience: your parallels are strong but it’s not just the entertainment industry. Car makers work with the military too (Hummer, Jeep). Your focus on video games comes across as pretty narrow. It’s not uncommon to dual-use a lot of things. NASA develops tech that goes back and forth between military and consumers.

Nina: a lot of advances in tech would not have come about without the military. The military-industrial complex is much larger than video games — games aren’t doing anything new and are following a strong history of this worldwide. I am not thinking that games are doing something new or radical, what I hope as we move forward is that this provides a context for things like CoD4.

Jon Sanbonmatsu: the analogy isn’t quite right. If you use styrofoam, it’s an artifact that was created to house a fusion weapon. But the function of styrofoam doesn’t normalize and legitimize violence. Video games DO normalize military action.

Nina: the Hummer is interesting. It came out of armored vehicles, and by driving it on the street, you are participating in the M-I Complex. The styrofoam cup is very divorced from the military in terms of its meaning, but the Hummer was marketed as a patriotic/militaristic vehicle. Where I’m headed with this is the difference between developing products out of the military and products that set up consent around the militaristic culture.

Audience member: the difference in the action involved in driving a Jeep and playing a game is that I’m not being trained to kill efficiently by driving a Jeep, but playing a game you are actually being trained to some extent.

[back to lecture]

There is a long history of entertainment, like films, being created in conjunction with military personnel. Some movies were specifically created to legitimize use of force (like the old “Why We Fight” films). Some say John Wayne’s military movies were some of the best persuasive tools for the millitary.

New militarism (Andrew Bacevich) is a marriage of militarism and utopian ideology. In ’02/’03 there was a flood of games about counterterrorism and I was encouraged by Bacevich to think about this.

“Strategic culture” (google it) is the overstated confidence in the efficacy of our force and our strategy. That our technological might means we will always prevail, a culture of technological fetishism. There is no better moment in recent history to describe this than the concept of “shock and awe.” The idea that we are so superior in our technology that we will just shock our enemies into surrender. That bravado about our superiority and technology points to strategic culture.

How do games fit into this? First we’ll look at historic video games.

Medal of Honor is a great series because there’s so much research that goes into creating historically accurate battles. The designers are to be commended for the amount of detail put into recreating the battles as accurately as possible. Airborne was developed with a historical advisor to ensure accuracy. The audio was recorded from hundreds of real WWII era weapons and tanks. One of the last remaining C-47s in the world was used to create sound for the game. It’s gripping and enthralling in its audio. They even recorded two sets of soldier’s feet so German and American boots sounded different!

But what does the detail entail? Most of the attention to detail is attention to technological and environmental detail (weapons and terrain). And also strategies employed at the time. [Shows us the trailer for MoH: Airborne. Montage of people reloading weapons, then mini-trailers for each realistically simulated weapon. Panzerschrek, Mauser, etc. It's a lot of gun porn! Rock music plays in the background. "Stand up for rock and roll!" the singer screams at the end of the trailer.] This demonstrates that what they are pushing through marketing is historical accuracy through the concept of strategic culture.

Question from audience: curious about earlier versions of MoH, which had a reverence for World War II, that we are going to show what our ancestors went through. Whereas Call of Duty was more like the Holywood version of things. CoD sold more than MoH and now MoH is following the CoD model more. That trailer is actually pretty unrealistic and the abandoned the reverence for rock and roll marketing with Airborne. It’s no longer like Saving Private Ryan. This is something different.

Nina: there’s a chapter in Joystick Soldiers about MoH enthusiasts vs. more rock and roll war enthusiasts. The author found that the historical accuracy is THE reason why historical enthusiasts play. As the games have moved away from that for a bigger market, one thing that is fascinating is the tension between realism and the demands of the market. Audiences are attracted to “realism” (MoH is still being sold based on its weapon accuracy), but it’s a pedestrian understanding of history rather than a deep understanding. That’s the tension between marketability and realism. Realism in games is a certain kind of realism, not necessarily historical realism.

George Phillies: I served in the armed forces. That trailer is not realistic. You can’t actually see your enemies in real war. The Panzerschrek was mostly given to 12 and 13 year old boys by the Nazis. The young kids thought they were indestructable, but the effective range of the weapon was about 25 yards and using it was essentially suicide.

Nina: yes, games and movies are the militarism that most consumers engage with. Real militarism is grossly missing from this depiction.

