Archive for the 'Analysis' Category

Raph Koster Foresees the Decline and Fall of Core Gamers

Published
on January 23, 2008
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Industry guru Raph Koster has an opinion piece over at Gamasutra about the future of games for core gamers. Koster, the lead designer behind Ultima Online, sees the industry’s future as full of “lower-budget, asynchronous, low time investment, web-based games” emphasizing micro-transactions.

This future is geared not towards yesterday’s hardcore gamers, but to today’s market of casual gamers, of moms and gradmas and people who don’t follow daily gaming news in their RSS syndicator. They play Wii Fit and Wii Sports and ignore No More Heroes and Assassin’s Creed, games made for that small market of people who know and love games.

However, Koster’s conclusion is a positive one. He sees the mainstream, casual audience and the niche, hardcore one forming some sort of syncretism.

The mainstream will get tugged in the direction of the niche. As the world has become more science-fictional, we have seen the memes of SF appear in everyday life. Stuff from James Bond and Lord of the Rings is now common currency. The boundary lines between niche and mass market are very thin these days, and will likely get thinner. So even the casual stuff is going to have a heavy tinge of the stuff that we the geeks love.

Given the nature of games, I’d expect to see a continuation of the trend to complexify the casual, because that’s what games do: grow more complex as people master the basics. The high-end casual market isn’t very casual anymore (some match-3 games are not only expensive to make, but downright esoteric in their rules).

In other words — gamers may not want to become like Your Mom. But Your Mom is gradually becoming more of a gamer.

In my opinion, this is simply a sign that games are a healthy, growing medium. It is inevitable. Will it mean an end to complex games like Mass Effect that take story seriously? Only time will tell.

Game Award Shows Get It Wrong

Published
on December 11, 2007
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Both Spike TV and Time named their top games of the year this past week, and both demonstrated that most game awards shows are not fully representative of the gaming industry.

Spike TV named BioShock Game of the Year and Halo 3 Most Addictive Game Fueled by Dew. Despite the “X-treme” pomp and circumstance and GameCock’s ridiculous outburst, I thought the recipients were all very deserving. A panel of U.S. journalists chose the awards and included Dan Hsu, Jeff Gerstmann, Dean Takahashi and Chris Kohler.

It is a step in the right direction for Spike, who’s past awards shows have been irreverent to say the least, but they still have a way to go. As long as they pack their shows with explosions, tits, Samuel L. Jackson and bad rock music to appeal to the 15- to 30-year-old male demographic, it’s impossible to take their choices seriously.

The “Top 10 Video Games” section of Time’s 50 top 10 lists was written by their book critic, Lev Grossman. Grossman listed Halo 3 as the best game this year, with The Orange Box and Rock Band holding the second and third spots.

“Halo 3 has become the perfect hardcore first-person combat simulator,” Grossman said. The game has been refined to a degree where “every combat is even-sided and complex and can be waged in multiple ways, using an arsenal of long- and short-range weapons, plus grenades and hand-to-hand moves.” I enjoyed Halo 3, but there are games that do all this and do it better.

“Every level is perfectly paced and balanced and graced with soaring architectural compositions,” said Grossman. Maybe he didn’t make it to the Cortana rescue mission at the end.

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Wii and DS In Hand, Nintendo Focuses On Multiplayer

Published
on November 5, 2007
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Is Nintendo becoming a multiplayer-only developer? MTV’s Steven Totilo postulates that they are.

“Nintendo’s console is a party console, destined to mark the end of Nintendo-crafted single-player game designs,” Totilo wrote on his blog earlier today. “I fully expect the next Zelda, the next Donkey Kong, even the next Mario role-playing game to be designed in such a way that at least two players will be able to enjoy the main game mode simultaneously.”

Totilo backed up his theory with a look at Nintendo’s marketing, sales and upcoming games, as well as comments by top industry personas.

Whether or not Totilo is correct, Nintendo is clearly taking the road less traveled. Both the Wii and the DS went in radically different directions than their chief competitors, introducing new approaches to gameplay rather than upping the ante technology-wise.

Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s president, recently called the current console business model, with 4-year generations, “too inflexible,” according to Next Generation. “When we will be able to launch a new kind of hardware will actually depend on when we can change entertainment completely,” he said.

Totilo concluded his analysis. “Where I’m going with all of this is the idea that The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess may be a relic of a previous era. When the Wii is old, I expect that game to look like an aberration: a freakishly lonely experience offered in a library of titles designed primarily for group indulgence.”

Multiplayer is becoming more and more of a draw to games, inviting casual gamers to play online or with friends. The Wii especially, with its simple and enjoyable controls, has always been a party system. And given Guitar Hero III’s success, the multiplayer trend clearly is not limited to Nintendo. These games are easier and cheaper to develop, sell like hotcakes and produce sequels like rabbits.

With all this going against them, I certainly hope we won’t see an end to top-notch, big budget single player games, as Totilo envisions. Let’s hope Mass Effect will stick it to the multiplayer competition this Thanksgiving.

