Dan Cook and the value of academics

There’s a good piece in Gamasutra by Dan Cook talking about older game designers and the “rebellion” against them that seems to be going on among younger and/or indie designers. I’d recommend you read it.

That said, I was a bit disappointed by the comments. I feel like some people have missed the point. (Or maybe I have?)

It doesn’t seem like Daniel’s trying to argue that the schools are terrible, though he’s certainly making a backhanded case for certification. It seems to be more that there’s a tendency to treat older designers like Cook and Koster as a sort of Authority handing down Law About Games.

Koster’s “Not-A-Game” tendencies aside, that isn’t really how they see things. They’re a generation of tinkerers and wonderers, trying to feel things out, who made some mistakes, had some triumphs, and developed some ideas. They don’t believe that they have all the answers, nor that they’re Authorities to be obeyed or rebelled against…they just have insights and beliefs that come from a long history of design.

(And, as Cook said, the biggest failing of absolutely everybody involved in gaming is that they’re completely blind to history.)

Where I part ways with Cook is on the question of academics. He came across as dismissive. Yes, academic analysis can be dry and jargon-ish. It’s still valuable. Academics worth the name specialize in turning experience, data, and cases into theory. Sure, they may not be game designers, but that isn’t their job, any more than it’s the job of a military historian to strap on a broadsword and go carve up some knights.

I know I keep on banging on about the guy, but that’s one of the reasons I find Grant Tavinor’s work interesting. Yes, he’s an academic. Very much so. But because he’s an academic, his work does a good and careful job developing theories that seem to elude off-the-cuff designers. The reason why his definition of video games is so good…

X is a videogame if it is an artefact in a digital visual medium, is intended primarily as an object of entertainment, and is intended to provide such entertainment through the employment of one or both of the following modes of engagement: rule-bound gameplay or interactive fiction.

…is because he employed the theory of disjunctive definitions (where two things can be sufficient yet neither are necessary) in order to solve the knotty problem of whether games need to be systems-focused.

This definition doesn’t come from vacuum. It’s the culmination of a long and fairly dry essay about the nature of video games. It’s an end-point of a lot of careful, slow thought, instead of some sort of blinding insight. That’s why it works so well. Sometimes you have to take it slow and work it out.

Yes, it has jargon. Yes, it’s kinda tough going. Yes, the linked essay and Tavinor’s excellent book Art of Videogames can reveal the sort of reservations and cautions that you see in all good academic analysis. And, yes, reading Tadhg Kelly bang on in bite-sized bloggy chunks about characters-as-dolls and about how the Zinesters don’t get how tabletop proves that players only really care about systems is a lot easier.

But it’s  worth it.

Academics have their place. And, if the job’s done right, they don’t pretend to have all the answers. There’s room for rebels and discontent; in fact, the best academic writers and thinkers practically BEG for rebellion and discontent. They practically feed off it. Something to think about.

(Oh…and they love talking about history.)

STOP IT. Stop with the formalism thing. Stop it right now.

A very simple response comes to mind:

“Tadhg Kelly, please stop trying to tell me ’what games are’. To be extremely blunt, judging by both your site and your CV, I don’t think you’ve earned the right.”

Granted, I haven’t earned the right to tell anybody what they should think is or isn’t a game either. But I’m not trying to claim it. 

You know who HAS earned that right, though? Anna Anthropy. Remember her? The woman who’s supposed to be at the vanguard of the “zinesters”? Her output has been excellent. Lurid title or no, Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars demonstrated a clear mastery of simple, elegant, oldschool game design, and she went into no small amount of detail in explaining exactly how she employed that mastery. She’s done that over, and over, and over. She’s a good critic and a great designer.

If she’s calling stuff like Dys4ia a game, I’m going to be very reluctant to disagree with her, because she’s actually really good at making and judging the things.

The funny thing is that I’m not actually a gigantic fan of the anti-mainstream backlash. I get it, but I think that there’s more mastery and craft in mainstream than the “zinesters” are necessarily always willing to admit.  I also  don’t root my disagreement with Kelly in the political and identity elements of games as Anna does. (Though I do respect those responses.)

I’m simply not impressed by these attempts to turn games into empty systems of rules, and to straitjacket criticism by forcing critics to engage them solely as systems of rules. If that was EVER the case, it’s long over. It’s over in board games, it’s over in card games (CCGs are far more than their rules), and you’d best believe it’s over in video games.