Moving forward, if we look at contemporary warfare games, we see similar themes. But there’s something else going on here. Tactical strategy is a term that is its own genre. Games grapple with the post-9/11 world. Counter-terrorism is the mission whether it’s a single soldier or group of soldiers, covert ops is a big part of this. The concept of the “rogue soldier” or the “rogue squadron” operating outside of the rules of engagement is popular. The idea that terrorism is so horrible it can only be dealt with outside of the rules of engagement. You violate the Geneva convention in these games. We do know that this kind of stuff happens in real world (Jon: recently it was made known that we have operations overseas to murder American citizens if necessary).

The rock-and-roll type modern warfare games that we see right now are doing something kind of interesting that I hadn’t seen directly following 9/11 as such. There is an underlying critique emerging. Army of Two is essentially a critique of the Blackwater scandal. In Army of Two you play one of two people in a similar mercenary organization where you are paid money to do off-grid activities. Events in the game don’t always go well and the Army is mess. But at the end of the day, although the critique is there, the weapons and the action and the money and the slickness is what is in the front of the game, and of course it has to be in order to sell it. The critique gets lost in the noise of entertainment.

Then we have proleptic war games: games about future wars. The assumption remains that there are fears we have currently that will be big problems in the future, but US or US/EU/UN coalition will use hypertechnology to passify the problems. This is strategic culture enacted through future war. [Trailer for Tom Clancy's EndWar. Shows high-tech military base, giving a tutorial about what tactics to use to help your infantry units inflict more damage. More rock music, this time with a little techno.]

So to conclude, military themed video games have a socializing power. They do train soldiers, but they also train society to accept a particular form of militarism. Video games are the “Why We Fight” films of our generation. These films were created in WWII, before the US was involved in the war. The Dept of War hired Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life) to create films to garner support for US participation in conflict. He made 7 films that were shown before features in theaters, and were also used to train draftees. It was a propaganda piece and understood as such.

Actually video games may not be like “Why We Fight” because there is not much discussion of “why.” Video games are the “how we fight” films of this generation. Entertainment media all the way back to go has served to teach people about the ideological reasoning for warfare. By showing people HOW we fight, and understanding warfare through tech fetishism, is becomes more acceptable as a response to global conflict because the representations are often sanitized. The problem is that often contemporary games lack historical context for understanding perhaps why the Taliban is in Afghanistan to begin with. We’re not getting a full education: should we expect that of games? That’s something we should discuss. Civilian casualties are not often discussed either: modern weapons are incredibly effective, but if used on the wrong people cause even more civilian casualties.

Video games normalize the use of force. It is impossible to progress through a military game without using force. In CoD4:MW2, the scene where you enter Moscow Airport covertly as the member of a terrorist cell and open fire on civilians, you had a choice for the only time in the game to not fire. Because the targets are civilians and you could choose not to fire. But it didn’t change the outcome at all. Your comrades didn’t seem to notice if you fired or not, and you’re still found out by your colleagues that you’re spy no matter what. So the only moment where you can choose to fire doesn’t have any consequence.

We are in an era of “the long war.” We’ll be fighting terrorism for a long time. It requires civlians to be accustomed to constantly being in conflict. Video games are used technologically to train our soldiers, but the same technology and ideology is being used to socialize us into the comfortableness of our weapons and military might.

Here are my raw session notes for RJ Mical’s Game Forum Germany 2010 talk, “The Intertwined Nature of Game Hardware and Game Design.” This is my best attempt at a transcription of what he said. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine and mine alone. My comments are in square brackets.

—

RJ Mical

Today I’m going to talk about the history of the gaming systems that have been out there. In the course of writing this I’ve learned a lot of things I didn’t know about the history of our industry. Then I’m going to relate various genres that are out there to the hardware that spawned them. Then I’m going to show how the demands of devs ended up driving the development of hardware. Last I’m going to attempt to look into the future of hardware and design.

But first, a story. I had an odd experience recently. I was playing Motorstorm on the PS3, a high action driving game. Then shortly after I got into my car and drove down the highway and got the same feeling, like I could run over and smash things! It was funny for a second, until I thought, “I wonder if I crash will I have an extra life?” It helped me remember my passion for how real and engaging games can be and why I do this.

So where did we start? The first games were on oscilloscopes. The first patent for a computer game goes back to 1948 for a missile combat simulation game made by some engineers. But the first real playable game was Tennis for Two in 1958, ran on an o-scope and entertained people visiting the lab. [Willy Higgenbotham, see here for bio and here for some criticism]

Mainframe computers at univiersities hosted hobbyist games. When I was at Univ of Illinois I got involved in this. The IBM computers supported something called Plato which ran a bunch of interesting games, and started the process for me of looking into myself to figure out why I found games so compelling.

