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THE SEARCH FOR THE PERFECT COMBAT ARENA #01 Also in this issue: How Noir Is Noire World War II Monopoly The Heist Indie Darlings Videogame Board Games Gaming Science House Rules

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002 _ WELCOME

003

WELCOME TO CONTINUE T

here’s a fundamental truth to the world of gaming that often gets lost in the noise generated by the 24/7 games media: every game has an audience. From the biggest first-person shooter or celebrity-endorsed sports title, to the nichiest of genre fillers.

For every devotee of Call of Duty, there’s an equally enthusiastic player of European Truck Simulator. For every Level 60 Tauren raiding in World of Warcraft, there’s a soccer mom playing Farmville on Facebook. The basic reality is that there are more ‘gamers’ in the world today than at any point in history and games are no longer confined to a teenager’s bedroom.

From a $1m Starcraft tournament to a regular family board game night, the very notion of playing games has emerged from the hobbyist’s closet and is wearing its colours proudly. A sort of Game Pride movement, if you will.

We created Continue to act as a celebration of gaming’s new-found freedom and widespread acceptance. Hence our focus is on bringing you interesting features from across the entire gaming spectrum, rather than a catalogue of reviews and biased opinions. We think you’re clever enough to make your own minds up as to whether you like something or not.

As well as the best in feature articles, we have experts in what we’ve termed ‘the gaming sciences’ giving their unique insights into the state of game creation today. Meanwhile, our news section provides a look back over the past few months of gaming, alongside more in-depth reporting from some of the best journalists in the business, giving us a chance to reflect and see what we’ve learnt.

That’s us in a nutshell. A regular celebration of games, gamers and our gaming lifestyles.

We hope you enjoy it and will want to join us for issues two, three and beyond. Naturally we welcome any feedback you’d like to offer – thoughts on the magazine as a whole, discussions on the themes raised by the content, even ideas for the future.

You can find us on Facebook (search for ‘Continue’), on Twitter (@Continuemag) or you can send an email to info@continuemag.com. This is just the start for Continue. If you like what you see here, help us to spread the word and together we’ll be able to spread the word of gaming far and wide. Just as it’s always deserved.

PAUL PRESLEY, EDITOR paul@continuemag.com

004 _ WELCOME

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50 64 96

30 72 28

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CONTENTS ISSUE #01

NEWS 008 Call of Duty XP 010 rpgKids 014 BoardGameCamp 018 James St. Laurent 020 Star Wars Galaxies 024 Merchant of Venus 028 Gourmet Gaming 030 D&D 034 IOGraph

OPINIONS 038 040 042 044

Richard Cobbett Dan Marshall House Rules Gaming Science

FEATURES 050 054 064 072 088 096

Pixels and Shadows The Perfect Battlefield War Games Indie Darlings Bits and Pieces The Heist

Editor Paul Presley • Art Editor Matt Dettmar • Production Editor Miwa Aoki

Contributors Emma Boyes, David Brown, Richard Cobbett, Paul Dean, Chris Donlan, John Dower, Michael Fox, monyo publishing Dan Griliopoulos, Duncan Harris, Vince Keenan, Mitu Khandaker, Craig Lager, Bernd Lehahn, Dan Marshall, Daniel Ness, Will Porter, Debbie Timmins Eternal Thanks To Jamie Malcolm, Enrique Bertran, Stronghold Games, Daniella Zelli, Egosoft, The Film Noir Foundation, EA/DICE, Rockstar Games Continue Magazine is published quarterly by Monyo Publishing Ltd. No part of this magazine may be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in whole or in part, without prior written permission of the publishers. Continue magazine cannot be held liable for errors or omissions, or be held responsible for unsolicited submissions. All rights reserved. All content © 2012 Monyo Publishing Ltd. www.monyopublishing.com

Illustration Š2011 Duncan Harris www.deadendthrills.com

CALL OF DUTY 4: MODERN WARFARE MAP NAME: CRASH YEAR OF RELEASE: 2007

008 _ NEWS

ANSWERING THE CALL Activision’s long-running battle for hearts and minds becomes flesh and blood

BY WILL PORTER

Photograph ©2011 Rick Kim

T

he internet, it seems, is not enough. You can build vast online communities, but for a focal point – and the opportunity to show off a little – there’s nothing quite like meeting up in the flesh. Blizzard has BlizzCon, id has QuakeCon and, as of this year, Activision stamped a military boot on an arid Californian air-strip to kick-start Call of Duty XP. The fast food outlet built to look like Modern Warfare 2’s Burger Town, the paintballing in a recreation of Scrapyard and the Juggernaut Sumo wrestling were remarkable fan service – but what else does XP tell us about the state of gaming’s most monolithic franchise? First and foremost, for its big announcements Call of Duty no longer has to rub shoulders with other (lesser?) games. It doesn’t need to make a big splash at E3 or Gamescom; like Blizzard it has the numbers to eschew the usual treadmill. COD’s Creative Strategist Robert Bowling will tot up the air-miles showing the game off, for sure, but COD’s dominance means that it can rely on the world’s media to appear at its beck and call for its marketing milestones.

If, that is, the live-streamed announcements don’t ultimately make them redundant...

For a journalist attending XP there is a two-pronged assault on the sensibilities. The first is the strangely

predictable one: being squirrelled away in a VIP area where you can watch Activision CEO Bobby Kotick engage in polite banter with Teri Hatcher while crowds of beautiful LA models cling to the walls. The second, oddly enough, is in the reaction to game itself – the sheer passion that its aficionados hold for it.

It’s easy to sneer at a market-leader, and with all its daft bluster Call of Duty has been remiss in providing its critics with ammunition, but when stood in a crowd of hooting fans who

clearly feel a huge degree of privilege for attending you lose all your cynicism. Call of Duty is so routinely accused of being built without a heart that you forget its players aren’t automatons, but very real and very passionate gamers. XP underlines this more fervently than ever.

For Activision, however, despite the grass roots fervour, the role of XP must also be about pushing Call of Duty further away from being marked out purely and simply as ‘a game’. It’s so ingrained in

009

OCTOBER

NEWS STREAM OCTOBER SATURDAY 1ST

●●According to figures released by a combination of UKIE/Chart-Track and Intent Media, game sales brought in a rather large £27.7 million in the United Kingdom alone last week, mostly thanks to the release of Gears of War 3 and F1 2011. ●●Cambridge Games Factory launches the Glory To Rome Beautification Project on Kickstarter. It ends up raising over US$73,000, over $50,000 more than its target.

MONDAY 3RD

●●Days of Wonder reveal Small World Tunnels, a free expansion that allows players to link the original game to the Underground version. It’ll only initially be available to visitors to Essen, then passed to game stores worldwide later in 2011.

TUESDAY 4TH

CALL OF DUTY IS SO ROUTINELY ACCUSED OF BEING BUILT WITHOUT A HEART THAT YOU FORGET ITS PLAYERS AREN’T AUTOMATONS

●●A more iconic gaming character than Lara Croft you’ll be unlikely to find, so Square Enix is celebrating her 15th(!) birthday with a showcase of artwork themed around her latest look. The first piece released to the public was by Andy Park, the original Tomb Raider comic book artist.

●●Meanwhile, Lara’s PS3 ‘successor’, Nathan Drake, sees his last outing, Uncharted 2, air as a sixteen-part TV series on Japan’s TV Tokyo network.

Each of the sixteen segments consists of four minutes of game footage edited for dramatic purposes, and runs until October 27th.

WEDNESDAY 5TH entertainment culture that it goes beyond everything else on the shelves and it needs ceremonies and shrines to demark it as such. It needs Kanye West to sing there and for Hollywood to strut the red carpet because it desperately wants to maintain the Call of Duty brand’s position of dominance within the everyday lives of millions. The whole COD phenomenon rests on more than just the quality of the games themselves.

Then again, it’s the physical yearly product that the empire is founded

upon. Given a sudden drop in the quality of Call of Duty series then all this could pass, and XP would become nothing but the Emperor’s New Clothes. History would suggest that no gaming franchise can assert a permanent dominance, so with this year’s XP event and the Elite social network we can see Activision constructing barricades, securing foundations and renovating the living quarters of their fanbase deep within Fortress Call of Duty. Their victory is assured, but it might not be final.

●●Hilmar Pétursson, CEO of CCP, developers of long-serving spaceship-based MMO, EVE Online, pens a heartfelt letter of regret and self-discovery following a major degree of player upset (not to mention exodus). This follows, amongst other things, the introduction of microtransactions in the still subscription-based game. ●●EA Sports celebrates the most successful launch in its history as FIFA 12 sells more than 3.2 million copies in less than one week.

●●Apple’s Steve Jobs passes away aged 56. His vision for mobile and tablet devices has forever changed the landscape of gaming.

010 _ NEWS

CHILD’S PLAY

The future of gaming relies on hooking the younger generations early on. One veteran D&D player has found a way to bring the classic hobby to a much younger crowd

BY PAUL PRESLEY

A

s Wizards of the Coast begins work reshaping the future of Dungeons & Dragons (see page 24), one way to ensure a bright tomorrow for tabletop RPGs is to find ways to get the kids of today rolling dice. One gaming father has taken it upon himself to create a rules system aimed at a younger crowd. Enrique Bertran (‘NewbieDM’ to online D&D fans everywhere) is the creator of rpgKids, an RPG proving as much of a hit with its pre-teen audience as with their gamer parents.

How did rpgKids begin? rpgKids started as a way to get my four year old daughter playing Dungeons & Dragons with me. My friends would come to the house and she expressed interest in what we were doing. She loved looking at the minis, the dice, the maps, and wanted to play with me, but I knew that D&D was way too complex for her to grasp, so I had the idea of creating a simple little dice game that emulated D&D and provided her with a toned-down experience. I wrote up the rules

and played it with her a few times, tweaking things here or there until it was a workable game for us. It really worked for her, and helped her out with her mathmatics as well, so it was a double win.

Was there nothing like this already out there?

There are games that are definitely aimed at kids, I’m not sure if there is a fantasy game like D&D out there for kids her age and in the style of rpgKids. I know there are plenty of

011

OCTOBER

THURSDAY 6TH

●●Games Workshop announce another limited release after 2009’s Space Hulk. Dreadfleet, a two player naval battle game of pirates against an undead navy, sells out worldwide within days.

FRIDAY 7TH

●●The target of much rage, scoffing and shaking of heads, Bethesda and Zenimax have been very unpopular for pursuing a legal trademark with Mojang over the use of the word Scrolls in the latter’s new title. They do claim, though, that “nobody here enjoys” the legal battle.

SATURDAY 8TH

●●A curious bit of news from IO Interactive, with Hitman Absolution producer Hakam Abrak stating the assassination simulator would have a “hardcore difficulty” setting for those who wanted to focus on stealth, indicating a more action-oriented direction for the game. ●●Lorien Green, director of board gaming documentary Going Cardboard, releases the latest trailer for the film. The DVD will come with a Reiner Knizia game, Shoot-Out.

SUNDAY 9TH story-based games and such, but I’m not so sure about fantasy-themed RPGs for kids her age.

How much of the game’s design has been originated by your childrens’ needs and how much from what works in existing games then adapted to fit?

My daughter has a hand in crafting the stories we tell when we play, and some of the plots in the adventures I’ve released have come from her imagination, not mine. rpgKids is meant to be played with a playful and simple tone, for example, the adventures I’ve released deal with a wizard turning people into frogs, or goblins kidnapping a unicorn from the fairy forest. It’s all very light and simple. I did not play any other RPG adventure with my kids, because I

don’t want to expose them to the more mature stuff out there, they aren’t there yet mentally for that. My kids are four and almost seven.

It often seems we underestimate just how smart and intuitive kids can be with game rules. Had you found that your initial designs had fallen into the old trap of ‘over-simplification’?

Mechanically, I feel rpgKids captures the right tone for the age it aims for.

Keep in mind that my daughter was only four when I first wrote it, so I had to keep things easy. For example, the game uses a 12-sided die because she couldn’t really count past 15 at the time, so a 12-sided die worked better. The adventures are limited to about four encounters because her attention span just wasn’t there

●●RAGE has been plagued by technical issues since it was released on the PC, but id Software has done the decent thing and listened to the plaintive wailing of the community, releasing a patch to deal with the (many) hardware issues.

MONDAY 10TH

●●Team Ninja is already making bold plans for its contributions to the Wii U. It claims to be “interested in pushing [Wii U] as hard as it can” and reiterating a desire to get Ninja Gaiden 3 onto the new system.

TUESDAY 11TH

●●Mass Effect has always been an offline enterprise, but no longer as the third in the series will feature the ‘Galaxy at War’ system. Four-way co-op will have an impact on the main campaign, with BioWare insisting its existence won’t diminish the single player experience. ●●THQ confirms that Brock Lesnar, one of wrestling’s ‘big name’ stars so beloved of founder Vince McMahon, will be in WWE ‘12.

012 _ NEWS

“IT’S GIVEN ME A WINDOW INTO THE CREATIVITY INSIDE MY KID. SHE CREATES STORIES I NEVER THOUGHT SHE COULD DO”

for longer games. So I didn’t really push the complexity at first, because I was pretty sure of what she could handle at the time. Not all kids are equal though, and perhaps the game might seem too simple for others, but I primarily wrote the game for her, so I stand by it. Based on feedback, I think I hit the right note though.

What was the defining moment for you, the moment when it all suddenly ‘clicked’?

When she asked me to play again.

Really, I knew I had something special for us. And again when I started getting feedback on the blog about the free version I had released to the public. It seemed to work.

How different are you finding the experience of gaming with kids from your older groups?

It’s great because it really gave me a window to the creativity inside my kid.

She creates stories and even histories about her character that I never thought she could do. You won’t hear me say anything negative about kids and gaming. I find it to be a positive experience all around for them.

I once tried a simplified version of D&D with my daughter and it rapidly went from structured

rules and dice rolling to just using the minis and maps to tell a rambling, unstructured adventure story. How much of rpgKids acts an extension of a child’s natural ‘imagination play’ versus playing a definite ‘game’ with rules?

You’d be surprised how well kids can follow simple rules. All games have rules, whether it’s playground hide and seek or rpgKids, kids get the concept of structured play. By the time kids are the age for rpgKids, school is a part of their life, and that brings structure and rules with it. Imagination play certainly falls into it, and the story may take off in unexpected directions, but then that’s always the case with D&D no matter who is playing!

What was it about RPGs that first drew you in?

I started playing D&D in high school.

I want to say it was around 1988 or so.

I wasn’t one of the kids who started with the ‘Red Box’, although I did own one. I never really understood exactly how the game was played, so I sort of ignored that box a little bit. But when the bug hit me in High School with a good DM, I was hooked for life! I remember really enjoying getting into character and trying out my acting

chops through D&D. I’ve always had fun playing dwarves, and that has sort of been a constant through my years of gaming. I think RPGs have a way to unleash many different aspects of creativity, it doesn’t matter if you are the player or the DM. How much has your gaming experience changed over the years you’ve been playing?

It really hasn’t changed much except for the fact that now a whole new world has opened up through online gaming. So, for example, I have a D&D group I play with via Skype and a virtual tabletop, so not having players locally doesn’t really mean anything anymore. As far as here at home, I play with mostly the same folks I’ve been playing with my entire gaming career, so not many changes.

Reception to the game has been almost universally positive, and recent expansions would indicate there’s room to grow.

How large can you see rpgKids becoming for you and where would you like to see it go?

I see rpgKids as an evergreen game that can be around as long as there are gamers having kids. I wouldn’t really try to fix something that isn’t broken by changing rules or expanding it

013

There is still something of a prevailing notion in the wider world that these ‘games are just for kids’ as it is, and only those of us that grew up with things like D&D are really in to them today. How are you positioning rpgKids towards parents who have no personal gaming experiences?

I don’t know if that’s the audience I’m reaching. Most (if not all) of the people who read my blog do so

because of D&D and RPGs. I can’t really say I’m advertising to nongamers, although if I could I’d tell them that it’s a fantastic creative exercise to try out with your kids.

Tabletop gaming is a fun social activity, and who better to share it with than with your children?

How about to that (thankfully shrinking) crowd that still sees these types of things as unhealthy influences on children? Has there been much in the way of backlash?

I read on a message board some negative comments regarding the fact that there are battles in rpgKids.

And while that’s true, I try to keep the terms used in the game fairly innocent. For example, nobody dies, they are simply ‘hurt’ or ‘knockedout’. There is ‘medicine’ available in treasure chests everywhere to make characters healthy, and the tone and flavour is child-friendly. As far as backlash, I haven’t really been exposed to any thankfully, it’s been a pretty positive experience.

The marvel that is rpgKids can be found over at newbiedm.com/rpgkids while musings about all things RPG can be had by NewbieDM himself via his Twitter feed @newbiedm.

OCTOBER

too much. If you feel that your kid has outgrown it, great, move to an RPG published by the professionals in the industry who cater to an older audience. My idea is to keep releasing adventures every so often to add to the library, since those are fun to write, and people like having them available.

I’ve toyed with the idea of converting rpgKids to other genres, like space opera or super heroes, but it’s so easy to do using the core rules that I don’t know if it’s worth it. Perhaps a blog post at newbiedm.com would suffice.

I am really happy with the response to the game, it has sold well, people like it, and it fills a niche that the pros decided not to bother with. As long as people want to game with kids, I’m happy to give them a cheap and fun option to do so.

WEDNESDAY 12TH

●●Repos confirm that a new wonder for its award winning 7 Wonders will be available at Essen. The Catan Wonder celebrates the 15th Anniversary of the release of The Settlers of Catan.

All proceeds will go to German charity Aktion Deutschland Hilft.

THURSDAY 13TH

●●Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley is having to face the press again with the topic of hacking on the agenda once more. Another attack on Sony’s networks occurred recently, but Smedley is denying it was carried out using data harvested from April’s PSN debacle.

FRIDAY 14TH

●●Antiquity, the hard to find (and very expensive) Splotter Spellen game in which players set their own victory conditions, is to be reprinted and will be available at Essen 2011. ●●Amazingly named mission design director on Assassin’s Creed Revelations, Falco Poiker, has said he doesn’t mind an annual release schedule, as while very stressful, he believes it gives the team focus and doesn’t allow for design indecision.

SATURDAY 15TH

●●The Independent Game Developers Association (TIGA) is warning of a potential luring of talent from Britain to Eire, mainly because of the size of the Irish administration allowing for easier legislation.

SUNDAY 16TH

●●New Zealander Nigel Richards becomes the first person ever to win the World Scrabble Championship for a second time. His highest value word is a 95-point play: ‘omnified’.

TUESDAY 18TH

“TABLETOP GAMING IS A FUN SOCIAL ACTIVITY, AND WHO BETTER TO SHARE IT WITH THAN WITH YOUR CHILDREN?”

●●Xbox Live has come under threat from the forces of techno-evil.

Microsoft has confirmed that a ”limited number” of accounts have been accessed by outside sources, but denies the service as a whole has been compromised.

THURSDAY 20TH

●●Rumours abound that Sony Pictures has signed a deal with Ubisoft to bring the Assassin’s Creed series to the big screen.

(cont.)

014 _ NEWS

TALKING A GOOD GAME Developers, theorists and players gather at BoardGameCamp to talk, design and, of course, play games

BY DEBBIE TIMMINS

T

he UK headquarters of eBay, PayPal and Gumtree is an unassuming white terraced building that overlooks the Richmond area of the Thames. On a recent sunny weekend it was filled with the sounds of scissors snipping away at cardboard and dice clattering across tables. What for? BoardGameCamp, an unconference-styled day dedicated to the pursuits of joy, happiness and tabletop gaming.

An un-conference? Yes, it’s rather like a conference, only not at all.

BoardGameCamp was the third in the UK GameCamp series of these attendee-led events. Attending one means you’re in for a day of deep thinking, of discussions and of debate.

Unconferences are open to anyone with an interest in the topic at hand – the only catch is that you must lead a session. On the far oaken wall of the main room was a matrix marked out in tape with times across the top row and room names along the side; this is The Grid. Scrawl some kind of topic on a scrap of paper, tack it to a grid space and voilà, you are now a seminar leader. Unconferences are not for the shy wallflower who wants to sit anonymously in the crowd.

That said, it’s an incredibly supportive environment. Martin Gaston attended GameCamp 2 to get some perspective on what budding games developers think of gaming.

“I saw one first thing in the morning chaired by somebody declaring their love of shmups [shoot-em-up video games]. While I think the girl giving the presentation was obviously nervous and had a hard time adeptly expressing her point, the actual core of the the presentation convinced me to go out and try some of the games she was talking about. Nothing else recommended that day had as much of an effect on me.” Discussion-led groups are very popular and an excellent way to pop your presenting cherry with little pain.

One of the challenges faced by the organisers of BoardGameCamp was breaking down the common perceptions. We spoke to ‘Idlemichael’ of the popular gaming podcast Joypod. “Most of the people I play with obviously love their games, but would never break out a copy of Thunderstone in a pub. Gaming in

real life is still seen as an incredibly geeky or boring pursuit – ask 99% of people about it and they’ll immediately think about a boring game of Monopoly played using the wrong rules on Christmas Day.” In addition to the discussions, BGC offered a library of almost a hundred games brought by the attendees.

Ranging from the gloriously silly Monty Python’s Fluxx to the intense Lovecraftian madness of Arkham Horror, gamers were spoilt for choice.

On the other side of the building was the third stream of the day: Game Hack. Confectionery giant Cadbury’s had teamed up with the BoardGameCamp organisers to sponsor a game design competition.

