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These days I only read Gamer's Quarter and The Escapist for well-written in-depth nostalgia, and a bunch of gaming message boards for the news.

is it the only computer games magazine ever written for mature adults

...that indie game devs stand to make _more_ money than those working at game companies.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/8/14

Great article.

The Escapist covered this topic recently. There's a fascinating alternative perspective presented in an interview with the president of RedBedlam, the team behind Roma Victor - another virtual economics-based VW due to launch in July. The interview is here.

NB my sig.

The Escapist covered this topic recently. There's a fascinating alternative perspective presented in an interview with the president of RedBedlam, the team behind Roma Victor - another virtual economics-based VW due to launch in July. The interview is here.

NB my sig.

Dang, why didn't the link go through? The URL for "Read Game": http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/7/12

Text version. (For some reason, you'll need to copy and paste the link.) PDF version.

Text version. (For some reason, you'll need to copy and paste the link.) PDF version.

does anyone else find the layout of The Escapist [escapistmagazine.com] to be one of the most annoying things to hit the WWW since dancing hamsters?

You do know there's a "text" button at the bottom of each page that takes you to a plain HTML version of the complete article, right?

"Wal-Mart Rules" (text version)

If you don't agree, try reading the article and then increasing the size of the already tiny text to make it more readable. Oh, look, a tenth of the article just disappeared. No problem, I'll just scroll -- nope. Can't scroll down to see it. It's stuck behind their navigation and page border graphics. Maybe if I select it I can read the highlighted text -- nope again. In fact, the only way to read the entire article is to view the HTML source, pick out the tiny bit of text near the bottom, and look at that.

And don't even think about opening the article in a tab and then _looking at anyone else's web page_ instead of theirs. It picks up the PgUp and PgDn keyatrokes used to navigate between tabs and interprets them as page navigation commands. How much tequila did it take to think that that was a really great idea?

"Oooh, I know! Let's design a page that mimics an awkward, offline format, set it up so that nobody can read it and be as hostile as we can to existing standards and the expectations of the public. It's brilliant! Look at what great artists we are!"

I suppose that the only good thing I can say is that at least it's not Flash.

Do you buy your electronic games at Wal-Mart? Never mind, doesn't matter. The retail games you buy at GameStop or Best Buy or online are the games Wal-Mart has decided you can buy.

Publisher sales reps inform Wal-Mart buyers of games in development; the games' subjects, titles, artwork and packaging are vetted and sometimes vetoed by Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart tells a top-end publisher it won't carry a certain game, the publisher kills that game. In short, every triple-A game sold at retail in North America is managed start to finish, top to bottom, with the publisher's gaze fixed squarely on Wal-Mart, and no other.

But how long will that last?

The Power
By consolidating many manufacturing sources and optimizing its supply chain, Wal-Mart has shifted the center of business power from manufacturing to retail. This has forced most American industries to move offshore, but the software business, and electronic games in particular, have been less affected this way. Though selected art resources are increasingly outsourced to India and Southeast Asia, games are largely still produced in relatively small, integral domestic groups. Is this because North American creators understand their audience better than overseas coders? Because the creators here are better skilled? Or is it simply that Wal-Mart customers, who unfailingly seek the lowest prices for food and appliances and shampoo and garden hoses, will still pay high prices for top-line computer games?

For whatever reason, the game business has so far resisted most competition from lower-wage workers overseas. Compared to physical manufacturing, software profit margins remain comfortable and can support

History has shown us that some entertainment industries are willing to censure themselves in the face of opposition. Look at the destruction of the "Golden Age" of comics after WWII, as the medium moved from "kids" stuff to WWII vets returning to the states and looking for the same comic entertainment they had as a child - but now with more "mature" storylines.

The Escapist recently had an article on this here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/35/17.

Back then, comic book stores rolled over. Perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of patriotism - after all, their government leaders wouldn't do the wrong thing, right? It took comics decades to crawl out of that "kids only" hole - and now, the industry is dominated by Japanese manga which didn't have such restrictions (all jokes about tentacle hentai and schoolgirl panties aside).

