Chances are that if you work on big-budget video games for a living you’ll eventually make something with Nazis in it, and while the coming of that day may not be a surprise, the news that your project will be released in Germany often is. Why would Germans want to play a game where they mainly shoot other Germans? you think. But Germany is the world’s second-largest market for many types of games, and a World War II theme has never been shown to harm a title’s sales there. At the same time, playing a game localized properly for Deutschland and set in der Zweite Weltkrieg can be like experiencing an unsettling alternate reality: all the Nazi symbology and slogans are gone– effaced completely. The vertical crimson banners still hang but are emblazoned with the iron cross or another innocuous symbol in the center, and those dual lightning bolts of the SS, so ubiquitous on your reference material, have been totally scrubbed away.

Planck v.0, the game prototype that a group of talented people and I have been working on over the past several months, has just been submitted to the 2010 Independent Games Festival. A slightly higher (but not high enough) resolution video is available directly on Vimeo.

I wish I could say this blog was started with only the most noble of intentions, but the truth is that I began writing Magical Wasteland as a way to give vent to some of my more personal frustrations with the industry in which I labored. I wrote anonymously in order to protect my employers from anything off-message (the number of big-developer bloggers who have gotten in trouble at one time or another for something they wrote on an ostensibly personal site is, I suspect, close to a hundred percent), and to protect myself, especially during the time I was working as part of a team whose members with more public contact information had been, without exaggeration, stalked, and more than once. I was also sniping at what I saw as “bad writing” in the enthusiast press, and, combined with my inextinguishable penchant for being a smartass, was sure to make trouble for somebody at one point or another.

The anonymous days, however, are over. Now, the only people I can cause difficulty for are me and my wife (who is used to that idea). After many years of working on very big games I have decided to try something new. Floating untethered without an idea of exactly where one is headed is an odd sensation, but one that I hope will turn out to have been necessary: the right decision. I am designing and writing, and hopefully all of the game journalists who have held deep in their hearts fiery vendettas against me for lampooning their typos– I’m flattering myself, I know– will see fit to forgive, and look upon my future creations with a benign eye. Magical Wasteland will continue to be a place for my personal thoughts on games, and future updates on the other things will come from more appropriate venues. I’ll conclude this little announcement of a post with a quote that I hope I will not get in trouble for, from the good people of Bungie (whom I all still love dearly, don’t sue me please), occasioned by the studio’s triumphant, nearly miraculous departure from Microsoft on July 7th, 2007. “The road to World Domination,” they wrote, “is twisty, and paved with bumps, potholes and sweet, sweet jumps.”

“Video games [...] owe their appeal to a combination of skill and chance. Winning, or at least doing well, in these games is desired as a demonstration of skill and, by implication, worthiness, but it also suggests one’s superiority to real or imagined competitors. Unconsciously, winning is also taken for a demonstration that fate favors one, an idea that adds considerably to the feeling of self-confidence which one seeks to attain. No wonder, then, that these games are played with great intensity and persistence by persons or age groups who are insecure, such as teenagers and adolescents, who try to compensate for their feelings of inferiority and to quiet inner doubts through demonstrations of both their skill and their luck.”

- A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child Rearing, Bruno Bettelheim

I recently had a chance to attend an awards ceremony that was not specifically meant for games. People who had dedicated their lives to their craft, the history of which dates back more than a century and a half, had gathered in an elaborate dining hall to celebrate their society’s annual recognition of the best they had produced. As with most award shows, the attitude was clubby; there was much assumed knowledge and inside joking. They all knew each other, and we knew many of them.

A startup developer was working on a small downloadable game for a large publisher. The publisher canceled the game midway through development for business reasons, and didn’t pay the developer for the work completed thus far – in violation of the terms of the contract. When asked about the money, the publisher’s lawyer got on the phone.

“Listen, guys,” said the lawyer. “I speak regularly to my colleagues in similar positions at the other major publishers. If you turn this into a big issue or try to take legal action against us, I’m going to tell these people that, based on my experience, you are a very difficult developer to work with. And when they hear that, they may avoid doing business with you.”

It was a cheap scare tactic, but the words resonated. As a nascent company with no name or reputation built up – no track record to fall back on that could dispute the lawyer’s threatened claims – there was little choice in the matter but to settle for a deal.

This is one of the reasons why in the game industry, as in film and music, the money for interesting new projects overwhelmingly finds its way to those groups with a well-established (and well-communicated) prior history.