Soon after we had early arcade systems, Pong etc, which then led to the development of game consoles and full and proper arcade systems (platforms, not dedicated hardware).

The idea of game systems caught on with the public so well that there was a demand for people to have consoles in their own homes. There’s been a history of rising and falling success of home console systems, where the market gets filled with junk and crashes. 1977 and 1984, I got pinched in both of those crashes! The 84 crash was almost devastating for the Amiga computer that we were developing at the time. When the bottom felt out we changed course and turned the Amiga from a game platform to a full computer.

While there were the C64, the Apple II, the Atari ST — the IBM PC was out there but it was not very good for games at first (text only, then modest graphics, and very expensive). Turns out that the PC helped usher in home game consoles more than any other machine — a lot of businessmen would say “I need a PC for the home for work” and then just play games on the IBM PC instead!

In the 1980s we started seeing the early handheld games. Nintendo and Tiger LCD games [man I LOVED Tiger games]. In the middle of the 80s, Mattel brought out Microvision, which was remarkable because it was a simple cartridge-based handheld system, which became the norm for portable systems. At the time this was radical and we were puzzled thinking about what it meant.

But in 84 the industry crashed, and out of the ashes, the first real serious game consoles arose. The NES was the most popular one of all — [speaker interrupts himself for anecdote :) ]

The first time I saw an Intellivision I played it at my friend’s house. The pixels were about the size of my head, but they managed to create the most amazing games. I went home after playing Intellivision games and got out graph paper and started drawing how I would make an airplane or whatever else. As a student today, it’s hard to imagine when you look at a console that it has the kind of capabilities that they do these days. But it was just as engaging in the 70s. It is true that hardware is so superior today that its performance is magnificent, but none of that stuff finally matters because what really matters is gameplay. All the fancy graphics and audio in the world isn’t going to make a core game better. I recommend that everyon get out a piece of graph paper and draw a tank in 64 pixels!

I believe the NES won based on the price tag: low cost and simplicity made it attractive to people.

In the 90s there was a big roar of handhelds that came in. I did an informal survey of my game industry friends, and 100% of them had played Tetris on the Nintendo Game Boy! It was such an important moment seeing such a simple system and such a simple game like Tetris be the greatest thing ever. I still hang on to these simple examples that bigger does not necessarily make better. Mid 90s started seeing simple games on mobile phones. Finally the 3D consoles came, the PlayStation, the N64. This gave us a taste of the amazing performance we would see in the future. I think it was the PS and the N64 that drove developers to start engaging with hardware companies to give us what we wanted to see! I’m leaving out a lot of systems here and I am going to hurt your feelings when I don’t mention your favorite system, sorry. But the real PS vs N64 battle of cartridge vs CD-ROM; kind of like DVD vs Blu-Ray today. Blu Ray has 27 GB of storage and you know that devs will expand to fill 27GB! We used to laugh that games would cost $1M to develop eventually. Nowadays that’s just the animation cost of a single game! $100M to develop a game is no longer outrageous. Sigh. I’m glad I’m not an accountant.

If I were a gambling man I would have put my money on the N64 in the beginning because I would say it would have kept development costs down. In doing my research and talking to friends in the industry, what helped the playstation be successful was that it could support richer content even though it was tough to develop for. I LOVE the N64. I gave so many hours to GoldenEye.

Then in the late 90s, the PC struck back! Where it had been behind the consoles, it started to catch up with advances in hardware to be a contender. Consumers wanted our PCs to be able to have better capabilities so the PC manufacturers encouraged graphics card companies to step it up. That turned around to getting the game companies to develop games to use that hardware, of course we had to upgrade our new pcs, and that was a snowball effect that turned the PC into a major player in the modern game industry. PCs always had the ability for players to customize their content, mod the games, and host your own games with levels you created yourself, sharing with others. It created a sense of community that consoles did not have in the 90s.

This eventually drove consoles to have these capabilities.

In the 2000s, we see more hand helds: GBA, DS, N-Gage (which was never meant to being a gaming system!). And finally the big consoles started using the internet: PS2, Xbox. And don’t forget the PC: it’s still a major contender these years.