If you want to know “what games are”, you don’t need Kelly. Go read Grant Tavinor for the definition of games:

X is a videogame if it is an artefact in a digital visual medium, is intended primarily as an object of entertainment, and is intended to provide such entertainment through the employment of one or both of the following modes of engagement: rule-bound gameplay or interactive fiction.

INTERACTIVE FICTION. “Rule-bound gameplay”… OR INTERACTIVE ‘EFFING FICTION.

This problem is solved. This discussion is OVER. Grant Tavinor solved it back in 2008. Now go do something productive.

Diablo 3 Auction House was “a mistake”. (Guess who WASN’T mistaken?)

So here’s Blizzard talking about the auction house on Joystiq:

[Diablo 3 Director Jay] Wilson said that before Blizzard launched the game, the company had a few assumptions about how the Auction Houses would work: He thought they would help reduce fraud, that they’d provide a wanted service to players, that only a small percentage of players would use it and that the price of items would limit how many were listed and sold.

But he said that once the game went live, Blizzard realized it was completely wrong about those last two points. It turns out that nearly every one of the game’s players (of which there are still about 1 million per day, and about 3 million per month, according to Wilson) made use of either house, and that over 50 percent of players used it regularly. That, said Wilson, made money a much higher motivator than the game’s original motivation to simply kill Diablo, and “damaged item rewards” in the game. While a lot of the buzz around the game attacked the real money Auction House, “gold does much more damage than the other one does,” according to Wilson, because more players use it and prices fluctuate much more.

A “mistake”, you say. “Everybody uses it”, you say. “made money a much higher motivator than killing Diablo”, you say. “Gold does much more damage”, you say.

What’s that phrase?

Oh.

Yeah.

F**KING NAILED IT. 

[D3 is a] CASH economy. In previous RPGs, you’d generally trade time and a little luck for your gear and capabilities. In a game like World of Warcraft, for example, there were stark limits on what you could buy; most high-level gear needed to be earned through gameplay. Not in Diablo 3. Everything can be legitimately bought and sold in Diablo 3, whether on the Auction House or just between players. Absolutely everything.

Gear? Just buy it with gold. Enhancements (gems, in this case?) Gold. Weapons? Gold. It doesn’t matter whether it’s early-game magic gear or end-game legendary weapons dripping with power, all of it can be yours if you have enough gold. And, sure, there’s also the real-money auction house, but that’s only one small part of it. Gold and real money are interconvertible currencies as well; gold in Diablo 3 is a currency as much as any other, albeit one that’s backed by a game-maker instead of a state.

That changes things a lot. It makes the game’s economics ultimately much like the real world’s economics, where the value of things are usually reducible to cash. Your time, your luck, your skill in acquiring gear—it really just determines your gold-earning power…

…Look a little closer, and you’ll see why these things are contributing to the sense of ennui and dissatisfaction that is plaguing the game, and have been plaguing it since the game was launched. It’s why people are complaining that they just don’t find it “fun” like they did Diablo 2—and it might just be why the reviews seem not to capture these issues.

Unseemly to gloat? Maybe. Don’t care.

You all better recognize.

(Yes, yes, h/t to Ben Kuchera, who needs to get over it and unblock me on Twitter already.)

What makes something art? Copyright law!

This has to be the most elaborate troll of the gaming community I’ve seen since Jack Thompson. “games aren’t art because they’re code, and that’s proven by how they’re copyrighted”? Glorious.

Kudos, Liel Lebovitz. Not only for writing something so ridiculous that it defies Poe’s Law. Not only for artfully avoiding both the fact that code is copyrighted all the time and the fact that language itself is quite literally a code. Sneaking in the implication that books and musical notation aren’t art, though? Opening the door to arguing that ANY digitized medium isn’t art, since digital media is nothing more than elaborate computer code?

Wow.

If only we all didn’t have better things to do.

I’ve Had an Extraordinarily Bad Day

…but this isn’t the place to talk about it.

(If you’re THAT curious, email me. Who knows? You might even be able to help. Yes, you. You, in the sweater.)

(That’ll put Gmail’s spam filter through its paces.)

Instead, I’m going to relay a really brilliant comment I read about SimCity on RPS.

