Call him the Bard of Avon or England’s national poet or ShakeyP, there’s no doubt that William Shakespeare is one of the top contributors in the business today. That’s why we were positively exploding with anticipation when we learned he’d be dropping by our office with a recent build of his latest project, tentatively entitled Hamlet. To our disappointment, Hamlet wasn’t a cross between ham and an omelette, as tasty as that sounds. No, it’s a new play, one that according to its author will break new ground in the often staid tragedy genre. But will Shakespeare’s Hamlet really live up to all the hype? Hit the jump to find out how our demo went.

Continue reading "Elsinore Baby! New Hamlet Preview!" »

Irvine’s late afternoon sun made Sean’s reddened and tear-streaked face all the more vivid. “I tried to find them but I could only find three and this one isn’t white all over, it has spots on it,” he stammered, the stones cupped in his hand.

“Aw, that’s okay,” his father said. “You made a good effort. You did your best, and that’s what count–”

“No,” Sean cried, wiping some tears away with his fist, which was curled around the rocks. “I was supposed to finish it. I was supposed to bring you ten white stones from the backyard and I couldn’t–”

“Sean, I... I didn’t even know if there were ten white stones in the backyard when I asked you to find them. I was just giving you a quest to find as many as you could.”

Continue reading "The Very Opposite of an Airport" »

Marco sighed, eyes transfixed on the reflections off the chrome of a mixing bowl. The pâtisserie was not doing very well lately and unless he got a couple big jobs soon he might have to consider the possibility of going back to the hotel, hat in hand– of all the cruel fates.

A bell rang towards the front of the store, and Marco looked up to see a man in his early thirties who must have been on his way to work. He wore an off-the-rack business suit that hung off his shoulders awkwardly, the fabric bunching up at the edges. Marco knew the type: old enough to be in charge of things and young enough to have faith in his adulthood.

“I’m in the market for a custom cake,” said the man. “And I hear this is the place to come to get one. Could you tell me about what I’d pay?”

Continue reading "The Cake Is a Metaphor" »

Genuinely thoughtful commentary on video games doesn’t come by all the time, and how much the rarer is the emergence of a truly worthy and unique voice. So when Rachael Webster, an aspiring writer stagnating at a menial job at a small and mostly unknown city newspaper, first took up the pen for her blog in the fall of last year, she quickly found herself amongst enthusiastic supporters and a welcoming community. PixelVixen707, as she called herself, brought a sharp-tongued but winsome pluck to the conversation about games, along with unusual, sometimes genuinely surprising, insights. Rounding out the program was an occasional note about her personal life— and that is where things fell off the rails a little bit.

Continue reading "Reality as It Is Today" »

As some know, I contribute a small amount of snark to Game Developer Magazine. These pieces are occasionally posted online at Gamasutra as well. Before you ask: no, nothing in it is about you.

Dubious Pitches.

Hard News.

Neurons and glial cells held a rally today in order to bring attention to their controversial plan to fundamentally re-shape the way the body is constructed.

Their proposal calls for a massive new type of processing center, dubbed “the brain”: essentially a drastically enlarged and significantly more complex version of the clusters of nerve cells that run bodies today. They claim that this dramatic expansion would provide untold benefits– from the ability to quickly analyze massive amounts of data to the capability to formulate logical models of the world around us.

But this highly ambitious plan would come at a steep price: staggering energy requirements, a difficult gestation process and no immediate guarantee that it will make existence any easier or more understandable. The proposal has been sharply criticized by constituents of other organs, such as the powerful endocrine lobby, who have ridiculed the idea as “preposterous” and characterized it as an expensive waste of money.

According to its critics, neurons’ use of resources is already excessive, and any further appropriation of the body’s energy would handicap other, more important systems. And commentators have pointed out what they see as fatal flaws in the plan: for example, that the relatively delicate construction of the so-called brain leaves it prone to damage.

Backers of the brain project have responded with the suggestion for a bony outer structure, called a “skull”, they say would protect the brain from all but the most concussive impacts. Ironically, though, this has increased the proposed budget for the brain even more. Though they continue to claim that the benefits of the brain’s processing power would more than make up for the tremendous expense, advocates for the brain face a difficult road ahead in making their dreams a reality.

“It’s a Catch-22,” said one glial cell, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “You want everyone to imagine the possibilities– but they can’t really do that without, you know, a brain.”

The customer service department isn’t the most glamorous part of the video game business. For one thing, it’s the same at any consumer products company. Calls and e-mails filter in and are gently deflected; on rare occasions, action is taken.

