The Disconnect

between creation and engagement with respect to the time interval is decreasing to zero. This video demonstrating the map editor of Far Cry 2 (and look at that user interface) and ability to jump directly into the created map within seconds makes the old world of bsp editors seem like a joke. Procedural methodology is appearing more and more in games. It won't be long until it enters other realms (machinima, film making, etc.).

The video is from PAX and comes in 3 parts.

1



2



3

2006 Game Sales Stats

For what it's worth, and since we cannot analyze the raw data, Next Gen has released (printable) some game sales stats for 2006 (I don't believe this includes any casual game stats). The source of the data is NPD and some other places. I have to ask why it is that I know the precise cost associated with movie production (and also box-office and DVD returns), but game production costs are shrouded in a black hole? Data needs to be free!

A few tidbits:

• PC games are almost nowhere to be found
• Most games are released in November, while the least number are released in December and January
• Nintendo's DS is a surprisingly robust platform
• Madden kills all

The comments on Digg indicate the stats may be suspect though. Check this chart from vgcharts for example.

New Social Networking Site For Indie Games

Garage Games is promoting a new site, The Great Games Experiment, that will be a hub for social game development:

The Great Games Experiment is a social networking community for gamers, developers, and publishers to play show off, promote, and ultimately enjoy.

See the Press Release.

The site is just getting started, so you can request beta access by submitting your email and there will be some ongoing contests as the site gathers steam. This will be an interesting experiment to see if the interchange of ideas from all interested parties will actually increase the quality and accessibility of games.

A Fine Selection of Games

1up.com has a selection of 101 free games (found in the recently renamed Games for Windows magazine- formerly Computer Gaming World).

Meanwhile, Gamespot has what looks like a selection of every single game coming out in the next year, although they state it is only a list of 'promising' games, or those they they expect will have a significant score when released (I would hate to see the full list of games coming out in 2007). BTW, far too many of these games look exactly the same. Where's the unique art and style? The 1UP selection of games seems far more individualistic and interesting. Is the cutting edge 'art' of games only to be found in the casual game sector?

RoboBlitz Postmortem

Gamasutra has an excellent RoboBlitz postmortem article. It delves into the details of the development cycle for this indie game with some interesting facts.

• game development was self-funded by Naked Sky
• they blew all their money and had to borrow some to cover their costs
• they had to make the game under 50 Mb to meet Xbox Live distribution requirements
  
• it uses both the Unreal Engine 3 and the proFX engine for procedural textures
• it only took 12 people 11 months to produce

The most interesting fact to me is that 80% of the textures for each level at generated at load time, thereby reducing the total size of the game, and allowing for a larger set of textures to paint their 19 levels with. (See previous post on procedural textures and animation). This fact alone may have enormous repercussions in game development, and hopefully machinima.

Procedural Textures

Saw this interesting post about procedural textures on bit-tech.net (via Blues News). Hmm....is this the future of games and virtual worlds? Will we never have to create every exact asset painstakingly again? (can we get procedural primitives and geometry too?). I believe Spore is using procedural animations so I suspect it's only a matter of time.

I know, how about procedural game design?

Independent Games Festival Mod Nominees

So busy these days.

The mod category nominees for the Independent Games Festival have been announced. The most surprising thing, to myself at least, are the large number of FPS mods. The entire category is dominated by FPS mods, especially for games like UT 2004 and Half Life 2 with only a few non-FPS mods listed for games like Neverwinter Nights or Homeworld.

Does this mean that few non-FPS mods are ever made or that those mods were not submitted to the festival, or that they were and were not considered of sufficient quality? Considering the popularity of RTS and RPG games in particular, I suspect that it is either category 2 or 3 (not submitted or not of a high enough quality). There are no mods for popular games like GTA or Oblivion (there is one for Morrowind), and the only RTS mods are for Homeworld, Warcraft III (no recent RTS games), and one nomination for a Civ IV mod (turn-based strategy). I was also surprised to see how many mods there were for Max Payne 2, a game I thought did not do so well in terms of sales, so the fact that there are three mod nominations for the game appears to be an aberration.

It's unfortunate that Dystopia was not nominated as I think it's one of the best mods I've played for Half Life 2.

Episodic GTA

A recent article on CNN money discusses the fact that Rockstar is taking the GTA series episodic, producing two smaller releases for the Xbox 360. This is big news as Rockstar would arguably be the biggest developer yet to take a mainstream franchise in the direction of an episodic release model instead of the typical large release every 2 years or so (if you don't consider Valve as the first to do so with Half Life 2: Episode One). Perhaps with Rockstar going this way we will find out some hard numbers on whether episodic releases work as Valve's reluctance to release sales data (since they make many sales through Steam) really puts a fog over the whole concept. (Do groups like NPD track online transactions btw?)

