My troubles come in the form of the interface. I'm not sure how I should create an interface for the player in Game Maker. The logic of how Game Maker's design isn't immediately obvious to me at this point. I spent a couple hours drawing up measurements on graph paper and transferring them to Photoshop to create backgrounds. From there I took them into Game Maker, messing around with room sizes and views, but I'm just not happy with the results.

My first design was essentially leading me to create the interface as part of the room, just outside the area where the player can actually walk. That just didn't work right in my mind, and seems like it would be a real problem to replicate in rooms of various sizes. It also just felt wrong!

Following that, I'm questioning exactly what I need in the interface. Since I'm not intending to implement a full-blown inventory system, I don't really need the full 'backpack' sort of grid. I'd like to implement a way to represent what keys the player has picked up, for example, but that's not quite the same as a complete inventory system. So it's basically back to the drawing board today.

Today my progress was largely off-screen. That is, I made a lot of notes about the themes of the game, the overall structure and basic fiction that will give us some reason for playing. I won’t reproduce all those notes here, partly because that would be enormously tedious for me, and partly because I don’t want to spoil the little fiction that I am writing for this game before its even playable. Suffice it to say that there is a hub, with four ‘temples’ to explore/solve/complete, and a few new mechanics in each temple.

So, as for mechanical progress, I mainly implemented a torchlight system. I toyed around with a few different options. The first one I tried ended up being what I stuck with—using a huge dark sprite with a gradient-to-transparent circle centred on the player. That gives a great illusion of the player emitting light. I also created floor-mounted torches which will light up when the player touches them. Those I used the draw and blending functions to emit a soft yellow glow.

So, since that’s basically all the mechanical developments, I’m going to export an exe of the game as it stands now, and whoever is reading this can just play around in the room I’ve created. Just for reference: WASD to move one block at a time, left click on skeletons to destroy them, the rest is basically self-explanatory.

Download the game here. 

So I just tested this download link, and Chrome warned me that the file appears malicious. It isn't, really. I haven't created this RPG project as an elaborate ruse to distribute a virus to all my personal friends and blog readers. 

LOOK OUT, SKELETON!!

Much progress was made today! I am fairly pleased.

I had many more hours to work today, so I got to really get stuck into the Game Maker scripting language, as I had hoped to do. As it turns out, I’m coming up to speed with it pretty fast, so let’s look over at what I did today.

Firstly, I got the health system working. As it turns out, the built-in system seems to be focused mainly on one of your objects. It took me close to an hour to figure out that the variable ‘health’ is a reserved word, and tracks a value from 1-100. I was very annoyed at my skeletons who just wouldn’t die, because their health was 100, and then eventually they all died, because the global health variable was zero. So anyway, skeletons have ‘stam’ now, not health.

Bit of a detour: A corollary to the health system was learning to write text to the screen. That took quite some time too because I, at some point, had made the object responsible for writing invisible, so nothing I tried worked. Obviously. But after sorting that out, I quickly came up with a total health display. Ok, back on the skeletons. I wanted them to be dangerous, so any time the player is standing next to a skelly, they will do some damage at intervals and within a range randomly selected. So if the player just stands next to the immobile skeleton, the player-character’s health runs down. (Come to think of it, I haven’t actually programmed anything to happen with the player’s health reaches zero. Hmmm.)

Having worked that out, I decided these little buggers needed to move around. Now, pathing is another function Game Maker supports with the drag and drop interface, but like I’ve said I’m avoiding all that. Also, the paths don’t really jive with a more or less grid-based system I’ve decided on. So I had to code a simple AI behaviour by hand. Basically, the skeletons are idiots with no real goals. They just randomly pick one of the four compass directions and take a step if they can, then rest for a few dozen milliseconds. If the player character is next door, however, they will stay put and cause the player some damage!!

I had a lot of trouble with the case switch in my skeletons, which manifested in all the skeletons eventually moving through the whole set of cases, and winding up in the bottom left corner of the room. “Break;” is a pretty important function, if you didn’t know. All that took quite a while and got a bit frustrating, I’m not embarrassed to admit.

From then I had a pretty smooth time of implementing a locked door (an impassable tile with a lock-looking sprite) and a key with which to unlock it. Took a few tries to figure out how to make it all interact the way I wanted—for example, in my first iteration my character had to stand on top of the non-solid door tile for it to work, which just looked kinda wrong. Had a brainwave eventually, and now the player just clicks the door when he’s near enough and has the gold key—a bit like attacking the skeletons.

