Continue issue 3

www.continuemag.com

MAKING HISTORY why games like assassin’s creed iii are embracing the past Also in this issue: The Fall & Rise of Adventures Board Game Piracy ARGs Game Taxes Contemplative Gaming Simulation Rigs and much, much more...

#03 Digital Issue $2.99/£1.99

002 _ welcome

003

welcome to continue A

t a press conference earlier this year for the intriguing-looking War of the Roses game from Paradox Interactive, much was being made of the time and energy the developers had spent on researching staggering amounts of minutiae regarding the medieval setting’s weapons and armour. In the game, everything from the pommel on your sword to the types of feathers you wear in your helmet is based on real-life historical records and have physical effects on your performance in-game.

The talk being given was littered with references to glaives, bucklers, cuirasses, billhooks, halberds and the like. What surprised me most was that it wasn’t an education in classical history or a lifetime of study devoted to the warfare of yore that let me recognise every piece of equipment being presented before us.

It was from playing Dungeons & Dragons.

There’s certainly a fair argument to be had that the majority of everything I’ve learned about life on Earth in my forty-odd years has come through absorbing television, comics (especially Tintin and Asterix), films and games.

I suspect I’m not alone. Games have often traded on the human race’s past to provide their splendours, but developers today are taking

the art of weaving mankind’s turbulent history into their narratives – mixing real-world figures and settings of renown and import with the player actions of derring-do – to new heights of grandeur. This issue we look in greater depth at the way these worlds of fiction and reality are combined, the pitfalls involved, the lessons we can learn and the benefits gained in being able to ‘Press X to speak with Abe Lincoln’.

One genre that often mined the vaults of the past for material was the adventure game (tortuous segues for the win!). Once a mighty colossus, striding hand-in-hand with flight simulators as the pioneers of gaming expression and technological achievement, these twin genres are now pale shadows of their former selves. We explore both in different ways, charting the rise, fall and rebirth of the point ‘n’ click, while saluting those not only keeping their simulation passions burning, but going to incredible lengths to live out their virtual dreams.

As always, we really value your feedback at Continue, so leave us your thoughts on this issue by email (info@continuemag.com), at our Facebook page, or via Twitter.

Paul Presley, Editor paul@continuemag.com

004 _ contents

contents issue #03

8 – News (inc. april news Stream)

18 – News (inc. may news Stream)

28 – News (inc. june News Stream)

How a bar in the UK is turning games into cocktails; when a gaming icon dies, what happens to his lifetime’s devotion to his art? Plus, April’s gaming news rounded up day-by-day.

Using Portal to teach physics; drunk comedians playing Dungeons & Dragons; videogames hitting the silver screen. Plus all the comings and going in gaming for May.

Testing the limits of acceptibilty regarding sexual assault in gaming; an award-winning book celebrates Nordic live-action role-playing; everything you need to know about June in gaming.

38 – Richard Cobbett

40 – Dan marshall

42 – house rules

controversy strikes!

When it comes to shock tactics, there’s a lot gaming’s advocates can learn, as long as we don’t all keep sticking our heads in the sand.

indie life

For an indie developer looking to make a splash, controversy can be a handy shortcut to publicity. But can it come at too high a price?

sky highs

Skyrim’s thriving mod scene has opened the fantasy epic in a variety of ways, but you don’t always need to be a coder to change the way it plays.

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

Contributors Colette Bennett, Richard Cobbett, Paul Dean, John Dower, Michael Fox, Dan Griliopoulos, Mitu Khandaker, Martin Korda, Craig Lager, Dan Marshall, Joe Martin, Craig Morrison, Will Porter, Jake Thornton monyo publishing Eternal Thanks To James Dance, Will Edgecombe, Funcom, Paradox Interactive, Parkour Generations, Ubisoft, Valve 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

44 – rogue warrior

48 – the gaming sciences

58 – the history toys

Moving as silently as the wind, invisible to all, striking suddenly then vanishing into the shadows. Unless you try it for real and find your trousers are rustling.

Our expert game creators this issue explore overlooked senses, the role of ‘story’, how game balancing is more complex than you may think, and what precisely defines a board game.

Videogames have always plundered the past for their stories and settings, but modern titles like the Assassin’s Creed series can offer us the chance to play virtual history student like never before.

66 – dicing with the law

72 – the rise, fall and rebirth of

78 – dream machines

stealthiness

It’s not just videogames. Board game piracy is a fast growing, yet often overlooked problem, and those fighting the bootleggers are seldom given the help or resources they need.

Once the mightiest of all genres, the adventure game has fallen on hard times. But the pioneers of old are not taking it lying down...

Simulation fans have plenty of specialist hardware and peripherals to choose from, but those truly dedicated to realism can create modern day marvels of home-brew engineering.

86 – the state of playfulness

92 – give us a break

98 – contemplative gaming

Alternate Reality Games have mainly been known as viral marketing tools ahead of big-name releases, but there’s a whole sub-genre of gaming to explore if you know the right clues to follow.

More countries are discovering that rewarding tax incentive schemes are a boon for their burgeoning game development sectors, but enticing studios isn’t only about the money.

Engaging your trigger finger is one thing, but games that require a more thoughtful, sedate approach are becoming ever more popular and ever more rewarding to players.

adventure gaming

bioshock infinite developer: irrational games year of release: 2013

008 _ NEWS

drinking games For the past two years, a popular gaming bar on the south coast of England has been the home to an ever more outlandish collection of gaming-inspired cocktails

L

oading, nestled in the seaside resort of Falmouth in Cornwall, is more than just a videogamethemed bar. Frequented by the hardcore and casual alike, it was inspired by the gaming cafes of Tokyo and is home to arcade cabinets, game consoles, regular gaming-themed community events, and the geniuslike ability of owner James Dance to create complex, yet delicious alcoholic mixtures based around videogames such as Resident Evil, Ghost Recon, Saints Row 3 and even Minecraft.

“The drinks came around because about eight months after I’d opened people had asked for certain themed drinks,” Dance explains. “I was always wary of going too nerdy (although I see the stupidity of this when you think I opened a gaming bar), but

decided to play to my strengths and created a menu with a friend that tried to cover all the main gaming icons that non-gamers would know.”

As Loading’s reputation grew, so it started appearing on the radar of games publishers. “Capcom got in touch firstly to offer support,” recalls Dance. “It asked if we wanted to cover one of its IPs as we hadn’t already done so on our menu. Being a massive fanboy of its old arcade games, and loving Resident Evil, I jumped at the chance.” With the game’s anniversary on the horizon, it became a perfect title to tie in to. “By a stroke of luck the ‘G&T Virus’ worked perfectly as a title and the colours of the in-game liquids matched nicely with Sloe Gin and Bombay Sapphire (at least people think it’s blue with the bottle), so it all

came together,” says Dance. “It did really well when Capcom put it out, and a whole sideline was born for us.”

Dance then turned to photographer Will Edgecombe to provide assistance in giving his creations a bit more visual flair. “Will came on board for the Square Enix ‘Deus Ex on the Beach’ and he’s been key in helping make my stupid ideas work and look great,” he says. “Something like the Gunsmith would never have been possible without him!”

Dance has kindly given us a few of Loading’s incredible cocktail recipes for you to try out yourselves on the following pages. Check the bar out in detail at www.loadingonline.co.uk, by following the team at their Facebook page (‘Loadingbar’) or on Twitter (@drinkrelaxplay).

009

NEWS STREAM april 2012 MONDAY 2ND

april

●●In an announcement issued well outside the April Fool’s window, Sony tell news site VG247 that the Playstation 4 will see release before its competitor, the Xbox 720, in the 2013 holiday season. ●●Tabletop, a games show, launches as part of Felicia Day’s Geek & Sundry network. Presented by Wil Wheaton and with suitably nerdy celebrity guests, the first episode featuring Days of Wonder’s Small World, hits 250,000 views within the week. ●●Website Anandtech claims that Apple is working on a “project to bring a physical controller to market”, likely a controller for iOS apps and games.

TUESDAY 3RD

●●The latest high-profile Kickstarter project to go live is a remake of Leisure Suit Larry, which will eventually succeed in funding its $500,000 backing.

WEDNESDAY 4TH

Uncharted Drinks Reception

Like the Uncharted games, this drink is one big action set-piece. Grab a highball glass and rub lime juice around the rim before dunking it onto a plate of brown sugar, then pour in 175ml ginger beer. Next, get a shot glass and pour in 10ml of Goldschlager, followed by 15ml of overproof rum, poured over the back of a spoon. You can now carefully light the shot and sprinkle cinnamon over the top from about 40cms to get an impressive flame.

Then blow it out and drop the shot glass into the ginger beer.

●●EA is voted the “Worst Company in America” by visitors to the website The Consumerist, but celebrity gamers such as Charlie Brooker support it for its positive depiction of LGBT characters. ●●Markus ‘Notch’ Persson announces his next project after Minecraft, a “space game” with the ambiguous title 0x10. ●●WizKids announces the Quarriors Quorld Championships will take place at GenCon in July, with qualifiers beginning in mid-April.

THURSDAY 5TH

●●Screenwriter Ryan Engle signs with New Line cinema to write a film based on the classic videogame Rampage.

FRIDAY 6TH

●●The popular iPhone and Android game Draw Something surpasses 50 million downloads.

SATURDAY 7th

●●Following a spirited online campaign by fans, German PC games magazine PC Action confirms that the PS3 game Dark Souls will see release on the PC.

010 _ NEWS

sugar and splice (bioshock)

Out of Eve? Take a shaker and fill with ice, add 15ml white rum, 15ml of vodka, 25ml Blue Curaรงao, fresh lime and shake. Pour some sugar onto a saucer and run a lime wedge around the top of a half pint glass, dip in the sugar. Pour your Bioshock mix carefully into the glass and top up with lemonade.

Kicked to the Kirb (Kirby series)

Cute, cuddly but still packs a kick! Fill a shaker with ice, 50ml of white rum, 25ml lychee liqueur, fresh lime and 125ml of cranberry juice. Shake and pour into a glass. For added sweetness add a splash of Grenadine to finish.

011

Monday 9th

april

●●The multi-platform game engine and development toolkit Unity surpasses one million downloads. ●●Cryptozoic reveals that it’ll be publishing five games based around The Hobbit movie, due for release between December this year and late 2013. Another Lord of the Rings game, this time a deck builder, is also planned.

Wizkids and Fantasy Flight also announce Hobbit-based games.

Tuesday 10th

Yoshimitsu/Poison breath (Street Fighter x Tekken)

Prepare a Martini glass by running a lemon around the edge and dipping in popping candy. Then mix 25ml of Midori, 50ml of sake, some lemon juice and 15ml of passion fruit syrup, shake with ice and strain into the Martini glass.

●●Commodore founder Jack Tramiel, whose company created the legendary Amiga and Commodore 64 computers, dies at the age of 83. ●●Ubisoft finds itself facing two legal challenges over its game Rocksmith, one from a band of the same name, the other from the creators of the instructional software, Guitar Apprentice.

Wednesday 11th

●●Microsoft announces that Halo 4 will be scored by composer and producer Neil Davidge, known for his work with Massive Attack and David Bowie. ●●To the surprise of some, in an interview with games magazine Edge, Shigeru Miyamoto describes how much he enjoys Angry Birds, but thinks it would be better “if the developer had created the game for Nintendo DS.” ●●Steve Jackson Games launches a Kickstarter to reprint Ogre, its legendary game of tank warfare.

The target of $20,000 is smashed within hours, eventually passing $920,000 by the campaign’s end.

The final product will weigh in at over 10lbs.

THURSDAY 12th

●●Bethesda Studios applies for a trademark for the phrase “Fus Ro Dah!” famous from the multimillion selling Skyrim. ●●On its first birthday, World of Tanks declares that it has over 24 million registered players, with as many as a record-breaking 450,000 playing simultaneously.

rogues gallery (batman: arkham city goty edition)

Left to Right: Two-Face, Riddler, Bane, Mr Freeze, Poison Ivy, Joker and Harley Quinn. For how to make these criminally brilliant concoctions, you’ll just have to visit Loading’s villainous lair and try them for yourself.

FRIDAY 13th

●●After a protracted development, the keenly-awaited independent videogame Fez is released to widespread acclaim.

012 _ NEWS

treasure troves The untimely passing of two of the original creators of Dungeons & Dragons has resulted in a glorious chance for RPG fans to own items of gaming culture lore

All Photographs © Paul J. Stormberg/The Collectors Trove, Alan De Smet

by michael fox

I

t’s always fascinating to discover what goes on behind the scenes of whatever your obsession may be. Discovering the secrets of a favourite game, the elements that were excised, that whole process of development from initial concept through to final release... all of these can give you a real look into the mind of those who were involved in the creation process. Nowadays, thanks to bonus content in videogames and sites like BoardGameGeek.com that encourage interaction between designers and players from the off, it’s easier than ever to get an insight into the development process of the games we play. Years ago, though, it was a far trickier thing to do.

Perhaps you’d be lucky enough to meet someone at a convention who had a hand in a favourite game, or you received a rare response to a letter you sent in. The secrets and stories behind countless games have disappeared forever, but for a select group there could well be some new discoveries regarding the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons. In recent years, collections owned by both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson have found their way into auction houses – however, the two co-creators’ ephemera had two very different stories behind the sales.

The decision to sell the Gygax collection was rather straightforward.

Following his death in 2008, Gygax’s family struggled to decide what to do

with the huge amount of products, magazines and random items that he’d managed to accrue in the fiftyfive years he’d been in business.

Some went to museums, but the vast majority sat in boxes gathering dust until his widow, Gail, came to the conclusion that everything should be sold. After contacting Paul Stormberg at The Collectors’ Trove, a company that specialises in online auctions of large collections of role-playing games, things were set in motion to sell the collection in its entirety.

Of course, such an immense accumulation couldn’t be done in one batch, so it had been split into lots that were then released every few months. The initial auctions began

013

SATURDAY 14th

●●A UK survey confirms the suspicions of many when it reports that 64% of parents don’t check the age restrictions on videogames that their children are playing.

SUNDAY 15th

april

in late 2010, with items including early issues of magazines such as Polyhedron and The Dragon (a signed copy of the first issue eventually going for $2,500) but – as you’d expect – the vast majority of interest was shown in the items involving Dungeons & Dragons.

The story behind the auctioning of Dave Arneson’s collection is a sadder tale. Again triggered by a death, this time in 2009, those left behind were bemused about what they could do with the remnants of an entire life of gaming and designing.

While they worked on a solution, the Arneson family put the whole lot into storage, locked it away and seemingly forgot about it. Whether through choice or forgetfulness, they failed to keep up with payments on

●●Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, creators of the original Space Quest in 1986, reunite after decades apart to begin work on a modern spiritual successor.

MONDAY 16th

Gygax’s family struggled to decide what to do with the huge amount of products and items he’d accrued in the fifty-five years he’d been in business

●●After a video of a 9-year-old boy building his own ‘cardboard arcade’ goes viral, Caine Monroy begins to receive college fund donations from well-wishers around the world. ●●The nominees for the Dice Tower Awards for 2011’s games are announced. This is the gaming podcast’s fifth annual awards set, and Flash Point: Fire Rescue leads the field with five nominations.

TUESDAY 17th

●●Bloomberg carries a story that Zynga attempted to buy out Angry Birds developers Rovio for $2bn, but was turned down. ●●Rockstar and Marvel Custom Solutions announce a Max Payne comic book series, to tie in with Max Payne 3‘s release in May.

WEDNESDAY 18th

●●The source code for the Apple II version of the classic platform adventure Prince of Persia is made available online.

SATURDAY 21ST

●●Peter Molyneux states that over 1,000 people have applied for jobs in his new company, 22 Cans.

MONDAY 23RD

●●Valve’s ‘Employee Handbook’ is leaked online and the company’s open and fluid attitude to work is widely discussed and praised. ●●This year’s Select Winners are announced at the annual US Mensa Mind Games event. From 68 entries, five are chosen as the best of the year: IOTA, Snake Oil, Mine Shift, Coerceo and Tetris Link - all combining the need for brain power with quality gaming. ●●The Sinclair ZX Spectrum celebrates its 30th birthday.

014 _ NEWS

the locker. Under Minnesotan state law, after a set period of time all contents are forfeited and sold to the highest bidder, sight (almost) unseen. No information is given on what could potentially be in there; no names, no list of contents. The lock is cut, the shutter raised and the bidding begins.

Many people make a lucrative living out of selling what they find hidden in these unwanted units, and even more would have seen the boxes of paper and thrown the lot away. Thankfully, the locker’s contents were purchased by a local auction company and while they were far from sure exactly what they’d bought, they knew it was something more than shoe boxes filled with old receipts.

A little research and a meeting with Michael Cox, an online games dealer, brought them to the team at The Collector’s Trove. They were

more than happy to verify that they’d managed to pick up a collection of more than ten thousand items any geek would be proud to own.

As well as the magazines and sealed games found in the Gygax haul, there were also notebooks.

Lots of notebooks, all filled in Dave’s tiny script and packed out with the stories behind the games he created.

Even better, there were unpublished manuscripts, adventure concepts and modules... even rules and prototypes for entirely new games that could now, finally, see the light of day.

A deal was struck between Cox and the team who then began work on the daunting task of cataloguing another RPG legend’s huge collection. The same system has been used with items going up on eBay in large groups, being sold and processed, the cycle starting again with another batch.

For someone like Eric Daniels,

a “fanatical Dungeons & Dragons player since the release of the Second Edition” it’s important to have their own little piece of history. “I’ve invested so much time and money into the game that a little bit extra wouldn’t matter!” he exclaims.

Despite bidding on a variety of items, Daniels only ended up winning a couple, spending “not as much as I expected” on some early First and Second Edition D&D manuals. “It’s great having these books, even if most people don’t use them to play with. I know I certainly don’t, I play 3.5. But not only do I see how the game I love has got to its current state, I get to look back using the books owned by one of the guys who was actually there at the beginning.”

Is there anything in particular that gamers are excited about potentially getting their hands on? Daniels mentions the many manuscripts and

015

WEDNESDAY 25th

●●The European Commission declares it will continue to offer a 20% tax rebate to all French developers whose games are deemed “culturally significant”. ●●Ravensburger announces it’ll be releasing SingStar: The Boardgame at Essen 2012. Based on the PlayStation series, details are sketchy but there’ll likely be no need for mics or a PS3.

april

THURSDAY 26TH

“not only do I see how the game I love has got to its current state, I get to look back using the books owned by one of the guys who was actually there at the beginning” notes that have yet to see the light of day that could possibly contain plenty of secrets about the world of D&D. But one thing has him rather more excited: Arneson’s locked briefcase.

As yet, only the auctioneers know precisely what is contained within; in an interview with Wired, they insisted that there were “some very interesting items inside.” Eric is a little more effusive. “It’s not going to be his lunch, is it? I’d love it if it were something unpublished, a whole new campaign that no-one has ever seen. Can you imagine how exciting it would be to play something that unique? The honour of being the only person apart from Dave to run it? I’d feel privileged.”

Would he share such a find with the D&D community? “No. Well. Not at first, anyway. I suppose I would do eventually, get my fifteen minutes of fame as this benevolent guy who’s

sharing his spoils, but I’d want to keep it for myself for a little while at least.”

The stories of these two collections end on a positive note. While it’s true that these legacies are now sitting in the hands of collectors worldwide, the team at The Collector’s Trove aren’t the only ones to profit from the fortuitous finds.

A portion of the profits from the Arneson collection is going to the family, a decision that has found a lot of support in the D&D community. It’s still unknown why they let the relics of their father’s life slip away but at least they’re getting a much-deserved cut, while a huge amount of people around the world now also have their own part of role-playing game history.

Whichever of the two co-creators’ collections they come from, there are many people out there who have had their peek behind a curtain that is now, sadly, closed forever.

●●According to a study by the British Psychology Society, playing Tetris can help in treating PTSD. ●●For the first time ever, Nintendo reports an annual loss: a net figure of $531m, despite strong 3DS sales.

FRIDAY 27TH

●●Developer Infinity Ward brings a lawsuit against Activision, seeking between $75 million and $125 million in compensatory damages for unpaid bonuses.

SATURDAY 28th

●●Fantasy Flight Games launches the beta of Community Wizard, a website to help gamers meet up in order to play. With a focus on conventions and organised play, as well as social network integration, FFG hopes to roll it out worldwide within months.

SUNDAY 29TH

●●Japanime Games, best known for maid-obsessed deck-builder Tanto Cuore, reveals it’ll be publishing an English-language version of Barbarossa in “late 2012”. Look it up for yourself.

There will be controversy. ●●Stephen Conroy, Australia’s Minister for Communications, launches a parliamentary enquiry into discrepancies in software prices, believing Australians are often overcharged compared to customers in other countries.

MONDAY 30TH

●●Richard Lemarchand, Naughty Dog’s lead game designer, leaves for a teaching role at the University of Southern California. ●●PopCap Games begins to license many of its most popular titles, paving the way for Plants vs Zombies pyjamas and Peggle boxer shorts.

Sniper Elite V2 developer: Rebellion Developments year of release: 2012

018 _ NEWS

science! lessons Remember when your parents use to say you’d never learn anything playing ‘computer games’ all day long?

I

n June, publisher Valve begun its much praised Steam For Schools, providing a version of its content delivery platform geared towards educational establishments. The first projects to arrive on the platform are Portal 2 and its Puzzle Maker, geared towards helping students learn about the finer points of physics.

With several months of student activity under its belt, we caught up with Valve’s Director of Educational Programs, Leslie Redd, to find out how the initiative has fared to date...

Where have you seen Teach With Portals make real impacts so far?

Leslie Redd: Since the launch in mid-June to the end of August, we have 2,300 educators from around the world who have signed up to utilize Portal 2 and the Puzzle Maker in the classroom, for free. There have been summer programs which have used the tool (see the blog at www. teachwithportals.com), teachers incorporating it into their curriculum, a teacher conducted a workshop for other teachers at a national conference, and students creating after-school clubs where they create levels and challenge each other.

What has been the general reaction from the educational establishment? Has there been much in the way of resistance?