Excellent question. Sure, you might have just been trolling, but it is important to ask, “why are people so concerned about this game?”

Pull up the chair, and let ol’ Granpa tell you a story. When I was a but a child, I went to a Community College and had a job. My job was playing computer games in a small office, back when “software testing” was something you not only could do while going to Community College, you could get paid for.

Remember when companies paid people for things?

Moving on…

We were an independent contracting house. Most of the games were the shovelware crap of the day — I have my share of war stories.

One day, we were asked to do final external testing on this Mac game from some small company out in Orinda. Yes, it was SimCity, and yes, it was an amazing game.

But it was more than an amazing game, it was amazing code. I remember we only encountered one showstopper bug. You could move around the city, but the city itself was frozen in time.

On the phone to Maxis, the reply (probably from Jeff Braun) was straightforward, “Yeah, that just means the simulation crashed; the interface will keep running.”

I know this sounds like basic game coding 101, but between the games I worked on and the ones we had in office for “research”, I was seeing between a half-dozen and a dozen games a week, on all platforms, and I’d never seen a game that was so well behaved as to have the simulation hang without bringing down the whole thing. And the stability was right up there with the titles from the PCEngine that we were certifying for the US market: frankly, there weren’t very many bugs, and those that we found were so minor as to be inconsequential. This was clean code.

The original was a rare thing: one of the few perfect games. Flawless code, easily readable, immediately accessible, SimCity gave birth to a genre while it marked a fond spot in the memories of a generation.

So it hurts to see it become the predictable result of groupthink mediocrity, a vision darkened by the urge to monetize and blinded by the buzzword-laden venom spat out by suit-wearing asps whose MBAs give them the right to override common sense and computer science.

For those managers who think the blasphemy of SimCity can all be attributed to teething problems, let me state clearly in your terms the problem: As long as you treat games as having a retail channel, you will be following a marketing model that flogs week 1 sales. DRM necessarily affects the core functionality of a game and necessarily changes continuously (out-of-date DRM might as well not be used). If you attach DRM to such a game, you will then increase significantly the chances that a significant percentage of your customers will not be able to play the game; that is, you will increase the number of dud products you sell. If you require internet-connected DRM, then you increase those odds by several orders of magnitude.

Always-on, Server-client games require a “Games as Service” business model. That business model is simply incompatible with a Week-1 spike in sales. A blockbuster movie has people waiting in line to see it. A video game with a long queue only generates hostility.

Your job is only safe until someone comes up with a metric to show how many millions you’ve wasted. Until then, enjoy laying off the people who actually contributed positively to the project.

So in short, what was a revolutionary title built on solid code, is now a “me-too” adaptation to the Social Network of 2008 with code that evokes comparisons to WWIIOL at launch.

I can’t add much to that…except that the story that it was linked to is one where a Maxis insider confirmed that SimCity doesn’t actually need the servers at all. Ayup. Doing a single-player version of SimCity isn’t just possible, this insider confirmed that it would be trivial. The only parts that wouldn’t work would be the “region” stuff, and while I’m sure that that sort of thing is neat, it clearly isn’t justifying this debacle.

I find it hard to care. People in the sorts of situation I’m in have trouble caring about stuff as abstract as digital rights management, which is one of the reasons why they can get away with that sort of thing in these dire-as-hell days.Yet it’s good to know regardless. It could have been different. It could have been better. And it WAS BETTER.

Just remember that.

Private provision of public goods

This piece by Patrick Miller in the wake of the 1UP/UGO/Gamespy closures is bracing, painful, and absolutely necessary. It details the desperately broken economics behind game enthusiast websites: they have to rely on advertisements, but the audience just isn’t valuable enough to advertisers except in mass quantities, so the sites are forced into churning out lowest-common-denominator, hit-focused pabulum like lists and slideshows and “best ofs” and whatnot. Good articles get overlooked while clickbait rules the day.

And why?

“Compared to, say, selling cereal/hamburgers/cars/video games, journalism works on a different model–a strange kind of model ostensibly designed to produce something approximating a “public good” but produced through private enterprise.”