The last thing I actually implemented today was a health potion. Pretty simple, the player just walks on it and gains 10 health, but can’t go over 100.

From there on I really only did a couple cosmetic changes, browsing through the sprites included with Game Maker. I did make my own key sprite, having not seen the ones packaged in the folders already. It is pretty ugly, but it’s a pretty straight forward process.

Now, I’m to a point where I have basic, absolutely essential mechanics in place, so I’m back to brainstorming. What do I want to do to this framework? Do I want any kind of inventory system beyond a yes/no on keys? Do I want equipment or levelling up? Do I want any skills beyond left-clicking objects in the game world? And a fairly major question is about interface. At the moment, the only interface I have that isn’t the gameworld is a strip at the top with health, score and the single line of messages. Shall I create some kind of sidebar with an inventory and message panel? An action bar? These are fairly significant questions! I will have to think about them.

This skeleton guards the locked door and a health potion.

Finally, I went online again and had a look at one feature I quite like, and may have to figure out a way to implement: a light-based line-of-site system. Nothing fancy, but basically, to give a sense of exploration, I feel it would be effective to limit the player’s range of vision. At the moment, the player can see everything in the room at once. If, instead, you could only see four or five tiles in any direction, this would be much more of a ‘dungeon crawler’ suddenly. However, the function I looked up was pretty complex (relatively) and required the Pro version of Game Maker. I’m not really opposed to buying the full version, but I do want to understand what’s going on. So I’ve decided I won’t add any functions in through copy/pasting someone else’s work. The whole point of this is to be learning, so I want to learn, and hopefully internalise some of this, rather than just trust Google to fix all my problems.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about possible projects, possible environments to build them in, all possible. Today I decided to simply make a snap-decision, and just go with it. I know Game Maker can make top-down RPG type games, I know all the basic mechanics (in general, not in detail) and all I need is to just do it. I need to just build something, nothing that is going to change the world, but only going to change myself—I want to improve my skills.

So I did a bit of work tonight, just writing down a bunch of ideas, high level requirements for  a game like this. For one, I decided to go with a grid-based design, even though Game Maker is advanced enough to handle a pretty fine resolution, and do collision detection in real time. I’m really focused on making the design tasks simple, and working in a grid, and in a turn-based concept just seems a bit simpler to manage.

I fired up Game Maker already—I’m probably not meant to actually even be working in the tools at this early stage, I should be working on a requirements document and game bible, but hey, who’s gonna tell me otherwise? I’ll have a bit more time over the next few days to write down some more mini goals for the project, to test concepts and thrash out a few fundamental mechanics before I start designing and building the world.

So what did I accomplish today?

I finished a super-basic tutorial that helped remind me how Game Maker works. That was great. I reset a few features and managed to create a grid system, with a player-character that I can control step-by-step with WASD keys. Since Game Maker has such nice collision detection, it was pretty simple to create the room and walls that the player-character can’t pass through.

After that I created a cherry object that when I walk across, I pick up and gain a point in the score. Yay, cherries!

I accomplished this stuff pretty quickly, so I set out to create the first set of mechanics to ‘act on the world’ (read: attack bad guys). So I knocked up a skeleton object, and set about creating some kind of attacking mechanism. I thought about this for a while, trying to decide how to represent the kind of ‘walk up to and bash’ style combat vaguely reminiscent of Diablo. It took me a while, but the concept I came up with was a mouse-click on the target enemy, which checks to make sure the p-c is in range before being destroyed. That way the player has to be close enough (next grid box over) to kill the skeleton, rather than just clicking on everything on the screen while hiding in the corner.

I definitely want to add a health system, which is basically built into Game Maker already, but I had about hit my limit of brain power for the evening, so couldn’t figure out how to make it take more than one click to kill the skeleton. Tomorrow!

I did jump on the forum and I downloaded an example RPG walker, and had something of a revelation, about how to build functions out of code instead of the drag and drop interface. I think, from tomorrow, I’ll get into the Game Maker language and avoid the drag and drop stuff entirely. I’d rather learn a little bit of programming, and this GML seems really basic introduction just to brush up my basic logic and scripting skills. So I need to find some documentation on the language, but that’s for another day.