LR: We’ve received a positive response from teachers, principals, curricula specialists, superintendents, government officials at the national, state and local level, and foundations and nonprofit organisations which focus on education. We also have many educational IT professionals sharing the program with their school’s faculty and staff. A challenge that does exist for some schools is the ability to ensure the technical connection to Steam for Schools.

What is the driving ethos behind the project?

LR: Valve was inspired by the segment of our community who are teachers. We started to hear from educators that they were using Portal and Portal 2 in creative ways in class. Physics and other sciences most obviously, but also Mathmatics and English. Educators asked for a distribution vehicle and for content.

Steam made sense in providing access and Steam for Schools has limited functionality more appropriate to a school’s needs. As for content, we believed that the community would be better able to articulate what

019

NEWS STREAM may 2012 TUESDAY 1ST

●●The Angry Birds theme park opens in Särkänniemi Adventure Park, Tampere, Finland.

Wednesday 2nd

●●Kickstarter suffers its first videogames upset, as Mythic, from Little Monster Productions, is withdrawn after allegations it’s stolen assets from other projects. ●●Analysis shows only 25% of Kickstarter’s game projects achieve their funding goals.

may

“We started to hear from educators that they were using Portal and Portal 2 in creative ways in class”

Thursday 3rd

●●The Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, Washington, completely sells out in under two weeks.

Friday 4TH

●●Fileplanet, the videogamer’s hosting service for mods, patches and demos, is to be discontinued and archived after thirteen years online.

Sunday 6th

●●The sell-off of the games collection belonging to the late Dave Arneson begins. The Dungeons & Dragons co-creator amassed over 10,000 items before his death in 2009, most considered lost until being discovered in a storage lot.

Monday 7th they desired for curriculum, so we provided a framework and destination for the sharing of lesson plans through www.teachwithportals.com. We hope to continue this collaboration with the educational community.

How far into a national school curriculum do you see projects like this being able to reach?

LR: In creating lesson plans, one of the things we are encouraging is the alignment to standards such as the Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards. Teachers can ascertain whether or not a lesson plan will be appropriate for them. Schools

around the world are beginning to incorporate ‘21st Century Skills’ such as collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, persistence and systems thinking. Games like Portal 2 and tools such as the Portal 2 Puzzle Maker well represent those attributes.

Where else are you planning to take Steam for Schools beyond Teach With Portals?

LR: We’ve been hearing from some other game developers who are interested in supporting educators and we’ve also been receiving game suggestions from educators. We’ll see where it takes us!

●●Speaking with website Gamasutra, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney speculates that improvements in cross-compiling technology may make AAAquality games playable via browsers within a few years. ●●Valve announces that Portal 2 has sold over 4 million units worldwide, just as it prepares to release a level designer.

Tuesday 8th

●●The now ubiquitous Angry Birds reaches one billion downloads.

Wednesday 9th

●●Virgin Media begins its 100 Day Game Project, which challenges developers to create a mobile game in just 100 days, with a £10,000 prize for the winner.

020 _ NEWS

playing for laughs When a group of Los Angeles comedians get together to play D&D and drink large quantities of alcohol, it’s more than just the dice that are rolling

All Photographs © David Bender - Ugly Mug Photography

W

hen the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons arrived, it brought with it more than just a new set of gaming rules. Almost overnight, the internet filled with ‘real-play’ podcasts, enthusiastic groups recording their adventuring sessions and unleashing them for the world to hear.

While most can politely be termed as broadcasting amateurs, one group is hoping to bring its real-world performing skills, bouyed by generous amounts of alcoholic beverages into a mix that provides a listening experience somewhat above the rest.

Crit Juice is the collective name for a team of Los Angeles-based improv comedians and actors, all of whom share a passion for malt liquor, audience participation and rolling natural 20s. The team decided to combine their passions and produce a regular podcast (details at critjuice. tumblr.com) featuring listener suggestions and promising ‘special guests’. We caught up with them at the end of their first recording session to

find out if dicing and drinking are natural bedfellows...

You’ve just had your first trial run. How did it measure up to expectations?

David Crennen: I think every DM’s greatest fear is that the party will just completely melt down, and I think in that way, the Prologue was a really good session because it happened immediately out of the gate. <Laughs> Tom Fonss: You know that part in Ghostbusters 2 when they get covered in the pink slime and all start fighting each other? It was like that with our D&D characters, except instead of pink slime there was booze.

Matt Cook: Everyone was so excited to finally play that things got crazy. It was really fun, though.

DC: I think we’ve got that out of our system now. So either every other

session will be great, or it will just be a complete nuthouse.

How much did the drink help?

Matt Buchholtz: Well, when we started playing someone would bring different alcohol each week and it just became a part of the game to us. The first few hours we were fighting ogres and talking about the alcohol, and the last couple hours we were fighting drunkenness and mostly verbally assaulting our enemies.

MC: How much did drinking help?

None! It does the opposite of help.

Brian McGrath: It makes you a little

021

●●On its 20th anniversary, the FPS Wolfenstein is released as a freeto-play browser game.

Thursday 10th

may

●●Microsoft is granted a patent for a biometric game pad, which can identify a person by the characteristics of their grip. ●●The game-themed bar Loading in the UK creates Minecraftthemed shots for its customers. ●●A 32-year old Elvis impersonator is arrested in Texas, charged with assault and battery following an argument at a barbecue over the correct way to play Taboo. ●●The Boy Scouts of America announces plans to launch a Game Design merit badge.

Scouts will claim their badge by creating and testing board, card, role-playing or videogames.

Friday 11th

●●After the game’s website suffers a DDoS attack, Fortresscraft creator Adam Sawkins contacts the police over “loss of earnings” and blames the attack on the Minecraft community.

Saturday 12th

●●The developer of iOS game Redux: Dark Matters will also release 1,000 copies for the 13-year-old Sega Dreamcast. ●●Statistics show that the beta for Valve’s next multiplayer title, DOTA 2, is as popular as the long-established Counter-Strike.

Monday 14th

●●Valve and Blizzard settle over the use of the name ‘DOTA’ for their games. Blizzard’s title will be Blizzard All-Stars and Valve’s DOTA 2 will keep its name.

TUESDAY 15th

●●Blizzard releases the longawaited Diablo III, but a host of technical issues mar the game’s launch and prevent many gamers from actually playing. ●●A new survey suggests that 50% of all Americans between the ages of 8 and 64 now play videogames.

WEDNESDAY 16th

●●Forbes magazine compiles a list that declares Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer the company CEO who most “deserves to be fired.”

022 _ NEWS

more impulsive. We end up giving very genuine reactions as to how our characters feel.

You all have a solid background with improv comedy. How much does not having a live audience to perform to affect how that skillset emerges during play?

TF: Me and Matt Cook are in the Groundlings Sunday Company right now, and all of us have performed at Groundlings or UCB (Upright Citizens Brigade), so I think, live audience or not, improv just naturally became a large part of our D&D gameplay. We just wanna hit things and make each other laugh.

BM: I would say we’re our own audience in this project. We all have to feed off of each other’s energy and guage it. But just like anytime you’re with your best friends, you have your own way of saying things, so we play to a lot of inside jokes that we know will tip each other off.

Gary M. Soldati: Improv helps us stay on our toes since it’s impossible to plan for what’s going to happen.

Everyone’s brilliant and just running their mouth.

Daniel Acker: In improv, you learn

to say “Yes, and...”, where you accept what is said and then add something. That really helps us build this fictitious world. We all work hard to entertain each other.

The Crit Decks are a great idea. How much will ‘audience participation’ play a part in future recordings?

BM: We’re trying to get them in there as much as possible.

MB: Crit Decks are our big one right now (submit yours at critdecks@ critjuice.com), but future audience participation will go from determining what merch gets sold to submitting characters for our special guests to play as. The options are limitless.

TF: The response we’ve been getting is phenomenal. All of the hits on the website and the Crit Deck submissions and our Twitter followers- it’s made this initial stage of Crit Juice ridiculously exciting. We’ve gotten followers from different countries.

To think that someone, thousands of miles away will be able to effect our D&D game- that blows my mind.

What more can you tell us about the special guests and how they’ll be involved?

DA: You’ll have to keep checking the website to see who’s sitting in with us, but we’ve got some special guests lined up to play with Crit Juice: improvisers, comedians, nerds. All people who love and appreciate D&D. MB: Without spoiling the surprise, if you know someone who fits into that

023

●●IGN launches its Middle Eastern service, with content available in Arabic and English. ●●Kickstarter pulls the campaign for Tentacle Bento, a card game from Soda Pop Miniatures, following publication of an article on Kotaku claiming that it makes light of rape. SPM transfers the campaign to its own site, pulling in nearly $50,000.

Thursday 17TH

There seems to be a slowly emerging trend of ‘Hollywood’ becoming nerdier. How much do you think games like D&D really get played out there?

TF: Not as much as they should.

MB: It’s out there. Vin Diesel plays, Wil Wheaton, Stephen Colbert. Rainn Wilson went on Conan and talked about his characters...

BM: Rainn Wilson? I wonder if we can get him in for a game?

DC: Geek is chic right now. More people than ever can just say outright, “I play D&D.” TF: D&D is one of the last sort of nerd things that has not been fully tapped by pop culture. Anyone can buy an Xbox, but it takes a different level to

buy a bunch of mini’s and get a group of people together in a basement (or a bar).

DC: It’s still underground. It’s still got that subversive stigma.

MC: Yeah, I told my mom, “Oh, I’m going to go play D&D with my friends,” and she said, “Oh, be careful.

That’s a crazy game!” It’s still got a very specific tone to people.

BM: I think all the nerd things, whether it’s comics, or videogames, or fantasy football, they’re more acceptable overall. But there’s still that stigma with Dungeons & Dragons, you know... “I’m going to go be an eighth level mage.”

MC: I think now, this year, it’s easier to play than ever before. I think that’s because of the progress and popularity of nerd things in Hollywood overall.

GMS: You couldn’t find Dungeons & Dragons in a bookstore three years ago. Now you tell someone, and they might not be into it, but I guarantee someone within earshot will say, “I loved that when I was fifteen, I played that at summer camp, or I have a friend who plays.”

MC: The geeks shall inherit the Earth.

MB: Oh, that’s nice.

DC: It’s got a ring to it.

may

Venn diagram, odds are we’re talking with them.

DC: As far as how they’’ll be involved in the campaign, they might sit down with us for an entire dungeon, or sometimes just pop in as cameos. With how incredible everyone’s backstories are, it might not even be surprising to see someone come in as someone from the past.

●●The popularity of the zombie survival mod Day Z, for soldier sim ArmA II, drives up sales of the original game by 500%. ●●The annual Game Chef competition winner is Ninety Minutes, a game revolving around a father and son’s final conversation. Game Chef presents designers with a set of words, and gives them nine days to create a working RPG.

FRIDAY 18TH

●●38 Studios, the developer of Kingdoms of Amalur, starts to struggle financially. The company will eventually fold and be unable to pay many staff wages.

SATURDAY 19th

●●Microsoft begins to offer free Xbox 360s to students who pay over $699 for a PC.

Monday 21st

●●In Pach Attack, videogames analyst Michael Pachter insists the used game market is vital to the industry, and preventing second-hand games being playable will hurt publishers and hardware manufacturers. ●●Videogame voice actor Nolan North reveals he has worked on J.J. Abrams new Star Trek film, winning a role after Abrams was impressed by North’s performance in Uncharted 3. ●●The three nominees for the Spiel des Jahres are announced: Eselsbrucke, Vegas and Kingdom Builder. The Kennerspiel, or ‘advanced gamers’ award will be decided between Village, Targi and K2. The winners will be announced in July.

TUESDAY 22nd

●●The latest videogame movie is to be Shadow of the Colossus, in development at Sony Pictures.

024 _ NEWS

star struck

Following Battleship’s less-than-stellar big-screen outing, and with games like Shadow of the Colossus and even legendary coin-op Rampage inking possible movie deals, these are some of the better-known gaming properties currently being touted around Hollywood... by paul dean

Assassin’s Creed

Names you may recognise: Michael Fassbender (Actor and co-producer) ETA: Unknown The game: Bartender Desmond Miles, born of a long line of assassins, is kidnapped and forced to relieve a series of ‘ancestral memories’ so that his abductors can mine these and locate ‘Pieces of Eden’ that will help them control mankind. Yes, it’s crazy.

The film: In October 2011, Ubisoft was discussing the possibility of a film with Sony Pictures, but now want to develop independently, demanding greater creative control, and with the aid of Fassbender’s company DMC. Likelihood of completion: The series’ reputation will give it some clout, but so far it’s little more than an idea.

Halo

Names you may recognise: Peter Jackson, Stephen Spielberg (Directors), Alex Garland (Writer) ETA: Never?

The game: As war rages across the galaxy, the forces of the Covenant beat back the outnumbered and underprepared humans. Meanwhile, the ‘Halos’, giant inhabitable rings dotted throughout space, are a network of weapons built to combat a far greater threat.

The film: If it happens, this will likely be a high drama, epic budget, science-fiction frag fest. But don’t hold your breath.

Likelihood of completion: Microsoft has been trying to make this film since 2005 and is no closer to doing so, having rubbed Hollywood up the wrong way.

Hitman 2

Names you may recognise: Possibly Timothy Olyphant (Actor) ETA: 2013.

The game: Agent 47 is a resourceful, relentless and utterly merciless assassin who will stop at nothing to take down his target and, quite often, anyone else who he thinks is getting in the way. His resourcefulness extends to both wearing and using absolutely anything to hand, if it serves as a means to an end.

The film: The original Hitman movie made a very tidy profit, so there’s no reason a sequel can’t cover the same ground and meet with similar financial success.

Likelihood of completion: It’s already being written and the $100m box office returns for Hitman would persuade any studio exec, whether Olyphant returns or not.

Metal Gear Solid

Names you may recognise: Avi Arad (Producer) ETA: At least 2014 The game: Trying to summarise the plot(s) of the many Metal Gear games would be like trying to force whipped cream back into a container, but they’re fundamentally about special operations teams trying to prevent the theft or proliferation of nuclear weapons. That’ll do.

The film: Series creator Hideo Kojima has revealed that an adaptation is in the works, supervised by Spider-Man producer Arad, but hasn’t to date give any more details.

Likelihood of completion: The series is well-known, but attempts to adapt it have stalled before.

025

WEDNESDAY 23rd

●●Capcom announces that a limited edition Street Fighter collector’s set will be released in September, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the series. ●●Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto is honoured with the Communications and Humanities prize at the Prince of Asturias Awards in Spain.

Mortal Kombat

Silent Hill: Revelation 3D

Names you may recognise: Sean Bean, Carrie-Ann Moss (Actors) ETA: October 2012 The game: The third Silent Hill game followed Heather, a teenage girl pulled into the horrific, otherworldly town of Silent Hill after her father’s murder, meeting someone who has terrifying plans for her.

The film: The first Silent Hill film was adapted in 2006, but the second and arguably more popular has been skipped over, perhaps because of its nuanced and somewhat abstract plot. Expect a more typical horror experience, with cults, knives and some very gruesome special effects.

Likelihood of completion: The film has been shot, mixed and is ready for release. It would take an act of god to prevent this from reaching cinemas.

Thursday 24TH

●●The public play-test for the latest version of Dungeons & Dragons begins. Tentatively titled D&D Next, it contains pre-generated characters and a sample dungeon based on the classic Caves of Chaos module. ●●Spanish gamer Alfonso Ramos becomes the first person to win the 2012 FIFA Interactive World cup twice, beating another previous champion, Bruce Grannec, to win $20,000. ●●An aide quoted in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper says that Prime Minister David Cameron spends a “scary” amount of time playing Fruit Ninja on the iPad.

may

Names you may recognise: Kevin Tancharoen (Director) ETA: 2013 The Game: The only way to conquer any of the six realms is to defeat their greatest warriors in tournaments of Mortal Kombat.

Hence people kicking each other all the time.

The Film: Tancharoen isn’t a household name, but in 2011 his web series Mortal Kombat: Legacy helped promote the ninth game, which sold over three million copies.

Impressed with his work, Warner Brothers want to give him the money and resources required to make a new feature-length movie, Likelihood of completion: New Line president Toby Emmerich has said he hopes the film can be released to coincide with the new Mortal Kombat game.

FRIDAY 25TH

●●The UK Games Expo 2012 kicks off for three days of gaming.

Games Workshop founders Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson are guests of honour, revealing their Top Ten Games, along with announcing a new Fighting Fantasy book entitled Blood of the Zombies. ●●Sony files a patent for software that can interrupt games with ads.

Tomb Raider

Names you may recognise: Graham King (Producer) ETA: 2013 The game: Lara Croft can’t seem to stop compulsively collecting obscure historical artefacts. To aid her, she makes use of two very large pistols, which she thoroughly enjoys firing at everyone and everything in sight. Especially animals.

The film: This isn’t the first time Tomb Raider has been adapted, and there’s room here for something more cerebral and dramatic. Then again, one of the games had dinosaurs in.

Likelihood of completion: Lara is practically infamous, making her very bankable, and the forthcoming Tomb Raider game reboot would tie in rather nicely with a motion picture.

Deus Ex: human revolution Names you may recognise: None so far ETA: At least 2014 The game: Like the classic Deus Ex, Human Revolution was partly about conspiracies and control of information, but it also examined and attempted to extrapolate medical ethics issues surrounding augmentation and transhumanism. Typical FPS stuff.

The film: This summer, Square Enix signed a deal with CBS Films to adapt Human Revolution. With luck, they’ll be able to craft a story as intelligent and as technically literate as the game, rather than plumping for a glossy action flick. Or Michael Bay could direct it.

Likelihood of completion: It’s still very early days yet, so who knows?

SATURDAY 26th

●●Indie Game: The Movie is the first film made available on Steam.

Monday 28TH

●●During a world news report, the BBC displays a logo used for the UNSC in Halo, mistaking it for that of the United Nations.

Wednesday 30TH

●●Square Enix celebrates the 25th anniversary of its Final Fantasy series, with a tie-in website.

Thursday 31st

●●One month and many disclosures later, Activision and Infinity Ward reach a confidential settlement in their legal dispute.

assassinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creed ii developer: Ubisoft Montreal year of release: 2009 (PS3, 360) / 2010 (PC)

028 _ NEWS

just say no How far does a game really need to go to tell a difficult or shocking story? Just where do you draw the line? by ‘anonymous’

A

fter reading the article ‘The R Word’ at The Escapist about a male gamer who’d been raped as a child, I felt compelled to speak up, too. I’m a female gamer and games journalist and I’ve also been sexually assaulted. It happened while I was living overseas. I’d been out for a drink with some friends and got a taxi home, but at the last minute changed my mind and asked to be dropped off at a convenience store to get something to eat. It wasn’t a long walk back to my flat, and it was well lit and I’d walked that way hundreds of times before, so I didn’t think anything of it. When I got to the door and fumbled for my key someone grabbed me from behind. I was too stunned to do anything for what seemed like an incredibly long time.

Then I fought back and he ran away. I felt proud of myself for fighting back, but it didn’t matter – IT HAD STILL HAPPENED. My boyfriend, who I’d had an argument with a couple of nights before, thought I was making it up and didn’t bother to come and see if I was alright. It signified the end of our relationship. My closest female friend was incredibly supportive, as was my apartment manager, who grabbed pictures from the CCTV feeds and came with me to the police station for moral support. I’d never understood women who didn’t report sexual assaults and rape, but after doing it myself, I now can totally

sympathise with why. It was an utterly humiliating experience, with the implication being very much that it was somehow my fault for daring to walk the streets alone at night, for having a few drinks with friends, for being a woman with big boobs and blonde hair. They asked what I had been wearing – jeans and a baggy sweater, hardly provocative. For most of the interview the police officer ignored my case and decided instead this was a good opportunity for me to help him practice his English.

At one stage, and I still really don’t understand why, he took a full-body photo of me, one from the front and one from the back. It was quite clear that even though we had pictures of the man’s face, there wasn’t any chance that he would ever be caught.

Rightly or wrongly, I very much got the impression they weren’t going to try too hard. Or at all, in fact. I certainly never heard from them again.

I didn’t think it affected me that much, and for a while life went on as normal. It was no big deal, I told myself, but at some point, I realised it was. I’d stopped going out at night, I only went anywhere, even in the day, with other people if at all possible.

I’d stopped feeling safe. What it had impressed upon me was that anyone could do anything to me that they wanted, and despite the fact that I’m trained in self-defense and have always considered myself street smart and someone who doesn’t take unnecessary risks or wear provocative clothing – none of that made any difference. I clearly couldn’t stop them.

Since I wasn’t going out much, I spent a lot of time renting videos and playing videogames. I played a lot of Tomb Raider. Lara Croft was another

029

NEWS STREAM june 2012 Friday 1ST

●●LucasArts reveals Star Wars: 1313, promising a more adult Star Wars videogame, set in a “dark and mature world.”

Saturday 2nd

june

●●The shortlist for this year’s Diana Jones Award, presented “to publicly acknowledge excellence in gaming” is unveiled. Nominees range from innovative RPG systems to Risk: Legacy. The winner is a coffee table book on LARPing (see page ??).

Monday 4TH

●●Ernst Henning Eielsen, a judge at Anders Breivik’s mass murder trial in Norway, is caught playing Solitaire on his computer as witnesses provided testimony. ●●Cevat Yerli, head of development studio, Crytek, becomes the latest high-profile games developer to predict that the next generation of consoles will be the last. Three days later, John Carmack predicts the opposite. ●●Peter Molyneux unveils his first 22 Cans project, Curiosity, which has players around the world tapping their way into a cube to find the prize inside.

TUESDAY 5TH tough woman who I couldn’t imagine would ever have allowed herself to be a victim like I was. You couldn’t imagine a man trying it on with Lara – she’d knock him back, both with sarcastic words and with a flying kick. Lara Croft was not the kind of woman that anyone with any sense would mess with. Lara Croft could walk alone at night without any fear.

Videogames were a safe haven, where I knew that I’d never have to confront anything that reminded me of my assault or see someone being raped.

Fast forward eight or so years, and I’m not sure what the hell happened.

