Arma 2 Wasteland: Development vs Design

Original Post: Jan 13 2013

Let's talk a little about game design. As a researcher and teacher, I sometimes find it difficult to express in words exactly what it is that game design is, or what I hope to teach to outsiders--even to gamers themselves sometimes. Capturing exactly what the difference is between design decisions and development process is difficult, since "good" design often fades into the background because it just works. As a player, one rarely notices all the individual rules and decisions that have been made, the experience occupies the conscious mind.

Discussing game design is difficult because it is a second-order task. A designer constructs the rules, environment, etc. but always in hopes that the player will experience something that is greater than the sum of those parts. When set in motion, the player(s), rules, environment and fiction all combine and create something that is not obviously discernible from a list of the game's rules. Further, since it is the player whom we as designers are trying to affect somehow, their perception and personal interpretation of what is happening is more important than what the game design document says should be the result. (Not that players can't be wrong or ignorant, but we still have to deal with their perception of our work.)

Finally, discussing the design of the kinds of games I like is very difficult, because there is very little opportunity for experimentation to verify any hypotheses about the way the game works. That is, I'm not often able to change one rule and see how it plays out. The games are sealed and finished, I can't tamper with them myself very often. Even in franchise games such as Assassin's Creed or Mass Effect, which are largely similar, many changes have been made between iterations, so it becomes difficult to nail down exactly what cause has led to which effect.

For these reasons, I've been excited by the learning opportunities I've had while playing the latest post-DayZ Arma mod to sweep the Internet: Wasteland. In general, Wasteland is much like DayZ: a semi-persistent, on-going mission set in Chernarus (or other maps now) where players must contend with each other, as well as manage a hunger/thirst mechanic. There are no zombies in Wasteland, only players. Much higher-grade weapons are generally available than in DayZ, mostly found in the trunk of the many vehicles which randomly spawn throughout the settlements. So Wasteland is, broadly speaking, a very large, variably-paced deathmatch. There are 3 factions, BluFor, OpFor and Independents. The Op and Blu forces are designated as teams who are to work together, while Independents are free to do as they please--team up or lone wolf.

From this basic premise, each server begins to differentiate. In a digital version of "house rules" many server admins fancy themselves amateur game designers (or at least developers, more on that soon), and so start to tinker with the code that defines the Wasteland mission. These small changes ripple outward in unpredictable ways, and interact with other changes, to affect the overall experience.

From here I will explore two examples of rules which are affecting the experience on certain servers that I've been playing on. The beauty of this server situation is that I can jump between very similar games, and compare the two sets of rules in a much more "controlled" experimental way than is possible in many other games.

The first issue is really more of a problem than an example of a rule-change between servers, but serves to illustrate my point about game design. In Wasteland, players can use various kinds of building-materials to create bases. These include sniper platforms, sandbag walls, and other ready-made base buildings. Some of these items are quite large, and the mechanics whereby a single player can walk along carrying a small building around is quite ridiculous. However, the problematic aspect is that a BluFor player can pick up a ten meter-long wall, and by walking or turning it around, can kill the other players using the collision physics built into the game.

Obviously, no cooperative team mate would want to do this--but this is a game played on the internet where people are jerks, so it happens all the time. Some troll will go to the BluFor base, as a BluFor member, and simply move a base wall, killing as many of his faction as he until one of them shoots him. The issue here is that the collision physics do not track who is responsible for the deaths--the system has no way to know that it was BluFor Johnny that killed his own team. Thus, the punishment mechanic, which is a way for players killed by their own teammates using weapons to remove team-killers, doesn't work. In fact, it is the troll--once shot by BluFor--who is better equipped to punish his law-abiding teammates.

To me, this is more of a development problem or task, than a design concern. This is a sort of maintenance issue where the game is obviously not working "right." The rules that define how the game is designed to work aren't perfectly translated into computer logic, and we have a less than optimal result. That said, the rules, the design decisions, are already made: teams, base building, physics etc. We simply need to code them into the computer system better.

Finally we come to the meat of this article--a long enough build up I'm sure. Recently, one of the servers I play on has changed a few things in Wasteland. I'm going to report the situation backwards for rhetorical effect here: Users noticed the changes and started complaining. Mainly, the complaints where about the lack of vehicles in the spawn areas. People were spawning in and had to run a couple of kilometers to find a car. This was not the case as recently as last week; cars were generally easy to find. Cars, remember, also usually contain weapons. So people were complaining about being required to run around with just pistols for quite a while.

The obvious solution to this symptom is to increase the number or frequency of vehicle spawns in the game. However, this was not the actual problem. What the admin changed was where people were spawning. Players were spawning along the coast, a much narrower range of areas than previously. The result of this is that the people who spawn first get in a vehicle and drive away, die somewhere inland, and repeat. So eventually, players have organically moved all the cars that were at the coast to somewhere slightly inland. The perception was that there were fewer cars, when really the issue was that the players were moving them basically in one direction, away from the coast. Since no one was spawning inland, the cars that made it even to the first set of towns away from the coast were staying there. People weren't driving any cars from inland back out to the coast, or at least not enough to make a difference.

By changing the spawning area, the admin did not just create a vehicle shortage. Because the sixty-or-so players were all spawning in about ten locations, rather than forty or fifty, there were far more shoot-outs in those spawning locations than when the spawns were spread out. These shoot-outs were often between pistols, since very few people had any access to higher grade weapons. Secondly, they are usually fatal, so at least one of the participants respawns again on the coast, exacerbating the problem.

So, there are no vehicles on the coast, there are many players, who continue to fight, and kill each other, and respawn again on the coast. Getting inland became doubly difficult. This has another knock-on affect, impacting the experience of being inland itself. Prior to these changes, the distribution of spawn locations and the high mobility offered by vehicles led to the entire map being "in play." Unlike DayZ where certain obvious paths became well-worn between highly-valued locations, Wasteland was less predictable. One could expect an encounter at any moment, or could dig in almost anywhere and set up an ambush. After the changes, with a large percentage of the population stuck in a coastal deathmatch, the rest of the map is desolate.

I have asked, but have yet to hear a cogent answer as to the purpose of these spawn-point changes. I'm not sure what the admin was seeking to do, but I'm sure this isn't the effect he wanted. The example is illustrative though--how one change can have such dramatic impacts, and how the symptoms ("Why aren't there any vehicles anymore?!?!") do not always point to the real problem. As I said above, game design operates at one remove: you design rules, but what you want to create is play.

Videogames and the Gilette Model

Original Post: November 6, 2012

Lately I’ve noticed a slew of products I can buy, which will subsequently force me to buy ‘refills’ of some description, in order to keep using them. On top of this, I have noticed an increase in the number of household products which determine how and when the consumable is used, to better schedule the re-purchases. Here are a couple examples:

Dettol hand wash – dumps a precise amount of soap into your hand through the magic of infra-red sensors. Of course you can’t fill it up with any old soap…

Auto-bug and freshener sprays – two different ways to fill your house with a fine mist of chemical sprays, set to a timer to empty the can right on schedule.

Lots of cleaning supplies and body cleansers have transformed from bottles into wipes, which you run out of at a pretty steady rate. You can’t really use just ‘a little bit’ of a wet, soapy wipe the way you can use just a little bit of soap. Those cages you hang in the toilet to freshen it up operate on a similarly automatic principle, as do air or water filters.

The ‘Gillette model’ is a method of selling consumer products where the initial buy-in is very low-cost, but relies on the purchase of a complementary product which is relatively more expensive, and certainly a higher profit for the manufacturer. The most famous example is the source of its name, Gillette razor blades: you can buy the handle for your razor (with one or two blades) very cheaply. But the new blades are extremely expensive by comparison. But you must buy them, or the handle is useless, right? This isn’t all smoke and mirrors—obviously many products like disposable razors, ink-jet printer cartridges, and air fresheners need to be replaced, they are consumable. It’s the pricing model that’s important to note.

What it achieves is a more predictable, steady flow of revenue for the particular manufacturer. Since you have to buy new razor blades occasionally, if you already own a Gillette razor handle, you’re more likely to buy Gillette refills. The schedule mentioned above simply regulates this a bit. Dettol want you to buy their soap regularly, so they make sure you use a certain amount of it every time you wash your hands. The automatic freshener sprays promise to fill the air with a pleasant scent to mask odours before you even notice they are there—also they use up a can of spray like clockwork.

What the hell does potpourri spray, soap and shaving have to do with videogames?? 

Videogame publishers, like Gillette and SC Johnson are businesses. They want money just like any other business. Further, they’d love to have a nice predictable stream of revenue they can use to make investments and placate shareholders. As the price of development in the AAA range continues to increase, the risk of failure increases also. Publishers are searching for ways to mitigate that risk, and new financial models are one way to do so.

If a game costs two hundred million dollars to develop, and is sold in a traditional, $60-100 one-shot transaction, the risk to the publisher is huge. What if the players simply don’t buy that particular box? Even if players do buy, once they take the game home, the publisher never hears from them again. Firstly, the publishers won’t know very much about the reasons the customers did and did not spend the money. Secondly, what if some population of players was willing to spend more than the sticker price? Thirdly, once the initial rush of ‘new game release!’ purchases are over, that publisher’s revenue stream plummets to a tiny trickle until the next big release. That could be as far as two or three years away—not a good interval between pay days, I think we’d all agree.

