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I believe the article you are referring to is this one: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20041103/bartle_ pfv.htm

The dumbing down of MMORPG's, IMHO, is clear from WoW... not only has perm-death no place in the present MMORPG world, now there's no real penalty at all for dying, just a minor inconvenience.

Not able to work well as a team player? Okay, you can level up solo!

Not willing to devote a lot of time to a game? Okay, we'll make it so you can reach max level in a couple or three weeks. We'll even give you XP while you're not logged in!

Frustrated at crafting and losing your items on a failed craft? Okay, you will always succeed in your craft!

(Things like this: Every attempt to create an item using a recipe is successful. As you create items your skill in your chosen Profession goes up. Recipes are color coded (like items and quests), and as your skill goes up recipes begin to become relatively "easier".... it becomes 'easier' to always succeed? But you always succeed anyway, where did you actually improve?)

WoW certainly appears to be exactly as Bartle fortold.... And the 'next gen' will be even worse.

In the days of text muds, there was a term for games that pulled all the risk (and therefore all the accomplishment) from a game: Twink.

Regisitration Required

How lame...Why on earth do "we" even bother reading slashdot anymore. The editors might as well be (un)trained monkeys.

Use:

Username: slashdot@mailinator.com
Password: slashdot
article linky

bugmenot login generator

Feel free to hijack this thread to complain about how slashdot is going to the dogs these days... I remember the good ol' days when they used to run real live interesting tech stories...not some

Copy protection has NEVER been a deterrent to copying a game. Copy protection hurts only legitamate users. People who want to copy that game are going to figure a way around whether it is easy or not is not something they care about.

It's not a matter of deterring copiers forever, but only until the lion's share of the games have been sold.

One of the more interesting articles I ve found about this is here: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011017/dodd_01 .htm

Great thing about deus ex is that you dont need thousands of rounds of ammunition to play it. I have personally played through the game without firing a shot (and with harming only one person).

I played a significant portion of the first game without firing a shot - although I wasn't exactly a pacifist.

It's all thanks to that gloriously deadly glowing blue sword thing I 'borrowed' in Hong Kong. Utterly brilliant for ambushes, and works against even the nastiest of foes. I'm hiding in a shadow, they walk past, I leap out and chase - it doesn't matter if they hear me or not because they're practically chopped in half moments later... ;-)

I think this is the 'emergent' gameplay they're talking about. In a Gamasutra article about System Shock 2 (free login required), the developers mentioned 'mini-games' - little, easy-to-code features that dramatically alter the overall gameplay, and add many new things for the player to work against or use in their favour. Examples would be the security cameras, item research and suchlike, where by themselves they're pretty small, but when integrated into the fabric of the game the player has to develop new strategies to make use of them - and there are many ways.

Probably simpler (and more realistic) than the omnipresent ventilation ducts in Deus Ex 2, anyway. :-)

Here.

Rob

I happen to know of at least one AAA game which used Java - it used it as a scripting engine.

Nihilistic's Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption, back in 2000. As I recall, in the Gamasutra postmortem, they commented on how well it worked out for them.

Sadly, I don't know what JVM they were using - but they did say in the postmortem that they didn't write it themselves.

Actually, DirectMusic (part of DirectX since version 7 or so) is not very dissimilar to iMuse, at least in concept. It lets you build blocks of music together, define transitions between them, and assign different 'groove levels' for them, so that the music can get more exciting as the action hots up, or you switch between 'moods', and so on. It's pretty good for creating dynamic soundtracks.

The thing is that synthesized MIDI music doesn't sound anything like as good as a digital soundtrack recorded in a professional studio, so it tends to get overlooked. Doing something with pre-recorded audio would be pretty hard to implement without using up masses of RAM for all the audio snippets and so on, and it would be hard to transition gracefully between them all.

While I have no doubt they will take a few good ideas here and there along with a healthy dose of experience, all indications point to a complete rewrite for Dragon Age with only high level borrowing from NWN.

As for using the same engine in KOTOR and Jade Empires this is patently false. KOTOR is developed by a completely separate team and has nothing to do with NWN. Jade Empires is even a different engine than KOTOR. KOTOR was designed to be compatible with the PC and Xbox while Jade Empires' engine is designed from the ground up for the Xbox with no PC compatability. That KOTOR and Jade Empires shares a common code base is a common misconception but to think KOTOR runs on the NWN engine is just plain ludicrous.

If you'd like, there is a postmortem available for the NWN multiplayer client/server and the game and toolset on Gamasutra . Free registration is required. I think they quite plainly admit the NWN development was backwards at best.

There is no doubt code can always be salvaged, but you are incorrect in thinking they would morph a PC only multiplayer swiss army knife like NWN into an Xbox only single player game like Jade Empires.

While I have no doubt they will take a few good ideas here and there along with a healthy dose of experience, all indications point to a complete rewrite for Dragon Age with only high level borrowing from NWN.

As for using the same engine in KOTOR and Jade Empires this is patently false. KOTOR is developed by a completely separate team and has nothing to do with NWN. Jade Empires is even a different engine than KOTOR. KOTOR was designed to be compatible with the PC and Xbox while Jade Empires' engine is designed from the ground up for the Xbox with no PC compatability. That KOTOR and Jade Empires shares a common code base is a common misconception but to think KOTOR runs on the NWN engine is just plain ludicrous.

