#02 Also in this issue: Virtual Sex Financial Frontier Long-form Games Playing Together Event DMing Zombie Shopping Mall Rogue Warrior
Digital Issue $2.99
002 _ WELCOME
003
BIENVENUE À CONTINUE B
ack when Continue was a mere twinkle in our editorial team’s eye, there were two defining moments that helped to solidify what we wanted to achieve with a ‘new kind of gaming magazine’. The first was being told the fascinating story of a WWII prisoner’s life-changing involvement with a Monopoly board (a story you can read in our previous issue). The second was staggering, bleary-eyed into a rain-soaked street at 3am after an epic, yet unsuccessful attempt to stop evil triumphing in an eight-hour session of Arkham Horror. We realised this was the very essence of why we enjoy games and wanted to capture that feeling in words and share like-minded stories with our greater gaming community. Although our team of five brave souls had lost the fight, all life on Earth had been extinguished, and our backs were killing us, we had thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and were in the finest of moods and spirits (buoyed, it has to be said, by the finest of foods and spirits). Before we parted, one of our troupe half-joked “Same time tomorrow?” and we didn’t immediately dismiss the notion. For some, however, an eight-hour struggle against evil is a mere drop in the ocean. Tales are told of games that last weeks, months even,
with teams of passionate warriors planning meticulous campaigns and fighting epic battles. Hence the second of our ‘Continue-defining’ features this issue: ‘Playing The Long Game’. It’s this drive not to shy away from immersing ourselves in gaming’s extremes that makes gaming one of the most exciting entertainment cultures. Most music, films, television programmes and books offer rigid paths once completed. Games have an almost unique ability to continually offer different interactions each time you play, regardless of the game itself being the same. This unique artistry is something all game developers understand, but that a certain group of créateurs seem to embrace more than any other. Our cover story explores the way the French game designing mindset has, since our earliest days, defined and influenced more of the games you play today than almost any other thinking on the planet. The likes of Michel Ancel, David Cage, Eric Chahi and the legion of artistes français bring imagination, individuality and inspiration to the idea of creating games, and are as worthy of celebration as the very notion of gaming itself. PAUL PRESLEY, EDITOR paul@continuemag.com
004 _ CONTENTS
CONTENTS ISSUE #02
6 – NEWS (inc. JANUARY STREAM)
16 – NEWS (inc. FEBRUARY NEWS STREAM) 26 – NEWS (inc. MARCH NEWS STREAM)
A new book charts how gaming rose to challenge Hollywood for our attentions; the rise of ‘experience gaming’ in the world of arcade amusement; January’s daily stream of gaming news
From sci-fi to strategy, how H.G. Wells became the father of wargaming; how a best-selling expose of social ‘players’ has become a party game; and a full round-up of February in gaming
When zombies attack! A shopping mall is overrun with the undead; leading media figures debate the point of videogames as an art form; a day-byday breakdown of March’s gaming news
36 – RICHARD COBBETT
38 – DAN MARSHALL
40 – H OUSE RULES
THE AGE OF DISCOVERY
Has the internet ruined challenging games forever, or do we just need to take a different approach to how we make things difficult for players?
INDIE LIFE
Everyone’s all about the Kickstarters these days, but according to our resident indie columnist, ‘Alpha funding’ isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
A MOTHER’S VIEW
Analogue: A Hate Story relies on a lot of eastern influences, but how do they hold up when you put it in the hands of a traditional Chinese mother?
Editor Paul Presley • Art Editor Matt Dettmar • Production Editor Miwa Aoki Contributors Emma Boyes, Phill Cameron, Richard Cobbett, Paul Dean, Michael Fox, Dan Griliopoulos, monyo publishing Mitu Khandaker, Cassandra Khaw, Martin Korda, Dan Marshall, Joe Martin, Philippe-Antoine Ménard, Craig Morrison, Gehan Pathiraja, Will Porter, Kevin Williams Eternal Thanks To Caroline Cloutier, Codemasters, Funcom, GOG.com, Paradox Interactive, Parkour Generations, Slightly Mad Studios, Ubisoft 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
005
42 – ROGUE WARRIOR
46 – THE GAMING SCIENCES
56 – VIRTUALLY YOURS
This issue’s game creation experts Sneaky, charming, agile, what does it weigh in on haptic user interfaces, take to become a real-life ‘rogue’? In the the realism of vehicle simulation, the first in a series of reports, our intrepid dynamics of social interaction and correspondent tries out Parkour capturing believable emotions
Balancing genuine emotional initimacy and gratuitous titillation in games is a tricky affair, and very few get it right. It’s even harder to take seriously when you know the models involved
60 – THE FRENCH CONNECTION
74 – PLAYING THE LONG GAME
MOVEMENT
From blockbusters to indie fare, the artistry of the French game design ethos has influenced generations. We talk to leading créateurs français to try and define the ‘French Touch’
68 – THE LOST SHRINE OF THE TRICKSTER GOD
Running a tabletop RPG at home is a million miles away from the highpressure, time-restricted world of convention game mastering
Some board games last an hour, some last a night, but a rare few transcend a single evening’s pleasure, calling on anything up to several months per session. Energy drinks at the ready...
84 – MAKING IT UP AS THEY GO ALONG 90 – THE FINANCIAL FRONTIER
98 – THE SOCIAL TOUCH
Self-generating content is increasingly being seen as a lifeline for independent game developers on tight budgets, but there are as many pitfalls as benefits for the unprepared designer
Multiplayer takes on a whole new meaning in public. A series of indie gatherings and games is exploring the social side of gaming and examining what it means to play together
Kickstarter may have spearheaded a funding revolution for game creators, but it’s only one side of the story. How are publishers, developers and the public reacting to this sea change?
006 _ NEWS
007
STARS IN THEIR EYES Movies stopped being the number one leisure activity a long time ago. A new book charts the rise of videogaming culture and how after a faltering start, it became the top dog in town...
J
amie Russell knows a thing or two about both the movie and the games industry. As a leading film critic and videogame journalist, he has combined both aspects to produce Generation Xbox, a book exploring the impact gaming has had on the dominance of the Hollywood studio as our leading purveyors of entertainment. We caught up with Russell to ask how he sees the battle for our leisure attention shaping up in the future... What was the impetus for the book? I’ve always found that the books I write are the books I want to read myself. With Generation Xbox I was looking for a book that charted the challenge that games now pose to Hollywood and realised no one had written it yet... It’s always nice to be working in virgin territory although given how much research it requires, I would have rather bought a book off Amazon! When did you first see a game that touch you in the same way a film can? I owned an Amiga in the late 1980s and was amazed by Cinemaware’s games like It Came From the Desert and Rocket Ranger – they were so filmic. A few years later I had an original
JANUARY
NEWS STREAM JANUARY SUNDAY 1ST
●●Eurogamer.net names Portal 2 as its game of the year, while its readers vote for Skyrim.
MONDAY 2ND
●●A statement from internet activist group Anonymous declares Sony its next target for the company’s support of the Stop Online Piracy Act considered by many to be overly restrictive.
TUESDAY 3RD
●●Writing in The Atlantic, US Army veteran and writer D. B. Gracy criticises the current, big budget Modern Warfare 3 advertising campaign, saying it “trivializes combat and sanitizes war,” and stars “two smug, A-list clowns.”
WEDNESDAY 4TH
●●Crysis 2 is revealed to have been the most pirated game of 2011, with over four million illegal copies downloaded.
THURSDAY 5TH
●●Civilization developer Firaxis confirms that it is developing a “re-imagination” of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the classic turnbased PC title of the 1990s. ●●After a variety of bugs and exploits are uncovered, including ones that make players invulnerable, BioWare promises to release patches for Star Wars: The Old Republic “almost every week.”
FRIDAY 6TH
●●US movie streaming service Netflix is made available to Playstation 3 owners living in the Republic of Ireland and the UK.
SATURDAY 7TH
●●After Namco Bandai asked for a show of public interest, over 40,000 sign an online petition for it to release a PC version of the critically-acclaimed Dark Souls.
MONDAY 9TH
●●Wizards of the Coast announces the development of the fifth version of Dungeons & Dragons, and calls upon players to suggest its direction, tone and content.
008 _ NEWS
PlayStation. My wife and I used to spend hours playing Tomb Raider together – she’s not a gamer but she loved watching Lara and helping me solve the puzzles. For her it was a kind of virtual tourism and a love for the character. That was the first time that I realised games’ ability as a storytelling medium had reached a critical mass. Around that time I became a professional film critic. I spent a decade seeing movies at press screenings, but as time went on – and the movies got worse – I realised that Hollywood cinema was becoming moribund. Meanwhile, the videogame industry seemed more and more dynamic and exciting. Sony’s PlanetSide blew my mind – the sheer scale of its battles and the drama that playing with so many people on such larger servers could bring about. At the same time, Half-Life 2 left me speechless. It was an incredible experience – I fell in love with Alyx, I wanted to help City 17’s resistance, I was terrified out of my wits in Ravensholm. In the book you pose the question of whether Microsoft needs Hollywood given its financial clout. How much do you see the traditional Hollywood setup being circumvented by enterprising game publishers in the future? It’s difficult I think, because traditional game publishers can’t afford to get this wrong. Making movies isn’t their core competency, it isn’t what they know about. So if you have a company like Microsoft with a multi-billion dollar IP like Halo, it’s going to want to do it well.
It can’t just wing it with such a valuable and expensive property. It’s not like these games could be turned into a low budget Atom Egoyan movie – they’re big, VFX-heavy pieces with a lot of prestige riding on them. So on one hand it makes perfect sense for Microsoft not to get directly into the movie business, but on the other it’s crazy for it not to. It has the financial clout to do it and that’s enough to buy the kind of producing/directing talent it needs to shepherd a blockbuster from start to finish. The mistake it made with the Halo movie was not putting up its own money, not keeping that control. I think Ubisoft is doing something that could be fascinating – setting up its own production company to guide its IP through the traditional studio system. It could be disastrous or it could be genius. How much do you think gaming should be trying to ape film’s techniques, instead of developing its own artistic direction? I think games have inherently had their own artistic direction ever since day one. Games are interactive, movies aren’t. Both movie and games can tell stories and both mediums can choose not to tell stories. But a game has to be interactive – and it’s that interactivity that will always separate the two mediums. The problem is that ‘gaming’ is now such a huge landscape, you can’t make generalisations. Games that are storyand character-based obviously have a lot to learn from movies. I think if you’re working on the new Call of Duty then you’re going to be drawing inspiration from movies. What story-driven games
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JANUARY
TUESDAY 10TH
need to do is cast the net wider. It’s not about movies, it’s about good storytelling, the kind that can be found in novels and comic books too. I’d love to see more games inspired by fiction. BioShock’s relationship to Atlas Shrugged is a great example of riffing off a literary source.
WHAT GAMES NEED TO DO IS CAST THE NET WIDER. IT’S NOT ABOUT MOVIES, IT’S ABOUT GOOD STORYTELLING, THE KIND FOUND IN NOVELS AND COMIC BOOKS
How do you see Hollywood adjusting to no longer being the biggest game in town? The book isn’t saying that Hollywood is going to be killed by games – that’s the hysteria that has been trotted out every few years ever since Atari in the 1980s. I do think that we’re witnessing a huge generational shift in the interests of Hollywood’s core demographic audience though. High-quality, bigbudget blockbusters like The Avengers will always pack them in – so too will low-budget, high-quality, art house or indie movies. I don’t think Clint Eastwood or Woody Allen would be too worried about Halo 4, but I bet Michael Bay would be if he had a movie slated for November. ‘Generation Xbox’, the audience that is also Hollywood’s target demographic, want three things: immediacy, interactivity and immersion. As a medium, movies aren’t satisfying them – neither is Hollywood as a business. This generation doesn’t want the old-fashioned, theatrical exhibition model. They want to watch The Dark Knight Rises in IMAX 3D then come home and download it to watch again in their living rooms. The key thing for Hollywood will be to work out how to appeal to this increasingly sophisticated and demanding audience.
●●After being detained while visiting relatives in Iran in August, Iranian-American developer Amir Hekmati, of Kuma Reality Games, is accused of spying and is sentenced to death. The sentence is later overturned but he remains in custody in Iran.
WEDNESDAY 11TH
●●Microsoft is investigating the working conditions at a Foxconn plant in Wuhan, China, as 300 workers who assemble Xbox 360s threaten mass suicide after a dispute over conditions. ●●Kosmos reveals the latest release in their Catan line: Star Trek. Based on the original series, players build space stations and collect dilithium instead of the usual wood and sheep.
THURSDAY 12TH
●●Nominees for the 2012 Writers Guild of America awards are announced. Nominated in the videogames category are Brink, Uncharted 3, Batman: Arkham City, Mortal Kombat and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. ●●Publisher 2K announces the return of its $1m Perfect Game Challenge, where gamers will compete to pitch a perfect game of Major League Basketball 2K12.
FRIDAY 13TH
●●At the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nintendo presents the Wii U and allows journalists to handle the device, while Microsoft says it will be the last CES it attends.
SUNDAY 15TH
●●Citing inflexible terms of service, BioWare declares that the eagerly-awaited Mass Effect 3 will not be released on Steam, unlike its predecessors. Instead, it will be available on EA’s direct download service, Origin.
MONDAY 16TH
●●A group of gamers expressing their frustration over a “lack of communication between Valve and the Half-Life community” grows to over 10,000. “A Call for Communication” protests a lack of information regarding the long-awaited Half-Life 3.
010 _ NEWS
EXPERIENCE IS EVERYTHING For what was once the beating heart of the digital entertainment scene – video amusement arcades, the arcade sector has all but vanished from the public consciousness of the average player BY KEVIN WILLIAMS
F
or many players, the reality is that most will only touch the coin-op scene these days through the purchase of Arcade Fight Sticks for their PS3 and Xbox 360 – unaware that the latest home versions are modelled on the popular layout of the current Taito ‘VEWLIX’ arcade cabinet configuration, a mainstay amongst the still strong gaming elite. It is the continuing appeal of arcade gaming that drives a subculture in the conventional consumer game scene, but also fuels the multi-million dollar amusement and attraction trade internationally. Not as popularized as its consumer equivalent, the digital out-of-home entertainment (DOE) sector that encapsulates the traditional video arcade sector is a transitional industry, attempting to embrace new methodologies and technologies to appeal to a new audience of gamers. The placement of the modern video amusement piece is one aspect of the changed environment of publicspace gaming. Where the dingilylit shopping mall arcade use to be the traditional habitat of the video machine, the modern systems sit in a wide variety of locations; the machines now ‘supporting acts’ rather than the ‘main attractions’. This demotion has not diminished
the popularity or interest, the modern DOE machine now having to offer unique appeal to keep the players coming back for more. One of the unique locations where the modern amusement piece has made their own is the tavern or bar environment. The mixing of food, drink and fun is not a new idea, the application of the latest video amusement pieces in these
venues, continuing the marriage of intense audience-based gaming in an environment that includes alcohol (harking back to one of the first video games, PONG’s début in 1971 at the ‘Andy Capp’s Tavern’). It is the popularity of tavern and bar-based gaming that has seen the recent launch of one of the most
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far-reaching developments in the video amusement scene. Launched in March, the latest in the illustrious Big Buck Hunter series of sports shooting games took the genre to a brand new level, matching – and surpassing – the consumer game equivalent. Since the launch in 2000, Big Buck Hunter has become a firm favourite with players, supporting leagues and tournaments, paying real cash prizes and offering compelling competition (the nationally-connected systems have driven the application of prize video gaming like no other title). In 2011, over 18,000 machines situated across the North American bar scene drew thousands of regular players. The success of this application of sports shooting and tournament prize gaming has seen thousands of dollars paid in prize money and has built a loyal player base. The developer, Play Mechanix, has raised the bar of traditional public-space gaming to create the brand new release Big Buck HD. The game marks a number of firsts in the amusement scene, including being the first nativelyrendered 1080p video arcade title – boasting a level of graphical realism unsurpassed by consumer or amusement titles alike, (over 2,000,000 pixels per frame all at 60 frames per second). Eugene Jarvis, President of Play Mechanix says the new title “represents a major development in the way players will interact with the game, but also offers a major opportunity to socially interact with other players across the country and increase competition.” Along with ultra-realistic graphics, the game plays heavily on its competition heritage, players using their VIP swipe cards to accrue points, even being able to pay for the experience with a credit card rather than a fistful of quarters. But it is with a constantly connected
TUESDAY 17TH
●●The Official Video Game of the Olympic Games is announced. Sega will release the tie-in for the 2012 event on PC, 360 and PS3.
WEDNESDAY 18TH
●●Across the internet, protests against two proposed US laws, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) see websites ‘going dark’, including Wikipedia and a large number of videogaming sites. Within two days, the present form of the bill is shelved.
THURSDAY 19TH
●●After twenty-eight years of covering videogames, Japanese magazine Gemaga (which began life known as Beep) announces that it will close in April.
FRIDAY 20TH
●●Capcom finally confirms that another Resident Evil title is currently in development. ●●After analyst Todd Mitchell says he has “creeping concerns” about the profitability of Star Wars: The Old Republic, in light of its recent issues, EA’s stock drops by a stark 3%. Rival analyst Ben Schachter says the concerns are premature.
SATURDAY 21ST
●●Despite the various criticisms it has received, Star Wars: The Old Republic wins the AbleGamers’ award for Accessible Mainstream Game of the Year.
MONDAY 23RD
●●Ofcom, the UK media regulator, rules that ITV has misled its viewers after screening footage of the military simulator ArmA 2 and claiming it represented a real-life recording of the IRA. ●●Details posted in Blizzard’s job listings indicate it is considering in-game advertising or product placement for its next MMO.
TUESDAY 24TH
●●The London Toy Fair begins. Game announcements are thin on the ground, though LEGO announces four new titles including strategy game Star Wars: Battle of Hoth, while Hasbro extends its Monopoly, Battleship and Connect Four brands yet further.
012 _ NEWS
machine that Play Mechanix has been able to create a game platform that is intrinsically linked to social media – offering the ability to share on Twitter and Facebook the latest plays. SOCIAL MEDIA Big Buck HD is not the first game that has linked tournament, social media and prize payouts – US developer Incredible Technologies (IT) has had considerable success with its own tavern and bar release ‘Golden Tee LIVE’. The golf game tournament platform – employing its unique trackball controller – has generated its own mass following of loyal players, enthralled by the prize payouts from tournament competitions. The embracing of social network gaming has been broadened by the modern amusement scene, with popular social game properties given a new lease of life in the publicspace arena. One such developer is Canadian-based Adrenaline Amusement, who has married its invocative ‘TouchFX’ multi-touch screen platform to adaptations of popular casual game content. Most recently the company has licensed the popular iOS title Infinity Blade and redeveloped the sword combat game for public-space entertainment. “We have worked towards creating a brand new way to enthral the player in the game,” says Vice President MarcAntoine Pinard, “building on the popularity of mobile gaming systems, the FX platform is a versatile and modern approach to the industry.” Applying previous mobile gaming titles to a big cabinet presentation has become a popular element of the transitional amusement scene – companies such as Step Evolution, working with Coast to Coast, have married the successful iOS-based iPad and iPhone music game ReRave to create a compelling arcade multitouch experience.
Market leader SEGA Amusement has not been slow to join the revolution, licensing one of the most downloaded casual games in history as a videobased multi-player amusement piece. Bejewled is a specially-designed four-player cabinet allowing the game experience to be enjoyed in competition, players attempting to accrue the largest number of prize redemption tickets. The casual game experience is inherent to the traditional amusement model, with powerhouse Namco Bandai Games applying its popular mascot to a multi-
player amusement experience with the unique ‘Pac-Man Battle Royale’. AUDIENCE-BASED But not all of the new DOE titles borrow from traditional routes or previous casual game releases – the amusement and attraction scene has created yet another truly unique platform for its market. Commonly referred to as ‘Mid-Scale Attractions’ – these large enclosures provide interactive game experiences within a dedicated space. The games offer audience-based social gaming
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number of enclosure games, most recently Let’s Go Island – 3D, a game that features the first deployment of a non-glasses 3D display (‘FreeD’) to add to the overall experience and potentially signifying as major a step forward for 3D immersion in gaming as its long-time home rival Nintendo achieved with the 3DS handhold. As the arcade sector moves into its latest chapter – some forty years since the worlds’ first videogame was launched – we now look at a diverse future for the pay-to-play scene. Along with the latest touch-screen, 3D and social gaming experiences – supported with online connectivity and prize tournaments – we also look at an inrush of new developers, some from brand new territories. While the traditional Japanese amusement industry restructures to better adapt to the changed business, we now see companies from China entering the market with products that are comparable if not superior to recent releases from traditional factories, opening the market to a brand new approach and marking what could be a new resurgence in interest from players. Kevin Williams is a commentator (The Stinger Report) on the emergence of the entertainment market and is the founder of a new not-for profit association and Conference (DNA Association/DNA Conference) that focuses on the digital Out-of Home entertainment sector. He can be reached at kwp@ thestingerreport.com and via www.the stingerreport.com (both free to subscribe).
JANUARY
entertainment, far beyond the ‘twoplayer games’ of amusement history. The Canadian corporation TrioTech Amusement has launched its XD Dark Ride theater that has multiple players blasting at a screen. The European developer AlterFace has its 5Di that also includes audience competition, sitting astride a special motion seat. These experiences include compelling 3D graphics viewed wearing glasses – the players’ scores recorded and winners singled-out at the end of the game. The traditional amusement manufactures have often toyed with audience-based attractions over the years. Namco Bandai established the concept with its Galaxian 3 Theater 6 in 1990 – soon followed by SEGA with its own Cyber Dome Super Shooter. Now, in the modern scene, these amusement giants are revisiting the premise, creating ‘Theater Enclosure’ systems. NBG has Deadstorm Pirates, and later this year will launch a new two-player enclosure called Dark Escape 3D – a horror shooter that includes physical effects such as vibration, lights and sensors monitoring the player, all within a 3D glasses-based environment. Sam Ven, Namco America’s Product Coordinator says that “Namco has striven to create unique and compelling amusement games for many years – with developments in the technology available we have pushed the boundaries creating fun games, but adding a new level of excitement to the experience.” Meanwhile, SEGA has developed a
WEDNESDAY 25TH
●●Nintendo’s Senior Director, Nobuo Nagai, dies aged 67. ●●Branching out from publishing videogames, Capcom opens a restaurant in Tokyo that serves videogame-themed food, such as ‘Phoenix Wright Onion Rings’.
THURSDAY 26TH
●●Developer Trion declares its intention to seek the Guinness World Record for “virtual marriages” in its MMO RIFT. Players who marry on Valentine’s Day will be logged by Guinness.