There’s your problem right there. Good journalism and criticism is absolutely a public good that will pay off for decades or centuries to come. But there’s no possible way that anybody but the wealthiest individuals could pay for it. That was fine back when advertising was valuable, but that’s the problem: nobody’s willing to pay more than a pittance for online advertising. So, now, it seems like there’s only two options: either cater to smaller, more valuable audiences (specialist trade publications and the paywall thing both do this), or try to convince unpaid or underpaid writers to churn out as much material as quickly as they possibly can to the broadest possible audience (the Huffington model). Neither is healthy. Neither rewards skilled writers with fair pay and solid public exposure. Yet those are the only two options.

(Well, okay, unless you’re Yahtzee. But you aren’t Yahtzee.)

Even if you aren’t just writing, you still aren’t better off. The most valuable part of 1UP for me was always its podcasts. The articles and reviews were fine, but 1UP’s podcasts in its heyday were quite simply the best gaming discussions on the Internet. Only John “TotalBiscuit” Bain’s Warcraft stuff even came close. Yet 1UP had to shutter its podcasts, because there just simply wasn’t enough money in it; and judging by what YouTube, it looks like the gaming-focused video market is flooded as well.

So what to do? Damned if I know. I wish I did. I have my own financial issues to work out, and nothing I’ve written about gaming has EVER been paid work. I’ve never even expected to get paid for it; it was all about building a solid portfolio of writing that I could point to when applying for paid work. But what I’ve seen is that there just isn’t a lot of paid work out there, and the people fighting over it are hungrier and more desperate by the day. Talented, skilled writers and analysts are having to look for day jobs or are going back to school to do something else.

And the truly sad thing? This was supposed to be what piracy does, but it’s not even about piracy at all. It’s just a straight-up broken market for writers and journalists, and for the life of me, I don’t see how it could improve. Maybe it isn’t going to. Maybe public goods really do need to be publicly provided. But how?

(I’ll tell you one thing, though…it certainly hardens my heart when it comes to shitty writers. Every time I see a terrible, lazy paid piece, especially from some smug editor or columnist, I just think of all the skilled people who  could put that money to better use. But I don’t think I want to name names here. I’ve picked enough fights.)

Can we please stop trying to have serious debates on TWITTER of all things?

See title.

No, really. See title. I’m enormously, impossibly tired of how everybody who writes about games seems to think that the best-or-only way to have debates on serious, often wrenchingly-personal issues is on Twitter.

Yes, I’m guilty of this myself. I know. But every single time it happens, I feel like I’ve made a mistake. I’m just reminded of how Twitter is an incredibly dumb way to handle these things. The posts are too short, there’s no proper threading, you can’t follow the discussion properly unless you follow everybody involved, expanding the size of the group makes it even worse, you can barely mention people without drawing them in…

…it’s just a gigantic dog’s breakfast that makes absolutely everybody involved look bad.

Worse, it elevates bad arguments. It seems custom-tailored for dumb appeals to authority/popularity and thrashing of strawmen and misquotation and pretty much everything OTHER than an actual grownup  discussion of issues. It’s absolutely one-hundred-percent boosting the arguments that are “simple, straightforward, and wrong”, as the saying goes. That likely has a lot to do with why everybody seems to rush to the most extreme interpretation of arguments and positions. Extreme arguments tend to be straightforward ones.

Sure, there’s worse. Facebook, for example. But every day I’m more and more convinced that Twitter should really be used to link to  arguments, instead of make arguments. It’s not working. So, please, stop.

Game violence redux (or: you are part of the problem. Yes, you.)

(This is adapted from a longer response piece to an article that, honestly, didn’t warrant it.)

I’m beyond tired of this damned violence discussion.

I’m not tired of the discussion per se. It’s important. And this has nothing to do with any specific author, since so many seem to be prey to it. (If not in their official work, then in their bandwagon-tastic Twitter and Tumblr feeds.)

No, I’m tired of this shape of the discussion. The medium is changing, positively changing, more quickly and drastically than it has at any point in its entire history, and is doing so while other media like film are demonstrating more resistance to change and experimentation than ever. The winner of the last VGA game-of-the-year award was THE WALKING DEAD, for Heaven’s sake: an adventure game (adventure game!) that people are lauding for its intelligent and tragic attitude towards death.

There are challenges, especially the treatment of women in the industry, but those are things to celebrate.