Teams were challenged to design a new type of game. The winning design will be printed on the back of this year’s Christmas selection boxes. The only catch? The paper, instructions

015

OCTOBER

and game pieces need to fit on a single sheet of paper. Idlemichael took part in the competition as well as the seminars: “There were a whole bunch of teams involved and we had four hours to come up with a working design – all of those were then judged by a panel. My team was a bunch of bloggers who’d never designed anything before, yet our concept was pretty well received and we ended up coming second. Nice that we beat some actual designers!”

Most of the attendees were there to meet other gamers that like to think about the concepts behind the games. Videogame developer Simon Roth travelled down from Cambridge to expand his horizons and look for inspiration. “I found several of the talks particularly interesting. One of which was about how to create better games for kids (at that time we were just finishing off Kinectimals).

I spent a lot of time discussing with James Wallis about how children’s games are based on chance rather than planning or skill, but often the players are unable to distinguish this which makes the fail state difficult to understand and upsets the player.

Also how the fail state can become enjoyable even for the loser... for example in Jenga.”

It’s not all paper, pieces and electronics, however. The most recent GameCamp featured a zombie-

●●Spiel 2011 begins; the world’s largest board games show will last for four days and see over 150,000 people walk through the doors. Panic Station

by Stronghold Games is the first game to sell out completely.

SATURDAY 22ND

●●BlizzCon 2011, the two-day celebration of all things Blizzard, comes to a show-stopping end with the Foo Fighters performing live for the assembled masses.

MONDAY 24TH

themed LARP set in the unoccupied corridors of London Southbank University. Grant Howitt and Mary Hamilton lugged as many NERF guns as they could carry across London and took over an entire floor of the building. “We recruited volunteers to act as zombies and sent terrified Gamecampees into their midst,” Howitt told us. “The standout moment for me was when one guy – having run out of ammo – ran out of the simulation, up two flights of stairs, and stole a fully-loaded pump-action from the ref room. He then returned to the floor and shot everything to death. That’s the sort of awesome cheating we encourage.”

The GameCamp committee are hard at work on future events, with another BoardGameCamp planned for 2012.

Find out more at gamecamp.org.

●●Insomniac Games, developer of Rachet & Clank and the Resistance series, has filed trademarks for two titles: Galaxy Beasts and Space Beasts.

Whether these are two separate games, two different names for one title, or part of its newly-opened ‘Click’ Facebook games development division, is as yet unknown.

TUESDAY 25TH

●●Rockstar puts up a holding page for Grand Theft Auto V showing little more than a logo. As a result, the entire internet goes into meltdown in a matter of minutes. ●●WizKids reveal a new addition to its HeroClix range: Star Trek Tactics.

Available from February next year, the initial run will include Federation and Klingon ships from both the original series and TNG.

WEDNESDAY 26TH

●●Continuing the Merchant of Venus ownership kerfuffle (see left), Wizards of the Coast registers the game name with the US Patent and Trademark Office, adding more confusion to the already confused mix.

FRIDAY 28TH

●●Paizo steps up its Pathfinder RPG with the release of the first Beginner Box, a slightly simplified version of the full game to entice new players into the D&D 3.5-inspired world.

MONDAY 31ST

●●Valve has confirmed that CounterStrike: Global Offensive will miss its planned open beta, which was supposed to happen this month.

Chet Faliszek states the decision was taken because of feedback from players in the closed testing process.

Illustration Š2011 Duncan Harris www.deadendthrills.com

COUNTER-STRIKE: SOURCE MAP NAME: DE_DUST YEAR OF RELEASE: 2004

018 _ NEWS

OBITUARY JAMES ST. LAURENT 1940-2011 Influential, but reclusive designer passes away as his seminal work undergoes a revamp

BY MICHAEL FOX

S

ome designers get to make a career out of their passion; creating games and managing to pay the bills is a dream that many people in the industry would kill for.

Others get to make games on the side, working a job and putting together these things that they love in their spare time. Yet more perhaps manage to make one single game; maybe it’ll be good, maybe it won’t, then they fade back into the shadows.

One of these people was James St. Laurent. Born in Michigan, his life was one of business, mainly working in the financial sector, but St. Laurent ended up as one of the lucky ones. Not only did he design a game that was published – he designed something that was actually good. So good, in fact, that many people consider his creation a ‘grail’ game, a rare and desirable release.

The name of the game is Crude.

Originally published back in 1974, players act as CEOs of large energy corporations seeking new oil fields to drill.

This oil can then be refined and sold on for a profit, but that’s not all the game offers.

A ‘Eurogame’ before the phrase even existed, Crude effortlessly simulates a market that expands and contracts, forcing players to focus on countless different areas to not only keep themselves afloat but to thrive. Everything from drilling and pumping the crude oil that gives the game its name to distribution and selling to huge foreign markets and lowly consumers is covered in its complex but still entertaining rules. It comes as no surprise that St. Laurent had a career in money; the game is tight, an intricate web of connections where every single action has a significant consequence.

He published the game himself under the St. Laurent Games brand – the only game he ever produced – and

seemingly slipped away into obscurity.

As word about this incredible game spread throughout the years though, more and more people sought their own copies to no avail. It was a limited print-run and Crude was scarce to begin with... and here’s where the story takes a curious turn.

Hexagames, a German company, stepped in and saw that there was a demand for Crude and decided to reprint the game without asking St. Laurent’s permission. This unauthorised version was released under the name McMulti and – despite it being completely illegal – it had to be said that the production quality was incredible. The game came with hundreds of small plastic oil rigs,

NOVEMBER 019

NEWS STREAM NOVEMBER TUESDAY 1ST

●●National Game Design Month (NaGaDeMon) kicks off, in which gamers are asked to design a new game from original concept to fully functional prototype in thirty days.

●●At the close of its opening week, EA announces sales of over five million units for Battlefield 3, making it the company’s fastest-selling title ever.

WEDNESDAY 2ND

gas stations, even tiny petrol pumps.

However, it did leave a bad taste in the mouth. St. Laurent only discovered that Hexagames had remade his game when it was too late; the company went bankrupt before he could claim his rightful share of any profits.

Back he went into the shadows, yet both versions of the game continued to be popular amongst players, many even going so far to create their own home-made versions. That was until US company Stronghold Games decided that it wanted to release the game itself – this time entirely legally. The only problem was finding the now vanished St. Laurent. Hexagames representatives insisted that they had spent time and money trying to hunt him down, but all they needed to have done was look at the back page of the Crude rule book.

As it was entirely self-published, St. Laurent had put his address in there should any gamers have any questions – and he hadn’t moved house in the thirty-seven intervening years.

The wheels were put in motion, contracts signed and production began on the new version, now officially called Crude: The Oil Game. St. Laurent had actually been tinkering with his original design on and off over the years and when Stronghold, a company known for lavishing care and attention on their

remakes, came knocking on his door, he already had plans to improve what many deemed a masterpiece of design.

According to Stronghold’s Kevin Nesbitt, he was overjoyed to get the opportunity to work on his game again. “He jumped in with both feet,” says Nesbitt, “I would make a development suggestion to him and he would respond the next day with pages of statistical tests that he had worked on the night before to test it.” Described as “cordial, inviting and very approachable”, St. Laurent seems to be one of those designers who make you think ‘What If..?’ What if he got the chance to create not just a single game, but got to spread his developmental wings? What kind of things could he have come up with?

Sadly, we shall never know. James St. Laurent died on August 8, 2011. He was involved in the remake of Crude to the end, firing out ideas to make his game perfect. Though he never got to see the finished version of his masterpiece, Stronghold Games will complete his work and release the game in 2012.

“We’re proud to have known him for the short time that we did,” says Nesbitt.

“It’s our privilege to reintroduce James St. Laurent to the gaming public.”

Sometimes designers end up just making one game. Sometimes that one game is more than enough.

●●Ahead of the London Games Conference on November 10th, attendees vote the late Steve Jobs as the person who has most shaped the games industry, ahead of Gabe Newell and Shigeru Miyamoto.

THURSDAY 3RD

●●Developer Rovio reveals that its ubiquitous smartphone game Angry Birds has been downloaded more than half a billion times.

FRIDAY 4TH

●●A ‘leaked’ video showing footage from a cut-scene in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 hits the internet showing a family of tourists (including a little girl) being blown up by a terrorist truck in London.

Speculation is rife that the leak is an attempt to create faux outrage ahead of release, to top MW2’s infamous ‘No Russian’ airport massacre level. ●●Identity Games announces The Game Changer, an add-on for the iPad that allows for the attachment of interchangable game boards. The iPad can be anything from a dice roller to question master.

SUNDAY 6TH

●●Steam becomes the latest service to fall victim to hackers. It’s neither taken nor forced offline, but its forums are closed and Valve subsequently announces that the hack has compromised a customer database. Some users receive emails advertising a hacking website.

MONDAY 7TH

●●French media reports the theft of 6,000 copies of Modern Warfare 3, worth €400,000, from a van driving through the outskirts of Paris.

020 _ NEWS

THE END OF THE WORLDS The plug has finally been pulled on veteran MMO Star Wars Galaxies – and the way people acted provides an interesting insight into how we’d probably act if the world ended for real

BY EMMA BOYES

W

e’re fascinated by the apocalypse – perhaps it’s the whole grim austerity regime, ever present terrorist threat or loonies constantly giving us dates they believe we will cease to be, but it seems we can’t get enough of it.

Nuclear war is an ever popular choice for our destruction, but there are myriad other ways we could perish – a giant asteroid or wayward planet crashing into the earth for example, or a particularly virulent flu epidemic.

Global warming might cover most of our land mass with water. Aliens could launch a hostile takeover. Or, my personal favourite, the dead could become zombies with a taste for human flesh.

NOVEMBER 021

TUESDAY 8TH

●●Members of the World Gaming Executives network vote Baldur’s Gate, Bioware’s seminal late 90s roleplaying game, as their favourite title of all time. Older games dominate the list, with Diablo and The Curse of Monkey Island coming second and third respectively, while Starcraft, The Legend of Zelda and EverQuest also feature in the top ten.

WEDNESDAY 9TH

●●Activision states that Modern Warfare 3 has become “the largest retail release in Activision’s history and in the industry’s history”, initially announcing over 1.5 million sales on its day of release. Revised figures will show that the game sold 6.5 million units in the US and the UK alone.

THURSDAY 10TH

●●Crowd funding site Kickstarter.com announces that October saw nearly US $244,000 pledged on board game projects, five times the previous highest monthly total. ●●In a public post on Facebook, Origin founder Richard Garriott expresses his dismay at the direction that Ultima Online has taken. He mentions changes made by “the people who pushed me out of EA”, before hinting that he is working on a new, secret project.

FRIDAY 11TH

●●Further staggering game sales as Bethesda’s freeform RPG The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is released. By the end of the weekend it will have sold over 3.5 million units.

●●Parents Eric and Megan Kellermeyer name their new baby son Dovahkiin, meaning “Dragonborn”, and in doing so win a Skyrim competition created

by Bethesda that entitles them to free Bethesda games for life.

SATURDAY 12TH

●●The American Library Association holds its annual National Library Gaming Day where families are encouraged to play a wide range of games. Everything from RPGs to card games and video games are allowed. ●●Bethesda suggests that players who have bought Skyrim for the Xbox 360 do not start playing until a patch is released to address a graphics problem. This will be the first of several technical issues the game experiences across all platforms.

022 _ NEWS

Images courtesy of Kyranna, Boscohark and Jedigirl

It’s as though we’re obsessed with the end of days – but perhaps the real fascination is because it makes us ask the question: how would I act if it happened for real? They say that extreme circumstances are a true test of character and one of the ways of finding out what we’re truly made of. Would we stoically accept the inevitable, perhaps comforting others and remembering the good times? Or would we rage against the dying light?

What would you do? Where would you like to be?

I’ve just been logged out of Star Wars Galaxies for the last time and the way people acted in its virtual last moments struck me as very similar to how people would act in real life. After all, it’s a game that required a great deal of emotional investment to play – players built houses which became cities when their friends moved in around them. They furnished their houses, designing or buying everything from furniture to pictures for their walls. They spent years with their characters, slowly building them up to high levels. It’s been going for eight years and some people have played it almost every day. They owned pets, got married, drank in cantinas, made friends and had jobs.

When the news came that SWG was being shut down, people on the forums could be seen going through

the classic stages of grief. Right up until almost the very end, some were still battling with the first stage, denial, seemingly unable to believe that the lights were going to go out in the game world forever. Others had moved on to the final stages, accepting that it ‘was time’ and ‘every adventure has an end’.

‘Kyranna’, who had been playing since 2005, is philosophical about the end of the world: “I’m sad to see the game go, and, needless to say, I’m not thrilled to see my characters, their items, houses, ships and accomplishments (not to mention all those monthly subscriptions) gone forever. I’ve made quite a few great memories though, and I suppose

that’s all that really matters in the end. Galaxies was a great game, but nothing lasts forever. I have noticed that some people have had a difficult time moving on.”

People busied themselves making preparations, some taking on quests they had left unfinished, others completing buildings or focusing on winning battles for their faction.

While to outsiders this might seem ultimately pointless since it would all be destroyed shortly, to the people doing these things, they felt they gave them a sense of purpose and a reason to continue, rather than just logging out and giving up right there and then.

Many people talked about where they would like to be when they died – some people decided to slink off like a cat somewhere to quietly die alone in their houses or bunkers, while others sought out company, wanting to be with others, perhaps drowning their sorrows and (literally) drinking themselves to oblivion in a cantina or joining the ‘official’ social event.

The social event on the last day took place on the planet Tattooine, in something of a strange location – the remote Sarlacc Pit. To start, there was something of a party atmosphere, as players messed around with different silly costumes and did silly things.

NOVEMBER 023

Boscohark, who’d been playing for over seven years, says, “The end of the world was more upbeat than anticipated. I spent the last few hours on the Gorath server playing with our legendary band the Kreetles, as the night went on and more and more players heard we were playing and came to see us. We had our first full house in years and we played right until the end. No better way for an ‘Entertainer’ to go out.”

About an hour before the plug was going to be pulled, the mood changed.

People started to admit they were sad, some brave enough to say that they were crying real tears. Others comforted them, offering them virtual hugs and kisses. Many people thanked each other for the fun times and the memories. Others noted that “this sucks”. Some simply desperately whimpered, “I don’t want to die,” and “don’t let it end like this.”

Predictably, some chose to go out with hate. For a few of the last precious seconds, the chat window was filled with spam from angry young men shaking their fists at the ‘Gods’ of the virtual world, SOE and LucasArts, telling them they could do anatomically unpleasant things.

They were quickly silenced. Whether by being banned from the chat, or by being sent to meet their maker ahead of schedule, will never be known.

Others clearly weren’t going to let them sully their final moments.

Perhaps one of the most surprising things was the way people still clung to material things until the end – one player was pleading for someone to give him a much coveted helmet so he could die wearing it. Another begged the devs to materialise a favourite ship so they could feast their eyes on ‘that beautiful thing’ one last time.

Lots of people focused on the afterlife – secure, at least in the digital world, that there were plenty out there to choose from. The world is hardly short on MMOs. In real life, the thought of being able to continue in some form is a nice idea to cling to, but let’s face it, none of us really know for sure until we cross over that doorway for ourselves.

Abruptly, it was all over. There were so many messages scrolling through chat that I hadn’t seen the notification that the final minute was upon us. Too late now to think of something witty to say. It’s all over. A simple message told us the connection to the server had been lost. The end.

Then since it was only a game and now past midnight for many, most groggily got up from their computers, found themselves back in real life, and shuffled off to bed for a well-earned rest. Tomorrow, when they woke up, it would be a brand new day.

MONDAY 14TH

●●US TV network The Hub launches its new TV series Clue, a mystery series for kids based on the board game.

●●PETA claims that Mario is “pro-fur” because he wears the skin of a tanuki racoon dog in Super Mario 3D Land.

The announcement is accompanied by a “Super Tanooki Skin” parody Flash game. After Nintendo crafts a careful response, PETA responds that its own game was a joke, “a fun way to call attention to a serious issue.”

TUESDAY 15TH

●●Microsoft celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Xbox and states that, at present, a new Xbox Live user is signing up every two seconds.

WEDNESDAY 16TH

●●The annual Board Game Geek convention, BGG.Con, begins in Texas. People converge from all over the world for four days of gaming. ●●Sims creator Will Wright announces HiveMind, a game that turns a player’s personal data into a game.

FRIDAY 18TH

●●Furniture designer Geek Chic reveals its latest creations. The high point is The Locus, complete with 60” multitouch screen built into the tabletop that sells for US $8,500. ●●Version 1.0 of the sandbox game Minecraft is released. Although officially “complete”, it will continue to be developed. Even before the final version was released, sales during the alpha and beta stages have totalled 4.1 million copies.

SATURDAY 19TH

●●New Line Cinema says that it plans to bring the city-smashing arcade classic Rampage to the big screen.

SUNDAY 20TH

●●Celebrating its seventh birthday, World of Warcraft screens a new commercial. Previous ads have featured Mr. T and William Shatner.

This latest one stars Chuck Norris.

MONDAY 21ST

●●In Rhode Island, USA, the Major League Gaming Pro Circuit National Championships close. Winners take home over $600,000 in prize money from tournaments of League of Legends, Starcraft II and Halo: Reach.

024 _ NEWS

MERCHANT WARFARE A classic game finds itself the center of a twisting, turning tale more complex than its own set of rules

BY MICHAEL FOX

B

ack in 1988 a company called Avalon Hill was riding high.

After over thirty years in the business and the publication of a raft of what many gamers now consider classics, things were going well. Sure, there were some minor setbacks in the early years thanks to some poor management decisions but hard work combined with some excellent releases got the company back on a successful path.

One of these releases was Merchant of Venus. Not one of its biggest, admittedly, but certainly one of its most well-loved. Designed by Richard Hamblen (who also created the terrifyingly complex Magic Realm in the late seventies) players take on the roles of space merchants, travelling through star systems and uncovering new alien worlds to trade with.

Ships and weapons can be upgraded, spaceports and factories created... the game offered a freedom not often seen in games from the eighties.

Years passed. The game remained loved by those lucky enough to have a copy, but Avalon Hill fell on hard times. In the summer of 1998 the company was sold to Hasbro who, even now, use the AH name on games that it was never originally involved with such as Axis & Allies. Many of the games from Avalon Hill’s past were seemingly consigned to the dustbin of history... or so we thought.

Jump forward to Essen, Germany, October 2011. Stronghold Games is a relatively new company who has made a name for itself by reprinting long lost games with a level of care and attention that befits these classics

that deserve a second chance. On the Friday of the Spiel 2011 fair, Stronghold announces that it has been negotiating with Richard Hamblen and will be reprinting Merchant of Venus. Fans of the game are overjoyed; many who have been looking for it for years have turned to making their own versions, but can now own an official copy.

Another jump, not so far this time, just to the evening of that same Friday. Christian Petersen, founder of Fantasy Flight Games, comes to the Stronghold Games booth asking to speak to the company’s representatives. Stephen Buonocore and Kevin Nesbitt, the Managing Directors, are present and are informed that they can’t reprint Merchant of Venus; FFG has already

NOVEMBER 025

procured the license from Hasbro and is ready to print its version of the game within weeks, despite there having been no mention of its intent to do so previously.

This is actually an approach that Fantasy Flight does quite regularly, announcing games that are pretty much ready to go instead of leaving people hanging for a year or more after revealing its plans early like some companies. An information page goes up on the FFG website – complete with artwork – within hours of the discussion between the two companies’ owners. Both Stronghold and Fantasy Flight assure they bear the other party no ill will while also insisting that they are the true owners of the rights to produce the game.

The question is, of course, which of the two companies are actually in the right? It’s a murky answer. Tracing the lineage of who actually owns the rights to Merchant of Venus and other Avalon Hill games is a terrifying prospect for even the most proficent of lawyers – not that it’ll stop them, of course. The legal minefield of contracts and intellectual property law are tricky at the best of times, but when a company has been pushed from pillar to post like Avalon Hill has, things get even harder. Given that there’s also been a precedent set where ownership of some AH games have indeed reverted back to the original designer, the situation gets deeper still.

Neither Stronghold nor Fantasy Flight are in the wrong here, but someone along the line has made a major error and it’s either someone at Hasbro or Richard Hamblen himself.

As gamers, all we can hope for is that a suitable settlement is reached between the companies and the game does actually get released. There’s a possibility that it could get lost in an expensive legal battle and eventually thrown aside as being more trouble than it’s worth – and that’s not the outcome that anyone wants. Merchant of Venus is a game that deserves a second chance at the limelight. Here’s hoping that it hits our tables someday soon, no matter who reprints it.

TUESDAY 22ND

●●Paizo Publishing, creators of the Pathfinder RPG System, announce that it plans to develop an all-new MMO based on its flagship product. ●●Codemasters relaunches one of its oldest series by announcing the development of a new Dizzy game.

WEDNESDAY 23RD

●●Following a long trend of John Carmack sharing his work, id Software releases the source code for Doom 3.

THURSDAY 24TH

●●Footballer Lionel Messi signs a deal with EA that will see him become the face of its FIFA franchise. Messi previously featured on the covers of rival Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer series.

FRIDAY 25TH

●●The beta test for Bioware’s MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic goes live.

SATURDAY 26TH

●●The new Irish President Michael Higgins criticises videogames, saying “Many of today’s children no longer fully appreciate the joy of taking refuge in their own imaginations.”

MONDAY 28TH

●●The new version of Fantasy Flight Games’ Game of Thrones is released after much demand from the playing public. Long out of print, the new version capitalises on the popularity of the recent TV series.