OK, least gamified game is a pretty horrible turn of phrase, I realise this. But I’m talking about all the additional stuff that frames the gameplay loop in games like FarmVille or TinyTower: the gathering of currency, the limited number of moves or actions you can perform in a set time, the dozens of ways you can display your accomplishments to your friends, and the social pressure that comes with all that. With Draw Something, the only Facebook integration is the handy method for finding people to play the game with. That’s it. There’s no badges to earn, there’s nothing to buy with real cash, none of that. All the game wants you to do is draw and guess.

In today’s atmosphere of cynical, Skinner-boxing game design focused more on prying a few cents at a time from players’ hands, it’s refreshing to see such a simple game with such pure goals. The importance of this is, for me, in the fact that no one I know has resorted to just writing the word to be guessed in the drawing space with the purpose of gaining more points. There is absolutely nothing stopping two players from doing this—ignoring the ‘game’ altogether in order to rack up the highest score. But in the end, they are only cheating themselves, since there is no social standing to be gained by amassing a bunch of those gold coins. There aren’t any badges, no fancy new cows, nothing to show off to anyone else. There’s no reason to cheat.

I am reminded of a story that ran a few weeks back about the PVP in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Patch 1.1 for that game introduced a point value for killing members of the opposite faction. BioWare assumed this would create greater incentive to participate in the epic PVP battles imagined by, well every MMO PVP designer ever. Instead, the players learned that a ritualistic execution of one side, then the other, was actually a more efficient means to gain points. Similarly, in World of Warcraft, Alterac Valley is merely a race to kill an NPC, rather than anything resembling warfare between opposite player factions. Those players don’t want to fight other players. They just want points.

These MMO examples are the most obvious, but games tend to encourage this kind of ‘min/max’ play. That is, do the least possible effort to gain the greatest possible reward. This economical way of thinking is disastrous for any game that is more concerned with creating some kind of virtual world, fictional experience. Introducing any kind of public competition—whether by creating tiers of weapons and gear, badges, cows to click, or even just a silly number next to the player’s name—attracts these profit-minded players. Not profit in terms of money, but in terms of results: “How can I most easily gain the game points to appear to be a better gamer than my nearest rivals?”

Games like FarmVille are built on this competitive urge and nothing else. The tasks that highly-economic players set for themselves are often painfully boring, rote activities that they will repeat indefinitely. Farming and grinding are not fun! Not in the way that a harrowing, touch-and-go PVP battle is. But in a genuine battle, you’re not sure of the outcome, so it could all be a waste. Better to not waste your time, and instead focus on the tried-and-true methods of gaining rewards. Those rewards are so incredibly important that it blinds many players to what one initially assumes to be the point of a game: to have fun. To do the activities are fun. Who cares if you gain five points or not, if your blood is pumping, the fear of defeat tinging every action with risk, and either the feeling of crushing loss or victory. As it turns out, an awful lot of people are much more concerned with points than with that kind of feeling. When you can gain the same kind of points in a risk-free endeavour that come from a very risky one, what difference does it make? Why risk the failure in the first place? So, if a designer does a good enough job of creating the public reward system to encourage competition, the gameplay loop itself can be next to nothing. If a WoW player is just going to repetitively farm the same, most efficient dungeon over and over, why create all the other ones?

Draw Something avoids all of this. The gameplay loop itself is essentially cooperative, so the two players are actually working together to solve the riddle, while obeying the spirit of the rules. Whether the players gain 1 or 3 coins is of no consequence outside the game itself—there are no trophies to buy with that currency. Breaking a streak is only that—there is no point multiplication factor ramping up the risk. So, as it stands, Draw Something is a fairly low-risk game, but also one that avoids the min/maxing mentality that drives so many people in publicly visible competition.

How long will this last, though? Being acquired by Zynga clearly signals changes are likely in the future. I simply can’t imagine the social gaming giant leaving this formula alone—how easily the game could be framed by the usual trappings of social gaming! Simply by posting on players’ Facebook walls every time the pair surpasses their previous streak record, or making one’s gold coin total public—without even changing any of the mechanics. I can see the potential for a time delay between drawings being created, then avoided through microtransactions. I can see new colour palettes costing real money instead of gold coins—or gold coins being purchased themselves. All driven by Zynga’s ability to profit from the desire to show off to one’s peers.

