I’ve been slowly (too slowly) working my way through these Sense of Wonder Night videos from TGS. It’s a great bunch of strange indie concepts and prototypes, including current belles Pixel-Junk Eden and The Unfinished Swan as well as a lot of more obscure prototypes, like Depict, where you have to reproduce things with a phone camera:
and Gomibako, which appears to be a Tetris style game involving shoving litter in a bin with physics, then setting fire to it:
(CC image by tracky birthday)
How things change. I blogged here before about the building conflict between Leipzig and Cologne for games industry events this year and next, and at the time Leipzig enjoyed a great deal of industry goodwill and confidence.
However, CMP have now acquired gamescom owner Global Games Media, and furthermore recruited former Leipzig conference director Frank Sliwka. They plan to run GDC Europe next to the gamescom consumer event, and with that kind of power and brand respect, Leipzig is suddenly looking dead in the water.
(CC image by Charly-Koeln)
One of the events we ran in London last week was the Indie Games Arcade, which was a huge success. We showed a handful of interesting games, detailed at the linked page on our website.
The highlights were five or so developers from Beatnik Games coming down to continually run a Plain Sight LAN, and someone setting a staggering record of 1:40 and 1749 points on War Twat. All of our photos are on Flickr, and this page on our website has details of all the games along with links to them.
War Twat developer Robert Fearon and volunteer extraordinaire Andrew Armstrong have both written a bit about the expo and the indie arcade, here and here.
Bruce Sterling gave a keynote at the Austin Game Developer’s Conference, and Rudy Rucker quickly posted a transcript of the talk. He manages to use a set of nonsense words to illustrate how the present regards the past, presenting his talk as someone from the future talking about our present. The entire thing is entertaining and worth reading, but one part in particular stuck out to me:
The other question they ask—if they’re smart—is, what is that I did not see? What was I NOT thinking about? What is that blindsided me? What is that I couldn’t see in my industry? The future development I just didn’t understand. The wild card, the black swan.
Well, I can tell you about that problem.
[…]
Entertainment is fun. Am I correct? I’ve gotta be. If it’s no fun, obviously it’s not entertainment. It’s one of those phony game educational applications that kids have to be tortured to use. You definitely want the users to have fun. That’s the definition of your industry. That’s what it is all about.
Except for three kinds of people. They’re not fun people. They’re not even users. They’re abusers, you might say, because they don’t obey your rules.
First, gold farmers. Rip-off artists. The excluded. The black market. The pirates. […]
Second, griefers. […]
Third—and these are the weird ones—the convergence culture people. They will play your game all right, but they play it while using six or seven other kinds of media. They don’t make any distinction between the media they use. They use the networks as a meta-medium. They don’t play the roles in your role-playing games.
People play roles in Dungeons and Dragons because that is a paper game, it’s like little theater for the home. People play roles. You don’t see D&D people passing each other text messages and looking for cheats on wikis. Convergence people are metamedia people who are looking for meta-fun. Not your fun.
New and emergent forms of game are dependent on new and emergent forms of play. Not enough of us are looking at these trends, least of all developers who mainly have their heads down in the trenches producing AAA code and art assets.
The picture at the top of this post is a mount in Age of Conan, inspired by this video of a griefer with a horse. Cut down, shown without context as in that video, we tend to find griefing hilarious, yet if it’s done to us in game we tend to be outraged.
As a behaviour, it’s probably only been on the radar regularly for less than a decade. We’re not even close to understanding it, though along with others it is being studied. Videogames are a fascinating lens to look at ourselves through, and doing so may give us some clues about the future.
The lingering death of E3 seems to be creating instability elsewhere, with European event organisers fighting it out to provide a better successor. As reported by MCV today, the MD of Gamescom organiser Kölnmesse is talking his show up, claiming it will replace Leipzig:
“It was to be expected that the Leipzig trade fair would try to keep the topic in its 2009 programme as well by announcing its date. But they will have to do it without the industry for the most part. The lead trade fair will take place in Cologne in 2009 and beyond.”
“From Leipzig we are bringing the clear message that the games industry will be exhibiting in 2009 in Cologne at gamescom.
We have met with broad approval, and the industry is looking forward to gathering in Cologne. Whatever happens in Germany in 2009 outside of Cologne cannot claim to represent this sector.”
Bullish, especially considering that Leipzig had record attendance at over 200,000 this year, and so many game developers have been talking it up as a good balance of trade and consumer shows during the long death rattles of E3.
However, GamesCom has the backing of the German publisher’s association, the BIU. Additionally, bad transport links have always been the Achilles’ heel of Leipzig, and and may be a big enough opening for Cologne to successfully attack. We’ll see.
For now, The Inquirer has some interesting details that aren’t being reported elsewhere:
Well, while the Leipzig organization owns the “Games Convention” IP, Kölnmesse was a bit more devious and hooked the BIU by offering it free-of-charge ownership of the GAMESCom event. So not only can Kölnmesse claim the backing, it will be the de facto official gaming entertainment tradeshow in Germany because it’s owned by BIU and regardless of whether it turns out to be a steaming pile of you-know-what.
So now, much like what happened in the UK, there’ll be two major gaming tradeshows in Germany that will eat each other up and ruin the fun for everyone.
There’s a massive opportunity in the wake of E3. Hopefully, these shows aren’t about to mutually strangle each other instead.