TUESDAY 29TH

●●In an interview with PC Gamer magazine, CD Projekt CEO Marcin Iwinski estimates The Witcher 2 has been illegally downloaded 4.5 million times, vindicating the developer’s decision not to develop DRM software as “DRM does not work.”

WEDNESDAY 30TH

●●The Massachusetts Institute of Technology launches a series of podcasts on game design. Hosted by Philip Tan and Jason Begy, it covers a range of genres and analyses the process from beginning to end. ●●The 1.2 patch for Skyrim is widely reported to have compromised the game in several ways, including making dragons fly backwards.

Illustration Š2011 Duncan Harris www.deadendthrills.com

BRINK MAP NAME: CONTAINER CITY YEAR OF RELEASE: 2011

028 _ NEWS

GAMING BITES Forget beer and pizza; there’s no better way to be immersed in a game than by trying its culinary delights for yourself

F

ood in gaming is often either a functional device to provide a quick stats boost between fights, or a decorative item simply there to add colour to a scene. For one woman, in-game edibles have become a real-world fascination. Daniella Zelli runs Gourmet Gaming, a website dedicated to recreating classic fictional dishes – such as Portal’s infamous cake, or Bastion’s Leechade – in real-world kitchens.

How did it all start?

Deadly Premonition is the reason Gourmet Gaming exists! I invited a group of friends over to play it so I had to serve drinks and food.

I thought it would be great to have Sinner’s Sandwiches from the game for people to eat. Everyone seemed to love it and it really enhanced the whole experience. I suddenly realised how iconic some food in games can

be, like the mysterious ‘Meat’ from Golden Axe or the Sweet Roll from the Elder Scrolls series.

When did you know it worked?

I started with what I felt was one of the most popular foods, the Cake from Portal and followed it with foods from games I was excited by. They got some great attention on Tumblr and I started receiving requests after about four weeks. That’s when I realised others were genuinely interested and excited by the idea too.

What makes a good candidate?

Anything – that’s part of the challenge! I started out quite slow, but I’d love to try some really difficult ones as I feel I’ve levelled up my cooking in the past few months.

Any that have been impossible?

There have been quite a few failures

but I wouldn’t say they’re impossible; I just lacked the skill or the tools at the time. I attempted Scrab Cakes from Abe’s Oddysee but it was a nightmare so I’ve pushed that down the list. My most popular post, the Minecraft cake took about four attempts. I was determined to do it though and I think it came out pretty good.

What games have you got an eye on for future dishes?

Games I’m excited for this year would be NeverDead and The Witness, as I was a big fan of Braid, but I’m hoping to find some foods in the beautiful FEZ and Catherine!

I’m also looking to feature foods from indie games as I love checking out the community titles on Xbox Live. I’d love to use Gourmet Gaming as a chance to feature some great indie releases as I think they’re an important part of gaming culture.

DECEMBER 029

WASTELAND OMELET (FROM FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS)

NEWS STREAM DECEMBER THURSDAY 1ST

●●South Park the RPG is announced.

Developer Obsidian, responsible for Fallout 3: New Vegas, will put together a game written by series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

When you settle down after a long day roaming in, well, nothing, you want something quick and nutritious (plus you really have to use up those Deathclaw Eggs).

What you will need: A large non-stick frying pan, a bowl, a spatula and a whisk.

Ingredients: • 1 teaspoon butter • 40g/¼ cup Red Delicious apple (finely diced) • 3 large eggs • 1 tablespoon milk • Salt and pepper • 30g/¼ cup Emmental cheese (grated) • 2 thick ham slices Method: In a bowl, whisk together the eggs and milk, season to taste and set aside. Then heat the butter in a frying pan on a medium heat.

Add the apple to the frying pan and warm through, once the apple begins to soften remove it from the pan and set aside.

Pour the egg and milk mixture into the frying pan and allow it to cook. Keep an eye on it so it doesn’t burn underneath and move the pan to help any liquid on top cook.

Once the top begins to look firm and cooked, sprinkle half the omelet with the apple, followed by the cheese and then the ham slices.

Add a little bit more cheese on top of the ham and carefully use the spatula to fold the omelet in half – the cheese should help it seal once folded.

Allow everything to melt and then serve!

●●US distributor Game Salute launches “Select Store Exclusives”, a service supplying certain games only to smaller retail outlets to support brick and mortar stores. Tasty Minstrel’s Kings of Air and Steam is the first up.

FRIDAY 2ND

●●After serious overcrowding, 2012’s Gamescom will be the largest yet, with 140,000 sq. metres set aside in Cologne’s Koelnmesse.

●●IGN publishes its list of the Top 100 Video Game Moments, which is peaked by the now notorious death of Aerith in 1997’s Final Fantasy VII.

SATURDAY 3RD

●●In Geneva, the International Committee of the Red Cross discusses whether game developers should reflect and promote international humanitarian law in military-themed videogames.

MONDAY 5TH

●●Lego and Mojang confirm that Minecraft-based Lego products will be produced next year.

●●Cryptozoic Entertainment announce new deck-builder Clash of Champions, based on World of Warcraft. Players take famous heroes from the MMO and level up through the use of special cards unique to the characters. The game is due for release in Spring 2012.

TUESDAY 6TH

●●Microsoft update the dashboard for the Xbox 360, adding further support for Facebook, cloud storage, Kinect voice commands and, in many territories, live television. ●●The UK’s Education Secretary, Michael Gove, backs a skills review co-authored by Ian Livingston, Eidos President for Life and Fighting Fantasy author. Livingston calls for greater support for computer science education, in order to boost both programming skills and the UK games industry.

030 _ NEWS

D&D’S FIFTH ELEMENT An ambitious new edition is in the works, but can WOTC learn the real lesson of D&D’s player-focused past?

BY DANIEL NESS

O

n 9th January 2012, Wizards of the Coast announced work had begun on the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. The announcement was heavily teased, with fans on Twitter speculating as to the kind of D&D news big enough to garner interest from news organisations such as CNN and the New York Times. A clock on the front page of the EN World forums, the internet’s most popular D&D-related news site, counted the seconds until the big reveal; Morrus, the forum’s moderator told followers to check the site at 10am Eastern Standard Time, saying on his Twitter account: “You don’t want to miss this!”

Although under embargo, by 9.30am the news had already been leaked.

First off the block was the New York Times, with other embargoed sources – including Wizards’ official

Twitter account – pointing followers in its direction. While Morrus and EN World waited until the NDA was officially lifted, like errant dice across the internet everything that needed to be known about the announcement had already been spilled.

Unlike many of the high profile geek blogs reporting the news, EN World is a forum run by fans for the sheer love of RPGs. For them the fifth edition of D&D isn’t a story plugging a gap in a slow news day: it’s the future of

their hobby. In the time between the NYT leak and the embargo lifting, Morrus’ Twitter account took a turn for the morose, expressing by turn the need to “do the right thing” and the futility of waiting to report news to an audience who already knew its every last detail. His sardonic message, “Breaking news: EN World is the LAST place to post about the latest #dnd news” said it all: the fans had been trampled underfoot and there was nothing they could do about it.

DECEMBER 031

WEDNESDAY 7TH

●●A video shows Croteam’s way of fighting piracy. Illegal copies of Serious Sam 3 spawn an invulnerable giant scorpion that hounds players until they buy a legal version.

THURSDAY 8TH

●●The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences plans to induct Epic cofounder Tim Sweeney who founded Epic (nee. Potomac Systems) in 1991.

●●The Guinness World Record for Most Players Online Simultaneously on One MMO Server is broken by World of Tanks, after 250,000 players played together on the Russian server.

FRIDAY 9TH

●●After Wired magazine prints a story stating that Shigeru Miyamoto is looking to retire, Nintendo moves to deny the statement is accurate.

●●D-Day Dice becomes the highest funded game project to date on Kickstarter, closing with 2,122 backers pledging a total of $171,805.

SATURDAY 10TH

●●The Sweet Relief organisation, a charity that raises money for ill or impoverished musicians, compiles a benefit album made entirely from videogame soundtracks.

This is a problem D&D players have had to deal with for quite some time.

After misjudging its audience badly enough to give competitors Paizo a leg up into the games market, Wizards’ plan for D&D’s fifth edition is to listen to what fans want and sculpt the new rule set based on their feedback. But if the intention was to welcome players onboard a friendly, less corporateoriented initiative, allowing one of the world’s largest newspapers to break embargo and then condone that

behaviour was starting off on entirely the wrong foot.

It’s this disconnect from the human element that necessitated a fifth edition of D&D in the first place.

In the wake of the announcement, many blogs and news sources ran very similar stories offering potted histories of D&D’s turbulent history, including the game’s wargaming origins, the financial difficulties of its previous publisher TSR and the schism that led to Paizo offering Pathfinder as a more traditional role-playing alternative to a fan-riling fourth edition heavily influenced by online videogames.

Dungeons & Dragons has always been a very difficult game to sell outside its core fan base; it’s as much a performing art as it is anything else: a cooperatively-told story that plays out in gamers’ imaginations as would

●●Online resource Gone Cardboard is reborn on BoardGameGeek.com. A constantly updating list of new and recent releases, it tracks only those games available on general sale.

SUNDAY 11TH

●●Bethesda wins both Studio of the Year and Game of the Year, for Skyrim, at the critically-pilloried Spike Video Game Awards. Batman: Arkham City wins the most with four.

MONDAY 12TH

●●Activision announces that MW3 made one billion dollars quicker than James Cameron’s hit film Avatar.

TUESDAY 13TH

●●Within a day of going live, Google terminates a Street View app known as Google Shoot View, created by the Dutch ad agency Pool Worldwide.

The app, a rudimentary game that allowed players to walk through Street View’s images and fire an assault rifle at scenery, was a “violation of terms of service.” (cont.)

032 _ NEWS

a novel, or a read-through for a play.

The dice rolls and tome-like rulebooks act as boundaries hemming in players’ actions while a games master controls every character players meet, as well as every location and situation in which they find themselves.

It’s this dynamism Wizards hopes to recapture in its as-yet-unnamed fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

Lead designer Monte Cook describes it as “a set of rules that unites all the previous editions and the players of

those editions.” Co-designer Robert J. Schwalb adds: “We aim to make a universal game system that lets you play the game in whatever way, whatever style, with whatever focus you want. We’re creating the game you want to play.”

It’s an ambitious approach that’s bound to provoke cynicism among fans who’ve since moved on to other game systems. While D&D remains the touchstone for a public otherwise ignorant of pen-and-paper role

“OUR GOALS ARE BIG, BUT THEY’RE GOOD GOALS, AND WE WON’T ACCOMPLISH THEM IF WE DON’T TRY”

playing games, the RPG market has become ever more crowded thanks to online distribution services such as DriveThruRPG, which offer PDF files of the latest indie titles right alongside classic, out of print modules.

Then there’s the elephant in the room: Pathfinder. For many years D&D had been the undisputed market leader. It suffered stiff competition from White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade, but that was a horror game catering to an audience of

DECEMBER 033

disaffected goths. Pathfinder doesn’t just tread a similar path to D&D, it is D&D, a licensed revision of the 3.5 edition rules with a fantasy setting familiar enough for fans not to feel alienated, should they cross over to the new system.

With the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards placed an emphasis on battles and miniatures and threw out, streamlined or simplified so many aspects previously associated with the game that fans saw Pathfinder as offering a more traditional D&D experience. Last summer, Paizo’s CEO Lisa Stevens revealed Pathfinder was out-selling Dungeons & Dragons “in most of the markets that I check”; since then Paizo has announced tie-in comics and a massively multiplayer online role-playing game set in the Pathfinder universe. Pathfinder, it seems, is not only outselling D&D, it’s out-D&Ding D&D. It’s not difficult to see why. Like something from its own Monster Manual, D&D has become a sprawling, multi-

headed chimera. Next to the purity of new kid on the block, Pathfinder, it needs rebooting, and that’s something the designers of the fifth edition – currently nicknamed D&D Next – are quick to point out.

“Our goals are big, we know that,” says co-designer Bruce R. Cordell, “but they’re good goals, and we won’t accomplish them if we don’t try.”

With the first public play tests of the new edition running at the D&D Experience convention at the end of January 2012 and many months of revisions still ahead, it remains to be seen whether the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons will draw all fans of the franchise back into the fold as its creators hope.

A day after being trampled, Morrus seemed willing to let bygones be bygones, and was updating EN World’s list of fifth edition scuttlebutt with great gusto. “I’ve had that on there since yesterday!” he posted in response to someone offering a link to old news. “Ya gotta keep up, man!”

With advice like that, Wizards of the Coast should really have started listening to its fans sooner.

●●Gaming charity Child’s Play reaches $1.5m in donations for 2011. Formed by the team behind webcomic Penny Arcade, the charity raises money to provide games and toys for hospitalised children.

WEDNESDAY 14TH

●●TIME Magazine’s “Top 10 Everything of 2011” is dominated by Apple and topped by the iPad 2, featuring the Nintendo 3DS, in fifth place and the PlayStation 3D display in ninth.

●●Joel Sherman of New York destroys the previous world record high score in a tournament game of Scrabble, finishing up with 803 points. The old record of 771 was beaten thanks to Joel managing to play seven “bingos” (using all his tiles in one go) including COTHURNI and TRAVOISE. ●●At Develop 2011, Rick Marazzani of Extent predicts a difficult 2012 for social gaming developers, citing market saturation and rising development costs.

THURSDAY 15TH

●●More content delivery platforms are added to the Xbox 360 Dashboard, including YouTube and MSN.

●●The iOS version of Carcassonne gets expanded with developers CodingMoneys making The River and Inns & Cathedrals packs available. ●●EA announces a new addition to the Command & Conquer franchise, a browser-based strategy MMO called Tiberium Alliances, playable on all web-compatible devices.

FRIDAY 16TH

●●Star Wars Galaxies, LucasArts’ eight-year-old MMO, is closed down, coinciding with the imminent launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic (see page 20.) ●●CNet speculates that 2013 will see the next generation Xbox console, but there is no official confirmation from Microsoft. CNet states that “a source on the Xbox team” has confirmed the prediction.

SATURDAY 17TH

●●Zynga, developer of social network games such as FarmVille, experiences a poor first 24 hours trading on NASDAQ, its shares closing down by 5%. By the new year, the drop will be nearly 20%, before a gradual climb back to their original value. (cont.)

034 _ NEWS

ART-MOUSE MOVEMENT You may consider headshots, rocket jumps and stealth kills to be pure art in motion, but now you can actually see them as such

BY PAUL PRESLEY

T

he eternal question of whether games can ever be considered as true works of art is one that will, it seems, forever divide the masses. While arguments rage back and forth on a daily basis in certain quarters as to the nature of the actual games, one handy little piece of tech is busy turning the actual playing of PC games into visualisations that wouldn’t look out of place next to a Jackson Pollock or Norman Bluhm.

IOGraph (formerly known as MousePath) is the creation of two Russian designers, Anatoly Zenkov and Andrey Shipilov. It works by running in the background of your desktop, tracking every movement and non-movement of your mouse (pauses in motion are displayed as ever-growing circles), then displaying the resulting motions as dramatic pieces of line art.

It’s not solely designed for gaming of course, any PC activity can be recorded, but it’s certainly the rapidity of movement required by gaming mice that is creating the most mezmerising imagery users are finding. The pieces on these pages, for instance, come from games such as Minecraft, World of Warcraft and Half-Life.

A growing IOGraph community has formed across the usual social networking platforms, with users happy to upload their own creations in either their raw state, or by using the software’s ability to overlay the recorded patterns on top of desktop backgrounds and other images.

IOGraph can be downloaded for Windows, Macs and Linux platforms for free from iographica.com, although a donation via PayPal is only fair and decent for the sheer artistic pleasure you’ll be getting.

DECEMBER 035

●●At a 48-hour game development weekend in Riyadh, over a hundred developers from across the Middle East create fifteen games based around the theme of “social issues.”

Many address consumerism, prejudice or bullying, but no titles have an overt political element.

TUESDAY 20TH

●●Star Wars: The Old Republic is finally released. 1.5m gamers who preordered or played in the beta have been in-game for a week already. ●●Toy Vault announces Abaddon, a new sci-fi battle game from Memoir ‘44 designer Richard Borg, will use a simplified variant of his much loved Command and Colours System.

WEDNESDAY 21ST

●●Controversy breaks out when the storyline for Fantasy Flight Games’ reissue of Fortress America is switched from the US vs. terrorism to something more ‘acceptable’: a new missile defence program.

FRIDAY 23RD

●●A group of students representing the Danish National Academy of Digital, Interactive Entertainment release the free game Blackwell, a survival horror title based on the experiences of investigative journalist Nellie Bly. ●●She Kills Monsters, a play in which a woman discovers her late sister’s D&D notebook and is flung into a fraught adventure, closes its doors after a successful seven week run at The Flea theatre, just off Broadway.

MONDAY 26TH

●●Videogame hardware manufacturer Razer receives $50m of investment from a Beijing-based venture capitalist fund. The company will, within three weeks, announce a “gaming tablet” PC.

WEDNESDAY 28TH

●●The editor of videogaming website Joystiq departs to join technical website The Verge, which will be begin covering videogames in 2012.

FRIDAY 30TH

●●Norway’s highest-grossing gaming app is given a worldwide release.

Hogworld: Gnart’s Adventure is as much a literacy tool as a game, aimed at children between the ages of three and six.

Illustration Š2011 Duncan Harris www.deadendthrills.com

TEAM FORTRESS 2 MAP NAME: STEEL YEAR OF RELEASE: 2007

038 _ RICHARD COBBETT

> RICHARD COBBETT

BARRIERS OF ENTRY Everyone’s a gamer these days, but how many of us have really paid our dues…

W

hen did we lose control? Back in the 80s, ‘gamer’ wasn’t a thing you were, it was a title you’d earned. You’d earned it by patiently sitting there for half an hour until a tape loaded in your ZX Spectrum, or spending twice that at a PC messing with files that had names like ‘config.sys’ and ‘autoexec.bat’ because the latest thing was a snob that demanded XMS memory instead of EMS, and didn’t care that you’d just spent £30 on what was now Wing Commander: Black Error Screen Ops. If you had a console, of course, you paid your dues in other ways – like the £60 it originally cost to get Street Fighter II on the SNES. (Do you know how much that was to a child in 1992? I did a quick conversion. Factoring in interest rates, inflation and the effect of global warming on the GDP, it comes to eleven squillion billion pounds. No arguing. It’s Science.)

What barriers to entry are left? Technical skill is out, even the ancient dark art of blowing into a cartridge. Cost? To some extent, but even £200 or so for a PlayStation 3 isn’t so bad compared to the paying the same for a console in the early 90s. With those systems, you’d also be paying to stare at the wonders in arcades and dream of a day you could play them at home, whereas now, the only thing you’re missing out on is the unforgettable texture of someone else’s hopefully-dried snot smeared over the joystick.

As for the PC, it’s simply not a contest. Back then, you were talking £1000 for a year’s worth of having a good

computer, and £2000 for two years. It seemed like a good deal at the time. Games are still expensive, but steer clear of big releases that consider Michael Bay movies just a little bit too thinky and elitist, and throw in second-hand, free-to-play services like Facebook and Steam and Good Old Games, and if you can’t find something new to play on a whim, you’re simply not looking hard enough.

The final victory though is that even basic interest is no longer a barrier of entry. Where once there was only the worldwide Tetris Exemption Clause, now even mothers who still tut and worry about their kids wasting their lives playing Grand Theft Doom and The Resident of Evil think nothing of clocking up hour after hour with something like Farmville and Bejewelled. These days, almost everyone is a gamer, even if it’s only Snake on their phone. If they’re not, it’s increasingly by active, heels-in-mud refusal to be dragged into the modern era.

But at what cost this victory?

Honestly, not much. Unless you count a smug feeling of personal superiority at being outside of the mainstream, mixed with the ‘fun’ of having to protest “But Tomb Raider is a really, really good game!” just a little too loudly, it’s all good news. Sure, there are individual things worth bitching about and always will be – DRM, free-to-play being pay-towin, glorified Ponzi scams masquerading as social games and all that – but most of the big complaints are at best misguided, and at worst just wrong.

039

A few years ago for instance, it would have been more or less fair to complain about games being dumbed down for the mass market. Now, you’re only allowed to say that if you’ve built at least one Dwarf Fortress, finished Super Meat Boy, made a billion ISK in EVE Online, run an MMO guild, and actually taken the time to play games like X-Com (or, for bonus points, UFO: Enemy Unknown) instead of simply wishing you had. The majority of games at every point in time have been ‘dumb’. The only difference is that where they used to be side-scrollers and similar, they’re now insanely budgeted cut-scenes – and even then, usually with awesome multiplayer shooters bolted on.

Things have changed though, of course, and not always for the better. One thing I miss is my ability to focus. When new games were a rarity, they were things to treasure, to replay, to know and to own in both senses of the word.

Friends with machines like the Spectrum could pick up games at the newsagent for pocket money, and it was a rare one that lasted more than its first play. My PC and Nintendo consoles, on the other hand, demanded dedication – especially since no store near me did rentals.

That £60 copy of Street Fighter II, for instance, was the only game I’d be getting for months. Like Charlie Bucket nibbling on his yearly Wonka bar, I had to make it count.

Now, he’s got his own chocolate factory, while I have this magic little thing called the internet. Much as I love it, it has made my attention span more... well, X-Factor. I had

to fight that boss three times before beating him? Begone, worthless game! You! Call that a shotgun? Get out of my sight! As for you... was that the Papyrus font I just saw in your menu? You dare insult me with Comic Sans’ posher brother-in-law? Mothers will scare their children with tales of your uninstall...