There are a few possible answers, experiments that developers and publishers have already been trying for a number of years. The first is pretty obviously DLC: you buy the game, and then a month later shell out another few dollars to inject some fresh cash into the developer/publisher. The second is the GOTY Edition, a phenomenon that has little (or nothing) to do with critical awards, but exists merely as an opportunity to package the DLC together with the original game to perform another exercise in marketing.

In the end, though, both of these are merely repetitions of the first practice, on a smaller scale: create a game/content, fire it off into retail stores and hope.

A more fundamental change has been creeping across the videogame industry. Speaking very broadly, the goal of publishers is to avoid these big, one-off purchases which exist as a point in time. Instead, they wish to set up a dialog between game and player, a kind of ongoing conversation which is spoken with money. So, the player is continually engaged in the process of buying something, and the publisher is constantly engaged in providing whatever it is that’s being purchased. There is obviously a point at which this begins, but no clear point at which it ends. Think, for example, of buying a new MMO, and setting up a subscription. Many videogames, like air fresheners and hand soap, are transforming from a product into a service.

This kind of steady stream of revenue is far more predictable and less volatile. After launch (still a risky proposition), a publisher can observe positive or negative sales trends over time. Assuming that the launch goes well enough, the developer can try things in real time to increase subscribers, rather than wait until their next game is ready to try anything new. MMOs are currently the only genre of game to require these kinds of straight-forward subscription fees, and players expect a certain amount of content to be added to the game over time without cost. To me, this is very similar to the Gillette model described above. Buy into the game, keep on paying to access the content you are increasingly invested in.

Blizzard (and many other MMO-makers) have somehow managed to combine the box-buy (purchasing the CDs) and the subscription fee. That the initial WoW buy-in, as well as expansion packs, costs about the same as any other AAA game without the on-going fee strikes me as fairly remarkable, distinct from the cheap Gillette handle with expensive blades model. An even more precise comparison is found in ‘free to play’ videogames.

The other name for the Gillette model is ‘freebie marketing.’ That is, you can practically (or literally) give away the first chunk of whatever your product is (the handle and first blade, the first ink cartridge, first tier of gear in your RPG), and rely entirely on the steady flow of revenue that this initial buy-in encourages. Quite a lot has been said about the merits and faults of this kind of financial arrangement, I won’t repeat here. Suffice it to say that free to play videogames work to gain buy-in from their players by generating an emotional investment in the game, before halting progress and asking for some cash. This can continue for as long as the player wishes to continue to progress.

Blizzard have created two much more subtle examples of videogames as services: Starcraft II and Diablo III. Strangely, perhaps, Blizzard/Activision have not monetised Starcraft II in the way I might have predicted. Other than releasing what is ostensibly one game in three distinct parts, there is no other way to keep paying Blizzard money. However, on a technical level, Starcraft II represents a clear example of this new videogame service: an always-online experience, constantly updated, connected to a news server and social network. This is not a game you buy, consume, and put away when done. One can easily imagine fees being leveraged for access to the highest (or otherwise ‘special’) league ladders, or personalised livery being implemented. All the infrastructure is already in place.

Blizzard’s cleverest new business model, however, is the new Diablo III auction house. This is literally providing videogame players a service: a virtual eBay for virtual items of which Blizzard can create an infinite supply.

Diablo III is (at one level) a complex gothic-fantasy slot machine. Each time a player kills a monster, the wheels spin ‘round and every so often, the game pays out. It isn’t quarters or even nickels that spew forth, though, it’s a virtual item with no exchange value outside of Blizzard’s system. By integrating the real-money auction house into that system, Blizzard have made it possible to cash out of the Diablo casino, effectively allowing players to convert their play time into cash. But it works for Blizzard too. Each time anyone does cash out, Blizzard takes it’s slice of the earnings.

So Blizzard/Activision have found a way to turn your play time into dollars. Realising this is incredibly important for the developers of certain kinds of games. Diablo is not the kind of hyper-consumable or disposable experience bought for 99 cents on the App Store. Diablo is the kind of game many, many people will sink many hundreds of hours into, as the norm. This vast amount of play time is, effectively, an untapped resource. It even makes sense for the consumer, in that a game you are willing to spend 300 hours in might be worth more money to you than the kind you will play through the campaign of 15 hours once and put away. If we don’t have to cough up the grand total all at once, all the better. I know I would never have bought World of Warcraft up front for the total price of all the subscription fees I ever paid.

Not everyone will participate, of course, not everyone will cash out either. But a large number will. Anyone who uses the auction house at all is participating in this economy, in the monetised dialog between Blizzard and their player base. Anyone who turns their play time into a commodity by placing it on the auction house is creating the opportunity for Blizzard to make a little more money. This, and similarly long-lived relationships between publisher and player are a very important aspect of the future of videogames. One need only look to the other experiment Activision are running in a very different game, with Call of Duty: Elite, to see how widespread this trend is. Not all games will go down this route—there will probably still be a many game experiences sold and consumed like candy on the App Store, or like films enjoyed intensely for a relatively long. but finite. time. But increasingly, publishers will be finding ways to maintain and then monetise long-term relationships between themselves and players.

The Gatekeepers of Videogame Culture

Original Post: August 20 2012 (Kotaku AU) 

There are hundreds of millions of games played across the world every day, there are clubs, conventions, and publications dedicated solely to the practice. In economic terms, the video game industry is certainly a powerful one, growing to rival any other kind of entertainment or media form one cares to mention. This is video game culture, and it is important.

So the ‘culture’ of people-who-play-games has begun to evolve to a point where we ‘gamers’ tend to self-identify. We proclaim ourselves gamers and partake in video game culture. What does this mean?

What is video game culture? What are the boundaries and who are the gatekeepers of the culture?

It seems fair to say that for many gamers, voicing an allegiance to game culture is prideful. We like video games, we wish to demonstrate our affinity for the pursuit, whilst hoping to receive a modicum of respect for our choice of entertainment. We value the experiences had while gaming, and wish others to at least appreciate the value of those experiences.

This process explicitly creates a rift between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ We often acknowledge the positive, that is, finding a sense of belonging and fraternity amongst like-minded souls. Yet the negative exclusionary practice is just as important. Those people who “don’t get it” are the ones on the outside, those who “don’t play” are automatically excluded. “We” are alike, and together, we are different from “them.”

As video games themselves become more diverse, battlelines begin to emerge between the people who play different kinds of games. The perception is that some gamers are “real” gamers and others aren’t. Some are casual while others are “hardcore.” Some are “more” gamers and others are less. Some, then, “belong” as part of the culture, and others are pretenders.

As is usually the case amongst self-identifying groups of people, the ‘most dedicated’ or ‘hardest core’ or ‘longest serving’ members are those who look down upon anyone with less pedigree. This elite priesthood is often situated historically–that is, if you “weren’t there” at a certain point in time, you’ll just never belong as much as we do. Obviously, then, there is always a set of people who will always have a sense of superiority over relative newcomers.

As the pool of game players expands, we find other ways to distinguish between each other. The way we play, how often, the platforms we use, the genres we enjoy are all markers of our status within the game-playing population. Gamers begin to identify themselves through which brands or franchises they buy and play–not unlike skaters who identify with brands such as Globe, or car enthusiasts and Ford or Holden. Or by how much money we spend on our “gear.”

Increasingly, there is a certain ferocity about publicly identifying as a gamer. I am no sociologist so I can’t quite explain it, but perhaps the stridence comes from years of defending gaming from a disdainful mainstream. Perhaps gamers are predisposed to finding the competition in life, and are therefore simply playing at being the best gamer. Perhaps the most dedicated gamers need a way to rationalise their (over-?) investment.

This ferocious distillation of video game culture down to a potent, pure hardcore is distressing. There is a strange agenda that seeks to purge anything from “game culture” which might somehow dilute the field. That is, if something does not satisfy the criteria of a self-appointed cultural gatekeeper, it must be expunged.

Casual games. Consoles. Zynga. The Sims. Women. Free2Play games. Critical writing on games. All of these are often targeted by the elite priesthood as not being ‘real’ or ‘necessary’ to game culture. They “aren’t relevant.”

In reality, the elitist notion of a pure, hardcore games culture is a fantasy. There is no such thing as a video game culture hermetically sealed-off from the rest of the world. Of course there are concentrations, where or when individuals focus on some things over others, but cultures do not exist in Tupperware containers sitting neatly organised on shelves.

By being a gamer, I do not stop being a man, a university lecturer, a mediocre sports fan, an American, an immigrant, a husband, a son, a musician. I am not a one-dimensional creature that is composed entirely of, and sustained by, video games. I am not defined by gaming and only gaming.

That anyone should want to be is morbid.

That anyone should demand it of anyone else is evil.

No one who plays and enjoys video games is required to ignore every (or any) other aspect of what makes up their identity, in order to be considered a gamer. People do not work that way. Culture does not work that way.