If you'd like, there is a postmortem available for the NWN multiplayer client/server and the game and toolset on Gamasutra . Free registration is required. I think they quite plainly admit the NWN development was backwards at best.

There is no doubt code can always be salvaged, but you are incorrect in thinking they would morph a PC only multiplayer swiss army knife like NWN into an Xbox only single player game like Jade Empires.

While I have no doubt they will take a few good ideas here and there along with a healthy dose of experience, all indications point to a complete rewrite for Dragon Age with only high level borrowing from NWN.

As for using the same engine in KOTOR and Jade Empires this is patently false. KOTOR is developed by a completely separate team and has nothing to do with NWN. Jade Empires is even a different engine than KOTOR. KOTOR was designed to be compatible with the PC and Xbox while Jade Empires' engine is designed from the ground up for the Xbox with no PC compatability. That KOTOR and Jade Empires shares a common code base is a common misconception but to think KOTOR runs on the NWN engine is just plain ludicrous.

If you'd like, there is a postmortem available for the NWN multiplayer client/server and the game and toolset on Gamasutra . Free registration is required. I think they quite plainly admit the NWN development was backwards at best.

There is no doubt code can always be salvaged, but you are incorrect in thinking they would morph a PC only multiplayer swiss army knife like NWN into an Xbox only single player game like Jade Empires.

At GDC 2003, Jason Rubin, head and founder of Naugthy Dog, a highly successful development studio for PS1 and PS2, delivered a speech (slides available here, audio and slides available on Gamasutra (free painless reg. req.)) on a closely related subject : improvements in graphics quality will not be sustained over the next few years, and relying on them to impress potential customers is a bad idea.

Moral : as long as gameplay, character development and story do not suck, nice graphics are of course an asset, but they're useless in case of an already shitty game...

Steve McConnell wrote about this in his book After the Gold Rush, in a chapter entitled "Orphans Preferred". He slams the heroic crunch coding style of programming and gives his ideas for a saner, more professional, development process.

It happens quite frequently, actually. I know several people in my area that make livings happily writing for videogames. You wouldn't believe the amount of creativity and sheer volume of text that goes into an RTS or an RPG... and the writers get to choose the direction the game will take, mapping out plotlines and character motivations like one would on a standard novel. They write an outline, get approval, write the lines, the lines get recorded, they re-write the lines, the lines get finalized, a section of the game gets cut, they re-write the game to compensate, etc...

Ironlore was looking for writers not too long ago, though they're moved far beyond what is written on their job page. Nival in russia is looking for writers, and Nintendo is looking for a copy editor. Then there is localization, a field that I have very little experience in (Sadly? Thankfully?).

In order to answer your question, yes, there are jobs in game development, and people make a living doing it. It may seem like a long shot, but it's probably a significantly better chance than doing anything else with that english degree. Game-specific writers with the experience and skill to tailor their writing to the needs of gameplay is a rare and valued commodity.

It happens quite frequently, actually. I know several people in my area that make livings happily writing for videogames. You wouldn't believe the amount of creativity and sheer volume of text that goes into an RTS or an RPG... and the writers get to choose the direction the game will take, mapping out plotlines and character motivations like one would on a standard novel. They write an outline, get approval, write the lines, the lines get recorded, they re-write the lines, the lines get finalized, a section of the game gets cut, they re-write the game to compensate, etc...

Ironlore was looking for writers not too long ago, though they're moved far beyond what is written on their job page. Nival in russia is looking for writers, and Nintendo is looking for a copy editor. Then there is localization, a field that I have very little experience in (Sadly? Thankfully?).

In order to answer your question, yes, there are jobs in game development, and people make a living doing it. It may seem like a long shot, but it's probably a significantly better chance than doing anything else with that english degree. Game-specific writers with the experience and skill to tailor their writing to the needs of gameplay is a rare and valued commodity.

I agree wholeheartedly with your points, with the possible exception of #6. I think what you describe in #5, in the context of Microsoft, is exactly what has happened to Blizzard after being acquired by Vivendi Universal.

• Jul 01, 2003: Blizzard Founders Depart VU Games
• Oct 22, 2003: Ex-Blizzard Staff Start New Studio
• Jan 19, 2004: Blizzard Co-Founder Resigns
• Jan 22, 2004: Ex-Blizzard And Naughty Dog Staff Form New Studio

My impression is that the top talent has bailed out of Blizzard, and it's not at all clear that the remaining husk of a studio will have what it takes to compete.

I agree wholeheartedly with your points, with the possible exception of #6. I think what you describe in #5, in the context of Microsoft, is exactly what has happened to Blizzard after being acquired by Vivendi Universal.

• Jul 01, 2003: Blizzard Founders Depart VU Games
• Oct 22, 2003: Ex-Blizzard Staff Start New Studio
• Jan 19, 2004: Blizzard Co-Founder Resigns
• Jan 22, 2004: Ex-Blizzard And Naughty Dog Staff Form New Studio

My impression is that the top talent has bailed out of Blizzard, and it's not at all clear that the remaining husk of a studio will have what it takes to compete.

I agree wholeheartedly with your points, with the possible exception of #6. I think what you describe in #5, in the context of Microsoft, is exactly what has happened to Blizzard after being acquired by Vivendi Universal.