What is an account? It is typically a text, a small ream of paper a few millimeters thick that is darkened by a laser beam. It may contain 10,000 words and be read by very few people, often only a dozen or a few hundred if we are really fortunate. A 50,000 word thesis might be read by half a dozen people (if you are lucky, even your PhD advisor would have read parts of it!) and when I say ‘read’, it does not mean ‘understood’, ‘put to use’, ‘acknowledged’, but rather ‘perused’, ‘glanced at’, ‘alluded to’, ‘quoted’, ‘shelved somewhere in a pile’. At best, we add an account to all those which are simultaneously launched in the domain we have been studying. Of course, this study is never complete. We start in the middle of things, in medias res, pressed by our colleagues, pushed by fellowships, starved for money, strangled by deadlines. And most of the things we have been studying, we have ignored or misunderstood.

Action had already started; it will continue when we will no longer be around. What we are doing in the field—conducting interviews, passing out questionnaires, taking notes and pictures, shooting films, leafing through the documentation, clumsily loafing around—is unclear to the people with whom we have shared no more than a fleeting moment. What the clients (research centers, state agencies, company boards, NGOs) who have sent us there expect from us remains cloaked in mystery, so circuitous was the road that led to the choice of this investigator, this topic, this method, this site. Even when we are in the midst of things, with our eyes and ears on the lookout, we miss most of what has happened. We are told the day after that crucial events have taken place, just next door, just a minute before, just when we had left exhausted with our tape recorder mute because of some battery failure.

Even if we work diligently, things don’t get better because, after a few months, we are sunk in a flood of data, reports, transcripts, tables, statistics, and articles. How does one make sense of this mess as it piles up on our desks and fills countless disks with data? Sadly, it often remains to be written and is usually delayed. It rots there as advisors, sponsors, and clients are shouting at you and lovers, spouses, and kids are angry at you while you rummage about in this dark sludge of data to bring light to the world. And when you begin to write in earnest, finally pleased with yourself, you have to sacrifice vast amounts of data that cannot fit in the small number of pages allotted to you. How frustrating this whole business of studying is.

And yet, is this not the way of all flesh? No matter how grandiose the perspective, no matter how scientific the outlook, no matter how tough the requirements, no matter how astute the advisor, the result of the inquiry—in 99% of the cases—will be a report prepared under immense duress on a topic requested by some colleagues for reasons that will remain for the most part unexplained. And that is excellent because there is no better way. Methodological treatises might dream of another world: a book on ANT, written by ants for other ants, has no other aim than to help dig tiny galleries in this dusty and earthly one.

Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (122-124)

No, this is not what I mean at all.

I've been having some conversations with my PhD supervisor about the finer points of one of my chapters as I near completion, and some interesting angles for further writing have come up. In some ways my thesis is setting myself up for a whole lot of more specific research questions later, which I guess is a good thing. This topic is one of them.

I'm becoming more and more interested in Mass Effect as time goes on. I haven't even managed to play the third one yet, but its now on its way to me from everyone's favorite importer, OzGameShop. I've already wandered into the territory I'm going to discuss here, though, before the whole fiasco with the ending to Mass Effect 3 transpired (and continues to). My thesis, generally, doesn't deal with people at large, but more with individual players as much as possible. Yet, increasingly, it is becoming apparent that to work out some of my interesting problems, I'll have to bring in "people at large" in a pretty big way. In trying to erect a useful framework for analyzing games, both in their ludological interactivity and dramatic narrativism, I've gotten into interpretations of canon. 

Authorial... authority... is a big deal in videogames that hasn't (that I've seen) really been dealt with properly yet. On the one hand, the ludologists are (unconsciously) very much promoting authorial authority. They presuppose that what the designer says, via rules, is what is true. End of story. The stuff that might be debatable, the drama/narrative, they don't even consider so that's the end of it. Players, too, tend to validate this flavour of authority; game players subject themselves to the rules of the game, and accept a priori that winning is winning is winning. Of course, there are those who subvert the game and play it differently, refuse to finish races, or griefing other players, or role-play at the expense of levelling up, etc.

The other side of this story is the canonicity of the fiction. I've touched on this in my research already, trying to work through the canon of Mass Effect in simple examples like: who is Shepard? Is Liara attracted to men or women? Facts like these are trivial to assign in a traditional narrative canon. We know who Luke Skywalker's sister is, for example. It's Canon.