At one publisher, the department manager would frequently requisition dozens of copies of the latest titles— it was a big company and they sold a lot of games, so surely there was a lot of customer servicing to do. People would bring home their new games from Best Buy or Wal-Mart and find the discs scratched or broken inside the box. The customer service department would take care of them. Nobody really bothered to check in on it very closely. It was just boring old customer service after all.

One day, though, someone was at the fax machine and noticed what looked like an eBay receipt, and it turned out the department head hardly needed as many games as he was requesting. Instead, he was selling them online to supplement his income.

After firing the manager, the company instituted much tighter controls and greater scrutiny on those parts of its operations. The department had earned a little notoriety.

The team was tired. It was close to three in the morning and the remnants of the night’s crunch food were still festering on the kitchen tables. A quart each of guacamole and sour cream sat untouched, waiting to be discarded.

“It’s a race,” the owner said suddenly, pointing to the condiments. “A thousand bucks to the guy who can finish his first.” Crass entertainment might have been the only goal, or it could have been something a little more sinister— a kind of inadvertent and spontaneous hazing ritual. This was a small group of people who worked hard for little pay but who were part of the proud Dallas first-person shooter lineage. The studio’s employees began gathering into the kitchen to see what the noise was about. Two programmers stepped forward and, on the mark, began to tip the containers of toppings into their mouths.

It was a mess, of course. The man who was gulping down the sour cream finished first, to the hooting and hollering of his co-workers. Then he paused, turned and regurgitated everything back up into a nearby trash can. The audience exploded and collapsed into hysterics. The owner paid him his one thousand dollars.

After something like that, any day is pretty much over. So the laughter died down and the team dispersed into the arid Texas night.

Though we regularly discuss the “quality of life” problem in Western game development, the Japanese have it even worse. There, long hours and sleeping at the office aren’t exceptional— they’re a matter of course for all kinds of businesses. But the combination of the culture of the game industry combined with the culture that produced karōshi (lit. “death by overwork”) can be especially potent. One anecdote I’ll always remember illustrates starkly how wretched it can become.

A large Japanese game studio was crunching, as usual, to get the next game out the door. The hours were insane and those employees with families hardly ever got a chance to see them. One day, a worker went to his boss and begged him to let him leave early that evening. It was his daughter’s birthday, he explained, and he wanted at the very least to have the chance to celebrate with a nice dinner together with his family. “Fine,” the boss said. The man went home at an unusual five o’clock that day.

Then, a little past midnight, the phone rang. It was the boss.

“Your daughter’s birthday is over. Get back to the office.”

Hello everyone, and thank you for coming to my talk. Today I’ll be speaking about player rewards: what they are, why and how you should put them in your games. I’ll start as usual with the obvious. People play games for entertainment. People like being rewarded. Video games can provide both entertainment and reward. Therefore, it follows that good game design is about making a game’s rewards equal and appropriate to its associated challenges. I have dubbed this concept “conflicto-payoff concordance”. An example of a game with poor conflicto-payoff concordance is Solitaire, since you do all this work and the only thing you get at the end is an empty table and a pack of cards, which, as we all know, is what you started with. I had a funny slide here with a photo of an old man playing Solitaire but it isn’t working for some reason. Anyway, you want to space out rewards so that players feel compelled to keep playing, but not so often that the rewards don't feel like rewards at all. In other words, my advice boils down to carefully considering your design and not overdoing anything in one way or the other. That’s basically what we did on War Zone of War 2, and it worked out pretty good for us. Thanks for coming.

In Pixar’s Ratatouille, the triumphant dish that brings a fearsome restaurant critic to his knees does so by evoking a childhood memory. Watching that scene I remember thinking it wasn’t truly fair— a kind of cheating, really, to bowl someone over with such a direct appeal to his nostalgia. We all know those early memories often occupy a strange and protected place in the heart, and that this can give rise to much subsequent irrationality. If you played Chrono Trigger soon after it came out in 1995 and recall it fondly, you might have felt a pang of emotion upon seeing the advertisements for the 2008 re-release: “Good morning, Crono!” in that old pixelated font, on a field of black.

Continue reading "The Madeleine in Eight Bits" »

In a certain way, Flower is an interactive experience reduced to one of its barest possible minima. The player navigates a space, “touches” things to unlock other things, and touches those in turn to unlock new areas— where the same thing takes place, and over again until it ends. The simplicity of the rules makes it seem easy and short for people who are already fluent in the language of the video game medium. Distilled to its basic pattern of interactivity, divorced from its art and music and its ambience, Flower would not be particularly fun and would only barely qualify as a game. Our enjoyment of the experience comes mostly from the content, which in turn creates the context, and feeling, of its action: the sun and the clouds, the grass in the wind, the floating and the soaring.

Continue reading "But Never the Rose Without the Thorn" »