• Jul 01, 2003: Blizzard Founders Depart VU Games
• Oct 22, 2003: Ex-Blizzard Staff Start New Studio
• Jan 19, 2004: Blizzard Co-Founder Resigns
• Jan 22, 2004: Ex-Blizzard And Naughty Dog Staff Form New Studio

My impression is that the top talent has bailed out of Blizzard, and it's not at all clear that the remaining husk of a studio will have what it takes to compete.

I agree wholeheartedly with your points, with the possible exception of #6. I think what you describe in #5, in the context of Microsoft, is exactly what has happened to Blizzard after being acquired by Vivendi Universal.

• Jul 01, 2003: Blizzard Founders Depart VU Games
• Oct 22, 2003: Ex-Blizzard Staff Start New Studio
• Jan 19, 2004: Blizzard Co-Founder Resigns
• Jan 22, 2004: Ex-Blizzard And Naughty Dog Staff Form New Studio

My impression is that the top talent has bailed out of Blizzard, and it's not at all clear that the remaining husk of a studio will have what it takes to compete.

While games may not be your area of interest, Gamasutra does put together solid salary surveys.

There was, and is, a lot of crossover between the internet and published magazines. Famitsu the magazine has Famitsu online. Die Hard Game Fan had Die Hard Online. IGN's Snowball owned several magazines. Gamespot is owned by Cnet, who owns everyone else. Plus, there actually were several rather famous cases of video game magazines pulling FAQs directly off of the web, adding photographs, and publishing them as if they were their own.

I wish I had more recent examples, but I've abandoned all of the published videogame magazines except for Game Developer Monthly, a cute little mag that reprints from Gamasutra. Or is it vice versa?

You clearly have no understanding of the game development process. At all.

Hiring some "U.S. coder buddies" and some "Russian artists" is not the way to make a game that you can "sell like hotcakes." It is the way to make a game like Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, which has the distinction of being the *only* game in the history of Gamespot to recieve a 1.0. For your reference, the developer's website is at Stellarstone.com.

There are several problems with this, but it boils down to a couple of key points:

1) Making games with today's technology is very hard in the amount of time allotted to development. Basically, you have one and a half to two years to rewrite *every component of a game.* Every time we write a new engine, we reinvent the camera. We reinvent user input, and a method of displaying that UI to the user. A new networking protocol, graphics engine, AI, physics, oh yeah, and game mechanics. Considering that there are entire companies devoted to developing each of these components, and have teams comparable or larger then we have for an entire game, one can see that it is non-trivial. Writing a typical game engine requires not one or two coders, but a team full of them (typically 10-20 for a medium to large title).

2) Making games is an iterative process. This is what *really* kills overseas development, and why I feel my job (I'm a graphics programmer) is pretty secure for at least the forseeable future. You can't plan out every aspect of your game. You can plan how you think it will work, and you can implement it. But if you don't leave time in your schedule to rework that when you are done, your game will suck. Designers and artists regularly come to my desk and ask me to help them prototype something. They need code support to try something different out in game. And they need it *now.* They can't wait 24 hours everytime they need some little piddily task completed so that they can see how something works.

You say that the common US developer is shoddy, and this I cannot disagree with. But the common US game developer is far from shoddy. We work hard, and we work smart. And we are paid well for what we can do because few others can do it (in what other IT field can you expect to make 75K with two years of experience?) Out of the 30 or so coders whom I've worked closely with on various projects, only two have been useless. And both of them have since left the game industry because it was too hard for them.

You may not believe me. After all, what do I know? But John Carmack gave a speech at GDC this year which pretty much touched on the points that I made above.

I believe that approximations are the best we can do.
....
So, I don't even believe in 1 as a physically measurable number!

Cool, I can tell that you and I are on a similar wavelength. Whether that wavelenth is representable as a real number or as a 24-bit color is another matter. ;)

I say again, every measurement is an approximation. Ergo, choose N large enough that no one can practically tell the difference. Then the approximation becomes reality.

And I agree 100% that a large enough N creates a indistinguishably fine approximation with one important exception. If the physical system violates the axioms of the mathematical system used in measurement, then there will be physical states or dynamical behaviors that have no corresponding mathematical state or admissible mathematical transform. Thus, for example, there are physical and perceptual colors for which there are no 24-bit approximations (the gamut problem). Moreover, the inverse problem occurs too. A mathematical system can have states with no corresponding physical state (see the problem of illegal colors)

The extent that the physical and mathematical systems lack a bijective (1-to-1) mapping of both states and admissible transforms is the extent that mathematical reasoning has short-comings. Math is great. As an engineer who has studied math extensively, I can vouch for the power of math to construct axiomatic systems that represent novel physical systems. I can also vouch for the weakness of math in misconstructing those axiomatic analogs of physical systems.

Math is like a chainsaw -- very powerful at cutting into problems, but also very dangerous if one is not careful.

According to Gamasutra Prince of Persia won game of the year and Beyond Good and Evil won excellence in writing. But GameSpy says that Bioware won both.

Which article is correct?

Durn it. I often find a DVD director's commentary every bit as interesting as a movie, itself. I wish Lucasarts would release what they had, along with a postmortem/commentary. Aside from being a fan of the original, I'd like to see where the sequel production went "wrong," and try to pick the thing apart.

Hell, I'm probably in the minority, but I'd be willing to pay for such a thing.

I can't give you specifics because you have not signed an NDA. I can talk in generalities, but I can tell you that TZ's load balancing is not random. Much of the information about how to load-balance such systems can be obtained from reading "Distributing Object State" which ran in GamaSutra a while back. The key is dynamic ownership, not static ownership. As you rightly fear, static ownership leads to slowdown and player hangs.