FRIDAY 27TH
●●Bohemia Interactive, developer of the ArmA series, announces a summer release date for its modern remake of the classic Carrier Command. ●●Virgin Gaming reports over one million registrations across its various online tournaments, with over $7m in prizes and cash rewards already given out.
SATURDAY 28TH
●●A games convention with a difference takes place in Nelson County, Virginia, USA, as people get to experience what their historical counterparts would have played. Games available include Primero (a card game apparently played by Elizabeth I) and Hnefatafl – a kind of Viking spin on Chess.
SUNDAY 29TH
●●After a number of scam sites have purported to offer access to the beta of Halo 4, Microsoft takes legal action against Halo4beta.net.
MONDAY 30TH
●●Job listings published online state that SimCity developer Maxis has a new “triple-A simulation style game” in development. ●●A Swedish-developed, browserbased, first-person shooter, Man vs Machine, breaks the record for simultaneous FPS players, with 999 users logging in.
TUESDAY 31ST
●●South Korea considers a legal act that would prevent minors from playing more than three hours of online videogaming per day.
ALONE IN THE DARK DEVELOPER: EDEN STUDIOS YEAR OF RELEASE: 2008
016 _ NEWS
LITTLE WARS
While War of the Worlds may well have influenced every grand sci-fi ‘invasion’ game ever produced, its legendary author may well have laid the groundwork for almost every game played today BY PAUL DEAN
T
hough chiefly remembered as a prolific and influential author, particularly in the realm of science fiction, Herbert George Wells was also a pioneering gamer. Not only did his imagination take him to other worlds and other times, it also helped him to devise ingenious new ways to entertain his friends, and one particular game he created would have a lasting influence on the development of a great many that followed. When he wasn’t writing what was often prescient science fiction, Wells wrote a variety both fiction and nonfiction. In 1911 he authored Floor Wars, a short book on children’s play which included suggestions for games, how to make use of toys and even how to re-purpose household objects. Hardly a formal text and more than a little whimsical, it was largely about encouraging children to use their imagination and to improvise. Wells ended the book with a brief idea about war games using toy soldiers, adding “Some day, perhaps, I will write a great book about the war game and tell of battles and campaigns and strategy and tactics.” And from this nugget of an idea he would lay the foundations for much of modern gaming. Little Wars came out two years later, developing Wells’ ideas (and his whimsy) after inspiration came to him from the strangest of sources. During a visit, fellow author Jerome K. Jerome played with some of Wells’s son’s toys, firing a spring-loaded model cannon at some tin soldiers and challenging Wells to fire as accurately. The idea planted a seed. Little Wars describes how Wells tested rudimentary game ideas with other visitors, arranging toy cannons and soldiers about the floor, experimenting with different rules for movement or firing until finally their “primitive attempts to realise the
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FEBRUARY
NEWS STREAM FEBRUARY WEDNESDAY 1ST
●●During an interview with German newspaper Die Zeit, Paul McCartney reveals he has been composing music for an unnamed video game. ●●Ubisoft donates the proceeds from a series of Assassin’s Creed art exhibitions to Red Cross relief efforts in Japan, pledging over 4m Yen (£33,850). ●●The annual Nuremberg Fair begins in Germany. Lasting six days, the world’s biggest toy fair also includes new game releases from Europe’s largest publishers.
THURSDAY 2ND
●●Sony reveals losses over £1.3bn for the final quarter of 2011, much higher than its previous estimates, attributing this to both floods in Thailand and falling hardware sales. ●●Nintendo announces plans to provide free wi-fi access for European 3DS users in over 5,000 of the continent’s restaurants, hotels and fast food outlets. ●●Rumours abound that Adam Sandler is producing a movie based on American classic Candy Land. Sandler will also apparently star in the film.
FRIDAY 3RD
●●Anticipating a potential backlash, Bioware warns that the ending of Mass Effect 3 will “make some people angry” but “you’ll get answers to everything.” (Come March, the game’s finale does leave some fans dissatisfied.) ●●Canadian publisher FoxMind reveals that they’ve picked up the North American rights to publish String Railway, a game originally from Japon Brand.
SATURDAY 4TH
●●Some US retailers begin to put PS Vita games up for sale, although the handheld console will not be on general release there until the 22nd.
MONDAY 6TH
●●Universal Studios pays Hasbro “millions of dollars” to escape its six-year contract to produce films based on its games. Only one will make it to release; Battleship.
018 _ NEWS
dream were interrupted by a great rustle and chattering of lady visitors,” and other “creatures unfavourably impressed by the spectacle of two middle-aged men playing with ‘toy soldiers’ on the floor.” It’s not entirely clear how much he embellishes his story when he describes kicking his kids out of their nursery so he can use more of their space and toys. Wells was familiar with the concept of Kriegsspiel, a proto-wargaming exercise devised by Prussian officers about a hundred years earlier, but it was an abstract and formal experience with an umpire adjudicating. Wells was interested in the idea of a spontaneous, exciting and immediate game that would make use of all the scenery, model houses and children’s bricks he could commandeer, around which he could arrange his tin soldiers and that ever-important spring-loaded cannon, “an altogether elegant weapon.” Something rather special happens with Little Wars, as it almost becomes a modern developer’s diary, or would certainly serve as an excellent template for one. Wells describes how he playtests his new ideas, encountering and then trying to eliminate the kind of rules squabbles that are all too familiar to modern gamers. Cannons, he decides, must be crewed by soldiers and so this implies they can be captured; players might win by overrunning enemy lines; cavalry must move faster than infantry; strict criteria determine which units fall in battle (after one soldier kills ten in turn, Wells is no longer content to toss coins to decide who dies); an army fighting to its last soldier is unrealistic, so losing players are encouraged to retreat or surrender troops in order
to save points, according to a scoring system that Wells devises. With each iteration of his wargaming system, Wells constantly finds himself adding new rules and striving to make his game both an accurate simulation and also an enjoyable experience, describing it as “a game crying aloud for improvement.” He restricts his players to just a few minutes of
019
than not, Edwardian gentlemen who have abandoned decorum and begun crawling about, outside and in, to arrange tiny cannons and cavalry. An entire chapter is devoted to an excited battle report, surely in part to explain how the game plays, but also just to celebrate the joy of it. At the time, buying tin soldiers en mass would not have been cheap, and Wells essentially creates a new and elaborate parlour game for the upper classes, suitable for only those with larger rooms, more generous budgets or more forgiving gardeners. “We have played excellent games on an eighteenfoot battlefield with over two hundred men and six guns a side,” he writes, already dreaming of larger games, with multiple players on each side, even including train sets to simulate lines of supply. Little Wars would remain an almost singular development for the next forty years, with wargaming only really taking off in the 1950s, often with cardboard components instead of tin soldiers. Nevertheless, it made a lasting and profound impression upon gaming, providing concepts from which many other designers drew inspiration. It’s well known that Dungeons & Dragons developed from reinterpretations of wargaming rules and so can trace a lineage right back to Little Wars. No wonder, then, that many later editions of the book feature a foreword by Gary Gygax.
FEBRUARY
moving and firing, and takes delight in seeing how time limits make the game more chaotic and more exciting. Throughout Little Wars there are illustrations and photographs to bring his new game concepts to life, depicting either dour tin soldiers fighting across floors or, more often
●●After videogame fans identify a number of inconsistencies, Bioware promises to edit and reprint Deception, the Mass Effect tie-in novel.
TUESDAY 7TH
●●After Tim Schafer, head of developer Double Fine, talks of his desire to create a sequel to Psychonauts, Minecraft creator Marcus ‘Notch’ Persson publicly states he’d be happy to fund such a game, though later expresses caution as “the budget is three times higher than my initial impression”.
WEDNESDAY 8TH
●●In the United States, a new Parks report states that the number of Americans playing videogames has risen from 56m in 2008 to 135m in 2012, mainly through free-to-play and social gaming.
THURSDAY 9TH
●●After explaining how difficult it can be to secure backing for projects, Double Fine starts a Kickstarter fund, hoping to raise $400,000 to develop a new adventure game. On the back of earlier publicity, the crowd-funding effort raises an unprecedented $1m in just 24 hours, closing at $3.3m.
FRIDAY 10TH
●●The Association for UK Interactive Entertainment aims to publish a report on the legalisation of crowd funding in Britain, describing how Kickstarter-style ventures could be made possible.
SATURDAY 11TH
●●Seatribe, developers of the forthcoming MMORPG Salem, explain that permadeth, the permanent loss of an in-game character, will be a core element of its game concept, hoping that it will encourage careful play.
SUNDAY 12TH
●●Another week, another Toy Fair. This time New York opens its doors, showing a relatively small amount of board and card games amongst the new toys on offer. However, analysts insist that the gaming hobby is becoming more mainstream.
020 _ NEWS
THE GAME IS ON Author Neil Strauss chronicled the controversial world of ‘pick-up artists’ in the best-selling The Game. Now, one enterprising board game designer is using it to explore the social party scene
P
arty games have been around since the days of playing Charades, Spin the Bottle or Truth or Dare as kids and even the most sophisticated of adult gatherings can often be relied upon to break out a round of Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit. However, it was a collaboration between Strauss and ex-Hasbro designer Adam Kornblum that has led to the creation of a social
party game expressly designed to break the ice with potential partners. A social experiment with cards, rules and the possibility of forging closer bonds with players you may not even have met before you started. Most of Who’s Got Game? is based on concepts from Strauss’ book, featuring personality tests, conspiracies, mind games, handwriting analysis, hidden secret revelations, storytelling, danceoffs and even palm reading across a series of cards that force players to engage in a group dynamic with often very revealing results into their psyche. We caught up with Kornblum to ask how it came together and what WGG? and his previous game, Charge Large, can teach us about our social habits...
What was the reasoning behind Who’s Got Game?’s creation? I created a board game before Who’s Got Game? and sold it to game giant Hasbro. Here’s the backstory. I was driving to Hasbro one day and since its headquarters is about four hours
THE SOCIAL PARTY SCENE IS REALLY TAKING TO THE IDEA OF ACTUALLY PLAYING THE GAME. WHO DOESN’T LOVE A GOOD PERSONALITY TEST?
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MONDAY 13TH
●●After more reports of appalling working conditions at Foxconn, Apple now begins an inspection of its factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China. Products Foxconn manufacture include the iPad, Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3.
TUESDAY 14TH
●●Redemption, a live-action film related to Bioware’s Dragon Age is released on DVD. ●●Closure by Eyebrow Interactive, wins the DICE Summit 2012 Indie Games Challenge. ●●Blizzard and board games manufacturer USAopoly reveal World of Warcraft Monopoly. A Facebook vote will decide what tokens will be included in the game. A Starcraft-themed Risk is also on the cards.
WEDNESDAY 15TH Facebook and one thing led to another from there.
from where I was located, my sister was nice enough to let me sleep in her sorority house to avoid spending most of the day/night in the car driving. As I’ve always been the ‘good friend’ to women, I decided to take everything I’ve read (from personality tests to handwriting analysis to kino escalation [physical contact]) and turn it into a game. This way I could more or less step outside of myself and be ‘better’. In my own head I was now playing for points which removed some of that unwarranted stress that some guys (like myself) feel when trying to approach, keep a conversation interesting, or attempting to go kino with women. That being said, after play testing it, I contacted Neil [Strauss] on
How has response been so far? WGG? launched about three months ago and the response has been good so far. Game reviewers are saying great things, Who’s Got Game?’s YouTube videos have over 550,000 views (which has helped us pick up additional distribution), Neil wrote an Op-Ed in the Huffington Post about it, and based on the high demand – we are creating a Who’s Got Game? app. How are you finding the social party scene has taken to the idea of playing an actual game as opposed to just playing ‘The Game’? The social party scene is really taking to the idea of actually playing the game. Truth be told, everyone is always playing The Game. We simply set the stage to play it right and maximize the enjoyment factor of each interaction with Who’s Got Game? After all, who doesn’t love a good personality test, loaded question, physical challenges, secret mission
●●Sony’s new handheld, the PlayStation Vita, launches in North America. Sales will exceed 1.2 million units by the end of the month.
THURSDAY 16TH
●●Brian Fargo, co-creator of the 1980’s RPG Wasteland, also declares his intention to create a crowd-funded game, hoping to raise $1m for a sequel.
FRIDAY 17TH
●●Angry Birds developer Rovio sets March 22nd as the release date for Angry Birds Space.
SATURDAY 18TH
●●Following Indie Game: The Movie, a new documentary on independent games is announced. Us and the Game Industry is set for a winter 2012 release.
SUNDAY 19TH
●●Amy Hennig wins the Writer’s Guild of America award in the videogames category for her work on Uncharted 3. ●●The Polish-American inventor of the two-flipper pinball machine, Steve Kordek, dies aged 100.
MONDAY 20TH
●●A report from McMaster University in Canada suggests that playing first-person shooters can help to correct some forms of visual impairment.
022 _ NEWS
from Neil, or a conspiracy adventure! I’ve received a bunch of Facebook messages (on Who’s Got Game?’s Facebook page) from people who have specifically said that they can’t believe how the handwriting analysis cards are so easy, fun, and applicable to use. Who’s Got Game? had a lengthy creation period between yourself and Strauss. How receptive to the idea was he and how well did the collaboration process between the two of you work? Creating Who’s Got Game? with Neil was incredible. When I reached out to him on Facebook, his assistant at the time, Monique, got back to me and really helped turn this on. Monique eventually put me in touch with Neil and we started collaborating from there.
Neil’s amazing. He’s really sincere and he’s super creative. Here’s something cool. When Neil and I started working together he had just launched his latest New York Times bestselling book Everyone Loves You When Your Dead. This really put things into perspective for me... Here I’m reading unpublished excerpts from Neil’s interviews with people like Tom Cruise, Paul McCartney, Lady Gaga, Paris Hilton, and more... and at the time I was just like... is this really happening? How much did the game’s design and mechanics change from your initial approach? They went through a lot of testing so as you can imagine a lot was tweaked along the way. However, the focus and goal of the game which is for a
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WEDNESDAY 22ND group of people to connect on a deeper level and have a fun time has remained the same. Neil, for example, sent out an email to his list around Valentine’s Day (when we launched Who’s Got Game?). It said “One tip that’s not in the rules for those who have it already: Hand one SECRET CARD to each player before starting the game”. So the aspects are constantly evolving. The app will also get a few different twists that people should really enjoy. Charge Large was your first game. How has that worked out in the long run? It’s actually a really cool new Monopoly. I’ll paint the picture of Charge Large for you quickly. If you can clear your mind for a second and imagine Monopoly with credit cards, then imagine those credit cards look like American Express Gold, Platinum, and Black cards... Now, each player starts with a gold credit card and cash. As they buy properties/companies, obtain a certain amount of cash, use their credit card (any amount can be charged) and pay it off, each player becomes eligible to upgrade to the Platinum credit card and then the elite status Black card. Rewards and benefits follow as players upgrade to higher level credit cards. Just like in real life. We had a really cool social media marketing/PR campaign, which was based on a fictitious billionaire playboy named Charlie Large. Charlie Large was the face of the game and got so popular on Facebook (and across the internet) that the CEO of Hasbro reached out on Facebook, invited us in, and acquired the rights to the game. Wild, right?
Both Who’s Got Game? and Charge Large are obviously games with strong (if wildly different) social messages. How well do you see games being able to reflect and inform public awareness of matters of importance as well as simply being fun things to do? You are so on point. Both games do have strong social messages. I added credit cards to Monopoly when I was about nine years old and the idea came back to me when I was a senior in college (about to graduate). I suppose I created Charge Large to escape facing the ‘real world’ as I hoped I would become a Black card member. With Who’s Got Game?, I initially created it for my own personal use and when it really worked and I saw people having a blast with it, I thought, I have to make this happen. When it comes to games, there’s just something special about opening up a game box, taking out the cards, and then transporting into a fantasy world that feels real with a group of people. What’s next in terms of game ideas? Let’s see... next game ideas. We have the WGG? app set to launch early-to-mid summer. I’m also in talks to collaborate with two other international bestselling authors. I foresee one of these being a strategy game since the author is utterly famous for his books that advise on strategy, war, and power. You can check out Who’s Got Game?’s official website at: www.neilstrausspartygame. com, visit the Facebook page at: www.facebook.com/ neilstrausspartygame, and catch the latest updates on Twitter at: www.twitter.com/ neilstraussgame.
●●UK high street retailer GAME shows more signs of struggling. After closing 35 stores, the chain also finds itself unable to stock many new titles.
THURSDAY 23RD
●●Antoine Bauza’s latest game Takenoko is announced as the 2012 As d’Or – France’s Game of the Year. Other prizes handed out include the Grand Prix for Olympus, while best children’s game went to Zwerg Riese.
FRIDAY 24TH
●●As part of the marketing campaign for Mass Effect 3, early ‘Space’ copies of the game are launched into the high atmosphere on GPS-tracked weather balloons.
SATURDAY 25TH
●●Former Bungie co-founder Alex Seropian and ex-Dreamworks Vice President Brent Pease form the mobile gaming studio Industrial Toys.
SUNDAY 26TH
●●Industry site ICv2 reveals the top selling hobby games in the US in 2011, with Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride taking the top spots. Game of Thrones, Mage Knight and Eclipse round out the five, while the most popular card games are revealed as Dominion, Munchkin and 7 Wonders.
MONDAY 27TH
●●A report by HIS Screen Digest Media Research confirms many suspicions, declaring the number of Facebook users playing games has dropped by half.
TUESDAY 28TH
●●HBO announces HBO Go, its streaming service, will be brought to the Xbox 360 by April 1st.
WEDNESDAY 29TH
●●After six years of development, the Raspberry Pi is released. The $25 single-board minicomputer has been designed to help with the teaching of computer science and programming skills. Reports claim over two million pre-orders. ●●Leaked concept art confirms that SimCity developer Maxis is working on a fifth title in the long-running city-building series.
TRACKMANIA2 CANYON DEVELOPER: NADEO YEAR OF RELEASE: 2011
026 _ NEWS
MALL OF THE DEAD
An abandoned shopping mall and a dedicated group of ‘experience junkies’ makes for a very British zombie apocalypse… BY EMMA BOYES
I
t was the demise of ‘high fashion’ clothing chain C&A that sparked the zombie apocalypse. The German retailer closed the last of its UK stores in 2001, including the one in Reading town centre, the flagship store of the Friar’s Walk shopping centre. Friar’s Walk opened its doors in 1976 in a prime location directly opposite Reading train station. But in 2004, when Reading had become home to not one but three separate shopping centres, Friar’s Walk was forced to retire. It sat there, abandoned, for years, a haven for vandals and urban explorers, although notoriously difficult to sneak into due to its town centre location. Recently, though, there have been strange noises coming from behind the shuttered shop fronts. People who’ve gone inside to investigate or on a dare have never come back. There are rumours of something being very, very wrong inside the abandoned building. Survivors report seeing impossible things – that the dead don’t stay dead and that they come back with an insatiable desire to eat the flesh of the living, that corpses are standing up and shuffling about the old retail units. Zed Events Ltd took over the lease for the derelict shopping centre in 2009, and have been running LARPing (Live-Action Role Playing) events there ever since – minus the undead. The ‘Zombie Shopping Mall Experience’ brilliantly combines the two and has proved so popular that when it was first announced it was solidly booked for months. The
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NEWS STREAM MARCH THURSDAY 1ST
MARCH
● Development studio Another Place Productions is formed by several ex-Lionhead head staff members formerly connected to the Fable series. ● Gaming website Kotaku publishes in full a letter sent to Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner by an excited 17-year old John Romero.
FRIDAY 2ND
● Social games developer Zynga opens a web portal that allows users to play its games directly, rather than through Facebook. ● To showcase Kojima Productions’ new Fox Engine, the company releases a series of photographs alongside ultra-detailed, photorealistic screenshots and tasks gamers to tell the difference.
SATURDAY 3RD
● Apple’s App store prepares to pass 25 billion downloads.
SUNDAY 4TH
● The 2012 Games Developers Conference begins in San Francisco, featuring the Independent Games Festival Awards and the Game Developers Choice Awards.
MONDAY 5TH
● Developer Stainless reveals screenshots of its reboot of controversial ‘90s racing videogame Carmageddon.
CLEARLY, I’M AN EXPERT IN KILLING ZOMBIES AND WHAT THE LOCALS OF READING NEED IS MY HELP organisers have since tried to open up more time slots on weekdays, but a ‘zombie’ shortage is proving something of an issue. I’ve completed the videogames Dead Rising, Dead Island and Typing of the Dead. I’ve watched Dawn of the Dead, both the remake and the original. I’ve been on
TUESDAY 6TH official zombie walks and attended a seminar on How to Survive The Zombie Apocalypse. Clearly, I’m an expert in killing zombies and what the locals of Reading need is my help. The experience starts in a ‘holding pen’ where a heavily armed police team equips the group – made up of 15 hardened zombie slayers like myself – with bulletproof vests, torches, (Airsoft) shotguns and, most importantly, tea and biscuits. One team’s already gone in. Our job is to find out what happened to them.
● Gabe Newell, co-founder of developer Valve, is confirmed as a billionaire, and is listed by Forbes as being worth $1.5bn.
WEDNESDAY 7TH
● “With mixed emotions” Peter Molyneux departs Lionhead to join the development company 22 Cans, formed by yet another ex-Lionhead staff member. ● Warren Spector receives a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards, while The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim wins Game of the Year. ● A musical based on the classic boardgame Cluedo starts a short run off-Broadway.
028 _ NEWS
We follow our kick-ass mentors through a maze of dark and creepy passageways, up and down dimly lit stairwells, escalators and service routes, all the time checking that the undead aren’t hiding anywhere waiting to jump out at us. There are a couple of close encounters with the ‘Infected’ and we also have to break through a horde of psychopathic scavengers to try and find medical supplies. In the CCTV control room, we’re able to review the footage and see that the previous unit were unfortunately eaten alive. We burst out into hysterical laughter. I don’t think our team leader was expecting that. Once we’ve finished giggling, it’s clear we’re hopelessly outnumbered, so we fight through another horde of zombies to get up to the helipad and make a clean getaway. After some more tea and biscuits, it’s on to the second part of the Zombie Shopping Mall Experience, and this time we’re on our own and split up into smaller groups. We play two missions – in the first we have to find a laptop which has important info about a possible cure on its hard drive. In the second we have to find a scientist
and keep him alive for a set amount of time. They’re both incredibly atmospheric and fun as well as a pretty good workout. The shopping centre is on several different levels and trying to find something or someone in the maze of empty stores and loading areas is a real challenge. Especially when zombies want to eat your brains. Unfortunately, two of the main reasons that the idea of a zombie apocalypse happening in a giant shopping mall appeals to me aren’t really possible to replicate in LARPing. Firstly, since the zombies are played by real, live actors and not the actual undead, killing them in a variety of ever increasingly creative ways is out. You need to be very careful to aim for their chest area and not their head. Decapitation, the traditional zombiekilling staple, is absolutely out of the question. One zombie showed us the red marks the plastic pellets made on his chest where he’d been hit and even that made me feel bad. Secondly, there is nothing to nick. One of the upsides to the apocalypse is going to be the fact that before we all die horribly, There Will Be Looting. We can go merrily from shop
EVERYTHING’S VERY PROFESSIONALLY DONE AND IT’S A GENUINELY FRIGHTENING AND FUN EXPERIENCE
029
THURSDAY 8TH
MARCH
● Fez wins the Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival Awards. The decision causes some controversy, as Fez is not yet finished and has also been nominated in previous years.