Yet the grotesque inferiority complex–the barely submerged and all-encompassing self-loathing of both gamers and game critics–is so pervasive and so all-encompassing that any positive development is ignored, while any stupid negative step or mis-informed promotional screwup or unenlightened developer soundbyte is hoisted up and carried around  as proof that things are just as bad as they’ve ever been. Whatever that was supposed to be. 

Bullshit.

Games aren’t making kids into killers.  They aren’t getting more violent, absent the ongoing changes in graphical fidelity. They aren’t getting dumber. They aren’t all just mindless shoot-em-ups. And Call of Duty’s fading seizure of the increasingly-marginally console space aside, there are a TON of important games making doing very well that either feature cartoony representations of mild violence, like Skylanders and Jetpack Joyride, or are completely and utterly nonviolent, like Super Hexagon, Where’s My Water, Just Dance and FarmVille 2.

By perpetuating this…by moaning about how Everything Is Terrible Forever And It’s All Our Fault For Being Horrible Gamers Oh God Why Couldn’t I Be Into Whittling Instead…you’re nothing more than a Useful Idiot. You are playing into the hands of everybody that wants to avoid real solutions, and you’re doing it by blaming a medium that’s actually improving by leaps and bounds. You are helping ensure that any movement towards useful things like reasonable gun legislation gets sucked into the endlessly swirling vortex of Game Violence Discussion.

You are not being “reasonable”. You are not being “rational”. You are not being “mature”. You’re just discouraging the people who are actually working to change things by devaluing that work.

YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.

Cut it out.

Four in February

Heard of “Four in February“? Basic idea seems to be to take four games that are in your backlog and actually spend a month playing through them.

(It’s also on Steam.)

Rowan Kaiser‘s doing it: he’s doing Cave Story+, Septerra Core, Alpha Protocol and Mark of the Ninja. Not sure where, probably on Joystiq, but I’m looking forward to following his travails. I kinda like like the idea too, so I’m going to do it myself. Thing is, I can’t do anything terribly system-demanding, nor can I do console stuff. Long story. But regardless:

First, I’ll do the AGD Interactive remake of Quest for Glory 2, since I’ve been curious to see how faithful they are to the source material, and the original version is one of my all-time favorite games.

Second, I’m going to do Christine Love’s “don’t take it personally babe, it’s just not your story”. Just a wee little visual novel, sure, but that’s my speed right now, and I REALLY enjoyed both Digital and Analogue.

Third, I’m going to follow Rowan’s lead and do Cave Story+. Why? Why not? It’s in the pile, and I’ve heard it lauded hither and thither forever. No reason not to.

Fourth…well, it depends. I’m probably going to follow Rowan’s lead again and do Septerra Core. I MIGHT do something else, though, since an RPG is a pretty heavy investment of time. I’m possibly leaning towards finally finishing Uplink, since that’s one I’ve started more times than I can count. We’ll see.

I’ll use this space to let people know how it goes.

(And, yes, I plan to get back to the Elder Scrolls thing just as soon as I can. I’ve got MULTIPLE scores to settle in Morrowind. I ain’t forgotten ‘em.)

Memo to Vaguely-Creepy 1UP Article Writer:

No matter how graphically accurate Call of Duty or Medal of Honor or What of Ever gets, Neal Ronaghan, you aren’t “killing human beings” in the game.

You’re interacting with virtual, synthetic simulacra. They’re subroutines, wrapped in a multitude of tiny triangles. That’s it. That’s all they are. They aren’t even SMART subroutines.

They aren’t people. They never have been. They never will be. Barring a revolution in strong AI, they’ll never even be close. One of the reasons why you’ve managed to keep your head despite playing these types of games for as long as you have is because you’re supposed to understand the damned difference.

If you don’t? Um, you’ve got way bigger problems than game violence. And so do the rest of us, because you’ve now officially wandered into useful-idiot territory by making the game-blamers’ arguments for them.

(By the by, since when does declaring your “layer of hypocrisy” somehow immunizes you from said hypocrisy? Yes, you’re being hypocritical in presuming that this level of graphical development is somehow beyond the pale whereas previous ones were supposedly fine.)

Very, very disappointed. Even if this is just clickbait, it’s the worst possible clickbait at the worst possible time. It threatens, again, to distract everybody from searching out the real means of ending REAL spree violence against REAL human beings by leading the body politic down a blind alley.