My supervisor, and other scholars like him, however, place far greater emphasis on what the fans have to say than I am used to doing. In the end, I'm not very post-modern this way--I still have some respect for authority. But its pretty hard to know what's canon and what isn't when the art itself allows the player to make a range of choices. The space for interpreting and reconfiguring the text is inside the text itself, as opposed to living on fan-fic pages where Draco and Harry make out. The space continues to extend, so you can have fan-fic outside the game as well--there's plenty of it. There is a difference between making a choice inside the game (male or female, Ashley or Kaiden?) and writing a piece of fan-fic outside the game, but is it a significant difference? Is the choice made within the game more like the fan-fic, or more like an authorially, canonically true event?

Obviously there are differences: I can only make choices in Mass Effect that BioWare have put there for me, like pursuing Ashley as a romance interest. I can act within the game according to their scripts. But I can do so for all sorts of reasons, and having done so, ascribe all sorts of interpretive meaning to those episodes that have nothing to do with BioWare's authority--and this is a valid, real *thing* that media studies has legitimated over the past few decades. The reader's interpretation is as real, if not more real, than the author's intention. Let's say I pursue Ashley not because I am also an ignorant xenophobe, but because I see Ashley as young and naive, and feel a protective urge to draw her out into the world and 'educate' her. Or perhaps her naivety is in itself attractive, a kind of innocence. All these interpretations can exist in my mind, and be 'real' according to reader-response theory. Is it any different when I write it down, as fan-fiction? Is it still "real" and legitimate, or has it somehow stepped outside and become non-canon? Does canon exist, in any form, in a model that includes legitimate reader-response?

It's difficult because on one hand the answer is an ideological "no." The author is dead. Reader is king. But on the other, can any of us deny that taking a couple sniper shots to the head kills Shepard? Or that Shepard is unable to carry on multiple romances at once? There do seem to be some things our reader-response cannot quite overcome. I'm just not sure what to call that stuff, and how far it extends exactly. I know vaguely of research into fan culture, particularly by Henry Jenkins, but haven't really gone there yet. It seems even more relevant with the distinct possibility that BioWare are going to release some kind of patch ending for Mass Effect 3--a move I instantly recoil from, but find academically fascinating. If BioWare do release a patch of this kind, they have essentially relinquished their authority. The author will have abdicated the throne, and I'm not sure even a relative modernist like me will be able to keep them in power!

The zealots of the videogame cult are self-identifying. There is a priesthood of core members who call themselves just that. Through various machinations, but most commonly through sheer time, a zealot becomes one of these hardcore evangelists. They prove their credentials by claiming years of experience, or waving brand names and model numbers like holy symbols. The significance of these symbols, like all icons, is only truly meaningful to the converted. For those that stand outside, they represent little apart from expensive hunks of silicon or personal preferences manifested a long time ago. For the initiated, however, these symbols, these claims of belonging not only represent one's status in the club, but one's worth as a person. For the cult, these symbols are truth, external and ideal.

The tenants of the faith are demanding, dichotomic. One must truly be converted, consumed by the brotherhood, and abandon all other measures of value or meaning. One must truly believe that the hunk of plastic and silicon determines your own self-esteem. Your value system becomes the yardstick of trophies and achievements defined by the club. To question the relative importance of the dogma is to become less core, more like the heretics who dare to blaspheme against the holy ludic way.

The fraternity is a bastion, the walls of which must be defended from the constance threat of a heretical insurrection. There is nothing the pagans on the outside wish for more than the absolute destruction of everything held dear by the zealots, or so they believe. Towards anyone who would dare step into holy land, or speak of holy ludus without conversion, the zealot must feel only fear and loathing. The cultist defines his worth by the videogame benchmark, by the traditions passed down from the golden age without question. To allow a heretic to even speak is to doubt one's own worth. So the zealot must fight. To protect the code is to protect oneself.

The one hope of the cultist is a return to that golden age of grace from which videogames have fallen. Some members of the priesthood can, they say, remember the good times, before everything went wrong. Back then, so the stories go, everything was perfect and no one complained. All games were utopias and no one tried to change anything. Only now, since the purity of the videogame has been tainted by the greed of publishers (videogames were not a profit-motivated venture in the golden age) have heretics begun to tamper with the natural order. Only now, lead on by the scent of mainstream dollars, have things begun to change. The exquisite perfection of the natural, original videogame has been diluted--polluted--by heretical ideas.