This time, I think the game industry "gets it", and luckily, they're forming a group to handle it. If done right, it can be something like the recent Anti-Broadcast Flag that I participated in last year. Gamers, when certain bills are under debate, can be organized en masse to send personal phone calls, emails, and letters to their local congresspeople with the same message: we support protecting children, but not at the expense of giving up 1st Amendment freedoms. Laws saying selling Mature games to minors is fine - laws saying no mature games at all or no mature games allowed in stores is not.

This would be the most powerful way to combat some of these silly laws. Some of them are well meaning - people upset and confused at a new medium that is "untraditional", and all they see is the bad and not the good. Others, I believe, are using the issue to promote their own agenda or pocketbook (and I think we know who I'm talking about here). By making massive communication movements in the media and politics when pressure is needed, politicians will have to really think about what they're doing, and if it's worth the political effort when there are other more important issues to deal with. (Such as, I don't know, hunger, homelessness, medical coverage, retirement issues, security, campaign finance reform - oh, wait, nevermind, the latter is a pipe dream.)

This organization has a lot of potential, and it's a group that I believe we should all support. It might not make a lot of difference in the short run - laws under consideration will go on. But we can either do what many in the comic book industry did - go down without a fight, or we can drag political leaders kicking and screaming into the modern age while exercising some discipline of our own and behaving like adults.

Of course, this is all just my opinion. I could be wrong. Either way, I've signed up, and I'm ready to pick up the phone and put in some dollars when needed.

I agree with you. I think some better questions are: Is it morally reprehensible for companies to rig the game so that you are doing something financially productive for them besides paying them to create the game. The ideal situation would be players pay company X to play game X. Company X has the players doing something X that they can sell to people/company Y. Company X pays players that meet specific goals. Everyone wants to love their "job" so isn't it the best situation if one could get pay to play a game that they enjoy.

This is kind of similar the article that the escapist did about getting people to do "quests" in real life http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/30/25
Would it be great if you could get someone to do a "get me TP from Walmart" and I will give you 5$ and 50xp?

The issue isn't about what lessons WoW is teaching. Basically, it's about a social sickness that pervades the game.

That's probably a little harsh. I played the game for a bit and it was pretty fun going through the very absorbing storyline-like quests. Like most people, once I hit 60 it was a pretty emty field. There was nothing mre besides Battlegrounds and 40-man raids. My guild wasn't large enough to do that (and we kept loosing players to "big-name" guilds which were more often than not the haven of assholes and jerks, but who did Molten Core and Zul'Gurab weekly) so we tried to settle for Dire Maul runs and pickup Battlegrounds fights. (You can tell that those went really well.)

The social sickness comes in, in that WoW fosters an insanely intense us-vs-them philosophy, and not only between the two factions -- that's a given, though I wish it could have been handled better. It's that even within a faction, there is intense rivalry, bickering, and TEH DRAMA!!!1! which turns otherwise rational people into frothing Greater Internet F*ckwads. It can make a person sick at times. Oh, and God forbid you disagree with someone. Forget about reasonable, rational dialogue. 'Cry more, noob.' 'It's fine, learn 2 play.' Yeah. Lots of good dialogue going on there, The old saying was that if assholes were airplanes, battle.net would be an airport. WoW very much lives up to that. See this article for an excellent discussion about this and related issues.

So, what to do? Kowtow and beg guys like Pals 4 Life or Banana Boyz to take you in and hope that they'll deign to let you do an MC or Onyxia run, after leaving a small guild of folks whom you've played with for months and been good friends with? Level up another character to 60... and lather, rinse, repeat? 'Learn 2 play?' Nah. There are better things to do with your time. If you can deal with the culture of immaturity in WoW, and if you can pump 40+ hours a week into it... more power to you. Just don't start whining when you fail to develop decent communication skills. It's fine, learn 2 live.