“No matter how I slice and dice the customer base, customers give lower ratings to obscure titles. A balanced picture emerges of the impact of online channels on market demand: Hit products remain dominant, even among consumers who venture deep into the tail. Hit products are also liked better than obscure products. It is a myth that obscure books, films, and songs are treasured. What consumers buy in internet channels is much the same as what they have always bought.”

– The Harvard Business Review, Should You Invest in the Long Tail?, July/August 2008 Issue

Mad Doc Software becomes Rockstar New England
Just as when Irrational was re-dubbed 2K Boston, which I decried earlier, another Boston-area developer has been subsumed into a larger conglomerate. There was nothing particularly remarkable about “Mad Doc” (in my experience, people often misheard it and called them Mad Dog), but at least it carried a personal touch, being a reference to the studio’s founder.

Cranky Pants becomes Sandblast
Do people associate fun games with being blasted with sand? I am skeptical. “Cranky Pants” was up there with the goofiest of them (maybe surpassed only by Deep Fried Entertainment), but at least it was unique and memorable. Perhaps it was also reference to the studio’s founder? And “Sandblast” represents what happened to those early hopes and dreams? Nah... too convenient.

Z-Axis becomes Underground Development
Z-Axis brings to mind the third dimension, maybe, but not much else. The name was changed to the equally nondescript Underground Development, a portent of things to come as Activision subsequently buried them.

I’ve witnessed a few conversations about the possible identity of Surfer Girl by a group of men. This is how they play out:

1. Surfer Girl probably isn’t actually a woman.

2. If Surfer Girl is a woman, she’s probably some kind of secretary or an assistant to a powerful and well-connected executive.

3. Yeah. Surfer Girl must be, like, this receptionist who sleeps around everywhere to get all her information... well, she may also get messages from tipsters from time to time.

The conversation usually diverts from there into some stories of promiscuous women that the people in the group have heard about.

I return to my fondness for Insert Credit, which is (was?) one of the world’s first truly honest blogs about video games– honest as in aiming only to represent the authors’ thoughts, with no advertising, no comments, no attempts to enhance credibility with appearances. The site ran a feature posted on August 21, 2003 about how to improve, or at least move forward, the dismal pseudoscience we in the industry call “game journalism”. It seems worth rereading in light of recent controversies. Writers on games that you may have heard of, if you bother to pay attention to the bylines at all, such as Brandon Sheffield, Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh, Chris Kohler, and Tycho Brahe (Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade) weigh in with personal thoughts on the matter. It’s too bad we don’t see enough of this energy shine through in the work they do for their day jobs. It probably doesn’t sell well.

It’s a common mistake to assume that the delivery of some big message or the exploration of some weighty modern theme indicates the possession of an underlying intelligence. Thus, there’s an incorrect perception by some commentators on the game industry that games which do feature these elements are necessarily “smarter” than their counterparts that do not.

This naïve and unfortunate attitude is on display in full force in a new interview on Gamasutra with Derek Littlewood, the Project Lead of the forthcoming Haze—not by him, but by the hysterical game industry journalist that is interviewing him. “Did you make Haze because you were simply fed up with the stupidity of most video games?” he asks at one point. Later on he repeats much the same thing, in an accusatory way: “Why are games so stupid? Who's to blame?” Beyond being bad journalism, this is a completely misguided line of questioning. A game (in fact, any form of art) does not need to have a message to be smart.

A good counter-example is Portal. Erik Wolpaw, its writer, made this point in a sly way in his own recent interview:

Also, there is cake. Why’s that?

Well, there are lots of message games coming out now. Like they’ve got something really important to get off their chest about the war in Iraq or the player is forced to make some dicey underwater moral choices. Really, just a whole heck of a lot of stuff to think about. With that in mind, at the beginning of the Portal development process, we sat down as a group to decide what philosopher or school of philosophy our game would be based on. That was followed by about fifteen minutes of silence and then someone mentioned that a lot of people like cake.

At the Electronic Entertainment Expo of 2006 (the last one, as it happens), an independent Canadian developer, Silicon Knights, displayed its latest project in development, entitled Too Human. The demo was, by all accounts, a disaster– technical problems abounded, nobody understood the product and the enthusiast press were quick to pile on large helpings of ridicule. Since then, the founder of the studio, Denis Dyack, has been visibly upset, defensive, and borderline obsessed with the fallout of that demo. He mentions it to nearly anyone who interviews him and he even tried posting on Internet forums to defend himself and his studio (to predictable results). Recently, he said he feels like he’s been through “eighteen months of hell”.