The best way to maintain ownership would be dynamically, using some sticky heuristics to predictively anticipate where a player will "be" following a move, and alert Servers within some defined "neighborhood" or "ZOC" to update their state. This is non-trivial, because you may be dealing with non-Euclidean geometries, distance metrics, or set/guild membership. Therefore, each distributed Server can update its affected Clients on-demand, without those annoying lags you get with some systems when you can "feel" the Client loading the data from a new Server.

Alerting Servers that currently "own" those possible Regions to prepare to update relevent Entities with info is also required. If no Server owns that Region, then you should have a whole other set of heuristics to determine which game server should own that Region. It may, or it may not, be the Server that "owns" the Entity that is moving into that Region. You probably need to do cost-benefit calculations for assigning/re-assigning Region ownership. You can run Monte Carlo simulations to see how best to describe possible Entity "walks" within the topology.

Similarly, because of the expense of instantiation, you need some pretty tricky finagling to figure out when to relinquish ownership and purge any "ghost" copies of the Entity State that have been following the main Entity "around" within the topology. Of course, the nice thing is that Server-Server entity state exchanges will take place along a fat pipe backbone.

Interestingly, such systems end up looking a little like a Kohonen n-tier feedforward neural network.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption uses Java as its game scripting language, as described here (free reg required) under the "What Went Right" section, 3rd topic (3. Using Java as a scripting engine.). I guess it pretty much says it!!!

The Parappa and Umjammer Lammy series are tons of fun and guaranteed girl magnets. Besides, any guy who can "mortify" Shigeru Miyamoto with his genius is cool in my book. There's a great long video lecture with him over at Gamasutra (free registration required) that explains some of his game design theory.

Also good are focused sites: Gamasutra for game jobs, Bio-Jobs for biotech.
I got a ton of interviews and eventually a job through the former, my girlfriend got one with the latter.

See also What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of NPCs?", an article by Ernest Adams discussing the behaviour of programmed characters, and how they can be modelled in terms of emotional state.

True, but the episodic content released in most MMPORPG only consists of updating with new areas, new classes or abilities. There is usually not that strong of a plot, with real world changing events (except, i've been told, asheron's call recently).

A very good article on the gripping way to implement a story in a massively multiplayer game is found over on Gamasutra. Free registration required, but there's a wealth of information there for free.. so if you're interested in game design, it's well worth it.

True, but the episodic content released in most MMPORPG only consists of updating with new areas, new classes or abilities. There is usually not that strong of a plot, with real world changing events (except, i've been told, asheron's call recently).

A very good article on the gripping way to implement a story in a massively multiplayer game is found over on Gamasutra. Free registration required, but there's a wealth of information there for free.. so if you're interested in game design, it's well worth it.

i'll offer my opinion on this....i've been a gamer for most of my life (starting with the early arcade machines, an atari 2600 and my apple ][) and i have about 10 years of professional development experience in games and related industries (animation programming and 3d special effects).

i'm currently teaching two videogame classes at MCAD - one is a history of videogames, the other is vs3370 : creating 3d virtual experiences / an introduction into 3d videogame design. basically, this class is an introduction to creating 3D game environments -- emphasis is on content creation tools and pipelines. for my class, i wanted a general purpose 3d game engine that would serve as a nice introduction to creating 3d game content and environments.. for this, i focused mostly on first person perspective engines.

you'll need to evaluate what type of game content you'd like to create (FPS, RTS, RPG, etc) and choose an appropriate engine and toolset that will allow to focus on the type of content interested in. increasingly, level design and level creation are becoming two different tasks -- if you are creating a demo yourself, you'll be filling both roles.

after evaluating the games and engines last summer, i chose Unreal Tournament 2003 and the ut2003 engine for my class, for many reasons:

• ut2003 is a derivative of the unreal engine - it's been out a while and is generally stable and easy to install
• the editing tools ship with the game (on the cd) and include decent documentation.
• the editing tools aren't perfect (none are), but are certainly more polished and professional than typical game editing tools. it's also very easy to import 3D assets from 3ds max and maya, which allows you to leverage any existing 3d experience you've got.
• video editing tutorials from buzz3d are available for free online (slashdot article)
• the ut2003 game engine directly loads the files that are created by the editor -- this makes things much easier in general, and also allows you to directly inspect (in the editor) any level that you can play with the game.... if you see a cool effect in a level, you can check it out and see how it was created.
• level lighting and compiling is a relatively foolproof single step process. it's much easier to setup and use than the quake engine based games (quake 1/2/3 and derivatives, like half-life). the down side to this is that visibility culling - determining what to draw and what not to draw - is a manual process in the unreal engine. this can be good and bad...
• this engine supports indoor environments as well as larger outdoor environments - most games tend to specialize to one or the other.
• the unreal engine is widely used - many games, many companies, many platforms. the quake 1/2/3 engines are also very popular - as are game engines like renderware (although renderware and commercial engines like it do not have a standalone general purpose engine...)
• Epic Games seems to be very committed to helping people create content for this engine. a free version of the engine is available (slashdot article) - so you can easily create a self contained demo of what you've done...