If you like to play a single-player MMO with other people who coincidentally happen to go by you once in a while, this game is not for you. However, if you are looking for a VERY complex and engaging game which nearly requires a multiplayer mentality, this game is more for you. Of course it's not impossible to go solo, but it will be a lot harder to accomplish anything, and it will be boring without people to help you out and whom with you can do cool things. On the other side, multiplayer end-game content is not nearly as one-tracked as WOW and many other MMO's. You don't have to do PVP or complexes (dungeons) as the main source of your pleasure; EVE has a absolutely monstrous variety of game play.

You have the liberty to choose what ship you want to pilot, what sort of roles you want, and what you want to accomplish. You can get rich in any number of ways such as mining asteroids (and selling the refined minerals), building ships and modules (buying blueprints, minerals, and other resources off the player market or from your own acquisition), hunt NPC's for a living, be a pirate and extort money from people, sell transportation services, and the list goes on. The liberty which CCP gives the players is unparalleled in any other game. Examples of these include the lack of a defining storyline, which makes most of the storyline based on actual player alliances, or written by fan-fiction authors or role-playing characters. Somewhere in this article i'm sure someone will reference the Corp thefts performed by a espionage-oriented corp. On http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/25/3, you can read how a corporation actually mimicked a real-life corporate IPO in order to finance a very expensive project, complete with shares and stock value. There are dozens of ships for each class (which can be piloted by other classes, too), hundreds of skills (which certain ships and modules require at varying levels), and many hundreds of modules, possible setups, and tactics.

The game really is what you want to make out of it. If you want to escape the fairies and wizards paradigm, desire developers who play their own game (and are addicted!), capped-shards, simple markets, and (most importantly) the direct plot control of the developers, EVE will definitely take you for a ride. I came from Earth and Beyond, and am kicking myself for not trying it out earlier. There is a fairly sharp learning curve, but if you want something besides a boring grind, rewards come to those who like challenges. I'd recommend to ignore the posts of those who never joined a corp, only played a trial period, or who have only heard from other players, because they don't have the faintest idea what they have missed, or what's changed since they left.

And no, i'm not getting paid. Is your MMO good enough that you would write a long post about it on slashdot? Mine is.

Yeah, the Escapist is always laid out wrong. The secret it to hit the button labeled "text: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/print/30/25
As it turns out, there are more pages to the story than what you read! Le shock!

Wrong. You play a girl because you want to enjoy the sense of freedom offered by totally escaping your mundane, real world existance, acting as something that you have never been. And perhaps because you think girls kick more ass.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/30/15

That ah-say that's a joke son.

Wow a personal anecdote. What a stunningly perceptive analysis of human nature and market forces. NOT

Yes, a personal anecdote. Which holds about as much truth as your editorial opinion above. However, unlike your little rant, I can back up my anecdote with additional info. There's lots of easily located evidence that a lot of people prefer to buy used as well, cost being a major, if not the only factor. Can you think of another "market force" that would convince all those people to buy used except the price angle?

And digital distribution doesn't work. Yet. How many people in comparison to the general PC gaming public even use Steam? Or Xbox live subscribers vs the install base of the Xbox? How many households in the US even have broadband vs the number of households with PCs? Until those numbers are way on the other side of 50% it won't take off as the principal method.

I'm not really sure what your quarrel with EVE is. It really is worlds better and more interesting than Everquest, WoW, or all their sword and sorcery derivations. There have been countless stories about EVE in the game media, a great piece in PC Gamer last year, any number of great pieces on The Escapist, and assorted gaming websites over the last couple years. Sure, it may not be as newbie friendly as WoW or City of Heroes, but it's a living breathing world, and the only unsharded MMOG around. Yesterday I was playing with 20,000 simultaneous players, and looking at the map and watching the stats glow, seeing alliances clash on that enormous galaxy map was just another reason to love the game.

