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.