In the present, we have more handhelds: DS, PSP, Apple iPhone/iPod. Big horsepower machines make it very difficult to tell the difference between console and PC. I don’t think there’s going to be much of a difference anymore.

When we worked on the 3DO, one of the guiding principles that Trip Hawkins had was that when he was at EA, when you had to develop for the PC you had to develop for so many PC configurations. Very expensive and difficult. What he envisioned was that everyone would buy a 3DO and that would be it. Sony had a different idea and brought out the PS, of course. But at least now with Xbox 360 and PS3, there aren’t a lot of variations anymore. Of course don’t forget Nintendo. I found out to my surprise that the in the beginning when the Wii came out the analysts thought it was dead in the water! Of course the Wii has sales numbers that the 360 and PS3 combined don’t reach. But Nintendo keeps bringing out these little one-cylinder cars that chug down the road and their pockets bulge with money! THe reason it’s successful is because that’s what consumers want: is it because Wii is good enough for most consumers, or is it because of the price point?

Now I get into the real meat of my presentation. I spent a lot of time thinking about the question of why we play games. Perhaps we have an innate desire to organize and groom — Tetris, Populous, SimCity. But I don’t think that’s it. Maybe nurturing? Nah, that’s baloney. We don’t play games to nurture, we play games to make war! Hunting, gathering, fighting. I found out something interesting. Cubs or puppies play fight with each other, which for me is an example of what playing is really about. I was going to use that example and found out that the only animals that have baby animals that play fight are the predators. There’s something there — it’s part of our instinct to play, to learn, to hone those skills. But I think there’s also an element of story-telling. I do love telling stories. And there’s a socializing element as well. We want to eat and we want to be loved. Games taking advantage of the net to allow for communities has become a really important part of it. EverQuest was remarkable for the large number of female players. I think it might have been due to the socializing content, just being able to hang out with your friends. [Hmmm, not really buying much of this. I wonder if he's read some of the theory about this stuff. Talking to him afterward he did say that he maybe pushed the war aspect a little too much!]

I think our need to socialize is going to really influence the direction of hardware in the future. [Now THAT I agree with!]

I was a big board game player when I was young. SSI, air combat games, big boards and tiny pieces of cardboard, I played those for hours. My kids play board games once a year: on FATHER’S DAY! That being my one wish. But why is that? Why are video games more attractive to kids today? It’s interactive, but there’s also no setup, no need to learn the rules ahead of time. You don’t think, you just do, don’t get bogged down in details. The other side of it is, when we played board games we had to use our imagination. We’ve lost the element of pretend play. Is that a bad thing? I’m worried that it is. We’re taking that away from kids, much in the same way kids would rather watch a movie than read the book. I don’t want to sound like an old worried guy — but in fact I am!

The first games that came into existence were war, sports, then war. Missile War (1948), Tennis for Two (1958), Space War (1961). No surprise there. Interesting thing about Space War is that Nolan Bushnell took Space War and turned it into a collossal flop of an arcade game, nobody bought it, they’d already formed the company so they made Pong as a simple alternative. Space War sold 1500 units.

Early computer games. Airflight on Plato (1974). Played on an IBM mainframe. It was originally just a flight sim, but soon converted into a shooter. “This is great, but give us some guns!” I was there and I was one of the guys begging for guns!

Text adventures, D&D-like games, text-based Star Trek games on teletype, etc.

All these early games were just for hobbyists and nerds. The fact that it was clumsy and crude didn’t matter to us, we were having so much fun it was okay. In the beginning it was a rare talent to create these games and get the time on the mainframe! Playing games was technically against the rules of mainframe usage at University.

Once PC came out, anyone could be a programmer to make games. You could get games printed in hex in magazines and transcribe them into your own computer! Distributing games by putting discs in plastic bags, walking into stores, and asking them to sell your game.

But although anyone could program, pretty much nobody was a good designer! So many early games were just bad. There was such a glut of bad games that everyone lost interest and the market died out pretty badly for PC games in the late 70s.

Finally the consoles started roling out in the 70s. Still war and sports and board game reproductions. But they started giving us the opportunity for unusual, different games. I think of it as a golden age as we went into the 80s, when it felt like anyone could think about it hard enough and come up with a brand new genre that nobody had done before! We saw more than a dozen unique genres of game come into existence. Now the storytelling part could kick in. Simple storytelling, even Donkey Kong counts. At one extreme there’s Dragon’s Lair. But what had started out as text adventures and maze-solving puzzles turned into a genre like Pac Man, where you’re trying to figure your way through a maze of obstacles or puzzles in real-time. The platform jumper arrived in the 80s as well!