Now, maybe that’s just me (the last one especially). Still, if the grass always seems greener on the other side, we’re currently standing in nothing short of a fractal maze of the most gorgeous fields imaginable, in every conceivable shade, and which stretches as far as the eye can see. Ten years ago, the idea of a ten-hour game was met with screams, wails and the gnashing of teeth.

Now, for many people, even half that is too long a commitment. You know what percentage of people finished Portal – a 3-5 hour classic? 49.8%. Steam’s honest truth.

How many earned even bronze medals in the challenge mode? 0.5%. Ouch.

Even so, the choice of geeking out is still there, whether it’s over a Team Fortress gun, a Minecraft build, or anything else that floats your boat. If it’s harder, it’s only because – by and large, and as a general rule – gaming gets better and better every year. The rest of the world shouldn’t have to bang on our doors and barricades to be allowed to enjoy it too, but welcomed into our once darkened rooms to help them to see the light. At least, until they start beating our high scores.

040 _ DAN MARSHALL

I

t’s not easy being Indie. Leaving my well-paid job as a bigwig pain-in-the-ass TV producer meant serious sacrifices. No more hand-reared, free-range organic bacon for me, I’ve (occasionally) taken the difficult measure of stooping to the Waitrose ‘Essentials’ selection.

You can see how serious I am about what I do.

Five years ago, being indie meant being a jobless slacker with delusions of grandeur. Now it’s all about chasing The Minecraft Dream. That could be me! Just one big game that gets picked up on by the great unwashed masses and I’m back in quails’ eggs for the rest of my days. I hear [Minecraft creator] Notch refuses to eat anything that hasn’t been washed in virgins’ tears. Fame has barely changed him, and all over a game that has those oldlooking ‘ironic’ graphics from when games were shit.

I jest, of course. Feel free to chuckle, knowingly. As everyone is well aware, indie games are made for the love of it and anyone who makes money out of the craft is immediately branded with the words NOT INDIE on their stupid, astonished foreheads with a red-hot branding iron.

It’s what they deserve, and it’s why the Hello Games team wear so many hats.

The daily challenges of my old London living are a thing of the past – no more being packed into a train carriage with slobbering, coughing grey-looking people, each one of them thrusting an unpleasant idiosyncrasy into my barely-awake early morning face. No more ‘Out of Order’ lifts. No more trudging up blue-carpeted stairs. No more dealing with obtuse IT departments.

The Daily Grind. The Rat Race. Shared toilets. Behind me. No more. I’ve broken free and I’m living the dream.

Brace yourself, I’m about to make you sick through your eyes with jealously: I work from home. Every single day.

I get dressed (in, like, whatever), I get Rachmaninoff up on the Spotify as soon as possible, and I settle in for a full morning’s work with a small glass of sherry for company.

Not that being indie isn’t a challenge. As an ex-TV producer turned to making games, I face two stunning obstacles; two vital skills of being a self-contained indie that, it turns out are really pretty blisteringly important: I’m terrible at coding, and I’m terrible at art.

For a career centred largely around coding and art, it’s not an inconsiderable problem, and one I’ve just about managed to circumnavigate with a cunning strategy of working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Code, for example, is a right pain in the tits. For the uninitiated, here’s how it works: you tell the computer what you want to happen using all these funny little words and squiggles and whatever, then you hit F5 to ‘compile’ the code, and the computer rewards you by endlessly complaining about what it was you wrote. “Oh, this line

> DAN MARSHALL

INDIE LIFE

Size Five Games’ founder has the greatest job in the world, or so the brochures would have you believe…

041

of your ‘code’ isn’t quite perfect,” it bitches. “There’s too many brackets, I SIMPLY DON’T UNDERSTAND.” After half an hour pissing around catering to its every petty whim, and three hundred F5s later, the game boots up.

Despite definitely telling it in no uncertain terms precisely where and when I wanted all my game objects to appear, The Computer has invariably had different ideas, and is choosing to draw them wherever it wants, before the whole thing crashes so hard the lights flicker in every house within a mile’s radius.

You can see why I work such improbably long hours.

It’s not my own crippling inability to write coherent code that’s the problem, it’s whoever decided upon the silly system that’s all semi-colons and curly brackets that is at fault. Which brings us neatly to Rule One of being an indie: wherever possible, blame someone else for everything.

Other ‘Rule One’s include “The bigger the pixels the better”, “The most important part of the trailer is making sure everyone gets a good long look at your title screen menu”, and repeatedly saying “You’re not Indie unless [LITERALLY ANYTHING]”. We’ll get to those rules in future columns, I expect.

So there you have it; a fairly solid foundation for understanding the indie industry from my own unique, blinkered point of view: it’s basically all just a bunch of people making things up as they go along. We’re like pioneers or spacemen, except we sit in small dark rooms thinking up ways to appear frightfully clever and aloof.

042 _ HOUSE RULES

> HOUSE RULES

THE KILLER INSIDE Games have rules, but experiences are made when we’re allowed to break them. The first in a regular series looks at one of the most open game series of all

BY CRAIG LAGER

I

f you want to pander to most gamers, a hitman fantasy is a strong route to take. A solitary guy, cerebral, methodical; a guy that can do whatever he wants because no one will ever know he did it. If he wants you dead, you’re dead, and there’s nothing you can do. It’s a power trip, a dark indulgence in the fantasy of murder because you can. I’d argue that every gamer has a hitman inside them, but as each gamer is different, so is their internal killer.

Blood Money, then, is one of the best games ever created.

The fourth entry into the Hitman series by IO Interactive and released in 2006, it sees Agent 47 take a string of hits that tie together in a loose plot of clones and assassins and political espionage. The plot is secondary, however, to the games complete understanding of what it’s presenting: You are a hitman. Here are some jobs. Go and do the jobs.

Skipping each cutscene will barely weaken the experience as each mission is a standalone sandbox – a set of targets, possibly a side mission, and a fee. Do the job.

The idea of the ‘Assassin Sim’ is accentuated too by the scope of character embedded into 47 himself. Though we’re in 47’s fourth outing – we still don’t know much about him.

He’s a clone, devoid of empathy and conscience, and living in solitude. The only human relationships he’s had have been of necessity: a priest in 2002’s Silent Assassin as he laid low in a church, and Diana – his mission handler from the Agency throughout the series. These are the closest he has to friends, and he’s employed by them both while the only emotional attachment 47 seems to have is with his pet canary whom he’s forced to kill in Blood Money. And that’s pretty much it.

He’s a blank slate in a defined role. The epitome of a hitman. He’s like a set stage but waiting for actors and, indeed, a script. These are for the player to write and act out: they bring their internal killer into 47 and his empty casing readily accepts it because while we know that he’s a killer, we don’t know of what sort.

The simplest option is to load yourself up. The pre-mission weapon select screen by no means shies away from giving you toys that can be fully upgraded and customised to suit. With a bit of tinkering; duel .45, laser sighted pistols (the signature Silverballers no less); a submachine gun with extended mag; auto shotgun and assault rifle with scope is on the cards. Walk in, start shooting your way past the guards, take out the target and shoot your way back out - probably taking a large amount of civilians on the way. 47 is by no means a one man army – this is a difficult approach to take – but it’s an option.

A classier, more traditional option is to go in lighter on the weapons and infiltrate – taking disguises to work past security and dispatch the targets. But then do you rig a fake accident, tumbling a chandelier onto the targets head; or poison their drink; slit their throat with a kitchen knife; or pull out that single, silenced Silverballer you managed to smuggle through and put a bullet through the back of their head?

043

Or do you work through an area like Leon? Leaving a trail of bodies but never being discovered, silently thinning out guards until your target is open enough to be taken. Or Jason Bourne? Getting up close and personal, disarming guards, killing with their own guns and using what you find on your way around you?

I know I must be sounding rather psychotic, revelling in the murder and brutality, but these are all viable options and I defy anyone to play as 47 and not develop their own style. This is more than just a list of ways to kill someone, this is a defining trait of your 47, an outlet for your internal killer, your hitman fantasy and it’s only because of the sandbox nature of missions and minimal character of 47 that we can be freely let loose with it.

Personally, I’ve played through Blood Money countless times – it’s my Deus Ex if you will. “This time, no disguises and without being discovered”, “do each mission perfectly”, “no shots fired”. It caters for everything and multiple playthroughs enhances your knowledge of what you can get away with and what systems you can manipulate. Blood Money is a game that’s so tight and knew what it wanted to achieve so well that even now, half a decade on, it doesn’t feel aged at all. Everyone owes it to themselves to play it, and revisit it – it’s a classic.

I KNOW I MUST BE SOUNDING RATHER PSYCHOTIC, REVELLING IN THE MURDER AND BRUTALITY, BUT THESE ARE ALL VIABLE OPTIONS AND I DEFY ANYONE TO PLAY AS 47 AND NOT DEVELOP THEIR OWN STYLE

044 _ GAMING SCIENCE

> THE GAMING SCIENCES

MODEL UNIVERSES

BY BERND LEHAHN, EGOSOFT

I

s the scale of this spaceship realistic? Is it physically correct if we put three suns in just one sector? Is it possible for a space station to remain in orbit over a planet this low?

Every day when we work on the X space game series, we are confronted with questions like this. Five games and counting in what is now coming close to 15 years of development, and I am sure that more than a thousand times we’ve had to weigh realism against other things.

Things like: Does this make the game harder to play?

Does it look beautiful? Will players understand this? The answers are different every single time.

All of us here at Egosoft are physicists at heart. We truly love science. Whenever there is a Livestream of a new launch on NASA’s website, or news about the latest

developments in CERN, you can be sure the guys here are all following it. It would be a dream for us to make the most realistic game ever created, a space simulator in the true meaning of the word.

Unfortunately though, not many people would buy such a product, because no matter how cool it would be, it would no longer deserve the name ‘game’. In reality, we always have to make these ugly little compromises.

As much realism as possible, but not where it destroys gameplay. This decision can sometimes go to the core of the gameplay mechanics, like the flight behaviour of ships.

Realistic space flight should never limit speeds. Without any air friction, ships can accelerate over an infinite time and would need to decelerate for the same. This flight behaviour can be very pretty to watch, but makes any

045

kind of gameplay mechanic very hard. Ship rendezvouses and dogfights would require a lot of training or artificial speed control systems. Instead, what most space games do (including the X series) is to bring a type of flight behaviour into space that is much more similar to the physics of aeroplanes inside an atmosphere.

Another example of a conflict between realistic universe modelling and a pragmatic design that suits our needs is much more ‘visual’: How should we portray rotating planets? Already with our early games, we showed planets in sectors which were true 3D spheres and not just an image in the background. This gave more depth to the environment and meant the player could sometimes even

recognizably. At the International Space Station, for example, which is just about 400km above Earth, the time for a full orbit is only 90 minutes! That means you would see a lot of movement with the bare eye. Not to mention what you would see when using the SETA time acceleration mechanic, but I don’t think that’s available yet on the ISS. So just like the beautiful planet rotating below the player, the space background including the sun and the light situation should normally also rotate above him, leaving only the nearby stations rotating with him. If we did this, orientation would be extremely hard. Players would never know which direction things are in and would always need highly complex tracking equipment to find things.

In a perfectly realistic game all objects would always move in relation to the objects that define their environment move significantly enough in relation to a planet that he could see the sphere from a different angle. Already at this early stage of the series there was a small ‘realism’ issue surrounding how fast we could make these planets rotate while still being plausible about what was the rotation of the planet itself and not just the effect of the viewer moving around the planet.

In a perfectly realistic game all objects would always move in relation to the objects that define their environment. A station has to fly around the planet to be able to stay on a stable orbit level. Once we introduced much lower orbit environments in X3: Reunion and X3: Terran Conflict (or, to describe it from the gamer’s perspective: much bigger planets), this became more obvious. In a true low orbit the planet must rotate very

So as you can see, although these are two very different problems – one touching more on the visual side of the game, while the other being at the core of the physical game universe – both could only be implemented realistically if our ‘game’ was only playable with the help of specialised instruments. We would have to give up on the idea of an intuitive game universe.

Face it, space is not an intuitive place for homo sapiens.

We evolved in a different environment and if we want to make entertaining games, even the most alien battlefields must be compatible with the way we primitive monkeys think. But who knows? Maybe one day we will have the time and budget to make a truly realistic simulation. I’m sure people would enjoy ‘playing around’ with it. Just not for as long and as intensively as they do with the X universe.

046 _ GAMING SCIENCE

> THE GAMING SCIENCES

OUT OF CONTROL

BY MITU KHANDAKER

Image ©2011 Ants ‘ACXtreme’ Külaviir

O

ur relationship with games has always been rooted in the physical. This is the cybernetic connection of videogames, whether we’re pressing buttons on a classic controller or waving our limbs about using Kinect. As videogame technology continues to evolve, including the controllers, graphical fidelity, and other factors increasing the credibility of game experiences, there seems to be a widely held public view that the idea of the ultimate goal of videogames being to end up with a technologically-immersive experience akin to the Star Trek Holodeck. This is the notion that researchers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman called “the immersive fallacy” in their 2003 book, Rules of Play. Anyone aiming for this Holodeck-style interface is, essentially, mistaken about what it means to play a videogame.

It’s easy to see why. Many of our favourite game

experiences have been with games using abstract control mechanisms – traditional gamepads, mouse-and-keyboard, or anything where there is little verisimilitude with regards to your action in the real world, and what happens in the game. However, it is more complex than simple nostalgia; playing a videogame works because our sense of identification with the game world is capricious rather than direct. In other words, we need a sense of critical or ‘aesthetic distance’, to use a term from the art world.

Indeed, research has backed up this concept. Work by academic Stephen Dow, investigated an ‘augmented reality’ version of Facade (the interactive drama about being around a couple in a strained relationship), to see whether players felt more involved in the narrative in this fullyimmersive version of the game, versus the normal version, played on PC. He found that technological immersion

047

(playing with the AR headset) can increase one’s feelings of ‘being there’. However, when the player is expected to play the role of a character, and feel involved in the story, he needs to feel as though the experience is more ‘mediated’.

That is, it needs to be more obvious to the player what specific actions he can perform, by, for instance, providing a non-realistic interface, amongst other things.

Interestingly, developer Eskil Steenberg recently noted that “Kinect is really cool from a technical point of view but pretty worthless for most games,” instead suggesting that “If I were actually making a game I would much rather make it for Playstation Move, because you actually have a button,” therefore echoing Dow’s findings somewhat.

Dow’s thesis backs up this notion of the Holodeck fantasy

control mechanisms; whether they are indeed confined to being useful only for exercise/dance games, or whether they can be used for more meaningful experiences. He commented that: “We’re still in the nascent days of ‘immersive controls’. It’s the equivalent of being back in the days moving pictures first came out and everyone was amazed by a masked man pointing a gun at a screen and shooting. That’s why we’re seeing games that are all about full-body motion, because it feels new, different, and ‘shiny’. We’ll get over this phase in the next few years, and start seeing more mature, integrated tech that will enhance the experience without being gimmicky.”

In widening the possibility space of what games can do, and mean, Glinert suggests that one possible application of

Anyone aiming for a Holodeck-style interface is, essentially, mistaken about what it means to play a videogame as being fallacious; while an all-encompassing virtual environment may make the participant feel like they’re actually in that world, it seems it is just not that useful for games. Or, at least, for the kinds of games we are used to.

However, technological fidelity of controllers continue to evolve, and we cannot ignore this, nor the commercial success of the Kinect, Move, and of course, the Nintendo Wii. While the full realization of a totally natural interface might be undesirable as far as games are concerned, perhaps it is possible that we can yet go some way up the spectrum of natural interfaces before we have to stop.

One such example of the widening of game possibilities is Dance Central for Kinect. Speaking with developer Eitan Glinert, President of Fire Hose Games (who worked on the prototyping and evolution of Dance Central on behalf of Harmonix), I asked his thoughts on the criticism of natural

this technology lies in dynamic difficulty adjustment.

“We’ll see camera systems that don’t care about full-body movement, but do care about facial expression and body language and will adjust the difficulty of a game dynamically to lessen frustration and heighten engagement. We’ll see systems that detect a group of friends reacting in a positive manner to in-game stimulus and the system will then learn from this feedback and provide similar experiences.”

Therefore, the increasing technological fidelty of control mechanisms has a part to play. Rather than necessarily ‘improving’ games, they are instead widening the possibility space of what games could be. There will always be games for which classic controllers will be more useful. It is, ultimately, up to game designers to ensure that motion controls, or other novel interfaces, sufficiently add meaning and purpose to a game experience.

048 _ GAMING SCIENCE

> THE GAMING SCIENCES

EMOTIONAL CAPTURE

BY JOHN DOWER

M

otion capture and performance capture are fast becoming the industry standard method for helping create naturalistic performances in games. Human live-action performance is used to create animation that feels increasingly true to life. The technology used was first developed to support the medical industry by analysing gait and bone structure, but now is so advanced that it can be used to record the subtlest gestures and emotions. In order to support the future capability of the technology, we need to recognise this shift and support the human element of the capture. We need to shift the emphasis away from the tech and appreciate more the importance of performance.

In order to support this premise, let me tell you about my own experience of directing using this technology.

Having previously worked as a director in television and

film and merely dabbled in animation, I was taken on by Lionhead Studios to help create the characters for the Xbox game Milo & Kate and then direct the motion capture shoots, work with the animation team and direct the voice recordings. Initially, things were pretty familiar. We engaged a casting director and went through an audition process. Our first character was an eleven year-old boy.

Having worked with children in the past, I knew how important inner resilience and confidence was to working on a film set and I guessed even more would be required in the stark motion capture studio. They would also need an active imagination and improvisation skills, since they would need to be able to visualise the world in which they inhabited. We shortlisted two boys – one who looked physically similar to our character model, the second who had few similarities, but had the edge as an actor.

049

We shot some test scenes and tried different methods to get the facial data. Facial markings proved less reliable than using a head-mounted camera and so we tried out different mountings. One required a bespoke, gel-injected helmet to be fitted to the boy, an experience he tolerated but clearly hated. Tight-fitting, with a chin strap and a side arm extending to the front of him on which was mounted the camera, it took some time for him to get used to.

We used Giant Studios in Los Angeles, where parts of Avatar and all of Tintin were shot. Illustrious as these films are, you can’t get away from the fact that they are shot in a grey room flanked by hessian padding, full of props and boxes made out of grey wood or wire netting made to represent the virtual world and lit by fluorescent lights. The

the better actor since we were able to make his body shape fit our animated character model. It was clear that his more natural performance style shone through the data and into the animation. More comfortable in his own skin, the fact that his easy confidence came across is a testament to the veracity of the technology and was a reminder of why it is becoming so popular. It also proved to me the essential value of a good actor, a good script and careful direction.

In most of our early scenes, the character related to and often talked to the game player, so much was performed to a virtual camera or the ‘fourth wall’. We used an actor for the boy to talk and respond to and this improved his performance. Later we shot some scenes with other characters in vision and though complex for the data

We need to shift the emphasis away from the tech and appreciate more the importance of performance skin-tight utilitarian suits are also somewhat disorientating to an actor used to some degree of contact with the real world. Though there was real time playback showing the character in the virtual environment, this is not useful to the actor since it is distracting to see a screen while performing.

In order to get my bearings and priorities right, I used the wise message of Sanford Meisner about the essence of acting as my guide – “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances”. I felt as if all my energy and focus as a director was on trying to help my actor make the sterile and featureless environment into an imaginary world which was real to him and then help him perform as truthfully and believably as possible within it. It’s a tall order for an actor and takes real skill and confidence to get over the obstacles – environmental, technical and physical.

After shooting some test scenes, we were able to go with

capture, we found that the more the actors could work together, the better the animation that resulted.

Though this looks obvious on paper, performance has not been prioritised by motion capture studios until relatively recently. This is illustrated by the fact that many still charge by the amount of seconds of data they process, rather than for studio hire. Putting the emphasis on the tech and away from the infrastructure to support the actor makes motion capture more challenging to actors and directors.

Once studios give this support to enable great performance as their first priority by organising shoots with the same actor-centred approach as film and television, and doing all they can to make the actors’ experience less alienating and more physically comfortable, then we will see the results in games with higher quality animation which will significantly raise player experience and satisfaction.

050 _ PIXELS & SHADOWS

PIXELS & SHADOWS Though most attention focused on the technological detail, L.A. Noire offered plenty for the film noir buff to savour

BY VINCE KEENAN

G

ather a bunch of film noir fans in a bar, admittedly not a difficult feat to pull off, and you’re guaranteed hours of conversation about not only whether a given movie qualifies as noir, but what noir exactly is. For a term with a lot of currency, the meaning remains somewhat loose. When it comes to noir there are plenty of gray areas, which may be the closest we come to a workable definition.

A few parameters are broadly accepted. Film noir is an indigenous American movement spawned by a host of influences, specifically German expressionism and hard-boiled fiction.

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The classic cycle ran from the 1940s to the 1950s, with Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) and Touch of Evil (1958) serving as convenient bookends. The visual elements don’t have to be heightened but the psychological ones must be, with the characters forever in extremis.

Another undeniable fact is that, idiosyncratic spelling aside, L.A. Noire has brought the genre – assuming it is a genre; even that’s open to debate – its greatest exposure in years. For many, the game chronicling the rise of decorated World War II veteran Cole Phelps through the Los Angeles Police Department will serve as both introduction and guide. The question is, how well does it know the territory?

Titles from noir’s golden age loom on theater marquees and appear on film canisters strewn across the game’s landscape. But more clever homages abound. ‘The Set Up’ mirrors the opening shot from the 1949 boxing drama of the same name, and posters tout the upcoming bout featuring Stoker Thompson, the punch-drunk pugilist portrayed

by Robert Ryan. The offices of California Fire & Life, where Phelps’ reluctant ally Jack Kelso toils as investigator, duplicate those in Double Indemnity, lacking only the uncredited cameo from the film’s cowriter Raymond Chandler. Being set in the quintessential noir burg helps.