Suddenly we’re being told that Lara Croft will become ‘like a cornered animal’ in the next Tomb Raider game

●●After press conferences on the 4th, the 2012 Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) begins. ●●Sony shows off a new steering wheel peripheral powered by the PlayStation Move.

Wednesday 6TH

●●Microsoft announces that it is partnering with Nike in a new Kinect fitness initiative. ●●Surprising many, EA declares it will not offer substantial Steamstyle discounts on downloaded software because it “cheapens intellectual property.” Within two weeks, however, it does indeed offer such substantial discounts.

Thursday 7th

●●Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima tells CVG he is now developing games based on “the concept of love, or rearing a family, things of that nature.”

030 _ NEWS

when ‘scavengers will try and rape her’. The developers tell us will make us ‘want to protect her’. I don’t want a Lara I have to protect! I want a Lara who can look after herself, in a virtual world where bad things like rape don’t happen to my heroine.

In many ways I realise that as far as the series goes, showing a Lara who in the beginning is vulnerable, unsure of herself and scared makes sense. In many ways the kind of one-dimensional heroes that easily overcome any obstacle that’s thrown at them and never have a second’s self-doubt now seem hopelessly out of fashion. These days videogame characters have become more sophisticated and realistic, but I can’t help sometimes wishing that I could have the old, uncomplicated Lara back. There was never any danger that phased her, never any challenge she shied away from, not thinking she was up to it. She was never afraid.

Playing videogames was my escape from my personal sexual assault, something I could do where I felt powerful and strong and safe. So far, I have always seen videogames as a safe haven, much more so than movies or TV. I’ve never really been able to stomach any kind of media with graphic scenes of rape in it, particularly visual ones, even before it became personal for me. Even movies like I Spit On Your Grave which I’m told I should enjoy because in the second half, the woman ‘gets her own back’. Or the current favourite: postapocalyptic movies where women are ‘inevitably’ raped. Since none of us really know what would happen or how people would behave come the apocalypse, why is this supposedly inevitable? Since all men are not, in fact, rapists, and most can only enjoy sex when it’s consensual, who’s to say that women wouldn’t be the ones with all the sexual power if society broke down? Come to think of it, since it’s a

widely known fact that women can be far more vicious than men, perhaps it would be the women who become the predators? How come we never see either of those scenarios?

In case you were wondering, yes, I feel the same about watching men rape other men. I once had to review a play called You’ll Have Had Your Hole

by Irvine Welsh in which the main character was raped by a HIV positive man. I found it incredibly unpleasant.

I just don’t want to watch anyone go through that. It’s not entertainment.

It’s too real. If you must have rape in a film, then can we not be forced to witness the actual act? It can be obvious what is going to happen and have the screen fade to black without having to show us it in every detail.

I also hate the way the word rape seems to have become an acceptable verb to use when people want to

talk about things they don’t like. For instance, I recently read a Facebook post where someone described the ‘I’m Han Solo’ dance scene in Star Wars Kinect as ‘raping my childhood’ and an article that talked of incompetent politicians ‘raping the economy’. Every time I hear that word I think about what happened to me again, just for a brief instant.

I imagine that anyone who’s ever experienced anything similar feels exactly the same way. Thinking something is embarrassing or not liking the way someone deals with something is nothing like being raped.

While on some level I’m glad that some people have obviously not had to find that out first hand, I am also appalled by their ignorance and lack of empathy for the pain of others.

According to UK statistics, 1 in 5 women has experienced some kind of

031

●●Brett Carrow and Sam Henneman break the world endurance record for playing a single board game. The pair complete over 61 hours in a single game of Strat-o-Matic Baseball, breaking the previous record of 54 hours spent playing Last Night on Earth.

FRIDAY 8TH

june

●●A trailer for the game Hitman: Absolution, which shows the lead character violently slaying a team of nuns dressed in tight leathers, is criticised for promoting sexism and violence against women.

Saturday 9th

●●Analyst DFC Intelligence says that current global revenue from videogames is $52bn. It predicts that it will reach $70bn by 2017.

Monday 11th

●●Author Neal Stephenson announces CLANG, a crowdfunded, motion-controlled sword-fighting game which will require its own peripheral. ●●Ravensburger’s Schnappt Hubi, a game about hunting down a little ghost in a house you build as play progresses, wins the 2012 Kinderspiel des Jahres award.

TUESDAY 12th

●●Brian Farfell, CEO of THQ, says the struggling studio has “hit the bottom,” but is recovering.

sexual abuse at some point in her life.

For men, it’s 3 in 20. It’s also believed that these figures are on the low side, since many people (particularly men) don’t report it. That’s a lot of people. I personally don’t want rape in my games at all, even as part of an interesting and well-written story.

Crystal Dynamics has since claimed it was “not clear” and had been “misunderstood” on the issue and now states that there’s no rape in the game, and that “sexual assault of any kind is categorically not a theme that we cover.” It seems that it was all a big misunderstanding and I hope that the negative backlash means that this is the last we hear of any ideas anyone has to abuse Lara in this way.

I’ve always found an easy way to

decide if something is acceptable or offensive to women or not is to imagine if the same situation was being written for a male character.

So, if we had a back story about Uncharted’s Nathan Drake, perhaps banged up in a prison somewhere with the implication being that he was about to drop the soap, so to speak, would that be acceptable to other men or would they find it unpleasant and offensive? Would that make sense as part of a narrative or just scream of gratuitous nonsense that had no bearing on the story whatsoever?

Would “feeling like you have to protect” Nathan Drake make the next Uncharted better? Would it be needed to make his character “more human?”

No. So, there’s your answer.

WEDNESDAY 13TH

●●The Executive Producer of the rebooted Tomb Raider tells players they’ll “want to protect” a Lara Croft who is threatened by sexual assault, the development team receives widespread criticism and retracts the comments.

THURSDAY 14th

●●Thatgamecompany, creator of the games Journey and Flower, raise over $5.5m in funding after becoming independent.

FRIDAY 15th

●●Repos Production unveils its 7 Wonders Companion iOS app that contains a constantly updating Wonder, the planned new Apple HQ at Infinity Loop.

The Cupertino Wonder reacts and changes depending on how Apple’s share price is performing.

cold play A coffee table book about a niche gaming interest in the Nordic region of Europe? Of course it’s winning prestigious awards...

All Photographs © Tommi Kovala, Niklas Arugård, Katri Lassila, Olle Sahlin, Peter Munthe-Kaas, June Witzøe

by michael fox

A

nnually given out to celebrate excellence in the field of gaming, the Diana Jones Award has promoted the curious and wonderful for over a decade. From people to websites, role playing systems to classic board games, almost anything can take the prize and this year’s victor, the coffee table book Nordic LARP, is a fitting addition to the pantheon.

LARPing, or Live Action Role-

Playing, is a niche but still reasonably well known gaming genre, sadly mostly for the wrong reasons. For most people, the idea of a LARP is visions of folks running towards each other, bellowing and brandishing foam weapons. Sure, there is plenty of this style of gaming going on, but in the Nordic regions the idea of LARPing is much wider ranging. Not just stuck in the realms of fantasy, more and more games throw their

net further afield. Everything from epic space operas through to smaller scale, one-room events focusing on relationships have been played, and these are documented in this now award-winning book.

Put together by editors Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola over the space of two years, it was their dream to create a document of this unique scene. A huge coffee table book, it’s packed with interviews

033

●●CBS commissions a TV game show based on the Draw Something app.

SATURDAY 16TH

june

●●Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, a Kickstarter media project by feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, raises $158,922 in funding, 2,648% above its original goal of $6,000. Supporters rally around Sarkeesian after she is subjected to prolonged online harassment.

MONDAY 18TH

●●Microsoft reveals its new tablet, named the Surface.

TUESDAY 19th

●●The Tetris Company wins a legal battle against the puzzle game Mino, which is ruled to be infringing its copyright in a case that may have significant implications for ‘cloned’ videogames.

WEDNESDAY 20TH

●●After twenty years in his position, David Yarnton prepares to leave his role as Nintendo UK’s General Manager to pursue other interests. ●●The latest version of Magic: The Gathering rolls out on various digital platforms. Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 is the first MTG game to be available on iOS and gives players an advance look at cards available in the physical game coming later. ●●The ‘Steam for Schools’ initiative begins, with developer Valve giving away Portal 2 for free to educational institutions.

THURSDAY 21st

●●At a Microsoft Windows Phone presentation, the company claims that Windows Phone 8 will be a “complete gaming platform.”

FRIDAY 22nd

●●A 56-page document outlining the next Xbox console is leaked online and anonymously verified as genuine by development teams.

SATURDAY 23rd

●●A cadre of EVE Online players exploits a loophole in the game’s economics and gains five trillion in ISK (the in-game currency), equivalent to $175,000.

034 _ NEWS

035

“We always knew it was a weird niche.

We’ve been a little surprised at how much interest there has been. Apparently it isn’t just us who find it riveting” LARPing depicted in the book will ever achieve mainstream popularity – at least not in this form,” he muses.

“That said, more and more people outside the Nordic countries in other role-playing communities have started following what goes on. And it’s not just the role-players but other people interested in interactive, participatory and co-creative endeavours.”

So who else is getting involved in the movement? What kinds of people are showing interest? Stenros mentions a surprising variety, with “numerous people in theatre, performance, art, games, education and simulation have started paying attention, but they’re not copying what other LARPers do, just picking the parts they like and adapting. As they should.”

How did he feel about the book winning the award? “We were excited to be nominated but did not expect at all to win; for a non-American thing to win just to get nominated is a big deal.” Sadly, they were unable to attend the ceremony themselves through lack of funding, but they still wrote a speech “because how often do you have a chance to write an Oscar speech in your life?” Delivered by American game designer Emily Care Boss on their behalf, it was a humble message of thanks to their whole community; just what you’d expect.

Stenros and Montola are celebrating gaming in a form that many of us will never even experience but Nordic LARP shouldn’t be dismissed as irrelevant. Even without the Diana Jones Award, this is a book that all gamers should read through if only to see how people play together from a totally different perspective.

●●WizKids reveals that it requested two of its games be removed from the ballot for Game of the Year at the Origins 2012 following problems with distribution of its submitted games to judges.

Keith Blume, the new head of the awards committee, stresses that changes will be made before next year’s event.

MONDAY 25TH

●●Fifteen years after the game was released, Blizzard is finally able to purchase StarCraft.com. ●●Two members of the hacking group Lulzsec plead guilty to charges of attacking Sony and Nintendo websites.

june

conducted with designers and players of games that have taken place over the last fifteen years. The true highlight, however, must be the vast array of photographs included.

They show how the people involved come together to create vast new universes or concentrated snapshots, tiny moments in time that they get to explore using surprisingly deep sets of rules. Despite the need to work within these strict parameters, many people find LARPing allows them to act with more freedom than you’d initially think.

Why does Stenros think the book has achieved such recognition despite its relatively specific subject matter? “We always knew that Nordic LARP is a weird niche,” he says. “We’ve been a little surprised at how much interest there has been towards [it].

Apparently it isn’t just us who find it riveting.”

This is true. The stories held within its pages are incredible; a personal favourite involves the use of a full-sized submarine by a group running a game set in a starship in the far flung future, complete with a fully functioning army of space cadets.

Does Stenros think that the scene that has spread through the region will ever be picked up in other areas?

Can the game move away from just being about guys whacking each other with foam swords?

“I don’t think that the kind of

SUNDAY 24TH

TUESDAY 26TH

●●Developer Christopher Hui wins $175,000 in Activision’s Independent Game Competition for his game Iron Dragon.

WEDNESDAY 27TH

●●Ex-Rockstar developer Navid Khonsari is branded a spy by Iran, his native country, after starting work on a game based around the Iranian revolution.

THURSDAY 28TH

●●Pictures that apparently show leaked concept art from Half-Life: Episode 3 are distributed online.

FRIDAY 29TH

●●The long-running Merchant of Venus licensing battle (see Issue #01) comes to a conclusion as Stronghold Games and Fantasy Flight Games settle their differences. FFG will publish the game with Stronghold’s Stephen Buonocore coming onboard as a design consultant. The final release will contain both the new version and Richard Hamblen’s original design. ●●South Korea’s shutdown law, which prevents children under sixteen from playing games for prolonged periods, is challenged by parents who argue for the educational value of some games.

SATURDAY 30TH

●●Iconic videogame character Donkey Kong turns thirty years old today.

call of duty: black ops developer: treyarch year of release: 2010

038 _ RICHARD COBBETT

> RICHARD COBBETT

Controversy Strikes!

When you need a molehill turned into a mountain, then packed with manure and dynamite for maximum shit-raising, nothing beats the internet…

I

n the last few months alone, Eidos alone has found that there is in fact such a thing as bad publicity, with two sex scandals over Hitman and Tomb Raider, and World of Warcraft was tied to cold-blooded murder simply because Anders Breivik played it. He was a mage, incidentally.

Something has changed in recent years though – the direction of all this mewing. Not that long ago, any fight could be summed up as ‘us vs. them’. You were a smart, modern gamer who Understood, or you were an opportunistic Luddite who thought the world’s problems could be pinned on something called ‘The Resident Of Evil Creek’. Sure, we’d go against our own in some situations, like shunning the racist shooter Ethnic Cleansing, but rarely. In the face of attack, gamers closed ranks. Usually, it must be said, not without cause.

Now though, the calls are increasingly coming from inside the house. Games are too ubiquitous for the word ‘gamer’ to be a good classification any more, turning us vs. them into something closer to us and us and us and us and oh god those idiots vs. them. We accept that games are great. Now our other biases get to come out and play.

This really started with Modern Warfare 2’s infamous No Russian level, where you take part in a terrorist attack on civilians in an airport. For the first time, buoyed by post-9/11 fears and MW2’s prominence, gamers in their masses were arguing over whether not only it crossed a line, but whether developers Infinity Ward should have been allowed to get away with it. Only a few years earlier, the mere idea of censorship was seen as the thin end of the wedge. When Rockstar’s Manhunt 2 was banned in the

039

UK by the BBFC for instance, very few were heard saying “Well, they are the experts…”

Violence isn’t the main flashpoint for gamers though – it’s sex, in various forms. As with comics, if you want a quick summary of what the words ‘male privilege’ mean, just express a desire for well-written, rounded female characters who look like they actually chose their own clothes. The instant fiery outrage at you daring to suggest chain-mail bikinis are dumb will tell you more than a hundred sociology lectures.

That’s a small part of the debate though, which stretches from Hitman selling itself on latex-clad nuns to the question of whether it’s appropriate for Lara Croft to face sexual assault (to whatever level) in the next Tomb Raider. What stands out of almost any discussion though is the hypocrisy after years of everyone claiming violence in games has no effect on a regular person’s perception and behaviour. Regardless of the truth of things, it’s hard to square the general knee-jerk “It’s Just A Game” reaction to that with the rather more complex responses to sexual content. Never mind where you personally stand on heroically saving the world by shooting a sixth of its population in the cock.

Controversy isn’t necessarily a bad thing though, especially when it comes from within.

Keeping with the sex theme, you only have to look at the truly shameful response from far, far too many gamers to a video creator called Anita Sarkeesian, who found herself nothing short of persecuted for making a video series that dared to suggest women aren’t well represented in gaming. Hate-mail, threats, worse.

Whatever you think of the project itself or her work, it’s sickening stuff. However, as shocking as it is, it does at least serve to highlight a major problem that’s historically gone unnoticed and under-reported thanks to everyone assuming everyone else is as polite and lovely as themselves. Without that awareness, how was the community ever going to see what needs to be done?

Another ultimately positive case happened with Dragon Age 2, when BioWare took flak for adding not simply a gay relationship, but one between... gasp... dudes. Despite being completely optional, there was the expected firestorm from fans and conservative critics – along, of course, with praise and people going “Okay, whatever.”

BioWare took flak for adding not simply a gay relationship, but one between... gasp... dudes By sticking to its guns though, and showing that men kissing did not in fact get anyone turned into a pillar of salt, the controversy is over. Smaller developers no longer have to fear an outcry for doing something similar. Gamers who disapprove of such things are still completely free to do so of course, but in the right way: one wallet, one vote.

As much of a nuisance as it is, controversy is and always has been the sign of an industry that’s doing at least two things right – daring to break the rules, and instilling passion. They strike and they fade, they come and they go.

What matters isn’t avoiding them, but what lessons can be learned to make things better, not necessarily safer. That’s endlessly easier when criticism comes from inside, even if it is occasionally sad to discover that that not everyone who shares our hobby also shares our obviously correct views.

040 _ DAN MARSHALL

T

he trouble with being an indie developer is that, by definition, you’re kind of a tiny, lone voice, yapping impotently at a group of gamers who all have their backs turned, watching a video of the next Call of Duty game and cooing at the HDR bloom bump-shaded quaternions, whatever those are.

What’s more, there are so damned many of us indies all shouting different messages that it makes it even more difficult to stand out. Advertising is damn costly, so the Indie’s main weapon of self-promotion is Word of Mouth.

Trouble is, indies don’t have the same hundred-bazillion fans AAA devs do, who carry word of mouth free-of-charge to the ends of the earth, so you’ve got to find something else.

Some way of making sure people hear you, see what you’re doing, and spend their hard-earned money on your game.

In steps CONTROVERSY in giant flashing letters, smeared in vaginal juices, and sticking two fingers up at an impressionable baby. CONTROVERSY is something indies have been doing a fair bit of recently. All right, mainly Polytron’s Phil Fish, who slagged off all of Japan, Japanese culture and the Emperor of Japan before going on to delete the entirety of Twitter in a fit of rage over people saying

the pixels in Fez were too big, or something. I don’t know, I didn’t follow it completely. Anyway, the result of this intentional-or-not controversy is that there’s now not a single article online about Fez, Indie Game The Movie, or Fish himself that doesn’t then have a whopping great list of people writing very rude things about him underneath.

Imagine going through life where every time someone mentions you, there are a dozen hangers-on gasping to type ‘prick’->right click-> synonym.

I once met Phil Fish, and found him to be a thoroughly pleasant man. He seemed humble and affable, and immediately at-odds with the hullabaloo that followed.

Standing out has backfired.

But then, one thing people like about indie devs is that they’re raw, unfettered access to the development process.

We are wholly unfiltered by PR agencies or corporate marketing men. We can say what we want, and sometimes it’s wrong because we haven’t thought it through properly.

Notch on the other hand, the poor man, he’s now got so many people hanging on his every word he can’t even mention he’s just had a lovely cheese sandwich without a billion journalists clambering to publish stories about what

> Dan Marshall

INDIE LIFE There’s no such thing as bad publicity, except when it’s bad

041

that means for the games industry. Heaven forfend when he has a genuine opinion about something.

I’m no stranger to controversy myself, mind. In all honesty, being controversial wasn’t really something we’d meant to do with Privates. I mean, I knew it was all a little risqué subjectwise, but I didn’t know it’d get picked up in the way it did. It turns out that vaginas and sperm touched a special sexy nerve that just got people all a-quiver. They completely ignored the fact it was commissioned as a sexual health edutainment title, and assumed that we developers were some sort of fruity, sexobsessed teenagers, dragging the medium further down into some horrendous pit of iniquity. We weren’t that, of course, we were sophisticated grown-ups drawing little willies and bum-bums entirely for the science of it.

Likewise, Time Gentlemen, Please! Had a puzzle that involved Hitler’s bloody faeces in it – again something that got picked up and caused a flurry of minor controversy.

Not by design, but just because we thought it was a funny, horrible puzzle.

And here’s the dividing line – those things served a purpose.

They weren’t controversy for controversy’s sake. We didn’t do those things thinking ‘this’ll get us some good press’. We did the things we did because it made for a better game.

So, you know what the best way to stand out is? Make a damned good game. The rest will follow. The most successful indie games weren’t those that shouted loudest, made the most revolting trouser jokes, or made for the most shocking, stomach-churning headlines. They were the games that were polished and fun to play. If you’re relying on shock value to get noticed, you’re doing something whiffy.

Sorry to get all meaningful at the end here, but focusing on anything else makes us a little too much like The Man we indies are all trying to avoid, in all honesty. The last thing we want is people like Phil Fish or Notch being filtered through some PR mouthpiece that makes them watch what they say.

It turns out that vaginas and sperm touched a special sexy nerve that just got people all a-quiver

042 _ HOUSE RULES

> HOUSE RULES

SKY highs Skyrim isn’t just a vast, open world to explore, it’s a vast, open ruleset too by craig lager

I

’m sorry, but you have to kill your horse and eat it,” I explain, my friend’s eyes gaining a sadness as he agrees that I’m right. He’d broken a rule and he had to pay the price. ‘The Rules’ for Skyrim is a set of guidelines I’ve been cultivating since release – a set of do’s and don’ts with a bit of flexibility to take into account bugs and glitches, but they’re there to make sure that I – and anyone else who cares to follow them – has a better game.

He had broken one of the big ones: ‘No Fast Travel’.

Skyrim is a huge environment and the temptation to just click somewhere on the map to be instantly teleported there is always present, but to do that is to defeat the point. The joy is in exploration, in finding random caves and people and just seeing what happens. Plus, to teleport somewhere is to skip the dangers of the wilderness – something that The Rules always try to exaggerate. Killing and eating his equine companion was his penance.

‘No Reloading’ is another big one, and one that I’m sure a lot of RPG fans would be familiar with. If you accidentally flambé your wife in the middle of a literal fire-fight, tough.

If you screw up a stealth mission because you got caught stabbing a guard in the throat – tough. Any situation that you get yourself in, you just have to deal with it.

In fact, a big theme of my rules is ‘deal with it’, because while choice and consequence is mostly missing from Skyrim’s various scripted plots, it’s there by the bucketload in the emergent play if you let it be.

Inevitably, others have their own rules and the Skyrim communities are peppered with people sharing and discussing them. Some invent ideas to transform Skyrim into a game of predatory, malicious NPC life-ruining: “I outright murder anyone who calls me a lizard. No exceptions.” or “I find where people live and stealing absolutely everything of theirs if they’re being a dick.” I can relate to, and have done, both of these.