Interestingly, in this month's Computer Gaming World, there is an interview with Mark Rein of Epic Games who states that he thinks episodic gaming is doomed for many smaller developers, and only the big production studios will be able to make it work.

So are we working towards a fragmented gamespace, where every single interaction requires your credit card? Many times when people discuss this, they completely fail to mention that many games started out in the arcades of yore (the good ones, not the ones that suck today). Inserting a quarter to play 2 minutes longer is nothing more than a micro transaction before people even knew what that was.

Now if only somebody could set up something online that doesn't require me to fill out 20 different fields so that I can virtually insert that quarter into whatever game I am playing at the moment (is Xbox Live like this now?). If it was general purpose and solely tied to the web and was not on a proprietary platform then I think we could see a wave of this type of gaming coming (Google Wallet?).

The Beautiful Game - Updated

Not football!













(guarding the bridge on de_aztec)
I have a profound fascination with CounterStrike, a modification of Half Life. In my opinion, it is one of the most brilliant game designs ever made (second only to Tribes for FPS multiplay), and the fact that it was conceived of by two people, Minh Le, a Canadian (yeah!) and Gooseman, makes it even more interesting (design by committee is for the communists).

CS is of course is now a retail product in it's own rights, and both CS 1.6 and CS Source are played avidly by the community. CS is the WoW of FPS games, and to this day, 7 years after the release, it completely dwarfs the competition in number of players (according to GameSpy stats, for whatever they're worth, CS is played by more people than ALL of the rest of the FPS games, COMBINED).

Valve just released a an update to CS that I think is phenomenal. The radar system in CS has now been upgraded to include a background of the map that shows far more of the action than was ever previously available (even in spectator mode). The information architecture in displaying complex information in a simplified manner in this instance is worthy of praise from Edward Tufte himself.

















(zoomed in radar view from above screen)
The map shows a great deal of detail, yet it is easy to understand even for the novice. Each player is shown as a blue or red dot (counterrorists or terrorists, respectively), along with an arrow showing their current orientation. Bomb areas are highlighted with a rectangular orange area showing exactly where the bomb can be planted and with text showing the name (in case you didn't know where A and B were) for each area. Teammates who use the radio buttons to broadcast information ("bomb down", "enemy spotted", etc.) flash briefly to show you where they are.

In spectator mode, the small map shows even more detail (all the better for spectators). Dead bodies, dropped bombs, player tracts, bomb plants, differences in heights, etc.













(bomb down)


















In spec mode the currently selected player is highlighted with an 'eye' (shades of Illuminati!)




























(nothing stands between this T and the dropped bomb)




























(bomb plants are shown are flashing expanding red circles)














(You killed Bill Cosby! You Bastards!)
The really interesting thing is how this applies to eSports. One of the biggest difficulties in making games like CS more popular is the complexity of the games themselves. Unlike normal sports where the playing field is typically rectangular and all of the players are visible, computer games have far larger and more complex game environments and arenas. The top down view provides enough information so that anyone not familiar with the game should be able to pick up the game rules and complexities fairly easy.













(large map fully zoomed out view in spec mode)
CS is of course one of the most popular eSports games, with many tournaments played every year with thousands of dollars in prizes. The prizes are paid for by sponsors, who would dearly love for a larger audience for their products. Part of obtaining a larger audience is having very clear explanations of what is going on in any sport or game. The radar and map updates to CS is going to significantly enhance that (in fact, I think some of the major sports out there would kill for this type of overview). Graphical enhancement of information is becoming ever more common in sports these days, with NFL football plays being shown in video games.

What I would be interested in is going through some of the demos from the major tournaments over the last year, and statistically analyzing the data, and then showing that information on the map overlays to show major routes for CT and T runs, kill sites, major sites for contact, chokepoints, etc. (which brings up another point about eSports - the lack of stats tracking as compared to something like baseball or football).

Hopefully this leads to greater coverage of games like CS on TV and it also provides a lot of opportunity for coverage by outlets like TSN.

Splash Damage's Enemy Territory To Have Jetpacks

Tribes fans rejoice. The interweb (via Tribalwar) sends news that Enemy Territory: Quake Wars from Splash Damage will have jetpacks for the Strogg. One of the developers states that he was a big fan of Tribes and engine code is currently in place to produce a Tribes-like mod for ET:QW for any interested mod team.