Los Angeles is the last stop on the desperation train, and Team Bondi’s Southland simulacra vividly recreates locations highlighted in numerous noir films that take place in the City of Angels, like Union Station and the Angels Flight funicular railway.

But visual nods are easy. True noir cuts deeper. Again, setting is a factor.

Any narrative based on postwar Los Angeles history will have a suitably bleak feel given explosive growth, a police force with unchecked authority, and power brokers of all

Film stills courtesy of the Film Noir Foundation

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stripes working in secret unison. L.A. Noire’s sprawling story shoehorns every sordid element into a miasma of malfeasance. The game’s overall mood is steeped in the ‘sunshine noir’ of later films like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, with their broad daylight visions of Southern California as a bleached bed of iniquity. The project owes a particularly monumental debt to the sensibility of Confidential author James Ellroy and his fictionalized history of the LAPD. I could charitably view the clumsy structural choices in the game’s final quarter as a heavy-handed tribute to Ellroy’s epic multiple-viewpoint yarns.

A dire view of morality informs the action throughout. During Phelps’ stint in Homicide, he investigates a string of murders that echo the infamous Black Dahlia slaying.

Culprits are apprehended, though Phelps suspects they’ve been framed.

(He’s correct, the game rewarding you for charging the right wrong man in an instance of meta-noir.) Phelps and

Film Noir Foundation

The Foundation is a non-profit organization established by writer and film noir historian Eddie Muller.

The mission of the Foundation is to find and preserve films in danger of being lost or irreparably damaged, and to ensure that high quality prints of these films remain in circulation for theatrical exhibition. Among the films saved by the FNF are The Prowler, now available on DVD, and Cry Danger. These titles and many others have played at the Noir City film festivals organized by the FNF, held annually in San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles and other cities. To learn more or to make a contribution, visit the foundation’s website at: www.filmnoirfoundation.org

his partner are routinely pulled off active cases to put out fires related to the Dahlia cover-up, creating a potent sense of powerlessness in the face of institutional corruption.

Noir ultimately comes down to character, the protagonist complicit in his own doom. On that score, at least, L.A. Noire would seem to fall short.

Cole Phelps is a driven do-gooder, his grim insistence on playing by the rules rendering him a one-note lawand-order automaton. The primary complaint I’ve heard about the game has been Phelps’ sheer unlikability, but that may stem from his erratic responses during L.A. Noire’s vaunted interrogation sequences. It’s tough to identify with a detective who expresses doubt by calling a helpful witness an “old hag.”

But as the game’s story spirals outward to incorporate every craven chapter of L.A. lore, it also circles back to Phelps’s tortured personal history.

His ill-advised dalliance with drugaddicted ex-pat singer Elsa Lichtmann is the first crack in his golden boy façade and a telling hint of darkness.

The core of L.A. Noire’s narrative proves to be the uneasy adjustment made by returning servicemen to

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civilian life, and the unspoken toll of warfare. It’s material that serves as the source for several noir films including The Blue Dahlia, beloved not so much for its compromised plot as its apocryphal production history in which screenwriter Raymond Chandler, forced to change the killer’s identity to avoid offending the military, rewrote the script while drunk on the studio’s dime. The best of this group, 1948’s searing Act of Violence, again stars Robert Ryan as a former POW seeking vengeance against the officer who betrayed him and his fellow inmates. Like the game, it subverts Southern California’s image as a land of promise, the era’s rampant real estate development casting shadows on its bright future.

Unlike the putative heroes of other Rockstar Games releases, Cole Phelps doesn’t do anything wrong during L.A. Noire’s gameplay. He doesn’t have to.

His sins are behind him, in the past he’s laboring mightily to forget. His relentlessness is an attempt to deny his actions and atone for them at the same time. Complete L.A. Noire and you learn that there is an explanation for Cole’s ‘Coleness’, that the flaws of the figure who has baffled you for some thirty hours were the largest mystery of all. Phelps doesn’t become a tragic figure; the storytelling is too ungainly and the final reveal too convenient to allow for that. But that the game aspires to that outcome is a testament to its ambition. And that it gives us a character who’s been running from himself all along means it can belly up to noir’s endless bar without fear.

Vince Keenan is a screenwriter. He blogs about popular culture, crime fiction and film at VinceKeenan.com. He is the head writer of the episodic adventure game March 32nd, coming from independent studio Chromed in 2012. He is also a regular contributor to Noir City, the magazine of the Film Noir Foundation.

054 _ A PERFECT BATTLEFIELD

THE SEARCH FOR

A PERFECT BATTLEF Gaming’s level design illuminati on the evolution of modern online conflict…

BY WILL PORTER

FIELD

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T

hese places don’t make sense.

No architect would put a door there. No room needs three entrances, oddly placed skylights and a bay window. Throughout history, in fact, no-one ever felt the need to place two gigantic symmetrical keeps directly opposite each other, with a causeway to link them and two opposing balconies from which knights could moon at each other while pinging arrows back and forth.

None of these facing worlds exist, yet their lines and gradients are traced indelibly in the minds of millions. The maps we live and die within online have become a common ground – a rare touchstone between yourself and strangers milling around you in the street and on public transport. You might not share a common tongue with some of the people you meet, but you both could have a favoured direction to lob a grenade when Nuketown boots up in Black Ops or a preferred route through de_dust.

“GOOD COMBAT MAP DESIGN MAY SOUND SIMPLE, BUT GETTING IT RIGHT IS AN ART IN ITSELF” As multiplayer shooting has evolved, though, how have these violent digital playgrounds changed? In an era that sees the military shooter stamp its dominance on gaming, what goes towards the creation of the perfect battlefield? It’s two decades since Romero and Carmack first directed a rocket launcher at each other’s Doomguys – and since then we’ve tread the length of the Longest Yard, buzzed over Blood Gulch and met a bloody end as soldiers in Lockout, Crash and Rust. So did we nail the template back in the past, only for level designers today to iterate former glories in ever shinier new clothes?

THE OLD DAYS “Well, good level design really hasn’t changed as much as you’d think

from BF1942 to BF3,” explains Lars Gustavsson, the Lead Multiplayer Designer on Battlefield 3, as he recalls past and current glories. “Our basic concept that’s been around from the start involves natural ‘honey pots’ spread over the world, and good cover in combination with room for vehicles to manoeuvre. It may sound like a simple recipe, but getting it just right is an art in itself.”

For the past making its presence felt in modern gaming you don’t have to look much farther than the sixth appearance of U-shaped island and firm fan-favourite Wake Island in BF3’s DLC pack Back to Karkand.

To all intents of purpose it’s the self-same map we’ve played multiple times before – albeit bigger and under an ever gloomier sky. Sometimes the old tunes are the best tunes, but that doesn’t mean the developer mustn’t play around with their beat to suit modern tastes. In BF3’s case, any classic map that makes a return

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HEAT OF BATTLE

Lars Gustavsson, Lead Multiplayer Designer on Battlefield 3, underlines his vision of the perfect BF gun game.

How does the new BF mantra of ‘Play it Your Way’ affect the game?

You really can play Battlefield 3 in so many different ways. A tight Team Deathmatch is a totally different experience to all-out vehicle warfare on a large-scale battlefield in Rush or Conquest mode.

‘Play it Your Way’ is present in every detail of the multiplayer game. First, you have the four playable classes that are highly customizable. You can tweak their loadouts and individually configure every main weapon to fit a large number of different combat roles, from long range to close quarters combat.

In Battlefield 3, this also extends to the vehicles where it’s up to you what weaponry and counter measure that you want to take into battle. Are you an aggressive player or the type that plays more defensively? It’s totally up to you this time.

The sandbox gameplay with rock-paper-scissors balancing makes every choice on the battlefield yours. If you’re like me, with twitch skills on the decay, then focus on a setup of kits, weapons and vehicles that allow you to play from a distance instead of going into clinch with the hardcore players at the front. I know I’m doomed to fail if I go there…

Urban combat is a major part of BF3, how do you make sure that city-based maps have that same feeling of the traditional, more open maps that your fans adore?

One major aspect of what makes a Battlefield game feel like a Battlefield game is the through the gun experience – the way weapons handle and the way they feel when being used. That will not change whether the map is wide open or urban based. Also, the ebb and flow of, say, capturing bases in Conquest feels much the same in urban Paris as on Caspian Border. The transition from wide open rural landscapes to tight urban combat mostly affects how many different types of vehicles we can supply.

It’s also worth saying that our more urban maps through the years like Stalingrad and Berlin (Battlefield 1942), Strike at Karkand (Battlefield 2) and Arica Harbor (Battlefield: Bad Company 2) have all been loved by the audience – so when we decided to add an even more city-based focus to BF3, it wasn’t a wild guess. We know that people love it!

What are your own favourite Battlefield maps? What sets them apart?

If I had to pick a couple from through the years, I would say El Alamein from Battlefield 1942, Sharqi Peninsula from Battlefield 2, and Arica Harbor. They all play well and put me into a context, a believable world where the feeling of a greater war that’s going on around you.

The fact that these levels can provide really cool infantry experiences, surrounded by vehicles that threaten you at any given time... that’s the greatness of Battlefield I think.

Strike at Karkand and Wake Island will always be on my list of favourite maps, and they constantly remind me why I love this game.

While making Battlefield 1942, I just sat down at one point and looked at the mayhem going on at Wake Island on a 64-player server. I was amazed by the sight and experience of this all-out-war. Recently, while working on the game for GamesCom, I got that same feeling when the war raged around me on Caspian Border and jets were dogfighting while the ground battle was building up to a crescendo...

must be heavily tested to ensure that the Frostbite 2 engine’s destructive capabilities don’t change the intended flow of the map. With this in tow, however, familiar landscapes can become exponentially more exciting.

“Often introducing destruction in a map from the Battlefield 2 days will only lead to great things,” continues Gustavsson. “An example of this is the new version of Strike at Karkand.

Where you previously found certain paths, the battlefield will now suddenly be a multitude of new access points as players start shredding the city to pieces. Do you remember your favourite sniping spot from old times?

Well, beware – since a well-placed RPG might reduce your cover to a big gaping hole. In Battlefield 3 you can run, but you can’t hide!”

The top level indications of evolution in multiplayer level design (and the franchises that tower over it) can be succinctly analysed, then, through the dramatic return of fan favourites. A phenomenon that Gustavsson’s archnemeses in the halls of Call of Duty are also more than familiar with.

“When people say ‘You should bring so-and-so map back!’ you have to sit down and think,” explains Infinity Ward Creative Strategist Robert Bowling. “That might have been a fantastic map for the original game, but that was because you didn’t have the Extreme Conditioning perk, or the ability to do this or feature that does that. All these can change the dynamic of the map. When we brought Crash back for MW2 we had to change the bullet penetrations and the like to deal with the new weapons.”

Approach other famed FPS designers and they’ll respond in the same way, explaining their reverence to the past – both recent and relative ancient – but also underlining how the terrain of the modern shooter is constantly evolving. “The same design processes apply today that did ten, or even

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ICONS OF DEATHMATCH The masterpieces of imaginary landscape that you know better than your own home...

Level: Deck 16 Game: Unreal Tournament An iconic vast main hall full of diagonal ramps, shackled to various side-halls and corridors – over various iterations of UT Deck 16 presents you with every form of Unreal gunplay: close-quarter mayhem, distant shots from near-vertical angles and a lot of falling off ledges...

Level: Longest Yard Game: Quake III Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space – and railgunning into the void.

Q3DM17 was built to capitalize on the speed, leaps, acres of space and pixelperfect mile-away shots that Quake III reveled in. Possibly one of the greatest Deathmatch arenas of all time.

Level: Facility Game: Goldeneye Your thumbs are still scarred, right? The ventilation shaft, the toilets, the stairs, the slowly opening doors you tried to sneak a shot around... someone playing Oddjob karate chopping you in the groin. Facility was a classic because it opened DM up beyond the PC, and did so with real-world finesse.

Level: Wake Island Game: BF1942 Battlefield’s iconic Wake Island is a classic because it nestles in the game’s systems so snugly. Naval, aerial and infantry combat equally important, while the landmass’ U-shape means that there’s always hope of securing a tactically important beachhead. It’s the most dynamic map in Battlefield.

Level: De_Dust Game: Counter-Strike Your digits still hold the muscle memory of your favoured weapon set-up. You still know your favourite pathways, and you still habitually know whether you’re better at covering to the left or the right.

De_Dust created pure, simple and tense team gunplay like no other. Familiarity bred deeper and deeper love for it...

twenty years ago,” underlines Dave Johnston, the creator of the CounterStrike DE_Dust maps and Senior Level Designer on Splash Damage’s recent Brink. “You still have to design from the player’s perspective with the overall game design in mind. I think all of Brink’s maps owe something to games that have come and gone.

There are some level design principles and patterns that never change – they simply need to be updated or adopted for different gameplay mechanics.

The capturable objectives in Brink, for example, are influenced by our own experiences of playing and designing CTF maps. While the destructible objectives are informed by not only

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, but also by similar objectives in CounterStrike and Call of Duty.”

Robin Walker, overlord of the remarkable Team Fortress 2, readily agrees – yet underlines that there’s still abundant room for originality and change. “There’s a significant amount of knowledge we have as a team, and that’s drawn on when designing a new map, but it doesn’t dictate how we design future levels,” he argues.

“Usually when designing a new map we have a specific goal in mind, such as a new arena layout or geometry feature, or a larger scale feature like a new gameplay element or game mode.

Our experiences making previous

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Level: Dawnville Game: Call of Duty A staple of the WW2 COD games, Dawnville is the town of Sainte Mere Eglise re-imagined for online combat. It is notable because it genuinely feels like a real world location – the Call of Duty bombast coupled with its wrecked train stations and Gallic graveyards creating something truly memorable.

Level: Gold Rush Game: Team Fortress 2 Silly, frenetic and packed with some of the greatest choke points in current gaming – Gold Rush was built around the tenets of TF2’s Payload game mode.

At every stage you know where to go, what to do and how to do it – and even the little victories mid-game pump endorphins around your body. A classic.

“I THINK ALL OF BRINK’S MAPS OWE SOMETHING TO GAMES THAT HAVE COME AND GONE” levels do help, but we can’t rely on that too much, or we won’t innovate.

Generally, if we’re highly confident it’ll work, it’s probably an indicator that we’re doing something too similar to things we’ve done in the past!”

Robert Bowling likewise prefers to bypass the implication that Call of Duty’s wares are based on ‘old knowledge’ – preferring instead to underline the design experience gathered from project to project.

“We’re constantly discovering new things on our own,” he states. “Our philosophy changes from game to game based on lessons learned and

Level: Blood Gulch Game: Halo Halo gave us multiplayer as a playpen, and the tall canyon walls of Blood Gulch joyously funneled us towards each other like no game to date – and provided some superb snipe-spots.

Rampaging through this green field was an incredible first foray into MP gaming for countless gamers – and Gulch’s fun factor would echo throughout gaming.

feedback from our fans. In Call of Duty 4 the maps were fairly simple: simple routes, simple sight-lines. They were great, there was a lot of balance to them, but with MW2 we took a different direction. We bumped up the complexity – allowing you to go in more buildings and allowing you to take more routes because of that and how you could go out of any window.

A lot more vertical combat was added too – a lot more rooftops, second floors and third floors. That made it more complex and encouraged different types of gameplay – and a lot more defensive game styles. With MW3 we’ve tried to find a balance between the two.”

Level: Strike at Karkand Game: Battlefield 2 One of BF2’s finest, interestingly, forbids air transport – keeping its players firmly on urban terra-firma. It’s asymmetrical, with one side rolling into town in heavy armour and the other being pushed further and further back, but the balance is impeccable. Setting up defences and waiting for the assault still sets the pulse racing today...

Level: Crash Game: Call of Duty IV: Modern Warfare Arguably the most popular map in modern day COD, Crash’s engaging mixture of narrow alley-ways and wide-open spaces make it a lovable meat-grinder of a map – and all the better to harvest XP within. Its fast pace exemplifies the dynamics of COD MP, and its ‘Black Hawk Down’ presentation is hugely engaging.

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With advances in gameplay, it seems, come many and varied extra considerations for the perfect battlefield. As time has wound on, meanwhile, complications haven’t only arisen within the map proper – but in the team creating it too.

Around the turn of the millennium world-beating dustbowl de_dust was created in a few weeks by one designer and one artist, in 2011 Dave Johnston created Brink’s Container City with several other designers, around 20-30 artists and input from multiple other Splash Damage departments over a period of months.

THE MODERN WAY What, then, are the ingredients that today’s major league designers believe are necessary to create the perfect modern-day killing field? A common theme within both of 2011’s military multiplayer big guns is in allowing for these different types of gameplay within each level. In the words of BF3’s Lars Gustavsson: “There is a higher need to deliver a perfectly balanced game at day one and to deliver a game that is offering more customization options, more variety, and more flexibility.”

We would perhaps call it being all things to all people, but the EA marketing machine have stamped a mark on it that reads ‘Play it Your Way’. This, of course, threads far beyond map design – into customisable classes, weapons you can fiddle around with and the vehicles and counter-measures you can take into battle. The geography of levels, however, is also a significant factor.

“When it comes to the actual map design, we’re giving each map a strong theme, but also allowing for those different play styles and tactics,” explains Gustavsson. “For example, even if the Caspian Border is a vast, open forest map, it still has sections with building clusters where the focus

CHOKE HOLD

Team Fortress 2’s lead designer Robin Walker describes how Valve control the ebb and flow of Red on Blu warfare...

Chokepoints in TF2 make for some of the most hectic combat that the game provides – but how does a level designer ensure that these don’t get infuriating, and that occasionally the blockage can be cleared?

While we use the ‘Ubercharge’ as a game mechanic to help break stalemates we don’t depend on it when designing defensive areas. A lot of the choke points have counter positions that are either hard to cover completely or offer an advantage over the defenders. For example, in Goldrush, the first stage has a choke point after the first Control Point in the tunnel. The attacking team has a couple high routes that puts them behind the defending team in the tunnel. This forces the defending team to deal with threats from multiple angles as opposed to everything being encapsulated within one view point. Players still perceiving them as chokepoints is important – they provide mini-victories within a map, and are strong markers for the current state of play – and so which team is in control of the various parts of the map.

How do you make sure that maps don’t favour a particular class?

Every level goes through a significant amount of play testing when in development to help us learn what is or isn’t working about a particular design. Often this reveals patterns of behaviour over time that may have not been intentional. Usually classes like Snipers or Engineers are the most obvious, as their gameplay revolves around very specific level design parameters. Removing metal from a particularly advantageous Engineer position makes that spot harder to hold. Adding an additional route that lets Spies through may put pressure on the Snipers allowing gameplay mechanics of those specific classes balance each other out. The overall process of identifying the problems, collaborating in groups to propose solutions, implementing them and then playtesting again isn’t any different for class balance than it is for the other aspects of level design.

What multiplayer maps do you most admire in other FPS games? Do you keep close tabs on what the likes of DICE and Infinity Ward are up to?

I’m a huge fan of DM4 in Quake, but that’s more due to the many great times I had in the map than for a specific design reason, although it does have Quake’s fantastic attention to risk and reward tradeoffs in the positioning of the items and power-ups.

I’ve had a ton of fun in all the recent multiplayer military shooters, actually, but there are already enough differences in the gameplay between those games and TF2 that it makes it hard to be confident that any particular design will translate nicely. We often find ourselves inspired more by community created TF2 maps – the community often takes interesting risks with their designs, and we can easily measure the response from players.

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tends to shift from vehicle combat to infantry combat, subtly changing the encounters you experience there.

There should never be the one and only way to play a map. No matter what class you prefer to play, or your preferred play style, you should always find something constructive (or destructive) to do on every map.”

Indeed, this is a policy that is extended to the fact that every map in BF3 has been built with all five game modes in mind – not least the Team Deathmatch that’s making its first COD-baiting appearance in the franchise. Tighter game modes see certain areas of the map locked off, for example, while great pains have been made to ensure the placement of objectives is pixel-perfect guaranteeing the best ebb and flow of battle.

This approach, however, clearly isn’t for everyone. Splash Damage’s Jamie ‘Fishbus’ Manson – Brink level designer and the man responsible

“CREATING A MAP THAT APPEASES EVERYONE CAN EASILY MAKE IT BLAND, CONFUSING AND OVERLY INCONSISTENT” for TF2 faves like CP_Freight and CP_Steel – underlines the fact that this approach doesn’t suit every game. He’s quite the stickler for individuality. “Creating a map that appeases everyone can easily make it bland, flat, confusing and overly inconsistent,” he coolly states. “Not everyone likes the same things.

Basically you shouldn’t overload a level with every idea you think will make a map unique, special and different from the crowd; instead, pick one and roll with it. You should spend all the focus on that one particular idea, and polish it as much as you can without alienating it from what people are already used to.”

Here we see, perhaps, the divergence

between the more specialist shooter and that of the annual allencompassing FPS blockbuster. A pressure of modernity that all and sundry share, meanwhile, comes with graphic prowess and the need for an engaging, consistent art styles. Every developer going, it seems, wants to underline that this doesn’t just give their maps a pretty face. Good looks mean a good sense of location.