FRIDAY 9TH
● Within twenty-four hours of release, Mass Effect 3 sells 900,000 copies in the US and ships 3.5m to retailers worldwide.
SATURDAY 10TH
● After protracted legal wrangling, Mojang and Bethesda reach an agreement over the use of the name ‘Scrolls’ which does not require Mojang to change the title of its new game.
to shop, stealing goodies, stuffing our faces with candy and smashing things up. Since the Friar’s Walk mall has been closed for almost a decade now, there’s not a single thing left to take. The store fronts don’t even have names on them any more. Another niggle is having to wear safety glasses the entire time. Clearly I’d much prefer that than losing an eye, but they’re incredibly difficult to see out of, particularly after you’ve been physically exerting yourself and they steam up. You have to wonder how safe you’d really feel if you fell down a flight of stairs because you couldn’t see – even with both eyes fully functioning. Just saying. But still, minor quibbles and impossible wish lists aside, the Zombie Shopping Mall Experience is an amazing day out. The make-up is fantastically gory, everything’s very professionally done and it’s a genuinely frightening and fun experience. Even though I didn’t end up being killed, it made me realise that I actually don’t want to genuinely experience a zombie apocalypse. Trust me – it would be terrifying. I’ll stick to video games. To book, head to www.wish.co.uk. The experience will set you back £119 and lasts four hours.
SUNDAY 11TH
● A videogame based on the action film The Boondock Saints is announced at SXSW in Texas.
MONDAY 12TH
● A special bundle for videogame Ninja Gaiden 3 is set to be released with a foam sword PS Move peripheral, with which players can swing and thrust.
TUESDAY 13TH
● iOS developer Playdek announces yet another partner, this time working with GMT to bring the classic Commands & Colors franchise to mobiles. ● Sony announces that it is using “social engineering psychology with data analytics” to anticipate and counter future PSN hack attempts, as well as employing former US counter-intelligence officer Brett Wahlin.
WEDNESDAY 14TH
● Another Kickstarter videogame sequel, Wasteland 2, receives enormous contributions on its first day, amassing some $500,000 in pledges. ● Dutch TV network VPRO is forced to remove an allegedly anti-Semitic boardgame from its website. The Settlers of The West Bank, unofficially based on the Catan franchise, has cards involving ‘Jewish stinginess’ that allows for the stealing of resources and also includes an ‘unhappy’ terrorist.
030 _ NEWS
PAVING THE WAY What is the point of videogames? Some of the UK’s leading minds recently addressed gaming’s place in our generation’s cultural landscape BY DANIEL GRILIOPOULOS
M
uch of the mainstream debate on videogames,” said Lord Puttnam, “fixates on their cultural validity; their state as art or not art. That isn’t, at all, what concerns us tonight.” The art debate, it’s true, seems tired; the arguments circular. The GameCity Prize debate, held at the prestigious British Film Institute in May, was singular therefore for making it past that sticking point. More importantly, it got some cultural movers and shakers to think fundamentally about what the point of videogames was at all; why and
how they’re interesting. Not everyone agreed; not everyone was as clearthinking as journalist and cultural critic Ekow Eshyn, as passionate as Young Bond novelist and one-time Fast Show comedian Charlie Higson, or as deeply embedded as legendary game designer and founder of Eidos and the Fighting Fantasy series, Ian Livingstone. But all had valuable contributions to make. On the panel with Higson, Eshyn and Livingstone were Helen Lewis, the newly-appointed deputy editor of the New Statesman and a lifelong gamer; Lucy Kellaway, office columnist for
031
adapted to games, and noted that the vocabulary of gaming had even infected the fiction of non-gaming authors like Hilary Mantel. This was picked up by Higson too, who has changed the way he writes books to appeal to games-saturated youngsters. “Games are incredibly alluring and can consume your life... to get a kid to read your book instead of playing a game, you’ve got to give them a lot of the same thrills and kicks they’d get in the game, but also what they get out of a book and not from a game.” Indeed, no-one disagreed that games had conquered the public; for example, Lewis said that she could finally play games with other women. Kellaway, who writes the ‘Office Life’ column for the FT, pointed to Jane McGonigal’s work showing how games had changed office workers, making them more communicative, optimistic and harder-working. Lewis pointed to gamification and the way it was spreading slowly through big business. Livingstone told us that 70% of the UK population were gamers. The solitary areas in the UK where games seemed to not be spreading were politics – problematic but increasingly irrelevant, and teaching – catastrophic. Lord Puttnam noticed that not a single person in the room was, or had been, a teacher. “What is it about this world that has disconnected from people who teach for a living?” he asked. Livingstone, who is writing the new computing curriculum that will replace ICT (Information and
“ARE GAMES OFFERING ESCAPISM FROM A SOCIETY IN WHICH PEOPLE FEEL ISOLATED AND ILL AT EASE?” LORD PUTTNAM
“BRINK IS NOT GOOD AS A GAME, BUT AS A TROUSER SIMULATOR IT’S AMAZING” HELEN LEWIS
THURSDAY 15TH
● Developer Beamdog announces re-releases of the classic Baldur’s Gate CRPGs. The new ‘Enhanced Editions’ will benefit from an engine overhaul and also be playable on an iPad. ● Car manufacturer Toyota launches a new advertising campaign in association with Hasbro where apparently owning a new Prius will help you win ‘The Game of Life’.
MARCH
the Financial Times newspaper; and, belatedly, Tom Watson British Member of Parliament, recent scourge of the Murdoch media empire and avid gamer himself. The panel was chaired by Lord David Puttnam, the man who seems to be the very definition of ‘great and good’. At first, there didn’t seem to be anything to argue about; the panel spoke about their experiences of gaming, ranging from the minimal in Eshyn’s case or the hostile in Kellaway’s to the surprising hardcore gamers of Higson and Lewis. Lewis was the first to eulogise games as a purely entertainment medium, proudly proclaiming that she loved her Xbox 360 more than life itself, but Higson was quick to follow, citing games as a cultural totem for modern youth to define themselves by. “I would have written a lot more books if I didn’t spend most of my day playing Call of Duty online...” he said. “Games have become for my kids what rock and roll was for my generation. Music was how we defined ourselves. Kids nowadays can’t get excited about rock and roll, because their dads and granddads are into it. Games have taken over [that position].” Self-proclaimed games naif Eshyn took a longer view; “We’re living at a privileged time,” he said, “at the birth of a new cultural form, watching it become not only high culture but one of the defining aspects of our society. It’s both mainstream and yet cult, inside and outside.” He pointed to the way that movies have
FRIDAY 16TH
● ‘The Art of Videogames’ exhibition, showcasing 80 games from 40 years of gaming, opens at the Smithsonian in the US. ● Portal 2 wins best game at the British Academy videogame Awards in London, while Battlefield 3 wins the publiclyvoted GAME Award.
SATURDAY 17TH
● Angry Birds developer Rovio signs a sponsorship deal with Formula 1 driver and fellow Finnish countryman Heikki Kovalainen. ● Business analysts Cowen & Cowen predict that the longawaited Diablo III will sell 5m units in its first year of release.
MONDAY 19TH
● Crossing the streams between screen and tabletop, Bandai announces a board game based on the Uncharted videogames. ● A bipartisan bill is introduced in the US House of Representatives, proposing the addition of cigarette-style labels on videogames that warn of the “relationship between violent videogames and violent behaviour.”
TUESDAY 20TH
● Microsoft announces that it will donate $1m to the children’s sport and play charity Right to Play.
WEDNESDAY 21ST
● OMGPOP, creator of the popular app Draw Something, is bought by Zynga for $180m. ● Geek and Sundry, a new YouTube channel network, reveals that celebrity gamer Wil Wheaton will be hosting a new show about boardgames called TableTop. The first episode will air on April 2nd, then every other Friday.
032 _ NEWS
Communications Technology) courses in UK schools this September, was brutal; “ICT has crushed the desires of people to want to study technology – particularly girls.” He hopes that the curriculum and the new super-cheap Raspberry Pi educational computer would encourage kids to learn programming. However, though games are universally played, Eshyn pointed out that they still don’t feature in the intellectual life of our nation – TV, radio and media generally underrepresent them, or represent them negatively. Much of this, Lewis felt, could be laid at the doors of the games publishers and their PR departments. The mainstream press won’t deal with anyone who too tightly controls the story and wants access to the personalities; games PRs are singularly rigid, slow and want to control the message. (As a former games PR myself, I’ll take that further;
“GAMES SERVE A FUNCTION IN LOOKING AT DISSONANCE AND VIOLENCE... IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD, THEN BEING UNBALANCED IS A GOOD THING” EKOW ESHYN
nobody in games wants exposure to ‘real’ journalists. Developers are precious, publishers have schedules to protect, and the games will mostly sell as well without features). When Woodrow Wilson saw the controversial film The Birth of a Nation in 1915, it was so groundbreaking that he called it “history written in lightning”. Puttnam also felt disappointed that games hadn’t found a similar moment or form, the way movies had settled on the 90100 minute story. The others rightly disagreed with this, pointing out that games’ endless flexibility and nonlinear outcomes were their defined form, and nothing more. It does seem, despite this, that there is still a gap for a great, culturally-relevant game which the blockbusters aren’t filling. Perhaps the type of experiences that were universal to a nation have gone? As ever, there was disagreement over gaming’s role in violence. The
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THURSDAY 22ND
MARCH
● The nominations for the 2012 Origins Awards are announced with many notable games missing. As companies must submit their own titles, it would seem that many simply forgot to do so. ● Alongside the release of Angry Birds Space, Rovio puts forward plans for theme parks based around the game, hoping to build the first this summer.
FRIDAY 23RD
● Only weeks after its release, but following substantial fan pressure, Bioware promises to “address” Mass Effect 3’s controversial ending. ● Dan Houser, co-founder of Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar, breaks Brooklyn real estate records by buying Truman Capote’s former house for $12.5m.
SUNDAY 25TH
● Within three days, Angry Birds Space is downloaded over 10m times.
MONDAY 26TH
● Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who was set to helm a film adaptation of the videogame Bioshock, quits the project.
TUESDAY 27TH argument settled on there being triple-A games which swallow the majority of the big companies’ marketing spends and have the widest appeal – and they happen to be the violent ones. The panel agreed that psychological addiction was a problem, especially for the young – but as Livingstone pointed out, the addiction was to screens and technology, not games per se. There were many more distractions and discussions during the talk. Two main outcomes were clear though; first, that gaming is now universal and if done well, can be educative and fun. Secondly, that the current strands of triple-A games and large publishers are holding back the medium from achieving the cultural relevance and recognition it deserves.
“GAMES ARE A WONDERFUL CULTURAL EXPERIENCE AND THERE ARE SO MANY MORE BULLETS IN FILMS THAN GAMES” IAN LIVINGSTONE
● Leading boardgames podcast The Dice Tower celebrates its 250th episode with a packed two-hour show filled with guests and stories.
WEDNESDAY 28TH
● The FBI licenses the latest version of the Unreal Engine, for use as a simulator tool. ● Mozilla, the creator of the web browser Firefox, launches the free MMO, BroswerQuest.
THURSDAY 29TH
● 4mm Games and Terminal Reality are sued for $8m by EMI, who alleges the developers used copyrighted music in their videogames without permission.
SATURDAY 31ST
● Molyjam, a light-hearted “International 48-hour game jam” inspired by the parody Twitter persona @petermolydeux, begins in locations all over the world.
BEYOND GOOD & EVIL DEVELOPER: UBISOFTS MONTPELLIER YEAR OF RELEASE: 2003
036 _ RICHARD COBBETT
> RICHARD COBBETT
THE AGE OF DISCOVERY
Just because you’ve got the solution, world map and puzzle FAQs at the touch of a button, it shouldn’t mean you’ve got the game beat BY RICHARD COBBETT
Y
ou don’t need me to tell you that this thing called the ‘internet’ is quite popular at the moment, or that 99.9% of the time it’s great. If you want to find out how to filter radioactive water, the circumference of the Earth, or whether your holiday hotel is in gang territory, you can’t beat it. There’s only one catch – or maybe two, if you’re a Star Trek actress who needed quick cash back in 1987. When we know there’s something out there, it’s next to impossible not to peek. Smokers sneak cigarettes, fat people pretend Maltesers really are lighter than the average chocolate, and gamers... gamers crave the advantage. In short, we’re currently in an Age of Information, which is a major difference from the Age of Discovery that most classic games had the advantage of landing in. It’s increasingly rare to find one where all the best stuff
hasn’t been spoiled by trailers and previews long before it even hits the shelves, or when you can find out damn near everything about it barely a couple of days after launch. GameFAQs gives away all the secrets, YouTube shows off all the good bits, and there’s nothing like forums, Twitter and Facebook for dismantling the details. This has had a massive impact on the way we play and appreciate games – for better and worse – but very, very few have shifted their designs to take advantage of the new order. Difficulty is the obvious casualty of this. Getting stuck in most games is now a mix of lifestyle choice combined with willpower – like sitting an exam with the answers sitting upside down on your table and an adjudicator who couldn’t give the faintest damn if you peek. It’s easy to avoid the temptation at the start, and you know you’ll feel
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better about yourself if you finish honestly, but as time ticks on... well, you know. Entire games like SimCity have been forever destroyed by a single cheat code, never mind comprehensive, internet-honed battle plans complete with annotated screenshots and video walkthroughs. The real issue isn’t whether or not people can finish games though. Honestly, I think the minimum you can expect for your money these days is a fighting chance of that, which you often wouldn’t get with older games’ bullshit puzzles, exponential difficulty curves or poorly explained mechanics. No, it’s that most gamers will understandably take the path of least resistance to the ending, which is rarely the most satisfying or scenic. Hitman: Blood Money for instance is designed around clever plans and subtle murder, but 99 out of 100 players are going to try just shooting everything that moves. At least the first time round. Done right, difficulty is a way of going beyond that – of encouraging exploration and experimentation. Not tough enough to fight a monster? Go over there, maybe, and come back later. Need money? You now have an incentive to collect coins. Classic adventure games really benefited from this. They could be toe-twitchingly frustrating, but only about a third of them were actually played in front of the computer. The rest of the time, they lived in the back of your mind as you showered or walked to school or did boring paperwork or slept, and were never more exciting than when a solution just clicked and you had to wait eight hours to get home and try it out. In the meantime, you’d explore, you’d talk, and give the game so much more chance to sink into nostalgia, if admittedly sometimes because of digital Stockholm syndrome. It’s not the same when you know you’re only a quick Google search away from all the answers. In more complicated games, it’s not simply solutions that cause problems. It’s knowing too much – and constantly being stuck in the sausage factory. Developers don’t help with endless behind-the-scenes videos, but that’s nothing compared to the brutal breakdowns that fans offer over on sites like Wikia. How can you see a game like Skyrim as a living breathing world when you know exactly how its AI works, or exactly how many quests it has (a number that’s never going to sound as impressive as it should)? Why would you ever bother replaying something like Mass Effect 3 to see the third ending if you can go straight onto YouTube and stream the damn thing? For fun? Please! We’re busy people here!
GETTING STUCK IN MOST GAMES IS NOW A MIX OF LIFESTYLE CHOICE COMBINED WITH WILLPOWER There’s no real ‘fix’ for this. People crave information. They did in the old days too – we just didn’t have access to it. There are, however, ways to get around it and work with it. Imagine, for instance, if Skyrim’s civil war was a living, breathing thing, updated every month based on player actions. How about an episodic, six-month long adventure built with the goal of fostering discussion amongst players – or an RPG built around emergent mechanics and playing with a political ecosystem instead of stock quests? There’s no way to beat the spoilers, but it’s long past time that games started coming up with this kind of more emergent challenge, instead of relying on pure barriers that are easier to cheat around than overcome. It may be harder to surprise us in this new age, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expect them to try.
038 _ DAN MARSHALL
MALNUTRITIONED PROGRAMMERS HAVE DECIDED ALPHA FUNDING IS A SENSIBLE WAY OF STAYING ALIVE
I
t’s not easy being Indie. That’s a lie. Not true at all. Made it up. Indie development isn’t hard like nursing, or being an accountant and having to do loads of adding up day-in, day-out. It is easy, being indie, it’s just that various unfortunate lifestyle choices are forced upon you. It’s not easy worrying about money all the time, I guess that would have been a better opener. It’s not that there’s no money in indie games – one only has to look at Hello Games’ fleet of golden helicopters or Edmund McMillen’s extraordinarily extravagant robotic auto-tap dancing shoes to see that. There’s money out there all right, it’s just that it quite inconveniently tends to turn up after you’ve finished making the game, not while you’re making it. This leads to all sorts of problems involving ‘eating’ and ‘wearing trousers’. So, with the lure of giant cauldrons packed to the brim with shiny, shiny gold at the end of the game dev rainbow, here we poor indies sit with a rough, dank shoal draped over our chafed shoulders, collecting our tears for use as a cheap water source.
> DAN MARSHALL
INDIE LIFE
Morals, principles, independence... all well and good until the bills need paying
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Quite a lot of the ideas I had for my next game The Swindle got canned, because I didn’t think they’d sell. Money is a huge worry for indie developers, because the vast majority of us quite simply don’t have access to enough of it. In steps Alpha Funding, the latest indie cash-making choice-du-jour. Since Minecraft made Markus Persson enough money to make Psychonauts 2 and 3 if he likes, more and more weak and malnutritioned programmers have decided alpha funding is a sensible way of staying alive. Theoretically, it’s brilliant – get people who like the idea of your end product to give you some money, and use that to buy all the necessary trinkets to remain alive during development. They’ve got too much money, you’ve not got enough – all you have to do in return is give them access to various pre-alpha, alpha and beta copies of the game along the way and you’re golden.
There are two problems, as far as I can tell. The first is why Alpha Funding strictly isn’t for me; you need a team of people whose development progress wouldn’t be completely crippled by one of them getting hit by a bus and winding up inconveniently dead at any given moment. I’m a solo indie – there’s no one else in the company. I do everything from programming to art. If I peg it, no doubt in some excruciatingly unpleasant-but-hilarious way, the project’s over. No one’s ever going to pick up on my behalf and unwrangle my messy, hopeless code. That’s it, the project’s as dead as I am, and all the people who stuffed five pound notes into my pockets get nothing more for their money. I’d feel awful, if I wasn’t being forcibly removed from the bumper of a double-decker bus. What’s more, the last thing I want is inflicting the burden of angry gamers on my loved ones at what would presumably be a tricky enough time as-is. And that brings me to my second anti-Alpha Funding point: gamers. You know what they’re like! Well, some of them at least. One only has to look at the furore over the Mass Effect 3 ending, or people protesting for Half-Life 3 news to see that the buzzword ‘entitlement’ is increasingly apt. I’ve spoken to a number of developers who, while they’re aware Alpha Funding has saved their skin, consider it something of a double-edged sword because they can’t take a break without their backers grumbling and calling them lazy. It seems Alpha-funded development goes against the grain of all the free-living, liberal hippy-ness that makes indie development such a joy; you’re forced into a state of perpetual crunch because anything other than working full-time, flat out on the game is seen as con-man levels of trickery to some of those who backed the project, drawing preposterous levels of ire. “What? I paid £5 to support a game I like the idea of, and now he’s ‘going to the toilet’? I didn’t pay £5 for you to go to the toilet! At the very least you should take a laptop with you so you can continue to add in new features while squeezing one away.” No, no, no. Not for me, any of that. What I get up to behind closed doors is for my eyes and ears only. I’ll get paid after the game’s released, thank you very much. So here I sit, worrying about money, happily coding away, worrying about money, and writing articles about money, for money, so that I worry a little bit less about money. And that’s what being indie is, I reckon.
040 _ HOUSE RULES
> HOUSE RULES
A MOTHER’S VIEW While fully capable of communicating in English, my mother isn’t particularly fluent in the language. As such, most of what you’re about to read was actually conducted in Hokkien, a dialect shared by my family and many of the other descendents of the Fujian district in China BY CASSANDRA KHAW
W
hen I told my mother that I wanted her to take Christine Love’s latest visual novel Analogue: A Hate Story for a test drive, she had seemed nonplussed. “But I’ve never played a computer game in my life!” My mother turned sixty this January. Born in South-East Asia a decade after World War II, for the first fifty nine years, she lived independently of computers. To her, they were interactive television sets – mechanical curiosities that had an unfortunate tendency of robbing her of her daughters’ attention. Even now, she sees her iPad as a source of contention, a tenuous link to the outside world that was frustrating as it was liberating. “I wouldn’t know what to do,” she added plaintively.
“You’d like it,” I reassured her. “It’s... it’s interesting. You’re supposed to figure out what happened to this ship after it disappeared for six hundred years. The people there were, like, inspired by Chinese and Korean culture. There’s this girl that reminds me of you – she kinda ended up getting married to an older guy, there’s a first wife, a good son, squabbling families...” “So, it’s like a Chinese drama?” I hesitated. “Yeah.” There was a moment spent deep in thought. “Sounds good,” she said, at last. “I want to see what this about.” We decided that I would serve as her proxy and her translator. She didn’t want to physically interact with the game: “I don’t want to spend twenty minutes trying to double-click the right way.” Fair enough. As we settled into the sepia-toned interior of Coffee Bean, a local internet cafe, my mother leaned over the arm of her chair. On the screen, the raven-haired Hyun-Ae was busy stammering an exuberant greeting. Bespectacled and lovely, she is the first of the two AIs that can be encountered in the game. “She’s an artificial intelligence,” I explained clumsily – ‘fake smarts’ was inaccurate as translations went. “Um. She’s kinda like me. She’s the go-between for you and the game’s computer files.” “Like the eunuch that follows the Emperor around.” The imagery was jarring enough to elicit a sudden laugh. The comparison was unexpected if perfect. In China, castration was mandatory for those who wanted to enter the Imperial service. It was a fail-safe measure, a way to ensure that officials would not be enticed into provoking revolts. Irrevocably bound to their monarch’s fate, incapable of even establishing their own families, eunuchs were often the hands, eyes and ears of their own sovereigns. “Sort of, yeah.”