It can also be quite rewarding. I started in the game industry about 10 years ago and left due to the stress. Since then most of the jobs I've had have only been slightly less stressful, but not nearly as enjoyable. I've recently come back to games and I'm happier than I've been in a long time. It's all a matter of doing what you love.

A note to our original poster: You need to take a closer look at how the game industry actually works. Trying to get in based on your skill with designing levels for a particular game is probably not going to pay off as well as you hope. A lot of companies frown on hiring people from what they call the "mod community". Also your first job will almost certainly not be doing what you want to do. Check out the career advice from professional game developer organizations like GDC (www.gamasutra.com) and IGDA (www.igda.org).

If you're looking for something entry level check out my current employeer (www.globalvr.com) We're hiring for a few positions, mostly in QA.

What is your personality like? Do you like all games equally? Is there something you wish to make just floating around in your head?

You should be looking something suitable for you not other people. Everyone likes how things work differently. Also go take a look at Gamasutra for some good reading.

Personally, try out Valve Hammer Editor and QuArK. They are standards that can be used for many games.

DNF is another story

Well, Python is relatively new, so it has not gotten as widespread of use due to people having more experience with C/C++. Also, Python requires some changes in the way you think about programming. For example C/C++ programmers are used to strong type checking where the compiler tells you if you try to pass an incorrect type to a function. In Python types aren't really important. You write your functions and assume that the parameters given will support the necessary operations, but if they don't you'll just have to catch the exception. As I haven't gotten to really learning Python myself yet, I can't explain this very well, but while it seems strange it works fairly well.

Python use is growing though. Redhat is using it for many of their configuration panels and their package updating programs which you can check out in Fedora. Debian's "reportbug" program uses it. It's also becoming popular for embedding scriptability in programs.

There's also a good article at Gamasutra(registration required) about how kid-oriented adventure game developer Humongous is using Python for their games.

Does Mr Adams want all the technology people to be given twinkies and be locked in a cave?

Using technology, be it a pencil, a brush, a new algorithm to make beutiful art work is well established. For example when the printing press came around, many more people were able to write things others could read. Resulting in many good books. Without computers masses of art work would not exist. The list is massive.

I think instead of seperating the 'art' people from the 'music' people and the 'game designers' from the 'programmers' games houses should be integrating them. Come together!

Allowing people to work on multiple aspects of the game gives them a much better overall view of the game.

Technology can and often does drive game play. Sometimes for the better. Mr Adams says in free reg required """It represents exactly the sort of thinking that the our medium needs more of, thinking that begins "What if..." rather than "How much money..." """.

Btw, check out the competitions on ludumdare. The general idea in the past is you make a game mostly from scratch, doing everything yourself. You have 48 hours, and as the competition goes on you compare ideas with about one hundred other game makers. Then you submit your game, and all the game makers vote and comment on each others games. Some very experiment, fun, different games result from it. Some people concentrate on technology, others game play, some music, sound. Some people manage to do well in all areas(bastards!). The idea is to get something finished in the short time period. You submit your executable(for as many platforms as you like) and your source code. Source code is there so other people can learn "how did he do that!", and so people can tell if they used some existing code. It is amazing how many games get made in so short a time. If your game sucks, you have only wasted a weekend(and a monday morning ;) If it is good some people enhance and polish the game further. If you are into making games, or want to learn I highly recommend entering. You'll learn more about actually making a game quickly than spending years coding your great big idea. Mr. Adams, if you are reading this, it would be awesome if you entered this comp! A chance to play with some game design ideas :)



I think a major problem with games these days is that games are too big, not polished enough, and are made by a mass of people. Ie they have no soul. Flashy graphics sell, so that is what is concertrated on. Also a lot of people getting into games think their first games need to be as good as some of the big titles. However even John Carmac wrote 2d platform games. People need to learn with small games first. Get all the new people making games and some which have been trying for years making some small games. They'll get an idea about different parts of game design, and what people find fun in games. Without spending two years working on one game which never really gets finished, and which doesn't turn out very good in the end anyway.

Small groups, less than ten people, still make some of the better games around. How many games from 'the industry' can claim to run on more than 50% of computers out there? There are people which strive to fill this niche. Using older technology, sometimes pusing it very far, to make thier games. Some of these games made by one or two people have sold hundreds of thousands, or millions of copies. Others have had their demos played by similar amounts.

Success means different things to different people. Some people are happy to have finished a game by themselves, as an expression of themselves. Even if lots of people do not like the game. For others success is about money. For others it is about making a game some people will enjoy. Or maybe it is seeking geeky fame. Then there are lots

His collected wisdom...

I'm unfamiliar with the source of the blog. He/she/they may be very influential, but it's still an independent's opinion. The comments to the post are revealing enough that other people felt things were left out.

The canon should have a reason for each item, like "first game to introduce lopsided play mechanics with draw potential," or the like.

This is the sort of thing that should be tackle by a consortium, like Gamasutra and altered as little as possible with the exception of adding new games that achieve some innovation.

I think the list is an excellent attempt, though. Hopefully, it will get the ball rolling for an authoritative list of innovations in chronological order as a reference for game developers.