Some have put in rules to plug the gaps in the games mechanics: “I wasn’t happy that being a werewolf gave

to teleport is to skip the dangers of the wilderness.

Killing and eating his equine companion was his penance

043

me this power to turn whenever I chose to. Instead, every other time I find myself in a town at night I transform and go wild, killing villagers until I’m forced to retreat.

Needless to say, finding a cure became a major goal.”

Others have set their own complete rule subsets to effectively create whole new character types. “I’ve recently started a new character who’s an opportunist,” says one player I spoke to. “My rules are simple: don’t use merchants, no hoarding stuff to sell later, no buying ingredients, food, potions, craft materials. Nothing. If I find a better sword, I leave my old one on the ground. It’s really effective at making you feel like an intrepid adventurer. You just work it out as you go along. If I want to buy a house and decorate I have to work in farms or go looting.”

“I play as a monk,” states another. “I can only specialise in one-handed combat, can only wear non-magical robes, I live a life of poverty with no gold and I can only use potions that I’ve brewed myself.”

What’s really nice with Skyrim is that rulesets can be enforced and the game expanded hugely with mods, which are actively embraced by Bethesda. Steam Workshop integration makes installing and managing new mods easy, so by extension, transforming the game into something personal is easy too. More Complex Needs for example, forces players to eat, drink and sleep while also assigning foods different nutritional values that need to be managed. It’s a single mod that can enable a whole new game of just surviving the wilderness as an outlaw, a hunter, an explorer, or whatever you want.

Frostfall, another mod, makes the cold weather affect the player by draining the character’s stats – making them weaker and incapable of fighting until they eventually die.

And that’s just from passive coldness; freezing rivers and temperature drops due to nightfall, rain and snow storms will kill you even quicker so finding shelter or a fire to warm up by immediately is a must.

The fact that Skyrim can accommodate and even encourages all of this – personal rule sets, play styles, and such drastic modding is a testament to how good and flexible the game is. It’s been a staple of the Elder Scrolls series for a long time, and if anything, it’s the combination of systems that make it all possible that guarantees that the franchise is going to be important for a long time.

044 _ ROGUE WARRIOR

Rogue Warrior

Stealthiness 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…

by Dan Griliopoulos

I

can see the target. Back to me, focused on the screen, on which mysterious petals are swirling hypnotically.

In ten seconds, I will be on her back. Concealing smoke creeps in, my feet roll like ninja caterpillars on the hardwood floor. Crouched, I move like the night, no, I am the night. A really cloudy night. The terror that lurks in the night. I’m the thing that the terror that lurks in the night is scared of. I’m like Barry Manilow for...

I stumble into the lampstand, knocking it over. V, my girlfriend shrieks like a Banshee and puts the Playstation controller down. “What are you up to NOW?” she yells, wild-eyed. Flower continues playing in the background. “... mumble... sneaking... ninja caterpillars...”

“What? Why are you wearing your pajamas? And what’s that smoke?”

“Oh, god! Um... do you like Baked Alaska smokey?”

Following my attempt last issue at improving my agility, I thought I’d focus on stealth, the key element of being a videogame rogue. I remembered, from my time doing the Heist (Continue Issue #01) that sneaking is HARD.

Especially if you’re six foot tall, clumsy and overweight.

Stealth games – mainly the Thief and Deus Ex series, let’s be honest – imply that as long as you stay to the shadows and keep quiet, you’re practically invisible. That’s simply not true. Nor can you buy moss arrows in London for love nor money. Well, probably for love.

For help, I turned again to Dan Edwardes, Director of Parkour Generations, the UK’s leading parkour training company and an expert in sneaky and agile movement.

“Silent movement denotes muscular efficiency,” he tells me, “therefore it’s wise to practice moving as quietly as possible. If one is moving and absorbing impacts with the muscles, it means less strain on the joints/skeleton and so a much reduced chance of injury over time. Training in this way will strengthen the body rather than damage it.”

In particular, for total stealth, you need to take a lot of care over your steps. As Edwardes says “The key is firstly to simply try to move quietly – this in itself will force you to move a little slower and with more control at the start, which will build good motor pattern habits and strong muscles.”

045

The classic technique is the rolled step – walking on the outside of the foot, so there’s never a moment of impact with the ground – if possible keep both feet on the ground as much as possible. If you’re tracking someone, the idea is to match the rhythm of their walk. If you’re walking on loose ground, alter your step to maximise surface area – this means gravel or shale is less likely to shift noisily.

Apparently doing yoga or ballet are great ways to build your body up for this. I try some stretches but give up when I realise I can’t reach my toes.

Something that both Skyrim and Oblivion got right is the clothing. It pays for it to be soft and light – in particular, well-fitted soft shoes are key. You also don’t want stuff that makes much noise. So you have to test out your cloth.

I spent a fruitless ten minutes rubbing all my trousers together to determine that all my trousers seem to be noisy – especially baggy shell suits which rustles like a cinema brat head-deep in popcorn. Baggy clothing is definitely a no-no anyway, as it tends to get caught on stuff.

On top of that, carrying minimal gear seems to be a good idea. And all your gear, clothing and equipment has to blend in with the target area. For the sake of simplicity, I focus on black, as it’s traditional, though I won’t be going out in the snow wearing it. Most people recommend olive and drab blues, as black stands out too well. Apparently, the original ninjas, the shinobi, didn’t actually wear black, but instead stuck to civilian clothing and disguises – the best form of stealth was blending in to a crowd.

Most experts on stealthiness emphasise that you need to move slowly, know where you’re going and plan the route before you move. Breathing control is also key, especially in dead silent areas.

Finally, sprinkling cayenne pepper as you go will keep dogs off your trail. The best way to learn, apparently, is not to rely on your own senses, but to have someone else watching over you. Time to try it out.

I’m behind the target before she has a chance to notice me. I am the night. Creeping over the sofa’s arm, I reach for the controller... and it’s not there. She’s not there. A tap on my back and V’s standing there, holding it. “You move like a sedated Hutt.

No games until your work’s done, remember?”

Most experts on stealthiness emphasise that you need to move slowly, know where you’re going and plan the route before you move

Sid Meierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Civilization V developer: firaxis year of release: 2010

048 _ gaming science

> the gaming sciences

out of control by mitu khandaker, The Tiniest Shark/University of Portsmouth

2

K Games boss, Chris Hartmann, recently asserted his belief in the importance of visual fidelity in games, saying that, “until games are photo-realistic, it’ll be very hard to open up to new genres.” He says that to “insert a whole range of emotions, [he feels] it will only happen when we reach the point that games are photo-realistic” The primacy we tend to give to the visual is easy to understand; after all, for a casual observer, the increase in graphical fidelity is the easiest to notice when looking at the evolution of videogames. This may explain the widespread belief then, that increasing this fidelity even further is fundamental to ‘better games’.

Hartmann’s comments about his belief in the visual comes alongside the successful Kickstarter campaign of the Oculus Rift system – which reached its funding goal within hours of being announced and, as I write this, has

more than septupled its funding goal, with time to spare.

The Oculus Rift is a head-mounted display system, which, through a very wide field of view, and low-latency head tracking, seeks to make the player unaware that they are looking at a screen at all. According to the campaign, it has convinced countless industry luminaries, from John Carmack to Cliff Bleszinski.

It all sounds exciting – and, pluralist. I won’t deny that increasing visual fidelity – through both polygons and peripherals – has its place in extending games in certain directions. However, this is not, hopefully, the only lines along which games will continue to progress; to do so seems to miss the point of what games are really all about.

Videogames exist at the intersection of both technology, and of systems of rules, so extending either in any direction gives rise to new possibilities.

049

However, we seem obsessed with visual fidelity in games, convinced that moving closer to realism in all ways is what will lead to the most compelling play experiences. Given this, it seems odd that despite all the ways in which games seem to aspire to technological hegemony, they are not aspiring towards one of our most evocative of senses: smell.

Early 20th century French novelist Marcel Proust explains this best: in his novel Swann’s Way, he describes in exquisite detail how the smell of a madeleine biscuit, dipped in tea, immediately takes the protagonist back to a place of his childhood. This experience – of how a smell can strongly evoke memories of people and places – is hence referred to as the ‘Proust Phenomenon.’ In researching this, scientists have indeed found that smellevoked memories appear to be more emotional than memories evoked by other stimuli.

This is because our sense of smell appears to have a direct neural link to the hippocampus – the part of our brain responsible for memory. Our senses of sight, touch and hearing are first processed somewhere else first, before going to this part of the brain. Therefore, our sense of smell appears very much linked to our memories – giving lots of scope for evocative emotions, as Proust indicated.

That’s not all that smell can do for us, though – some studies are exploring how our sense of smell helps us

to find our way around our environment, too. If we’re trying, as Hartmann suggests, to “insert a whole range of emotions” into games, then why are we not exploring the use of smell, too? Just where are all the smelly games?

After all, smell interfaces exist – the fancier name for which is olfactory interfaces. An early example was Heilig’s Sensorama, developed in 1960, basically, a giant booth in which the user would stick their head, and be bombarded with movies featuring breezes and smell. More recent examples include the still-in-production ScentScape from ScentSciences, or the ‘Scent Collar’ developed by USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. This is a necklaceshaped device featuring small wireless scent emitters, designed to provide the user with location-specific smells.

If we are serious about our apparent obsession with increasing technological fidelity and “more emotion” in games, then perhaps smell interfaces are the future. Yet, we should ask why we privilege photorealism over other types of realism – particularly as smell has been linked to eliciting such strong emotional responses in us. Perhaps we might wonder: if games are not going to appeal to our emotionally evocative sense of smell in the name of ‘realism’, then perhaps we should question whether realism – rather than more interesting game mechanics – was ever the goal in the first place.

We seem obsessed with visual fidelity, convinced that moving closer to realism leads to the most compelling experiences

050 _ gaming science

> the gaming sciences

games are stories By john dower, www.johndower.co.uk

T

here is much debate about whether games need ‘story’. Many assert that story-led games are a genre and complain that story gets in the way of gameplay. For me, this is all bluster. There is story in every game and often this is story that is created by the player.

First, let’s differentiate between story and plot. Plot is the series of events that makes up a story. Story is much bigger. It is an interpretation of events, a re-telling in order to make sense of the world, often from a specific perspective. As Shekhur Kapur (Director of Elizabeth) says “A story is the relationship that you develop between who you are, or who you potentially are, and the infinite world.”

There is story in most things we do. The ebb and flow of life is echoed in archetypal story structure, which can be defined by its elements. It begins by the status quo being established. An element is then thrown in to the mix to

fundamentally change things, which leads to conflict between the forces of change and the forces of the original status quo. This conflict will lead to some kind of climax after which a new kind of status quo arises, where things have fundamentally changed – a state that Kapur calls ‘harmony’. This dramatic pattern is played out in everyday situations; a night out, a working day, a competitive sports match. We also find it played out in games, which by their very nature follow this dramatic model. We are gripped by games because of the stories they tell us.

The repeatability of scenarios that make serial television so effective is often played out in games too. Players return to gameplay because it is profoundly compelling to be a part of creating new worlds and dramatic situations that develop. Having been involved in storytelling, as a director in film and television for many years, and recently in

051

games, I am struck by the potential of interactivity. This is new for storytellers used to the linear tradition. When I first started working in games, it took months for me to get into my head that as a director used to controlling the story for a viewer, I had to accept that the player did that for themselves, becoming their own story tellers.

The most successful games in my view, are those that take the story off the rails and allow each player to see different aspects of the game world – to create their own stories and relationships to that world. This presents a great challenge to games designers, writers and directors in engaging with the player in order to present truly interactive worlds, where the infinite and contradictory can be tackled and the resultant plethora of stories made greater than the sum of their parts.

Now is a great time for storytelling and that is largely due to the great development of interactive entertainment – from the multi-choice ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ story books from a few decades ago, to the enormously complex games of today. By putting the player at the active centre of the experience, we have made everyone into a story maker, but we are only in the early days of exploration.

As existing writers and dramatists of the linear tradition increasingly recognise the power and potential of

interactivity, interactive media will mature. This can only happen if the games industry fully appreciates the value of story. Open mindedness from both sides is essential for convergence to occur.

This brings me back to my earlier point. Once games makers have accepted that there is some level of story in every game, they will need to accept that those stories can be improved, refined and opened up. Games must be taken seriously as an art form and the linear traditional entertainment industries need to accept their new cousin as a true member of the family. Open mindedness is essential for the industries to converge, but in any case this is inevitable – one only needs to look at the games-derived films coming out of Hollywood as proof of that.

Kapur’s call for story to be seen as the relationship between us and the infinite world, comes alive if we allow ourselves to see the incredible potential games have to offer us as mind-expanding, ethics-challenging and problem-solving models of the world we live in.

John Dower (@JohnDower on Twitter) has directed motion capture performance and voice for Lionhead Studios, SCEE Cambridge, Camouflaj Game Studio, Audiomotion Studios and Eurocom.

The most successful games are those that allow each player to create their own stories and relationships to that world

052 _ gaming science

> the gaming sciences

the balancing act

By Craig Morrison, Creative Director – Funcom Montreal

C

ompetitive play is an important aspect of most multi-player offerings, but it has always presented unique challenges to developers working with roleplaying game systems.

RPGs place a priority on progression, in some form or other, whether it’s gaining levels, skills, items, or funds.

This presents all the traditional problems of balancing inherent with those types of systems. You have the basic requirement to make sure that all the working parts that go into an average RPG system all work together reasonably well, and do not present any major, game breaking, imbalances to the end users. Whether you have a class system, a skill system, an item centric system, or a unique mix of your own concoction, you will always have to ensure something approximating equality of power. You need to make sure that there are no combinations of those items, skills, or classes that present the players with big glaring

‘I win’ buttons when they face each other in their chosen form of virtual conflict. That means that designers often rely heavily on testing, data, and feedback from users. The problem is that what we usually find is a really interesting insight into how players relate to the games they play.

Generally players express the desire to have a ‘fair’ setting and a level playing field. However, when it comes to providing feedback during testing or with a live online product, most tend to fall foul of two intriguing reactions when assessing their relationship with the ‘balance’ of a game. We find there is an intriguing bias that sneaks into feedback once you start to consider competitive play.

We survey our users a lot, taking the pulse of gamers, and figuring out what they like and dislike. We then use data mining to question or confirm the user’s feedback, and it is in game conflicts where the most interesting aspects of how people relate to games are often revealed.

On one hand, players like the concept of a fair fight, but they also want their achievements to provide an advantage in-game

053

‘Balance’ is the area where that often reveals the most interesting of conflicts. What we invariably find is that users consider the game to be better balanced when they win more than they lose. When the data suggests that the win/loss balance is actually close to 50/50, the users generally feel they have been at a disadvantage in some way (although they often fail to be specific about why). The competitive spirit seems to warp the players’ perception of the action in a real and identifiable manner.

Likewise players can offer contradictory opinions to the same design question, depending on how it is approached.

If you ask users whether they believe a fight should be ‘fair’ they will invariably say that is ‘very important’ stressing the need for a ‘level playing field’. Yet, turn it around, and ask whether they feel someone’s time investment or achievements should give them an edge on the battlefield, and they will also answer that yes, that is also important.

So, on one hand they like the concept of a fair fight, but they also want their achievements to provide an advantage once there is a system in place that allows that. Thus the question itself, and how it is asked, can be very important.

That was traditionally only an issue for RPG-style games, but as the other modern online competitive genres start to incorporate more and more persistence, statistic tracking, and reward-based structures, you start to see these issues crop up in everything from World of Tanks to Call of Duty.

Many users also fail to recognise beneficial elements, or flaws, in their own chosen play style. This is most easily identified in class-based games. Once a year we poll the community playing Age of Conan with an extensive user survey, and it never fails to illuminate this particular

challenge. We ask users to identify which class they play the most, and then later in the survey comes a question where we list each class and ask the players to rate how well ‘balanced’ it is.

What we almost always see is that the vast majority (almost 90% this year) mark their chosen class as being ‘well balanced’, even when the statistical opinion from other users is undeniably strong in an imbalanced direction. Perhaps most interestingly, this tends to hold when surveyed whether the perceived imbalance from other classes is good or bad, meaning that even when everyone else thinks the class may be underpowered, those actually playing the class do not seem to want to acknowledge it. Pride? Is it an attempt to ‘play’ the survey for fear of changes one way or another? Hard to say, but it certainly presents an interesting insight into how players consider their own experience, and one that a designer would be foolish to ignore.

What this experience usually shows us is that when it comes to competitive design, user feedback simply must be taken alongside data. The introduction of the competitive element seems to inherently bias user feedback, even when they are genuinely trying to be impartial.

All this said, actual player feedback is still vital to the process as numbers, data points, and statistics will not aid in gauging whether your experience is actually fun or not. For designers it presents a unique challenge. The feedback is vital to the process, but you have to learn how to process it, and how to filter it for the inherent biases that appear to come from the unquenchable competitive spirit that drives any gamer.

054 _ gaming science

> the gaming sciences

edge of the board

By Jake Thornton, quirkworthy.com

G

aming is divided. Not only do warring factions struggle for supremacy across a tabletop, board or digital landscape, but the very formats of the games themselves define passionately separate camps of devotees.

I’ve worked on a wide variety of projects over the years including those defined as computer games, role-playing games, tabletop wargames, card games, dice games as well as more traditional board games. Personally my interests are pretty broad, but I’ve met many people who zealously champion their little corner of the gaming world and I’ve always been intrigued by where the boundaries are supposed to lie. The closer one looks the more crossover there is and the blurrier the edges between types, but most gamers could still look at an individual game and agree that it was a board game, card game or whatever. In fact,

those two areas are closer than most, and illustrate another facet of defining gaming types: hierarchy. Card and dice games are generally thought of as subsets of board games, and it is this larger category that tends to win out in the fuzzier cases. Take Monopoly for example. It contains several decks of cards and is played by rolling dice, but most people would never consider calling it a dice or a card game. It is arguably the archetypical board game. But why?

What defines a board game? I think, at its heart, you have to go with the obvious: it’s the board. But I also think that this is only half the answer. I think the board has to be broken up, the areas clearly separate, defined and discrete.

Let me explain why with an example. For this I’ll compare a board game to a tabletop wargame as the formats are similar enough for the differences to be illustrative.

Firstly, I need a volunteer from each camp. For clarity

055

I’ll pick two similarly themed games, say Squad Leader (board) and Flames of War (tabletop miniatures). Both involve moving playing pieces representing WWII squads and vehicles around an area of terrain to fight out a battle.

Both use dice to randomise the elements of chance and luck.

If you’re unfamiliar with these types of games a little explanation is in order first. Tabletop games have a three-dimensional modelled playing surface with no defined zones other than those bound by ‘natural’ terrain features. It looks a bit like a model railway set up. The whole tabletop represents the arena of battle on which you simply measure whichever direction you want to move. On a board game recreating the same battle, your board would be flat artwork, clearly divided into separate areas.

To demonstrate that this definition of board games works, you just have to imagine a tabletop game laid out in front of you. Perhaps it’s part of the battle for Normandy in WWII. There are hedgerows and roads, little French villages and small bridges over winding streams. The playing area for our imaginary Flames of War game is a tabletop decorated with modelled scenery and fought over with miniature infantry and model tanks.

If we take a photograph of this battlefield from above and print it onto a large board, do we then have a board game?

No, I don’t think so. It would just be a tabletop wargame played on a flat surface. Whether we’re using miniatures or counters as playing pieces, printing our photograph onto a piece of card doesn’t make it a board game.

So what if we imagine overlaying a hex grid on our photograph board, would it be a board game then?

Suddenly I’d say it’s “hmm, yes,” instead of “hmm, no.”

This seems to be the key change.

And this is not merely a cosmetic difference – the regularisation of distance redefines not only the rules for movement and ranged combat, but also the way you think about tactics and strategy. It pushes the information in the game towards the perfect end of the scale where plans can have more certainty and variables are reduced. At the extreme there are few or no variables at all, as in chess for example, where the only random element is likely to be how you choose which colour you play.

The knock-on effects of this permeate everything to do with the games. The different playing area requires different rules, which appeal to an overlapping but different player group which in turn means that the design, marketing and sales have to subtly shift to accommodate them. The impact is vast. And all from putting a few lines on the board.

If we take a photograph of the battlefield from above and print it onto a large board, do we then have a board game?

g a m e s f oral i f e t i me !

A B O U T U S Ki ds , pa r e n t s , t e e n a ge r s , ol de rpe opl e , a n y ofy ouh a v eac e r t a i npl a c ei nou rh e a r t a n dmi n d, awor l df u l l ofga me sa n d e n t e r t a i n me n t .

Wel ov et os e e pe opl es i t t i n gt oge t h e r , pl a y i n g ga me s , e v e npe opl ewh o don ' tk n owe a c hot h e r .

You rde v ot i ont o ga me s , i sou r mot i v a t i ont o k e e pon goi n g.

c ha ngi ngt hes c ene Ourpas s i oni sone , t oc r e at eandof f e r .

Ourpur pos e ,t oc hangeonc eandf oral lt he wor l dofboar dgame s .

Ouri ns pi r at i oni se ac honeofy ou!

15B' HanKr um St r eet 8000Bour gas, Bul gar i a

Emai l :magec ompanyi nf o@gmai l . c om Websi t e:www. magec ompany. c om

ERAGRA: TheFi r s tSt ep

T hegameofEr agr at ak e spl ac ei nt woDi me ns i ons-I n t he Anc i e nt Er a,br i mmi ng wi t h pr i mor di alpowe r , pl ay e r smus tc ol l e c tasmanyc r y s t al sast he yc an.

T hr oughs mar tc ombi ni ngandmani pul at i onoft he s e c r y s t al s ,y ou c an unl oc k di f f e r e ntpowe r s ,unt i lt he Cy be r s pac eVor t e xt e l e por t se v e r y bodyt ot heFut ur e Wor l d.I nt hi sCy be r wor l dy ou wi l lf i ghtunt i ly ouâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; v e e ns ur e dt he s ur v i v alofy ourf ac t i on -Cy be r mage s , Hac k e r s ,Re be l sort heT or r usSy ndi c at e .De f e aty our oppone nt s by at t ac k i ng t he i rf ac t i on di r e c t l y wi t h Mac hi ne s orVi r us e s ,ort ak e away t he i rpowe rby de s t r oy i ngt hec r y s t al st he yc ol l e c t e d.