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As Hyun-Ae continued to talk, my mother frowned. “Did she kill someone?” Her question took me by surprise again. “Why do you ask?” “She has to have done something wrong. I don’t think anyone would be so nice to a stranger.” My mother frowned. Oblivious to our conversation, Hyun-Ae stood frozen in the game, a tiny smile wreathing her pretty face. “Maybe, she’s just lonely?” I replied tentatively. “No. That’s not possible. That ‘computer girl’ is supposed to be from Asia, right? No Asian woman, real or fake, is going to run up with open arms to the first person that shows up after six hundred years. The first thing she’s going to say is, ‘Who are you? What do you want? And why should I trust you?’” my mother informed me. “I would be disappointed if you thought differently.” It’s a stereotypical line, one entrenched in her constant need to educate. “Yes, mom,” I replied, smiling, unable to articulate anything better. The first letter that we examined was the one the Emperor’s first wife had written for her husband’s new spouse. My mother marveled over its delicacy. She said it was welcoming but not overwrought, an elegant entreaty that immediately brought the image of a straight-backed woman draped in expensive silks to mind. “If she’s being sincere, the First Wife is a really good woman,” my mother announced quietly. “It’s also very practical of her. If she can’t give her husband the son that he needs, it makes sense to be nice to the woman she can. After all, the Pale Girl will be the one who holds the power when that happens. You can’t make enemies.” The characters were not referred to by name. Instead, we addressed them by titles or nicknames – First Wwife, Pale Girl (The Pale Bride sounded silly to my mother), Emperor, Adopted Son, Adopted Son’s wife. My mother was married to my father at the age of eighteen. Twenty years later, she became a single mother of two and the proprietor of a large business. After decades of labor and self-discipline, she and pragmatism are inseparable.
I DON’T WANT TO SPEND TWENTY MINUTES TRYING TO DOUBLECLICK THE RIGHT WAY
Over the course of one lazy evening, we poured through all of the ship’s files. Personal letters, diary entries and accounts were pulled up and studied, read out and then tucked away. She expressed fondness for the Kim family’s adopted son. “He’ll go far, especially with a good wife like that.” Hyun-Ae, on the other hand, was constantly dismissed. Whenever the AI approached us with a desire to talk about anything but the work at hand, my mother demanded her silence. “I like Mute better,” she informed me after our first encounter with the yellow-haired manifestation of the ship’s security system. Her answer came as a surprise again. Mute had been all but patronizing in regards to my mother’s status as an unmarried woman. “Why?” I asked. “Because she’s honest.” A flippant, puzzled response and a look that suggested I should have already known the answer. After all, honesty is something that the Asian culture only reserves for those closest to a person. In a society built on a framework of courtesy and decorum, candid behavior is a privilege, an indulgence permitted only in the company of those you trust and something that made Mute’s bluntness refreshing. No stone was left unturned in our investigation. My mother was meticulous about her need to know about everyone in the cast. No preferential treatment was shown to any of the characters. Eventually, I asked her about her reasoning. Why was she so curious about everyone in the game? “I’m supposed to be a god, right? I’m passing judgment on all these dead people. If I don’t know everything, I won’t be able to decide who is right and who is wrong. Just because our god isn’t always a very good one, it doesn’t mean I have to be the same.”
042 _ ROGUE WARRIOR
ROGUE WARRIOR
MOVEMENT
Who doesn’t want to be a rogue? Charming, silent and deadly, rogues have crept from Tolkien to D&D and onward to videogames including Thief, Skyrim and Warcraft. We dispatched our correspondent to train himself in the various sneaky arts… BY DAN GRILIOPOULOS
I
’ve always been a rogue, in my head. As a child, others would dream of sweets and toys; I’d dream about how to break into banks. I’d watch heists in Westerns and learn about drilling safes, disguises and learning guard routines. When I (regularly) got locked out of the house after school, I’d invariably break back in, by climbing up to top floor windows, breaking window panes, or trying to pick the lock (unsuccessfully.) Last issue, I wrote an article about an ARG [Alternate Reality Game], Fire Hazard’s The Heist, which got my rogue juices flowing again. So this year, I’m going to train myself to be a proper rogue; I’m going to learn sneaking, persuasion, lockpicking, seduction and anything else that fits; I want to find out how easy it is to do this stuff in real life and how realistic it is for one man to do it.
The first important thing is to move like a rogue, agile and swift. But it turns out moving like a rogue is hard, especially if the person moving is overweight, out-of-shape and has a bad back. I look at Mirror’s Edge, the perfect example of the free-flowing travel that a good rogue needs, and despair. Jumping that far without looking down or breaking your legs on landing? Impossible, surely? For help, I turned to an expert in sneaky and agile stuff, Dan Edwardes, Director of Parkour Generations, the UK’s leading parkour training company. Parkour is the art of fluid movement through urban areas – perfect training for a modern rogue. Dan sent us on a crash training course. Our first night of free-running consisted of a ‘discovery session’ with Dan’s henchman Dominic, a lithe hulk of a man, and a team of parkour veterans. We ran through the
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backstreets of Pimlico in London, making excellent use of the area’s brutalist architecture in the area as we scaled walls and leapt over terrifying gaps. Afterwards, tired but limber, we caught up with Dan to find out more about the physical capabilities necessary to be a good rogue. His first point was that key to smooth movement around buildings is sticking to what your body is capable of; “Your bodytype might predispose you to be better at certain types of movement, or may lead you to move in a certain way... Parkour is highly functional and so requires ‘functional strength’. This means the ability to move one’s bodyweight through space and other terrain with ease, no matter what the situation. So it really requires one to have strength and stability everywhere from the fingertips to the toes. Mental strength is also a vital component.” To my surprise my physical strength is fine, but my mental strength fails early in the training. I scale a two storey wall with relative ease, making use of brickwork and drainpipe footholds as Dominic illustrates, but freeze from vertigo trying to descend a slippery roof. I have to backtrack and find some stairs. Ezio Auditore never had this problem. Again, an exercise where we leap from a staircase through a window on the opposite wall gives both my girlfriend ‘V’ and I heebie-jeebies. Neither of us try it, and even some of the parkour veterans skip out on it for fear of a ten-foot high faceplant. Dan is realistic about the leap; “human anatomy and gravity impose certain limits; the world record is nine metres, which is close to our limit as a species... what one person find tough another might find simple. Parkour is a concept of training and moving in which we focus more on attributes of movement – such as fluidity, speed, balance, spatial awareness, touch, strength, and power – rather than set techniques.” Indeed it becomes obvious to us that to the Parkour crowd, it’s a combination of lifestyle, exercise and social scene – not just a movement technique. At times, Dan’s Sphinx-like exhortations on it take on an air of the guru: “Parkour is arguably the most comprehensive and all-round functional movement training discipline there is. As it has no rules/ regulations, and its physical practice is a case of adapting to whatever environment you find yourself in and learning to move to your utmost limits, parkour offers a vehicle by which you can reach your actual potential.” “Most other activities train to do what we actually do. In parkour we learn to overcome real, tangible challenges – with no safety nets, no pads or gloves, no crash mats. These are real tests you are subjecting yourself to, and that brings a mental component into play that rarely exists in other activities, most of which have been sanitized and standardised to the point of losing their original intention.”
MY PHYSICAL STRENGTH IS FINE, BUT MY MENTAL STRENGTH FAILS EARLY ON
The movements of the parkour crowd are sometimes spectacular; the standing leaps to chest height, the mid-air twists, and the cat-like leaps onto and off railings in less than a second look impossibly dangerous, especially across the brutalist rooftops of these London estates. Watching them, I’m aware that while I’m never personally going to have the ability to move like a videogame rogue, the depictions of Ezio, Garrett, Faith and even JC Denton aren’t that far from reality.
FAHRENHEIT/INDIGO PROPHECY DEVELOPER: QUANTIC DREAM YEAR OF RELEASE: 2005
046 _ GAMING SCIENCE
> THE GAMING SCIENCES
OUT OF CONTROL BY MITU KHANDAKER, THE TINIEST SHARK/UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH
I
n the last issue, I discussed how improvements in technological fidelity for controllers do not necessarily ‘improve’ games or make them more ‘immersive’, but instead could widen what types of games are possible. This included discussing a brief quote by Love developer Eskil Sternberg which summed up a commonly-held feeling about motion controlled games: “If I were actually making a game I would much rather make it for Move, because you actually have a button.” Of course, ‘having a button’ serves to usefully increase what kind of actions can be mapped to the controller, but the other advantage the Move (as well as classic controllers) holds over the Kinect: there is something to actually hold and touch. We are fleshy humans: our sense of touch is important to us, and helps us to make sense of the world. There are
two ways that our sense of touch works: cutaneous touch – which is the sense of perceiving surfaces, mediated through the skin and nerve endings – and, kinesthetic touch – which we feel through our muscles, and through movement. It’s these kinesthetic pathways that motion controls seek to leverage for new types of game experiences – though, whether or not they are successful is, of course, another issue. However, this aspiration may be restricted by our own human bodies. Research has shown that our kinesthetic sensing system has a ‘bandwidth’ of being able to perceive movements that happen up to 30 times a second. However, from studies on perception of high-frequency vibrations and surface texture, the tactile pathway has been shown as our primary information channel, with kinesthetic as secondary. All this may be a fancy way of saying that being
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able to feel force feedback – or, indeed, ‘having a button’ – is way more effective at being meaningful to us than moving our arms around. Combining these two may result in a more optimal experience – again, if the particular game design takes full advantage of this. Indeed, the problem experienced by many players (and designers) when it comes to motion control interfaces, is the sense of dissonance as our kinesthetic senses are engaged, but our sense of touch is not. This gap between what we expect and what we feel gives rise to a feeling of incongruence. Research has shown that multi-modal interfaces (i.e. those which engage multiple senses at once) are instrumental in reducing these sorts of problems, but as technological fidelity of motion controls increases, little is being done to address the fact that our sense of touch is left hanging. This explains why, when clashing your lightsaber in a Kinect: Star Wars duel, it may feel better if you were to actually feel the hit connect with your virtual opponent, rather than having it glide mysteriously through them. It’s a question of missing vital feedback. The importance of tactility and feedback is acknowledged by game designers who pay particular attention to ‘game feel’; this is an aesthetic sense, which arises from a satisfying mapping between human perception and how the game acts and reacts. (For an excellent text that describes this in detail, I recommend the book Game Feel by Steve Swink.) Though many game designers have this notion of ‘feel’ down to a science with regards to classic controllers, there is unexplored territory when it comes to novel interfaces.
Of course, our sense of touch is so unlike the rest of our senses – our haptic receptors are not associated with a single organ, and we process different categories of tactual information: heat, pressure, vibration and pain. Touch conveys to us many important types of information – so why aren’t game interfaces taking advantage of this in more interesting ways, beyond what we’re already familiar with? Could games be designed which take full advantage of the primacy of our sense of touch? After all, games are increasingly experimenting with new types of minimal interaction; Papa Sangre and The Nightjar, which, despite having no visuals, create compelling, unique experiences through audio alone. In doing so, this has the added benefit of being accessible to players with sight impairments. A game that uses only our sense of touch – whether this means pressure, vibration, or even temperature – could not only broaden the scope of what games are, but also appeal to a wider audience. Touchscreen interfaces – whether that’s a tablet device like the iPad, or any choice of fancy smartphone – have some advantage here by potentially engaging both cutaneous and kinesthetic touch. The upcoming Wii U controller, with its touchscreen capabilities, opens up fresh opportunity for developers too. Although improving the sense of tactility in games and making sure it lines up with improvements in motion control and other technological fidelities won’t automatically make for ‘better’ game experiences, understanding how our bodies perceive touch, and why it is so important is a necessary tool for developers. There is a wealth of design possibility still left untouched.
When clashing your lightsaber in a duel, it would feel better if you feel the hit connect with your virtual opponent
048 _ GAMING SCIENCE
> THE GAMING SCIENCES
DRIVING TESTS BY GEHAN PATHIRAJA, CODEMASTERS
A
simple question yields a simple answer. And for most people, when you’re asked what your occupation is, it is simple; but not so when you are a Car Handling Designer. “So, you make the cars then?” That’s the Vehicle Artists’ job. “So, you program the physics?” Not exactly, that’s the Physics Programmers’ job. “So what do you do?” Well, a Car Handling Designer’s primary role is to design the driving behaviour of a vehicle, so that the player is challenged to learn its characteristics where the ultimate goal is to master the control. Not the easiest of answers and one that could potentially lead to further questions or a silent-confused nod. Vehicle simulation in a computer game faces many challenges, particularly when you have a fan-base as diverse as DiRT3’s, which ranges from the casual to the hardcore. The former will expect an accessible driving
experience whilst the latter will crave realism (particularly when portraying licensed vehicles). The staff that makes up Codemasters’ seasoned development team represent the full spectrum of this audience, and whilst some would love to deliver an experience that provides the realism of a professional F1/WRC simulator, the niche nature of this section of the audience combined with the requirement to own specific hardware to get the full experience must be balanced against the need for accessibility. As a result, compromises need to be made to ensure the game can reach the broadest audience possible. The majority of players will most likely use a control pad as their choice of controller. The standard configuration is to use the stick to control the steering which resembles nothing like a steering wheel. Now picture driving a real car; at low speeds such as turning at a junction you would
Do you sacrifice fine handling details to ensure consistency, or compromise the behaviour of the chase camera?
049
expect use a lot of steering lock (perhaps 1.5 turns) but at high speeds such as lane changing on a motorway you would use less steering (perhaps 1/8 turn). Now, repeat the scenarios in a game using a control pad and you’ll find in both instances it is likely the player will use the full extent of the analogue stick which could mean using full steering lock instantly on the motorway which could be disastrous in the real world! This is an example whereby a simple system is required to ensure the player’s intention is interpreted correctly. Your perspective of the car plays an important role in conveying the behaviour of the vehicle. The most popular driving cameras used in our racing games is chase camera which is an external elevated view of the car. This view gives the player good visual clearance of the car and the track ahead at the expense of being a somewhat detached driving experience. Comparing this to a fixed bonnet camera which in turn unifies the handling model and camera into a cohesive experience. So the question here would be: do you sacrifice the fine handling details to ensure consistency or compromise the behaviour of the chase camera? We’ve all heard the saying “fly by the seat of one’s pants” which means to decide a course of action as you go along, using your own initiative and perceptions. Here at Codemasters we’ve been fortunate to have driven various cars in anger in the name of research. And one of the first things you will notice when doing so is the g-forces and rotational movement of the car. This feedback is critical in feeling for what the car is doing. On a control pad the
rumble motors can go some way to providing an indication of traction, but the hardware and feedback will ultimately be the limiting factor of your experience in terms of realism. For DiRT2 we collaborated with the company D-Box to develop a ‘Motion Code’ to work on one of their actuated platforms that simulates the pitch and roll of a car using the physical data from the game. The behaviour was so convincing that even professional rally drivers Kris Meeke and Sebastian Loeb were seen battling it out for lap times on the DiRT2 stand at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Of course, not everyone can afford an actuated racing seat to go along with their console/PC. Thankfully, advancements in home video game technology in terms of their software, have now got us to a stage where the player can be fully immersed in the comfort of their own home, and all at a fraction of the cost. What is the future of vehicle simulation in a computer game? Could the next generation of hardware unlock a new way to interact with the handling model such as Microsoft’s Kinect? I believe there is place for the devices like Kinect to enhance the experience but it is unlikely they will replace the feedback from a wheel or a control pad. In my opinion, hardware is not the answer. My role accounts for a small thread within the complex weave that is our racing games. Vehicle character cannot flourish unless it is complemented by every other system within our games, all of which are masterminded by the immensely passionate and experienced members of the team. Bringing all of this together into one coherent package is ultimately the key to a believable racing experience.
050 _ GAMING SCIENCE
> THE GAMING SCIENCES
SOCIAL DYNAMICS BY CRAIG MORRISON, FUNCOM
M
MOs are entering somewhat of a generational crisis when it comes to the fundamental tenants underlying modern design. Early MMOs brought with them all kinds of new, exciting, and previously uncharted, motivations for players. They were also obtuse, inaccessible, and required a degree of patience and dedication not always associated with gamers. In many ways the early titles failed to fulfil some fairly basic needs; the need for accessible, understandable progression and rewards. The current generation has managed to mitigate those old issues in many ways. The gap has been bridged, largely by incorporating more of the lessons that have been learned from single player genres. This hasn’t come without a cost though. In seeking accessibility we have run the risk of losing what first appealed to gamers about this genre. In a world that is ever more connected and online, we are,
almost perversely, removing the need for real interactions in the name of accessibility. A lot of what we do, and what we will be trying to address in future generations of virtual worlds, will be identifying how we balance between the benefits of meaningful social interactions and the personal need for progression. The very process which has opened up the genre and introduced more people to it than ever before, has also lead to a situation where many players feel like they are playing alone in a multiplayer world. All of that isn’t necessarily surprising however, in particular when you take a deeper look at the motivations of players, and factor in a little psychology. The key to future MMO designs may well be understanding those basic psychological factors that drive human behaviour, and more importantly perhaps, figuring out how we can apply that to our designs. Players motivations in their MMO gaming are not that different from those that
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influence our real lives. A deficiency in any of the basic needs that we fundamentally need as people, and as members of any given society, can weigh just as equally on our virtual lives as they can on our real lives. Self-esteem, confidence, achievement, and a need to both give and receive respect, are important drivers in our lives. Here is where the first generation of MMOs struggled, but have since come to excel. A lot of the design that has gone into the current generation of MMO titles has focused on fulfilling those needs, and rewarding players, allowing them to earn the respect of their peers in very easily identifiable and achievable ways. If we were to continue down that road design-wise, we risk ending up distilling otherwise important social elements down to the level of ‘friendship’ as a pure progression commodity, as you see in social and Facebook gaming. In that sphere, the relationships you have with others are translated purely into bite-sized gameplay advantages that simply speed up the reward cycle in your proverbial skinner box. We also value friendship, family, intimacy and belonging, all things that come from meaningful social interactions. This was the primary strength of the first generation of MMOs, and while it is still an important glue for many online communities, it is also something that has been a lower priority in MMO design during the last generation. Seen more as simply a fringe benefit of being an online medium, rather than being something that design must actively encourage. In chasing the higher need, for progression, achievement and self-esteem, we have lost sight of that bedrock of community that also contributes significantly to a human’s satisfaction with any activity.
Now those of you who might have studied a little psychology might start to recognise the tenants of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs here, and in many ways that is exactly what you see in an MMO community, and can explain that odd disconnect that many players experience with the current generation of titles. Once they are done with the more linear content on offer, they haven’t necessarily developed the social ties that support an attachment to the world itself, and the community around it, because the design has often made that purely optional. That means they miss out on an integral part of the community experience. The need for belonging is a deeper rooted, more basic need than achievement or self-esteem... i.e. without someone to share it with, that understands the context, an achievement feels a little more hollow. Now all this might sound like I am knocking on the current generation of MMOs. That’s not the case at all. I feel the genre has needed this evolution and had to learn what lessons it could take from more established genres, and we needed to learn how to make more accessible games. Now that those lessons have been learnt, I think that we will be able to start to focus more on the social elements again. There is, after all, a specific difference between the social design for a full virtual world, as you see in an MMO, and the social experience offered by social media based games. We should be aiming for a divergence there, not a convergence. While there are always lessons to be learned from other genres, at a fundamental level MMOs offer designers something that few other genres can – the chance to craft real, meaningful, human interactions that can enhance the gameplay experience significantly.
We risk distilling important social elements down to the level of ‘friendship’ as a pure progression commodity
052 _ GAMING SCIENCE
> THE GAMING SCIENCES
EMOTIONAL DEPTHS BY MARTIN KORDA, VIDEOGAMECONSULTING.COM
Y
ou’ll often hear games writers talking about the challenges and limitations we face when it comes to writing for videogames. We work in an industry that is still learning how to best integrate storytelling and characterisation into gameplay. However, over the past few years a revolutionary new technique called motion capture has started to be used extensively within game development. It is a technique that offers us an incredible opportunity to take our craft to the next level in the fields of character development and the conveyance of emotion. As little as ten years ago, game visuals and animation were too basic to enable games writers to call upon the same gamut of characterisation techniques that movie scriptwriters take for granted. After all, even the snappiest, most realistic dialogue counts for little if it’s being delivered by an expressionless, static character model
with a flapping, out of synch mouth and an inability to physically convey believable feeling. The advent of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 brought with it superior graphical prowess that finally allowed for the rendering of highly detailed, more lifelike character models. And with a new wave of even more powerful consoles on the horizon, we games writers now find ourselves with an opportunity to revolutionise what we do. Thanks to motion capture techniques and the visual capabilities of modern day consoles, both the creation of realistic, multidimensional characters and the execution of believable acting performances are now very much possible: characters that can move, act and convey emotion much like real people. Whereas once the characters we wrote moved with little realism and possessed virtually no facial animation
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– something which had to be compensated for through excessive use of dialogue and often overblown acting performances – motion capture techniques now provide us with the opportunity to write characters in a similar style to film and television. Thanks to the increasingly widespread use of professional directors and actors for videogame motion capture shoots, we are finding ourselves – for the first time since the generally failed experiment with FMVs in the late ‘90s – competing on a far more level playing-field with the movie industry when it comes to creating believable characters and delivering emotion. We can now write stage directions for characters to smile or frown and convey sentiments with a single look or expression. What’s more, we can be confident that facial capture provides realistic footage that animators can use as a reference point when animating facial movements. With the advanced technology at our disposal, a character can now believably show emotional pain, look genuinely angry or deliver subtle performances that previously would have been lost on the more robotic character models of yesteryear. With such exciting new innovations also comes a responsibility for games writers and developers to seize the opportunities these revolutionary techniques provide. As motion capture technology allows characters to look and act with greater realism, it is time for our industry to start looking at ways of creating deeper, more complex and interesting characters. For too long we have relied on wise-cracking 1980’s action B-movie stereotypes when it comes to creating
videogame protagonists: characters that more often than not have no needs, wants or inner scars other than a desire to kill the drug trafficking vermin who killed their wife/ child/partner, and who rarely show any growth throughout the course of their adventure. Portraying emotion to such realistic levels through the use of motion capture and facial animation, games writers and developers have the opportunity to start creating deeper, multidimensional protagonists and antagonists, along with supporting cast members that are rich and full of personality, rather than being mere devices to tell the player where they should go and what they should do next. As an industry with such exciting new options at our disposal we should be striving to make each character interesting, deep, unique and lifelike, so that we can harness the true power and capabilities of motion capture and take characterisation to the next level. We should be seeking to create casts of characters that compel, delight and interest us. Games such as Heavy Rain and Uncharted 3, as well as projects such as Milo & Kate (which I was fortunate enough to be a co-writer on), are the first steps towards bringing movie-style depth and realism into gaming characterisation. These are early but exciting days as we attempt to take our craft to new heights and undoubtedly there will be pitfalls and failures along the way. We must try nonetheless, for if we are to grow and evolve as a storytelling and characterisation medium, we must attempt to fully embrace the opportunities new technologies such as motion capture provide us with.