In fact, the integration of wildly varied and diverse people into video game culture is literally the best thing that could possibly happen to our medium. Without different, new ideas smashing into each other our medium will stagnate and die. Our culture will become so incestuous that it will no longer function. We need to bring new people in, not keep them out.

This kind of exclusionary practice is not unique to video game culture. Like the skating or car cliques mentioned above, other hobbies are just as exclusionary. Read up on heavy metal or punk music for an interesting comparison.

But, like music in general, video games are a creative, expressive medium. They are an art form. As a result, video game culture bears a greater burden, that of art.

Art is communication. As individual yet social animals we are largely defined by our ability to communicate with one another, through speech, stories, pictures, and other media. By communicating, we learn to balance the tension between our uniqueness and commonality. Every human being has a right to be part of this artistic conversation, whether as a creator or an audience.

Through art we are able to embrace one another’s perspective, at least for a little while, and maintain the empathy that human society requires to exist.

So, when someone self-identifying as a gamer claims that someone else’s experience with or interpretation of a game is not relevant, the first gamer is attempting to stifle the other’s attempt to come to terms with life.

Simply put, video game culture does not exist. There is no stone tablet inscribed with commandments. Only gamers exist, and their experiences, ideas and interpretations are what create and sustain video game culture. That culture is a vapour, constantly about to disappear, and only remains through the actions of the people involved.

Video game culture does not define who is and is not a gamer; people who play, talk or write about, and make games define what video game culture is. So when Patricia Hernandez is reminded of her trauma by a video game, then rape is relevant to game culture. When Lisa Foiles finds some aspect of a video game funny, then humour is part of game culture. When Kirk Hamilton analyzes the soundscape of a game, music is relevant to game culture. When Dan Golding or Brendan Keogh (or hey, even me) talk about video game studies, academia is part of game culture. When players scream obscenities at each other through voice chat, trash talk, casual racism and homophobia are part of game culture. When female developers, critics or players are derided based on their gender or appearance, then misogyny is part of game culture.

There are no neutral video games, or experiences of video games. No one stops being who they are as they play a game. So, everything that happens in the game, and everything said about the game, is always already being filtered through whatever lenses the player brings with them wherever they go. So, the female games critics can no more prevent their gender from being part of their experience than I can, or than you, the reader, can. Simply because some players aren’t aware that their gender, race, wealth, privilege, age or whatever is impacting on their experience with a game does not mean it isn’t happening. The same is true for the people who create video games.

Being understood as an artistic practice alongside writing, painting, music or film certainly aids in elevating the status of video games in the wider social context. They become something a person can learn from, enjoy, and enrich their lives with. But there is a caveat: everything is relevant to art. There are no limits.

So like video games themselves, game culture is what we make of it. We are all, individually, the gatekeepers.

I am an Explorer

Original Post: April 26, 2012 (Kotaku AU) 

Tracey is a body-builder. Mark is a rock climber. I am… neither of these things.

***

My hands clutch the controller in a death-grip. My jaws ache from clenching. Sweat is beginning to rise from skin wrapped around my tense and tired muscles. I’m even past the yelling. And now the game is warning me that I only have fifteen minutes left. Fifteen minutes, then ten, then five.

Finally, after 27 minutes and over 150 faults, I finish Gigatrack, and what do I feel? Triumph? Accomplishment? Satisfaction? No, the only feeling I have is relief.

It’s over, I tell myself. Finally, it’s over. I don’t feel that rush of fist-pumping victory because I don’t feel that I’ve accomplished anything. All I’ve done is what the Gigatrack expected of me, the bare minimum.

I feel like I’ve merely filled in some blanks that a developer carefully sketched out ahead of me.

The thought weighs heavily on my mind: imagining the countless hours of play-testing and fine tuning the exact angle and length of a ramp, the position of that barrel in the landing zone, the distance to the next obstacle and the speed a bike will have at that point. Everything carefully, meticulously, excruciatingly precise.

In the end, I simply don’t feel like I have done anything meaningful, instead I’ve just obeyed instructions. It might be hard, but Gigatrack is eminently beatable because, like any obstacle course, it was designed to be.

***

Alone atop my ziggurat, I carve a swathe through the alien hordes with a well-placed explosion. The music changes.

I swear, I comment on Twitter, that the music changes when you get close to your high score. I feel the drama intensify as I’m about to pass my previous high score.

Then I die.

As it turns out I kept dying at about the same moment, so my high score just happened to sit right at the moment in the musical score where some rising squeals signalled a spike in difficulty, for me anyway.

Gradually I began to learn the pattern. The alien freaks’ assault followed a kind of rhythm I could measure through the appearance of the giant aliens. Just after that second giant one, I thought, I need to be ready to blow up a big group of them and have time to defend against the floating red guys.

Sometimes I forgot, sometimes I misfired, and sometimes I succeeded. My top score was 147 after three or four days of playing.

Then the next day, I just didn’t pick up my iPad. I knew what the game had in store for me, and, in that knowledge, I was done.

***

Riding through Calradia, I spot a group of six sea raiders fleeing from my warband. I chase them down, and ready my blade. My warband forms up, charges and annihilates them. I take the meagre spoils and head back to town to replenish my supplies.

I recruit a couple more lowly volunteers, I now command a group of ten. I am unstoppable.

I see a group of twenty-five mountain bandits and flee.

Curious, I head to the next major town and approach the lord in his castle. He has a task for me, I accept, and head to the small village that’s behind on its taxes. I rile up the locals a little bit as I collect the bags of denars. The lord will cut me in for 20 percent of the takings… or I could just keep this money.

I decide to take it back and honour our deal. After all, I only have ten men, the lord commands an army. Besides, 20 percent of the two thousand or so gold I just collected is good money for my company. With it, I recruit a few more and go hunting for bandits.

Soon I am at the head of my own small army of forty-five.

What happens, I wonder, if I travel to the next kingdom, and attack one of their noblemen? Am I strong enough? I ride.

On the way, it occurs to me that I should probably wield a lance while on horseback, surely the longer reach will be more effective. So I buy one and test it out on some unfortunate bandits. The lance is a great success, and I put my bow away for good.

I arrive in the Southern desert, home to the Sarranid Sultanate and go hunting. Eventually I find a noble party small enough for me to handle, and approach him. No thought for negotiations, I simply attack, and after a pitched battle, I am victorious.

I have taken a prisoner! And it is the noble Emir! The ransom broker will pay me top-denar for this guy! So I secure my prisoner and the other loot, and make tracks back to Swadia.

Just as I approach one of the Swadian strongholds, I receive a message. The Sultan has offered me 1800 denar for my noble prisoner!

1800 denar buys a lot of troops, I realise with glee. I wonder what I can accomplish with fifty men under my banner?

***

For me, the best games are those I am constantly discovering. Not just the geography: I have crossed the whole of Calradia, Liberty City, Panau, Skyrim, and both New Austin and Nuevo Paraiso many times. There is a mechanical space to these games I can also explore, the space where I can ask “What happens if I…?” and am able to experiment to find out the answer. Because of this, even Mount & Blade, an unpolished game if there ever was one, offers me more joy than Trials or Ziggurat.

The possibility space is much, much wider in these games than in Trials or Ziggurat, where the tiniest variation from the required manoeuvers is disastrous. I know that, upon getting a gold medal in a difficult Trials course, I’ve done basically the same thing as countless people before me, and exactly what the developer expected me to do. In Ziggurat, I know what to do because I know what’s coming — I have to memorise the pattern of the alien onslaught to stand any chance of achieving a higher score. Both of these games require a repetition and rote drilling I can’t tolerate. By the time I’m “practicing” I’ve already learned all there is to know about the game, I just have to get better at it.

Videogames are best, for me, when they are adventures into unknown territory, beyond the frontiers of familiarity. I guess that makes me an explorer.

Videogames, aggression, Anders Breivik – let’s not join the dots

Original Post: April 20, 2012 (The Conversation AU)

“Violent videogames cause people to become violent in real life”. It’s a familiar refrain for anyone who has read a newspaper in the last 15 years.

Today, the media reporting surrounding the trial of accused mass-murderer Anders Breivik has dusted off this old chestnut to explain a shooting spree and bomb attack that claimed the lives of 77 people in Oslo last year.

Breivik has testified that he used World of Warcraft and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to train for his attacks. He also testified to be a member of the anti-Muslim militant group Knights Templar and refused to recognise the authority of the federal court system.

The fact that videogames play no demonstrable part in Breivik’s (or any other) act of violence hasn’t stopped the media from creating and re-creating this narrative, even to the point that university media officers are picking up the chant.

The research shows what?

A University of Gothenburg press release about a new study is entitled Researchers questioning link between violent computer games and aggressiveness.

The release reports that the authors are “questioning the whole gaming and violence debate”. The study itself, published in the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning is entitled How gamers manage aggression: Situating skills in collaborative computer games.

Taken together, these two titles might lead one to interpret the study in a similar vein to researchers Craig Anderson or Christopher Ferguson. That is, it would make sense to argue either that violent videogames do (Anderson) or do not (Ferguson) have a meaningful effect on players' aggression levels in real life.

Instead, the research is actually a detailed study of how players of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) – such as World of Warcraft – cooperate to manage the attention of powerful, dangerous enemy characters (known as bosses). In MMO parlance, that attention is known as “aggro”.