T heEr agr aPhe nome nonbe gi ns , Ar ey our e adyt of ac e t hec hal l e nge ?

Pl ay i ngT i me 60mi nut e s Mf gSugge s t e dAge s11andup Pl ay e r s : 24

St r i k eDi c e

Combi ne l uc k and s t r at e gy pl ay i ng wi t h Py r ami d Di c e .Pl ac et he 8 pi e c e sy ou pos s e s sone ac honeoft heboar dat t r i but e s and att he s ame t i me s t r i k e . .outy our oppone nt s ! Be war eofT r i c ar dst hough!

T he s e t r i c k y me ans c ome t o c hange e v e r y t hi ng.A ne w game whe r e no one k nowsofhi sv i c t or yunt i lt hel as tdi ei s pl ac e d!Youmayt hi nky ouar et hewi nne r butSt r i k eDi c edoe snot !

Wr ongChemi s t r y

T heMadSc i e nt i s t sar eoutt he r e ,i n al ab,t r y i ngt o c r e at ene we l e me nt s ,and t he yge ti tal lwr ong! I n Wr ongChe mi s t r yy ouc hangeamol e c ul ei nor de rt o c r e at ene we l e me nt soutofi t .Af un, e as yt ol e ar n, but har dt omas t e r , game , wi t hf unnyr e f e r e nc e st ot her e al e l e me nt sf r om t hepe r i odi ct abl e .I fy ouc ande alt he s c i e nt i f i c . . . humor ,t he ny ouc anpl ayW. C.A Gameof MadSc i e nc e !

Pl ay i ngT i me 30mi nut e s Mf gSugge s t e dAge s8andup Pl ay e r s : 24

L ET ' ST RI ANGUL AT E! T heNe wEdi t i oni she r e : St r i k eDi c e : D4Wari sc omi ngs oon.

I ti st i me t of ac et hePas tandt heMons t e r swhi c h c r e at e dSt r i k eDi c e . . . !

Pl ay i ngT i me20mi nut e s Mf gSugge s t e dAge s8andup Pl ay e r s : 24

058 _ THE HISTORY TOYS

The History When games blur the lines between real world history and fictional creation, how important is it to remain faithful to reality?

by Will Porter

W

e’ve all stood in the ruins of ancient civilizations tapping numbers into audio tour guides. We’ve stared at broken walls, imagined longdestroyed towers and learned much about hypocaust systems. Every time, though, the drive is the same – to imagine how these people lived. What would you ask if you met them? How would they react to you?

“I think there’s a magic to the idea that you are a tourist in time, exploring long dead cities and speaking to people who have long since died,” explains Alex Hutchinson the Creative Director on the Assassin’s Creed series. “We try to bring history to life, then let you play in it.”

Gordon Van Dyke, the producer of the forthcoming War of the Roses game, agrees. “People like the settings of the past because it’s our history,

it brought us to this point. Now with videogames people can try to experience what it must have felt like.

It’s an awesome opportunity we have now, as creators of these worlds and experiences. Videogames will never be the same as the real thing, but it’s the closest we can get.”

Epic films, evocative historical novels and, in their day, cultural touchstones like the plays of Shakespeare have used the past to tell stories that resonate with a contemporary audience. Increasingly games are no different. History, however, is not a static thing – our understanding of the past has been moulded by the ways these tales have been told. There are many historical voices to attend to, and the truth can be buried deeper than what’s commonly believed.

So how important is it for game developers to set the past to rights?

059

“there’s a magic to the idea that you are a tourist in time. We try to bring history to life, then let you play in it”

“Every target in every Assassin’s Creed game is a real person who dies in the right year at the right place, although we take liberty in ‘how’ they died of course,” explains Hutchinson. Clearly, however, the nature of gaming means that the tangent of Ubisoft Montreal’s vision of the past must divert from reality – generally with a cowled figure flashing a blade. How, then, are the adventures of AC3’s hero Connor weaved through the American War of Independence?

“We stay with the truth, although we try to find interesting angles,” says Hutchinson. “We usually begin with an event that’s fairly well known, such as the Boston Massacre, then we build out the landmarks and set up the crowd to play out basically as it did in history, then we put our mission down inside it. When we have characters who had strong opinions, such as George Washington or Ben Franklin, if it works in our story (and we can find historical documentation to back it up) then we will put it in even if it’s a little confrontational: it gets people talking and we know we have supporting evidence.”

That ‘historical documentation’, it seems, is vital – and part of the reason that Ubisoft has historians on-staff, and a budget for hiring consultants like the Native American cultural advisors that have worked on Connor’s story

arc. “We spend a big chunk of the early development of all of our games on historical research,” says Hutchinson.

“We read books, watch documentaries, search the internet and try to find not only the well-known history but any conspiracy theories that might be useful. Once we have a base of ‘fact’ we weave our story.”

Authentic Gameplay This is an approach shared by many developers who aim to recreate the past. The designers of the forthcoming War of the Roses, a multiplayer battle simulator that puts you in the plate armoured boots of the Yorkists and Lancastrians, went as far as putting themselves in full armour and on horseback – on top of copious library research, battlefield location scouting and museum visits. What, though, does this truly bring to the game?

060 _ THE HISTORY TOYS

“It brings a solid feeling of believability, and world that makes sense,” explains the game’s producer Gordon Van Dyke. “It also lets the players that really fall in love with the setting have a wealth of documentation and artefacts to explore and learn about. Having that makes the game even more fun, especially if people recognise a real world artefact and then see it in our game. We’ve spent an enormous amount of time on getting things factually correct – some might argue too much – but I feel that’s given us an amazing game and an experience dipped in truth and facts.”

The same approach is true in the Oxford studios of Rebellion – responsible for WWII long-distance shooter Sniper Elite V2. Set in war-time Berlin, huge amounts of research were channelled into the creation of its environments and in the design of its weaponry.

“Authenticity is important because games are about more than just fun,” says the game’s lead designer Andy Kaith. “We want players to feel immersed in the world and really feel like they’re playing a part in a wider conflict. Authenticity plays an important part in that.”

Sometimes the melding of fiction and history can be an entirely natural process

Indeed, it’s this fight for authenticity that seems common for every developer seeking to recreate a version of the past. The very nature of games however, the requirement that players enjoy themselves, will always be a primary goal. In truth, for example, the streets that you negotiate in Sniper Elite V2 would have been flattened by the point in time the game ostensibly covers. Rebellion, however, needed to include structures (if generally semidestroyed structures) to keep its game fresh and engaging.

“Ultimately, we have to remember that we’re making a game, and that it has to be balanced and playable,” says Kaith. “So environments are adapted from the real thing, to ensure they support the right mission flow, and rifle characteristics might be exaggerated to make sure there’s a tangible difference between them. There will always be compromises in games when it comes

061

to accuracy, but if we can convey the true atmosphere and tension of the time, then hopefully that will interest people enough to go and find out more from other sources. Games can act as a sort of gateway in that sense.”

Alternative Histories The same is, of course, true when creating the sort of timeline that’s so beloved by videogame studios: an alternate history. For an unlikely, yet engaging, turn of events to feel viable you need it to be based on a firm historical grounding. Gaming’s masterclass in creating an inflated and warped, yet educative and intelligent, side-step from real-world history was 2007’s BioShock. Its creator Ken Levine’s next step is to parallel turn-of-the-century American Imperialism with the flying city of Columbia in BioShock Infinite.

Sometimes, he argues, the melding of fiction and history can be an entirely natural process.

“I’m a huge history nerd, but this is not a period that I had previously been into,” he confesses. “With BioShock I was way more aware of the WWII and

post-WWII era than I was the first half of the century, so with Infinite had a lot of learning to do. I had read a couple of books about the period, but nothing extensive – and had read a Teddy Roosevelt biography many years ago. Not much.”

The more Levine started digging into it, though, the more interesting things he uncovered and the more hooked he became. “Right now I’m incredibly immersed,” he says.

“I’m currently reading a book that chronicles President McKinley on one hand and the anarchist who shot him on the other. It’s fascinating how they stand in so well for Infinite’s Vox Populi and the Founders. I’m reading this history while I’m working on the game, and seeing things that I’ve put in reflected in what happened historically.

The over-arching themes tend to repeat themselves over and over and over again throughout the course of history. And not just in America.”

For any game that explores an alternate history, then, the kind of challenge faced by, say, the creators of Assassin’s Creed is inverted, instead working out how to lace your own narrative with the thought and texture of the period, rather than deciding where to thread your own story through a real-world timeline.

“Bioshock Infinite is about trying to encompass certain aspects of what was going on socially and culturally during the time it takes place,” says Levine “Obviously, though, we take those things and we run with them.

Ayn Rand never built an underwater city! Crick and Watts never made a genetic modification that shot bees out of their arms!”

BioShock Infinite’s narrative, setting and art style combine to reflect what was going on in America at the

062 _ THE HISTORY TOYS

turn of the century. It concentrates on labour unrest and the conflicts created by American exceptionalism and nationalism – yet it also splices moment-to-moment gameplay with contemporary scientific thought. The game features rips in time that can be accessed by damsel-in-distress and player companion Elizabeth, providing leaps backward and forward through these alternate timestreams or pulling in combat opportunities from parallel dimensions.

“In terms of science, we’re looking at amazing people like Heisenberg trying to peel back the origins of physics,” continues Levine. “He was moving away from contemporary ‘intelligent’ understandings and starting to get a sense that the universe is so much more complex than people thought it was, and had so much more possibility. People then weren’t answering questions, they were starting to ask them. We’re trying to reflect that.”

This is an approach that can be clearly understood by Arkane, the creator of Dishonored, which takes place in the fictional city of Dunwall. The artistic and architectural vision for this stark, dismal and somewhat beautiful place, however, come from an appreciation of the history of London. Indeed, the game’s earliest roots in development were that of 17th century England.

“We developed a past for our city,” explains Art Director Sebastien Mitton. “The player will never feel lost because he’ll feel that, as if he were in London or Paris, this place could be real. This isn’t science fiction where it’s all-out crazy. There is something real here – and that turns your head.”

Arkane mounted what it describes as a “surgical vivisection” of London – to analyse what made it different, and how to inject the fictional city of Dunwall with its traits and idiosyncrasies. “Our first discovery in our archaeological research was that there actually was a renaissance in London – bit not a regular one,” says Visual Design Director Viktor Antonov. “England was fighting with France, which was the real renaissance country.

The Venetian renaissance trickled through Austria, and through the Netherlands and Holland into England. So there were Venetian façades that were very southern and Latin mixed in with the grey London skies, and the brutal city.

That was a striking discovery once we sat down to analyse it. The first layer: the Jacobean style.”

Next came the the geographic location, with Antonov drawing on London’s relationship with the Navy and the sea. “From this we have a strong marine theme with ships and sailors,” he says “and all the fiction

063

of rough adventure that goes along with it. That’s very specific to London – with its maritime stories and literature of pirates and adventure.”

What Antonov and Mitton discovered was that it was less historical fact that engaged them, but more the historical logic. “Facts do not interest us, because we do fiction,” Antonov concludes. “Fiction is a distilled version of life, where you eliminate everything that’s not interesting. Historical facts are not interesting: it’s people’s emotions, stories and context that are interesting.”

Edutainment Those emotions and that context, however, will always mean that history can never be seen as a straight line. Historians disagree on why, where and how events took place – in fact entire nations can develop with very fixed impressions of their origins.

When you’re placing your game’s tale within the boundaries of reality, this can cause issues.

“There’s a lot of different histories, right?” asks Matt Turner, the lead scriptwriter on Assassin’s Creed 3.

“Especially in the case of something like the American Revolution where the victors wrote the history. We have a lot of glossy versions of these men, of what they did and how they apparently always knew what they were doing. The truth of the matter

064 _ THE HISTORY TOYS

comes when you get to the nitty-gritty – the letters of Franklin, Jefferson and Washington’s, or the journal of Joseph Plumb Martin. When you get to that stuff and see what was driving these people, it’s a really different beast. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to paint it in that light. We’re moving away from the glossy, canonised Hollywood version of it.”

An example that Turner cites is that of Paul Revere – who famously rode solo through the countryside shouting “The British are coming!”

In fact, he was just one of twenty riders, he never made it to Concord, he was being as quiet as he possibly could and at the time everyone would have considered themselves nominally British – he would, in fact, have called the opposing forces ‘Regulars’.

“The reason that there’s a popular version of the story is that in the midnineteenth century a dude was writing a song to try to galvanise America just before the civil war – and Revere rhymed!” explains Turner.

“If you look into Revere though, the guy was amazing,” he continues. “He was so much more than that anyway.

For us, we want to go in and find these real versions – try and bring those into the story as much as possible. To give as honest a picture of what it was like to be there at that time as possible.”

And if that version of history jars with that commonly held by the people playing the game? “You look at the history and say ‘Yeah, sure.

I’m sorry man, but that’s not how it happened. Deal with it’,” states Turner. “I think the narratives that come out of real history are far more compelling, and more relatable to people, than the stuff that gets glossed over. There are amazing moments

like that that have been pushed aside in the interests of sensationalism of the subject matter: the push to tell a simple sensational story.”

“If we can promote debate then that’s great,” picks up AC3 Creative Director Alex Hutchinson. “We try not to take a position, which is why all our arguments are within the fictional setting. History plays out as it is currently believed to have played out: events occur in the right order, and you cannot change them. Occasionally people have tried to dispute us, for example with the representation of the Borgia family and their relationship with the Vatican and their various Popes in Assassin’s Creed 2, but we have so much documentation that they give up fairly quickly.”

Should developers feel a pressure to present a balanced story, then, given that their vision of the past could well be an education to gamers whose history lessons didn’t focus on their chosen era – or, indeed, weren’t particularly listening when they did?

“It’s one of our secret hopes that kids will play these games and be inspired to go and learn more about this stuff on their own,” says Turner. “If we can accomplish that then, for us, it’s a huge win. History serves a big purpose for us, it teaches a lot of lessons if you can get kids into it – and if they go in under their own power then it’s five times

065

as valuable. I have a friend who’s an Ottawa schoolteacher who was doing a unit on the Renaissance: he just couldn’t work out how all these boys were acing their tests. The answer?

Assassin’s Creed 2!”

Creators may underline that their works are entertainment first and foremost, but the educative role of historical gaming is hugely important – especially, one might argue, when the period a game covers flicks forward through the ages and into recent memory. What difference, one

might argue, a fictional retelling of the American Revolution and a fictional tour of duty with the US Operators of Medal of Honor: Warfighter?

“Everything in this game, every mission, every event, every location that we go to has a dotted line to something that has happened,” explained Warfighter’s Executive Producer Greg Goodrich last year.

“Authenticity, plausibility, Medal of Honor has always been a fictional story woven through historical events.

This game, even though it’s not an

identifiable battle is the same thing.

When gamers go online and Google these locations, they’re going to find a whole host of bad things that happened in these places to good people.”

In a world where the victor writes the history (and increasingly a world where videogames are a medium in which it’s written), responsibility and balance are required more than ever before. After all, the allure of visiting times past, of being a tourist within the origins of the life we lead in this exact instant, will never go away.

“It’s one of our secret hopes that kids will play these games and be inspired to go and learn more about this stuff on their own”

066 _ PIRATED BOARDGAMES

Dicing With The Law In the world of games, piracy is usually only associated with videogames, knock off DVDs or illegal torrents bringing the latest titles to an underground crowd.

Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s less well known is that thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just as big a problem facing the board game industry

by Michael Fox

067

F

It seems that almost anything can be procured as a knock-off and even something like board games are affected

or some people game piracy goes back to exchanging C90 cassettes in the playground, stuffed with copies of the latest Spectrum or Commodore 64 games.

Another generation may recall modded PlayStations and bootleg CDs. Now all you need to do is search a torrent site and see the countless titles available, many before they’ve even been officially released. But what of physical items? The news often reports crackdowns on pirates and the capture of their counterfeit goods but the supplies never seem to dry up. It seems that almost anything can be procured as a knock-off and even something like board games are affected.

The vast majority of pirated items, whatever they may be, emerge from China. It’s a country which somehow manages to combine incredible levels of production with some of the most lax copyright laws on earth. Walking

down the street of your average Chinese town, you may expect to discover the latest DVDs or clothing from exclusive brands – all ripped off, of course. To pay the high prices commanded by the real deal is almost frowned upon in Chinese society, so it’s no surprise to learn that fake board games are also widely available – and as the hobby grows in popularity, so does the likelihood that the product that hits the table is an illegal copy.

I spoke with Johannes Goeth from Swan Panasia, a company based in Taiwan that attempts to bring games in from Europe and the United States then translate them for the local market. Of course, being legal versions, they work out as more expensive than the ones you’ll find gracing many of the bootleg stalls, but Goeth is determined to make a go of his business. Some may say that he’s already been quite a success – the company launched back

068 _ PIRATED BOARDGAMES

in 2002 and is still running, which is quite the achievement in a country where piracy is considered the norm.

I asked him to first give me a rundown on what the situation is like in China and the response wasn’t good.

According to Goeth, around 95% of the games in the country are illegal copies, either exact duplicates of western titles – even down to the publisher logo on the box – or facsimiles that have perhaps had the odd detail changed in order to prevent the authorities tracking down the fakers.

A growing trend is for companies to take a game engine and rehash the whole thing, effectively adding a paint job and hoping that no-one notices.

“The most notorious example for this is a game named Sanguosha, or Three Kingdom Killers, produced by a company called Yoka Games,” says Goeth. “Mechanically speaking, it’s an exact copy of the card game Bang!, first put out by DV Giochi in Italy back in 2001. It’s one of the most successful games in all of China, but it has never been licensed or even authorised by the original producers.”

Thankfully, the situation in Taiwan is improving, with perhaps nine out of ten games sold actually coming

from reputable traders providing legal copies to their customers. Since January 2012, Swan Panasia has been working alongside the police to crack down on piracy with some success.

“In co-operation with the Taiwanese Intellectual Property Rights Protection team, we’ve started to raid warehouses of both brick and mortar stores as well as online sellers,” mentions Goeth. “So far, there have been five raids and all pirate copies found have been confiscated.”

I ask him what kinds of things have been discovered in these raids? The answer is quite surprising. “Basically, every game which Funbox – our partner in Shanghai – had licensed since 2007 has been copied,” he insists. The list provided is immense; I read over seventy games, all of them from well known publishers such as Rio Grande, Days of Wonder and Mayfair Games, and I’m then told that while it’s far from complete, the number of pirated titles has fallen in the past year or so. “Funbox recently stopped promoting a wide range of titles, instead concentrating on a smaller amount, so that means the number of fakes fell. Most pirate copies now confiscated by the police are games from 2007 to 2010.”

Global Problem Why do people pirate games? In the comparatively well-off Western world, it’s a subject that is barely thought about. However, in places like China and Taiwan where wages are lower and luxury goods costly, it all comes down to how much cash you’ve got in your pocket. I was contacted by a gamer in Beijing who wished to remain anonymous and was told that many

069

Chinese gamers simply can’t afford legal copies of the games. “I don’t earn enough to buy games every week from a proper store, but can visit a street market and pick up a couple of new ones for a much smaller amount of money.

If I bought an imported copy of a game, people would laugh at me anyway.

They’d say ‘Why did you spend all that money?’ and ask if I was mad. I know these are copies, but I want to play.

They’re cheap, they’ve been translated.

Why would I buy a real one?”

It’s not just the Far East that has seen an explosion in the bootlegging of tabletop games. Now anyone can get involved simply by scouring a few torrent sites and seeing what’s available; a quick search turned up PDF files of big name games like Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride and Dominion amongst many more.

However, there’s one area – the growth in widely available 3D printing – that seems to be worrying at least one company in particular.

Games Workshop, the UK based firm founded back in the seventies by industry legends Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, is a company that is highly protective of its intellectual property. The company manages to turn a healthy profit even during these less than affluent times thanks to a legion of hardcore devotees to their Warhammer and 40K lines, so if anything (or anyone) encroaches upon those licenses, the hammer falls swiftly.

One person to fall foul of their litigation is Thomas Valenty, a hobbyist who put together two figures inspired by the long-running tabletop game after seeing his brother playing it one day. His design called ‘Tabletop Wargaming Robot Model’ was uploaded to Thingiverse, a 3D printing community site, where it was quickly picked up by other users who praised its detail.

However, Games

Why do people pirate games? in places like China and Taiwan where wages are lower and luxury goods costly, it all comes down to how much cash you’ve got in your pocket Workshop also spotted it quickly and sent in the lawyers, demanding that the information and files be taken down.

Thingiverse capitulated, removed the files from their site almost instantly.

However, this being the internet; the damage was already done – in Games Workshop’s eyes anyway. Again, a quick Google search will show up the ‘physible’ files which are now spread over countless torrent sites, and more are being submitted every week.

However, who has the responsibility to police these sites? Depending on who you speak to, you’ll get differing answers; the companies believe it’s down to the sites, while the sites either encourage moderation by the users themselves or throw everything to the wind and say there is little they can do to stop files from being shared.

070 _ PIRATED BOARDGAMES

Of course, if a 3D model is an exact copy of something, it falls under copyright law and should be removed; Thingiverse did what was necessary to cover themselves. They’re a relatively small community and an expensive legal battle would do them more harm than good. However, Valenty’s models were only ‘inspired’ by the 40K universe, so did they do the right thing in removing the files?

Talk to the users of Thingiverse and you’ll soon discover that they felt that Games Workshop had no place in getting involved, especially as the models created were not bootlegs.

In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, Kyle Workman from Games Workshop stated that they were “very protective of [their] intellectual property and our legal team investigates each issue on a case by case basis.” When pressed on whether the company would consider selling their own 3D designs in future, he declared that it “would be nearly impossible, unless the customer had plastic, metal and resin casting equipment.”