The crusade is divisive. One is either a zealot or a heretic. The cult cannot tolerate shades or degrees of difference. The cult of the videogame is a sacred refuge, wherein the zealots know they are safe, they are right, absolutely. To allow any other but their own doctrine to exist negates the value of their beliefs. To entertain any other use of videogames but their own is to destroy the special protection they offer. To tolerate other views is to admit that the cult lacks something. For the fanatic, those are impossibilities, aberrations that must be annihilated to preserve the world order.

The order of the world is that videogames belong to the brotherhood, because this is how it has always been. They are the keepers of the sacred secrets. This way is the right way, because this is the way it was in the golden age. The way must not change, the cult cannot allow evolution, or else admit that the past was not ideally, objectively, perfect. To change is to cease to exist. So change must be fought in all things. Mostly from the heretical blasphemous outside, but occasionally from within as well. From time to time, a priest, a member of the inner sanctum will fall to the evils of unorthodoxy. For this, punisment is absolute. The brotherhood closes ranks and casts out this fallen one. Mocking him, they create a new history of his decline, discovering evidence of his wavering faith scattered throughout the past. Though heretics are vile, they are low, base, unable to comprehend the lofty ideals of the doctrine. The betrayers are doubly worse: not only do they chose to abandon the faith, to reject the truth, but they are on the inside, spreading their poison like a cancer.

So the videogame zealot lives a constant nightmare. Their very soul is bound up in their blind, unflinching faith in an unchanging deity. They are besieged on all sides, and constantly threatened with betrayal from within. How exhausting it must be! One cannot but wonder at the cost of this terrible struggle and ask: Why?

Sunday afternoons are for relaxing.

Recently I wrote a post where I defined ‘MMO Syndrome’ as a kind of threat to the pleasure of single-player games. The syndrome comes into effect when the reward schedule and grind start to creep into the gameplay experience at the expense of other kinds of fun. I felt like the way World of Warcraft was structured made it difficult sometimes to enjoy single-player games, like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. I have been thinking about the article I wrote, and reading the comments it generated, which have shown just how many views there are on the subject. I thought I’d share another one here.

Today is a lazy Sunday afternoon and I’m a little tired from yardwork, and I find that I just can’t be bothered to play any of the games I’ve got at my fingertips. This is the perfect time for an MMO.

I recently picked up a copy of Sins of a Solar Empire. By all accounts its exactly the kind of PC strategy game I really enjoy, so I am really looking forward to playing it. I don’t know how to play it, though. So sitting down this afternoon, I fired it up and went through the first tutorial and got about halfway through the second when I decided I just couldn’t bring myself to learn another game system. Looking at the other games on hand, I am in a little bit of a lull—between games you might say. I’ve finished the majority of Assassin’s Creed, and I’ve simply had my fill of Skyrim. I had the itch to play something, but just can’t find the right thing to scratch with.

Used to be, on a day like today, I’d jump on WoW—I might have already been playing to be honest. MMOs (or at least WoW, in my case) are a great way to while away some time. I remember days spent essentially just hanging out in the game, either working through a few daily quests or a handful of dungeon runs with some friends. Maybe I’d just jump on a lowbie and do some levelling. I’d be chatting as much as I was fighting, though, with the guild and other friends. I’d be enjoying the familiarity of WoW, with the novelty of fresh conversation, and maybe a new item or handful of badges.

World of Warcraft benefits greatly from a phenomenon of ‘same-but-different.’ No, I’m not making that up, check out Salen and Zimmerman Rules of Play. Essentially, the comfort of WoW’s familiar ruleset is coupled with the variety that it generates, even the minute level of difference, to keep my attention. There’s a pleasure to be found in the manipulation of a relatively complex system of rules with which the player is deeply familiar. There is a sense of mastery, and therefore comfort. I can’t exactly ignore the game, but I don’t need to concentrate nearly as hard as is required for learning a new set of game rules, like the focus Sins of a Solar Empire would require today.