Even the most realistic dialogue counts for little if it’s being delivered by an expressionless, static character model
WALTER DEVELOPER: BLOSSOM MINDS YEAR OF RELEASE: TBA
056 _ VIRTUAL SEX
IRTUALLY Y URS Will they? Won’t they? Actually, what are they doing? Why sex and games have yet to find the right way to hook up… BY EMMA BOYES
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’m all for virtual sex in games – games aren’t just for children, whatever politicians and muckraking newspapers believe. The problem is no one has ever managed to incorporate sex into a game in a way that doesn’t make me feel completely awkward. Take Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy) for instance. First of all we’re controlling Lucas Kane’s thrusting movements while he’s in bed with his ex-girlfriend after about five minutes of playing the game. Next thing I know, the ex is dead and he’s so sad he’s getting it on with Carla Valenti, the police detective that was investigating him for murder. They might both be fine with that, but I felt distinctly creeped out. Then there’s Heavy Rain. One of the main characters, Madison Paige, is a sassy, resourceful photo journalist investigating the twisted ‘origami’ serial killer. Single dad Ethan Mars is
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on the run from the police and is their number one suspect. Momentarily losing all her brain cells, Madison finds something about ‘he’s probably a serial killer’ just does it for her and suddenly, seemingly without any kind of build up at all, they’re dancing the two-backed beast in a motel room? I’m so not feeling it, even though the scene itself was well done. Lots of other games signify sexual relations by cheating and making the screen go black – what a let down. Call to the stand Fable II, which had a massive amount of hype concerning your ability to marry anyone and have a family and how this would make you feel attached to them and the game world. Sadly, the reality was that as all the characters were essentially caricatures whose affections were ridiculously easy to gain, in the end one partner was almost identical to another – it didn’t make me care about them at all. Sex was signified by the aforementioned black screen, a feature Peter Molyneux once attributed to the fact that “there’s something about nipples you [Americans] hate.” Other games, like The Witcher, are obviously ridiculous – there are about 26 different, super hot women desperate to jump the bones of possibly one of the most unattractive and uncharming characters we’ve seen in games ever. Yeah, right. Dream on, boys, because videogames (and certain porn films) are the only place where that’s ever going to happen. So far, it probably has been BioWare that has managed to make sex the sexiest, building up a genuine rapport between characters and a long, slow burn build-up before anyone gets to get anyone’s armour off. Dragon Age: Origins has excellent romance
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side quests for both male and female characters, where you have to have long conversations with your chosen partner, and success in winning their heart (and getting them between the sheets) is dependent on how much they like you. This in turn depends on which conversation options you pick and how you act when they are in your party. You can also boost their affection by finding or buying them gifts that they will like and completing tasks. The characters are well-rounded, come complete with their own foibles and flaws and I felt genuine emotions for my party by the end of the game. The sexy bits were short non-interactive cut scenes, and unfortunately they did still feel slightly cheesy.
SHE’S VERY EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES, HAPPY TO GET IT ON WITH BOTH A MALE AND FEMALE COMMANDER SHEPARD
The first Mass Effect also offered similar romance side quests in a science fiction setting, although none of the romanceable characters for either the male or female main character really appealed to me in the same way as the ones in Origins – probably just personal taste. Of course, if you don’t like any of your options or don’t fancy adding a helping of romance to your game experience, having a boyfriend or girlfriend in the game is in no way mandatory, simply something you can pursue if you want to. Both Mass Effect and Origins also included same sex romance options, which was nice to see, but sadly a move that bought BioWare much media controversy and an Internet hate campaign.
In the latest game in the series, Mass Effect 3, BioWare took virtual sex one step closer to being real. Jessica Chobot, real-life video game journalist and presenter for IGN and G4, stars in the game as a virtual TV reporter. She’s the model and voice for Diana Allers, who you can invite to embed herself reporting on you and your team. Furthermore, Diana is a romance option for characters – and she’s very equal opportunities, happy to get it on with both a male and female Commander Shepard. Chobot is a self-admitted fangirl of the Edmonton-based developer and had campaigned on her Twitter feed for there to be a Commander Chobot in Mass Effect 3. She claims she was the one who insisted that her character be romanceable. Her opinion seems to be that if she wasn’t a romanceable character, then what would be the point? A pretty sad reflection of how she values herself and her abilities. With motion capture technology at the standard it currently is, Diana Allers is undoubtedly Jessica Chobot, as clearly as if she were acting the part in a TV series and there’s a big difference between making a character that was inspired by her and transplanting her physicality, her voice, her mannerisms and all directly into the game. For me, it’s a disconnect. I’m playing a game for fun
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THERE ARE ABOUT 26 DIFFERENT, SUPER HOT WOMEN DESPERATE TO JUMP THE BONES OF POSSIBLY ONE OF THE MOST UNATTRACTIVE AND UNCHARMING CHARACTERS WE’VE SEEN IN GAMES EVER in this vast, thrilling virtual sciencefiction universe, and suddenly, there’s someone I know in real-life. From work. Talk about killing the mood. You first meet Jessica/Diana early on in the game when you visit the Citadel – the seat of the Galactic Council – for the first time. She approaches you and explains that she’s a TV reporter looking for her big break and asks if you’ll consider having her onboard your ship, the Normandy. In return, she offers to try and help boost morale and secure funds for the war effort with her coverage. She asked so nicely I didn’t have the heart to turn her down, unlike one of my other friends (and colleague of Chobot) who decided the whole idea of having her on board was just “too weird” and that would have killed their immersion in the game. I thought that would be the end of it – I’d just let her stay there in my cargo bay, and she could do her news reports and I’d slip her the occasional interview to keep her happy. But it became clear that she wanted more, and it wasn’t just hot scoops she was after. This was just a whole new level of awkward. I mean, what’s a girl supposed to do? Will she get upset if she finds out I turned her down? If I take her up on it, next time I see her for real at a conference or something,
will she somehow know? Will I even be able to look her in the eye? And how about Chobot herself? How would it feel to be yourself playing a virtual character who’s having sex with a character based on yourself? Wouldn’t
the whole universe just vanish in a puff of logic? Chobot’s clearly not worried about any of this. “Oh,” she says. “I’m gonna give it to me so hard.” After all that, in the end, there’s no cut scene for Diana – just the copout black screen, but it’s interesting that the prospect felt so much more awkward compared to watching a well-known actor play a character in a movie and have an intimate moment. Perhaps it’s the interactivity – the fact that it’s you deliberately choosing to initiate the experience rather than being passively shown it as part of a linear story? It feels much easier to suspend my disbelief in a movie when faced with an actor I’ve seen play several other characters in several other films than to realise one of the fictional characters in a videogame is modelled on someone real. I felt the same way when I realised Nariko in Heavenly Sword was modelled on Anna Torv (Olivia Dunham in Fringe). It ‑somehow made the game seem less real to see a real-life character popping up. I think adding recognisable real-life characters to a virtual world doesn’t work. It’s the videogame equivalent of breaking the fourth-wall. So, how should games do sexy? I don’t know, but it’s sure going to be a whole lot of fun finding out.
060 _ THE FRENCH CONNECTION
I
THE FRENCH
loved French games from the moment a laser bolt appeared from off-screen and broadsided the black alien beast pelting after me through Another World. I loved then when I awoke on the planet Twinsun to discover myself incarcerated in an asylum, strait-jacketed by an autocratic regime of bunnies, spheres and elephants in Little Big Adventure. I loved it when a police officer from the city of Omicron reached out through my computer screen and asked me to possess his body as he investigated murders in the oppressive society of The Nomad Soul. They used to call it ‘the French Touch’, but during my tender gaming years I never truly grasped what that meant – or indeed the common strand that bound these games together.
CONNECTION David Cage, Michel Ancel and the French game design revolution BY WILL PORTER
They were all so different, yet they shared an independent mindset and stylistic bravery unparalleled elsewhere in Western gaming. What’s more, that seemingly indefinable seam of brilliant ‘Frenchness’ still echoes through games like Rayman Origins or Nadeo’s lovably bonkers ‘Mania range… “It’s definitely something to do with the culture, but… I don’t know!” laughs Quantic Dream’s David Cage when my love for his country’s early gaming produce surfaces. “It’s just definitely something to do with being French! They were bold games: they were so interesting, and so early. I feel that my work is just a continuation of that work – I’m just doing it with the technology available to me today. I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, but I’m really in the direct line of what those first creators did.”
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Just what is it, then, this French Touch? Why was it important, and is it truly still alive today? “I think that we wanted to invent the future,” explains Frédérick Raynal, the creator of both Alone in the Dark and Little Big Adventure as he, stereotypically and brilliantly, stares into a steaming vat of black coffee. “We wanted to make things different. We had freedom.” LIBERTÉ Before we get onto Flashback’s jungles, Twinsun’s flights on the Dinofly and perhaps even take in a Cruise for a Corpse – let’s take a trip to 1988 and Captain Blood. The work of a former musician called Philippe Ulrich and the graphical prowess of one Didier Bouchon. Captain Blood was a bizarre, merciless, free-roaming classic. You played a game designer, one Bob Morlock, beamed inside his own game as Captain Blood to hunt down five of his clones – hiding somewhere in the Galaxy. To compound this you’d also have to master Bluddian, a symbol-based language invented specifically for the game, while listening to the synths of Jean-Michel Jarre. It was a game that sums up the French Touch well – the treatment of alien climes, the sublime graphical work with fractals, a personal slant and a punishing mentality that’d see your cursor shake uncontrollably as your health declined. Like all French Touch games, it was unique. “To me, at its roots in the mid ‘80s, the French touch was a combination of brilliant aesthetics, boring gameplay and hard as hell difficulty,” counterpoints Jérôme Braune of French indie outfit Blossom Minds. “A couple of years later though, when the game industry was getting bigger, it was almost seen as the counterpart of art house films. It was the opposite to the mass market.”
Enter stage left in 1988, then, Delphine – funded and founded by musician Paul de Senneville, and named after his daughter. The following year’s Biochallenge would impress with its technology, music and sci-fi settings – yet it was Eric Chahi’s Another World that would enter the annals of gaming as a trueblood classic. Remarkable vector graphics, slick rotoscoped animation and a feeling of total immersion in an alien society and landscape scorched themselves into our collective memory banks. The game is still one of gaming’s most cinematic outings, even if there was an awful lot of falling down holes and throwing keyboards at walls... After Chahi’s departure, meanwhile, Paul Cuisset’s Total Recall meets Blade Runner actioner and flappy beige jacket simulator Flashback would double-down on Another World’s success – selling 1.25 million copies and securing its place as the biggest selling French game. The French Touch’s love of total immersion in alien worlds, oppressive authorities and often ingenious graphical trickery was by now clear to one and all. Paul de Senneville, however, did not stop there – going on to found sister studio Adeline, and naming it after his second daughter’s surname. It was here that many of those who constructed the first Alone in the Dark at Infogrames found themselves – after disagreement over the direction of the nascent franchise was heading in. Frédérick Raynal was at its helm, and would go on to create the Little Big Adventure series. Speaking to him today, it’s entirely clear that Raynal considers himself an artist. “When I was making paper and pen boardgames and I discovered computers, I really had the feeling that I discovered a tool,” he explains. “If I was a painter I’d have found my brush. If I was a sculptor I’d have found my chisel. I had found a tool to make games.”
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Michel Ancel the luminary behind Beyond Good and Evil and the Rayman series, meanwhile, views himself in an entirely similar fashion. “There are very strong artistic things in, say, American games – but in France you always have the influence of the artist,” he explains. “We have a lot of things to say and to do in our games – that’s not simply in their appearance or exterior. We go beyond the superficial part of the game. We really consider the artist as something that’s in the meaning of the game – the reason that we’re making it.” Why, then was there such a clear line between French game development and that of other Western output? What was so different about France, and the French, that creates such different stylistic output? “I think it goes back to what we learn at school,” ponders Anne Blondel-Jouin, the Director of TrackMania creators Nadeo. “We’re such an old country. All you learn about in history class is how independent people used to be – and still are. For example Les Lumières back in the seventeenth century, when we realised that human minds were so important – and that we should fight for equality. We had human rights, we had the French Revolution, we had the student protests of May 68... I think it’s always been in our genes.” Rather grandly, then, this is what led us to the talking FMV dinosaurs of Cryo’s Lost Eden and the epochspanning leaps of Time Commando. Throughout it all, however, the role and power of the independent individual within society – and in art, the auteur – is vital. “When tourists come here from Japan or the US they’re all surprised when people are supposed to be queuing for a show to start, but it turns into a nightmare,” continues Blondel-Jouin. “What we do in France is that it becomes a mind-game – for us to be as wise as possible, and for us to cut the queues!
WE HAD HUMAN RIGHTS, WE HAD THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, WE HAD THE STUDENT PROTESTS OF MAY 68… I THINK IT’S ALWAYS BEEN IN OUR GENES
We like those mindgames. We like tricking people, and we’re happy when we do it! It’s rooted into our culture. That’s the way we are. It’s already a game for us to be independently minded. It makes us feel clever.” So there’s a pride in standing out from the crowd, but this focus on an independent vision goes both ways. There’s a bold artistic stance, sure – but might it not also give rise to more personal games and reflections on the way the artist’s mind ticks? Thinking of the growing friendship between Lester his alien companion in Another World, the role of the pregnant wife in LBA 2 and David Cage’s more recent output – I posit to Frédérick Raynal that many French Touch games might reveal a little more about their creators than the creators themselves realise. “You know I never thought about that, but now you’re asking the question I’ve realised something,” he replies. “I know that Paul Cuisset, Eric Chahi and myself – we all wanted that kind of thing in our games. Something with emotion – not love, but emotion between humans. We’re all very wild, almost hermit-like. We like to be alone, working at our computers. Paul is even worse than me for that! Maybe, maybe, maybe… the reason I make games, and the reason I make games in this way, is to communicate.” “I’m a very shy person, although that’s perhaps harder to see now
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I’m older, and I’m sure that back then games were a means of communication. My game is full of love: I think that maybe I’m showing that I’m not a bad guy. Maybe that’s the answer? Why we made games about relationships? It was a personal issue for us, and this was our way of expressing ourselves – going further within our games.” EGALITÉ So far we’ve concentrated on the French respect for the Artist, but not actually taken into account the role of the artists whose visuals and vision go into the games themselves. These men and women, and the way that they are trained within French society, are another vital part of The French Touch – both in how it once was, and how it is today. “We like to spend a lot of time on the artistic aspects of games,” smiles Michel Ancel, creator of the colourful delights of both Rayman Origins and Beyond Good and Evil. “We really want to be immersed in a piece of art – whether it’s 3D or 2D. The idea of making a painting or concept art come alive is very exciting. Sometimes you just look at a piece of concept art and
WE LIKE TO SPEND A LOT OF TIME ON THE ARTISTIC ASPECTS OF GAMES from that imagine a lot of different situations, and we really pay a lot of attention to turning these pieces of art into an experience. It can be good and bad! Sometimes too much on the artistic side can make you forget
about the more concrete and rational rules. Sometimes it can lead you to interesting destinations.” This final destination, however, comes with training – and France stakes more importance on this than elsewhere in the West. “The first, and maybe most important, reason for our games perhaps being more bold and imaginative is the quality of artistic training and its dedicated schools in France,” explains Blossom Minds’ Jérôme Braune. “Art History, for instance, is often mastered by artistic directors who’ve graduated from ‘Beaux-arts’ or similar schools. The same goes for animation with ‘Gobelin’s school of the image’ which is probably the world’s most prestigious school of animation. French artists get a very strong cultural and artistic background through this education...” The composition of French art teams such as that behind Arkane’s forthcoming steampunk epic Dishonored underlines that this is very much the case today, while Frédérick Raynal assures that this training was a foundation of the French Touch in the early nineties. “Programmers all over the world wanted to do the same thing at the same time, because it was the right moment,” he explains. “There were no videogame schools, so people were working with the graphics created by artists from classical schools. When they started to work in videogames they could express everything they’d learned, but in a very different way. I’m especially thinking of my wife Yael, who I met when she worked on the backgrounds of Alone in the Dark. Yael came from a classical art school – when she saw videogames with their tiles and sprites and she knew that she could do something different...” In a global market averse to experimentation, however, this rich seam of gaming was prone to wobble.
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Ground-breaking as they were, games like Flashback follow-up Fade to Black failed to thrive, while the sixyear nightmare that was Eric Chahi’s underwhelming Heart of Darkness showed that stylistic difference wasn’t always the best thing. Latterly, while Michel Ancel’s much-lauded Beyond Good and Evil sold well in France – overseas it was a commercial failure. Mainstream gaming didn’t quite gel with the idiosyncrasies of the French Touch, while the bigger teams required to create modern games began to compromise the once personal direction of many projects. Indeed, many French studios found themselves specialising in more specific genres – with Adeline, for example, diverting into the Moto Racer franchise. “Now you can’t just make the game you want,” explains Frédérick Raynal. “It’s not so much that the publishers are the bad guys, but if you tried to make something like Little Big Adventure nowadays they’d say ‘No’. If you put some nice cute characters that look like they should be in a game for five year-olds with a story that’s dark and mature, and then do action and adventure at the same time... they’d ask ‘Just what is that game?’” “When we started Adeline, the guy who’d put the money in, Paul de Senneville, gave us complete freedom. He said ‘You know how to make games, do whatever you want.’ Then, later, when we joined SEGA with No Cliché they just said ‘Okay. What do you want? You know what you’re doing: we need a French game for when the Dreamcast launches’. We had so much freedom, so alongside my vision everybody in the team put ideas in. We were so free. So naive. We just didn’t ask ourselves questions. Now when you make a game you ask so many...” It’s clear, however, that in studios like Ancel’s Ubisoft Montpellier, in David Cage’s Quantic Dream and in the Nadeo ‘Mania factory – those same French
Touch impulses are still bouncing off the walls. Eccentricity and personal charm must now be, it could be argued, wound deeper within established genres and more familiar boundaries. “That established familiar gameplay is what you were playing when you were a kid,” explains Michel Ancel after we’ve touched on the Zelda leanings of Beyond Good and Evil and Rayman Origins’ take on classic 2D platforming. “When you play as a child you add your
own imagination, just as with games you had to add your own imagination – especially with old games as everything was just pixels. So, when you make your own game you always have a feeling that there’s a missing part: something that needs to be added, something that’s in-between... So, naturally you add your own things. I’m not really comfortable with the idea of reinventing the wheel. I’m more interested in inventing a new story and characters.”
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With TrackMania, ShootMania and the still mysterious QuestMania, meanwhile, Nadeo see their streak of independence letting them distil genres rather than expand upon them. “You say that ShootMania is a bold title, but I cannot agree with that,” responds Anne Blondel-Jouin to a query as to whether the forthcoming FPS was a financial or stylistic risk. “Any other studio would have taken the shooter genre and made it bigger, stronger and with even more production values than all the others. Florent [Castelnérac, Nadeo’s prime creative mind] has taken the opposite route. He often refers to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry saying ‘Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away’. We want to have the purest game possible.” FRATERNITÉ So what’s next? As with other European countries – the French game development industry is in a period of transition. Franchise landgrabs such as Ubisoft Paris’ comic book XIII game simply didn’t work in the mainstream. Recently, meanwhile, studios like Test Drive Unlimited developers Eden Interactive or original I Am Alive coders Darkworks, who pitched for
IT’S FUNNY TO SEE FRENCH STUDIOS STILL TRYING TO DELIVER MASS MARKET GAMES WHILE FOREIGN STUDIOS SEEM TO CARRY THAT LOST LEGACY AAA greatness without necessarily having the economics to back then up, have struggled or fallen. The most talented French-speaking developers themselves, meanwhile, are clearly priority targets for the booming Canadian games scene – while many
studios (such as Ubisoft Annecy with Assassin’s Creed’s ingenious multiplayer) find themselves working on the constituent parts of blockbuster games rather than the frameworks that hold them. “As most game studios need publishers, they can’t target niche markets anymore and they need to attract the most players,” explains Jérôme Braune of Blossom Minds, an indie start-up that’s grown from the ashes of Eden Interactive. “French developers have stopped taking risks, as mistakes are paid at great cost.” For lovers of the French Touch, however, there is a silver lining. The rise of the indies, and the prevalence of downloadable titles and new platforms that encourage experimentation, might just fall in their favour. “I’ve seen a lot of interesting developments with the smaller game companies – doing things for iPads, iPhones and Android,” ponders Michel Ancel. “Those people aren’t really known, but maybe that’s where French games development is going to work once again. French developers are really personal – they’re indie in the roots. The opportunity of indie development is connected to that spirit. We can expect some very innovative and interesting games developed by small studios.”
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“Indies are mostly keeping that ‘French touch’ spirit alive when they can take risks and avoid publishers for distribution,” argues Blossom Minds’ Braune. Indeed, it only takes a cursory glance at the early teases of his water-based platformer, Walter, to spot a familiar element of the weird and the wonderful – while other French studios like Arkedo with Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit, or Mobigames with Edge, share that vibrantly independent Gallic streak. Then again, through the download revolution, the move away from traditional publishing and the rise in popularity of smaller more intricate experiences aren’t we also at a point when every developer can be free to taste the artistic freedom of the French Touch? “It’s funny to see French studios still trying to deliver mass market games while foreign studios seem to carry that lost legacy,” muses Braune. “For me, the most accomplished and successful French Touch game over the past few years is Journey, which is made in Santa Monica, California.” We stand on a new frontier for gaming. Through digital distribution, whether sanctioned through an uber-publisher like Sony’s Journey or thrown by a lone developer into the wilds of the App Store, creative works can finally find their niche. The sensation of risk that dulled the French Touch is being peeled away and that means, ultimately, that designers everywhere can now embrace the design philosophies of a golden age of gaming that’s all-toooften overlooked. The old debate over whether games can be considered as art is long in the tooth, boring and unnecessary. The true argument is whether a game designer can be considered an artist. Through the French Touch this was an argument won long ago.