However, as the technology used in 3D printing improves, it’s also plain to see that the level of quality is also getting better as people develop their skills. Games Workshop’s policy of sticking their head in the sand could well see them stumble in years to come as the machines grow ever cheaper and more accessible to people who aren’t happy to deal with a monopoly.

Bleak Expectations Wherever there is piracy, there are those who are looking to beat it. Going back to Goeth, I asked him what can be done to combat fakes in a country where no one really seems to care. His answer is two-fold, but the main focus is on education. “We need to accept that convincing people will take a lot of time,” he says. “We must teach people what Intellectual Property is, and that it’s important to support publishers and designers. Without that, they’ll go bankrupt and there won’t be any new games in the future. It may seem naïve, but it makes sense to people. The number of original copies being sold in China is rising... slowly.”

There are also shortterm

methods that he hopes will help. Not selling card sleeves on their own, for example, or getting the assistance of high-profile celebrities to get consumers to stop thinking piracy is fine. The main thrust will continue to be those raids, however, and lulling the criminals into thinking that there’ll be no action taken against them. “Swan Panasia pretends to do nothing, letting pirates feel safe so they’ll put all their stock in their homes or warehouses. Then we apply for a raid and get them. The news filters through their networks quickly, so we must be quick too. If we go to raid and don’t find any pirate copies, we’ll be in trouble.”

Meanwhile, over in the world of 3D printing, the outlook is mixed. Yes, there’s undoubtedly going to be a growth in piracy when people realise the possibilities open to them when the technology becomes cheaper and more mainstream, but the flip side is that smaller companies will be able to jump on board to promote their games. Rather than going through the whole process of finding funding, getting the game built, getting it transported, warehoused and sent out to retailers, you can upload your physible files and sell them directly to the consumer. Sure, there’s always a likelihood that someone out there will be intent on ripping off

071

a product no matter what, but the relationship between producer and customer will become much closer.

As this situation grows, this personal touch will become increasingly important in the fight against piracy.

For many, the investment of time and materials just isn’t worth it to make a single copy of a game but wherever there’s the possibility of profit, no matter how small it may be, there will always be people making counterfeit runs. The problem is exacerbated when you realise that many of the games we play are produced in China. The high quality files that are sent to the manufacturers can find their way into the hands of less than scrupulous printers who can often manage to get a counterfeit version of a game on the streets before the original English language edition arrives in store.

In the meantime, the amount of gamers willing to spend money on their hobby will always outnumber those who are intent on producing their own illegal copies, but the

growth of technology will undoubtedly see a huge change in the industry.

It will be very interesting to see how things are ten years down the road, not just in China, but in the US and Europe too. While we may not see the demise of the local game store in favour of a direct download from your favourite company just yet, it’s certainly a vision of the future that shouldn’t be ignored.

there’s always a likelihood that someone out there will be intent on ripping off a product, NO MATTER WHAT

072 _ ADVENTURE GAMES

RISE, FALL AND REBIRTH OF ADVENTURE GAMING THE

Once the king of all gaming, adventure games have endured a rocky ride since their ninetiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; heyday. Where did it all go wrong, and why is it starting to go right again?

by Richard Cobbett

073

W

hile it’s arguably never been true, no genre has been declared ‘dead’ as often as the classic adventure. In its day, it brought us legends like King’s Quest, Day of the Tentacle, Broken Sword, and until Portal, the game widely held to be the funniest of all time even by people who’d never played it, The Secret Of Monkey Island. Until the mid90s, it was one of the most beloved genres on the PC, and incredibly successful. Until The Sims, picturepostcard adventure Myst was the best-selling PC game of all time, and many companies made their fortune through pointing and clicking.

Then, almost overnight, the good times were over. Companies like Lucasarts and Sierra, for assorted reasons, turned their backs on the genre. The big names who’d made it great moved on, to other genres or even out of the industry. Now, fifteen years later, some of them are finally returning – and joined by a new breed of indie developer looking to breathe new life into the genre. But what went wrong? And why should we care once again?

TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, NONE ALIKE In case you’ve never played one, here’s a quick primer. Adventure games came in many shapes and styles, but usually shared a goal – sending you into an interesting world to solve puzzles with ingenuity – and usually a bottomless pocket full of assorted crap that would eventually come in useful for something.

They were full of characters and challenges, comedy and lateral thinking, exploration and discovery, with settings that could be standard game fare like fantasy kingdoms and deep space, but were just as likely to take you to Parisian cafés, the mean streets of film noir, or back in time to an Atlantean temple.

If that doesn’t sound particularly unusual now, at the time it was. We spoke to several classic adventure designers, and in every case, the genre wasn’t merely a way of telling stories, but the only real way at the time. These days, things are different. RPGs, for instance, are cinematic, filled with plot-twists and dialogue trees, and borrow a great deal from the adventures of old – for example, the term ‘cut scene’ comes from 1987’s Maniac Mansion, an adventure game written by Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert.

“People love to be the star of their own movie, and that was always the goal that I had,” says Al Lowe, creator of the Leisure Suit Larry series. “I wanted you to feel like you were in a story and affecting the outcome of that story. That’s a powerful emotion to give to people. I think people who had that feeling at some point want to have it again, and so we see the resurgence in adventure games now.”

“Adventure games were the perfect medium for telling stories,” agrees Jane Jensen, creator of the Gabriel Knight trilogy – a set of supernatural horror games noted for their level of detail. “I don’t have the patience for the stats and repetition of RPGs or sims.”

Part of the appeal was that ‘adventure game’ was a very loose definition. The two giants of the

the only castiron rule was that anything demanding fast reflexes had to be avoided, or at the very least skippable genre, Sierra and LucasArts/ Lucasfilm Games, both had very distinct styles, interfaces and approaches. To use a metaphor, LucasArts made movies – polished, perfect. Sierra made TV shows – rougher, but with more variety, more willing to explore niches, and ultimately allowing for more people to tell their stories. Other developers had their own styles, their own rules, their own takes on the genre – the only cast-iron rule was that anything demanding fast reflexes had to be avoided, or at the very least skippable.

074 _ ADVENTURE GAMES

Jump into Adventure

Looking for a good place to start?

Here are some adventures available on GOG.COM that will give you a taste of why this genre is so beloved.

Beneath A Steel Sky Quirky and British, and best of all, free.

Enter a dystopian but light-hearted world to find out who you are, and what lurks underneath sinister Union City.

Resonance (above) A brand new, but brilliant thriller. Four strangers are brought together to save the world from a new scientific discovery, and you control all of them.

Quest For Glory I-IV Adventure meets RPG in these five amazing adventures. Be a Fighter, Magic User or Thief, but be ready for puns, beautiful scenery, and surprising narrative depth.

The Last Express (above) A real-time adventure on the Orient Express just before World War I. Slow, yes, but adventures don’t get much more atmospheric.

The Pandora Directive Futuristic P.I. Tex Murphy’s greatest case – aliens, conspiracy, and one of the few adventures to make 3D actually work. If you like it, go on to Overseer. Skip the rest.

Zork: Grand Inquisitor (above) Easily the best ‘Myst clone’ game around, focused on lateral thinking of the most head-twistingly brilliant kind.

It will make you feel very smart indeed.

THE DEMISE OF ADVENTURE In 1999, Al Lowe took part in a discussion called, simply, ‘The Death Of Adventure Games’ which tried to figure out what had gone wrong. Many things were suggested, including the genre’s lack of replayability, the double whammy of the internet giving people instant puzzle solutions but nobody being able to figure out a way to harness it for multiplayer games, and the effects of Myst. Myst is often accused of destroying the genre with its empty world and focus on environmental puzzles over character interaction, though in practice the problem was more that its success spawned an endless range of dreadful copies that made adventures look more boring than a diamond-tipped drill.

Looking back though, what does Lowe consider the killer was in retrospect? “I think the biggest problem was publishers. Publishers got the idea that they could make more money more easily with these other kinds of games, and that adventures were difficult to produce.

They required a lot of one-off artwork for instance, and when publishers realised they could do an action game and have the same explosion a thousand times...”

It’s often suggested that the genre’s problem wasn’t that people stopped buying adventure games, but that it didn’t scale. When Lucasfilm’s The Secret Of Monkey Island came out in 1990, selling 100,000 copies of a game made it a smash hit. Its exact development budget is unknown, but co-designer Tim Schafer has since said that it and its much larger, more ambitious sequel combined cost under a million dollars. Jump forward to 1998 and one of Lucasarts’ final adventures, the critically acclaimed Grim Fandango, sold around that many copies in North America alone.

However, with a budget of around

$3 million, it was officially a failure.

Lucasarts left the genre entirely shortly afterwards.

Chris Jones was in a good position to know for sure what things were like at the time, being both the co-designer of the Tex Murphy series of sci-fi detective adventures, and CFO of its developer Access during this period.

Was this primarily a scaling issue?

“I think there’s some truth to that,” he says. “At the time, adventure games were becoming less popular and consoles were really starting to take off. Unfortunately, many adventure games weren’t a great match for console play, which tended to be aimed at younger people.”

The genre’s growing unpopularity quickly turned into a vicious circle for anyone still wanting to make adventures, and even the big names of old hit brick walls. For anyone looking to get the money to make an adventure, someone else had to first prove the genre was profitable enough. Catch 22. Al Lowe remembers his attempts to sell a new game, a comedy detective adventure called Sam Suede in Undercover Exposure, back in 2006: “We went to every publisher we could find, hoping to get money to finish development. We produced a good prototype, we had a good design, lots of the script, some of the game...

Invariably the meeting was ‘Oh my gosh, Al Lowe, I loved your games, you’re one of the reasons I’m in the business, blah, blah, blah,’ and all was great. Then a week later we’d call back and they’d say ‘Y’know, we’re having real trouble with comparables...’”

Making things harder, other genres hadn’t been standing by over the years. Ultima VII, for instance, released in 1993, was at least as much an adventure as it was an RPG, with a deep story and heavy focus on character interaction. Shooters like SiN, Half-Life and No One Lives

075

Forever increasingly borrowed elements like characters you could talk to instead of just shoot, along with adopting more realistic worlds.

Every genre evolved, developing atmosphere, character... even the basic desire to tell stories itself.

And what of adventure? If anything, it went the other way; curling up into a shell of puzzles and nostalgia, more content to remember old glories than try to create new ones, with an audience that had understandably learned to fear change after one too many games tried to pretend that simply flipping a lever was the same as solving a ‘puzzle’.

A QUEST FOR KINGS One of the saddest parts of adventure gaming’s fall from grace is that while its reputation for being old fashioned isn’t undeserved – even now, the average adventure largely follows the template laid down in the early 90s – it absolutely wasn’t always the case.

Adventures were in fact the trailblazers for much of the PC’s early life, and became where most new technologies were tried out.

When IBM needed a game to sell the IBM PCjr as a gaming system back in 1983, it was the original King’s Quest that lead the charge. In 1998, King’s Quest IV was the first game to support the Adlib sound card, which replaced the built-in PC speaker with something capable of actual music. A similar revolution happened not long afterwards, in 1990, when the storage space of CD-ROM allowed for fullmotion video (and the regrettable-inhindsight interactive movie craze) and the so-called ‘talkies’ – fully voiced games for the first time ever. Sadly, the genre stumbled with the rise of 3D and never regained its footing. Until then, it had been gaming’s showcase.

It wasn’t just tech that adventures pushed though. No genre has ever offered so much variety or taken

so many risks. Maniac Mansion, for instance, offered seven playable characters, each with their own skills.

Police Quest drew on the real-world experience of designer Jim Walls to try and simulate the life of a beat cop.

Quest for Glory united the adventure and RPG. The Colonel’s Bequest could be ‘finished’ without solving a single puzzle, but the only way to actually win it was to grab a notebook and think like an actual sleuth. The list goes on. Everyone who made adventures brought their own voice.

This was an exciting genre. It had problems too. Stupid puzzles like King’s Quest V having you defeat a yeti by throwing a custard pie at it.

But it also had the balls to take on controversial content in games like Phantasmagoria and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, and take us to worlds that no other genre would dare to risk, like Grim Fandango’s Mexican-themed Land of the Dead.

True, in many cases these classics can seem slow and fiddly by modern standards, but for those who played in their heyday, the love of these old games still burns. And you don’t have to go far to see it.

A THOUSAND TINY SUNS When publishers became unwilling to fill the niche left by the classic adventure, the fans stepped in. With

Adventures were the trailblazers for much of the PC’s early life, and became where most new technologies were tried out emphasis on the word ‘relatively’, adventures are relatively simple to create – especially when you have an audience willing to take creativity and passion over cutting-edge graphics and Hollywood casts. Nobody can make Assassin’s Creed 3 in their bedroom. But a game inspired by Monkey Island? Not easy, but doable!

While there are other engines out there, most of the indie adventure scene revolves around a tool called Adventure Game Studio – a completely free piece of software that requires little programming to

076 _ ADVENTURE GAMES

What is ‘Adventure’

How would some of the genre’s creators, past and present, describe this most nebulous of game types?

“To me, it is creating an all encompassing world that has the rich story-telling aspects of novels and movies combined with deeper, more interesting, and welldeveloped characters.”

Chris Jones, Big Finish Games

“A game that uses the interactive element to create an additional level of immersion that you wouldn’t get from a traditional passive form of media (like a film or a TV short)” Dave Gilbert, Wadjet Eye Games “Story and universe are foremost, and the gameplay is more exploratory and puzzle-like. There is no ‘twitch’ or action reflexes required” Jane Jensen, Pinkerton Road

“The term is misleading, and that’s a whole separate discussion, but to me an ‘adventure’ is a game that is intimately tied to a story. In any other genre you could change the story and the gameplay would remain the same” Agustin Cordes, Senscape

“Adventure games to me meant my life. They were the difference between being a schoolteacher at the top of his career with 20 years still to teach, and being at the dawn of an exciting new industry and able to do some things that affected millions of people” Al Lowe, Replay Games

make a game with, but can be heavily extended by people willing to get their hands dirty. For most of what we sadly have to call ‘the noughties’, this was what kept the scene going, from games like Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw’s Chzo Mythos titles, to Dave Gilbert’s episodic Blackwell series of urban fantasy adventures set in a haunted New York. The odd thing is that while the core market would seem to be small, and other genres more attractive, there is an obvious untapped market out there for this kind of game.

“It’s funny,” says Monkey Island’s Ron Gilbert. “When I first started out, I figured there was a finite number of people who would buy my stuff – made up of the people who grew up playing adventure games. I worried that as more people stopped playing, there wouldn’t be enough new players to make up for it. I expected my sales and customer base to shrink as time went on, but the opposite has happened. Each game has sold exponentially more than the last.”

One possible reason for this is that while ‘adventure’ is no longer the only genre for stories, it is one of the few not focused on high-octane, testosterone-fuelled tales where men are men, women are chilly, and talking is great until it’s time to shoot someone’s face off with a plasma gun.

The exact audience is also different.

Adventure gamers tend to be older than, say, Uncharted fans. We also shouldn’t rule out the demographics of fiction in general – like the fact that women are more likely than men to read mystery novels (57% of female readers vs. 39% male according to one survey in 2010) while men are more likely to get their escapism from science fiction (32% vs. 20% in the same survey).

Whatever defines the adventure game audience though, one thing is clear – it’s not been well served

over the last decade, and there’s a lot of pent-up demand. This was demonstrated in March, when Grim Fandango designer Tim Schafer was facing tough times at his company, DoubleFine. Despite critical success with his last two games, Psychonauts and Brutal Legends, the studio was struggling. As a desperate experiment, he used online funding site Kickstarter to see if fans of his old games might possibly still be interested enough in the genre to fund a new one. He asked for $400,000. He ended up with a record-breaking $3,336,371.

Adventure was officially cool again.

THE NEW AGE Not since the golden days have adventures been such a flavour of the month. Fast enough to create sonic booms, the ‘name’ designers of Sierra and LucasArts raced to set up their own Kickstarter projects and have one more go at the genre.

Jane Jensen pulled in $435,316 for both a new studio and a game called Moebius. Chris Jones scored $598,104 to bring back Tex Murphy.

Al Lowe got $655,182 for a remake of Leisure Suit Larry 1 – which will make it the second remake of the 1987 original, which itself was a remake of a game called Softporn Adventure. And they’re not the only ones, by a long shot.

“I think we’ve paralleled movies, back in the ‘40s and ‘50s,” suggests Lowe. “The movie business got into a real stagnant routine of producing these blockbusters that were very safe and tried to appeal to everybody, and it wasn’t until the indie film movement in the ‘70s that we started to see some creativity. Well, we’re at that point now! It just wasn’t until Kickstarter came along that people could finally fund the games they wanted themselves.”

Despite this optimism, and the success of these projects, we do have

077

to be realistic about Kickstarter’s success. For starters, while half a million dollars sounds like a lot, modern game development remains expensive. To put it in context, the hands-down winners at the moment are DoubleFine, with a $3 million payday. Back in 2010 though, it made a dirt-simple downloadable RPG called Costume Quest for Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Live. Its development budget? $2 million. What makes Kickstarter notable is that the money comes from the fans, not that it currently provides great riches.

It also remains to be seen if Kickstarter fever will continue – which will primarily be down to how much people like the games they’ve kickstarted when they finally get their hands on them.

For this reason, Agustin Cordes, owner of Senscape and writer of the forthcoming horror title Asylum, isn’t jumping in yet. “People are kind of betting here,” he says. “They’re buying games in advance with just a promise from the developer. If that promise isn’t fulfilled, they’ll start to lose their faith. This is a transitional period. It could well be the beginning of a whole new business model for adventures, but there’s a lot at stake.”

Gilbert shares this concern, adding that he’d prefer fans who want to fund him do it by simply buying the games he sells. “I think [Kickstarter is] great for individual projects, but for a business like mine? Too many variables. Sure, I could start a campaign to make an epic HD adventure game and probably succeed, but how much will that HD adventure earn beyond the donation level? Will it be able to pay for the next HD adventure? If not, I would have to either revert back to my lowbudget stuff or hop on Kickstarter again, both of which could lead to complications. I like things stable.”

RESTORE, RESTART, QUIT Being realistic in the face of an apparent gold-rush may not be exciting, but it is sensible – especially when you remember why adventures floundered. Are people willing to buy these games? Absolutely. Are they competing with big AAA releases?

Not even close. On the PS3, Heavy Rain is easily the most successful adventure of the generation, with top production values, many awards, and over 2 million copies sold. The two most recent PC hits, Amnesia and the indie remake Dear Esther, are credited as selling around 400,000 and 250,000 respectively. Modern Warfare 3? 6.5 million copies on its first day.

However, this doesn’t have to be a problem for adventures – indeed, it could be one of the genre’s biggest assets. With massive budgets comes massive risks, with huge – or indeed multiple teams comes an inevitable dilution of vision. With less money on the line, and smaller teams, there’s not only more scope for trying new things, but no point doing anything else. Even hardcore fans have no interest in seeing generic adventures.

Will everything work out? In truth, it already has. The indie scene has proven the market exists – even if making money from it is far from guaranteed – and the response to

Whatever defines the adventure game audience, one thing that’s clear is that it’s not been well served over the last decade Kickstarter has reminded everyone of what they’ve forgotten. If it can go beyond reviving the classic franchises and usher in a new era, fantastic.

With modern technology, there’s no end to the stories games can tell, and an audience willing to play them will be richly rewarded with some of the finest writing in any medium. If this doesn’t come to pass, and this really is traditional adventure gaming’s last chance in the mainstream, at least it’ll get to take its final bow on its creators’ own terms instead of fading away, forgotten.

078 _ GAMING RIGS

dream Passion and dedication to a cause can elevate the most obsessive of pastimes into something far greater

by Craig Lager

079

T

he Tyrell P34 was a sixwheeled Formula 1 car that ran, competitively, in 1976 and ‘77. The six-wheel design was implemented on the idea that with more – but smaller – wheels, front downforce would be increased and a larger amount of surface area would be available to the tarmac and brakes.

The car did reasonably well, especially for one with such an outlandish design. In ‘76 it landed the team third place in the constructors championship, but they dropped to sixth in ‘77 – and at the end of the day, with only one Grand Prix win under its belt and a driver leaving the team calling it a “piece of junk”, it obviously wasn’t a recipe for perfection, so the design was scrapped.

So, why did Remco Hitman (real

name, I checked) decide to spend “in excess of 400 hours over a three-year period” to build a full-scale replica P34 cockpit in his home at Groningen in the Netherlands, then wire it up to a PC to race virtual cars in?

“I was playing Grand Prix Legends using ‘flappy’ paddles and left foot braking and at one point an epic video was circulating the forums of some old bloke driving GPL with an H-shifter and right foot braking with heel and toe. That’s when I realised that what I had been doing up until then was totally lame. That was ‘simracing’!”

The question remains, though: why a P34? Racing chairs and setups are commonly available, but such a specific cockpit, especially this cockpit, seems such an odd, niche choice – it’s not even like he’s going to actually strap six

wheels to it – the unique selling point of the iconic motor.

“Pondering possible designs with some of my simracing buddies, I quickly narrowed it down to a late ‘70s F1 tub. Simple, honestly constructed by true craftsmen, these are amongst the coolest of all racing cars. It was a close one between Hunt’s 1976 McLaren M23 and, indeed, the 1976 Tyrrell P34. It’s not exactly a photogenic car, but the design is so challenging and such a prime example of ‘outside the box’ thinking that it warms every engineer’s heart.”

Flawed Perfection It seems a huge leap of logic from wanting to play racing sims to picking out your favourite late 70’s F1 car to build, but in having similar

080 _ GAMING RIGS

conversations with a few people like Hitman, something very quickly becomes apparent, something genuinely surprising. They build these extravagant contraptions of dials and wheels and pedals that most would look at and call excessive, not because they want ‘something to do’ – and not even because they especially love the real-world variation of what they’re building. They do it because it seems the only logical thing to do.

Hitman explains: “In my quest for more realism, the construction of a genuine cockpit was inescapable. Not only because it’s cool, but for very practical reasons. If I wanted to drive like my heroes, I’d need much more realistic hardware: a better shifter, a stronger wheel and pedals with a load cell brake of at least 80kg. I was going to need a steel frame.”