The aggression being managed, then, is not that of the players, but of the computer-controlled enemies. How, then, is this research linked to the debate about media effects?

Hint: it’s not.

The ‘media effects’ narrative

As Dan Golding pointed out in an earlier article on The Conversation, the media only seem equipped to discuss videogames in three ways:

1. as moral panic
2. in terms of (always surprising) economic profit and
3. as an exotic artefact or sub-culture.

The press release announcing this new study, as well as coverage of Breivik’s trial by the Sydney Morning Herald, among others, falls right into the first category.

The notion of media effects and transfer (from medium to real-life) is perhaps as old as communications media themselves. Even Plato was wary of the power of the poet “because he awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings and impairs the reason".

Today’s “violence and videogames” narrative is well-worn. So much so that even a public relations officer at a university takes a study on videogames with the word “aggression” in its title to be examining a “link” between mediated depictions of violence and real-world aggression.

But the link to the media effects research such as Anderson and Ferguson’s is not entirely facetious: the Swedish team of researchers are in fact questioning the basis of the videogame violence debate; the “transfer” mentioned earlier.

Transfer, as the study points out, is a contentious construct of educational theory. It is, to quote from the article: “the appearance of a person carrying the product of learning from one task, problem, situation, or institution to another”. In this case, the “transfer” of aggression from videogames to real-life.

The authors of this study rightly point out that the nature of transfer is contentious, ill-defined, and rarely agreed upon. Thus, there are disagreements about how to empirically measure the effects of media on an audience.

But instead of pursuing this, the paper moves on to conduct a close study of raid encounters (where numerous players attempt to take out a boss together), documenting the skills and knowledge used by players who cooperate successfully.

These skills include:

• spatial awareness and the importance of positioning one’s avatar in the immediate geography around the boss before and during the fight
• case-specific knowledge about additional enemies entering the fray and appropriate responses
• reacting to other unexpected events during the fight, such as the death of a healer (a team member who’s role it is to heal fellow players).
• The depth and precision of the details presented in this study are valuable and will certainly provide excellent reference material for future scholars who are researching and writing about MMO gameplay. But this study simply isn’t focused on violent videogames leading to aggression in the real world.

Overcoming the narrative

The aim of the study I’ve been discussing was, in fact, to take a step back from the debate entirely and avoid assuming the straightforward transfer of media, with regard to videogames.

The authors “approached collaborative gaming where aggression is represented as a practice to be studied on its own premises”.

To that end, the study is working around what media researcher James Paul Gee calls “the problem of content". That is, looking past the representations of violence shown on screen and measuring what the human players are actually learning to do while playing the game.

In this case, players deploy very specific knowledge about the geography of terrain, the behaviour of bosses and the various skills their individual avatar possesses.

This study does not suggest that causing an avatar to swing a broadsword will incite the human player to do the same, or similar, the next time he or she steps out of the house for some milk.

Even though there’s no consensus on media effects nor the relationship between videogame and real-world violence, the international press still get completely lost in a frenzy as they pump out hysteria-filled headlines.

Gaming news outlet, Rock, Paper, Shotgun has called out a range of global outlets on their reporting of the Breivik case. Thankfully, publications such as these are interested in clarity and truth and refuse to allow the popular mythology of videogame violence to cloud basic reporting.

Something about Draw Something

Original Post: April 7 2012

Everyone has been playing this game, from my parents to the most dedicated videogame critic I know—Draw Something. Though it may in the end turn out to be a flash in the pan, Zynga see some potential there, and have bought out the developer, OMGPOP. The thing that stands out to me about Draw Something, though, is just how un-Zynga-like it is at the moment. In fact, this is probably the least “gamified” casual, super-popular iPhone type game I’ve played.

OK, least gamified game is a pretty horrible turn of phrase, I realise this. But I’m talking about all the additional stuff that frames the gameplay loop in games like FarmVille or TinyTower: the gathering of currency, the limited number of moves or actions you can perform in a set time, the dozens of ways you can display your accomplishments to your friends, and the social pressure that comes with all that. With Draw Something, the only Facebook integration is the handy method for finding people to play the game with. That’s it. There’s no badges to earn, there’s nothing to buy with real cash, none of that. All the game wants you to do is draw and guess.

In today’s atmosphere of cynical, Skinner-boxing game design focused more on prying a few cents at a time from players’ hands, it’s refreshing to see such a simple game with such pure goals. The importance of this is, for me, in the fact that no one I know has resorted to just writing the word to be guessed in the drawing space with the purpose of gaining more points. There is absolutely nothing stopping two players from doing this—ignoring the ‘game’ altogether in order to rack up the highest score. But in the end, they are only cheating themselves, since there is no social standing to be gained by amassing a bunch of those gold coins. There aren’t any badges, no fancy new cows, nothing to show off to anyone else. There’s no reason to cheat.

I am reminded of a story that ran a few weeks back about the PVP in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Patch 1.1 for that game introduced a point value for killing members of the opposite faction. BioWare assumed this would create greater incentive to participate in the epic PVP battles imagined by, well every MMO PVP designer ever. Instead, the players learned that a ritualistic execution of one side, then the other, was actually a more efficient means to gain points. Similarly, in World of Warcraft, Alterac Valley is merely a race to kill an NPC, rather than anything resembling warfare between opposite player factions. Those players don’t want to fight other players. They just want points.

These MMO examples are the most obvious, but games tend to encourage this kind of ‘min/max’ play. That is, do the least possible effort to gain the greatest possible reward. This economical way of thinking is disastrous for any game that is more concerned with creating some kind of virtual world, fictional experience. Introducing any kind of public competition—whether by creating tiers of weapons and gear, badges, cows to click, or even just a silly number next to the player’s name—attracts these profit-minded players. Not profit in terms of money, but in terms of results: “How can I most easily gain the game points to appear to be a better gamer than my nearest rivals?”

Games like FarmVille are built on this competitive urge and nothing else. The tasks that highly-economic players set for themselves are often painfully boring, rote activities that they will repeat indefinitely. Farming and grinding are not fun! Not in the way that a harrowing, touch-and-go PVP battle is. But in a genuine battle, you’re not sure of the outcome, so it could all be a waste. Better to not waste your time, and instead focus on the tried-and-true methods of gaining rewards. Those rewards are so incredibly important that it blinds many players to what one initially assumes to be the point of a game: to have fun. To do the activities are fun. Who cares if you gain five points or not, if your blood is pumping, the fear of defeat tinging every action with risk, and either the feeling of crushing loss or victory. As it turns out, an awful lot of people are much more concerned with points than with that kind of feeling. When you can gain the same kind of points in a risk-free endeavour that come from a very risky one, what difference does it make? Why risk the failure in the first place? So, if a designer does a good enough job of creating the public reward system to encourage competition, the gameplay loop itself can be next to nothing. If a WoW player is just going to repetitively farm the same, most efficient dungeon over and over, why create all the other ones?

Draw Something avoids all of this. The gameplay loop itself is essentially cooperative, so the two players are actually working together to solve the riddle, while obeying the spirit of the rules. Whether the players gain 1 or 3 coins is of no consequence outside the game itself—there are no trophies to buy with that currency. Breaking a streak is only that—there is no point multiplication factor ramping up the risk. So, as it stands, Draw Something is a fairly low-risk game, but also one that avoids the min/maxing mentality that drives so many people in publicly visible competition.

How long will this last, though? Being acquired by Zynga clearly signals changes are likely in the future. I simply can’t imagine the social gaming giant leaving this formula alone—how easily the game could be framed by the usual trappings of social gaming! Simply by posting on players’ Facebook walls every time the pair surpasses their previous streak record, or making one’s gold coin total public—without even changing any of the mechanics. I can see the potential for a time delay between drawings being created, then avoided through microtransactions. I can see new colour palettes costing real money instead of gold coins—or gold coins being purchased themselves. All driven by Zynga’s ability to profit from the desire to show off to one’s peers.

Azeroth from the Outside

Original Post: February 16, 2012 (Kotaku AU)

The view of the Earth from the moon fascinated me — a small disk, 240,000 miles away. It was hard to think that that little thing held so many problems, so many frustrations. Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don’t show from that distance. — Frank Borman, Apollo 8.

***

As astronauts blast into the dark frontier of space, their minds look with wonder at the mystery before them. Distant moons, quasars, asteroids and comets spinning out their lives, impossibly far away, impossibly numerous and impossibly alien. Yet the most sobering experience many space travellers have is not from looking outward — which most of them have done all their lives.

No, the most altering moment is when they look back, and for the first time in their lives, they see our Earth, suspended like a drop of shining blue water in an infinite sea of black.

Our understanding of a place hinges almost entirely on our individual perspective, the point of view from which we observe that place. From inside, almost any environment can seem comprehensive, all-encompassing and immersive. Anyone who has ever visited their former high school after many years will understand how the transition from insider to outsider vastly changes the nature of that place. Not only do the classrooms and hallways seem smaller, but so too do the rivalries, difficulties, and even the friendships and pleasures the place offered. As an adult, you can simply walk out of the gates, get in your car and go away. The whole grounds seem tiny, enclosed and just another small part of a much larger, infinitely more complex world.