Great news because Tribes was one of the best games ever made. Splash Damage has a history of producing quality products, including the freely available Enemy Territory for Wolfenstein. This looks like a marriage made in heaven: a decent dev team that itself came from the mod community and the ability for a new mod team to modify the existing game to slap in some jetpacks for both teams, to add skiing, and to bring back the glory of Tribes to a new generation.

Looks like I will definitely be buying ET:QW!

Will Wright's Emotional Investment

Will Wright is interviewed in this month's Discover Magazine. The article covers the rather scientific aspects of the various games he's produced and it seems that Wright is very big on modeling. He discusses how various scientific disciplines have influenced the Sim games (ecosystems for SimEarth, Edward Wilson's study of ants for SimAnt, and astrobiology and evolution for the upcoming Spore).

What caught my eye, however, was not the science, but instead was this quote:

"People talk about how games don't have the emotional impact of movies. I think they do - the just have a different palette. I never feel pride, or guilt, watching a movie."

That's an interesting point, and I think he's right (Wright's right!). It's not that games lack emotion-inducing events, it's simply that they are not stories being told to us in the normal sense but instead unfold as a series of events that we experience. Pride or guilt are two emotions that people feel for something they are expressly responsible for: pride for having achieved or created something, and guilt for messing up or destroying something. Probably the only people who feel pride or guilt when watching a movie are those directly responsible for its creation (director, producer, actors, crew). I'm sure that the emotions Frodo and Sam experienced on their little journey were not the same ones we experienced reading (or watching) the journey unfold.

Pride and guilt are directly tied to both a personal investment and the acts of creation/destruction that are heavily favored in Will Wright's games, where the open sandbox is omnipresent, allowing the player to do what they will (I wonder, as the games have gotten increasingly personal from sculpting city blocks, to sculpting your sims personalities, whether the amount of pride/guilt has changed in the average player when playing a Maxis game).

At some point in the future, the story-inducing emotions we typically experience when reading a novel or watching a film will exist in a game, namely when the creations/creatures that we have helped shape into being come back and tell us a story about their experiences (btw, will my creatures in Spore worship me as a God?). The other possibility is for games that are no longer about "play" (does that mean they are even games at that point?), but are instead created explicitly to make the "player" experience emotion (one is reminded of the empathy machines in the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick) although the mind shudders at the possibilies for abuse that this leaves open.

Half Life 2 Episode One

Valve is just about to unlock Half Life 2 Episode One over Steam (my version has downloaded already). In promoting the expansion pack, Valve has released 3 (now 4) movies over steam that center on Alyx, one of the main characters from Half Life 2 (movies are also available on 3D Gamers, among other sites).

The really interesting thing is how cinematic the movies are. I can't wait to utilize the new capabilties in some machinima. Valve is supposedly working very hard on increasing the effects capabilities of the Source engines. The recent Day of Defeat movie showcases a number of them. Upcoming effects include depth of field, motion blur, color correction, and a film grain effect.

John Romero says modder are screwing the industry

You have got to be kidding with this one. John Romero, formerly of Id software, has blamed modders for releasing game mods that expose games to a re-rating as recently happened to Bethesda's Oblivion, and previously happened to Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto due to the Hot Coffee mod.

There's a number of problems with this entire thing:

1. the modders aren't to blame
   
2. give me a break, it's a polygonal breast (as opposed to all the silicon ones you can find on the web)
   
3. the US views on sexuality are from the dark ages (damn Puritans)
   
4. who cares what John Romero says these days (when was the last time he produced anything noteworthy)

The real outfall from this will have a chilling impact on game development. The modding industry is a great source for new ideas as well as new employees for developers. If developers become paranoid about modders altering their game content so that sexual content become available, then developers will simply not produce any modding tools, and will aggressively go after the modding community and shut them down. The real problem, however, is not with modders, or the ratings produced by the ESRB, but is instead due to the puritanical right wing idiots who are both offended by this content and the power they have in affecting entire industries (recall Janet Jackson and the superbowl scandal). It's rather repugnant to me that in the US human sexuality is a forbidden zone for all media content, while violence is shown at every step (seems rather pathological to me) in video games and on mainstream TV. I say, more sex, less violence.

On a tangential note, it would not surprise me in the slightest if some underhanded game company produced a 'mod' for a competitors product that contained sexual content or artwork or looked into the game files to find such a thing. "Hey Walmart, Game Company X has a game with sexual content, while our game doesn't".