Sigh, I look at these titles and it makes me so happy. Mario and Zelda: kill bad guys, get around barriers, solve puzzles, collect treasure. Simple and massively enjoyable. Racing games became popular in the 80s. Earlier arcade racing was not very satisfying. Now we get into Road Rash, etc. The racing game took off as a genre.

Also 80s: action puzzle games. Dig Dug, Lode Runner, Jack Attack (Atari 400). Rhythm games began: Dance Aerobics for NES, had to buy peripheral. The start of realizing that you could make additional peripherals to make games more engaging. On the Amiga we had a device called a joyboard, which is a joystick you stand on and tilt! [ie Wii Balance Board] Rhythm today is not only DDR but also Guitar Hero and Rock Band, etc.

What 80s games were not: they were not 3D. Some modest attempts: Battlezone, F-18 Interceptor on the Amiga. Simple flat-shaded triangles. 18 triangles for the jet, 20 triangles for the aircraft carrier.

80s games were not online yet. Not social. Early attempts were mostly text-based (MUDs). Didn’t really occur to the industry until consumers requested it.

The 90s became the consumers’ “give us what we want” decade. We want more realism, better graphics, online multiplayer, portable, etc.

3D hardware was the biggest advance in the 90s. Manufacturers made better hardware for both console and PC. The advanced hardware did spawn a few new genres, but there wasn’t the same explosion as in the 80s. By the 90s it’s died down, and in the 00s it’s been even more sparse for new types of games. 90s brought us the first person shooter. Castle Wolfenstein with textured surfaces. Real-time strategy games, C&C-like games. Finally enough horsepower to take the load off the CPU for graphics so you could use the CPU for real-time game logic.

90s: more detail. We demanded more realism so we switched to CD-ROM for richer media. But there’s a problem with more realism. There’s a real hard limit to adding realism to games. It’s like trying to reach the speed of light: the closer you get the harder it will be to reach that last inch. More interestingly, the closer we get to real, the worse experience consumers are gonna have. [Uncanny valley] The CD-ROM + more memory gave us stuff like Myst. Design-wise it was just a text adventure type thing but with extremely lush graphics.

90s: give us the internet! Give us love, friendship, community! Unreal/Quake created online gaming in a very real way, created whole communities.

90s: portable HW. Surprised that it took off as early as it did, also surprise that it kind of slowed down as soon as it did.

2000s. Now consoles are almost as powerful as PCs. What new genres have come out in the last 10 years? [Is genre innovation really a sign of health? Do we have new genres in film every decade?] Well, we have sing-along games like SingStar, play-along games like Guitar Hero. The Sims took off in the ’00s too.

What about the future?

Alternate controllers will be big. Been around forever: light guns, foot pads for dancing, instrument controllers, motion controllers, microphones, even newfangled things like keyboards and mice you can add to a console :). Possible future tech: augmented vision, haptics. There will be an abundance of controllers now that they’ve proven successful.

In terms of realism, 3D displays are coming at 400Hz or better. They’re pretty astonishing even today with their crude tech: cutting a 60 Hz game into two stereoscopic 30 Hz signals. We’ve pretty much reached CPU speed saturation so there will be lots of multicore processing going on which will affect the way we program games. Students take note: learn good multicore programming, you will have an edge in getting a job. I believe we’ll have better graphics, higher density color. Experts say we can’t perceive better than 24-bit color, but I disagree. We’re going to see more cinematic experiences as part of our entertainment. There will always be room for Tetris, but stuff like Uncharted 2 sets a new standard of excellence. I had the pleasure a week ago of seeing Heavy Rain in its current state, and it is a game that doesn’t give you a fixed storyline, and I really felt like I was living inside a movie. I got badly beaten up at the beginning of the game, and was told that if I kept playing through, those bruises and the scar I got would last with me through the game.

[Okay, I'm stopping here, the rest of the future predictions are pretty much bigger/better/faster with some interesting anecdotes that I'm a little too tired to transcribe. Bigger environments, more nonlinear stories. A lot of the stuff he's talking about like it hasn't been done but a lot of it was pretty much already there in Deus Ex (2000), GTA 3 (2001) just with more power behind them. More merging of technology. Movies/TV/music on game consoles, VOIP, online stores, ad integration. It's sort of interesting to hear these predictions from someone fairly entrenched in the traditional games biz, where the near-future recommendations remind me of things that we were already innovating on 10 years ago.]