It's full of trickery and scams, people who would kill you for just coming into their asteroid belt, PC characters more evil than any of the NPCs, spying, scheming, infiltration, betrayal, and distrust, and that's the beauty of it. Combat, trading, and anything that involves two player parties is much more reliant on your wits and intelligence, rather than your level 60 mage and his staff of smiting. Not that there's anything wrong with a staff of smiting, but in EVE, you can out think a much more heavily armed ship, a newbie can con a con man, and that's ok.

The best part about the world of EVE is that the devs know it's just that - a virtual world. They don't step in to regulate the market, they don't shut down corporations whose goal is to disrupt someone's legit space-business, they just set it in motion, provide timely updates, and make sure the servers are running. The rest is up to the players.

So in short, I say "yeah, right" back at you in all seriousness. In every way I can think of, EVE: Online is the MMORPG of the year.

I'm not really sure what your quarrel with EVE is. It really is worlds better and more interesting than Everquest, WoW, or all their sword and sorcery derivations. There have been countless stories about EVE in the game media, a great piece in PC Gamer last year, any number of great pieces on The Escapist, and assorted gaming websites over the last couple years. Sure, it may not be as newbie friendly as WoW or City of Heroes, but it's a living breathing world, and the only unsharded MMOG around. Yesterday I was playing with 20,000 simultaneous players, and looking at the map and watching the stats glow, seeing alliances clash on that enormous galaxy map was just another reason to love the game.

It's full of trickery and scams, people who would kill you for just coming into their asteroid belt, PC characters more evil than any of the NPCs, spying, scheming, infiltration, betrayal, and distrust, and that's the beauty of it. Combat, trading, and anything that involves two player parties is much more reliant on your wits and intelligence, rather than your level 60 mage and his staff of smiting. Not that there's anything wrong with a staff of smiting, but in EVE, you can out think a much more heavily armed ship, a newbie can con a con man, and that's ok.

The best part about the world of EVE is that the devs know it's just that - a virtual world. They don't step in to regulate the market, they don't shut down corporations whose goal is to disrupt someone's legit space-business, they just set it in motion, provide timely updates, and make sure the servers are running. The rest is up to the players.

So in short, I say "yeah, right" back at you in all seriousness. In every way I can think of, EVE: Online is the MMORPG of the year.

Wrong URL. Sorry!

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/ is sometimes worth a read, and is at least trying to be more professional about things.

Woohoo a nomination.

Just for clarification, what exactly are you angry about?

Are you angry that I think girls are socially smarter than men, or that I think it's clearly proven? If the latter, then your anger is misplaced. I don't think it's clearly proven, just believe it to be true and generally (not universally) accepted. If you're angry that I think that, well, that can't be helped.

But lest you think that I'm just pulling stuff out of my ass to annoy you, here's an article for your reading pleasure. It presents a logical argument, based in evolutionary psychology, for my conclusion that as a group women are socially smarter then men. I didn't say proof: "socially smart" is a lot harder to measure than "physically strong", but I don't want you to leave with your impression that I'm just disguising my opinion as accepted scientific fact.

Chris Crawford, Women in Games: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/17/3 [Escapist Magazine]

As for the inherent contradictions in posting the most subtle and simultaneously stupid posts you've come across, I'll just chalk that up to your clearly highly emotional state.

Please tell me one thing, however. You say "it works", but I'm not sure what you mean. What do you take my objective to be? If I'm trolling, then I would want a flamewar not a+5 moderation. Do you think I'm just out for the mod points? I guess I can't convince you that I don't care about those, but I'm really not sure why you're so riled or what you think my insidious scheme really achieved.

-stormin

You should check out an article at the Escapist Magazine discussing gender differences from an evolutionary pyschology standpoint. I'm not going to try and tell you it's in any way definitive, but I think it demonstrates a rationale framework for a biological basis for gender differences.

Women in Games, by Chris Crawford
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/17/3

You've go to remember that individual variation will be greater than group variation, and I definitely think that we sometimes use tradition to override individuality (and that's a bad thing). But to say that "it's just arbitrary tradition" doesn't really make sense: where do you think tradition comes from? Traditions evolved with society, and I think that both society and, therefore tradition, are essentially products of evolution.