“If you were just playing pure geometry would it be just as much fun? Probably. Would it be as immersive? Probably not,” explains Call of Duty front-man Robert Bowling. “You can go back and play insane Quake and CS maps that are just basic geo – and they’re not any less fun. You’re still getting that core gameplay, but the immersion and the full experience is lost. That’s where the visual fidelity comes in: the environment art and our guys building it all together. What the

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detail adds also plays into what makes a great map, is the ability to easily identify and call out a location. So you can easily call out ‘I’m in lamp store’, ‘I’m in bike shop’, ‘I’m... wherever’.

Being able to communicate effectively and quickly like that is essential to the tactical element of our game.”

Robin Walker meanwhile, with Team Fortress 2, looks beyond the appearance of individual levels – and towards the way that his game’s blanketed and iconic art style gives every map a sense of purpose and direction. “The world in Team Fortress 2 is purposefully simple to make our characters stand out from the background and to allow players to see the battlefield and make various decisions at any given time,” he explains. “Routes are usually well marked and the level flows in one direction or another.”

Jamie Manson is also of this opinion.

He underlines, however, that clear visual clues and streamlined level architecture go hand-in-hand when herding happy gamers through a map’s corridors.

“Map design has come a long way in trimming off the fat,” he describes.

“In a lot of ways we’ve made maps easier to read for people, so they’re less likely to get lost. We’ve also made them simpler to learn by taking away extraneous routes, while providing much more visual fidelity that allows mapmakers to create fantastical locations, breath-taking vistas and some memorable objective narrative.”

This importance of knowing exactly where you are and exactly what you’re doing, it seems, is just as true in the modern Call of Duty games. “It comes down to being able to understand the map – and visualise it in your head very easily,” explains Robert Bowling.

“To know where the hotspots are, to know where the clearest routes are and to know where the alternate routes are. So when you’re clearing

“ONE OF THE MAIN REASONS TO OUR SUCCESS IS THE WIDE VARIETY OF EXPERIENCES THAT A BATTLEFIELD GAME CAN PROVIDE” areas you’re blocking it all off in your head – and you can guess at where your team-mates are. It’s all about situational awareness. That’s vital to a good multiplayer map.”

Balance, meanwhile, is this year’s buzzword – at Activision’s Call of Duty XP festival this year the aforequoted Bowling strode on-stage to mark out the game features that would be struck from the record in MW3 to bring fairness and equality back to his game. The noise in the halls as he did so was deafening. In direct contrast to this however, in games that lurk a few fields distant from the COD goliath,

a disparity in fairness in level design can create maps that will become famed throughout the ages.

“Character comes around by having memorable locations, fun areas, and so on. What’s more, any flaws that come from that give the map a personality people remember,” smiles Jamie ‘Fishbus’ Manson. “The reason we remember great people, friends, products and designs isn’t necessarily because they were perfect.”

Is the perfect battlefield for some shooters, then, potentially one that’s a little broken? “An assumption that seems reasonable is that maps should

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be balanced – each team should have an equivalent chance to win,” says Valve’s Robin Walker. “But with TF2 that’s not born out by the data we have so far: several of the most popular maps are the least balanced, in that one team has a much lower chance to win than the other team.

Our current theory is that people don’t mind being on a team that has an uphill battle as long as they know they’ll have their turn to stomp the other team shortly afterwards. Since you know your team has less chance to win, it makes it even better if you manage to pull it off.”

Universally, however, it’s Jamie Manson’s sentiment of “Understand the game first and then make the map” that echoes throughout the considered opinions of our assembled gaming giants. The perfect battlefield can only truly exist in the game it has been built to neatly snuggle within – showing off its best features, and smothering the worst.

All this clever level design, this coagulated build-up of ancestral knowledge in the construction of fictional architecture, is created to let games express themselves – which in turn massages your experience

into one that feels both free and unpredictable. It’s from this that you gain your treasured gaming anecdotes. The time you singlehandedly defended a capture point on Wake Island, only to be joined during your dying breath as your comrades respawned and the distant rumble of a tank turned into an ominous silhouette atop a nearby hill. The time you kamikaze-ed another plane with a sneaky Spitfire-dismount, then finished off the pilot in the shrubbery below. The time you accidentally drove a bunch of fellow players off a cliff and into the sea.

“I can clearly say that one of the main reasons to our success is the wide variety of experiences that a Battlefield game can provide,” reflects Lars Gustavsson. “By now there are millions of stories on the internet with personal moments that people have experienced. These can’t be built intentionally, can’t be scripted and sometimes not even retold in a way that does them justice. You just have to be there when it happens.”

So it would seem that the most vital element of the perfect battlefield, the part whose absence would cause everything to come crashing down around us, is you.

064 _ WAR GAMES

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ier t d l a so ’s wha y an ere m t h o – g I y I ol WW hem t p o f Mon ough one o t h r a u g h t AN L ON it t

BY C

HRI

SD

066 _ WAR GAMES

Images of Monopoly game set courtesy Simon Wintle � www.wopc.co.uk

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ll games have rules, but Monopoly, right up there with the likes of Poker, Go, and the marvellous hick obscurity Farkel, has actual rituals, too. Every nation, real and – increasingly – imagined, thoughtfully redesigns that famous pale green board in its own image; every household in the world seems to have a different way of handling tax collection, Free Parking, or the loathsome and obscure ‘first trip around the circuit with no option to buy’ rule.

Monopoly’s written history is a well-polished tale of ironic origins and capitalist pluck. The ultimate money-grabbing fantasy began as an interactive means of highlighting the dangers of certain free-market tendencies, while designer Charles Darrow printed the first run of sets himself after all the big league publishers had turned him down. The game’s unwritten, personal history, however, is where the really good stuff can be found. This is where you’ll discover the squabbles that turned into feuds and the long-burning filial resentments that could only really show themselves around the kitchen table on a Sunday evening, with dinner cleared away and the Community Chest and Chance cards stacked in neat little piles. To reappropriate Tolstoy, every family’s relationship with Monopoly is different, whether happy or unhappy.

What follows, then, is my story.

WAR STORIES For my grandfather, the Second World War lasted four years and 45 minutes. Like a lot of soldiers, he kicked things off with 30 minutes spent sitting around on a boat: a clean half hour of being tossed about by midnight waves while he wondered if he could remember how his gun worked, whether his shoes were done up tight enough (a fixation that would

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stay with him long into his declining years), and if he would prove to be a hero, a statistic, or both.

On the last point, at least, we know the answer: he would be neither.

That’s because, right after his boat trip was over, he had just ten scary minutes to wander the shores of France, a nervy 20-year-old’s first time in a foreign country, before he was captured.

This brings us onto the third stage of his war experience. Being caught in an impromptu pincer movement by the Germans probably took up about five minutes of his time – he always said that the whole thing was fast, efficient, and strangely undramatic – and then, finally, he concluded his adventures with four years of hanging about in a POW camp in Poland. He learned to knit (a lot of prisoners did, apparently) and he somehow ended up handling the financial matters for a small farm nearby. Mostly, however, he sat with his fellow prisoners in one of the chilly communal areas of the frosty complex where they were

being held, playing board games and waiting for somebody to win the much bigger board game that was going on around them – the board game that rattled the windows at night as dark craft dived and dipped overhead, screaming and roaring and leaving behind bright chunks of smoking wreckage in the morning.

As a British prisoner in Poland, my grandfather knew that his duty was either to escape, or to sabotage the Axis war machine as much as he could. Nice options, but they didn’t actually hold up that well under scrutiny. Escape was off the cards.

Grandad hated to move quickly even on the best of occasions, and since he still struggled to build convincing sand castles or go-carts by the time he had grand-children to build them for, it’s probably the best for everyone that he never ended up crawling slowly across the dirty floor of a self-made tunnel with a trowel clenched between his teeth and the fate of civilised Europe resting on his shoulders.

Sabotaging the Axis war machine

CHARLES DARROW PRINTED THE FIRST RUN OF SETS HIMSELF AFTER ALL THE BIG LEAGUE PUBLISHERS HAD TURNED HIM DOWN was tricky too, not least because there wasn’t much of the war machine near by for him to get his hands on. He was surrounded by fields and farming folk rather than stylishly lit train tracks and rangy film noir Zeppelin hangars.

The only machinery of any kind that he could find within sabotaging distance was the counting apparatus that he needed in order to keep on top of his spreadsheets down at the farm, or the ancient hulk of metal and cogwork stored in a drafty barn across the way. It was used for turning local pigs into local sausages, and he was afraid of hurting himself on its many sharp edges. Instead, he used to lie on

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his bunk at night and imagine stealing tools from the work yards or stabbing a soldier efficiently between the ribs at the end of a routine inspection.

Even then he felt guilty. Murder and robbery didn’t come easily to a quiet Englishman, tall for his age and awkward because of it. Stamp collecting was more his speed, and that didn’t really lead to useful harm for anybody. That’s why he liked it.

(That and the smell of stamp gum.)

So instead he spent the war rolling dice and moving little tokens about.

He didn’t jump fences on a motorbike, or bail out of a flaming half-inched Messerschmitt leaving a false leg behind. He selected a tin counter and wandered around the board with it.

He passed Go. He collected £200.

HOUSE RULES Monopoly came into his life unexpectedly, wedged at the bottom of a care package sent by one of the UK POW associations. The game was still relatively new at the time, and John Waddington, the English publisher, had been press-ganged by the Secret Service into creating an edition for captive soldiers that included “maps, compasses, real money, and other objects useful for escaping”. That’s according to Wikipedia, anyway.

While it’s nice to think of my grandfather and his plucky chums quizzically pulling a hacksaw and fake beards out of a board game box, he never mentioned this clandestine side of things. Instead, along with dozens of pots of something called ‘peanut butter’ – the Brits knew it was a kind of scented paste, so they assumed it was shoe polish – that care package provided the prisoners who received it with a means to escape in another sense entirely: out of the war in Europe and into a strange, cut-throat pocket kingdom built from wooden houses and wooden hotels.

Grandad and his POW friends played

THE GAME WORKED ITS PECULIAR MAGIC, HOWEVER, IN A WAY THAT KNITTING AND BOOK-KEEPING NEVER COULD a lot of Monopoly over the war years.

Actually, they played it pretty much solidly. They changed the parameters of the game so that a single match could last all day – an early and rather poignant example of house rules – and they crafted new pieces when the old ones got lost or stepped on or were needed to wedge ill-fitting windows shut. The games had a drama that being imprisoned in a stylish German castle during the greatest conflict of the twentieth century apparently did not.

They allowed for heroism, for victory, and for moments of individual flair.

They allowed for stories: real

narratives with twists and feints and false-endings. One fellow won a 40-hour marathon game with just the ‘Browns’ – a piece of plucky, modest tenaciousness that netted him the ever-lasting admiration of all present, as if he had done something genuinely astonishing, like navigating the Khyber while attached to an iron lung. Somebody else battled through to win using only a handful of Utilities – I loathe the Utilities and laugh at anyone who buys them – and a single Station. Now that is astonishing.

It’s strange to think of all the contradictions of my grandfather’s wartime experience in this way: playing games while Europe and the Pacific burned, indulging in a rich, exotic fantasy of capitalism and dominance while he slept in ratty cots, ate dull, pencilly stubs of bread, and awoke with barely enough energy to put peanut butter on his boots each morning. The game worked its peculiar magic, however – in a way that knitting and book-keeping never could – and by 1945, Monopoly was World War II, and World War II was Monopoly. It was impossible for my grandfather to tell where one ended and the other began. Many former

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POWs would revisit the sites of their internments years after the conflict had finished. They found a form of closure this way, apparently, although most of them would wince at that term. Grandad went back to Poland and was strangely unmoved by the whole business. He broke down only when a family vacation took him to New Jersey and he went to spend a night in Atlantic City, the setting for the original version of the Darrow’s game. (Atlantic City, incidentally, is a comprehensively terrible place, a real armpit, and Grandad spent most of the trip crouching by the bed

in a Motel 6, certain that the entire neighbourhood was about to be destroyed in street warfare between the cops and some local dealers. Even so, it was still a kind of homecoming for him.)

MILITARY STRATEGIES It wasn’t my grandfather who taught me to play Monopoly. It was Ben, my older brother. I was six at the time, old enough to have a very simple understanding of Chess – shamefully, 26 years on, I still have the exact same very simple understanding – and old enough to learn the basics

of buying properties and going after sets, and to get my head around how hocking something meant you still owned it, in a way, but you couldn’t really use it anymore.

I understood some of the basics, anyway. My initial instructional game ended with my first glimpse of a truly epic rage quit when I accidentally landed on Free Parking and was suddenly wealthier than Bruce Wayne and Lex Luthor combined (we played the version of the game where all tax money goes into Free Parking – we were that kind of family) and my brother decided to kick the board over

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and leave me to pack it away. It was an oddly wonderful moment: it made me realise there were other rules that lay beyond the standard ones – that there was a game going on beyond the board: huge, social, fascinating, and quietly adult, and that it was here that the true players lived.

Ben had clearly taken me as far as he could go. If my brother had provided my introduction to the game, it was my grandfather who taught me to play well – who taught me strategies for the board and short-cuts for navigating that mysterious mass of social interactions surrounding the board, that I didn’t yet understand. It was his wartime legacy.

Here’s what he taught me. Success in Monopoly is largely down to only two things that take place on the playing field itself, whether it depicts weary American good-time towns, the stony heft of London, or the Simpsons’ Springfield. These two things are pretty simple: get the Oranges, and try to control the Stations.

These elements work brilliantly together, they’re like two gears clipping snugly into place alongside each other, teeth meshing. Really, it’s beautiful: the Oranges are cheap to buy, and cheap to build up, but once you’re in charge of a full set of hotels, they can be surprisingly vicious for anyone landing on them.

And people will land on them, of course – and land on them often – because they’re nearly impossible to avoid when you’re rolling to Get Out Of Jail, which is where any good Monopoly player tries to spend a fair amount of time when the game is really hotting up and most of the board has been bought out and developed. The safety of Jail is the lure, the Oranges are the pit of spikes, and the strategy almost never fails.

It’s murder. The Stations, meanwhile, provide regular low-level infusions of cash as players make their rounds.

You’re never going to kill someone off at Marylebone, but you’ll wing them and hopefully leave them bleeding all the same. (Also, there’s just something pleasantly romantic about owning all the Stations. They have exactly

the kind of class and character the Utilities lack.)

There would appear to be a lot of luck involved in getting these winning pieces of property, however. Weak players will tell you there’s a lot of

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luck to getting any pieces of property in Monopoly. They’re wrong. This brings me to my grandfather’s best piece of advice, the real key to victory in the beautiful game – and it has nothing to do with house prices, tiles, dice, or Community Chest cards.

Off the board, the difference between a good Monopoly player and a truly great one, is that the great one knows how to maintain a campaign of low-level psychological torture, feathered with unpredictable instances of brutal emotional violence. It’s about getting the properties you want, even if someone else has already landed on them and paid for them, and that, in turn, comes down to making use of every mind game in the book, from canny deal-making to pantomime begging and acts of open intimidation.

Monopoly’s a game that gets better if you play with family – or people, like fellow POWs, that you know the way you do your own family – because so much of it is about the shared experiences you mine for leverage.

For several years when I was in my early teens, I knew that my eldest brother had broken a small yet strangely critical window towards the back of the house, and had somehow managed to blame the incident on the neighbour’s cat, Percy-Percy (real name). This, despite the fact that Percy-Percy was old, fat, and had been dead for several years.

With that hanging over him, I was practically unbeatable. He did whatever I asked him to. The threat of real-world retribution cancelled out any game-world ambitions he might have had, and he crumbled every time I brought the subject up, no matter how obscurely I hinted at it.

Grandad would be proud. God knows the kind of moves he pulled on his soldier friends back in the 40’s, when he could bring the steely might of the Nazis into his threats.

WHAT’S WORSE THAN LOSING AT MONOPOLY? WINNING IS WORSE. I KNOW, BECAUSE MY GRANDFATHER TOLD ME SO CEASE FIRE Ultimately, I think there are probably two interesting conclusions that emerge from my grandfather’s winning strategy.

The first is that videogame Monopoly is useless – a brainless aberration that no amount of interface redesigning and meta-game twiddling can ever resolve. As the game is, in truth, only loosely played out on the board, it’s impossible to get the genuine Monopoly experience without

including all the psychological aspects that envelop it, and I’ve yet to see a computer intelligence that can pull off that kind of intimate cruelty – or the kind of advanced AI that once saw a player break a window and blame it on a dead animal.

The second conclusion is that Monopoly is an intensely transformative game. It has the power to change mild-mannered people like my grandfather – and like myself – into utter monsters, psychopaths who will stop at nothing to achieve the slightest, and the least meaningful, of victories.

As such, Monopoly has a unique kind of thematic and mechanical purity. It sings. It’s a game about an ideology that then creates microcosms of that ideology as you play it. Pick up the dice, move your shoe around, and after a few turns, you’ve become a capitalist, and then you proceed to engage in fierce capitalist warfare, even if, away from the table, you’re all about goat’s cheese, collectivism, and weaving dream catchers.

It’s a great example of the powers of games to alter behaviour, and an indicator of their fearsome potential (so often wasted or entirely ignored) to put you into other people’s shoes and bring ideas – often complex, troubling ideas – to life vividly and effortlessly. Reading about concepts is fine, but perhaps you really only understand and appreciate them when you have to use them to win.

And in Monopoly’s case, the ultimate sting in the tale is that it’s also a critique of its ideology – a genuine indictment of capitalism. Because, really, what’s worse than losing at Monopoly? Winning is worse. I know, because my grandfather told me so.

Forget broken windows, dead cats, and the Second World War: in this life, there’s nothing quite as terrible as winning – winning and having nobody left to play against anymore.

072 _ INDIE DARLINGS

INDIE DARL “AN ALL-ENCOMPASSING CREATIVE ADVENTURE, WHICH RANGES FROM THE MOST EXCITING TO THE DULLEST WORK YOU CAN IMAGINE! IT’S A CHANCE TO MAKE STUFF YOU BELIEVE IN, AND THAT MAKES IT ALL WORTH IT”

PAUL TAYLOR MODE 7 GAMES

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“INDIE DEVELOPMENT IS FREEDOM. FREEDOM TO WORK HOW AND WHEN YOU WANT. FREEDOM TO EXPLORE YOUR OWN IDEAS AND TAKE RISKS. FREEDOM TO ENJOY GAME DEVELOPMENT!”

JAY KYBURTZ IRON HELMET

LINGS

BY CRAIG LAGER

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ndie developers are nothing if not profound and/ or sweary. They are passionate, hard-working and ridiculously talented people who have ditched careers, gambled huge chunks of money, and often gone it alone to make games that we (hopefully) want to play. But what’s it like to be an indie developer? How do you survive in an industry that moves so fast? How do you achieve success?

In talking to the following seven teams, the conclusion is that indie development is hard, sometimes scary, but massively rewarding. The trend seems to be that if you have a good idea and have the opportunity to go for it – then go for it. People will always buy good video games.

And it doesn’t matter what your background is – you can be a long-time developer, a gardener, or a cryptographer in the navy. If you want to do it, learn to code and do it. If you dare. Oh, and don’t shove in a load of DRM because it will get you nowhere. And try to avoid living next door to people who like to make bombs. And don’t expect to get paid for a while...

“FUCK THAT SHIT!” ANDY SCHATZ POCKETWATCH GAMES

074 _ INDIE DARLINGS

FRICTIONAL GAMES > FRICTIONALGAMES.COM

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reators of the Penumbra series and then massive cult hit Amnesia, Frictional is more firmly established than other studios out there, and reaching that sort of status is no small achievement. With a team of “7.5 people”, all working from their respective homes, Frictional has put together interactive, Lovecraftian horror that worms out the girliest of screams from even the most bearded amongst us.

Frictional started when Jens Nillson got together with Thomas Grip after a history of making indie games: “I was freelancing, working with different games over a number of years and Thomas has been making games on his own since his teen years. We came into contact during studies at university, where we did a thesis project together and then eventually went on to create Penumbra.”

As a horror game with no real combat and a physicsbased control system, Penumbra was ambitious for the

company’s first outing. Early on, there were a couple of moments where it looked as though the project was going to fail completely. “We had a couple of those moments when we really did not have any money left and felt tired of trying to keep going under those conditions,” remembers Nillson. The duo persevered though, things got easier, and after widespread critical success with Penumbra, they released two full sequels. Frictional was around to stay.

Work on Amnesia started as soon as the Penumbra trilogy was done, which is not quite as early as Nillson would have liked. “It took three years to make Amnesia and the new revision of the engine that also included the tools for level editing, etc. We always try to begin the technology development of the next project at the end of the current one, but unfortunately we always have limited resources and time so we often end up having everyone working on the current project all the way to the end of it.”

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“THERE WERE A COUPLE OF MOMENTS WHERE IT LOOKED AS THOUGH THE PROJECT WAS GOING TO FAIL COMPLETELY” Money is always going to be an issue without publisher backing too. While Frictional had certainly done well out of Penumbra, it was by no means cash rich, which meant that paying staff was a bit of an issue. “Everyone agreed to work for a very low pay during the production of Amnesia in order for the project to be completed,” says Nillson. “The

rest of the people that worked on the game did it for free with the promise to be paid when the game was released and we hopefully got money from the sales.” Getting everyone paid took around a year but, thankfully, Amnesia has done well enough for them to be fully rewarded.

Nillson tells us that when Amnesia started to go ‘viral’, it did incredibly well for the team. Massive exposure through link aggregators and social media – something that Nillson hoped for but had no way of securing – has been one of the best ways to make sales: “It is definitely something we wanted, but not something we could create. It was created by the users. We had earlier experiences with how crazy things can get if you get onto these type of ‘fast spreading news with a tons of users’ sites, with the tech demo we got on digg.com and got tens of thousands of visitors in a day, which back in 2006 was crazy for a bunch of students. It’s a tremendous uplift to be on the sites.”