***

Azeroth is a big place — if you’re inside it. I remember quite clearly the first time my Night Elf warrior jogged to the crest of the first big hill in Ashenvale. The sweep of the Ashenvale basin spread out before me, and the sheer size of the continents began to dawn on me. I realised, as I checked my maps and counted up the zones, that my journey through Warcraft would be a long one. More than seven years have passed since I first set out upon that journey, and though I have taken substantial holidays from Warcraft, I have recently returned to the realm. A little like returning to high school, the game feels in some ways smaller, though if anything, there is more in it.

And then I saw it, I saw a whole world of Warcraft, sitting on a table. Like Julian Dibbell witnessing the LambdaMOO server at Xerox for the first time — I knew what to expect, more or less, but it was no less a surreal experience. And I was only looking at a photo of the real thing, I can only imagine what it would feel like to hold the entirety of Azeroth, Outland, all its races, the Alliance and the Horde, Onyxia and Hogger, Ironforge and Warsong Gulch — the entire history of a world — in my hands. Or to buy it from Blizzard, with proceeds being donated to the St Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

The_Author realises now that during all those months he never really doubted LambdaMOO was in this box, compact, condensed, its rambling landscapes and its teeming population all somehow shrunk down to the size of The Server’s hard-disk drive. – Julian Dibbell, My Tiny Life

***

The artificiality of the world of Azeroth was never a mystery — any gameworld is obviously a product of human design. But that does not diminish the significance of my memories. There was the grind to farm my leather for a tanking set, so I could step into Karazhan. There were the times, when off-tanking Gruul whre I couldn’t help but overtake the main tank’s threat generation, mixing pride with sheepish guilt if he took the vicious strike I was there to soak up. But all these pale in comparison to the social, political and personal relationships that had little to do with ludic goals.

I started a guild before I knew about raids and had no concept of a raiding schedule. Yet we had a good time. The days of my ‘Flickering Colours’ guild are my fondest memories of the whole game, a convivial family of friends playing for fun, rather than calculated progress. I met friends who are now long, long forgotten, but in those few months were terribly important.

Though many are gone, some of my longest acquaintances began and have been maintained almost exclusively through Warcraft. One of the two has since moved on to The Old Republic, but I chat to him almost every day regardless. Another was still there, in Azeroth, waiting to welcome me back and reminisce about old times — times we both know will never be replicated no matter how many pieces of gear we transmogrify. There is the girlfriend, then fiancée, then wife who I can still play with, share a space and quest with, and who is the only reason I have gone back to play at all.

When you step outside of your world, whether it’s high school, the planet or a fictional universe, your perspective changes: it enlarges. I realise that the blade server on which the copy of Warcraft resides is a small thing, and one of many you can stack on top of each other, turn on and turn off, and put in a closet for storage. But the measure of the world is not in physical size, or even gigabytes of memory. The measure is in time. Blizzard inscribed the active lifespan of the server on each one they retired because of the importance of when.

There will never be another time like the first years of my Warcraft history, so no matter what other places into which I will venture, I will not find the same feelings, experiences and adventures. Slowly, I have come to accept this. Like high school, I wouldn’t want to go back, back to my ignorance, back to a certain kind of solitude that allowed me to start playing. I will remember, and maybe visit for a while, but I don’t think I’ll ever live there again.

There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. — Carl Sagan

***

Adam Ruch is a PhD Candidate and thinks of Azeroth as a second home. You can follow him on Twitter, or check out his blog, Flickering Colours.

Bending Time in Skyrim

Original Post: December 20 2011 (Games.on.Net)

Time is a strange thing in videogames, especially in open-world RPG type simulations such as Bethesda’s Skyrim. A fair amount of scholarship has been undertaken examining time in games (Juul and Eskelinen are a good place to start, if you’re interested) although these tend toward explaining time with regard to narrative theory, rather than pertaining towards the more uniquely videogame experience of time. Time is also bound up in theories of space, so Nitsche’s work on videogame spaces is probably another important background to this present discussion, as is Adrian Forest’s recent post about Skyrim in particular.

"Time is ‘spent’ by people with the knowledge that they will never get it back. So every action has a ‘cost’ to the human. This is important because we generally want more experiences within the same real-world time while playing a videogame than would naturally occur in everyday life"The fundamental problem of time in videogames is that the time flow a human player exists within is immutable and inexorable. Real-world time cannot be slowed down or sped up, it is non-negotiable. Time is ‘spent’ by people with the knowledge that they will never get it back. So every action has a ‘cost’ to the human. This is important because we generally want more experiences within the same real-world time while playing a videogame than would naturally occur in everyday life. We use games (and other artistic/entertainment media) to cram more action, drama or other experience into each real-world minute we engage with the work. Artists cut out vast stretches of down-time in most narratives in order to progress through various scenes without actually costing the viewer the same amount of time in the real world as passes in the fictional one. So we can read a historical account of World War I in less than five years, for example.

Obviously in this, we miss out on a great deal of detail. One of the great strengths of various narrative media, and our literacy with them, is the ability to abridge time and omit detail, and still make sense. This is not a trivial matter! Learning that time can pass between shots in a film is a terribly foreign concept, if one were to apply real-world literacy to the film. How does one jump forward in time by several hours? Linear media can also rewind time, to depict events from multiple perspectives, but having occurred at the same fictional time. This is another impossible feat to replicate in reality, humans can’t go back in time to see what was happening somewhere else.

Certain videogames operate on a similar temporal structure. That is, in a level-based, linear game, we might skip several hours or days between playable missions. In others, we may play as different characters, acting in different locations simultaneously (in fictional time). Call of Duty: Modern Warfare comes to mind as an example of both of these techniques. In this we can begin to discern the relationship between space and time: the shifts in time often occur when the player-character is being ‘extracted’ and moved to a different location. So the game simply skips the long plane flight and picks up again at the insertion point.

Skyrim, however, is not like Call of Duty. In Skyrim there are (almost) no ‘cuts’ between which time can be shifted, not in the same familiar filmic way Call of Duty does.

Elder Scrolls games, and large RPGs in general, face a difficult problem. One of the reasons for a time-shifting cut in games or novels is to skip over a (tedious) journey. But for Skyrim (and the other similar Bethesda worlds) one of the primary ways of engaging with the world is travelling through it. Travel is so important that whole quest lines are built into caves and other locations that players are more likely to stumble across than be led to. One could argue that the point of building an open world as densely-packed with ‘stuff’ is to travel through it—so a travel-skipping cut would truly defeat the purpose of the game. Yet at the same time, travel takes a long time. So the point of an epic journey across Skyrim is to take an epic journey, but epic journeys are largely epic because they take a long time to complete. So how can an experience be designed that feels like an epic journey, but doesn’t take the same amount of real time as crossing a state, even a small one, on foot?

"The alchemist in Solitude speaks of Whiterun as if it’s a place so far away as to be inaccessible to her, so she’d need an adventurer to take a letter there. Yet, I can make the journey, on foot, in a few game-time hours"One answer which is obviously not taken is to simply speed everything up. I mean everything. Put the game in fast-forward. But that would be unplayable, and certainly unenjoyable. Players would have no time to react to events, and it would just look stupid!

Another option, and this is the one that Adrian discusses at more length, is to make the world small but feel big. There are many ways to do this, and he goes through several in his blog post, so I will only summarize. The rendering technique makes the world visually look larger than it actually is, using different methods of fogging and reduction of detail to create a slightly distorted perception of distance.

The problem for me, though, is that even if the world looks fairly large, and feels fairly large, it still isn’t. This is where time-bending comes into play, and gets more complicated the more one thinks of it. What seems to occur is that there are at least two time scales in Skyrim: one for the player-character and one for the rest of the world. Certain quests in games such as Skyrim don’t make sense because of the strange time scales used. For example, NPCs will ask the player-character to take notes from one hold to another, and speak of the difficulty in making such a journey. The alchemist in Solitude speaks of Whiterun as if it’s a place so far away as to be inaccessible to her, so she’d need an adventurer to take a letter there. Yet, I can make the journey, on foot, in a few game-time hours. But even better, there’s a horse-drawn carriage just outside the city gates. Why doesn’t she just take that?

As a fast-travel system the carriage is diegetic, that is, it fits in the world sensibly and doesn’t look out of place. But no one but the player-character and the drivers of the carriages seem to know that it even exists. This weirdness goes farther than just the carriage though. It’s almost as if the player-character operates on this time scale where so much can be accomplished in one day, but the NPCs do not. So, for example, we have a College of Wizardry apparently conducting an archaeological investigation of a site not 10 minutes’ walk from their front door, which has presumably been there for hundreds of years, and yet is only just now being looked at. What have they been doing all this time?

There is also the obvious problem of the theoretically time-sensitive series of events driven by multiple-part quests. The sort where an NPC asks you to meet up with her so you can, say, assault a fort. Later can mean either immediately, going there right now, or after several days of game-time.

There’s the craftsmen NPCs who spend all their time, day after day, working on blacksmithing for instance. The player-character, on the other hand, can turn up and crank out dozens of daggers, armour and whatnot in an hour or two. Either Adrianne is hoarding a warehouse full of gear somewhere, or she’s just really, really slow.