I used to play UO. Hell, I beta tested it, like I've beta tested just about every other MMPORPG out there (the only exception is DAoC). I quit about a year after it was released... it was by far the longest hold any of these games had on me. This was in the Dread Lord days, when you had to be careful who you associated with. Keep in mind, I wasn't one of these people.. but this sense of adventure and danger really enhanced the game for me. DAoC's RvR sort of put this in, but it was nerfed and pointless. Capture the flag to what end? So your realm could gain access to the super-duper dungeon? Lame. What MMPORPGs need is an excitement factor, and less of the camping factor. And more of the story factor. There's a good article that's about a year old on Gamasutra about putting stories into mmporpgs. (free reg. required)

Given that there is (I believe) a much larger installed base of PS2s and Xboxes in the US, there is a much larger market for second-thought GameCube purchases.

In Canada, here are the latest stats on installed base, as reported by GamaSutra on Oct 1st: PlayStation 2: 2.5 million units
Xbox: 900,000 units
GameCube: 700,000 units

I assume the ratios are similar in the States.

Shenmue was hyped to an amazing extent, both to players and to developers. Shenmue was going to revitalize the adventure game category, and show developers how games would be made from then on. If you go to Gamasutra, you can actually watch Yu Suzuki's original presentation of the game at the 2000 Game Developer Conference. It's a love-in of epic proportions.

Then the game was actually released. While it excelled in many areas - it had good characters, large environments, lots of interaction, etc, it also suffered from some severe gameplay problems that made it frustrating to play. Couple this with the fact that developers began to realize the resources the game required - five years of work by a one-hundred-person team! - and the development hype wore off as well. Eventually the shine wore off and reviewers began rating the game (or revising their ratings) based on how it actually played.

Disclaimer: I personally love Shenmue, and love its sequel, Shenmue II, even more. But I can recognize overhype when I see it.

Sega showed us it takes more than originality in game design to survive in the console industry. It takes a viable platform and large installed user base. Sony just announced it's shipped over 60 million PS2. Nintendo announced that it sold 15 million GBA and hopes it'll sell 6 million GC by March 2004. Granted console sales alone are no gauge of the financial health of a game company, but while Sony touts its online strategy with EA Sports currently exclusive support, it's penetration of the Middle East/Europe market, all Nintendo can talk about is its GBA-GC link (whoop-de-doo, "wait, you're telling me that I can play a portable game system in MY OWN HOME? Wow. What's next? A park full of mobile homes that don't go anywhere?") and its next big console (which they should call the Osbourne-2). Not helping is Nintendo's reputation for arrogant indifference towards the interests of 3rd party developers (the paternalistic "Seal of Quality" for the NES, keeping the cartidge system when 3rd parties were clamoring for a CD format, an extremely litigous culture) survives, despite Nintendo's attempts to rehabilitate its image among game developers. At the last Game Developer's Conference, Sony had a HUGE booth and their head of developer relations ran his ass off meeting with developers. Nintendo (to quote gignews.com) "acted as if North American developers were about as relevant as airline customer service." And what if players don't want to play Pikmin, Warioware or Metroid Prime? Is it their fault that they want games they see on other consoles? If Mario, Zelda, F-Zero GX, Metroid, Resident Evil 0, Final Fantasy Chronicles and all the other GC exclusive titles haven't convinced a console buyer to to buy a GC, nothing will. With 80,000 (or 800,000 which still sucks) GC sales in the last quarter, you can basically assume that anyone who's would buy a GC for exclusive games has already bought one. Now they have to expand their appeal to everyone else. Nintendo has to understand that gamers buy what they want to play, not what Nintendo thinks that they want to play. It's fine for Nintendo to make innovative, original games the "Nintendo way" but they can't continue to turn a blind eye to the success that 3rd party support has brought PS2 as a platform.

Sega showed us it takes more than originality in game design to survive in the console industry. It takes a viable platform and large installed user base. Sony just announced it's shipped over 60 million PS2. Nintendo announced that it sold 15 million GBA and hopes it'll sell 6 million GC by March 2004. Granted console sales alone are no gauge of the financial health of a game company, but while Sony touts its online strategy with EA Sports currently exclusive support, it's penetration of the Middle East/Europe market, all Nintendo can talk about is its GBA-GC link (whoop-de-doo, "wait, you're telling me that I can play a portable game system in MY OWN HOME? Wow. What's next? A park full of mobile homes that don't go anywhere?") and its next big console (which they should call the Osbourne-2). Not helping is Nintendo's reputation for arrogant indifference towards the interests of 3rd party developers (the paternalistic "Seal of Quality" for the NES, keeping the cartidge system when 3rd parties were clamoring for a CD format, an extremely litigous culture) survives, despite Nintendo's attempts to rehabilitate its image among game developers. At the last Game Developer's Conference, Sony had a HUGE booth and their head of developer relations ran his ass off meeting with developers. Nintendo (to quote gignews.com) "acted as if North American developers were about as relevant as airline customer service." And what if players don't want to play Pikmin, Warioware or Metroid Prime? Is it their fault that they want games they see on other consoles? If Mario, Zelda, F-Zero GX, Metroid, Resident Evil 0, Final Fantasy Chronicles and all the other GC exclusive titles haven't convinced a console buyer to to buy a GC, nothing will. With 80,000 (or 800,000 which still sucks) GC sales in the last quarter, you can basically assume that anyone who's would buy a GC for exclusive games has already bought one. Now they have to expand their appeal to everyone else. Nintendo has to understand that gamers buy what they want to play, not what Nintendo thinks that they want to play. It's fine for Nintendo to make innovative, original games the "Nintendo way" but they can't continue to turn a blind eye to the success that 3rd party support has brought PS2 as a platform.