076 _ INDIE DARLINGS

THE INDIE STONE >THEINDIESTONE.COM

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ade up of games journalists, game developers and BBC sketch show writers, The Indie Stone was the brain behind the controversial hit, Privates, for TV station Channel 4 in the UK while collaborating with Size Five Games. Since that breakthrough moment, it has produced the not-quite-outyet Project Zomboid – an isometric zombie survival RPG. The company was born when co-founder Andy Hodgetts found himself out of work as the small development studio he’d been with for ten years closed down. He and Chris ‘Lemmy’ Simpson had been talking about going indie for a while, so, together and with a “statutory minimum redundancy cheque” in their pocket, they decided to go for it.

After Privates, the pair immediately started work on Zomboid, picking up more people on the way. All was not plain sailing though. The plan was to take pre-orders to fund the project through PayPal, which worked for a time until PayPal decided to freeze its accounts. Then, after moving

to Google Checkout, the exact same thing happened. As Indie Stone scribe-in-chief, Will Porter, narrates: “The early problems came through our pair of indie heroes not quite realising that PayPal and Google weren’t keen (at all) on ‘donations’ being made for as yet uncreated products – which brought up the work-around of them releasing three god-awful games with about four lines of code to their name... these were then sold as the ‘product’, with a life-time key to the doors of Project Zomboid included as a bonus.”

It was an ingenious solution, and one that the team revelled in pushing to its extreme. “We figured that by having a text version of Rock, Paper, Scissors as the most expensive game, it would well and truly cement that ‘this is a joke work-around’,” explains Hodgetts. “Early signs were good. We’d get a whole bunch of comedy responses from people requesting a key for ‘that zombie thingy that comes free with this awesome Rock, Paper, Scissorz! game’. But as time went on, we started seeing more and

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“WE ENTERED THE INDIE SCENE TO MAKE A GAME WITH THE SUPPORT OF A COMMUNITY, NOT TO MAKE A GAME TO GET US NOTICED BY PUBLISHERS”

more complaints that we had the nerve to charge £15 for a command-line random numbers game. So we found ourselves writing more and more explanations on the ‘Buy Our Games’ page until eventually, we may as well have had a big flashing ‘THIS IS A JOKE’ banner at the top.”

The development problems haven’t stopped with just financials either. With indie development, it seems, anything can happen. “There was a strange, and tragic incident in which a neighbour made a bomb in his flat and blew himself up in his car, meaning that the team were evacuated for quite a while,” says Porter of one of the more memorable pit stops the team faced. And it didn’t stop there. Next was the thorn in every developer’s side: piracy. For technical reasons, it seemed that anyone who pirated the game was getting updates for free, direct from The Indie Stone’s servers. In effect, each pirated copy was directly costing them money. The only solution was to release the alpha tech demo early which was incredibly

annoying for the team. “I don’t think there is an effective way of preventing piracy which doesn’t restrict or irritate your legitimate players,” complains Hodgetts. “When you’ve got the sort of restrictive security which requires, say, being constantly connected to the net within a singleplayer game... well, it does send the message that you place sales over the experience of your players.

Project Zomboid is catching the eye of a few big-name publishers, but as its name implies, The Indie Stone is staying indie. “When a publisher points to a now successful independent commercial developer and effectively says, ‘this could be you’ well, that’s not really motivation to sacrifice everything we hold dear,” says Hodgetts. “We entered the indie scene with the desire to make a game with the support of a community, not to make a game sufficiently popular to get us noticed by publishers – and then work behind the same sort of impenetrable wall that we spent the previous twelve years working behind.”

078 _ INDIE DARLINGS

MODE 7 GAMES > MODE7GAMES.COM

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fter a relatively small release of Determinance in 2007, Mode 7 (named after graphics tech that “was used to make things seem more impressive than they actually were”) hit it big last year with Frozen Synapse – a brutal turn-based strategy game that’s received barely anything but praise.

Paul Taylor started work with Mode 7 when Ian Hardingham invited him to do the sound design on Determinance, but they soon realised that they made a good pair so Taylor got more and more involved in development enabling the pair to “make games on our own terms.”

Initially, Mode 7 wasn’t strictly indie. Frozen Synapse is actually the first game that it has published itself. Taylor explains: “We worked with a publisher on Determinance – that experience was enough to put us off! I just don’t think publishers can add sufficient value to be worth working with, in most cases. Sure, there are some areas

where they can be beneficial. Also, there are still some interesting publishers out there who we’d consider working with. But ultimately someone has to come and say, ‘Here is the value I am adding; this is what justifies me taking X% of your game and a significant amount of your time and attention.’”

Taylor is openly frustrated with publishers: “You come up against a huge amount of irrationality masquerading as data-driven decision-making, and that’s incredibly tiresome.” But at the same time, he’s discovered, not having one has its own problems. With no secure financial backing, tough choices have to be made and life might not be as comfortable as it could be. Mode 7 has brought people in, for example, only to have to let them go due to a lack of work and funds which was “one of the worst commercial decisions we’ve made, and although it worked out okay for them and us, that was a really hard time.”

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For a few years, too, Hardingham and Taylor were on very low salaries, and while they’re better off now with the success of Frozen Synapse, Taylor is quick to point out that they aren’t “raking it in or changing our lifestyles”. What’s important, though, is that Synapse did well, that they’re both happy with how it’s turned out, and that they’re striving to provide the best service possible. “We’re trying really hard to do good customer support,” promises Taylor. “I really genuinely want everyone to be able to play the game hassle-free so we do our best. Aside from being morally the right thing to do, this is sound commercial behaviour – if someone has a problem and you fix it quickly, they will stick with you because they know you care about their experience. I’m not saying we get it right all the time – we don’t – but I think that if we keep doing our absolute best this will pay off in the long term.”

080 _ INDIE DARLINGS

IRON HELMET > IRONHELMET.COM

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eptune’s Pride is a game that breaks people. It has you setting alarm clocks for 5am, it has you falling out with friends, it has you unable to sleep because of paranoia (I’ve played it and experienced all these things).

It’s an RTS that you play in your browser in which eight people can join a single game and that will last for a realworld month. More recently, Iron Helmet released Blight of the Immortals which was of a similar bent, but in which all the players work co-operatively against a zombie uprising.

Jay Kyburtz, along with Iron Helmet co-founder Penny Sweetser, worked at 2K Australia for ten years, but left after releasing Bioshock because he “wanted to make games again” which doesn’t immediately make sense. “For many of those ten years, I was a team lead and manager,” he starts to explain. “It was meetings, budgets, schedules and people problems all day long. Then, on Bioshock we were shortstaffed on the art team and I was able to jump back into

making levels again. It felt really good to sit down all day and just think about how to make a small piece of Bioshock look good and play well. These days I spend all day everyday just making games, not organizing other people.”

Few indie developers have that sort of experience, and Kyburtz is clear that he prefers the indie environment to being inside a large company: “The best thing about working for yourself is that your success or failure is entirely in your own hands. If you work hard and make the right decisions you’ll succeed and millions of people will enjoy your games.

That’s not always the case when working for a big company like 2K. There you might work hard and make all the right decisions only to have somebody on the other side of the world, who you’ve never met, completely trash your project.”

Contrary to what we’ve heard from some of the other developers, Kyburtz says that indie development for him has been quiet. Whether this is just in contrast to working

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“I WAS TRYING TO MAKE A GAME THAT WAS EXCITING AND COMPELLING, BUT I NEVER EXPECTED PEOPLE TO SET ALARM CLOCKS AND GET UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT”

at 2K though is another question. “At 2K there was a new horror story every week,” he confesses, “but as an indie I can just put my head down and get on with the job. There are no dramas.” This isn’t to say that he wouldn’t go back, but only if “the right project and the right team came along,” which he says is far more important than whether he’s working for himself or not.

Iron Helmet’s first project was Neptune’s Pride . There’s nothing quite like it on the market. A game can literally last for a month, while only requiring you to log in a couple of times a day for a couple of minutes at a time. Kyburtz says he designed it to be ideal for “a few minutes between meetings, 15 minutes after lunch, or even while eating my breakfast.” Which is great, but isn’t really how it worked out. “I was trying to make a game that was exciting and compelling,” he describes, “but I never expected people to set alarm clocks and get up in the middle of the night. I

actually tried to pace the game so that not that much would happen over an eight-hour period. I’m happy to see the game get under people’s skin. I think it’s really great to see some people actually care.”

Since no one makes games like this, polishing them is a challenge. “There are two challenges in making these kinds of games,” Kyburtz says. “The first is how long they take to play and test. We do have systems that allow us to fast forward through time, but to get a real sense of whether the game is working we need to play it at its intended speed. It can take weeks or months to have a game play out.”

The second challenge is that Iron Helmet’s games really have to be played with other, real people. “Our games are about multiplayer and don’t even really have AI,” he says. “Rounding up testers to play our weird games that last for weeks can be a bit of a challenge. Particularly if the game is not working very well or is just not very fun.”

082 _ INDIE DARLINGS

CHARLIES GAMES > CHARLIESGAMES.COM

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harlie Knight from the daringly named Charlies Games is a true indie developer – a lone guy with a computer, releasing score-attack shooters ranging from the unpronounceable Irukandji, to the slightly more sensibly-nameed Bullet Candy, to the untouchable Space Phallus and the newly-released Scoregasm. He also comes from one of the more unlikely backgrounds as a “gardener with a show garden” which he openly admits to quite enjoying.

Slowly, though, Knight slipped into making games. “I’d bought a computer while I was working in the garden,” he says, “and had been trying to write a little game in the evenings. I enjoyed it enough to want to make a stab at a career in programming of some kind so I started a software engineering course shortly after, and during the second semester of the first year I released my first game, Bullet Candy, after being encouraged by a lecturer who told me it looked as good as anything else he’d seen on Real Arcade.”

Speaking to Knight really cements the idea of the bedroom coder. He isn’t doing this for the money but genuinely doing it for the love. Here, for example, is what he had to say about making a deal with publishers, or moving into PSN or XBLA which his games are perfect for: “I’ve, never gotten into any of that sort of thing with publishers. In truth I’m happy enough as I am, and the games I put out sell just well enough for me to be able to continue doing what I do, with a little left over for a few beers. I’ve bought an iPod Touch with a half-hearted intention of doing something for iOS, and I also looked into Xbox indie games, but from what I understand it’s a hard market to make much money in, and while I’m not in it for the money as such, I do still need to earn enough to pay the bills, so I decided it was too risky.”

Without the big money-and-profit focus though, things can and do go wrong. Once, for example, Knight completely

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“THE GAMES I PUT OUT SELL WELL ENOUGH FOR ME TO BE ABLE TO CONTINUE DOING WHAT I DO, WITH A LITTLE LEFT OVER FOR A FEW BEERS”

ran out of cash which was “a bit scary” but after posting something on his blog, some “very generous, super cool people” donated him enough funds to get by on.

An event like that might be enough for some developers to chuck it all in and go with a more stable career, but Knight’s stuck with it and, thankfully, without having a publisher breathing down his neck, he’s been able to produce the likes of Space Phallus. “It’s kind of a riff on how spaceships in the shooters of yore look very phallic.

Design wise it was mainly move, shoot, don’t get spunk on the dog. It’s very silly really, but people liked it which was cool.” Essentially, Knight’s in the situation where he can do what he wants. “It’s free and has a naked cowboy with no arms, and a badger with irritable bowel syndrome.” You’re not going to see that from a big-name publisher.

When you’re on your own and customers are having to bail you out, you have a responsibility to them to be as fair

as possible. Knight prices his games in the most ethical way he can – he wants to be paid, sure, but he wants to be fair about it more than anything. “With Irukandji, for example, the development cost/time was so short I felt I could afford to let people pay whatever they felt was fair.

There was a demo, so people could make their minds up what they wanted to spend on it if they wanted more.” And for anyone ordering Scoregasm, there is tiered pricing with higher amounts getting you beta versions, your name in the credits, or even having enemies named after you – which is pretty awesome.

Plus, anything that Knight ships is DRM free because he doesn’t want to “affect the ability of actual paying customers to enjoy the game”. He likens DRM to DVD sales in that, “when you buy a DVD, you have to sit through a minute of ‘don’t pirate this video’ messages, but if you get a copy from that guy in the back of the pub you don’t.”

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POCKETWATCH GAMES > POCKETWATCHGAMES.COM

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auntlet meets Hitman is a concept that’s both difficult to grasp and incredibly interesting. It’s also what Andy Schatz of Pocketwatch Games is promising with his next game Monaco. Schatz comes from a background at EA, which he’s not so affectionate about.

“I was contracting during the EA_Spouse débâcle... pulling all nighters, 110-hour weeks on the abysmal Goldeneye: Rogue Agent. After having been through a number of critical and commercial failures at the behest of corrupt and narcissistic executives, and having been the victim of bloated teams and anorexic schedules, I just decided that I could do it better on my own.”

From there, Schatz applied to business schools and, while waiting to hear back, started making games. “I got rejected from all four schools, but that first game went on to sell 100,000 copies. So I’m glad I didn’t get in!” Up until Monaco, Pocketwatch had produced educational animal-

based games, but only now is it grabbing the attention of gamers properly, and by winning two IGF [Independent Games Festival] awards it seems that we’ve been grabbed by the balls, but it’s been a long time coming.

Getting here doesn’t sound like it’s been easy either. While Schatz is clearly confident with Monaco, and while his previous games have sold in their thousands, Pocketwatch’s financial history doesn’t sound so secure. “I started Pocketwatch with a relative fortune in my bank account,” he admits. “I had $150,000 in the bank at the end of 2004, which is when I started. Now I’m down to around $40,000, but some of that is from Indiefund, who I have to pay back after the game ships. So yeah, I’m not scared of being destitute and homeless, but if I were to be shot in an alley, my wife would be left with pretty much nothing.” Oof. Rightly, there are some big ambitions for Monaco, including an all-formats release. There are plenty of

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“I’M NOT SCARED OF BEING DESTITUTE AND HOMELESS, BUT IF I WERE TO BE SHOT IN AN ALLEY, MY WIFE WOULD BE LEFT WITH PRETTY MUCH NOTHING”

issues in doing this however, which stretch far beyond re-writing code, one of which is particularly pertinent for all developers of PC-based titles. “A big part of Monaco is the living room setting,” says Schatz. “A lot of players will want to be able to play with people on the same screen. This generally means console.

But the game is really strong on the PC and Mac as well, and I think PC/Mac gamers in general are typically more receptive to experimental ideas. So in that regard, the PC is the ideal market as well. So that means that it’s important to me to make sure both PC gamers and console gamers are given great experiences with a relatively tight release

window. I don’t want the PC version to feel like a port if I have to release on a console first.”

Even prior to Monaco’s release, a lot of people are very excited about it and it wouldn’t be hard to picture some people with money being interested in investing. When asked about why he didn’t have a deal with a publisher, he simply replies with a cryptic “Who said that?” – so whether it will stay indie only time will tell. What Schatz is very vocal about though, is how the business side of things can get in the way of actually releasing a game. “I spent my first four years of being an indie focusing too heavily on this aspect. The biggest lesson I’ve learned from Monaco is that you just have to make an awesome game, and then talk about it lots. You can call that marketing if you’d like, but really it’s just a way to build community around an awesome game. Every dollar or minute you spend making an awesome game and talking about it is worth five spent on business or advertising.”

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CRYPTIC COMET >CRYPTICCOMET.COM

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nother one man show; Cryptic Comet is really Vic Davis; creator of Armageddon Empires – turn-based, post-apocalyptic strategy, Solium Infernum – turn-based, play-by-email strategy in Hell, and The Six Gun Saga – a single-player card game based in the Wild West. Davis also has probably the most exciting origin story of all the developers we’ve spoken to: “I did eight years in the US Navy as a Cryptologic Officer and then went to grad school thinking that I was going to be a national security advisor. I quickly realized that I was never cut out for being a ‘yes man’ memo-writer so I changed course drastically and taught myself how to program multi-media CD-ROMs.” What might surprise most people with a more casual attitude to indie gaming are the prices on display on the Cryptic Comet website. Armageddon Empires, for example, is $45, while Solium comes in at $24.99.

However, Davis insists that his games are under-priced because of the niche he’s catering for. “If you compare my prices to competitors like Matrix or Shrapnel then you

will see that they fall onto the lower edge of the price bell curve,” he offers by way of explanation. “If you want a turnbased strategy experience like Armageddon Empires or Solium Infernum you don’t have a lot of new choices every year from any type of developer... indie or otherwise.”

Going on to mention the two to three years of development time behind each of his games, plus art costs and financial risks, Davis almost berates me for even bringing price up.

Seems it’s a bit of a touchy subject.

He does make a valid point though. Right now, we’re used to seeing stuff appear on app stores for less than 99 cents, while indie games are sold via Steam sales for a couple of dollars, which isn’t fair to people who are both niche and on their own. “The casual game and app store price deflation that has happened over the last few years has been a real concern for indies like me,” Davis laments.

“I hear about it all the time from fellow developers. But it is how the market should work. I’ll need to adapt or die with the new price expectations. May you live in interesting times and all that.”

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“I LIKE THE IDEA OF BEING A BOUTIQUE DEVELOPER DIRECTLY SERVING A SMALL CLIENTÈLE VERY WELL”

So, Davis wants to serve the fans of his niche and doesn’t care about much else. It’s an ‘I’m doing this, and if you don’t like it then fuck you’ attitude, which is brilliant – though might be part of the reason he’s yet to be seen on staple indie outlets like Steam or Direct2Drive. “I’ve made some efforts to get on the portals but things have fallen through or been just flat out declined,” he says. “At this point I don’t even make an effort. I like the idea of being a boutique developer directly serving a small clientèle very well. Selling direct to the customer can be very satisfying.”

He compares himself to a “blacksmith working in Henry Ford’s world” and while there is “some work at the race track for the equestrian enthusiasts”, it’s obviously not where the money is. But Davis doesn’t care: “Once you have been your own boss there is no going back. I’m such a hermit right now that I’m frankly not suited for a workplace environment.”

His latest game, The Six Gun Saga, is vastly different from the others. Not only is it much cheaper at $15, it’s not some epic, turn-based strategy game either – it’s

card-based. It seems, though, that this was by no means the original idea. “Six Gun Saga is both the child of necessity and a little bit of a sales experiment. I bought a lot of art for it and then ended up with a design that didn’t work when I went from the drawing board to the digital incarnation.” Being adaptable, then, is a necessity because if something isn’t working but you release it anyway and it flops, you don’t eat.

And then price comes up again. “Also, one thing that I thought the line up of games on my website could use was a low price point ‘entry’ game that customers could look at instead of just going full-blown into hex and counter Hell.”

Davis explains that there were other reasons for the change up too. Solium and Armageddon were both “250,000+ lines of code” projects which he needed a break from, but, as ever: “the real irony is that SGS ended up taking much longer than I planned and was even harder from an AI perspective than my first two games. So instead of having my batteries recharged, I pushed the burnout meter even further into the red.”

088 _ VIDEO BOARDGAMES

BYTES & PIECES The history of videogames on the tabletop

BY DANIEL NESS

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ou’re playing Gears of War. It’s a game of visceral future combat: Locust troops erupt from the ground; your buddy’s on the other side of the map, bleeding, crawling, begging for help; you fail your active reload, your Lancer jams and the only thing preventing you from becoming grub food is the chainsaw bayonet slung beneath its muzzle. You rev it up, dive from cover and roadie-run into the enemy.

You’re playing Gears of War. You’re playing a board game. Board games have changed – they’ve had to. It’s the gimmicks, you see: the lights and beeps of their hated foe, the videogame.

There’s a moment in Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive where an arcade cabinet hypnotises some dude into smashing his head through the monitor. That was us in the 1980s, only we didn’t put our head through the glass just the once: we did it over and over again. It was the thrill that kept us going. Smart bombs. Extra lives.

We lived out Star Wars fantasies on a nicotine-stained screen and when we died, pocket change was our salvation.

After all that action, cardboard and dice seemed like relics from a bygone age. At Christmas you open a parcel

from Aunt Viv only to find Monopoly inside and not Crystal Castles for your Atari. “It’s great,” you lie. “It’s just what I always wanted.” But Aunt Viv’s a canny one; she spots your disappointment and you later overhear her talking to mum and dad: “I wanted to get him one of those videogames,” she says, “but they’re so expensive.”

But, as Aunt Viv’s predicament was echoed in homes across the planet, board game manufacturers, tired of living in the shadow of the amusement arcade, hatched a plan. They went to videogame publishers like Atari, Namco and Gottleib and bought licensing rights by the armful.

MERCHANDISE MADNESS In 1981 – only a few months after the eponymous videogame hit the arcades – Milton Bradly released Frogger: The Board Game. Frogger was followed by a flurry of arcade conversions from other companies eager to catch the cresting videogame

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wave. ‘Pac-Man fever’ was still sweeping the western hemisphere; fans bought Pac-Man toys, lunch boxes, even pencil sharpeners.

With a new market eager for cheap, emblazoned merchandise, Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers moved in for the kill, waving board game adaptations before consumers’ eyes like joss sticks at a hippy sit-in.

The amount of arcade-licensed board games that hit the toy market in the early 1980s is staggering. Like the games they aped, they flooded the market. Too many, too fast. Smaller manufacturers were left floundering for obscure licenses just to grab a piece of the pie. In 1983, Ideal released Blue Print, a board game based on a barelyremembered 1982 Bally/Midway title; in the same year, Parker Brothers released Popeye, which has the distinction of being (deep breath) the first board game based on a videogame based on a cartoon show based on a comic strip. Just to ensure potential buyers wouldn’t think otherwise, it even said: “Based on the exciting arcade game!” on the box lid next to the sailor man himself.