Will portables replace consoles? I hope not. I do want big complex games.

Will consoles replace PC? We’re almost there. I don’t think they will but I woudln’t mind.

Someday will I have a jack wired into my nervous system allowing my body to wither away from inactivity while entertainment is projected directly into my brain? MAN I HOPE SO! [Laughter] Seriously I do think we’ll eventually get there, and it will be creepy, creepy day.

Q&A Session

Q: What do you think of services like OnLive and Gaikai that are trying to make consoles obsolete?

A: Oh, I forgot about the cloud computing systems! Instead of buying a console you buy a box that plugs into a remote server farm that delivers the experience to you. In theory they keep their hardware updated so you don’t have to. I think it’s brilliant, but I’m not convinced that it’s actually going to work. In both cases the demos I’ve seen were in a pretty controlled environment where the servers were a few short miles away from the console. And it was over a dedicated ethernet line. There wasn’t any latency, and it felt great, but I can’t imagine it working in a real internet environment. I do wish them all well!

Q: You also didn’t mention new motion controllers from Sony/MS. What about new genres for these controllers? Will there be a revival of the RTS due to this, or new genres?

A: [RJ works for SCE Worldwide Studios so it's touchy for him to discuss this stuff right now, so he's kind of dodging the question.] Wii has proved motion controllers work. I’ve seen at least one very good PS3 sixaxis bowling game. There’s another game under development where you can use two controllers to do a bow and arrow effect [Wii Sports Resort, Twilight Princess did this, yeah?]. But I don’t remember what Sony has said so I don’t know what I can say or not. Some of the tech I’ve developed for Sony at Worldwide Studios gets put into the SDK for the PS3. We’re a separate org under the Sony label so I get to see 3rd party games in development. Seen some interesting sports combat games, some interactive motion controller 3D puzzle games, so there are some new genres. Some existing genres are being reworked to use motion controller. FPS can work really well.

Q: [This guy seems to be asking a question founded on wrong data. Although he's pointing out that major consoles are basically graphically inferior PCs with horrible copy protection, which is kind of an amusing viewpoint!]

A: I think you’re right that the line between PC and console is going to shrink, and I personally don’t care about who “owns” the living room. You’re right that you simply can’t make hardware for less expense than they’re making it now. We’re going to see multicore GPUs in addition to multicore CPUs, but the price will keep going up while PC prices will keep going down. I think it would be a good idea if I didn’t have to make a disctinction between my PC and my console. The other part that you didn’t mention in your question which is significant is that we’re running up against the heat limits of advanced computing components. I saw a display in the lobby of the sony building in japan, and they have a display where they break apart the PS3 and show you the parts. The most astonishing thing you learn is that fully half the inside of a PS3 is for heat dissipation. Heat sinks, fans, etc. That is going to be a huge limiting factor for the next generation, especially from a price perspective.

Q: Do game designers or consumers have more influence over the direction of the industry?

A: It used to be just the game designer, but from my little experiences at Williams Electronics where I was involved in game design, it was not a question of “what are people looking for” but “what can we dream up that people will like.” Now game designers are highly conscious of what consumers want. I know at least two teams that playtest their game concepts before they even start developing a game as part of the approval process. We’re just going to see more of that. But I don’t want to ever take away the small shops and their innovation. You get Fl0w and Fl0wer from ThatGameCompany which are amazing and are built more with the old philosophy of what players might find fun, not what players are asking for. And they are great games!

Q: [This isn't really a question. I hate this shit. Please do not espouse your philosophies in fake-question form.]

A: Guitar Hero is a fresh take on the rhythm genre, Max Payne was a fresh take on the FPS, so even though you might be working in an existing genre there are still places to innovate.

Q: You’ve talked about the difficulties of dealing with cooling more powerful hardware, and it’s hard to make money on selling the hardware. What does that say for the PS4 and its release? Is it going to be a later release so you can get more money out of the PS3 for the next 5 years? [The emcee is asking this question. This is a question that RJ cannot answer. What the hell.]

A: I don’t know exactly what the engineers are working on, but I do know they’re always inventing new stuff. I do know that I personally am hoping that whatever decision Sony makes is a decision that is way out in the future in terms of schedule because it’s just now that devs are getting comfortable with the current generation of hardware!

Here are my raw session notes for Jason Rohrer’s GDX talk, GAME and Other Four Letter Words. This is my best attempt at a transcription of what he said. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine and mine alone. My comments are in square brackets.