And so he built it, much like Chris Ostring who embarked on a “hundreds of hours long” project to build a fully customisable aircraft cockpit. It sits in his bedroom in Phoenix, Arizona, tucked away in a corner – as tucked away as three monitors plus projector

plus dials, levers, etc. cockpit can be – and can transform into pretty much any aeroplane he likes.

“Basically, you start adding things, or that’s at least the way it got for me,” says Ostring justifying why he’s built what he’s built. “I started adding things so I could use my mouse less and the more and more I could get away with using an actual tactile control for something, the better it seemed to be for me. Before I knew it, my desk was so cluttered up with all kinds of garbage that I was like ‘ya know, it’d be really cool to build an actual little cockpit’. So I set out and started to do some drawings and figure out how big I wanted to make it, and what I wanted to come up with.”

The founding principle driving Ostring’s cockpit design was to be able to simulate more than one aircraft. “I wanted to be able to simulate multiple different types, so, while my setup is not geared towards any one aeroplane that I want to fly, what it does allow me to do

“i literally spent every free minute either building or thinking about how to build a component”

is just about anything pretty darn well.”

As Ostring talks about his build, he’s quick to throw around adjectives like ‘sloppy’ and ‘loose’ as he picks apart which components bolt together to make his cockpit. It’s not something he can try to deny – other people have created things that “look perfect” he says, but his configuration is very much function over form, so he doesn’t really mind the inaccuracies.

In fact, there’s an almost sedate pride in his voice as he acknowledges that while people have built tidier and more impressive looking cockpits, no one has really built anything as flexible as his own. That’s not to say that he’s cocky about it or anything like that – if anything, talking to Ostring just emphasises that he doesn’t see what he’s built as overly impressive or ground breaking – it’s just a solution to a problem.

Blood, Sweat and Money Things are quite different when talking to Hans-Joerg Krohn. In fact, asking him what he’s built is answered with precision. “It’s an F-16 fuselage,”

081

he exclaims. “The seating position and actual interior size is that of a jet fighter.” To make sure we’re clear on what that means, he has a full-size cockpit to a fighter jet in his house.

“The stick and throttle quadrant are also F-16 style. The instrumentation, autopilot, flight management computer and all panels are Boeing 737NG [a commercial airliner] style – downsized and rearranged to fit the cramped interior of the F-16.”

It looks pretty big, and incredibly impressive visually – professional even. If he said he’d bought it for tens of thousands of dollars, you wouldn’t be surprised. Krohn says the cockpit is only two square meters, but he uses a 6x1.5 meter projection for the outside view so it takes up a lot of space. If you’re wondering, he keeps it “in the basement of my home. I think it was originally built as a party room.”

Krohn, of Frankfurt in Germany, got started in 1996, estimating that the build would take around a year. He finished in 2010, fourteen years later.

Originally, Krohn wanted to make something like Ostring’s universal cockpit, but ditched the idea to make a unit more like a Boeing 737 (he’s ended up with a 737/F-16 hybrid). It’s never really taken over his life, he says, but at times he “literally spent every free minute either building or thinking about how to build a component.”

Weirdly, none of the guys have an engineering background – they’re just good with this sort of thing.

Hitman puts his talent down to his grandfather being a carpenter – impressive since he built every component from scratch himself, from the chassis to the pedals to the gearstick, all from going by old pictures of the P34. He notes, too, that he had a chance to measure the actual car afterwards and found that his estimates were already pretty much spot on.

Ostring says he just gets on with

building when he needs to, but works as an arcade machine technician so is pretty good with wiring and switches, while Krohn works in the financial sector – far, far removed from building military cockpits. And what this lack of engineering background probably explains, is how little each know about the financing behind their projects.

“Cost? Huge!” Hitman has probably the most precise figures of the three.

“I reckon I spent close to €8,000 on this rig. That’s a lot. However, close to €3,000 was really an investment in tools, upgrading the workspace

and commuting the 40 miles to and from the workspace during those three years. Around €2,500 went into raw materials and the other €2,500 I spent on the force feedback solution.”

He refers to the part of the mechanics that provide the user with realistic vibrations during use.

When Ostring is asked how much his universal cockpit has cost, he just laughs. “That’s a good question, it’s been over a long period of time. I didn’t build all this at once. Originally it was just one monitor, the radios were hard mounted in there and

082 _ GAMING RIGS

cash on this contraption – only I know where every cable goes – so I guess, the whole money-making thing is rather hypothetical.”

that was it. As it’s evolved over the years I’ve added a little bit here and there, and then this last year I really ramped it up. To build this from scratch including the projector and everything, I would say you would probably end up spending like, three to four grand, I dunno. Then I have go-flight modules, which alone are probably something in the neighbourhood of $2,500-$2,800.”

Krohn works in the financial sector, and the ease with which he throws around big numbers is startling: “I did not count the dollars, but I think I spent fifteen hundred per year on average during the construction phase. Once I was offered $50,000 for the cockpit, but it did not cross my mind to sell. If I count all the hours I spent building it, a price of around $100,000 would be more adequate. But, I am aware of the fact that no one would spend that much

The Best A Man Can Get One of the most interesting and passionate points that comes up when talking to any of the guys is from a simple question – what attracts them to ‘simming’? What is it about these games that’s caused them to make them ‘better’ through these elaborate building projects?

“Simply put: driving fast!” Hitman enthuses. “Ever since the arrival of the PC, I’ve been interested in racing games. My love for real racing will have been a factor, and I will go as far as to say that racing games have acted as a catalyst for my interest in the real thing. Both real historic racing and simracing have since grown into a passion of mine. Personally, I see simracing as a tool to approach the feeling of driving a racing car as closely as possible. In that light, I strive for the best possible representation of a racing car, especially by improving the hardware required: building a cockpit, pedals, shifter, and using a projector for the best possible immersion.”

Krohn has a much more serene response: “I guess, in the beginning it

was just the idea of being ‘up there’.

I had a fascination with flying since I can remember. Once I actually learnt to fly, it was the new perspective, and the feeling of limitless freedom.”

Freedom is an interesting idea – it’s a touchstone for people who are into aviation, but when that ‘flying’ is in a basement it must be something different. Is it possible that Krohn actually feels more free in his sim than when flying real planes (both he and Ostring are qualified pilots), because he can recreate any situation he wants? “Yes,” he says unequivocally.

“The sim allows me to fly when I want, where I want. I can fly inside the Grand Canyon, under the Golden Gate Bridge or do a Top Gun-style tower fly-by – all without having my licence revoked.” There are freedoms from real-world administration too.

“Real-life ATC [air traffic control] can be a drag – this is why there are two pilots in a commercial plane. My sim incorporates an elaborate ATC simulation, but I admit that sometimes I fly the 737 without any interference from the simulated ground – just roaming the blue yonder.”

For Ostring, though, it seems to be more about practice – he enjoys his sim, sure, but the way he talks about it makes it sound more like a learning tool than something he does just for fun. “I really like flying. I always liked it when I was a kid, and Flight Simulator was probably one of the very first PC games I ever played. But, as the game grew in recent years, it became more and more of a passion.

Five or six years ago it was pretty rudimentary, but I started using it to practise instrument procedures, so when there are times that I might not get to fly for real for a while and I want to stay proficient, I use this to keep my skills up.”

In talking about their different reasons, you start to understand that while Ostring, Hitman and Krohn

083

have each built something to fill a gap, they’ve actually succeeded in fulfilling their deeper aims. Ostring’s machine is doing the exact job it was meant for – actually simulating flight. Both pilots and race drivers use simulations in training, but the realisation that what someone has built privately in their own house can do just as good a job is incredible.

“It’s pretty close,” is how Krohn replies when asked about how accurate to real flight his sim manages to get. “On a number of occasions I was allowed in the jumpseat on a real 737, so I’ve seen with my own eyes how the approach into a big airport looks and feels in reality. My cockpit is eerily similar – for a home-made contraption, that is. The same is true for flight at cruising altitude.”

“There’s one thing that none of them do really accurately,” says Ostring about commercial and home sims.

“They don’t give you the feel of flying and landing an aeroplane, per se.

“In my quest for more realism, the construction of a genuine cockpit was inescapable”

But what you can use them for is instrument practise – that’s where you’re flying in the clouds with no outside reference to the ground, flying solely on instruments and that right there is where the sim has already paid for itself, preventing me from having to actually rent a plane and go out and fly for that sort of stuff, to keep current with it.”

It’s easy to sneer at people like Ostring, Hitman and Krohn – people who have invested literally countless hours into a project, striving for perfection, for it to be the best it possibly can be and, ultimately, only getting close. What they’re creating is never going to be the real thing – it’s always going to be a simulation of a more complex reality. But, to trivialise that is to miss the point.

“Here’s the way I would look at it,” concludes Ostring. “Anybody who’s into simulation usually, they’re doing it to try and get an experience that you very rarely get in real life.” These guys have gotten pretty close, relatively, on a shoestring. Even Krohn, valuing his sim at a hundred thousand dollars,

has paid a vast amount less than what it takes to buy an actual 737, or an F-16 – and his setup is extreme.

Plus, like with the P34 that Hitman modelled his cockpit on, sometimes doing something a bit special is more important than doing something perfectly. A lot of racing fans couldn’t instantly recall who won the ‘77 Grand Prix, but ask them about the P34 and they’ll tell you about it with a smile.

The car, and the idea behind it, had heart and ambition, something else recreated by these ambitious home builds. Ostring basically got carried away and ended up building his fully customisable cockpit. Krohn has spent 14 years on a single project because, for him, to fly in a proper cockpit is the only logical thing to do. Hitman built a P34 because he loved the “out of the box” thinking behind it. They all did these things because, even when knowing it was going to take forever and never be perfect, they wanted to try it. While they could have just bought something from some supplier – what they’ve ended up with is uniquely theirs and full of heart.

PC version coming June 15th

086 _ ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES

The State of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) stand distinct from other types of game in that they can span any and all mediums, genres and methods – yet they remain relatively unknown even to hardcore gamers

by Joe Martin

I

t’s mid-April and London is hot and drizzly as two people I’ve only just met blithely watch a man in leather armour tie my hands behind my back. One of them, a fashionably coiffed girl called Sophie, giggles as he does it.

With the knots secured the armoured man falls in behind his captain; an elf named Iorveth, who had previously been my favourite character from CD Projekt Red’s epic RPG, The Witcher 2. I say ‘previously’ because right now he’s looking at me with contempt, spitting as he talks and rudely demanding to know what we’re doing in ‘his domain’. He says he’ll have us butchered if we try anything funny. Sophie stops laughing.

There’s a short silence in which we don’t know who’s going to talk, then my other companion, Matthew, puts himself forward. He tells Iorveth that the three of us are fugitives, framed for murdering the king and we’ve come to him for help. “We need help,” he says. “Um, please.”

The soldier sniggers wickedly and twirls a sword in my direction, anticipating violence while Iorveth

adjusts the red bandana that covers half his face and laughs openly. Behind my back, I start to experimentally strain against the knots.

“It’s much easier to get lost in an alternate reality the first time you play an ARG,” Michael Anderson tells me from his office in Philadelphia. “That first time you go through, so many of the things which eventually start to seem trite are so fresh and new.”

Michael points to the first ARG he followed as an example. It was 2004, he was a student and, along with some

friends, was throwing a party during one of the presidential debates. Over the course of the event he noticed something strange; that many of the posters and placards in the crowd didn’t seem linked to any of the candidates involved.

“Some of the people at the debate were holding posters with a picture of a bee on them, for some odd reason,” says Michael – who at the time didn’t think much of it. It was only later that week when he read an article in The New York Times that he realised

087

those posters related to the now-infamous Halo 2 ARG, IloveBees.

Played out across the US and spanning multiple different platforms, IloveBees tasked participants with helping an AI from the future by cracking codes to find payphones across the country. Famously, one player in Florida even stayed by a phone to receive a call as Hurricane Frances closed in around him – though it was the accompanying audio drama that appealed to Michael more than the real-life adventure.

“The payphones seemed like a cool gimmick, but it was the six-hour audio play which really hooked me on the concept,” says Michael. “That was my introduction to ARGs.” Eight years later, Michael runs the largest online news source for ARG players across the world, ARGN.com, with the support of a dozen regular

088 _ ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES

contributors and editors who help him track all manner of transmedia events.

He off-handedly references a dozen other ARGs as we talk – Subservient Chicken, The Beast, HashTagKiller – and points to an upcoming convention he’ll be attending too.

There are even some games he’s played more than once – and the difference between replayable and limited run ARGs is something he’s particularly interested in at the moment.

“Replayability is the aspect a lot of veteran developers are trying to crack at the moment, because therein lies scalability... but what draws a lot of people to ARGs is the belief that their actions can have a direct impact on the story,” says Michael. “That can remain in replayable games in the form of story trees and so on, but it becomes a lot more limited...”

I point out to him that his continued closeness to ARG communities – and particularly his replaying of existing games – suggests he’s not as jaded as his earlier comments implied. He concedes that, yes, his default state is still one of excited anticipation, even now. There’s simply too many new ideas to get bored and developers are constantly presenting new ways to advance the medium.

“When someone finds out about a new ARG, we refer to it as ‘finding

the rabbit hole’ as a nod to Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass,” says Michael. It’s an apt name for it because, once you’ve found the rabbit hole, you feel just like Alice – compelled to delve deeper forever. into the rabbit hole Lady LaFayette rises from the bathtub rim, drops her shawl to the floor and delicately steps over the candles

littering the tavern basement. In a few steps she’s uncomfortably close and stands with one hand on the centre of my chest. How would I feel about bathing with a Baroness, she asks.

This time it’s Matthew who giggles.

I gulp, politely refuse, and explain that this may not be what Iorveth had in mind when he sent us dashing across Shoreditch to find her. As soon as I mention the elf’s name though she backs away and the mood takes a sour turn. She screams for silence.

Matthew stops laughing.

There’s a moment of tense, awkward quiet then Lady LaFayette launches into a violent tirade. Accusations and paranoia fill the room until a cloaked man bursts in, shoulders through and declares the Lady is under a curse.

It’s that which has caused her odd behaviour he says in what I think is an implied insult to my attractiveness.

He insists we help him break the curse and find out what’s going on – we must fetch him some magic herbs.

089

All eyes turn to Sophie, who reaches into her bag and pulls out the herb pouch we’ve been filling since we left Iorveth. She glances at Matthew and I for confirmation, then hands it over. The wizard passes a gold coin in return and rolls up his sleeves. experience points “ARGs are open to a lot of problems,” admits Ben Mason of The Tom Sawyer Effect – the developer behind The Witcher 2’s ARG. Lots of things can go wrong and beyond that there are limits on what you can feasibly do in the real-world anyway; what’s presented as a wizard is actually just an actor in a cloak, after all. You can promise magic, but you can’t actually show it.

“We can get away with a lot of stuff at the moment because the idea of an ARG – of being a real person in a story with real choices – is just so new to many people,” says Ben. “As we move forward with the genre though, we’ll need to focus more on the types of experience we can offer and consider how to refine them.”

Getting that real-life experience right is vital to the future of the medium because, according to Ben, it’s that which should be the main reward – not the financial incentives which some other ARGs favour. There’s nothing wrong with offering up physical prizes, he says – The Witcher 2 ARG let players collect gold coins to swap for free drinks later on – but being part of the adventure should be enough on its own.

“Videogames are a paradigm in that respect,” Ben says, who first got started in ARG design through marketing games such as Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. “You don’t actually earn anything by finishing a videogame; it’s about the personal experience and the social reward of being able to brag about it.”

That combination of novelty and

shareability is likely what’s caused the format to be used so much for marketing purposes in recent years, as big companies are always looking for ways to engage audiences and generate word-of-mouth. Yet what’s striking about using ARGs as advertising is that, so long as the game is fun to play, participants don’t seem to mind how cynically they’re being manipulated.

“It’s all about being able to play a role in a story,” says Michael, again pointing back to Halo 2’s IloveBees.

There was a player during that game who spun off an entirely new plot line through his involvement with a specific character – and it’s being present to that event which Michael remembers, not the promotion of Microsoft’s blockbuster.

“Personally, for me a lot of the enjoyment of ARGs comes from this – working with other people and being impressed with the creativity and puzzle-solving abilities of my fellow players.”

Being able to predict how participants use these abilities is one of the hardest things about designing an ARG however, as there’s no way to effectively playtest a game prior to launch. Instead, where conventional game designers

use rules to cultivate the player’s experience, ARG developers have to embrace an improvisational approach. Ben points to one of the first ARGs he worked on as an example – a promotional game for John Connolly’s The Whisperers.

“That took ten weeks to plan and was our most intricate game to date, because the idea was that there were multiple factions in the game that players could join up with” says Ben. “We had to create a lot of blogs, Twitter accounts and LinkedIn profiles for players to interact with. Creating back stories, but keeping them loose enough to allow flexibility when we needed it. That’s the key, really; without flexibility players will feel like they’re stuck in a loop, like in most RPGs where characters can only give out certain information.”

He does warn that this improvisational power does bring risks, however; just because you can improvise and help funnel players through, doesn’t always mean you should. Some players have the best experiences when they miss content or fail to solve everything, because it makes their story that little bit different. It’s all about understanding what players want to get out of the game in the first place, then tweaking it in real-time to match that expectation.

“We can get away with a lot of stuff at the moment because the idea of an ARG – of being a real person in a story with real choices – is just so new to many people”

090 _ ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES

“One of the games I played, called Maddison Atkins, was actually a reboot of itself,” remembers Michael.

“In the first game players didn’t piece everything together in time and the main characters died as a result.

Game over.

“When the game started up a second time it started out the same, but quickly took a different path because of how it was played... we were now poignantly aware of the stakes involved.” prepare yourself “The witcher will not fall easily,” warns the elf, leading us to a selection of weapons laid out in the hall.

Axes, daggers, clubs; I watch as the somewhat stocky Matthew chooses a longsword and gives it an experimental sweep. I can’t help but laugh when it almost hits Sophie in the eye.

“When he does, you’ll need to use this poisoned knife,” the elf takes a bundle from his pocket, unwrapping it to reveal a wicked looking dagger.

He shoots me a look that says we’ll only have one chance to get

this right. I stop laughing. There’s a moment of tense silence, then Sophie sighs heavily as she takes the dagger.

The elf nods, points down the hall at a shattered door propped in a grimy frame, then wishes us luck and heads downstairs. Matthew looks at Sophie and I questioningly before he opens the door, as if to say; Is this it?

I grab a sword and nod. This is it. story time “Traditional ARGs are all about conspiracy and twists and cults,” Jim Babb tells me, explaining that he doesn’t think they always need to be that way. The ones he’s designed with his studio, Awkward Hug, are a perfect example of how the ARG

format can handle entirely different types of content.

“The problem with those sorts of stories is that they appeal only to a very specific audience and you then have to push down that path deeper and deeper to keep exciting them.

So, when we designed our game, Socks Inc., we set out to broaden ourselves away from that... That game is designed more with family and children in mind.”

The decision to appeal to children is immediately obvious when you visit the Socks Inc. website and see the array of sock puppets filling the screen. These are the characters of the game and when the ARG starts you’re invited to join them in working at a factory which makes ‘Believe’ – all you have to do first is make a sock puppet avatar of your own.

“The idea is to be less serious and more playful,” says Jim, “because if you’re being playful and childish then it enables you to approach storytelling in an entirely different way – thus giving wholly new experiences to players.” Combining a sense of newness with experiences that audiences consider meaningful is the mark of any good game according to Jim – no matter what format it takes.

“ARGs are inherently about being

091

novel,” he says. “Every time you tell someone who doesn’t play ARGs about how you’ve broken the fourth wall and played games without controllers or touchscreens... it just blows their mind. This whole genre is all about continuing to do that with cool new ways to tell stories.”

Again, telling and generating interesting stories is the point that the genre is being driven to, though Jim chooses to approach that goal from a more absurdist path than The Witcher 2 ARG. Where that game uses real-life movements and a serious fantasy setting, Socks Inc. takes place mainly online and is both absurd and contemporary – but the goal of creating compelling stories is the same for both.

“You can come at it from a number of different approaches,” says Ben. “There are games like Zombie LARP, for example, where you’re given NERF guns and chased by zombies. In those games there are rules about how you become a zombie and how you survive, but their foundational ethos is that it’s not about winning. It’s not about getting to the helicopter. It’s about the experience and having a story to tell your friends.” end game I hand a gold coin over to the barmaid and carry my drink back to the table.

Matthew has just finished explaining to another group how we defeated the evil witcher and now they’re looking at Sophie as she argues that meeting

in these games it’s not about winning. it’s about the experience and having a story to tell

Iorverth was lots more fun. Matthew remembers and starts to laugh.

“You looked so scared when they tied your hands up,” Sophie tells me as I settle into my chair.

There’s a moment of quiet while I take a sip of my drink, but I put the glass on the table and reply that it was worth it in order to get to the Baroness. Matthew chuckles until Sophie gives him a withering look.

Soon, we’re all yelling over the top of each other as we recall our favourite parts of the night – each story getting

grander than the one before as we work through out communal pot of gold. Some people talk about winning a game of poker dice with the beggars, while others poke fun at themselves for getting lost while looking for herbs.

As the night draws to a close, my phone rings and I answer it to find my girlfriend on the other end. Am I having a good time?

“Lots, but I’ll be home soon,” I say as I empty my last glass with a single gulp. “And I’ve got one hell of a story for you when I do.”

092 _ GAME DEV TAXES

Give Us A

Break What role can government-funded tax breaks have on a country’s bid to establish itself as a leading player within the global videogame development scene?

by Martin Korda

$

115 billion. It’s a figure that’s hard to ignore, especially in a time when the global economy is floundering in the depths of an unprecedented slump. But according to boffins at technology advisory firm Gartner Inc, $115 billion is what the videogames industry will be worth by 2015. It’s little wonder then that games development has been identified by several countries’ governments as key components to their nations’ economic growth.

By incentivising the establishment and growth of videogame developers within their borders through generous tax break incentive schemes, these governments have created a mutually beneficial financial framework to support both the growth of the games industry and that of the nation’s overall economy.