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THE LOST SHRINE OF THE TRICKSTER GOD TALES OF A TRAVELLING CONVENTION DUNGEON MASTER There’s something about running games for complete strangers at a convention that morphs a seemingly mundane tabletop RPG session into an unpredictably riveting experience worth writing stories about… BY PHILIPPE-ANTOINE MÉNARD
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here’s something electrifying about having thousands of gamers crowded in an open hall. It puts everybody’s moods in some kind of excited expectancy. Players sitting at your table have no idea how their experience will turn out and often find themselves playing with complete strangers. Convention RPG games are usually made up of a few players that know each other and one or two random people that get picked up in the line-up to round the table up. The social dynamics are skewed from the get go. You have a core that are used to playing together with its own set of social rules. You then graft other players with vastly different backgrounds and social etiquette. In fact, merging a group of mismatched players into a functioning group around the table and within the game’s story is likely the most challenging feat a convention game master has to
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Photographs © Caroline Cloutier (carottelychee.blogspot.ca)
perform. If you fail at this, you risk finding yourself with a group of halfinterested players chucking dice in between bouts of dejected texting and Facebook updates. I recently attended the PAX East convention in Boston as a panelist and made a point of freeing a few hours to volunteer to run a session of ‘Learn to Play D&D’ because it’s one of my favourite activities offered by Wizards of the Coast’s organized play at conventions. I always get a kick teaching the game to new players and, fortunately, I had my bag of tricks. “Hi, my name’s Phil. I’ll be your DM for the next few hours.” I read their body language and got ready to rein them all in: “I’m sure you’ve all heard of those D&D games where the Dungeon Master tells you that you meet at a tavern. Then players spend the next 25 minutes being jerks to each other until they grudgingly accept to work together.” I got a few
giggles and one or two knowing nods. My first hooks were set. They were still unsure though, and that moment of hesitation was my window of opportunity to pounce. “I have to say I kinda hate those games. I’m not really that kind of DM. In fact the adventure I was supposed to run for you today sucks. That’s why I threw it away and decided you were going to help me design the adventure!” At that point, I had their attention all right, but I hadn’t quite established my credibility as a Dungeon Master. “We’ll assume that your characters know each other but you’ve only adventured once before. That last adventure both went great and seriously wrong at the same time. Now I want YOU to tell me what went wrong and what went well in that adventure.” As the players recovered from their surprise of being required to be active in establishing the session’s quest, I quietly observed them, trying
to identify the likely leaders. More importantly, I tried to spot the tables’ instigators. There’s always at least one at all RPG tables. He’s that one guy – he’s usually a guy – that pulls levers, kicks doors and opens chests before the rest of the group can react. That person can either be the driver of the game or its worst enemy. I’ve found that getting the instigator on my side has always been the key to a game’s success. You do NOT want to have a bored or unhappy instigator at a gaming table. One player finally pipes up: “We were sent to rescue a dragon and we got the dragon killed!” It looked like I had found my instigator. The game was played with level one characters, beginning heroes, so such a quest made little sense. But that smart-ass hadn’t played at my table yet... “Oh that’s good, but just convince me why beginning adventurers would be hired to protect a mighty dragon and I’ll run with it.” After some back and forth between the players, which ‘inadvertently’ helped create the social bonds needed to run a great game, another player suggested, “We failed to recover a dragon’s egg from some kind of cult.” That player had a calm and smiling disposition. I noticed two other players deferring to him. I later learned he was a DM
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himself and had brought a player from his group and his neophyte brother to the game. Good, I had identified the table’s leader. I looked at everyone, “That’s very good! We’ll say that you guys dropped the egg, perhaps even broke it when you were fleeing the claws of the dragon-men cult! Now why don’t you tell me what went really well for you guys?” The instigator didn’t miss a beat and said “We found this huge treasure chest!” By that time, some of the other players were already face-palming. I wasn’t born yesterday, I’d seen this trick used before. “That’s an AWESOME idea man. In fact...” and that’s when the whole adventure clicked in my mind “...the chest is one of those heavy contraptions made of enchanted elven oak, reinforced with dwarven steel and featuring a very complicated puzzle lock!” “Of course!” said Mr. Instigator, convinced I was going for a cheap DM cop-out to kill his idea. “Here’s the thing though, the reason why you’re all going on this next quest is that you’ve found the whereabouts of the solution to that puzzle lock. You see, its design is closely associated with an ancient god of chance and trickery. One of you managed to find an old, abandoned shrine dedicated to that god, chances are you’ll find what you’re looking for there.” “Hey, That’s kinda cool man...” said the Instigator. I had established my credibility. Things were going to be just fine. TRICKSTERS OF THE TRADE I distributed character sheets. The three new players picked the fighter, the mage and the paladin. The player-DM picked the rogue and, to no great surprise, our instigator chose the drow ranger, a dark-skinned elven Aragorn-like character. To set up the adventure, I used an open gridded map featuring
GETTING THE ‘INSTIGATOR’ ON-SIDE IS ALWAYS KEY TO A GAME’S SUCCESS. YOU DO NOT WANT A BORED INSTIGATOR AT A GAMING TABLE a whole dungeon. Using a simple chart I made a few months ago (see Chatty DM’s Instant Dungeon Room Generator panel), I generated the content of each room as they explored it. I made sure to always go back to the ‘trickster god’ theme when prompted by a player’s action. This reinforced the idea that I was making them play in an adventure they had co-created. For instance, in one room, I mentioned an empty, dust-covered pool. When the rogue’s player asked me about the pool, I said “While it
seems empty from where you stand, you hear the distinct echoing sound of falling drops of water hitting a liquid surface.” As he started interacting with the pool, I made a point of telling the other characters they were unable to hear or see anything. This prompted jeers and catcalls for the poor rogue who was convinced something was afoot. When the rogue finally gathered the courage to dip his hand in the seemingly empty pool, I told him “you feel icy cold water on your skin as your hand closes around something.” “Can I take it out?” asked the rogue, sensing I was going to spring a nasty trap on him. “Sure, in fact it seems to be a small bag filled with some kind of
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cut stones or beads,” I said. The rogue quietly pocketed them, the player beaming at having figured out this illusory trick. Later, when faced with a stuck door, the shy guy playing the dwarven fighter asked me is he could roll a dice to bash it down. I nodded and used another of my dirty DM tricks. “I don’t really care about figuring out if you can or can’t open the door. I mean look at that axe of yours right? So here’s what I propose, you’ll roll to see if, once you bash it down, you kept your balance and don’t fall on your face at the feet of whatever is waiting on the other side. Are you cool with that?” He agreed, rolled great and the door exploded in a cloud of splinters and bent iron
bands. The player was all smiles, until a patch of green goo fell in front of his character and promptly engulfed him, starting a slow and painful process of acidic digestion. As I taught the newbies how combat worked, my fellow Dungeon Master piped up to help them by sharing advice and tricks to remember the core rules of combat. I’m always grateful when I have someone who knows the rules at the table. It allows me to focus on running the event and get rules-related support when I need it. Thus armed with the fresh knowledge of sticking pointy things and casting fiery spells into green piles of goo, all the players mobilized to help the poor dwarf whose beard had already melted off his face.
HAVE A ‘FINAL SCENE’ READY AHEAD OF TIME, ONE THAT TAKES ABOUT 15-20 MINUTES TO RUN
As combat progressed, I started to see the signs. “Hey, I have this power on my sheet that lets me freeze and move monsters around,” said the mage, a very quiet girl. “Oh you WANT to use it to pull that green slime away from the dwarf,” answered the rogue. “Now that the fighter is free, I’m going to heal him and then bash the monster!” said the priest’s player. “If you move in that square instead of that one, I can squeeze in and sneak attack it,” said the rogue. This discussion of tactic, this unification of purpose around a single threat was what I had sought from the start. I had started a game with six individuals; I now had a single gaming group sitting around me. The game would be a smashing success. One room featured a large, glyph-like pattern on the floor upon which rested the oozing monster. When I noticed that the players were getting low on hit points (an abstract representation of a character’s health), I leaned over the rogue’s player and whispered “You’ve run the game before, you know how bogged down in numbers we can get. I just want to remind you that your character can look around and ask questions about the environment.” “Oh right!” he said. “What about that set of runes there, can I roll to see what it is?” After he succeeded, I informed him that the glyph was actually some sort of ventilation mechanism. The drow ranger said, “So is there any kind of lever in the room?” “Dude! Never give a DM ideas!” said the rogue. That’s all right boys, I was way ahead of you. “I’m happy you finally asked, you see, there’s a strange, bone-like lever surrounded by elven inscriptions set in the wall just beside the ranger.” The whole group groaned. “I can read elven,” said the ranger, “what does it say?” “There’s some ambiguity because the modern elven word for ‘lever’
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has similar roots to those of the fingers of the hand. I guess it roughly translates into ‘pull my finger’,” I answered, deadpan. When the laughter subsided, the players promptly beat the monster without triggering the explosive gas trap. They adventured for another half-hour or so, disarming a whirling blade contraption and recovering the solution to their puzzle chest. I could see on everyone’s face they enjoyed themselves. I even got one of the best compliments a convention Dungeon Master can get. During the adventure, the instigator said, “Can you come to Newark and run my game?” CONVENTION UNCONVENTIONS Running a convention game is very different from running home games. You have to deliver a self-contained playing experience with a well-defined beginning and a satisfying end. You want players to leave the table knowing the fate of their characters. You have to make sure to have an adventure that will fit in the allotted time. The best way to ensure that is to have a ‘final scene’ ready ahead of time, one that takes about 15-20 minutes to run. My favourite ones are challenges where all players need to cooperate to succeed. The whirling blade trap I mentioned above was such a scene. I asked one character to take the lead in getting the treasure while all the other players described how they helped, each rolling against an appropriate skill and giving a bonus or a penalty to the lead player based on its success or failure. The scene culminated with characters jamming the blades with magical ice, shields, weapons and, in the case of the dwarf, his face! That allowed the rogue to duck and weave between the remaining blades to recover the quest’s reward. Thus I was able to satisfyingly conclude the session. Sometimes you end
up rushing a scene for completion, cutting some corners like making monsters easier to kill. I’ve noticed that players don’t mind that, as long as they get to have a story they can retell later: “Oh man, let me tell you about this Drow ranger I played...” One element worth mentioning with convention games is dealing with unpleasant or overbearing, socially oblivious players. This is the darker side of conventions. A convention Game Master has no choice but to deal with players that steal other people’s fun. In such case, I tell DMs to immediately call out rude behaviour. Whether it’s making sexist comments, criticizing other people’s way of playing, ranting or just being a jerk, the Game Master has the responsibility of being the
CHATTY DM’S INSTANT DUNGEON ROOM GENERATOR Roll a d10 1-2: Empty, roll again: Treasure out in plain sight (1-5), hidden (6-8) or camouflaged (9-10) 5-6: Trap, roll again: Trapped Lock(s) (1-2), Trapped Treasure (3-4), Complex Contraption (5-10) 7-8: Puzzle, roll again: Riddle/Word puzzle (1-3), Magical puzzle (4-5), Mechanical puzzle (6-10) 9-10: Monster. roll again: Distracted (1), Hungry/Hostile (2-5), Neutral (6-9), Friendly (10)
bigger bastard. For instance, if someone cracks a sexist joke at my table, I give a benevolent warning that I’ll have no such thing, or any other kind of intimidating behaviour toward any player. If the behaviour persists, my tone hardens and I tell the perpetrators that they will be expelled from the table with no reimbursement or prejudice. If things get heated, I invite the other players to take a five minute break while I resolve the issue. I’ll even call for support from the event organizers if needed. Under no circumstances do I raise my voice or lose my cool though. When things go bad, you want to salvage the session for the remaining players. You want them to see you being cool and professional so they can return to playing with the minimum amount of awkwardness. All these tricks can be learned through experience and practice. All convention GM have similar tool kits. Some use visual aids like miniatures and 3D props; others make funny voices and always speak in character. Yet, whatever the tricks we have up our sleeves, we all share the same goals: spreading fun and bringing new players to the fold. That’s why I keep volunteering for these events. That’s why I love the game.
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G N I Y A L P E M A G G N O L E H T o hours tw k in th y a m You opoly with playing Mon er Sunday the family aft jor time lunch is a ma t, but the committmen e barely truth is, you’v surface scratched the X BY MICHAEL FO
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henever you sit down to a new game, whatever the type, you’re making an investment. With videogames you’re looking at the hours you spend in front of the screen, working your way through fantastic adventures or one-shotting enemies with a sniper rifle across a distant planetscape. Some may take a considerable time to complete. Think about your average RPG, many of which boast forty or more hours of gameplay on the box as a major selling point. Some, like World of Warcraft, are essentially open-ended and may never be finished; there’s always an instance that can be fired up, after all. Now, think about the kind of games you play when sat around a table. For many people who have a limited experience of such things, they may recall a couple of hours playing Cluedo or Monopoly as children. Surely noone would want to subject themselves to anything more than that? In reality, gamers are a hardy bunch. A couple of hours spent on a single game is often the norm. Many can last longer; three, four hours on a game like Age of Steam is nothing... but then you begin to look a little deeper. You can dig down a bit further and discover that to some gamers, four or more hours
spent on a single game is a drop in the bucket. There are titles out there where you can spend that long (and more) on a single turn. Length doesn’t necessarily equate to complexity, though. If you look back into history, there’s plenty of evidence of Victorian gents playing chess matches by post that could potentially take weeks or months to complete. Nowadays, with our modern technology, it’s easy enough to reach checkmate in the space of a few minutes by using an app on your chosen smartphone, but there remains a hardcore out there who draw from the past and still love to take on opponents in far away places in a relatively old fashioned (albeit still speedier than the old days) manner. It’s called PBEM, or play by email, and it’s unlike anything you’ve played before. MAIL SHOTS Originally released back in 1959, Diplomacy is often labelled as the game that destroys friendships
THERE’S PLENTY OF EVIDENCE OF VICTORIAN GENTS PLAYING CHESS MATCHES BY POST THAT COULD POTENTIALLY TAKE WEEKS OR MONTHS TO COMPLETE
One Night In Arkham
Arkham Horror is on the light end of the ‘Long Game’ spectrum, but throw in a few of the many expansions and you’ve got something that will easily eat a sizeable chunk out of your day. We huddled together around the table, ready to save the world. Four of us came together with the base set and Dunwich Horror combo to take down a
mythical beast which has only one aim: to devour the planet. Not everyone will survive, but we’re ready for war. 4pm Set-up begins. Lesson One: I should really invest in some ‘Amazing Tape’ to keep all these cards together because they are currently everywhere. Both boxes hold a lot of cards
and they all need sorting and shuffling, so we split into pairs. Team Cards separate the many stacks, Team Bits organise the hundreds of tokens... and soon we have our arena. An additional board (from the Dunwich Horror set) is placed at the top of table, adding new locations for our characters to visit but also bringing in a potential pain in the backside: the ‘Horror’ itself.
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It’s a secondary boss that will invariably come out at the worst possible time. 4.10pm It’s been a while since our little gang played Arkham Horror last, so a quick reminder of what we need to do is in order. Your characters travel around the town of Arkham, beating monsters up and visiting places
that will hopefully bestow Elder Sign tokens upon you. You need these to close down interdimensional gates that spawn your enemies. Close down a set amount and we win. Too many open gates appear at the same time and the ‘Great Old One’ wakes from its slumber and it’s time for an all-or-nothing final battle. We’re hoping that won’t happen. It’s a bad thing.
4.20pm Finally, we’re good to go. We have our characters. Sanity and health tokens are dispensed and starting items are collected. Jim Culver, Doctor Walters, Amanda Sharpe and Wilson Richards have teamed up to take on Azathoth and we’ve got a decent array of spells and items that should give us a good start against him... assuming Azathoth is male, of course. It’s
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thanks to the making and breaking of deals, endless backstabbing and destroyed promises. It’s war in its purest form, with European powers at the beginning of the twentieth century battling for supremacy, and is certainly not a game to play if you’re one to bear grudges once everything goes back in the box. While there is a wide range of games that people try to adapt into a PBEM format, amongst aficionados Diplomacy is the only real choice. Already a game that can take up a whole weekend in real life, the digital version can take weeks to work your way through a single play. Playing an online or PBEM version of the game adds in a whole new strategic layer – who do you know to trust when the only thing you can see are the written words before you? Robert, a Diplomacy player who refused to give his surname for fear of giving away his secrets, insists that a PBEM game is a whole new challenge. “It’s all about nuances, about reading between the lines and working out what the other players are really saying. When a decision you made days or weeks before turns out to have been totally right, you just don’t know how good it feels. Of course, there’s a flipside: if you’ve developed an alliance with someone else who then turns around
and stabs you in the back you just feel like a sucker – but you can’t let that affect you next time around. There’s no room for metagaming.” PBEM groups come together through one of the many sites that organise such games. Countries are handed out and the emails fly. “You’ll often find that one player takes the lead when it comes to organisation, sorting out turns and such things,” says Robert, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean they can be trusted.” Tracking the various plays can be done using online apps and sites but many gamers apparently enjoy a rather more
old fashioned method. “Yes, I have a board set up. It makes life easier. When everything’s laid out before you it’s relatively simple to see what’s happening. Of course, you get the majority of your information from your discussions with other players, but spotting someone else’s sneaky tactics while they’re essentially lying to your inbox is very satisfying.” When asked about the appeal of PBEM, Robert has a few ideas. “It’s a whole different type of game. If you’re looking for something that you’re comfortable with but also brings new
kind of hard to tell, but what we do know is that with Azathoth there’s no final battle – it’s just game over. This is going to be all or nothing. We’ll need to keep the number of open gates under control. The first cards are turned over, monsters appear and it’s time to save the planet.
going well with a couple of us ‘cursed’ (making dice rolls harder) and open gates all over the place with marauding monsters everywhere. We’ve only played a couple of turns and have barely made a dent. This could be a pretty quick game... comparatively.
5.10pm An hour in and things are not
5.35pm Things are turning vaguely in
our favour despite there still being more monsters than humans roaming the streets of Arkham. A couple of players have roamed further afield onto the mean streets of Dunwich which probably wasn’t the best idea... the Horror has awoken once already and is ready for a second bite at the adventurers. Meanwhile Azathoth is half-way towards waking.
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challenges, it’s an ideal arena. You have the bonus that you don’t have to concentrate on it in one solid block, you’ve got time to consider your actions. It’s also a great diversion. When a new mail drops into your inbox and you get to see if your plans are working or not... it’s always a new experience, no matter how long the game runs for.” Of course, ‘long’ is a subjective thing. Spending half an hour on something you don’t enjoy could feel like time itself is slowing down but there are plenty of games out there that will make even the most hardened player take a step back in a combination of fear and wonder. It takes a special breed to take on these monsters; people with a combination of stoic patience and utter passion for the game that sits before them. Silent War, Advanced Civilisation, Diplomacy... they all inspire a mix of awe and dread that can only serve to enhance the experience, but if you want to go all the way to the top there’s only one game to seek out: The Campaign for North Africa.
6.00pm A visit to Arkham’s scenic woods has left Doctor Walters in hospital with a broken leg. We’re pretty sure things won’t end well for him, yet he insists on heading through a gate to ‘Celeano’. He makes it all the way though, somehow manages to close the portal... then gets his face eaten off by a rampant Mi-go. The Doctor is our first casualty
CAMPAIGN MODE The vast majority of gaming timesinks fall under the banner of wargames. This is no surprise. They often have an incredible level of detail and require intricate planning. Campaign for North Africa, however, takes everything involved in
WHEN A NEW MAIL DROPS INTO YOUR INBOX AND YOU GET TO SEE IF YOUR PLANS ARE WORKING OR NOT... IT’S ALWAYS A NEW EXPERIENCE, NO MATTER HOW LONG THE GAME RUNS FOR
but definitely won’t be the last. Thankfully losing a character isn’t a game ender. Doctor Walters is given a customary send-off, saluted with a cup of tea, chucked back in the box and replaced by Ashcan Pete, a drifter who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. 7.00pm Three hours in and we’re still
warfare into consideration. Literally everything. You certainly have to consider tactics, troop movements and all the usual things... but have you ever heard of a game where you need to be concerned about having the proper elements available for your soldiers to prepare their food? In CNA there are rules for just that – Italian troops need clean water to boil their pasta in and you need to make sure they have it. You’re looking at a game that has an expected playing time of around one thousand hours and requires two squads of five people to
only three gates down. As pizza arrives we take a breather and summarise our situation. Luck hasn’t been on our side, with mythos cards (which come out every turn) really kicking us while we’re down, though some useful meetings with the clergy have cleared up our curses. Amanda’s even managed to be blessed. It doesn’t help much when we’re barred from closing
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get the full experience – it’s truly the definition of a long game. What kind of mind comes up with such a creation? Look into the history of Richard Berg and you’ll find a man who has a CV boasting everything from singer with a rock and roll band to defence attorney, soldier to writer and, of course, game designer. He’s a man capable of taking the smallest aspect of reality and incorporating it into a game that people actually enjoy playing, but what’s more important to consider is the type of gamer who can play something like CNA. Someone like Graham Bull. He not only owns a copy, he’s played it – in full – numerous times. “It’s a true campaign,” says Bull. “An actual battle between armies. The individual players each have their respective roles and place in the command structure. You need to work together like you would in the real thing, keep an eye on your area of expertise and hope everyone else on your side is doing the same.” I ask if that’s what appeals, the teamwork? He responds that it’s only part of lure of CNA. “In all honesty, yes, there’s a great deal of satisfaction knowing that your team is functioning well together, but there’s also the fact that you’re taking on this huge game. There’s a massive amount of logistics
that need to be managed, units to keep track of, supplies to send out... and not many people have managed to work their way through the whole campaign. It’s almost a badge of honour to have completed it.” What about other games? Does he play anything else? “Not much else, really. I don’t really enjoy many games, they just don’t offer the complexity I want from my play experience.” Bull and his friends, currently in the middle of their eighth playthrough, will reset their positions, reallocate team-mates and begin the whole thing all over again for a ninth time when they’re done. He insists that it’s worth it: “It really is different every time. Every campaign is a whole new story. It’s the perfect game.” YOUR TURN So, what do you do if you want to try out something epic yourself? You’ll need some like-minded friends who are willing to dedicate some time, but you don’t need to fling yourself straight into the arms of something like Twilight Imperium III. Games such
YOU NEED TO WORK TOGETHER LIKE YOU WOULD IN THE REAL THING, KEEP AN EYE ON YOUR AREA OF EXPERTISE AND HOPE EVERYONE ELSE ON YOUR SIDE IS DOING THE SAME
gates and slowly moving further up the terror track. We’re running low on items (though we’ve got plenty of whisky – good for steeling the nerves and restoring Sanity!) but the team isn’t beaten yet. 7.30pm A second colleague falls after some awful dice rolls. Despite spending clue tokens to trigger
much-needed rerolls, Amanda Sharpe is no more, becoming a Dark Young’s dinner moments after arriving in Dunwich. Cue her replacement, everyone’s favourite nun – Sister Mary! Surely her holy ways will help us in our quest to whup the Great Old One?
to be closed to win us the game, we just can’t catch a break! The same locations keep popping up meaning that the gates currently on the board are cut off by monsters. Unfortunately, so is the hospital and everyone’s low on health – this may end up being a case of just going for it...