-stormin

Though it's kind of hard to tell since the article is spread out over so many pages.
"Print" version - select "Text" from the bottom of the escapist page.

esacpistmagazine.com

From the article: "He also highlights several games that, instead of focusing on the female form in its big-breasted glory, showcase women who are intelligent, strong, and powerful. He insists, 'The protagonists highlighted above illustrate that plenty of excitement can be provided by female leads who will, in turn, bring in female gamers - not to speak of richer gameplay options. Additionally, as McIntosh says, most women gamers are "confident enough not to feel threatened" by sexist imagery, merely finding it annoying and disappointing.'"

OMG girlz don't exist on teh Intarweb!!!!1

I'm not sure if this is significant or not; it's related to the article. When I hit Alt+Home in Firefox to go back to my home page, it takes me to this link instead. The home button still works properly, however. Bug in FF, or is the article set up to capture this shortcut?

I'm not sure which is worse: My confusion, or admitting to having read the article.

At the bottom of that big image, er, page, er, whatever is a pdf and text link in small text. Here's the text version if you're lazy.

I disagree with the premise.

There are tons of people making non-gamer games. The Sims. The Movies. Everything at Popcap. Zillions more here:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/8/15

Your article's proposals are so good, hundreds of entrepreneurs are already doing them, and have been for years. :P

Best possible time to plug The Escapist magazine. Yeah, I know, you hate the layout -- but (I speak here as a writer for the site) its journalism stands comparison with "real" magazines.

Small addition to the news post, there's a letter from Trip Hawkins in the next issue. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/15/1 It starts on the right column and goes over the next page.

The writers there have been blathering on and on about it for as long as I've been reading it. I'm too lazy to find the link to the specific article but it was one the ones about long rants about a hit driven industry the gaming has become and unlike other mediums where indie persists and is partially funded by the hits making it more appealing to a greater number and occasionally people filter in to the mainstream. There was also the article at wired a while back about the long tail.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/page/archive/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail/

Can be found here.

And they don't even link to the actually readable version:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/print/11/3

If all they do is produce the same crap over and over stop buying thier games. Support independent game developers and their creativity. Cut out the evil middle men and marketing morons who ruin everything with their single minded devotion to money.

Death to The Games Industry Part 1
Death to The Games Industry Part 2

If all they do is produce the same crap over and over stop buying thier games. Support independent game developers and their creativity. Cut out the evil middle men and marketing morons who ruin everything with their single minded devotion to money.

Death to The Games Industry Part 1
Death to The Games Industry Part 2

Yes, the layout is awful for the web, but at least they provide an alternative layout (little 'text' link at the bottom:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/print/9/4

Not usually journalism, but interesting none the less. I just thought the editors at the Escapist (if they still read slashdot after the last 2 posts) would like to hear something other than complaints about formatting/graphics.

FTA:
Morrowind was a blast. I never paid for it. World of Warcraft cost me $70, if you count the two months I paid for the subscription, and it's one of the least compelling games I've ever played. Does paying for WoW take away from the great games like Morrowind I stole? Unfortunately, it does.....
....I managed to send an unspoken message to Bethesda Softworks: "Your game isn't as good as this crappy one I just shelled out 70 bones for.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/8/28

Pretty accurate description of the evolution of the "new geek". He'll be praising Stallman by the end of the year....
Welcome Friend.

.....Innovative, compelling novels are published every year, and that's a medium that's 300 years old. We're only 30 years into the gaming revolution. Additionally, games are an enormously flexible form: They've been created with every technology from the Neolithic to the modern. And software is an enormously flexible medium, too; if you can specify it, you can implement it. We've gone from three genres to dozens in a few short decades, but we've charted only the merest coastline of a vast, virgin continent. And we need to keep exploring it, or we're going to get stale.