Advertising to gamers

Microsoft has bought Massive Inc., a company that specializes in producing in-game advertising. MI has partnered with an impressive array of game companies, including Sony Online Entertainment, a relationship that will definitely become interesting after Microsoft's purchase. MI predicts that in-game advertising could reach $2 billion by 2010. In-game advertising is all the more important for going after the coveted 18-34 male demographic which has been unreachable lately through normal means of advertising simply for the fact that people in that age bracket are no longer watching TV, movies, or doing anything remotely linked to traditional advertising streams. They're simply spending all of their time online. Joystiq notes that this acquisition will result in another revenue stream in Microsoft's games/home entertainment division, which should help offset the losses they've taken due to the high cost of production for Xbox units.

I'm not against advertising in general. Watching ads on TV is just part and parcel of the broadcast medium, and I have nothing against it since I don't actually pay for the TV programs I view (and no, I don't have cable). However, if you are forced to purchase a game, and then have to sit through advertisements, then there is a problem. Your eyeballs have been effectively taken hostage which I feel is a shady practice. If, however, the game was offered for free along with the ads, versus a pay for subscription model where the game would be ad-free, then I would be all for it. Too bad there's no way that is going to happen.

On another note. What about accepting sponsorships for having in-game advertising? If I play Counterstrike or World of Warcraft with a company's logo on it, then do I get a kickback? This might be something to consider for clans and guilds out there (I know some professional clans are sponsored in competitive esports). I'd gladly wear a Logitech shirt if my subscription fees to WoW or some other online game were paid for (I know you can't slap whatever you want on WoW clothing).

Gaming history

An excellent article in issue #42 of The Escapist dealing with the history of board games. Written by Greg Costikyan of Manifesto Games, it covers everything from the first recorded instance of a board game developer in 1759 through to the continued impressive board game market in Germany and the influence board games and their developers have had and continue to have on the computer games industry.

From personal experience, the name Civilization might invoke thoughts of Sid Meier's venerable PC title (now in it's fourth iteration, Alpha Centauri notwithstanding). Few people might know that Sid based his version on a board game developed by Francis Tresham for Hartland Trefoil and sold in the US by Avalon Hill (now sadly out of print, although sometimes copies can be found on eBay) called, oddly enough, Civilization (and Advanced Civilization, see Wikipedia entry here). I have spent many a rainy Saturday with friends whiling away the hours playing this superbly balanced and yet incredibly fun game. Although not a war game per se, it mixed a fantastic blend of population and economic expansion, trading, scientific development, and political intrigue. Personally I've always found the Civ PC games to be a pale comparison to the board game mostly due to the fact that the PC game is played almost entirely in single player mode, while the board game was played with up to 8 like-minded scheming underhanded fellow humans. No AI programming can match that.

There is an old computer game version of Advanced Civilization by Avalon that is still available at a few places if you know where to look. I wouldn't recommend it since it suffers the same problems that afflicts Sid's game, namely a lack of human presence. There's nothing like trading away a civil war to somebody in order to get the last salt on the board to complete a set (and watching your opponent's crestfallen face as he realized that you lied to him about the commodity you were trading him).

The Next Generation of Gaming

Raph Koster posted some speculations on where this is all heading. Similar ideas have been passed around before, that the production costs for mainstream video games are ballooning out of control and will simply be too expensive for most publishers and developers. Personally, I think that these same publishers and developers brought this on themselves with their overemphasis on eye candy and graphical splendor over any sort of gameplay whatsoever.

My idea is that there should be open source development. Let the gaming company produce the infrastructure, and then let all the amateur level designers and modders produce most of the content. What would an MMORPG look like if it was moddable but had a basic framework in place that allowed questing, leveling, etc? I'm not talking about Second Life, which allows for a large amount of user-generated content, but something like WoW or Guild Wars, where most of the quests/missions were created by the players themselves? SL unfortunately is not a game. What if Orgrimmar was entirely player-created, from the buildings, to the personnel, to the quests handed out? What if you had to go kill 10 Elder Panthers because Gimpy the Dwarf (another player) really needed you to kill those 10 cats in exchange for 5000 XP or 10 gold? What if there actually was a war being fought in WoW, and supplies really did need to be moved from behind the lines to the front where they were most needed? What if that Sword of Slaying I held aloft before crashing into the battle lines was created by Darok Forgemaster entirely, from the iron bars I gave to him, to the glowing ruby in the pommel, to the textures he uploaded to the server so that everyone else can see the fine grain of the steel before it swipes off their head?

What if, what if?