The Video Game Ombudsman does what this article did on a regular basis, with more structure, in the form of a (we)blog. Plus, Kyle has heard of the word "ombudsman" before, so that gives him a little more cred.

Websites like GameCritics, Joystick101, and GameGirlAdvance have gotten notable mentions from industry and academic heavyweights, such as the venerable Henry Jenkins.

I encourage smarter game/gamedev/gamebiz/gameculture/gameacademia journalism, but to say this is new and unique is an insult to those that have come before.

The Irony of Indy Games

Outside of the handheld ( PalmOS, PocketPC ) markets, or cell phones... many indy games are either crap... or sales pitches to publishers! Im not saying all... there are probrably dozens of exceptions, but on the whole this remains true. Its funny though, when you look at "past" indy games...

HomeWorld
Doom
FlashPoint

Really... by definition, an indy game is self financed, without a publisher in site. Its funny that that moment you have success in the indy market, you tend to get picked up by a publisher... then your no longer indy! ;) Than again, there are a few companies that are going from commerical projects to more of an indy style. Once you see the amount that publishers take... you start to see the value in online distro's!

For anyone really interested in learning more, check out:
Garage Games Misc resources, plus a licensable engine
FlipCode Great gaming related site
Gamedev.net Like flipcode, but less mature ( you'll see! )
Gamasutra The site for game developers! Must see
CrystalSpace LGPL 3d Engine. Very impressive
WildTangent Cheap game engine (web based), plus online publishing
Auran Jet Affordable 3d engine, flexible licensing
OpenGl The site for OpenGL info. Lots of useful links

From the above list, you should easily be able to find anything else your looking for! ;) Enjoy the world of game development for zero cash!

Notice how your entire post is centered around the *technology* behind the games? (You put the game in, decide it sucks, but all of the sudden since you got a game with an updated engine all your old games suddenly look better? No. It requires artists to create more detailed models/animation for that to be. Besides, there's more to a game than looks.)

Yes, convergence of technology is good. When engines and tools become flexible enough that each developer need not spend time in pre-game phase (read: GK3 postmortem), game development costs can cut drastically, and can especially improve the situation for smaller game-dev studios.

However, this doesn't mean the fact that for every leader there are 100 followers is a good thing. *Artistic* convergence is bad. One simply need look at the hyper-genrefication of games to see the harms of a convergent collective mindset. I say I like games, and people respond "What kinda games you like? FPS? RPG?" AHH! I like many games -- adventure, shmup, platformer, the "casual" FPS (Halo, e.g.) -- but whatever preconcieved notions I have about genres of games I like have been derived mostly from precedent. My older brother gave me a copy of Samba de Amigo for the DC. I played it, and liked it, so I searched for a few others like it. Does that make me a music game fan?

Now, I'm aware that I just pointed out a potential counterpoint. I exhibited the "copycat" tendency of consumers by searching for other music games. However, if genres weren't so restrictive (look at all the music games -- mimic visual cues through button press, hear the result -- but there are plenty of other ways to handle music [I've got some ideas... shh!]), I might have picked up a musical RPG, and then through that found an interest in RPGs. Of course, there's more to innovation than clever hybridization -- 10 years ago, did music games even exist?

(Another example of bad convergence is perhaps the continuing emphasis on realism, but I can't think of any good examples right now -- anybody wanna tag team?)

1. This is a proof of concept that Microsoft's "Managed C++" stuff may be an interesting technology.

   If really Managed C++ isn't too much slower than C given the standard optimizations Managed C++ may become a viable platform for development in the end. We will see what will happen as Microsoft's JIT compiler matures.

2. If it is viable for Quake 2, it might be viable for any future game coming to PC, XBOX or even Phantom. Remember that having .NET (or Java with JNI as well, see this nice soviet Sturmovik simulator which really owns you ;D ...) allows you to access several non time-critical libraries (chat, rankings), or to prototype in an easier way several features that you wish to implement, without introducing slowdowns in the development and security issues (XBox savegame hack anyone?).

   I can remember Sony and other vendors being interested in a Java Gaming Profile for consoles... a very hefty addition to J2ME with JNI libraries for Physics, "Game Lobby" functionalities and mp3 streaming. That JCP anyway seems (in my experience) to be stalled. We will see if adoption of Managed C++/Managed DirectX will occur and will help the adoption of "Virtual Machines" technology in game consoles as well and revitalize the interest. Many titles, like Nihilistic Entertainment (of Zerstorer fame) Vampire The Masquerade use or used Java as a powerful scripting engine.

3. Anyway, remember that if you find Managed code to be too slow for your projects, you can always bridge your code with COM+, as Direct-X up to version 8 do succesfully :D... then using a COM+ component is easy as hell with .NET (let's hope that Mono makes this easy for Bonobo components too soon).

+ + + +
And now imagine embedding Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 with Excel.NET... oh WAIT!

Of course, the 'mess they made' resulted in the highest sales Square has ever seen in the US, not only for FF7, but also for 8, 9, 10; they expect 11, 10-2, and 12 to do so as well (though obviously 11 should have a drop in sales associated with the fact that it's online-only).

If Square is doing so well, why did they need Fund Q money so badly? For that matter, why in Heck did they merge with Enix, at terms disadvantageous to themselves? (IIRC, 1 share of Squaresoft to .79 shares of Enix.)

[Full-Motion Video]
Yet it's what most games had, especially the best-of-breed games at the time.