Time isn’t just measured in minutes and hours. In fact, minutes and hours don’t exist—they’re totally made up by people, as the alternate speed at which minutes pass in Skyrim demonstrates nicely. A slightly more reliable way of measuring time is by how long it takes a regular person to do a thing like make a dagger, or walk to town. This is why space is important. Space and speed are pretty reliable measurements, and they are very familiar to us. We know roughly how far we can walk in a day because we know how fast we can walk.We know we couldn’t walk across the state in one day because of its size and our speed. The problem for Skyrim is that Bethesda need the big long things to take some big long time, but not so much that it becomes tedious in real-time, and yet not speed everything up so much that the little things whip by in an instant. So they stretch and contract time constantly, in order to cram all those events into a reasonable number of real-time minutes. The final problem with this is that in reality, the significance of events is often measured in, or at least influenced by, the time it takes to do it. Writing a novel takes time, months, even years. Graduating from school not only requires passing tests, but taking the time to go through each course, because after all, we can’t fit all the exams in as short a period as we might like to. Building a sandcastle takes time and therefore patience. Some things in reality can’t be rushed, so merely completing the task is meaningful in and of itself.

Sometimes, then, the achievement of arriving at that far-away city in the deep frozen North should take a lot of real-world time - or it risks feeling meaningless to the player regardless of how important a place it is in the game.

The Australian Videogame Industry

Original Post: October 19 2011

The Australian videogame industry is suffering right now, in a bad way. Though the small, more agile teams and the two juggernauts of iOS games Halfbrick and Firemint are going gangbusters, the larger-scale, higher budget sector has been all but obliterated over the past four or five years. Following this, there is a perceived 'brain drain' (how often we hear that with regard to the Australian workforce...) or an 'exodus' of talent moving overseas, particularly to Canada. Why are the pastures so much greener in the snow-covered gardens of our northern Commonwealth brothers? What has happened to the local industry to cause such a drought? How can we pick up the pieces and carry on?

I've been talking to a lot of people about this, and I have some thoughts. 

Firstly, I think its important to recognise that we have the talent here in Australia. There are dozens of designers, programmers, artists etc who have worked in the A-grade industry environment for a number of years, and a whole lot of them are out of work. We have even more graduates of an increasing number of videogame related tertiary qualifications from both private and public universities or colleges. Local talent is not a problem. If (and when) we do lose some overseas, we are very well-placed to produce more.

Further, our talent is being nurtured by this new wave of videogame degrees. I am responsible for one of them! Increasingly, the academy is working on enhancing the education these graduates receive. Rather than simply a programming degree working in UDK one semester, we are incorporating the critical artistic skills that differentiate an Arts/Humanities graduate from a TAFE tradesman. Our talent will have more going for them than the ability to follow instructions and program what their creative leads tell them to. Our talent will be the creative leads. They won't just know how to create videogames, but why it's worth doing so.

The international developers know some of this. According to Anthony Redden, formerly of THQ Studio Australia, after the exposure the closure of his studio received in the media, international recruiters were contacting him with job opportunities. These overseas studios actually want the kind of talent we have here in Australia. Further, some of the talent is obviously willing to move, internationally, to wherever the work is. To me, that means there is an opportunity to import talent if we need to--Canada is doing it, why shouldn't Australia?

The question becomes how do we manage to keep the work here in Australia. To understand this problem it's worth taking a moment to note where the work came from in the first place, to know why it all dried up so suddenly. Several of studios that have closed recently: Blue Tongue and THQ Studio Australia, Pandemic and Visceral Games, Team Bondi, Krome and now KMM, relied significantly on foreign investment. Blue Tongue and THQ Australia were subsidiaries of THQ, Pandemic and Visceral Games both belonged to EA, and Team Bondi, well... they worked with Rockstar and fell apart for their own special reasons. The executives at Team Bondi were former Team Soho Studio employees, so foreign in a different way.

The relationship a lot of Australian game development work had to the publishers was essentially outsourcing. Many of the games developed by these studios, while big enough to often be casually classified as 'AAA' (whatever that means...) were not of the same ilk as the work being done by the other studios these same publishers own in other countries. The Ubisoft studios in Montreal, for example, or Rockstar North were not making licenced games such as Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots (Blue Tongue), The Last Airbender (THQ Studio Australia). Nor are those other studios tasked with sequels like De Blob 2 (Blue Tongue) or Star Wars game after Star Wars game (Pandemic and Krome). So many Star Wars games...

This isn't to cast dispersion on the work that was done by those studios, but as a bit of a reality-check. These studios weren't valued for their original creations, they were used by the larger companies that owned them to produce the middle-range film tie-ins and other licenced material. We were a high-quality outsource location, not a producer of original, unique content. Consider Pandemic, who produced the Saboteur--an original IP and a game I really quite liked--who were promptly shut down after its release. My goals with the work I do at the university is to equip my graduates with skills that enable them to do much more than follow a brief handed down from the licence lawyers at International Publisher Headquarters via email. I want my students to be the creators of art, not the factory workers of the videogame industry. I really hope I'm not the only one in Australia who wants this.

The question is, if Australia is a world-class country full of the talent that international corporations are willing to invest in, willing to recruit into their closer-to-home studios, why are we acting like an outsource location? Why aren't we, as Australians, creating our own original content and keeping control over our IP and our industry? Why are practically all the major studios (including Firemint now) owned and operated by overseas publishers/developers?

Obviously the game development scene in Australia needs a bit of a boost if it is to continue. I am not a proponent of the "let's just all make iPhone games forever!" attitude. Those kinds of games already don't need the kind of help I'm talking about, and they do not have the kind of potential I will describe below. They lay a great foundation for where we need to go from here: the kind of game you pay $30-40AU for on Steam, right up to genuine AAA games. Personally, I like the big-budget, richly immersive games that take me to another place and time, cast me in an exotic role, and tell me a new story. I am really tired of tapping cartoons on my iPhone. I like the games that give me a little something to think about other than how to knock down the next pile of sticks and ice blocks. There is no reason these can't be made in Australia. Videogames are not a physical resource that has to be mined from the ground. They can come from anywhere.

These kinds of games require an investment framework that allows them to work for a number of months or years towards a large-scale, higher-risk release. Yes, there is risk. This is why the international investment has dried up: the cost of doing business in Australia no longer outweighs the risk associated with larger development projects--even projects assured of some degree of success because of their licences. As the global economy has struggled over the past few years, the Australian dollar has become increasingly valuable, so the cost to foreign companies rises. If the invesetor was Australian, however, they might not run for the hills the moment our currency reaches parity with the US dollar. Its a tragic situation when, as our economy actually shows some strength and resilience, this particular sector all but collapses because the whole paradigm relies on the weakness of the dollar through the late 90s.

So, yes, there is a lot of room for governmental incentives of the sort Canada offer to court the big players back to Australia. But there is even more room for better incentives to encourage Australian investors to set up an end-to-end development and distribution industry locally that does not rely on international investment. International sales? Absolutely, go for it. But we shouldn't be waiting around asking for permission from the big American publishers to make our own products. We shouldn't consider ourselves lucky for being able to work on something that Rockstar North or Ubisoft or THQ Montreal don't want to because they are too busy with Grand Theft Auto 5, FarCry 3 or Warhammer games.

That image at the top of this post is of a sunset, and is one of the saddest pictures I think I've ever seen. But, even if this is an end of an era, we have the opportunity to start a new one. Its a lot of hard work, believe me, I know. There weren't any game design or studies units at Macquarie University when I got here, there certainly weren't any degrees or majors in the area. There are now. This stuff can be done. It will be done, so long as we don't give up. We could flip that image of sunset around so the game development industry is looking into dawn instead.

Age of Empires: Pay to Play

Original Post: August 26, 2011 (GameSpy)

Free-to-play, social, online -- these three terms have, for me, defined a slew of insipid, frustrating experiences that resemble reinstalling Windows or downloading a series of patches as much as anything I'd call a "game." The core mechanic is of setting a series of timers, then waiting. And waiting. The end result of waiting is the ability to set yet more timers. For me, not only were the wait times interminable, but the payoff never came. I began to wonder, though, about what the play experience would be like if I actually paid some money for these games. I realized that comparing the experience of a game I've paid for upfront to one I was playing for free was a terribly unfair contest.

Within a couple days of this realization, Age of Empires Online was due to be released. I decided that I would use Age of Empires Online as my test case for a pair of reasons: firstly, I had a benchmark to measure the "game" aspect of Age of Empires against its previous installments. Would the symptoms of some free-to-play, online, and social disease transform this real-time strategy war game into a collection of egg timers? Secondly, in my entirely unscientific way, I had a generally optimistic view of Age of Empires, I had reason to believe I would have a good time with it. So I gave this free-to-play thing its best chance of succeeding by stacking the deck a little, and started my little experiment. I decided to budget for this game, rather than just spending willy-nilly. I aimed for about $40 (in Australian dollars, but we're still close enough to parity), since that was what Tropico 4 was going to cost me. A mid-sized game, not a blockbuster, but one whose predecessor I've had a tremendous amount of fun with.