The Point of Games

Published
on September 11, 2007
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Whether they seek to educate or persuade, “serious games” only occasionally succeed commercially or even appear in game stores. But they are becoming increasingly prevalent, and more mainstream titles are picking up their new approach to gaming.

Simulation games, which seek to accurately reproduce real world systems, educate the player on those systems. Sim City demonstrated all the variables necessary for a city to function properly and rewarded efficient urban planning. Flight Simulator allows the player to fly a plane with all the controls and obstacles that a real pilot would encounter.

These games sacrifice fun and gameplay, the two essential aspects of most commercial titles, in favor of realism. Similarly, games such as Brain Age and the recently announced Wii Fit are designed for more than just fun: They are intended to improve the player, either through physical or mental exercise.

A recent slew of serious games intend to influence the player’s opinions, taking the realism of simulations and applying it to a message. Orwell Today’s simulation of JFK’s assassination challenged players to reproduce the shots which killed Kennedy, shooting from Lee Harvey Oswald’s position. While notably morbid, failure would prove that there was more than one shooter.

Even governments have seen the persuasive potential of games. The US military uses America’s Army, a realistic first-person shooter, as a recruiting tool, and Iran’s Save the Port promotes Islamic beliefs.

The utility of games for arguing a point has been picked up by commercial games as well. For example, Army of Two designer Chris Ferriera commented in an interview with Gamasutra that the very modern issue of private military contractors is an important part of his game’s setting.

Ian Bogost, the author of Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames who recently appeared on the Colbert Report, comments in his blog that many commercial games–such as Sim City and Grand Theft Auto–consistently reference and provide allegorical insight into real world events.

These examples take games in a new, more meaningful direction, hinting at a future where an argument or theme is at the heart of any good game.

I Finally Take a Side in the Console War

Published
on August 25, 2007
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I finally broke down and bought an Xbox 360 — BioShock was the last of many convincing reasons (expect a review within the month). I want to steer clear of the Console Wars on this blog, but my purchase warrants a detour.

I admit to some Nintendo bias last generation. The SNES was my first system, and I’ve always loved their franchises, creativity, ingenuity, and their Miyamoto. I’ve since revised my fanboy ways. This generation for me is all about the games, and Xbox 360 simply had more games that I desperately wanted to play either out now or coming soon.

Dead Rising, Gears of War, and most recently BioShock are all fantastic titles, and with Halo 3, Mass Effect, and Call of Duty 4 just around the corner, Xbox 360 fans are set for life. PS3, on the other hand, has Resistance: Fall of Man in terms of exclusives. Heavenly Sword and Lair, arguably its two biggest fall releases, haven’t scored particularly well. Wii has several fun party games, but I can play those at a friends and see no point in shelling $250+ to play them on my own.

But to be honest, I still hope Nintendo wins.

Two Steps Towards Making Games an Artistic Medium

Published
on August 15, 2007
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At the end of my last post of substance (on Roger Ebert’s inflammatory comments), I referenced N’Gai Croal’s blog. Croal challenged gamers “to keep doing the heavy lifting necessary to suss out where the art of videogames lies; to determine how the craft can enhance that art; and to continue the fight to push this young medium from squalling infancy into graceful adulthood.”

A bold charge. But where do we begin? I gave it some thought, and came up with two things we can do right now to start moving forward.

1. Keep talking, but keep it civil

“Yours is the most civil of countless messages I have received after writing that I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature.”

That’s how Ebert began his response to a concerned gamer’s letter in 2005. That’s embarrassing. There’s no way games will be accepted as art if their fans respond like drunken truckers scrawling messages on the wall of a gas station bathroom at the barest whiff of criticism.

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Protagonist or Pawn: Canon in Video Game Tie-Ins

Published
on August 5, 2007
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Gamers regularly make choices when playing a game. But what if those decisions were truly important? What if they changed the future of the plot?

An article in the most recent issue of The Escapist looks at how games in multi-media franchises treat “canon” — the official position on plot and characters which is necessary to ensure continuity in series like Star Wars that span films, shows, books, graphic novels and games. That is, you delivered 100 pizzas in the Spider-Man game, but is that the Sam Raimi-approved number of pizzas delivered by Spider-Man?

This may seem like the realm of nerds and Star Trek enthusiasts, but the changing relationship between canon and video game tie-ins raises an interesting question: What if the player’s actions and choices tangible repercussions in movies, games, and books to follow? What if the player could influence a franchise in a way that readers and film and television audiences cannot?

Chris Dahlen’s Escapist article, titled “The Open Source Canon,” looks specifically at The Matrix Online, a tie-in to the Matrix films with an interesting catch. Troy Hewitt, a writer and community event manager for the game, said in 2005, “Our intention is that players who play a really big role, or make a key decision, become part of the Matrix canon, and they become part of the story.”

In other words, The Matrix Online’s player-driven events and their conclusions are part of the official canon. This includes everything from small quests to major plot events given to the community to play out. In 2005, one of these events resulted in the official death of Morpheus, demonstrating the magnitude of the story decisions players are allowed to make.

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