Doesn't mean it's not bad design. Really bad design. :)

[Enix]
Enix, of course, being the company for which Japan legislated that their top series can not be released except on weekends and holidays. Not to mention that Square and Enix worked together on Chrono Trigger, which you already mentioned as one of their better early titles. When two Japanese companies see a chance to become a $500M/year company, what else do you expect? Number 7 in the industry, no longer consequential? That's just funny.

Enix still produces Legendarily Bad Games... Kind of like Bond movies, I guess.

#7 in the industry or not, they sure aren't acting complacent or self-confident. Did you hear the announcement that the latest Dragon Quest would have a larger base of appeal, e.g. places outside of the United States and Japanese mental institutions :), by virtue of having anime-like graphics? Crazy...

As for mergers, following that logic, Nintendo and Sega should have merged around the time of the Genesis. What I'm arguing is that while it might make good business sense, the merger ran counter to a few substantial egos at Squaresoft, and wasn't the sort of thing they'd do readily.

This Gamasutra article (no membership needed to view) supports me just in incidental remarks, saying that Square and Enix ran into some pretty stiff competition.

Some psychologists believe it's healthy to take out aggression in other activities, even simulations (though it may be laughable to call GTA3 a simulation). Others believe that pretending to be violent leads to violence. Which psychologists you believe tends to be more of a personal and political choice than a real observation weighing the arguments against each other.

I would be with the second camp, and I take it you're with the first. We may want to leave it at that...

(Emacs stinks! VI forever! :))

[Action movies]
I haven't seen Gone With the Wind, but wasn't Ben-Hur one of those movies where someone died on-screen during production, and they left the footage in there? (the answer is yes) Generally a pretty violent film about a pretty violent portion of world history.

However, all of this (except the guy getting killed in the chariot race, which was unintentional...) was in there for the sake of the story, and relatively subdued. Like I said, "[H]ow much action-movie violence is there in ... Ben-Hur"? The film's quite violent, but the violence is to tell an incredibly powerful story, not as an end in itself. Contrast with, say, The Running Man or way too many other Schwartzenneger films.

Shakespeare tends towards 'mature' themes, including violence and rather odd sexual pairings, but people tend to interpret it as less because they don't get the imagery so well from his prose (and most interpret Shakespeare from plays and movies rather than his actual words).

I don't like how he plays up the sexual stuff for laughs either, but it seems to be a constant of Western civilization that sufficiently off-the-wall sexual themes are the most effective of anything at producing (uncomfortable) laughter...

As for violence, what I was arguing was not that, say

They want to maintain a certain image, which is great in theory, but tough on sales.

It's also helpful when Lieberman and the Vice Squad start making the rounds of game companies...

This attitude of superiority has cost them the friendship of Sony and Square, two mistakes that they have been paying for ever since.

Just a nitpick here, but it seems to me that Square, not Nintendo, suffered after deserting to Sony. Their late Super Nintendo games (FF6, Chrono Trigger, RS3, SD3) were extremely good, but in retrospect after seeing the mess they made of FF7, FF Tactics, and subsequent games, it seems that this was *because* they were being censored up the wazoo and weren't able to do the FMVs that their lead FF designer (Hironobu Sakagami, IIRC) wanted so desperately.

Pre-rendered video is now recognized pretty widely [Item #6] as bad design and an impediment to storytelling and immersion. This was the issue that Square jumped ship over...

They got what they wanted: no censorship and all the FMV they could possibly want. Result: Angsty foul-mouthed adolescent protagonists, unplayable games (FF10), and a merger with *shudder* Enix. They're a sinking ship, and no longer consequential. More importantly, they made themselves that way.

It's nice sometimes to be an adventurer and save princesses, but sometimes people do want to rob cars and kill prostitutes. Without giving the gamer a choice of that kind of game on your system, you are hampering your business.

This is a good point, although IMHO anyone who wants to rob cars and kill prostitutes, even in a game, should get his head examined, and see whether his insurance would cover moral-compass-replacement surgery. Some activities are so depraved that even pretending to engage in them is very questionable.

Anyone who disagrees with that will surely be interested in the new game by Rockstar Studios, First-Degree Murder: Jihad, in which the player takes on the role of an al-Qaida guerilla in the United States in a variety of missions, culminating in participating in the destruction of the World Trade Center and the ushering in of a glorious new age of faith and godliness...

Much more upbeat tone than their previous releases, isn't it? And for the chronically humor-deprived, no, this game isn't going to be released, it's a hypothetical example. Here's the obligatory smiley. :) And just in case, have another. :)

On a different subject -- a common one in this discussion, but not mentioned by Acts of Attrition -- I would say that a common misconception in America is that for a game to appeal to adults, it has to have "adult themes," e.g. liberal amounts of excessive violence, blood, and gore. (Our adolescent culture won't stand for sexual themes, of course.) This theory is nonsense; how much blood and gore, how much action-movie violence, is there in Gone With the Wind, say, or Ben-Hur, or the other memorable films of the Golden Age, or most of Shakespeare?

Grand Theft Auto, Bond movies, Terminator 3, and so on are adolescent in their appeal, not mature. One can appeal to adults more effectively without "adult content," whether sexual or violent, beyond what might be needed in the story. In the end, it's more effective to censor one's own work if one wants to appeal to mature adults...

Just as long as one doesn't cripple himself with Wind Waker-style animation.