But the arcade boom wasn’t to last. As the videogame market crashed so did the market for board game adaptations. Licensed board games trickled to a halt and by 1984 production had all but ceased on this briefly lucrative sub-genre.

Between 1981 and 1983 Milton Bradley designed, manufactured and released fourteen board games based on videogame licences as diverse as Pitfall!, Dragon’s Lair and Ms. PacMan. During this time Atari, once market leader of the home videogame market saw its stock plummet thanks to shoddy sales of titles it had manufactured in great numbers. Copies of E.T. The Video Game and the arcade boom’s mascot, Pac-Man were returned in their millions, ground into pieces and buried in the New Mexican desert.

But this was far from the end of videogames and their board game conversions. As Atari bowed out of the market, a Japanese company, Nintendo, was readying its own home console for launch in the west. In 1985, it released Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo Entertainment System and in doing so created the perfect boxlid icon to kick-start the board game conversion machine back into action.

FIGHTING IT OUT With videogames no longer restrained by primitive graphics, Super Mario Bros. brought a new range of colourful characters to the tabletop. The visual language of the game seemed tailor-

made for transition to board games; after all, Mario climbed ladders in Donkey Kong only to spend much of Super Mario Bros. sliding down pipes.

Milton Bradley had already worked with Nintendo, having released board and card games based on the Donkey Kong franchise; unsurprisingly it licensed Super Mario Bros. but with a new gaming mega star up for grabs it wasn’t the only company seeking to cash in. In the years to come, CBD Spiele, Epoch and Tiger Games would all make their own Super Mario Bros. tabletop adventures, while in the United Kingdom Waddingtons adopted the license, making two Mario games for its native market.

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As the eighties rolled into the nineties, other gaming mascots followed Mario onto the tabletop.

In 1992, Mattel and Milton Bradley adapted Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog as a card game and board game respectively; Bandai released a series of arcade game conversions to a Japanese audience under the Party Joy banner; and in 1994, Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers adapted Capcom’s Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior.

Up until this point, board game adaptations had been simple and formulaic, cynical attempts at merchandising with little to endear them to either video or board gaming audiences. The majority of these adaptations were released uncredited, without any mention of designers and illustrators evident in the box.

This practise was typical of the era – many of Milton Bradley’s other games produced in the same period were similarly uncredited – but winds blowing in from Germany and the United States were about to change tabletop gaming forever.

In 1993, Wizards of the Coast released Magic: The Gathering – the world’s first ‘Collectible Card Game’. In Magic, players built personalised decks of cards assembled from randomly

distributed booster packs. Each card bent the rules in some way and the tactical variety this offered ensured no two games played out the same.

At the same time, advances in optical media and 3D graphics introduced new levels of realism to videogames. With the popularity of both CCGs and videogames on the rise, publishers were eager to take advantage of both markets. Licensed CCGs such as Mortal Kombat: The Kard Game, Tomb Raider and Mayfair’s Sim City appeared in the 90s and as time passed more and more videogames were snapped up for use in the CCG market.

One-on-one fighting games proved particularly verdant ground for CCG designers with licenses from Capcom, Midway, SNK and Namco appearing in Score Entertainment’s Epic Battles and Sabertooth Games’ Universal Fighting System. In Epic Battles players fought with characters from the Mortal Kombat, Tekken and Street Fighter universes, while UFS licensed rosters from King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown, Soulcalibur and Darkstalkers – as well as characters from gaming webcomic Penny Arcade.

CATCH ‘EM ALL As CCGs dominated the world of tabletop gaming a new breed of computer game emerged: the Massively Multiplayer Online game.

MMOs encouraged subscribers to spend hours searching for rare items.

With CCG players doing much the same thing to find rare cards in the real world – and both sets of players paying out every month to keep on top of the latest content – it was only a matter of time before the first CCG based on an MMO appeared.

In 2003, Wizards of the Coast released the Neopets Trading Card Game. The Neopets TCG was part of a cross-media marketing barrage that

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Though Pokémon’s popularity has diminished in the last decade, both the card game and the videogame that inspired it are still selling strongly. This year saw the seventh annual Pokémon Trading Card World Championships held in San Diego, in which 16-yearold David Cohen won the Masters Division, taking home a $7,500 scholarship cheque as his prize – not a bad amount for kid playing cards.

saw Neopets merchandise appear in fast food restaurants as well as restaurant-sponsored items appearing inside the game itself. The following year, five exclusive Neopets trading cards were included in boxes of General Mills cereal.

In a 2004 interview with Business Wire, General Mills brand manager Jared Gustafson said: “Kids associate Cocoa Puffs, Cookie Crisp and Reese’s Puffs with carefree fun, and we’re committed to bringing them new and exclusive offers for fun, ageappropriate activities. Neopets is one of the hottest youth entertainment properties, and the trading cards are a great way to add extra value to some of our most popular cereals.”

Neopets was the first CCG to be part of an MMO franchise, and as such paved the way for later releases like City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, Maple Story and Free Realms. But Neopets was far from the first CCG based on a videogame to be aimed at a younger audience. At the turn of the millennium, while teenagers across the globe played Magic: The Gathering, their younger siblings had their eyes on another card game altogether.

In 1999, three years after Media Factory had released it in Japan, Wizards of the Coast brought Pokémon: The Trading Card Game to the western world. Fewer than six weeks after the American launch, the Pokémon starter set had sold 400,000 units and would go on to sell millions more by the year’s end. In the United States, Electronics Boutique pre-sold 50,000 booster packs before the game had even shipped. For children the world over, Pokémon became a way of life. Rare cards fetched hundreds of pounds on eBay, kids fought over cards in classrooms and as Pokémon’s notoriety grew, schools banned the game citing disruption and playground violence.

In early 2000, thieves broke into a UK toy store to steal £300 worth of cards, while in Philadelphia a 13-year-old boy was stabbed in a dispute over a card prompting US police to brand Pokémon “America’s most dangerous hobby”.

DESIGNER GAMES As with much in life, Germany takes board games seriously, so seriously in fact that in 1979 it awarded the first Spiel des Jahres award for the best game released in a German-speaking country that year. Today the Spiel des Jahres is a prestigious award highly sought after by game designers the world over, but it wasn’t until 1995 that it produced a bona fide global hit. That game was The Settlers of Catan and unlike the Milton Bradly games of the early 1980s, this game had designer Klaus Teuber’s name printed prominently all over it. The age of the designer board game had arrived.

Videogames had changed a lot since the late eighties, with MMOs only counting for one small corner of what was fast becoming an entertainment industry to rival that of Hollywood.

Games were sophisticated, allowing

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players to interact with and even command vast, visually detailed worlds. But just as videogames were no longer flashy arcade mindtraps, so the new wave of board games based on them scoffed at the ageing, roll-and-move mechanics and lazy, cash-in mindsets of their predecessors. These games were deep, cerebral and involving, and for the first time board game adaptations had more in common with the videogames they emulated than with Snakes & Ladders.

2002 saw Eagle Games publish Sid Meier’s Civilization; at the helm was the company’s founder Glenn Drover, whose background in imperial war games suited the project perfectly. But Drover wasn’t the only person attached to Civ who’d dabbled in board games. “We could do them so much better on the computer,” said Civilization’s creator Sid Meier, speaking to Mindjack in 2002. “With board games it took so long to set them up and you had to worry about the rules – on a computer you just turn it on and it is ready to go.”

Board gaming scuttlebutt persists that Meier’s seminal game Civilization was influenced by a 1980 board game of the same name, which was at one point distributed in the US by

Avalon Hill, a company Meier’s design partner Bruce Campbell Shelley had previously worked for. Shelly, speaking to Gamasutra in 2009 said of the tabletop version: “I had played it many times. I believe Sid had a copy of the game and looked at the components. I owned the original board game, but don’t recall if I brought it into the office.”

To avoid any future legal troubles the videogame’s publisher, MicroProse, licensed the title from the board game’s designers, ensuring smooth sailing ahead for Meier’s computer version which – somewhat inevitably, given its content – went on to conquer the world.

In the years that followed, Drover became a bit of a strategy game adaptation factory, working on a number of titles based on Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon and Microsoft’s Age of Empires series – which, funnily enough, Meier’s old mate Bruce Shelley had helped to create. Shelley now works for Zynga, developers of Farmville, although it seems unlikely that Glenn Drover will be adapting that any time soon.

FULL CIRCLE The market for board games based on strategy titles was bolstered considerably when in the early 2000s Fantasy Flight Games attained the license for Blizzard Entertainment’s

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Warcraft and Starcraft series. Fresh off the success of Reiner Knizia’s Lord of the Rings, Fantasy Flight took its source material and spun it into three Warcraft and World of Warcraft flavoured games, a Starcraft title and an expansion.

While adapting MMOs and strategy games was hardly an original concept – even Settlers of Catan creator Hans Teuber had adapted the Anno real-time strategy franchise – in the middle of Fantasy Flight’s Warcraft blow-out it acquired a license that was firmly entrenched at the other end of the videogame spectrum.

Harking back to the likes of Milton Bradley’s classic HeroQuest, in 2004 Fantasy Flight released Doom: The Board Game.

Doom was new territory for board game adaptations. Not a children’s toy, not a CCG, not a strategic wargaming extravaganza, it turned twitchy first-person action into a tense confrontation between space marines and the Invader: a single player controlling the enemies pitted against them. Many of the mechanics designer Kevin Wilson devised for Doom would go on to form the backbone of Fantasy Flight’s Descent series of dungeon-crawlers, and are still being used in new games.

Today Fantasy Flight is one of the biggest and most well-recognised publishers in the industry. It has recently announced the acquisition of the Star Wars franchise, and that the first game based on their new license will be an X-Wing space combat game – something that will no doubt appeal to fans of LucasArts’s classic X-Wing series on the PC – but it is still keeping its hand in the videogame adaptation market. In 2010, it released a highly-acclaimed new adaptation of Sid Meier’s Civilization and in September 2011 released Gears of War, proving that even though tabletop games are constructed from

dice, cardboard and little plastic men, they still have what it takes to go chainsaw-to-chainsaw with their younger, flashier, digital cousins.

Board games have changed. This year Mattel have released two games – Angry Birds: The Card Game and Angry Birds: Knock on Wood – based on the best-selling iOS app of the same name; but just as Angry Birds and the games mentioned in this article have made the transition from computer screen to tabletop, so tabletop games are now also making the transition in the opposite direction. Board gamers can now play Carcassonne, Ascension: Chronicle

of the Godslayer and many other games anywhere they go, so long as they have their smartphones with them; XBLA dabblers can enjoy Catan, Carcassone (again), Magic and many others via their gamepads, and with many other adaptations announced on all manner of digital platforms, the board gaming riptide has only just begun.

When Auntie Viv – who’s well into her sixties now and needs her money more than you do – passes you a present at the next Christmas family reunion, chances are you’ll be telling her the truth when you smile and say, “Thank you, it’s just what I always wanted.”

096 _ THE HEIST

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098 _ THE HEIST

hypnotised, at my bizarre Movember Mark Twain moustache. After more blarney, he lets me in, but not before I’ve had to make up a contact ‘Alex’ and expertise “the agency called me in, I just do what I’m told”. Surreptitiously, I wave my team to follow us and prop the door open, while he leads me off into a side room where the first motion sensor is – and where the laptop with the codes on is sitting.

Through my earpiece, I can still hear the rest of the team who are making a move on the back gate – their constant chatter is distracting and I’m wishing we had had more time to establish communication protocols – when to talk, how much to communicate, and so on. I try to warn them that the alarm is going to go off in thirty seconds, but it’s very hard while I’m keeping up the blather on the guard – who’s starting to look suspicious and is moving towards the door. I deliberately trip the motion sensor, but he’s already out –

and I doubt my two back-ups made it through the hall in time.

I make the best of a bad job, and cut the motion sensor wires – we should be able to move in and out of this room with impunity now, which is important as I’ve just spotted the computer with the box codes on it. I don’t get a chance to play with it though, as he’s back through the door, moaning about the alarm. Keeping the banter up, I start talking about how wonderful the architecture of the place (which is dreadful, to be honest, some sort of abandoned police station) and taking photos of it with the big camera slung under my arm (which I’d planned to use to snap the codes. He’s getting obviously impatient now and is getting complaints from what I guess are more guards over his radio about the alarm going off. He talks them down.

I persuade him to show me the other motion sensor, deeper in the complex, and tell him I’m going to set

IT STARTS IN A PUB, WHERE YOUR TEAM IS ASSEMBLED, YOU PLAN YOUR ROUTE, AND ARE INTRODUCED TO THE KIT MADE AVAILABLE TO YOU

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it off for a test. I’m about to disable it too with the clippers I palmed, when a squawk comes through on his radio – one of his colleagues has just woken up, stunned by a tranquilliser dart, and raises the alarm. I’m ushered out of the front door, protesting and pretending to ring the agency to complain as I come up with increasingly unconvincing excuses, and get increasingly isolated and blunt as I realise subtlety really isn’t working. This is only the first of seven times this evening that any of the three guards will chuck me out of the building.

THE SET-UP ‘Heist’ is just one of many Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) springing up – in this case in the UK by a group called Fire Hazard – taking the principles of computer games and live-action roleplaying, and applying them to real world situations. Heist’s premise is that you’re breaking into a security facility to recover up to ten secure cases; you don’t know what’s in them, you’re told not to open them, so they’re the old-fashioned McGuffin of the Hitchcock movies; a reason to get into the scenario and to roleplay as thieves.

It starts in a pub, where your team is assembled, you plan your route, and are introduced to the kit made available to you; in our case, we’re all issued short-range radios with concealable earpieces to talk to each other, along with a variety of tools to share out; two ‘tranquilliser’ Nerf guns, a single night vision scope, two sets of wire-cutters, and some peanuts (one of the guards has an allergy, we’re informed). Sadly for me, half our team consists of idiot city banker types and I just can’t talk to them, not that they’re interested in talking to me anyway, so in my mind they become Team B. Their job is to get in through the back entrance, stealthily, so we give them the night vision and one Nerf gun. I

pocket one set of wire cutters, as I’ll be going in through the front door, using an ability to fast talk I didn’t know I had (and still don’t think I have). The guards act with all of the characteristics of videogame artificial intelligence; being obvious and clumsy in some regards, and otherworldly fast in others. It’s one of many ways that the language of traditional computer games informs the feel of the night.

THE STEALTH SECTION It’s later, after my repeated ejections from the target. I can’t risk going through the front door again and my team have had to go round the back way. The snow’s so heavy this evening that I wore heavy, warm walking boots. Have you ever tried sneaking in boots? It doesn’t happen, and I can’t take them off in case I’m thrown out in just my socks. I’m clumsy, tall and heavy; every time I’ve walked in, someone’s spotted or heard me before

I’ve got further than two rooms into the complex – and then I’ve had to start with the fast-talking again, just to get out, just to avoid being thrown in the ‘cells’. I can hear over the radio that we’ve already got two people locked up and the guards are highly alert now; everyone else is inside the complex, but each time I try going round the back, I can hear a guard on the other side of the gate. I feel useless.

It’s then that I spot the gap on the wall. Not a gap in the wall, notably, a gap on the wall. Well away from the gate, at least ten feet up, behind the tall trees and bracken bushes, looking like ice cream cones in the heavy snow, there’s a gap, with a gas meter box in front of it, also covered in snow. If I stood on the curved top of box, and if I didn’t slip off due to the snow, and if I managed to pull myself up, and if the drop on the other side isn’t too far... I might be able to make it into the compound. I might

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make it in badly injured from the fall, admittedly, but considering I’m stuck out here and I’ve friends trapped in there I struggle up, embarrassingly, onto the gas box, then realise I’m stuck, straddling it, facing the wall, just as a local walks past. I freeze.

This just changed from a game to reality. Suddenly I really am breaking into this place, after all, and the real police station is just next door to it. If someone spots me, I’ll spend the next three hours explaining myself to a cop.

The pedestrian doesn’t seem to spot me in the shadow of the bush, and after a few tense seconds, I relax and manage to drag myself up to a precarious standing position. Then it’s matter of pulling myself up another seven feet onto the wall. I pull myself up eventually, with much swearing and scrabbling, and am relieved to see what are nearly bootholds in the brickwork on the other side. My radio is gone though – in the struggle I’ve accidentally torn off the earpiece, so I’m alone suddenly; no more warnings, no knowledge of where everyone’s gone. I lower myself cautiously, then drop the remaining distance; the snow dampens the sound and impact, and I dodge under a fire escape for a bit of breathing time.

Which is where I find one of the packages and two of the girls on my team hiding, trying to open it. It has a combination lock chaining it to the staircase and it was my job to get the codes – which I failed at, so they can’t open the box. I move them aside, test the chain and realise I’m a warrior.

I’m too big to hide, I’m too clumsy to sneak; all I can do is talk, uselessly, and use my strength. I give up on subtlety and, apologising silently to the Fire Hazard organisers, move to Plan B. I snap the chain. I pick up the box under one arm and lope off, crunching through the shadows and snow, to the back gate where I drop it with our grateful contact. It’s the

THIS’LL SOUND STRANGE COMING FROM A GEEK, WEB DEVELOPER, AND ANDROID APP AUTHOR, BUT I’M VERY WARY OF TECHNOLOGY IN GAMES second of eight boxes we manage to recover that night.

AFTERMATH “Everyone’s got a different background.” says Fire Hazard’s organiser, Gwyn Morfey. “Mine is in improvised theatre – I did several years of TheatreSports back in Adelaide, including some big shows at the Fringe Festival. Back in the day I played tabletop RPGs, but I’ve never done any ‘real’ LARPs (Live Action RolePlays).”

So this is informed more by theatre and other ARGs than by games?

“Along with alternative theatre, I do seek out and play everything I can find, provided it fits in less than an hour or two – I don’t have time for long-form ARGs. Hide & Seek’s ‘Sandpit’ is a great session, and there’s

the Weekender once a year and Igfest in Bristol.” I’ve never heard of these things so I roleplay awareness, nodding and smiling. Any video games? “I play the odd board game or round of Team Fortress 2, but I’d rather be out running.”

Gwyn tends to find the locations through word of mouth. “We found the Bocking Street warehouse [location of tonight’s game] through a friend of a player. I heard about the Old Police Station through my girlfriend.

Sometimes they’re handed to us – Sci Fi London had already booked the Greenwich Observatory and asked us to run a game at the same time. I love disused spots because they’re cheaper – games have to have much smaller audiences than theatre, so space rental is a problem – and because the ambience fits in really well with apocalyptic themes. Also, it’s nice to reduce the number of non-players around. You just can’t run through a populated building with a chainsaw,

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whether there’s a chain on it or not. “ Fire Hazard’s most popular themes stick mostly to B-movie and pulp fiction settings, and they’re almost always contemporary. “Zombies are huge. Everybody loves zombies.

Ninjas aren’t bad, spies are pretty good, burglary seems to go well.

Contemporary is by far the easiest to do so we’ve stuck with that so far, although we’ve got a game in development (Basilisk) which is more futuristic. All our games are pretty action-packed, so we stick with themes that work well with that.” It doesn’t sound like anything more philosophical or sedentary will be taking place any time soon then.

People find out about the games almost completely through all wordof-mouth – Fire Hazard now has a mailing list of about 1000 people, and a lot of traffic comes in through Facebook and Twitter. “The mailing list is awesome – the fastest sell-out was in eight hours, and most stuff is gone within two days.” The Halloween games are the single biggest sessions, with 50 players and eight crew.

Heist puts the most players through during the course of the event – eight 12-person teams in the last run. They also do bespoke games for larger groups. “We’ve done custom

events for Sci Fi London, stag parties, birthdays, and a couple of corporate groups. I even ran a laser maze for a wedding once.”

All this talk of lasers reminds me of the large amount of alternate reality enabled devices – the smart phones with built-in cameras, 3G and custom apps, the newly released microprojectors – but Gwyn doesn’t think they’ll alter how the games work; “This’ll sound strange coming from a geek, web developer, and Android app author, but I’m very wary of technology in games. I’ve seen lots and lots of games break because the

technology failed. The human mind is a micro-projector and it’s amazing how well you can build an alternate reality with nothing more hi-tech than a laser pointer and a rubber mask.”

That said, they are prototyping their first smartphone-based games (Cyc/ Ops and Basilisk) this year.

With ‘gamification’ being seriously talked about in political circles as a way of social behaviour-shaping and a sizeable majority of the UK population now playing videogames, Gwyn must feel the era of LARPing has finally come? “Londoners are great – they’re up for anything that’s exciting and different, and this is both. It’s a shot of adrenaline, a new experience, and a way to be in the movie without feeling awkward. You can certainly use games to inspire positive behaviour. I run much faster when I’m being chased than when I’m just exercising, so I’ve been kicking around the idea of running ‘Zombie Resistance: Boot Camp’ – a regular personal training session styled as a game. I’m not sure I’d really call this LARPing, though. In role-playing, you’re pretending to be someone else.

In our games, you’re playing as yourself.

This knocks down a lot of the barriers.”

Not everything always goes as smoothly as tonight did, but if the players and actors run with it, it normally turns out well; the 2009 Halloween game has entered legend.

Fifty players were fending off zombies throughout the night; at the finale the crew were supposed to distribute ammo boxes around the woods it was being played in, whilst Gwyn was briefing the players and arming them with (empty) Nerf guns to battle the hordes. “We’d had a screw up on the radios, though, and the ammunition actually never got distributed. So we had fifty people running around in the dark clutching empty weapons, desperately searching for ammunition and being eaten by zombies. It was actually rather awesome.”