I got this in my inbox, and it’s definitely worth passing on. Game Jams have been a venerable part of games culture around GDC for a long time, and now the IGDA Education SIG is aiming to send them global:
I am really excited to announce to friends the live website of a new project that the SIG is organizing. I hope with your help to make at a real success with everyone globally. The Global Game Jam will be announced at Sandbox and SIGGRAPH, where we are doing a call for host venues and looking for sponsorship money to pull of such a large scale project. The Global Game Jam is a first of its kind Game Jam that will take place in the same 48 hours around the world, January 30-February 1st, 2009. Our friends at the Nordic Game Jam will be our flagship Jam – they have had years of success. This should be a real experience in creativity, innovation and experimentation.
If you know of anyone willing to host a Game Jam in their local area or for that matter, help us sponsor the project, please let me know. Information regarding hosting and sponsorship is available on the site. We hope to have local jams throughout Asia, Europe, North/South America, South Pacific… and anywhere else willing to host a jam. The Global Game Jam is open to everyone. Sign-up for the local Jams will happen in late October. The GGJ will provide one representative of each winning local jam a round-trip ticket to present their game at the IGDA Education SIG Workshop at GDC.
I’m looking forward to seeing the results of this.
(CC image of seed packed Kiwi jam by rachel is coconut&lime)
Many more of the slides from Games:EDU will be online soon, but for now I’d just like to draw your attention to Jonathan Blow’s blog, where he’s posted his slides and audio.
(The quotes in this post are paraphrased from my notes on this session)
One of the sessions I went to at Develop last week was “Why We Sold Our Studio and Why We Didn’t: A Candid Discussion About Selling Up or Staying Free”, which had a panel comprised of Ian Baverstock of Kuju, Paul Wedgewood from Splash Damage, and Sarah Chudley from Bizarre Creations.
I made it as a sensible and work relevant choice over potentially more entertaining sessions, but actually it was one of the best sessions I saw, with studio owners heckling from the audience. Some of it has been reported on already (Though Paul did an okay job of presenting Splash Damage, I don’t think the press are being entirely fair to him), but here are a few extra tidbits I got from it:
Sarah Chudley:
You’re only as good as your last game, whether internal or external. If PGR5 had flopped, noone would have wanted PGR6 (publisher or fan), and we’d have ended up doing Barbie Racing
Paul was extremely sceptical of studios that do make games like Barbie Racing, and even came off as a bit of an idealist; very passionate about what games should be and what studios should be doing. In response, Ian had some words to the effect of
That’s fine, as long as you keep rolling sixes. Roll a one and you’ll be thinking “Shit, I wish I’d sold”
and also pointed out that for every independent like Valve or Epic, there are probably another 100 studios that have taken the same high risk approach to IP and failed. Andrew Oliver also weighed in from the audience with “When there’s only one offer on the table you’ve got to take it, and if that’s Barbie Racing, so be it”.
An interesting dichotomy emerged during the panel, with Ian and Sarah both telling Paul he’d probably feel different if he had kids. Some studios are suited to young, single people, whereas Bizarre have found that the more people they have with families, the more flexible they’ve had to become, with some odd shift patterns designed to accommodate parents.
Overall there was a lot of pragmatism there, though it may have been a bit stacked to have 2/3 of the panel from studios that have sold. Overall, the consensus was that selling a studio grants a certain amount of financial security to the organisation itself rather than just the owners. Of course, though, that’s not necessarily the case when a global publisher needs to trim down and starts shutting studios.
(Image: Enemy Territory, Quake Wars, by Splash Damage)
Jonathan Blow gave the closing keynote for us at Games:EDU on Tuesday. The most interesting point he raised for me was conflict between dynamical meaning and narrative.
Dynamical meaning is the meaning generated by the game rules themselves. The way the game encourages you to play sows values and motives in you as a player, automatically generating meaning around game elements. This can often conflict with story.
One of the examples he gave is the character Kate in Grand Theft Auto IV. Unlike many of the characters, she gives the player no kind of perks or bonuses, so the player is unlikely to care about her more than nearly any of the other characters. However, the story calls for Nico Bellic to care about her a lot, creating a massive dissonance between the feelings of the player and the protagonist.
Another example: Saving Little Sisters in Bioshock grants you less Adam than harvesting them, however, because it’s a game the designers felt the need to balance both choices. Overall, the choice of whether to exploit or assist has little effect on the situation the player ends up in. Many grokked this evenness after a little experimentation, and realised that it negated the narrative importance of choosing to save versus harvest, rendering the drama built up around it meaningless.
Dynamical meaning often seems to trump narrative due to its influence on player actions, Jonathan contended that the dynamical and narrative meaning can be harmonised, but often aren’t.
We’ll be posting more from Games:EDU in the coming week.
(Image of Jonathan Blow by me)
E3 has now passed, and seemed surprisingly uneventful even with vastly reduced numbers of people.
Probably the most interesting big announcement I saw out of it and haven’t blogged here yet is Sony’s PSN video rental service. It’s been rumoured (and obvious) for a while that Microsoft were likely to partner with Netflix to offer video through the 360, and this was announced, but SCE seem to have surprised everyone… even though they’re part of a huge media corporation with access to massive amounts of video content.
Pretty much all of the industry comment I’ve seen on E3 this year has been “I’m glad I’m not going”, and in the wake of the event, has become really quite savage. The newly relaunched EDGE Online has a couple of quotes:
“I hate E3 like this,” said EA CEO John Riccitiello. “Either we need to go back to the old E3, or we’ll have to have our own private events.”
Laurent Detoc, president of Ubisoft North America, was equally critical. “E3 this year is terrible. The world used to come to E3. Now it’s like a pipe-fitters show in the basement.”
Ouch.
(CC Image by Zoethustra)
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