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This talk starts off from a place a lot of my other talks launch off of: an acknowledgment that we need to look in the mirror and understand that games exist in kind of a cultural ghetto, a line in the sand. Above the line you have established media (novels, film, theater, painting, rock and roll). Down below we have stuff like Shadow of the Colossus, Legend of Zelda, Metal Gear Solid. We talk about these three games in particular a lot, but it’s hard to take those games and compare them to Nabokov’s Lolita. Part of this is an external image problem. You get guys like Ebert: games will never be art. A lot of people dismiss him as a crusty old luddite, people say they’re waiting for that generation to die. But partly it’s an internal problem: even as designers we need to realize we haven’t been doing stuff that will get us across that line.

I’ve spoken about how we might try to design games with expressive values that can make games more culturally relevant, but this talk isn’t about that at all. This talk goes back further and examines the problem itself in more detail. These thoughts are structured into two analogies, ridiculous analogies. I brought up one of these with my friend Frank Lantz, who said: “That analogy is shallow, misleading, and banal.”

Analogy 1

First observation: in our culture as gamers and reviewers and developers, the value of a game is often measured by the number of hours of gameplay a game provides. IGN, for example, has a lasting appeal category in their ratings, but it often just means how many hours it takes to complete the game. Short games are sort of worthless to us — Katamari Damacy, which is an amazing game, debuted in the U.S. for $20 because it’s maybe at most a 10-hour game. Braid is like a 5-hour game, and it was priced at the top price point on XBLA at $15 and people complained like crazy that they were paying $3/hr for a game! Despite the fact that Braid stands as one of the most artistically important games of the last decade. But people are complaining about spending $15 on something like that. So what do we want from games? I think Braid got a bad lasting appeal score on IGN. Yet we’re going to talk about Braid for years.

Maybe people are seeking escapism. The more hours of my miserable life I can kill away, the better a game is. But think about this: is 30 hours a good thing? Or even 10 hours? That’s a long time to spend with a work. In what other medium is value so tied to total duration? Most mediums value conciseness instead. In movies, a director is heckled for making a 3+ hour movie for being self-indulgent. The shorter film is just considered tightly-crafted. The only thing that compares to video games for length is a book. But a 30-hour book would be like 900 pages long which is still considered self-indulgent. Even in the world of books conciseness is valued.

Second observation: we value games by which are most addicting. Even as a designer we ask if a design can keep you coming back for more. A game like Fable isn’t addicting in the same way as Desktop Tower Defense. Fable’s a long story you want to see unfold. DTD is 5 or 10 minutes, and then you want to play again, and you might spend even more than 30 hours with it. It’s a big compliment to call a game addicting. That leads us to the next observation.

Third observation: parents fear games. The Immersion Projct by Robbie Cooper of the New York Times. This guy took a camera and hid it beneath a TV and got pictures of people’s “game faces.” The glassy-eyed stare scares parents. This is trashy sensationalist journalism to underscore every parent’s worst nightmare. Some of this stuff has to do with the addicting and timekilling properties. One of my cousins, when he was 12, he was playing Runescape for $5 a month. He was absolutely hooked on this thing, and his parents would always talk to me about this: is his life going to amount to anything? He’d always want to show me stuff he’d done in Runescape. From his parent’s point of view, they screwed up and his life is over. There’s this creeping sense that games are bad for kids. Think about how gov’t keeps flirting with age restrictions on game sales, etc. Once we get out from under our parent’s careful eye, watch out!

Fourth observation: we all play way too many video games when we go to college. When I was in college we played Quake and had a T1, unique IP addresses, back in the utopian glory days of being on the internet for real. We could connect in a deathmatch on the network at school, run through the halls, start a Quake game. Taunting each other, chest puffing, etc. We played many late night marathons, and then my roommate, who was valedictorian of his high school class, got so into playing video games late at night he got such bad grades he was kicked out of Cornell. I have another friend who was kicked out of two different grad schools because of his obsession with Everquest. And it’s probably a preexisting problem being channeled into video games, but still.

Fifth observation: an overdose can kill you. “Korean drops dead after 50-hour gaming marathon.”

Analogy 2

First observation: there are these places out in the world where you can walk in to the establishment and play the video game for $0.25. Normal people don’t usually go into those places.

Second observation: if you want to buy a video game, there are special stores you go to and you feel a little weird and it smells funny. Normal people don’t go into the store.