8.15pm With only a single gate needing
8.55pm Go for it we do! A final all-out
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as Arkham Horror are a great way of easing yourself into longer games – it’s substantial but not entirely terrifying and should be over in three or four hours if you’re just using the the base set. If you’re all on your own, perhaps something along the lines of Silent War is more suited to your needs. Yes, it’s another wargame, this time based around submarine conflict, but there’s one major difference – it’s designed to be played solo. While a quick browse through the rules reveal that you can play anything from a quick ten-minute sub patrol to ten or more hours spent on a section of a campaign, it’s a potentially long game that can be taken to whatever level you please. One gamer is even taking it to the extreme by attempting to re-enact the entire Second World War (search for A Long and Silent War on Google – it’s an excellent read). There really is something about settling in and getting a big game under your belt. It’s something that all gamers should try at least once and can be an experience that will often lead to trying out even longer efforts. They’re nothing to be scared of, so why not give them a go? That investment of time could pay off with a brand new passion for something that only the brave few will ever dare to tackle.
push sees the group coming together around the Silver Twilight Lodge, our only barrier between victory and defeat. Culver heads in first, sneaking past the bad guys, making it through the gate and warping to Lost Carcosa. A new mythos card is flipped and monsters are moved, a couple of flyers swooping in for another attack, and we desperately fight for our
lives. In our weakened state it’s all we can do to stand up and eventually Richards succumbs. A gate spawns on the General Store, a final Doom Token is added to Azathoth’s card, the game ends and the earth begins to rumble beneath our feet. After nearly five hours, we’ve managed to lose the game – though we did get quite close.
Despite that, it was a valiant effort and no one leaves the table disappointed. It’s not about winning when you’re taking on a long game – it’s the playing experience. If we can get this involved and excited about something that lasted just this long, imagine how deeply you can fall into a world like Campaign for North Africa or Silent War.
PC version coming June 15th
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Independent game developers are enjoying the endless possibilities (and failures) that procedurally-generated content presents BY PAUL DEAN
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ndependent game developers are embracing randomness. They’re shrugging their shoulders, throwing their hands up and admitting their games have a life of their own. They don’t know what these games are going to do and, most of all, they don’t mind one bit. Sinister as it may sound, they’ve handed control over to the machines, but it really isn’t so bad. It works a little bit like this: Imagine you’re sitting down to play a game of solitaire, any of the many variations that exist. You shuffle the deck and deal yourself a tableau of cards. The arrangement is random and, because of this, all kinds of things might happen in your game. It might be an easy one or a difficult one, perhaps even impossible. You laid the cards out according to predetermined rules, a particular procedure that defines the limits of the game, but otherwise their combination is unique and you play the game because you don’t know what’s coming next. Every time you shuffle and lay out the cards, your game will be different and this appeals to you. Now, imagine you’re meticulously machine-coding a space simulator that you might call, say, Elite. The
limits of your early ‘80s hardware means you can’t store all the data you want to include on your star systems, planets and people, so instead you plump for another option. You instead tell your game how it can randomly generate its own data. You give it a procedure to follow that will allow it to build its own planets and people, on the fly, in new combinations every time it is played. You’ve taught the game how to procedurally-generate its content, how to endlessly recombine its elements, and you hope this appeals to its players. It’s not so far removed from teaching it how to reshuffle a deck of cards. Elite was far from the first game to do this. The infamous dungeoncrawler Rogue, for example, reshaped its underground labyrinths time and again, and did its successor NetHack. It was something of a trick of the times and the constraints imposed by fledgling computer technology actually ended up creating endless possibilities for gamers, as early developers would code instructions for procedurally-generating any and all kinds of content. But the technique began to fall out of favour as computers increased in power
and developers began to realise the complex worlds that their predecessors could only dream of. The detailed, scripted and finelycrafted environments of games from Doom to Bioshock to Mass Effect were all deliberate affairs, built by hand for a particular purpose or to offer a specific challenge, often by large teams who would labour over everything from the layout to the lighting. There were far fewer rolls of the dice, little was left to chance. Procedurally-generated content continued to lurk in the shadows, appearing from time to time. It created random maps in Civilization, governed traffic flows in the Grand Theft Auto games, built the dungeons of Diablo and shaped the difficult, arbitrary and randomly-created racetracks of F-Zero X’s highest levels, but in an era of ever more scripted games it was increasingly sidelined. OUTSOURCING CONTENT Now, however, procedural generation is seeing a resurgence in the indie games scene, among a community who, unlike the programmers who have inspired them, are constrained not by their hardware, but instead by team sizes and money. “Content is bad,” declared Introversion Software in a GameCareerGuide development feature, because “the costs of creating game content, in terms of both time and money, are increasing at a tremendous rate.” Developing a reliable method of procedural-content generation would leave much more time to focus on other elements of the game, such as its engine and core mechanics. Many indie developers had the same idea. Why design and sculpt all your levels, missions or challenges when you can get your game to do the work for you? “I think procedurally-generated content’s firmly back in fashion,” says Ian Hardingham of Mode 7
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Games, the team behind Frozen Synapse, “It cuts down on the number of people you need to make a game. It’s one of the greatest things computers can give us in games: Our own private designer sitting in our computer ready to give us new content whenever we want.” Frozen Synapse procedurally-generates its player-versus-player arenas. When it shuffles its deck, it deals out different combinations of buildings and obstacles, meaning players will battle across many different combat arenas. The benefits are twofold, because not only has nobody had to spend time pre-building these countless arenas, but it also prevents players anticipating or trying to exploit arenas they’ve played in before. “Procedural generation can be a lifesaver for small teams that may not have the resources to hire huge numbers because the algorithms do all the heavy lifting,” agrees Danny Day of QCF Design, developing the bite-sized Rogue-like Desktop Dungeons. “The other big benefit to procedurally generating content is that, provided you do it right, you have an almost unending fountain of stuff for players to get into. Yes, a meticulously designed map or environment is often breathtaking, but it will never be able to consistently stun or amaze veteran players the same way that procedural content can. Building a really great generation system is tricky too, but for many devs it’s an easier problem to solve than finding, paying and communicating what the game needs.” Of course, ‘doing it right’ very much becomes a priority. The quality of your private designer and the work it produces is going to depend entirely on how much time you’ve invested in instructing it how and what to generate. “If your game predominantly uses procedural generation,” says Hardingham, “then designing and iterating on the generation system is
going to be a very large proportion of your work. You’re asking the computer to create fun levels for your game. That means that first you must know how to make fun levels for your game.” This process will only become more complicated as you add more elements to the game and try to define how each interacts with the others... or instead discover, by trial and error, how they interact when thrown together in so many inevitable and unexpected random combinations.
PROCEDURAL GENERATION CAN BE A LIFESAVER FOR SMALL TEAMS THAT MAY NOT HAVE THE RESOURCES TO HIRE HUGE NUMBERS
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MAKE IT WORK, MAKE IT PAY “I think the key is to make sure that everything interacts with everything else correctly at a fundamental level,” says Derek Yu, creator of Spelunky, a platform game that procedurally-generates all of its levels on the fly. Like many designers who built systems of procedural-generation, he describes an iterative process where simple elements – whether rooms, objects or anything else – are gradually added and carefully, clearly defined. “Spelunky always worked pretty well because I used a simple scheme for generating stages that was easy to refine and build upon. I guess there’s always the risk that you’ll generate a boring or broken level, but you can mitigate that problem by adding more human-designed elements to the algorithms.” This means absolutely everything must be rigorously tested, examining new combinations again and again. Imagine adding entirely new cards to that deck you’re shuffling, or experimenting with the layout or hand size of a card game, that’s exactly what you do as you add more elements. The more a game contains, the more
difficult it becomes to anticipate how they’ll behave when combined, or even how they might combine. “Any procedural generation system, once you get it humming along, is going to throw out so many situations that you simply didn’t foresee,” is Danny Day’s warning on this. “All the elements of your game that have to interact with what’s been generated need to be incredibly robust and well constructed.” Unexpected outcomes might be as technically baffling as crashes or combinations of elements that cause the AI to malfunction, or could be content that is illogical, such as mazes without exits. On the other hand, they may be as simple as an unforeseen arrangement of content – the notorious story of Elite’s development was its random creation of a solar system named ‘Arse’ springs to mind. “If you make sure that the basic elements of your design interact with one another effectively, it will always make things easier for you to correct down the road,” reassures Yu. “This is a good rule to follow in general when developing games, but it’s especially true of games with
randomly-generated levels, where you can’t always be sure what might come together.” Naturally, the pay-off for all this is a process that can keep on producing whatever it is that you need and this doesn’t just have to be content created when the game is played, it can also be used as a shortcut tool for the developer. Introversion used procedural generation to create landscapes for its games and, before its ambitious Subversion was canned, was working on a system that would generate all the game’s cities so they wouldn’t need to be laboriously built by hand. From an economics point of view, procedural generation requires a far greater initial investment from a developer, with its endless retesting and reconfiguring, but it can pay dividends in the long run. Another reason, says Day, that it appeals more to indie developers: “You put in hours up front and see what sorts of emergence you get that then become gameplay hooks and points of inspiration. Can you imagine a publisher being okay with the idea of spending millions messing around to see what sticks? That gels a lot better with the indie mindset than the big studio need for design up front. You have to be agile to work with emergence in any complex system. Indies can afford to keep experimenting until they hit on something that really works, but big studios have deadlines and burn rates and headaches that get in the way of that constant process of tinkering and refinement.” IT’S NOT FAIR! Nevertheless, no matter how rigorously you test your process and how many eventualities you try to prepare for, the nature of any procedurally-generated game will mean it will still surprise its creators
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by creating extraordinary outcomes. Most importantly, it will rarely, if ever, be fair. When playing any of the procedurally-generated games mentioned here, or others such as The Binding of Isaac, Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress, it’s easy to see how the introduction of randomness greatly affects how challenging each new playthrough is. A new game of Spelunky can see the player starting next to a helpful power-up or a pit full of snakes, while Minecraft is ambivalent about spawning players in safe or dangerous locations, yet this is no different to dealing yourself a weak hand in solitaire or poker. In fact, argues Hardingham, this is the whole point of randomly generating starting conditions, to see what people do next and how they handle what they’re presented with. “Most games become pretty emergent pretty quickly,” he says. “A real-life sport like tennis, for instance, has far more in common with proceduralgeneration games than ‘designed’ games. I’d also add, parenthetically, that people need to get over their obsession with games being fair. In more general terms I think games are about failure in a way people often don’t realise. You shouldn’t be trying to remove failure from games, you should be trying to embrace it and make failing and re-trying as much fun as possible.” Much of the value in any game is found in how willing a player is to give it another go, while the very appeal in of games that randomly generate their content is that the next go will be very different to the last, something that encourages players to keep playing. “There’s a certain amount of forgiveness allowed for procedurallygenerated levels,” says Yu. “Players understand that they’re exchanging hand-crafted precision for a fresh experience each time they play.”
And that’s the crux of the concept. By giving players new, randomlyforged content every time they play, developers are presenting them with choices, choices that they can accept or reject. At the push of a button, Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress can simply build a new world, something that may be much more to a player’s taste than the previous one, even if they cannot precisely shape the result. What these games offer, and what their players seek, are possibilities.
CAN YOU IMAGINE A PUBLISHER BEING OKAY WITH THE IDEA OF SPENDING MILLIONS MESSING AROUND TO SEE WHAT STICKS?
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THE FINANCIAL FRONTIER As digital distribution lowers the distance between game makers and their audience, a growing number of developers are tearing free of the shackles that link them to big publishers and finding new ways to fund and release their games... BY JOE MARTIN
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im Schafer and Ron Gilbert have changed the way the entire industry looks at adventure games. Again. It has become something of a habit for the pair, who since 1990 have been creating hilarious games in an industry typified by chest-beating soldiers and sorceresses in nipple armour. The Secret of Monkey Island, Grim Fandango – these are Schafer and Gilbert’s love letters to gamers sick of Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. This is the first time the pair decided to use their adventure games to challenge the business of making games, however. It all started earlier this year, when the duo decided to extend their legacy as the masters of the point-and-click. Fans had been begging for a new adventure game for years and the pair, reunited under Schafer’s Double Fine Studios after time spent working apart, were finally ready to satisfy demand. The only problem was that
nobody would give them any money; publishers and critics had held the adventure genre as dead for years now, so nobody would offer up the cash the team needed to get started. Here, the project stayed stuck for twelve months – fallen at the first hurdle until Double Fine noticed the increasing ambition of crowd-funded projects. Kickstarter, a site where members of the public contribute money to new ventures in exchange for eventual rewards, started to seem like a viable option. Schafer and Gilbert wondered about an adventure game funded by the people who would play it, rather than the people who would sell it. Double Fine Adventure was born. Unveiled publicly on February 8th, Double Fine Adventure was aiming to raise US$400,000 in one month – a small budget even for a small, old-school adventure game, and yet still one which Double Fine was sceptical it could achieve. As the Kickstarter went live, the staff
of Double Fine stayed glued to their screens, as uncertain of what would happen as they were about what they should expect. Eight hours later, Tim Schafer tweeted to his thousands of followers that the project had already raised the full amount. He said he was about to cry with happiness, but it was doubtful anyone was listening – everyone who might be interested was too busy pledging yet more money. It took Double Fine Studios less than 24 hours to raise $1 million. Within two weeks the company would double that and still have a fortnight to spare before the clock ran out. “It’s been an amazing experience,” said Greg Rice, producer for Double Fine Adventure and the man who used to represent Double Fine Studios in its dealings with publishers. “I grew up playing Tim and Ron’s adventure games, just like our 70,000 backers. I’m so excited to be a part of this adventure.”
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What shape that adventure might take, however, is still unknown. We spoke to Rice in the final days of the Kickstarter campaign and he admitted that, even a month into funding, the company still had no plans for what type of game it might be. It could be another pirate comedy or it could be a sci-fi murder mystery; nobody at Double Fine knew what was going on – and that was deliberate. “We were waiting for the Kickstarter to finish, so we could get the cameras in and get all our backers on board,” said Rice, referring to Double Fine’s plans to publish a documentary on the project and allow fans to shape development via an exclusive forum. Filming would be conducted by 2 Player Productions who had been one of the inspirations for the project after previously using Kickstarter to finance a documentary about Minecraft. Granted, a serialised documentary about the development of an old-school adventure game might not sound like
Going Slightly Mad
everyone’s idea of fun, but Rice sees the documentary as playing a vital role in the development of the game. There’s a lot of pressure on Double Fine to both define what crowd-funding can bring to professional-level games development, and to live up to the promises laid by Schafer and Gilbert’s involvement. By having a film crew in every meeting Double Fine will become as transparent as possible, allowing fans to shape not
Kickstarter isn’t the only route for companies looking to involve their fans in the design and funding of games. Need for Speed: SHIFT developer Slightly Mad Studios has launched a similar project of its own, dubbed Project: Cars. Using a platform Slightly Mad calls WMD (World of Mass Development), players subscribe to the game even before the initial Alpha version is finished, slotting into tiers which dictate their involvement with the project. At the lowest echelons players can read minutes from developer meetings and play monthly builds of the game, while more senior investors can actually attend meetings, appear in the finished game and reap a cut of the revenue when the product goes on sale. While Slightly Mad Producer Suzy Wallace says the freedom from conventional publishers is certainly a “refreshing change”, the biggest benefit to the developer is the QA resource now at its disposal. “Games are normally played by focus groups before release, but at that point the feedback is often given too late to make major design changes – you can only make tweaks,” says Wallace. “Our development method means we have a huge focus group playing the game daily, right from the beginning. We get feedback on all our decisions, but early enough to do something with it.” Getting used to so many dissenting voices hasn’t been easy for Slightly Mad, however, and a number of moderators had to be drafted in to manage the community. Some fans have given unrealistic proposals or misunderstood the development structure too, creating very public problems. At the same time though, some investors have proved invaluable to the game. Wallace points to one group who investigated an abandoned race track, taking video footage and interviewing experts so that Slightly Mad was able to create the location in-game. Car blueprints and reference material is often submitted to the team too, proving that internet communities can make worthwhile contributions after all. “There’s been a shift in games development,” surmises Wallace. “We’ve gone from big, console-based teams to smaller studios and more social platforms that fit better with new funding methods. It’s not going to kill the big publishers – and there will be some duds – but we’re all for opening the floodgates.”
just the game but also the method by which it develops. Double Fine’s Kickstarter campaign isn’t an attempt to revolutionise game development, however. Instead, it’s part of the studio’s continuing pursuit of financial independence; a goal which has seen it self-publish its latest games on PC via Steam. The benefits to the studio are clear, with self-publishing letting the team set its own deadlines
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and manage its projects in a way consistent with their original vision. “It’s always better to be financially independent,” says Rice. “It lets you have full control over your games and their intellectual properties, [while] also meaning you don’t have to split revenues with an external publisher.” Schafer has always been a figure of frustration in the games industry for this very reason; his idolisation by fans contrasting with his bad luck when dealing with publishers. Psychonauts, for example, is often blamed for the financial troubles experienced by publisher Majesco, while Brütal Legend swapped publishers three times and created a public disagreement with Activision boss Bobby Kotick in the process. Gamers have become desperate to see what Double Fine can achieve without publisher-imposed constraints. Yet, it’s not only gamers who are watching Double Fine to see what its Kickstarter campaign can produce;
the rest of the industry is paying close attention too. Developers such as Fallout: New Vegas creators Obsidian Entertainment have already embarked on their own Kickstarter projects, for example, as has Brian Fargo’s inXile. Not everyone is so eager to jump on the crowd-funding bandwagon, however. “Tim succeeded because he’s Tim,” warns Dear Esther designer Dan Pinchbeck – but it appears there are those who will take risks to break the cycle of publisher dependence. Big companies such as Activision bring more to game development than just funds, of course. Even Rice is assured that there will always be a place for publishers when it comes to triple-A games – but for the smaller developers who are inherently more flexible and reactive than larger outfits, the publishing deals of old are starting to look less and less appealing in the wake of big-name independent successes. And Double Fine isn’t the only one looking for alternatives.
THE FUNDAMENTALS “The problem with the business terms offered to even competent developers is that they are basically not viable,” says Jonathan Blow, the independent developer behind 2008’s Braid. “The terms are designed to keep developers subservient... keep them dependent on publishers.” Blow feels that breaking free of that control to become independent is almost totally dependent on luck. “It’s not in the long-term interest of anyone – publishers end up with starving developers who are rushing to finish work, meaning they have to offer worse products.” Determined to find a solution to what he perceived as a serious problem affecting both creativity and success within the industry, Blow talked to other indie developers who’d found mainstream success. Before long he’d teamed up with studios such as 2D Boy (World of Goo) and Capy (Sword & Sworcery) to create an investment fund exclusively for small game developers. The aim, says Blow, is to help these companies reach independence by offering terms more fair than those laid down by large publishers – budgets are flexible and repayments both proportional and scalable. The developers get the cash they need, as well as guiding advice from Blow and co. without having to break themselves to hit unrealistic milestones. As an angel investment group, Indie Fund is very careful in selecting who it works with though, partly because of the creative vision behind the fund and partly because it only invests in teams it believes won’t need to ask for more money in the future. Projects need to be unique and immediately compelling based on submitted prototypes – otherwise they’ll never recoup costs, let alone bestow financial independence. “Finding projects to work on is very difficult,” admits Blow, who’s regular speech rhythm stumbles as he tries to define what he wants
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to see in games. Of more than 350 titles submitted to Indie Fund, only five have been given backing so far. “One of the most important criteria is what we call ‘Specialness’ – that is projects which do something different or which contribute to ongoing debates about games.” It was that Specialness criteria which led Indie Fund to invest in its latest release; Dear Esther, a remake of a 2008 Half-Life mod by Dan Pinchbeck and ex-DICE artist Rob Briscoe. Casting players as an unnamed man who explores an uninhabited island, unable to interact with the world other than through brooding monologues, Dear Esther was a project no conventional publisher was ever likely to touch. Where a conglomerate would have seen risk however, Blow saw a game he describes as “so creatively worthwhile [we] would have funded it even if it lost all the money.” Again though, that didn’t happen. Dear Esther sold 16,000 copies and
recouped all costs in less than six hours and has since gone on to sell over 50,000 as a full release on Steam. Dan Pinchbeck’s studio, TheChineseRoom, has since stayed true to the ideals of the Indie Fund too, starting work on new projects, rather than returning for more investment. “Working with Indie Fund was a nobrainer for us,” says Pinchbeck, who remains certain the large publishers would have shown him the door with alarming speed if he’d approached them. He goes on to praise every aspect of working with the Fund over the course of our conversation, especially the transparency with which the group offer guidance and practical advice to the teams it backs. “If you’re under a normal publisher, it’s hard to have a similarly frank, equal dialogue with your account manager – he just has an entirely different agenda to you,” says Pinchbeck while Blow chuckles knowingly in agreement.