I went into this Age of Empires Online experiment largely ignorant. For example, I didn't even realize it wasn't a browser game. Well, I thought to myself as I installed the client, I wasn't sure how the real-time aspect of the game was going to work in the browser, so maybe this is a good thing. It was.

As I went through the download and installation process, I reflected on what I expected of this game. To sidestep my major frustrations with other free-to-play games, Age of Empires Online would have to provide an actual real-time game, with units moving around on a battlefield, not a series of progress bars. It should provide playable content anytime I wanted to play; I was not looking forward to paying money to sit around waiting. The game should also let me continue to play inside the free area for as long as I want, rather than interrupt what I was doing to offer paid content. Even if that free area was limited, it should be self-sufficient.

So I started on my journey.

On founding my capital city, I was immediately greeted by the FarmVille-like interface and a Dreamworks Studios aesthetic. I became apprehensive. There was very little in the way of interaction available in my capital city, and I could sense the underlying structure of slowly acquiring different buildings and vanity features. Clicking on the floating yellow exclamation point quickly altered my perception. I accepted my first quest, and genuinely embarked on a mission. I left my slow-moving capital city and found myself in command of a real-time outpost, instantly recognizable as an Age of Empires battle. I could point-and-click, select soldiers, build houses, and watch my small army of villagers scurry about. I led my troops into the fog of war and did battle. In short, I was playing a real-time strategy game, online and for free, with a social chat window in the lower left-hand corner.

So Age of Empires Online had already somewhat flummoxed my original intentions by being fun even before I paid any money! I kept having fun for a good six or seven hours before I really started to think about paying for the pleasure. I mentioned earlier that the capital city screen reminded me of the FarmVille-like games I was seeking to escape, and it still does. Although certain resource-producing buildings that tick over slowly in real-world time do make an appearance, this is not the sole game experience. As should now be clear, Age of Empires Online has two very distinct, complementary game modes. The Empire view is one, and the real-time quest mode is the other. Where clicking timers in other games serve only to unlock more timers to click, in Age of Empires Online the tending to one's capital city enables better units and technologies on the battlefield. Performing well on the battlefield, meanwhile, furnishes one's capital city with resources, currency, and upgrades.

The paid content is geared toward improving one's capital city directly, but this has the repercussions of creating a stronger army on the real-time map. Age of Empires Online utilizes a massively multiplayer online role-playing game-like architecture based around quests, rewards, and loot -- even breaking that loot into familiar grey, green, blue, and purple tiers. These rewards are used to improve the buildings in the capital city. While playing prior to paying, I received a couple of blue rewards which would bolster my infantry and villagers' abilities. But alas, only by upgrading to the premium content could I actually equip these rare rewards! Subtle, if insidious, incentive to upgrade. I respect the subtlety, though, as I was never offered a brigade of spearman for a mere 500 Microsoft points that would turn the tide of a real-time battle. The money-spinning seems limited to the Empire screen, allowing an unencumbered concentration on tactics during real-time warfare. When I finally cracked and bought the launch offer pack (Greece and Egypt civilizations with the Defense of Crete booster pack), I spent $49.50AU so I could equip the blue shinies sitting in my inventory.

So far, I have thoroughly enjoyed Age of Empires Online. The most telling factor is that I actually want to go back and play more. Its novel combination of MMO architecture with RTS action is a much-needed antidote to the frustrations I had with other free-to-play games. The free content is generous, and does not feel like half a game. Age of Empires Online clearly demonstrates that free-to-play does not immediately require a FarmVille-like experience, and that an MMO can end with "RTS" just as comfortably as "RPG." I feel that my eyes have been opened somewhat, my jaded assumptions challenged, and a little faith restored. "Going free-to-play" or "online" or "social" doesn't necessarily spell disaster for a video game, even by the offline, paid, single-player focused standards I hold.

Sustaining Content Providers, redux

Original Post: August 10 2011

I wrote an article over a year ago in response to Ars Technica openly discussing their dilemma regarding generating cashflow. Theirs is the same problem faced by many, if not all, commercial websites providing media content. I am inspired to bump that article again here, as the problems have come to a head today. The Escapist have, up to now, hosted a remarkably successful video series Extra Credits. A very nasty disagreement has erupted quite publicly between the two.  From Extra Credits, there are accusations of non-payment and breach of contract, along with unreasonable claims made on charitable donations to cover medical expenses. From the Escapist, various explanations, mitigation, and an admission that they simply didn't have the money to pay their content providers, such as Extra Credits. (Here's a post that seems to be tracking and updating the situation.)

Siding with the perceived 'little guy' in this situation is all too easy, especially since I really like the content Extra Credits produce. Yet I feel for the Escapist in this situation too, as a representative of a huge slew of online publishers that I'm learning a bit more about lately. Paying creative producers like the EC team is an absolute necessity, I have no doubt about this. But where does that money come from? The standard set all those years ago is that content on the internet should be free, so the money doesn't come directly from the consumers, that's for sure. The alternative, up to now, has been to rely on advertising revenue. Is it working? Well I'm not privy to the accounts of enough websites to know for sure, but from what I do know, online games sites aren't all rolling in cash.

So I ask again, all the same questions that are in the article, one of the first I wrote for this blog. Where to now? 

Ads, AdBlocker, and Sustaining Content Providers

Recently Ars Technica presented 'their side' of the story regarding free websites and ads. Of course, we all know that creating and hosting a website costs money, and most of us know that money doesn't grow on trees. Advertising on the website can generate a significant amount of revenue for a high-traffic site like Ars, but when those ads are not viewed, they won't.

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis.

I must admit, I was one of those people who thought something along those lines, if I really thought about it at all. The problem is almost as old as the internet itself: how do we get people to exchange money for content in an environment where end users have been trained to expect everything for free? Andrew Zolli over at Newsweek has some ideas on the matter and some speculation.

What I see is not so much a lack of willingness to pay for things, as Zolli points out. We--people like myself who are the second wave of the early adopters--are coming of age. We are online almost constantly. We may never have purchased a newspaper for ourselves (and if we have it was probably for a plane flight where we can't be online). But the important bit is that we're growing up and we actually are starting to have the money to buy things. Back when I first started surfing, I didn't, so I couldn't have paid for things I wanted, now I can.

What is holding us back, I think, from paying for online content is just how fiddly it would be. Imagine having to register your credit card with every news site or blog you visit. Firstly, many people wouldn't want to do that for safety's sake. But forget that for a moment, think instead of having to go through the form that would have to pop up between the link on your friend's Facebook page, and the content of the article you want to read. Wouldn't happen. But would you kick in $0.05 to read the article if it just ticked over in an account you maintained with your PayPal information? I think some people would.

If we can add a widget to Firefox that allows us to add links to Facebook, Digg or whatever else we use, surely there is a way to click one button to authorize a tiny exchange of cash directly to the publisher. The key is to create trusted links between the content provider and the plugin we use for our browser, which enables us to authorise the transaction without having to type long numbers, fill in forms, or really break the flow of link-to-story at all.

I name PayPal because its the one transaction system I know of that's large and trusted enough to support this kind of thing, but there could be others. The service should allocate a set amount of funds for this kind of thing, and warn you when you are approaching your 'cap' so you don't suddenly realise that you have spent $500 browsing through Gamasutra and didn't realise you were paying for every pageview. Alternative options would be a few dollars for unlimited access a month (pretty standard subscription). Pop $5 into your account, surf away at some reasonably small fee per story, and keep an eye on your balance in the plug-in's toolbar. Think of it like the E-tag systems modern toll roads use. Get a tag, drive through and it debits your account. Top up the account every so often, and off you go.

Overall, the system has to be EASY. iTunes and Steam prove that people are willing to pay (in significant numbers) for content that is available to be pirated illegally, why not for other kinds of content? The trick is, as especially iTunes demonstrates, make it easy.

Questions for further thought: How much would one user's read of the story be worth? How much are sites pulling in via the ads? Would the paid version eliminate the ads (keeping in mind there are ads on cable TV)? What about printing, or re-reading the same article?

R18+ and Managing Information

Original Post: July 22 2011

So this is a knee-jerk response post to the R18+ discussions at today's meeting of the Standing Committee of Attorneys General in Australia. While the reporting on this issue is likely to be all over the usual outlets (GameSpot.com.au, Kotaku.com.au, ABC's Tech site and it seems likely the Laura Parker will be featured on the major TV news broadcasts tonight), its also a little confusing. From what I can tell, despite the reports of NSW AG John Rau opposing the rating earlier in the week, he doesn't actually oppose it. Further, ABC's story calls this a delay, when in fact this meeting signposts the most progress since, well, ever on this issue.

So all around this is good news, though apparently South Australia consider a ten year old and 17 year old to be the same thing, such that any game rated MA15+ will be rebadged with the R18+ stickers before being sold. Bizarre. As someone deep in my Twitter feed said, this only deepens the gulf between ultra-childish and ultra-adults only. Its a deep conception of games, that they are either entirely juvenile, or entirely pornographic with no middle ground whatsoever.