I already know the patterns the game will throw at me, and I know all my character’s abilities like second nature. I just have to pay attention enough to decide where to go, then keep an eye out for familiar dangers. When I see one of the attacks I’m already expecting, I’m well-prepared to deal with the issue. It’s also fair to say that, for the most part, most end-game players will be over-powered enough for everything other than raiding that even if a mistake is made, it isn’t really that big a problem. I even used to watch TV while playing—can’t do that very well when learning a new game.

Despite the many reasons that playing WoW at the end-game stage (when not doing a high end raid) is fairly predictable, almost rote (but not quite) there is still a progressive element to it that makes it “worth your time.” So maybe I’m not acquiring that next piece of my tier set, but I’m grinding up some faction reputation to get a new mount. Or I’m acquiring badges (or Justice/Valor type points) that I can use to buy a piece for my other spec. WoW has an amazingly thorough capacity to translate gameplay time into some kind of palpable residue. Even the most abstract become numbers like experience points and faction reputation, and are all on your record. So, by the end of the play session, there is something you can point at and say “This is what I just did,” and feel some sense of accomplishment.

So that sense of virtually infinite progression coupled with the minute variety of a familiar rule set creates a very pleasurable experience indeed. I can have the best of both worlds. On the one hand, I can be playing a game I am so deeply familiar with that I don’t have to marshal all my learning faculties. Yet on the other, I can enjoy the feeling that I am making (new) progress which somehow validates the time spent in a way that replaying a different game would not. Even replaying the same dungeon in WoW is same-but-different because you’ll never know for sure exactly how the boss fights will go, or what will drop. The social angle is hard to quantify, but is just as important. Sometimes sitting around in Ironforge chit-chatting is enough for an hour or two. Other times, a party will smash through half a dozen heroics and feel a badass camaraderie that really can’t be compared to many other game experiences.

If one reads between the lines in the paragraph above, a fairly deep criticism of World of Warcraft can be found. The pleasure is rote, requiring fairly little cognitive focus. The progress is illusionary and arbitrary, constantly being generated by Blizzard for us to grind through. It’s a little like watching a sitcom on TV: there’s no real meat to it, no real reason for it. But that’s ok. It feels good on a lazy Sunday afternoon, when you’ve already done the yardwork.

P.S. This blog isn't dead, I've juts been having a run of good luck with freelancing gigs, so the writing energy that would go into posts here has been going to paid work instead. I'm sure you all understand!

With every day that ends...

The Australian videogame industry is suffering right now, in a bad way. Though the small, more agile teams and the two juggernauts of iOS games Halfbrick and Firemint are going gangbusters, the larger-scale, higher budget sector has been all but obliterated over the past four or five years. Following this, there is a perceived 'brain drain' (how often we hear that with regard to the Australian workforce...) or an 'exodus' of talent moving overseas, particularly to Canada. Why are the pastures so much greener in the snow-covered gardens of our northern Commonwealth brothers? What has happened to the local industry to cause such a drought? How can we pick up the pieces and carry on?

I've been talking to a lot of people about this, and I have some thoughts. 

Firstly, I think its important to recognise that we have the talent here in Australia. There are dozens of designers, programmers, artists etc who have worked in the A-grade industry environment for a number of years, and a whole lot of them are out of work. We have even more graduates of an increasing number of videogame related tertiary qualifications from both private and public universities or colleges. Local talent is not a problem. If (and when) we do lose some overseas, we are very well-placed to produce more.

Further, our talent is being nurtured by this new wave of videogame degrees. I am responsible for one of them! Increasingly, the academy is working on enhancing the education these graduates receive. Rather than simply a programming degree working in UDK one semester, we are incorporating the critical artistic skills that differentiate an Arts/Humanities graduate from a TAFE tradesman. Our talent will have more going for them than the ability to follow instructions and program what their creative leads tell them to. Our talent will be the creative leads. They won't just know how to create videogames, but why it's worth doing so.

The international developers know some of this. According to Anthony Redden, formerly of THQ Studio Australia, after the exposure the closure of his studio received in the media, international recruiters were contacting him with job opportunities. These overseas studios actually want the kind of talent we have here in Australia. Further, some of the talent is obviously willing to move, internationally, to wherever the work is. To me, that means there is an opportunity to import talent if we need to--Canada is doing it, why shouldn't Australia?

