I can’t sum it up better than Raph does with this quote:

For those of us who dream of a place we can’t possibly be, doing things we couldn’t do, as someone else, with friends… well, we’re a little bit out of luck. We’ll always have our Avalons and our Lost Worlds. They’re just not the future anymore.

I’ve done a fair bit of research on virtual worlds, and the entire Neuromancer/Lawnmower Man/Matrix scenario has always seemed a bit ridiculous to me, but reasons for failure of things like Second Life tend to stall on the aesthetic (they’re butt ugly, as going for a cutting edge 3D approach generally means the aesthetics are dated before the world gets any traction) and functional (3D is a terrible method for organising and retrieving information: cloud cuckoo filing cabinets that dispense with many of the advantages of digital content), but it took experimentation to be able to say it would only expand so far and that new forms of virtual world would find a bigger audience.

Raph has an interesting observation though (among many), and with restrospective vision it’s kind of obvious: Virtual worlds aren’t the escape we thought they’d be, but are bleeding into real life through people’s preferences for content. While it was led by MUD and Ultima fans, the virtual world movement will end with a mass market, and interaction design will see to it that the most effective are those that tie to customers real lives.

(CC image by fdecomite)

This DICE talk is doing the rounds (to me via Kim Pallister’s notes and Nicholas Lovell’s embed).

I’ve often thought about designing game rules into everything: what if a mundane job could be made compelling by game rules? That simple rule systems can become compelling is something I talk about a lot. From The Game and One Behindmanship to Chore Wars and Eric Zimmerman’s coloured cards (which was an amazing demonstration), games can motivate and influence behaviour enormously.

Here’s the talk, well worth 28 minutes of your time:

Jesse talks about game making us into better people, for instance someone choosing to read less trash and more enriching things because they know their descendants will be able to see a record of it all. Personally, I think it’s likely that many people will go for “cooler” first. Kids reputations at school can be broken by a dodgy song spotted in a playlist, and while this is one very sad example, there are plenty of Nathan Barleys around us.

He specifies “If the game systems are designed right”. Is everything around us already designed to promote psychological health? No. Behaviour can be manipulated in all kinds of ways, some sinister and propagandistic, and games won’t escape this at all. The dystopia/utopia dichotomy I’m seeing applied to this in various places is simplistic, but this technology will be a tool entities can use to shift the balance. People are going to be incentivised to do horrible and self-defeating things as well as immensely healthy things. Pride isn’t a perfect motivator when it’s combined with superficiality and fast-moving fashions, but it might be enough to make people eat healthier foods and exercise more. Or, perhaps, just drink more Dr. Pepper as Jesse illustrates in the talk.

Popcap have released a market research survey they recently commissioned, revealing that apparently between the US and UK, the average user of social games is a 43 year old woman. I’m wary of these figures since they don’t include typical platforms such as consoles, and the study doesn’t state a great deal about where the sample came from, but it at least comes from a market research company rather than a PR company.

It also found that only 5% of social game users are under 18. Though I’d like to see how that compares to other platforms, it’s likely the age groups measured by the BBC in 2005 have been creeping upwards. Games are well and truly busting out of the demographic stereotypes that have seen them demonised like comics in the past 20 years.

(CC image by lyzadanger)

The inimitable James Wallis has bravely salvaged his blog and started posting again, pointing this week to Roger Caillois’ book Man, Play and Games, and summarising some of its main tenets. In particular, agôn, alea, mimicry and ilinx were terms I’d heard unreferenced in a GDC presentation last year, and I’m pleased to stumble across their source.

Between work like this, the vast and ancient body of cultural experience pointed to by Frank Lantz when he insists that games are play rather than media, and the largely unplumbed depths of other fields such as architecture, games have a lot to go at in terms of discovering and building their heritage.

I still meet people who ask me, perplexed look on their fizzogs: “Channel 4 are publishing games? Why?”. Here’s why, in a Gamasutra piece examining Adult Swim and Channel 4’s forays into games so far. It’s worked excellently for them, and excellently for games too, with them taking on smaller projects and different topics.

(CC image by twicepix)

Clint Hocking nails it as far as morality in games is concerned:

When canned, discrete moral choices are rendered in games with such simplicity and lack of humanity, the message we are sending is not the message specific to the content in question (the message in the canned content might be quite beautiful – but it’s not a ludic message) – it is the message inherent in the form in which we’ve presented it: it effectively says that ‘being moral is easy and only takes a moment out of each hour’. To me, this is almost the opposite of the deeper appreciation of humanity we might aim to engender in our audience.

He also points out that early pioneers of film didn’t care about making them morally uplifting, and it certainly wasn’t a bullet point on film posters. Morality isn’t something that can be bolted on to a game as a feature, and typical games are fine; there’s room for everything rather than necessity for a single vision of what they should be. It is somewhat depressing to see session titles like “Five Ways a Video Game Can Make You Cry“, as well as Michael Samyn trolling the rest of the games industry for publicity. I don’t think alternate approaches should be excluded, but I switch off as soon as any of them seem to be proclaiming themselves as the one true way for game development.

Many approaches to morality have been rubbish, whether central to a game or not. While it is an excellent game, GTA IV failed to imbue any sense of drama in the (potential) death of Kate McReary, on account of her being a non-beneficial time-sink to the player. Ostensibly, it was a part of the story hinting that maybe Nico could progress beyond a life of crime, but this was never extended in the theme or mechanics. The character motives diverged from all of the incentives given to the player, but never mind, it was an excellent game.