Still, the most disturbing thing I heard flew a little below the radar, regarding a proposal by Rau to make Facebook an 18+ website... somehow. Of course he didn't go into details, but rather gave anecdotal evidence of a mother who was concerned about the slutty pictures her 13 year old daughter was posting on the site. Having discovered them, the mother found that she could not force Facebook to take them down. So this is why Australia should prevent all children in the country from using the single most widely accessed website in the history of the internet, because one woman is a terrible mother. Not only can she not keep enough of an eye on her own offspring to stop her from taking, then posting the pictures, but she is unable to sit down with her, explain the situation, and have the daughter take the pictures down herself? I'm sorry but I call bullshit.

This is obvious avoidance of parental responsibility. Out of the hundreds of millions of users of Facebook, some percentage are going to get themselves into trouble. That can't mean a government needs try to legislate this fact into non-existence. Rau trotted out the same old "Parents can't be around their kids 24/7 to watch what they do. Gee whiz kids these days are so clever," argument that is so prevalent in these kinds of discussions. But this is not a new thing. Parents have never been able to do this, why are we suddenly making laws about it in the case of new-ish media? I mean, any parent who doesn't realise their kids are a little different at school or in that God-forsaken space between school and home is delusional. Of course the difference in some kids is greater than in others, but there aren't any laws against this. Where and when did today's adults learn to swear or talk about sex and drugs and whatever else? Around the kitchen table? I think not.

At one point, I heard the phrase "Managing the flow of information through the internet." They still don't get it. They don't get the internet and they don't get liberal democracy.

Won’t Somebody Think Of The Children? So I Don’t Have To…

Original Post: June 28 2011 (Kotaku AU)

Early this morning the United States Supreme Court finally judged that Video Games were a form of speech, therefore deserving of protection under the First Amendment. In Australia, video games, or any form of media for that matter, are not granted the same rights. Adam Ruch, as an American living in Australia, can’t understand why and, in this compelling piece, discusses the issues with censorship in this country.

Won’t Somebody Think Of The Children? So I Don’t Have To…

The US Supreme Court has ruled that videogames are like other forms of media in that they express ideas and are therefore deserving of the same protection under the First Amendment. Specifically this ruling was made in response to a California State proposal that would ban the sale of ‘ultra-violent’ videogames to minors. This situation is almost a perfect inverse to the what we now face in Australia, and may help us to understand our own circumstances better.

First a criminally broad background discussion of the American Constitution, which is a wonderfully idealistic document that has influenced every aspect of American government for over two hundred years.

Generally, the spirit of the Founding Fathers was one of individual liberty, enshrining the rights of men to live their lives largely unencumbered by oppressive government. The government was there to provide for the society, but a society made up of individuals with their own capacity to make decisions and duty to accept responsibility for their actions. The idealism boiled down to many practical rights, such as the right to bear arms as to facilitate the raising of a powerful militia to oppose the national military, should the need arise. The right to privacy, including requiring the government’s agents to secure a warrant, through the judicial system, to prevent unreasonable searches of a man’s home. The right to free religion. And finally the right to freedom of expression, to prevent the government from silencing dissent. The earliest Americans experienced a need for all of these things, under the rule of the British monarchy, which led to the founding of the United States in the first place.

I have lived in Australia for almost 15 years, and am an Australian citizen, but I was born in the United States. I have had the American sense of individuality engrained in me right through my childhood and increasingly supported by rational decisions into my adult life. Notions of personal freedom coming at the cost of personal accountability are second-nature to me. I believe it is absolutely the right of each person to make his or her own decision, with the knowledge that decisions have consequences that one cannot shirk. From this perspective it is difficult for me to fathom the reasoning behind a government mandating what I can and cannot put in my PlayStation 3. If anything, living in a country that was not founded on this principle has caused it to become stronger within me.

In Australia, personal rights are much weaker than in the US. There is no precise equivalent to the Bill of Rights for Australian citizens, for example. There is a provision for free speech in the Australian constitution, but it only applies to political speech (perhaps explaining the idiotic performances in parliamentary question time). As a result, the government has always had the power to regulate artistic expression, legally. So, here we have a National Classification Scheme, which is a piece of legislation that brings the full weight of the punitive justice system to bear on infringements.

Historically the earliest incarnation of the Classifications Board was in a single agent known as the Chief Censor, who was part of the Customs Department. He, and his subordinates, literally checked books and reels of film as they entered the country for obscene content. Their aim was to protect the morality of Australian society from the evils of the outside world. Now, our classifications mostly revolve around the protection of children, and so the sale of many types of media to minors is an offence. Yet this notion of preserving the overall purity of Australian society remains in the legal ability of the government to expunge certain content from the country entirely.

Of course the United States has a range of classification schemes as well, but they are not legally enforceable. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) are industry sponsored bodies that work to satisfy the community’s desire to protect children from material that may be difficult for them to manage. Whether the film, for example, is very violent, sexy, full of obscene language, or even simply scary, the MPAA will weigh these factors against their standards, and make a recommendation for rating. In effect, the MPAA or ESRB work very much the same way as our own NCS, only they cannot make arrests if a person doesn’t follow the rating, as they are only guidelines. They do not attempt to control citizens, only to advise them.

The American system rests on that assumption that people are free to make their own decisions, because they are ultimately responsible for themselves. Further, parents are responsible for raising their own children. The opponents of an R18+ rating here in Australia show surprising contempt for the ability of parents to act as such, especially considering that some of the loudest voices come from family and parenting groups such as the Australian Council for Children and the Media. In the ACCM submission to the SCAG consultation in 2010, the group claims that the “present sale and hire system prohibitions are not effective in preventing access by minors.” They also respond by rewriting one of the questions regarding the potential R18+ game rating from a suggestive to a declarative. The question read: “Is it difficult for parents to enforce age restrictions for computer games?” In the space for response the ACCM wrote: “This question should read ‘It is difficult for parents…’” (Italics in ACCM source)

This group, more than others, also claims widespread illiteracy in the NCS, and that an R18+ rating would only confuse the issue, where “the message that an R18+ category might send is unnecessary if such games were Refused Classification.” Time and again they demonstrate a preference for governmental censorship over the expectation of parental vigilance and decision-making, as well as completely ignoring the right of adults stated in the NCS code to consume what media they want.

Australian parents are, according to the R18+ opponents, so inept that it is literally inevitable that, should adults-only games be allowed to exist in this country, children will get their hands on them, they will be mentally and emotionally damaged by the content, and in sufficient numbers that the problem warrants a federal law banning them more strictly than alcohol, cigarettes or operating an automobile.

The ruling of the Supreme Court this week takes an astonishingly different position, particularly Judge Scalia’s opinion. His opinion could be used as a point-by-point counter to the arguments presented from the anti-R18+ camp over the past … aeon:

Firstly he refutes the assertion that because of interactivity, videogames should be considered specially apart from other media, which is the fundamental reason that the R18+ rating wasn’t included in the Australian NCS in the first place. Had Scalia been part of the Classifications Board in the 1990s, this may never have been a problem for us.

“Crudely violent video games, tawdry TV shows, and cheap novels and magazines are no less forms of speech than The Divine Comedy, and restrictions upon them must survive strict scrutiny-a question to which we devote our attention in Part III, infra. Even if we can see in them ‘nothing of any possible value to society… they are as much entitled to the protection of free speech as the best of literature,’” says Scalia.

Second, he refutes the science that is always trotted out to demonstrate that any time a child plays a violent videogame, they are made more violent: “California relies primarily on the research of Dr Craig Anderson and a few other research psychologists whose studies purport to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children. These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason: They do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively (which would at least be a beginning). Instead, ‘[n] early all of the research is based on correlation, not evidence of causation, and most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology.’” I cannot actually explain why this point has been so difficult to make in the Australian debate. Those who use this research, time and again, to support their ideological position simply refuse to abide by the logic, rather than opinion, expressed here by Scalia.

Finally, the most basic point for me is the government’s role in all of this in the first place. Is it not the parents’ place to act as parent to our children? Scalia says: “While some of the legislation’s effect may indeed be in support of what some parents of the restricted children actually want, its entire effect is only in support of what the State thinks parents ought to want. This is not the narrow tailoring to “assisting parents” that restriction of First Amendment rights require.”

Here, he clearly states that it is not the government’s place to determine for its citizens what constitutes appropriate or inappropriate media. Some parents may indeed feel their children should not be exposed to certain videogames, as is their absolute right. But do they need a federal law to ensure this happens? In Australia, only the unsupported claim that children will access whatever media they want justifies our law. And what of the parents who do not feel their children need to be restricted from this media? This Californian proposal would restrict them from making their own choice, so effectively the pro-restriction parents are acting as guardians for all American children—as the NCS currently acts not only for Australian children, but Australian adults as well.

Surely here in Australia, we can see the sense in this decision. Surely Australians are not more primitive beings than our American counterparts that we cannot parent our own children, nor discern gameplay from reality. Surely there is some merit in a Supreme Court ruling that the science of Anderson et al. is not the last word on media effects. Surely the fact that the MPAA and ESRB have emerged in a country where this is no legislated requirement for classification demonstrates that a community can work together with industry to maintain a civilised society. Is Australia less able to do the same? Our government certainly seems to think so.