The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
Last week I discussed great bugs that never see the light of day.
What follows is a transcript of a conversation I had this morning, about a hotfix for Throne of Oblivion slated for next week.
Me: Sorry I’m late. Anything unusual in this morning’s hotfix build?
QA Lead: Every vampire NPC in the game is a female named Beavis.
Heh heh. Heh heh heh heh. Being undead is coooool.
File this in the ‘these guys haven’t been litigated out of business yet?’ Perhaps inspired by bad Capital One giveaways, Project Entropia has sold a virtual island to the highest bidder, for a sale of $26, 500. The winner plans to take that land, subdivide it up and resell it to other players for what he figures to be a net profit. Which just goes to show, there’s no place that can resist the encroachment of Levittown. Continue reading
The president could have been caught beating a puppy to death while wearing lingerie, and still all anyone in the industry would want to talk about is The Deal, specifically the one where they get exclusive rights to the NFL player names, team names and likenesses. So let’s take a look at it with completely uninformed speculation, complete with a crazy conspiracy theory! Continue reading
… either that, or they decided to take my advice. Hey, Monolith, as long as you’re going to ship in spring anyway, may I offer some advice? Find out when TV goes into reruns, and ship then. I’m serious. I can’t even tell you how much more time I’ve spent gaming now that House is the only show on TV still doing new episodes because no one wants to go against A Charlie Brown Christmas. Exactly what you need if you’re trying to build a core community for your MMO.
There’s something compelling about a man so brilliant that he can be an unabashed jerk to everyone, including his patients. It and Lost are the only two new shows worth spit this year. Note to self: ABC is replaying the first two episodes, which I missed, of Lost on Wednesday. Maybe if I watch those, I’ll FINALLY understand what the hell is going on.
Double-coding is the practice of creating a work of art that speaks to two different audiences in different ways. It’s most often used to describe Children’s shows that also entertain adults. For example, Animaniacs and the classic Bugs Bunny cartoons are double-coded well – they have many references that a child won’t get but will amuse an adult. ‘Blues Clues’ is not double-coded – and as such, an adult watching it will be put to sleep.
Of course, this is all an excuse to show you all this very double-coded, hilarious clip from a 70’s children’s show. Warning: requres flash, sound, and playing at work will elicit some very odd looks from co-workers and possibly a talk with your HR department.
I’ve never fully embraced the academic side of our field as others in the industry have. I’m an intensely practical person, and academics, frequently, are not. So it was with some interest that I read Mark Barrett’s indictment of game academia. He starts off with an illuminating bit of background:
In college I took a run at academic criticism, including semiotics. I spent time studying films and writing them, studying fiction and writing short stories, and studying theater and writing plays. The most surprising thing I learned in my criticism classes was that most of the people sitting in the chairs beside me had no interest in making anything. They were there to learn how to talk about the medium they loved, not how to better create in the medium they loved.
MMOs, due to their shiney new nature, their social aspects, and the insights they can offer on sociology, psychology, economics and social network theory among other things, attract more than their fair share of observers, more than willing to give you their two cents about what you’re doing wrong.
Last week, Kotaku reported that China banned a game for recognizing Taiwan as being a sovereign state. I mailed this news to a friend of mine, who is a nut for Championship Manager (which is, btw, probably the most popular game in the world that you’ve never heard of). His thoughts were good:
Interesting… This is indeed a strange one… Especially since Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Tibet all have national teams and are affiliated with FIFA in real life. I don’t see China ever pulling out of the World Cup because of this… Continue reading
Jeff ‘Dundee’ Freeman and Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green are having a discussion about breadth vs depth in game design. Brian gets the ball rolling.
Broad content is content that is spread out and is measured in raw numbers. For example, large continents are broad content, because you have to spend time traveling around in the area to see it all. More races, more areas, more items, more monsters, anything that can be measured by counting.
Deep content is content that is concentrated and tends to be a bit more abstract. Puzzles, secrets, emergent behavior, anything that can’t just be measured by numbers.
Idle Thumbs has been in a tizzy for the last couple of days because the Doom Movie will not be based on Hell, Space Marines or anything else vaguely Doomish. To quote their source article:
Doom 2 was subtitled ‘Hell on Earth’, and the key plot point of Doom 3 is that the monsters in-game are Hellspawn, hence the multiple pentograms and such vile creations as dead-baby-cherub-wasp combinations. A ‘necessary’ change, or a neat way to avoid right-wing criticism? We wonder.
To quote Idle Thumbs:
t may be worse than this. I’m not a zealot about brand protectionism the way that some people are. Hell, I even like the taste of Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper. I tried to put steampunk into Ultima (I plead duress). But I still firmly believe that brands have real value, more value than the people who create these brands seem to grok. If you’re Id, then the Doom brand is your bread and butter. It’s got a core fan base that loves what the brand stands for and is willing to evangelize it, so long as you don’t betray what the brand stands for.
Doom is, fundamentally, about being a space marine killing demons from hell on a space station with a shotgun. At its core, when I think of my fondest memory in any of the Dooms, that’s what comes to mind. It’s also shockingly original – except for perhaps Event Horizon, what other movies can you think of that bring theological themes of heaven and hell into sci fi?
The Doom movie, as currently slated, looks to strip out the demons from hell, strip out the space marines, and set it in common times. If we’re lucky, though, maybe they’ll remember to give someone a shotgun. The Id guys would be better served by having a crappy movie that exactly fit Doom’s themes and values than by having a mediocre to good movie that betrayed them. They risk enraging their core evangelists, and confusing more tertiary fans who thought they knew what Doom was about. They also end up looking like ‘me-too’ers with a warmed over Resident Evil ripoff, rather than the venerable market leader with a golden IP that they are.
In the long run, this could easily weaken the franchise, hurting it in the long haul. But try telling that to the money guys, who see a quick way to cash in.
EDIT: It seems that lately, Penny Arcade has been annoyed by exactly the same things I am.
Someone mailed me this webcomic weeks ago. Shoulda looked sooner. The first 30 in particular are pretty damning to the newbie experience in every MMO.
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