That difference in motivation is something which the pair believe may eventually create problems for studios who attempt to follow Double Fine down the Kickstarter rabbit hole. After all, it’s easy to criticise massive, faceless companies for their approach, but gamers aren’t exactly without bias either. Enthusiast audiences often hold so much entitlement that they lash-out at developers as it is – that’s likely to only get worse when they’ve invested in the project and are told they can guide development. Or, to put it another way: what if gamers decide they want something different than what Double Fine is prepared to offer? To this end, while Indie Fund still recommends upcoming developers explore all the opportunities available to them, Blow also warns there’s no such thing as free money. The extra workload piled onto projects by the creation and distribution of investor incentives (not to mention a serialised documentary!) can easily disrupt development or
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jeopardise the creative vision. All games, whether the work of a lone artist or a 300-man team, are prone to delays – and fans may be less likely to accept excuses than publishing professionals who understand the process. “You need to be careful with these radical models,” echoes Pinchbeck. “Sure, we’re seeing success stories right now, but there are also horror stories in the pipeline.” The question more relevant to the Indie Fund isn’t how viable crowdfunding is however, but whether publishers will ever offer business terms good enough that developers don’t feel driven to such extremes. Can a happy medium be found for developer and publisher relations? Blow is uncertain, often sharing data with and trying to inspire change via his industry contacts, but saying he has no faith that such change will ever come about. To him, publishers are the oil tankers of the industry – too large to turn
around easily and match the tides which surround them. Can the successes of Double Fine Adventure and Dear Esther inspire the captains of the industry to change their course in time? Blow and Pinchbeck hope so, as these stories directly challenge the old notion that publishers are the surest route to success by offering the first legitimate alternatives. Previously, publisher-backed games could only really be compared to amateurlevel productions or to projects which never
THE QUESTION MORE RELEVANT TO THE INDIE FUND ISN’T HOW VIABLE CROWD-FUNDING IS HOWEVER, BUT WHETHER PUBLISHERS WILL EVER OFFER BUSINESS TERMS GOOD ENOUGH THAT DEVELOPERS DON’T FEEL DRIVEN TO SUCH EXTREMES
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got off the ground, but thanks to Indie Fund that’s no longer the case. We now have new terms which can be contrasted against publisher contracts – and which haven’t produced a failure yet. “What if the publisher model which we all previously thought was okay, actually isn’t?” asks Blow, his rhythm picking up excitedly as he presents a new line of reasoning. “What if it doesn’t work well at all and we just didn’t know because we had nothing to compare it to before?” MY IDEA OF FUND There are those who don’t see anything more unusual than a fluke occurrence in the success of these titles, however – and to whom Blow’s assessment of the publisher/developer relationship rings false. A good publisher can bring much more to the table – and more fairly – than developers give credit for, say these parties. Part of the problem is that ‘publisher’ is by nature a vague and
Franchise inXile
nebulous term. If a company agrees to publish a game, that may mean it is just distributing it, marketing it or throwing money at it – there’s no clear definition. The best publishers will do more than just any one thing though; they’ll supply whatever is missing while trying not to detract from the creative vision of the project. So are developers subservient to publishers? It’s better to think that
As Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert are to adventure games, Brian Fargo is to RPGs. Thanks to the likes of Fallout, Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale, the founder of Interplay may now run a new studio – inXile Entertainment – but his past still casts a long shadow. Now, inspired by Double Fine’s example, he wants to cast it further by using Kickstarter to resurrect one of his oldest series – Wasteland, the top-down precursor to Fallout. “I’ve been trying to do a Wasteland sequel for twenty years, but there were legal issues,” says Fargo, who says the Fallout series was created in part as a reaction to that very problem. “EA was nice enough to work out a deal with me about ten years ago and I started to shop it around in earnest shortly after that, [but] we just got nowhere.” While it’s easy to see publishers buying in to the misconception that the adventure game is dead, it’s much more baffling to hear of Fargo’s pitch being rejected. RPGs haven’t just gone from strength to strength, but the titles which Fargo helped launch continue to be recognised for their commercial and critical successes. Saying ‘No’ to a Brian Fargo RPG is like saying ‘No’ to a Michael Bay action film. “The problem was most people at the publishers we spoke to had never even played an RPG,” says Fargo, who explains how difficult it then became to communicate the opportunity he was presenting. “We would get generic responses, or we’d be told the company already had an RPG in its line-up and that that covered the entire category for them.” To Fargo, Kickstarter represents a chance to break out of that sort of formulaic thinking and return to the creative vision he’s been carrying for the past two decades. The Wasteland sequel will defy modern expectations and be a top-down, open-world RPG that doesn’t hold your hand or present a black/white morality, he promises. Rather than getting entrenched in design by committee, Fargo will tap into fans directly by involving them just as Schafer and Gilbert are. Fargo may still only be painting his designs for Wasteland 2 in the broad strokes, but those strokes still spell a clear message – that publishers may soon regret not supporting developers properly. “If you had any idea how some publishers treat developers, you’d be shocked,” says Fargo, promising he can tell tales of disrespect from his own bitter experience. “The indie movement has started a power shift that I hope continues.”
the two are subservient to each other, implies Paradox Interactive’s Shams Jorjani – the producer who oversees incoming game pitches for Paradox. “We try to be a partner in any project we work on. We assess new games on more than just sales projections, but on criteria such as if we’re a good fit for the idea and how far apart our vision for the game is from that of the developer.”
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Faced with the hypothetical question of whether Paradox would back Double Fine Adventure even now, Jorjani says the company would still turn the project away for that very reason. There’s nothing which Double Fine needs which Paradox could realistically bring to the table, as it’s far more experienced with straight-faced strategies than witty adventures. Going it alone may pose risks for Double Fine, but Jorjani suggests it’s also the most sensible option for the studio. There is more flexibility working with publishers than Blow’s warnings imply too, says Jorjani, pointing to the recently launched Paradox Incubator program as an example. Here, new developers can come inside the company for six months to generate prototypes, with Paradox providing equipment, tutoring and office-space as required. After six months Paradox re-evaluates the project and will either publish the full game in earnest, or free the developer to take the game
elsewhere with some new references and work under their arms. From the outside, it seems like an ideal situation for new developers and, while Paradox is clearly hoping to get the drop on The Next Big Thing, the incubator also allows developers to test the water too. “We’re pretty transparent and so, yes, we want to recoup any investment, but we also try to be as fair as possible,” says Jorjani. “If the prototype isn’t a good fit after six months then there’s still a lot we can do to help these teams, whether guiding them to self-publish on Steam or forwarding them to another publisher.” Jorjani and Blow do agree on one thing though; that bureaucracy is more of a threat to large publishers than Kickstarter will ever be. If the recent economic difficulties have proved anything it’s that the greater the distance between those who have money and those who need it, the harder it is for those people to work
together. The largest publishers may have dozens of producers and consultants to throw at a project, but as the market continues to swell games’ need to stand out from the crowd more and more – ‘design by committee’ is a weakness, not a strength. “When I hear of a big publisher opening a new 2,000 man studio in Toronto, all I can think is how inflexible that sounds and how whatever trend that company is betting on had better pay off,” says Jorjani. Following the reasoning through presents an interesting conundrum. Namely; if bureaucracy is the problem which plagues developer/ publisher relationships, how will Double Fine Adventure fare in dealing with its 66,000+ investors, each of whom is promised a voice? Double Fine may have gained financial independence (and some free QA testers in the process), but it’s also dramatically increased the number of people who will be actively involved in making the game. Success has only compounded this problem. The extra funds Double Fine has generated haven’t been squandered; they’ve been ploughed back into development. What began as a digitalonly release for Mac and PC is now offering boxed copies to investors, full voice acting, multiple languages and iOS, Android and even Linux ports. This has not only drawn more backers to the project, but also pushed expectations higher. Bear in mind that while $2 million may sound a lot, in game budgeting terms it’s still very small. Can Double Fine avoid succumbing to the type of groupthink which plagues publishers while still giving fans what they want? We’ll have to await 2 Player Productions’ documentary and the final product to tell, but with so many eyes on the company it’s likely that even if everything goes to hell then others may be inspired to find their own solutions.
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THE
Social TOUCH
Redefining ‘party games’, developers are putting their players in the same room and seeing what happens BY PHILL CAMERON
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f you squint, it wouldn’t be so hard to imagine a bead of sweat trickling down the side of the faces of the two men. There’s so much concentration and focus held between their gaze that it wouldn’t be surprising. They move cautiously – almost gracefully – in a slow circle. No sudden moves and nothing aggressive. Not yet. One feints, his left hand moving forward in an attempt to put the other on the back foot. It almost works, but his opponent quickly recovers and makes a lunge of his own, only to be foiled by a quick parry. They retreat a step, and continue to circle one another, eyes locked, feet moving in step. There’s a soundtrack: Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto, that plays in slow motion. Each note is drawn out to a sinister degree, the kind of sinister this abstract knife fight needs. It’s not just a soundtrack, though. It’s also a signal, and a warning; something to keep the two on their toes.
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The Events
Babycastles
New York, Weeknights babycastles.com In a basement in Queens, four or five nights a week you can head down and enjoy whatever the flavour of the month is. ‘Games to Make You Cry’ or ‘Christian Video Games’ have been past inspirations, but whatever you find there is likely to be wholly different, and wholly unique.
Prince of Arcade
Montreal, Annual bit.ly/KhO31e Held after the Montreal International Games Summit, it acts as an unofficial after party to the event, more about the atmosphere than the games on display. But the games create that atmosphere as much as the music or the drinks, so it’s all good.
Dirty Rectangles
Ottowa, Monthly www.dirty-rectangles.com Slightly more formal, the Dirty Rectangles Show and Tell centres around guest speakers, while the games are played as they talk. There have even been ‘game jams’ taking place at the meetings, with games developed and played within two hours.
Wild Rumpus
London, Every few months thewildrumpus.co.uk While centred in London, Wild Rumpus roams around the UK, and even made it out to GDC in San Francisco this year. Live DJs, excellent games and lots of space to play and listen, it’s the closest to a club night as you can get while still playing videogames.
No More Sweden
Sweden, Annual www.nomoresweden.com A three-day gathering that bounces around Sweden pulling together developers from around the world, along with enthusiasts and the like, with a mixture of presentations and game jams, all geared at showing off just how versatile independent development is.
All of a sudden, the music speeds up, and so do the fencers, their movements matching the increased tempo. Desperate lunges and sudden feints become too fast to watch. One gets the upper hand, literally, fingers coming up underneath his opponent’s guard and knocking his grip. An explosion sounds. The LED on his Move controller goes dead. And, as far as the game engine powering Johann Sebastian Joust is concerned, so does he. Seven players are placed in an arena and given the task of jostling one another’s controllers, causing that explosion to sound and knocking them out of the game. That’s it. Which leaves a lot of space for interpretation. Standing in the bitter cold of an early February evening at London’s Wild Rumpus, I see one player take off his scarf and use it like a whip to slap another player’s controller.
Another adopts an unassuming pose, incongruous among the couched, paranoid attitudes of the other players, and just walks up behind a player and pushes their hand, eliminating them. One, particularly tall, just holds his controller high above his head, in a misguided attempt to keep it out of reach. Unfortunately accelerometers aren’t immune to height, and he’s quickly knocked, and knocked out. This is a videogame that resolutely defies that term, taking the video out of the equation, and keeping the electronic element to a bare minimum. It’s a game that’s about the people that play it, rather than what they’re playing. The ambiguity in the rules and the space for players to come up with their own is absolutely intentional, and part of the beauty of JSJ. It’s an analogue game in an increasingly digital world.
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SEVEN PLAYERS ARE PLACED IN AN ARENA AND GIVEN THE TASK OF JOSTLING ONE ANOTHER’S CONTROLLERS, CAUSING THAT EXPLOSION TO SOUND AND KNOCKING THEM OUT OF THE GAME
EVENT-BASED GAMING Johann Sebastian Joust has been developed by Douglas Wilson, a member of both game developer Die Gut Fabrik and the Copenhagen Game Collective, a Danish institute that’s produced more than its fair share of these odd, motion-controlled physical games. As Wilson states: “Indie games can be more than just ‘products’ distributed over the internet. J.S. Joust is more of an ‘event-based’ game. It foregrounds context, not just content. There’s a lot of fertile ground to be explored at the intersection between games and more experience-based creative traditions like performance art, new media art, live-action role-playing, etc.” Fertile as they are, these grounds are not virgin territory. Games like Buzz and Rock Band throw a bunch of players into the same room, feeding off the presence of each person to elevate the game beyond people hammering at bits of expensive plastic. They by no means plundered the soil, either technologically or conceptually, but they certainly got there a while back. These aren’t concepts that are new; they’re just new to videogames. There’s a level of irony there. Inspired by physical, social games like tennis or football to make Pong or, more recently, games like the FIFA or
The Games J.S. Joust
gutefabrik.com/joust.html Each player gets a Playstation Move controller. Get knocked too hard, and you’re out of the game. Jostle other players until you’re the last standing.
Hokra
www.ramirocorbetta.com Five squares. Two per team, and one that’s the ball. Hold the ball in one of your corners to score points. Block and intercept the other team.
Nidhogg
messhof.com/Nidhogg A chandelier swings above, and you duel. You must reach the right side of the screen, your opponent the left. Only thing in the way is each other.
Pole Riders
www.foddy.net/PoleRiders.html A pole is in your hands, and above is a ball on a washing line. You want that ball in your opponent’s goal. They want the same. Get vaulting.
Sixteen Tons
bit.ly/aePVFF Art game become installation piece. Put on a gas mask and headphones, and walk the haunted seabed, blind. You look ridiculous. And terrifying.
Madden series, digital representations of games that are about as physical as they get. We flew to one extreme, without considering a middle ground. The fact that JSJ uses Move controllers is indicative that console manufacturers, at least, are starting to head towards the centre of the two extremes with Move, Kinect and Wii all realising that your body isn’t just fingers and thumbs. It’s difficult not to feel like they’re hitting wide of the mark, though. They stick to ‘screen worship’, forcing the players to be staring at the displays rather than each other, and to interact with virtual representations of each other, rather than grabbing the physical person right there next to you. They’ve got as far as including your body, but they stop short of including the bodies around you in any meaningful way.
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No Quarter Given
Event organiser Frank Lantz explains the thinking behind the New York City gatherings How did you select developers to make the games for No Quarter? People we know who are doing interesting work, people we think would do something cool with the context, sometimes they’re NYU alums, often they are local NYC indie developers, sometimes they’re not. How successful has No Quarter been? From our perspective it’s been a great success. Mostly because the openings have been rowdy parties filled with charming people having a great time. Some of the games we’ve commissioned for No Quarter have gone on to win contests and be famous and awesome – Mark Essen’s Nidhogg, Ramiro Corbetta’s Hokra, Terry Cavanagh’s At A Distance, Robin Arnott’s Deep Sea. We’re happy that we can support talented designers doing interesting work, that’s what success looks like for us. The majority of these games is that they’re extremely audience friendly. Do you feel that’s an intentional consequence of how these games were developed, or just a happy coincidence? When you design a game for a public setting it forces you to think about how people get into your game, even before they pick up a controller. Making games that work in a gallery setting means considering the qualities of performance and spectatorship. As you also help to fund these games, how do you think that’s going to effect the future development of these new kind of social experiences? No Quarter is part of a larger movement of games emerging out of scenes – communities of designers and players creating games that don’t necessarily fit into standard commercial contexts. We are inspired by Kokoromi, the Copenhagen Game Collective, Babycastles... There’s crazy stuff like this happening all over the world and it’s just going to get better. The majority of the event games favour fun over being competitive, often being absolutely fine with making the players play the fool. Why do you think that, particularly, has happened? Oh, I don’t think that fun and competition are opposed. A lot of the best event games are intensely competitive and ridiculously fun at the same time. There’s a point at which a desperate desire to win at all costs meets a Dionysian frenzy in which you abandon your ego and allow yourself to be swept away by the chaos of pure play, we call that point ‘art’.
Videogames have their work cut out for them. For the past decade we’ve been moving away from having multiple players in the same room, with the advent of Xbox Live and the Playstation Network, that icon on the back of game boxes with the little figures gathered around a screen has become less and less common. With an internet connection, why would you want to surrender valuable screen space to other people when they can be in the comfort of their own living room with their own screen? Why invest in extra controllers, when you can get your friends to invest in their own console? Multiplayer has moved online in a big way, but it’s hard not to feel like something is being left behind. BREAKING THE GAME For me it was Super Smash Bros. I doubt that makes me unique, but that was the one that always came out the instant four of us entered a room with an N64 sitting under the television. But we wouldn’t play fair; we would barely play the actual game at all, so concerned were we with knocking one another’s controllers out of our hands, or obscuring the screen so you can get a cheap kill. Everyone did it, so it was fair. That’s what we told ourselves. People will break rules if they can, and they’ll break them in interesting ways if you let them. We’re always going to have that defiant streak, no matter how polished and perfected your linear shooter has become. Tell us to go forward and we’ll go left. Tell us not to shoot a dude and we’re going to try and shoot him. Just to see whether we can tear down your carefully laid out house of cards, figure out the structural weakness and break the game. JSJ presents us with an already broken game and suddenly there’s laughter and drama. It’s not alone, either, accompanied by half a dozen other games at just the one Wild
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Rumpus event. Taking over a bar in North London, huge projectors thrust Hokra – a four-player minimalist ball game – onto the walls. An entire corner is dedicated to Monkey See Monkey Mime, a game specifically engineered to make one person look like a complete idiot and then have three other people copy them. A laptop, dwarfed among all these others, demonstrates Pole Riders, the latest game from Bennet Foddy, he of QWOP and GIRP. It produces a lot of laughter. Wild Rumpus itself isn’t alone, either. It has equivalents all over the world, such as Babycastles in New York, or Prince of Arcade in Montreal. These events and these games go hand in hand, designed by independent developers to harness the social energy of the gathering, and above all else, be fun. It doesn’t really matter who wins, or even if you’re playing, because watching people do silly, stupid things is funny. Watching them do it while looking like they’re in the middle of a knife fight, or about to score a winning goal, makes it funny and exciting.
WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO SURRENDER VALUABLE SCREEN SPACE TO OTHER PEOPLE WHEN THEY CAN BE IN THE COMFORT OF THEIR OWN LIVING ROOM WITH THEIR OWN SCREEN? That’s what sets these games apart, and makes them their own thing, carving out a niche genre all for themselves, event by event. Even those that aren’t physical, like Nidhogg or At a Distance, by Messof and Terry Cavanagh respectively, manage to take advantage of that player proximity in ways that are both interesting and essential to the experience of playing those
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games. Nidhogg has you crowd around the same keyboard, your fingers cramped up against your opponent’s as you duel underneath a precariously swinging chandelier. At a Distance, meanwhile, necessitates communication away from the game, before you can even attempt to progress. You need to look away from the screen and at your partner’s, otherwise you’ll be forever trapped in its duo-tone world. More than that, it’s about the experience, however short or peripheral that is to you. Regardless of whether you’re the one holding the controller, it’s entertaining enough that you just get to watch people perform impromptu theatre in front of you in which none of the players realise they’re acting. As Wilson said, it foregrounds context.
WILD NIGHTS One of the first of these events is arguably the most prestigious; NYU Game Center’s No Quarter, that’s produced the likes of Nidhogg, At a Distance, or Hokra by Ramiro Corbetta (and it did actually produce them, paying for all the games to be developed). “We wanted to create an event that embraced the social, public and physical qualities of games,” explains Frank Lantz, Director of the NYU Game Center, “and at the same time encouraged experimentation and avant-garde exploration, that combined the spirit of the video arcade with the idea of the art gallery.” Which might make you think that the No Quarter event is a wholly different affair, with canapés and civilised, high-brow conversation about the
artistic merit of the games on display. In which case, you thought wrong. “The openings have been rowdy parties filled with charming people having a great time,” says Lantz. Rowdy is the right word. Back at Wild Rumpus, while I was watching Hokra, the cheers of the crowd almost drowned out the chiptunes blasting out of the speakers. That crowd was always lively, and slowly grew as the night went on, swelling
INSTEAD OF SOMETHING YOU JUST THROW ON TO WASTE A LITTLE TIME AT HOME (OR A RICH NARRATIVE TO LOSE YOURSELF IN), YOU GET TO PLAN AHEAD TO A NIGHT WHERE YOU GET TO ACT LIKE A FOOL IN FRONT OF A MIX OF STRANGERS AND FRIENDS
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depending on quite how exciting a match was being played. Every time that final whistle blew, there was a surge to talk to the players and to share in the highs and lows. More than anything else, that’s the impression you’re left with by each of these games. The mechanics are facilitating that shared experience, no matter whether you’re playing or watching. It’s something you’re going to talk about the next day, and something you’ll look forward to reexperiencing the next time an event rolls into your area. Each of the games starts to feel like a stadium where your favourite sport is played. Instead of something you just throw on to waste a little time at home (or a rich narrative to lose yourself in), you get to plan ahead to a night where you get to act like a fool in front of a mix of strangers and friends. And you get to watch other people do the same. It’s recreating that feeling of inviting your friends over to your house just so you have people to play Smash Bros or Halo with. You know it doesn’t matter whether the game is any good, or even if you play it properly, because you’re going to have some fun. Fun that can’t be transferred over an internet connection. You can’t ‘screen-watch’ over the net. These events are taking that notion and turning it into a party. “Freud has this idea of the ‘return of the repressed’ in which whatever psychic element has been excluded or neglected comes back with a vengeance,” exhorts Lantz. “For videogames, the human body and face-to-face interaction is that element. There’s something appealing about the dream of escaping into a pristine world made of logic and light, but there’s something even nicer about waking up out of that dream next to another human being. As ridiculous and awkward and smelly and terrifying as they are, other people are the miracles that make games beautiful.”
Spectator Sports
Ramiro Corbetta, developer of Hokra, on how to keep an audience engaged Hokra came out of the NYU Game Center’s No Quarter event. Can you explain how that came to be? The amazing people at the NYU Game Center approached me about making a game for the 2011 No Quarter exhibition. They had liked some of my previous work and wanted to commission me to make... anything I wanted, really. The only speculation was that the first public showing of the game happen at the No Quarter opening event. I can’t thank the NYU Game Center enough for giving me the opportunity to focus on Hokra for a long time. Where a lot of these Event Games have focused on discovering new ways for people to interact through games, Hokra seems to head in the other direction, distilling it down to the bare essentials of multiplayer. Was that deliberate? I don’t know if it was deliberate. I’d be giving too much credit to my authorial intent if I were to claim that I had a clear goal in mind when I started working on Hokra. It all started as a self-imposed mini programming challenge. I wanted to create a top-down passing mechanic that felt satisfying. The game slowly build around that. By the end of the process, the decision to make a game that was about the bare essentials of multiplayer had definitely been made. I’m just not sure if I made the decision or if it was made for me by my design process. Hokra is a great spectator sport, despite having such a minimal aesthetic. Did you develop it with the audience in mind? I definitely developed it with the audience in mind. I would love to say that I was going after that from the beginning, but it wasn’t even my idea. Charles Pratt, who teaches at the NYU Game Center and curates No Quarter, warned me that on the opening night there would normally be more people watching the game than playing it. From that point on, I spent a lot of my time making the game as readable as possible for the audience. Since its arrival, it seems to have spawned all sorts of competitions and tournaments. Why do you think it’s proved so popular? I’d like to believe that it’s because of both its simplicity and depth. I kind of hate when people say this because it’s such a game design cliché, but I’ll say it anyway – I think that Hokra is a game that people can enjoy the first time they play, but there is enough depth of competition to make high-level play quite serious. I also think that the spectator sport aspects really help makes these competitions feel real. If you can get the entire crowd into it, competing feels much meaningful. Does the success of these games rely on funding from the NYU Game Center to be viable to independent developers? If you’re talking about financial success, we just don’t know yet. Maybe all the money will come from commissions from art institutions, or maybe there is enough demand from people who want to play these games at home. On the other hand, the fact that we’re talking about ‘event’ games right now says something about how successful they’ve already become on a cultural level.
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