Third observation: video games appeal to teenage boys. That’s the main marketing demographic, their girlfriends don’t understand the continued fascination. But they still appeal to these 30-something-year-old married men. If you go on flickr and search for “gamer dad” or something, you see so many pictures of a dad with a baby while he’s playing a video game. Their wives don’t understand this either.

Fourth observation: games are the center of a censorship debate that has been going on for a long time.

Fifth observation: come back to that Ebert guy. You know what he used to do? He wrote a review of the Cosmology of Kyoto. He liked it a whole lot. Ebert no longer reviews video games.

Sixth observation: our attempts to be serious with throwing in acting, we know the acting is really terrible.

Seventh observation: The games that try to have a serious streak put in a cutscene that interrupts the action. We try to fast forward to get to the good part.

Eigth observation: designers and players are really obsessed with the money shot. Check out the head shot, etc.

Not a lot of game designers consciously think in terms of these analogies. There are advancements being made in the indie/art scene, a lot of these games think about how to get rid of cutscenes, use game mechanics to express unique things, and they’ve made a lot of progress. They personally detest addiction as a goal, don’t pander to teenage boys, no money shots. Most of these games take between 5 minutes and 20 minutes, you play them once or twice, you think about them, it changes your life in a little way, and you move on. It’s not about consuming 30 hours of your life. In a sense they’re anti-games in the mainstream sense. NPR is starting to pick up these games as something to cover seriously. Seems like a good approach to start inching our way over that line.

But this approach raises some really interesting questions. It seems like we hate our own medium: I want to do something that doesn’t even feel like a game anymore. Are we throwing away something unique there, the baby out with the bathwater? For example there’s a really fine line between something addicting and something compelling. Frank Lantz said at GDC that games are not media to be consumed and finished, they’re cultural objects some of which have been with us for thousands of years. Think of board games: have you played X, no I haven’t, or yes I’ve played it ten times and I’ll play it again. Games are cultural objects that often demand a lifetime of study for full appreciation. Think of old guys in the park playing chess, the dude who just stands and looks at the baord watching people play, studying the moves. It’s just as interesting to watch as it is to play, and they appreciate chess on a deep level. You only read a novel or see a movie maybe 5 times even if it’s your favorite game ever, but I’ve played chess a dozen times and I don’t even really like it! You get something like MGS4 with cinematic technique that’s trying to hop over the line and land in the area of movies, but we need to look at what sets us apart. Things like chess that contain an infinite intrigue, standing with your toes at the edge of the abyss peering down into a deep space. At the heart of our medium that’s what games are about. They are inherently obsession-inducing artifacts, maybe that will prevent us from ever being in that club. Maybe our legitimacy quest is misguided in the first place and we’ll come full circle. Maybe it’s not even a medium but a cultural phenomenon. So it’s exciting to think aboutu what the future of games may hold.

Q: You’re bringing up the same questions we’re raising in our classes here (I’m a professor here). It’s interesting that we haven’t looked at the transformative properties of games or edifying value.

A: It’s similar to what’s going on with those indie games. If you play Braid and think it all through, you’re going to have an experience that will blow your mind. I came out of Braid thinking about the world in a different way, it’s been a year since I played it and I think about it almost every day. Most of these games leave you with questions: is marriage really like that? Was that game really right? A lot of people have played Marriage and thought about their own relationship differently, so it’s possible to use games for an uplifing purpose. When we talk about timeless works in other media, that’s what these games are doing. Whatever it is that Sgt Pepper’s does when you hit A Day in the Life, we need to figure out how to make games do something like that. Each medium does it in a different way — instrumental music is so much more abstract than a book or a movie. More abstract than a Pollock painting but we don’t thinka bout it that way because we’re so used to it. But all these media engender the same transforamtive experience. So there are people who say that games are so different they’re going to do something totally different, but I disagree, I think there’s so much diversity in those that we just need to figure out how to get games to punch you in the heart in the right way.

Q: What determines legitimacy?

A: A lot of people say we’re waiting for the old guard gatekeepers like Ebert standing on the line so we need to wait for them to die. But it doesn’t really matter what these people think, we need to come face to face with it ourselves. Chris Hecker says we’re constantly writing checks we can’t cash, making promises to people about our works and then on inspection we don’t provide that. Lolita’s not riddled with typos, Guernica was not half-finished due to budget constraints. Games are reaching so far into technology, we don’t even have the craft down pat yet. We need to tackle this internally.