I do hope we all can stop picking on him and his project, at least until it is released. All parties acknowledge the game was not ready to be shown in May of 2006, and any further hounding of the people behind this title seems rooted solely in the knowledge that Dyack is a risible figure– he will react if we tease him, so tease him we must. As hardcore gamers, we are used to being cynical. But as fellow developers, perhaps we can show some support for this independent studio with a solid track record (Eternal Darkness, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes) and their pursuit of their huge ambitions. Denis Dyack is easy to make fun of because he wears his heart on his sleeve, as the saying goes. He is genuinely trying his hardest to push the medium forward in the best way he knows how. Why can’t we support him? It’s clearly what we would want, if we were in his shoes.

As has been understood for millennia, names are important – they designate us and therefore play a part in defining who we are. For a game development studio, a name is not just a hint at the kind of mindset within, but a blank slate upon which a reputation can be built. Some of the best developers’ names have value that is nearly incalculable; any new release announcement from them is automatically widely reported, simply on the basis of their pedigree. So it is with great disappointment that we note that, in some bizarre idea of a reward for completing BioShock, the publisher Take-Two has decided to rename Irrational, the studio that created it, into the faceless, dead, and insulting “2K Boston”. Gone, now, is the chance for Irrational to create its own identity in the vein of Blizzard or Bungie: to anyone who is unaware of the developer’s work, it’s just a branch office of a struggling publisher. This seemingly innocuous change is a big loss for Irrational and a setback for developers in general.

You never truly begin to understand a language, no matter how much you are exposed to it, until you try to speak it and write it yourself— until you grapple with it to express your own thoughts and feelings. In the same way, through no amount of just playing games can one really get to the bottom of what they are about, why they exist and where they are going. To play a game is to be forced to come to terms with the game’s limitations, but to design a game is to face the world’s limitations.

When you have been making games for a while, you become acutely aware of what the real triumphs are and where the corners were cut. Features that once seemed like difficult feats of technical trickery to you are exposed as the developmental equivalent of a parlor trick, while the very best games soon become all the more impressive to you, knowing acutely all the hurdles they must have overcome. If you want to appreciate games to their fullest– as everyone who professes to love them should – don’t just play games. Make them.

As a cost-saving measure, Activision has joined the ranks of publishers that do not print the full credits for a game in the accompanying manual. Rationally, this may seem like a small, perhaps inconsequential loss in the overall battle for the recognition of talent and hard work (the credits can still be seen in-game, after all). But it’s somehow saddening all the same. Not everyone hungers for fame or recognition beyond that of one’s close friends, but as a kind of professional courtesy it doesn’t seem prohibitively expensive. A name in print is nice, as any journalist will tell you.

Recently it became a widely reported news item that the Xbox 360’s lack of a guaranteed hard disc drive was “holding back” the development of Grand Theft Auto IV. But in a thinking, reasoning reality, this shouldn’t have been news at all. Having to struggle against the technical limitations of all consoles is, indeed, one of the chief challenges (one might say problems) with the multi-platform development strategy in place at the major publishers. During the PS2/Xbox time period, the PS2 “held back” dozens of games because of its own lack of a hard drive and mostly inferior specifications. Now the tables have reversed, but multi-platform developers are still mostly doing what they have always done – develop for the lowest spec machine and then port upwards.

At any rate, there is nothing in the Microsoft requirements that says a game can’t work better with a hard drive as long as the game works at all without one. In other words, developers for the 360 are quite able to take advantage of the hard drive if they have the time, ability and inclination to implement a system that can work in either case.

Sometimes I get the sense that people have started to consider video game graphics a “problem” that has been largely “solved,” and that any further development is an exercise in diminishing marginal returns. Like a skyscraper, after too many stories have been added the building becomes too expensive and simply not worth the effort to construct. It is then usually suggested that now we can finally stop worrying about graphics and go on to begin making the great, innovative gameplay we’ve all been waiting for (even though we do not really seem to agree on what that actually is).

However, just the opposite is true: the more development that has taken place in this area, the more that is possible to expand upon. Instead of a single skyscraper, the development of graphics technology is more like the construction of roads: the more development that takes place, the more valuable the resultant network as a whole, and the more further development becomes possible. The next generation consoles have opened the way to all kinds of new territory– areas of which we are really only beginning to scratch the surface in shipping products. There is a huge amount of work still to be done: a myriad of problems to be solved, and plenty of opportunity to seize.

Welcome to Magical Wasteland, a new blog on video games and the industry that creates them. I'm Matthew, your mysterious host.

The opinions expressed here are and will always be the personal views of the author and never those of his employer.