Bioshock: Binary choice, excellent game in spite of this, not because of it. Fable: almost exactly the same story, with different main character aesthetics and AI responses for good and bad playthroughs. Made very little difference to the experience, but never mind, because it was beautiful and fun to play. The closest attempt I’ve seen to getting it right was S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which had seven endings, five of which depended on your aggregate actions during the game, and there wasn’t a giant indicator on your HUD throughout proclaiming “You are a BAD Stalker”. In the happiest of those five endings, your character went blind. The other two of the seven comprised a much harder to find binary choice with ambiguous moral outcomes. It was far from perfect, but interesting, in that it was closer to being a literary facet than a marketing bullet point, mostly by virtue of dodging obvious symbolism and not exposing the bones of the system to the player.

From commercial blockbusters to vague art games, attempts at morality have so far fallen flat. For a medium that is fundamentally about play, inclusion of a moral dimension seems to involve very little scope to actually play with it, instead offering an opportunity to perform the same actions upon targets designated as good or bad, or perhaps “deserving it” and “not deserving it” by the developers.

I have no doubt that the people who made any game with an attempt at a morality sim included care enormously about the future of games and want to expand their remit, but anyone who sees morality systems in games as a commercial problem needs to take a serious look at their business plan. Clint Hocking has way better ideas on how to make games deeper, more interesting and possibly even informative of morality: It’s not in the scope of a single production, it’s about cultivating development communities that will make games containing subjects they care about.

(CC image by denn)

Lewie Proctor pulls in a variety of opinions on piracy over at Savy Gamer, including CEO of TIGA Richard Wilson, indie developer Cliff Harris, and Dmitry Guseff from DRM provider StarForce.

All kinds of new platforms are habituating people to buying downloadable titles, but it’s new territory and there have been a lot of screw ups. The industry is finding it’s way through them, slowly, and pieces like this SavyGamer one will help. Two things really stuck out to me from it. First, Richard Wilson:

“It is not the responsibility of publishers to sustain a secondary market in games.”

He’s quite right. It’s a different matter if they’re trying to actively destroy it, but frankly, it’s entirely up to digital distributors if they want to offer any ability to resell or not. Digital games aren’t property in the same way piracy isn’t theft (it’s copyright infringement), and a lot of people, no matter what their position on piracy, seem to want old models to apply whenever they’re to their advantage.

Tellingly, the most naive and conflicting two of the interviews are with the guy from StarForce, and another from ReleaseLog, a site that links to newly pirated content. It’s interesting that StarForce see their product as a temporary bulwark against piracy rather than any kind of cast iron solution, and that they see making it consumer friendly as fundamentally weakening it. It turns to self-serving fluff as soon as he says discs are more convenient than downloading though.

The second real standout from the piece are Lewie’s own desires for DRM in future, which include:

Publishers should be absolutely open and honest with what DRM they are using. Everyone along the supply chain should take responsibility for communicating to customers exactly how their digital consumer rights are going to be managed.
Ideally, when the DRM devalues the product, the product should be discounted. Charging £30 for a game that can be resold, and charging £30 for an equivalent game with DRM that absolutely [prevents] it from being resold isn’t right. They are inferior products, and should be priced accordingly.

That kind of pricing structure is an interesting idea, though I suspect it would lead to almost universal acceptance of DRM. That in itself is not so bad, but if or when it begins to lock tinkerers and developers out of platforms altogether, or oblige developers to work with DRM whether they like it or not, that’s very, very bad.

(CC image by Mike Baird)

I’ve heard from one XBLIG developer that any game making three hundred sales there is doing very well relative to most. Brandon Boyer goes into quite some detail on Boing Boing about what Microsoft promised at launch and what they’ve actually done, finding a somewhat depressing result. There’s clearly some commitment from Microsoft when they’re getting us to produce events like X48, and running competitions such as the Imagine Cup, but as Brandon points out, they seem to have fallen short on promises they made with regard to marketing. XBLIG is basically buried fairly deep in the interface.

Were Microsoft expecting better results than “Rocket Fart” and “Don’t B Nervous Talking 2 Girls”? Most probably, but to be fair, there are a few excellent games on there that they could be making more from, both financually and in terms of PR.

Quite possibly, there are also multiple departments within Microsoft contesting various things related to XBLIG. No matter how much Microsoft departments, project managers and developers believe in the indie community, they have a marketing department to go through when it comes to the front end of Xbox Live.

More importantly though, what do developers do when things such as XBLIG, the App Store, and Android Market are exhibiting such small, long tails that even the short heads can fail to make project costs back? It’s quite literally a $64,000 question, and there’s no easy answer. None of these methods of digital distribution offer a ready made living for anyone; it’s as much a jungle, and a business effort, as sending something to bricks and mortar retail.

EDIT: Gamasutra jump in with a much more positive piece on it. Some games have made decent amounts of money during 2009, but they are a tiny minority. Nonetheless, as Gama say, it’d be vey premature to call XBLIG a failure at this point.

(Image: XBLIG title Leave Home, by Hermit Games).

Consollection really has a good, documented set of games console images. Look how far the industry has come!

Parliament commissioned an educational game: MP For A Week. Nicholas Lovell Dan Griliopoulos reviews it on Games Brief.

It guises as educational, and to an extent is, but it also smacks heavily of PR, as Nicholas points out:

The win element also implies that bad MPs always in the long run are losers, which is not strictly true. An MP who does nothing in parliament but bangs on in the local media, or a safe-seat MP who does nothing in his constituency, or even a media-friendly cheeky chappy like Charles Kennedy, Alan Clarke or Boris Johnson, will get re-selected and re-elected most of the time.

Flawed then, but still an interesting games project.

(CC image by **Maurice**)