The question becomes how do we manage to keep the work here in Australia. To understand this problem it's worth taking a moment to note where the work came from in the first place, to know why it all dried up so suddenly. Several of studios that have closed recently: Blue Tongue and THQ Studio Australia, Pandemic and Visceral Games, Team Bondi, Krome and now KMM, relied significantly on foreign investment. Blue Tongue and THQ Australia were subsidiaries of THQ, Pandemic and Visceral Games both belonged to EA, and Team Bondi, well... they worked with Rockstar and fell apart for their own special reasons. The executives at Team Bondi were former Team Soho Studio employees, so foreign in a different way.

The relationship a lot of Australian game development work had to the publishers was essentially outsourcing. Many of the games developed by these studios, while big enough to often be casually classified as 'AAA' (whatever that means...) were not of the same ilk as the work being done by the other studios these same publishers own in other countries. The Ubisoft studios in Montreal, for example, or Rockstar North were not making licenced games such as Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots (Blue Tongue), The Last Airbender (THQ Studio Australia). Nor are those other studios tasked with sequels like De Blob 2 (Blue Tongue) or Star Wars game after Star Wars game (Pandemic and Krome). So many Star Wars games...

This isn't to cast dispersion on the work that was done by those studios, but as a bit of a reality-check. These studios weren't valued for their original creations, they were used by the larger companies that owned them to produce the middle-range film tie-ins and other licenced material. We were a high-quality outsource location, not a producer of original, unique content. Consider Pandemic, who produced the Saboteur--an original IP and a game I really quite liked--who were promptly shut down after its release. My goals with the work I do at the university is to equip my graduates with skills that enable them to do much more than follow a brief handed down from the licence lawyers at International Publisher Headquarters via email. I want my students to be the creators of art, not the factory workers of the videogame industry. I really hope I'm not the only one in Australia who wants this.

The question is, if Australia is a world-class country full of the talent that international corporations are willing to invest in, willing to recruit into their closer-to-home studios, why are we acting like an outsource location? Why aren't we, as Australians, creating our own original content and keeping control over our IP and our industry? Why are practically all the major studios (including Firemint now) owned and operated by overseas publishers/developers?

Obviously the game development scene in Australia needs a bit of a boost if it is to continue. I am not a proponent of the "let's just all make iPhone games forever!" attitude. Those kinds of games already don't need the kind of help I'm talking about, and they do not have the kind of potential I will describe below. They lay a great foundation for where we need to go from here: the kind of game you pay $30-40AU for on Steam, right up to genuine AAA games. Personally, I like the big-budget, richly immersive games that take me to another place and time, cast me in an exotic role, and tell me a new story. I am really tired of tapping cartoons on my iPhone. I like the games that give me a little something to think about other than how to knock down the next pile of sticks and ice blocks. There is no reason these can't be made in Australia. Videogames are not a physical resource that has to be mined from the ground. They can come from anywhere.

These kinds of games require an investment framework that allows them to work for a number of months or years towards a large-scale, higher-risk release. Yes, there is risk. This is why the international investment has dried up: the cost of doing business in Australia no longer outweighs the risk associated with larger development projects--even projects assured of some degree of success because of their licences. As the global economy has struggled over the past few years, the Australian dollar has become increasingly valuable, so the cost to foreign companies rises. If the invesetor was Australian, however, they might not run for the hills the moment our currency reaches parity with the US dollar. Its a tragic situation when, as our economy actually shows some strength and resilience, this particular sector all but collapses because the whole paradigm relies on the weakness of the dollar through the late 90s.

So, yes, there is a lot of room for governmental incentives of the sort Canada offer to court the big players back to Australia. But there is even more room for better incentives to encourage Australian investors to set up an end-to-end development and distribution industry locally that does not rely on international investment. International sales? Absolutely, go for it. But we shouldn't be waiting around asking for permission from the big American publishers to make our own products. We shouldn't consider ourselves lucky for being able to work on something that Rockstar North or Ubisoft or THQ Montreal don't want to because they are too busy with Grand Theft Auto 5, FarCry 3 or Warhammer games.

That image at the top of this post is of a sunset, and is one of the saddest pictures I think I've ever seen. But, even if this is an end of an era, we have the opportunity to start a new one. Its a lot of hard work, believe me, I know. There weren't any game design or studies units at Macquarie University when I got here, there certainly weren't any degrees or majors in the area. There are now. This stuff can be done. It will be done, so long as we don't give up. We could flip that image of sunset around so the game development industry is looking into dawn instead.