Taking its lead from the likes of Canada, USA and France, the United Kingdom recently announced in its 2012 Budget plans to introduce tax breaks for UK-based game developers, with exact details set to

be announced in autumn 2012 after an extensive consultation period with key industry players. The UK games industry’s battle to convince the ruling bodies of the potential benefits of game tax breaks has been

093

â&#x20AC;&#x153;We can say that quebec could be considered one of the top places in the world for games developmentâ&#x20AC;?

Pierre Proulx, Alliance Numerique

094 _ GAME DEV TAXES

WARNING SIGNS

Despite the many benefits tax breaks offer game developers, there are also associated risks.

“A difficult lesson was learned by the Australian industry when the exchange rate shifted from being favourable for production to not,” warns Antony Reed, Chief Executive Officer of the Game Developers’ Association of Australia.

“It’s an example that can be applied to tax breaks. Governments don’t want or like tax relief programs that run in perpetuity and a simple change in government could see the end of a generous scheme. Any industry that develops a dependence on tax breaks will wind up in trouble eventually.”

Supermassive Games’ senior producer Ollie Purkiss also warns of potential pitfalls. “The focus of games development in the UK may change as a result of the proposed tax breaks if the criteria applied to them encourages that change, but if tax breaks aren’t given to studios that are working in an outsource capacity for projects based in another country, then that could encourage studios here to be used for building IP. However whether that is purely positive is hard to tell – building IP is an exciting thing to do, but money coming into the country for any type of development is a positive thing and studios need to make sure they are not chasing the tax breaks at the expense of other types of business.”

a long and challenging one, a fight that has been spearheaded by TIGA, The Independent Game Developers’ Association, a leading trade association that represents the UK’s games industry.

“I knew in some respects that the worse the economy was the better it was for our case for Games Tax Relief,” explains TIGA CEO Dr. Richard Wilson. “There are only so many ways we can promote growth. It’s not as though the government and the opposition have a locker full of policy ideas. The fact that we had a concrete policy proposal that was researched, backed-up and ready to go probably stood us in quite a good position given the wider economic malaise.”

Wilson and his allies presented the government with compelling evidence that the UK was drastically falling behind many tax-incentivised overseas centres of game development. “We had a lot of anecdotal evidence in relation to the brain drain of talented game development staff that was drifting overseas,” he explains. “41% of the

jobs that had been lost between 2009 and 2011 [in the UK videogame sector] relocated to Canada or the United States.”

But the UK government’s move appears to possess more ambition than a mere cursory nod to a burgeoning industry. “The Plan for Growth published in 2011 identified the creative industries as having the potential to drive significant growth in the UK, prompting the Government to set a new ambition of making the UK the technology centre of Europe,” revealed a Treasury spokesperson who spoke with us regarding the UK government’s wider plan.

FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT The announcement has certainly come as a boon to the UK games development scene, which has suffered from an economic downturn that has taken a heavy toll on developers. A series of studio closures in 2011 – THQ Digital Warrington and Codemasters Guildford to name but two – further weakened the country’s position.

Despite these setbacks, the UK remains

095

on a solid footing from which to move forward thanks to the continued success of world renowned studios such as Rockstar North, TT Games, Rocksteady and Lionhead Studios.

The UK government’s tax plans are already starting to bear fruit, with Microsoft recently announcing the establishment of a new London-based Xbox development studio. Wilson believes this is only the start. “I think this will lead to a renaissance of the UK development sector,” he posits.

“With tax relief it’ll be like an entirely new playing field. The UK has an excellent, skilled workforce, some great universities that provide a lot of highly skilled people to work in the videogame industry, very experienced management teams and a long heritage of game development. To have the tax relief on top of that will have a number of implications. Overseas investors and global publishers will be reassessing their investment plans.”

Based on his organisation’s meetings and ongoing discussions with the UK government and on the Consultation on Creative Sector Tax Relief document released in June by Her Majesty’s Treasury, Wilson believes that the UK can expect similar tax breaks to those for the UK film industry (approximately 20-25%), which would position the nation’s videogame development tax incentives as amongst the most generous in the world. “If we get that level of tax relief,” explains Wilson, “I think it’ll stand us in really good stead as the talent we have in the UK is amongst the best in the world. It will let the UK games development industry compete on a far more level playing field. These levels would be very comparable to those in the United States and better than in France where the government offers 20% tax credit.”

CULTURE CLASH Despite the proposals, UK game developers could still find themselves

“Australia has nearly ten times the number of studios it had at the end of 2009” antony reed, gdaa

unable to qualify for funding due to stringent EU stipulations, under which companies will have to pass a ‘Cultural Test’ akin to tax-incentivised game developers in France. Although the details are yet to be confirmed, it’s likely that for a game to benefit from tax breaks it will need to attain a number of points in several categories.

“You could get points if your game was based on some aspect of British or European cultural heritage e.g. a game based on a film, book or television series, history, myths and legends, sport, etc.” explains Wilson. “You could also score points for your game being a new intellectual property (IP) rather than a sequel, or if it uses some technological innovation and if your key staff are based in the UK. A game will need to get points in all of these categories, the more they can get the better.” With only around 45% of games in France passing this test, companies eager to exploit the UK’s imminent introduction of tax breaks would do well to be wary of these potential pitfalls.

While tax breaks certainly offer an excellent foundation on which to build, Supermassive Games’ senior producer Ollie Purkiss believes they are only the first step if the UK is to re-establish itself as a major global player. “Tax breaks are a nice cherry on the cake of UK development,” he says, “but the main reasons companies would develop their games here are to do with the people that work here. We have a good pedigree of development talent – collectively and individually – and that is a real strength. We need to ensure we take care of that by trying to keep our talent here, and by ensuring that the next generation of developers is also world-class.”

GLOBAL PLAYERS Despite the promising rhetoric emanating from Whitehall, even with the proposed tax breaks the UK will have a long journey ahead if it’s to compete with several key game development regions across the globe. Fuelled by generous government research and development grants, cities such as Seattle have flourished, as evidenced by its contingent of world renowned game developers such as Bungie, Valve Software, Gas Powered Games and Monolith. But even Seattle, with its deep talent pool and R&D tax incentives cannot compete with

096 _ GAME DEV TAXES

Quebec. The French-Canadian region stands head and shoulders above its competitors, offering 30% tax breaks for eligible labour expenditure relating to a game’s development, and a further 7.5% bonus for the production of a French-language version of the product.

“The program funds up to $25,000 per job created in the sector for five years,” reveals Pierre Proulx, general manager of Alliance Numerique, which serves as the business network for Quebec’s new media and interactive digital content. The introduction of these tax incentives, followed by Ubisoft’s establishment of its Montreal development office in 1997, quickly led to Quebec becoming one of the world’s most dominant games development regions. It is able to attract and finance the finest talent and the creation of numerous giant development teams including Eidos Montreal – responsible for last year’s hit multi-platform RPG Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Bioware Montreal and EA Montreal.

“We can say that we could be considered one of the top places in the world for games development,” says Proulx, although he also argues that tax incentives alone would not have been enough to achieve this.

“If you go deeper, you will see that the presence of complementary industries such as digital animation, film making, television, aeronautics and telecommunications is a determining factor in the development of the videogames industry in Quebec. Indeed, the concentration of a specialized workforce allows the weaving of formal and informal networks that stimulate exchange, mobility and creativity between local companies. We also have to keep in mind that the synergy between the major actors in the industry is quite unique in the world. Many have deep business relations among them. With small studios as well creating a dynamic metropolitan centre on a human scale... that has created a satisfactory balance between a stimulating career and an enjoyable life!”

“The UK has an excellent workforce, some great universities, experienced management teams and a long heritage of game development” Dr. Richard Wilson, tiga

Evidently, tax break incentives are only one component in a region’s game development growth, with Montreal’s vibrant, inclusive games community and cosmopolitan city streets that buzz with bars and restaurants also playing a key role in the acquisition and retention of talent.

But according to Proulx, even the mighty Quebec still possesses room for improvement: “The tax credits are not stimulating enough for the indies.

For them, new initiatives that would focus on the financing of new IPs would be more effective in order to help them to be more successful in the development of new titles.”

097

OZ FEST Perhaps inspiration can be found across the Pacific in Australia. Despite the country’s lack of a bespoke tax relief system for videogame development, games companies can benefit from a non industry-specific tax program consisting of an ‘R&D Tax Incentive’ that enables developers to claim 45% of R&D expenditure and supportive R&D back from the government. With a minimum R&D spend of AU$20,000, even smaller indie developers are able to be innovative and create new IPs. Josh Birse, a producer at Australian indie developer Current Circus, is acutely aware of the impact the R&D tax incentives have had on his company. “At Current Circus our focus is developing innovative content using depth camera technology,” he describes.

“The hardware is relatively new, and developers are still struggling to create stand-out games (in our opinion) that don’t resort to gimmicks during gameplay. We have a successful R&D partnership with PrimeSense where we were working with its hardware prior to commercial release. The R&D tax offset has been an invaluable incentive for our company, as it has allowed us to engage in rigorous R&D without commercial

pressures that can sometimes affect project development. Consequently this has built up the company’s expertise and resources and positions us at the forefront of depth camera development.”

After a lean period in 2009, the Australian videogame industry has been reinvigorated by the country’s burgeoning indie gaming development scene, fuelled by government R&D tax incentives. “The Australian industry is going through a substantial growth phase,” explains Antony Reed, Chief Executive Officer of the Game Developers’ Association of Australia.

“Many experienced developers have elected to establish their own smaller studios here and Australia now has nearly ten times the number of studios it had at the end of 2009, most of which are small, indie developers.”

As with Quebec, Reed believes Australia’s success has been further fuelled by the creation of a lively and inclusive environment in which talent can flourish, with larger and smaller Australian studios cooperating to create exciting products and a true sense of community within the games development fraternity. “The publisher owned studios are strong, but they’re also keenly aware of the

GAME CHANGER

While the ability for developers to create games at a reduced cost is the obvious overriding benefit of tax breaks, TIGA’s Richard Wilson believes their influence also has a cultural resonance.

Speaking of the impact of the proposed UK government game development tax breaks, Wilson states that, “In many respects videogames will be put on a par with other cultural products like film. It’s recognition of videogames as cultural products and something that can be socially and educationally beneficial as well as for entertainment purposes.”

However, it’s not a view shared by Chief Executive Officer of the Game Developers’ Association of Australia Antony Reed. “Tax breaks are typically discussed at an industrial level and have little bearing on the public perceptions of the global games industry. Certainly a successful product release might prompt a government or corporate announcement of the benefits of having an incentive scheme in place, but it is the games and the players that dictate the public perceptions of the industry.”

development happening around them. The local industry is very community-oriented even between states, so there’s a lot of engagement between creators; we’ve moved from the ‘don’t copy my homework’ mentality to ‘how can I help?’”

It’s clear that for all the benefits created by game development tax breaks, financial incentives alone are insufficient for any nation seeking to take its development scene to a higher level. The creation of thriving centres of games development are equally reliant on a system that nurtures new talent and the establishment of a creative and culturally appealing environment to attract and retain talent. Quebec and Seattle are testament to this, as is Australia’s rebirth as a centre of games development and innovation, and any nation seeking to follow suit would do well to look at tax break incentives as a first step rather than the sole solution in its bid to claim a larger slice of a multi-billion dollar, ever expanding industry.

098 _ CONTEMPLATIVE GAMING

Contemplative

Gaming

Sometimes itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s as important in a gamescape to pause over the fire button and smell the virtual roses. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d be surprised just how much you can gain

by Colette Bennett

099

T

he year is 1976. You are standing in front of an arcade cabinet with your hands wrapped around a large, glossy black steering wheel. On the screen in front of you, black and white pixels represent the car you are driving, primed to run down screaming gremlins who teem on the streets around you. You don’t know what Grand Theft Auto is yet, but you’re playing its precursor – Death Race.

This old racer seems anything but offensive if we peer back at it through a tunnel of years. However, at the time of its release, it caused a stir that we are now all too familiar with in the current space of gaming culture: concerned voices complaining that games offer a way to enact violence. The US current affairs program 60 Minutes featured Death Race in a segment about the psychological impact of videogames.

Apparently, a lot of gamers enjoyed driving at top speed and protecting the world from the claws of monsters, but people who didn’t play games were

already raising an eyebrow.

In the past ten years, the media focus on violence in gaming has reached a fever pitch, with little attention devoted to games that aim to accomplish the opposite. Dozens of studies have been done about how violent gaming correlates to real life aggressive behaviour, although establishments such as The Harvard School For Medical Health and The British Medical Journal still have yet to be able to draw any conclusive evidence. As violent crime rates continue to drop since the 1990s, it continually becomes more difficult to blame people who unwind by stabbing demons for a few hours. Besides, stabbing demons is fun.

Even so, it’s not uncommon to hear people pointing the finger at games, even when their connection to an unfortunate event was tenuous at best.

As graphics improve and the capability to make games more and more realistic increases, we’ve seen games that portray violence do so more realistically

than ever. Brutality has littered the film screen for years, but a clamour of voices claim that the difference lies in the ability to ‘play’ as a character who commits illegal or otherwise immoral acts. In reality, there is no difference.

Sitting in the movie theatre can be every bit as impactful as holding the controller – in the end, our minds have to motivate us to act.

Defining Contemplation For every hundred gamers who adore evenings spent gunning down teammates and enemies alike in Call of Duty, there are a dozen who are seeking different ways to engage in the virtual

games that fit the contemplative mould are thoughtprovoking projects that have content that’s relevant to adults

100 _ CONTEMPLATIVE GAMING

space. A new movement is on the rise, and the further it evolves, the more it shows us that gamers crave more than just bloodshed and demolition. That movement is contemplative gaming.

Contemplation is commonly known as an act of paying attention. The word is also defined as “a concentration on spiritual things as a form of private devotion.” These words seem fitting for use in a temple, but gaming hardly seems like a spiritual practice – how can double wielding giant guns with

a cigar jammed in the side of your mouth possibly have anything in common with communication with a sense of spirituality?

However, for gamers who have known the bliss of ‘falling into the groove’ while playing the fastest levels of Tetris or blasting Through The Fire and Flames on Guitar Hero 3 without missing a single note, they might be able to more closely relate to thoughts of a near-meditative state. And even recent casual titles like Farmville and

Angry Birds offer their own levels of trance-like concentration. They lull us away from reality, but still present a sense of comfort, like falling asleep listening to the sound of the ocean.

So, contemplative gaming is nonviolent. But beyond that, what defines it? Jenova Chen, co-founder of thatgamecompany and the designer behind several games that promote meditative themes, believes that games that fit the contemplative mould are thought-provoking projects that have

101

content that’s relevant to adults.

“The intention behind each project varies,” he says, “but the common thread among all of the games we have produced is to push the boundary of what a videogame can communicate in the emotional spectrum.”

Each of thatgamecompany’s releases has achieved that goal successfully.

Cloud, a game Chen created while in college, told the tale of a boy in the hospital who soared through this sky in his mind. Chen went on to form thatgamecompany with co-founder Kellee Santiago and continue to embroider on the ‘Zen’ genre, signing a deal with Sony for an exclusive three-game contract for the PlayStation Network.

Chen cited Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘Flow theory’ as the core of their next release, Flow. The theory itself states that human beings are happiest when they are in a state of complete absorption with the current moment – the same practice Buddhists refer to as ‘mindfulness’. In the game, the player becomes a multi-segmented snake-like creature which swims upward through a milky black space, absorbing other organisms as it goes in order to grow. As Chen puts it, “Flow was an experiment to see whether that concept could work for gamers and non- gamers alike.”

Flow was well-received, garnering millions of downloads and taking home the Game Developers Choice award for best downloadable title in 2008. After decades of gaming in a space that focused on high-energy, brain churning activity, gamers were responding to experiences that promoted peace. thatgamecompany followed its lead with its next release, Flower, in which the player swept over a green landscape collecting petals and bringing flowers back to life. While Flow introduced the concept of mindfulness, Flower gave gamers the chance to turn that

the common thread among all of the games we have produced is to push the boundary of what a videogame can communicate in the emotional spectrum concentration to action. “By making positive changes to the world rather than violence or destruction,” Chen describes, “we aimed to make the player feel peaceful, and also in touch with nature and life.” thatgamecompany’s most recent release, Journey, took all these concepts and introduced a new theme, sending the player on a pilgrimage to reach the apex of a glowing mountaintop in the distance.

It was the first of their games to feature multiplayer, but took a very different approach: there was no way to choose who you played with, and there was no way to send in-game messages to one another. Whether you made your journey alone and chose to leave the people you saw behind or chose to wait for them to walk alongside you was left entirely up to the player.

Chen says that Journey’s aim was to build an emotional connection between players, curating a spirit of trust and friendship and attempting

to change the attitude of aggression currently present in the world of online gaming. “We designed the entire journey for two players to experience together,” he explains.

“They will experience the passage of a lifetime, from innocent childhood, adventurous teenage, roads of trails in the adulthood and the transcendence in the end.” thatgamecompany believes that selfreflection is one of the few ways you can entertain an adult, while younger people are content to run ‘n’ gun.

“That’s why we are very keen to craft an emotional catharsis. Only by giving an unexpected strong emotion can you shock the audience and put them in a mental state where they think about things they keep ignoring. We believe that is good and healthy for our players.”

Should Contemplative Games Attempt to be Games?

While thatgamecompany has made considerable headway into the contemplative gaming space, it isn’t the only one to do so. As more developers work with models that are based less on action and achievement and more on contemplation and what we take away from them, they challenge us to learn to work with the medium differently.

As we move further into the era of digital gaming releases, we see

102 _ CONTEMPLATIVE GAMING

more ‘alternative’ offerings than ever before. Dear Esther, a first-person perspective adventure released this year, removed most of the familiar game mechanics altogether, leading the player to explore a world while simply listening to the game’s story through spoken dialogue. No item collecting necessary, just... listening.

But with these elements that we associate with gaming removed (such as item collection, killing monsters, and gathering points), can we still call these experiences games? Or are they another type of interactive entertainment altogether? What happens when we remove violence and conflict from the equation?

Timothy Welsh, Professor of Digital Humanities at Loyola University in New Orleans, believes that comparing ‘contemplative’ and ‘violent’ videogames against each other is an error in terminology.

“The word ‘violent’ would describe the content of a violent videogame, right? Call of Duty: Modern

Warfare is a violent videogame because it depicts violence onscreen,” says Welsh. “Journey, by contrast, doesn’t depict contemplation; players don’t ‘Press X to reflect wistfully’. Contemplative as a category would, I think, describe a kind of user-experience.”

Welsh says that rather than name contemplative gaming as a new genre, it is more about a style of play in games that can promote different states of mind than the

adrenaline rush we might gain from a racing or fighting game. But, he also believes that idea of games that reward contemplative play can have problematic connotations.

“Videogames are sets of affordances. They grant us a range of actions that elicit a range of responses. How one employs those actions and processes those responses is really up to the player.

Portal supports both imaginative reflection and speed runs. The Sims

103

can be a life simulator – as marketed – or it can just as easily become a game about an impatient, vengeful god. Even in Journey, players can reject the parable-driven attitude altogether and look for glitches, grief other players by sacrificing them to the scarf-eating monsters, try to do funny or weird things with their avatars, or really anything the environment allows.”

In other words, ultimately, it’s up to us what worlds we choose to create within the games we play, rather than wait for titles to come to us that present different experiences. This is surely a statement that many would argue the validity of. After all, we are consumers, and we are bound to have different kinds of experiences based on the stimulus we encounter. On the other hand, since gamers cite having a variety of different experiences, it may be that contemplative play can appear in all forms of games, even those that seem that they promote no sense of peace at all from the outside. When it comes to shooter-heavy titles, for instance, Welsh cites several instances in which these games offer more than just endless bullets.

“Violence can itself be an occasion for contemplative play. For all the awkwardness of the scene, the one great success of the No Russian sequence in Modern Warfare 2 was its ability to prompt FPS players to pause over the trigger button. Or, in a less controversial example, take the first reveal of the Capitol Building in Fallout 3. One certainly could ignore that monument of US democracy off in the distance and get right on to the mutant nuking. But it can also be an moment in which a player considers how Fallout’s alternative history compares to the current socio-political climate. This is the same game that introduced a slow-motion kill cam to highlight spectacular skull-shattering finishes,” Welsh says with a smile.

it is more about a style of play in games that can promote different states of mind than the adrenaline rush we might gain from a racing or fighting game Gaming as Escape, Gaming as a Return As the industry has grown and changed over the years, we’re seeing more adults than ever involved in the hobby – it’s left behind the concept of being ‘for children’ long ago. It’s also becoming clear that this new demographic needs a different type of gaming experience than the one our kids crave. Both generations can enjoy some of the same titles, but considering how different our lives are and how much free time we have to spare, one size definitely does not fit all.

Whether contemplative gaming is an all-new movement meant to speak to the hopes and dreams of the adults that play it, or merely an idea that can appear within the framework of the gaming structure we are used to entertaining ourselves within, it wields the power to impact us. With platforms like Steam making it easier than ever for indie developers to flesh out any ideas they choose and platforms like Ouya promising the

ability to make games “less expensive to make and less expensive to buy,” we come closer than ever to a space where games can be anything we want them to be. Fitting the mould of the $60 console release in order to make back the cost of production is no longer an object. The era of open source gaming is here – and it’s something to contemplate, indeed.

Games that give us the opportunity to tune out less and tune in more are something we need. As a society, we have more information available to us than ever, and even more is coming. We may not always have the hours available to consume the latest RPG, but whether we spend three hours or thirty, we crave media that has the ability to make us think, feel, and celebrate more than ever.

While gaming was once a throwaway experience we used to occupy time and provide entertainment, it has moved into the realm of leaving its signature on us permanently, something literature and film have long done with great success.

“Your interpretation of the game is more important than my intentions,” creator Jason Rohrer wrote in the intro to his side-scrolling life journey title, Passage. Perhaps this is the motto of the new age: that we way we think about games, rather than the games themselves, is the most important thing.

copyright Š 2012 monyo publishing ltd