For those of you on phones, here is the text version, with all its scrolly-goodness. Also, click there if you cannot find the "Next" button on the page.

Or click on the Text link to read without all the flash.
Here's a shortcut

The Escapist - Casual Fortunes
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/print/8/14

Wrong link, apparently the text version only does one article instead of the entire issue /rollseyes Here ya go for varney's article: Linkage

Linkage for the text-only version for SMS/people-with-a-800x600-resolution/aversion-for- the-current-design/people-who-like-scrolling.

How about we put some journalism into video game journalism first? The Escapist is about the only video game related website I can read without having to endure lame jokes, constant pop-culture references, and the ever-so-popular "attitude."

At least they explain in their technical FAQ that it's all intentional.

My take is that using a print layout on the web is akin to trying to make a printed page scroll, but they're free to make all the mistakes they want. Graphic designers so often have trouble adjusting their work to the relative nature of the web.

This is like the 5th article from Escapist that Slashdot has linked to since the magazine started its publication. So far, just about every article is of interest to the Slashdot gaming crowd. So, just read the magazine already! It's free and stuff!

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/

Yeah, and what's up with the charts on this page? Somehow they predict that the PSP will magically quadruple its sales in the next 12 months, while the DS will maintain the exact same sales rate? Did he get this from an analyst, or just make it up on the fly?

There's also a problem with his theory that the PSP will win because of easy ports. In the recent article State of the Handheld Industry, handheld developers seem to believe that Sony won't tolerate console-to-PSP ports. It sounds to me like they're fine with console franchises on the PSP, but they don't want straight ports. If developers have to rebuild the game for the PSP anyway, there's no financial advantage to developing for it.

I have a feeling that "Max Steele" doesn't really know all that much about the handheld war at all, especially if he's crediting Nokia with the win. Any joker with a remote interest in video games and access to Google could have written the same article.

Max out.

Right now, the DS is outselling the PS2 in Japan. Sure it's not a "GameBoy" in the purest sense, but it still plays GBA games and has a fairly similar design aside from the extra, touch-sensative screen.

A new online publication, The Escapist, has a column about the downfall of Nintendo. It seems like everyone is always jumping on Nintendo's back dispite that they're remaining profitable dispite losing market share.

Personally, I don't think the Gameboy is dead, it's just waiting for a while before a new version comes out. Because the DS is capable of displaying graphics on par with an N64, what would any gameboy released now have to offer? The same N64 graphics without the extra screen? Nintendo could probably produce something with the same kind of power as the PSP, but why bother? It would be more expensive (because Nintendo can't afford to sell at a loss) and wouldn't improve the quality of games any.

A while ago I read an article that theorized Nintendo's next handheld would be a portable GameCube. I think this was in a magazine so you'll have to forgive me for not being able to link it. If Nintendo waits 2 or 3 years until the price to produce the hardware at a reasonable price and with a small enouch size to allow it to be portable, then this could work out really well. Add in the fact that the chip companies are starting to focus more on lowering power consumption instead of ramping up the the clock speed, and such a unit might have a decent battery life.

My main question is, why is the media so obsessed with the graphical capabilities of consoles? Sure pretty graphics can make a game that's wonderful to look at, but if it's not fun to play, what's the point of buying it? As this article points out, 3D isn't always better.

I still play a lot of GB and GBA games because they're fun and give me something to do on road trips. Not to mention that the batteries last quite a bit longer than either the PSP (4-6 hours) or the DS (6-10 hours). Not to mention the fact that a GBA game will cost anywhere from $20-$35, while DS games usually cost $30-$35 and PSP games cost $45-$50. I think the GameBoy offers a fun, affordable, and long-lasting experience that no other console or handheld will ever be able to match.

The Contrarian

Nintendo's hardware is doomed. The Game Boy? Drowning. Gamecube? Buried. Revolution? Dead on arrival. Sony and Microsoft have begun the process of cleaning their clock, and there's just a bit of dust on the minute hand still left to go.