The Future of Gaming

nvembar writes: "The International Game Developers Association has the text of the lead designer at ION Storm, Harvey Smith's keynote address. In it he addresses "high fidelity similulations" entering games, making them more flexible and realistic. It's an interesting read on the future of gaming."

Comments

A friend was talking about

[trilucid]

this sort of thing with me the other day... he just quit his job as a programmer with a large accounting software maker to go to work for a gaming company. They're working on new tech for MMRPGs these days.

We had a rather *long* conversation about new stuff coming down the pipe, wherein we discussed different models for the I.T. infrastructure to support this sort of thing. Basically, we ended up going back and forth on the merits of p2p tech when it comes to reducing primary server loads and increasing playability.

The biggest obstacle we could see at the moment is (of course) still the latency on a p2p network. While users with high-bandwidth connections would whiz along fine, those on modems would have a tough go of things. Another point we covered was the continuing advances in PC power we're seeing (Moore is still right ;-] ), and how this relates to the ability to offload a bunch of the world computation to discrete units (each gamer's PC). In this model you'd use spare cycles on your own box to perform calcs for other portions of the environment.

The problem with that, of course, is that gamers will always want to play with the highest detail, color depth, etc setting as possible. This would tend to "max out" most gamers' boxes, reducing that particular advantage of the p2p structure.

What sort of thoughts do others around here have about this stuff? C'mon, I need some ammo to go back to my friend with ;-]. I just *can't* let him keep winning every argument we have about this stuff...

Re:A friend was talking about

[elfkicker]

P2P will always have latency issues. Depending on how you do it, you either going to hit a bandwidth obsticle or high hop counts. And with games, you're going to run into cheating issues because the data is coming from untrusted clients. I'd suspect a central server would be more equipped to deal with this.

Perhaps it could work well in a setup like IRC where you have many central servers all interconnected. That way you'll save on bandwidth and hops. There will still be trust issues, but it's better than pure p2p. Just watch out for server splits.

Re:A friend was talking about

[The Cat]

Before approaching publishers, be fully prepared.

..to be turned down. Don't waste your time.

If you want them to hire you to develop games for them, bring several demos of different kind of games your team created. Do not just do PC games - the PC is a minor segment of the overall game business today.

..and the only segment that doesn't require an upfront five-figure investment, in addition to the thousands of man-hours you'll need to invest in order to produce "several" game demos.

You need to make demos for Game Boy and PlayStation as well (NOT Xbox!). It's kind of a chicken-and-egg Catch-22 dilemma - you can't develop games for consoles until you have a contract, and you can't get a contract unless you develop games for consoles - it's not easy but you can find a way.

Don't waste your time. Make a really good PC game and publish it yourself. Forget the Byzantine publisher agreement submission routine. Even if you somehow luck out and manage to get an agreement, you've just signed away all of your value in the product and 85% of the gross.

If you want them to publish your game, you need to finish the game first.

I have a better idea. Walk in with 50,000 unit sales and a pre-written agreement signed off by *your* attorney. If nobody signs it, sell another 50,000 units and retire.

If you're going to invest 30,000 man-hours to develop a game, why would you go sign it over to some other company?

I recommend you bring them several finished games, in different genres and for different hardware formats.

Oh, come on. Do you hear yourself? You're talking about hundreds of thousands of man-hours here. Don't bring them anything. Build the game. Sell it. Use the proceeds to build another. Sell that. Repeat.

The economics of brick and mortar computer game publishing are broken. It isn't possible to make money, because the shelf space is too expensive, the development costs are too high and the market is too small (right now). The publishers will make it your responsibility to solve this problem before they publish your game, and the only way you can solve the problem is to give them a gargantuan percentage of the sales. It is a waste of time.

Do not just bring PC games - the PC is not the #1 gaming platform. And the Xbox is not the #1 console. And also bring several demos of other games you're working on. Maybe nobody will publish your game, but they might hire you to develop a game for them, if they like your work.

Sure. Bring an arcade game while you're at it. Cabinets aren't that expensive. Let's see. $20K for each of three console licenses, 400,000 man-hours to build several completed games, and $10,000 per pitch to each publisher in materials, travel and time. For this investment (several million dollars, in all likelihood), the publisher will *think about* giving you 15%, but you'll probably get turned down.

When you have prepared your finished games and demos, and you have the contact information at the game companies, call and find out who is in charge of receiving submissions (if you are looking for publishing) or who is in charge of hiring developers.

Also known as the "Search for the Appropriate Wastebasket"

At my last job, there was no one person in charge of hiring developers. Each producer was in charge of hiring developers - which means you might need to pitch your services to 10-20 guys at a large publishing company. It might be best to do a mass mailing, followed up by selective visits.

After an unbelievable amount of effort and time invested (while your demo gets more and more dated and no money is coming in), you might have a game that makes back the royalty advance on bargain-bin sales or a $40K/year job testing setup programs.

If you want to make games, just make games. If you want to negotiate publishing deals, get a law degree and a phone headset. Before submitting to a publisher, have a nice large number of unit sales. At the end of the day, there are few cynical publisher responses to solid unit sales. The statement "50,000 units sold in six months" tends to shut the "yeah but" crowd up.

As always, YMMV.

Crap

[Red Moose]

No, the future of gaming is when people like Romero, Carmack and the rest of the talentless (regarding GAMEPLAY) cesspool-of-patch-release inhabitants quit the crap and stop making games like Quake 3, etc., . It's a real cop-out to say "it's multiplayer only" and therefore they don't need to bother making a half-decent game but just make a fancy 3D engine to sell.

Deus Ex was a GREAT game, and has a lot of factors that you won't find in big name releases; how about the incessant crap from Romero and Daikatana? and it turned out the less hyped game whupped it and most other games of 2000 collective asses.

End the tyranny of arcade shoot-em-ups! Death to the FPS and bring back a decent PLOT structured game to the PC!

How about C&C Renegade or whatever it is. It's another FPS, just like ANY other standard fare shootemup, but woohoo you can blow up a stealth tank or an obelisk of Nod because it's in C&C land so that obviously makes it the "biggest" game of the year.............fucking cretins. And Peter Molyneux and that 15 year old bloke from Theme Park have gone nuts. Black & White was a big tamagotchi, and this Republic just stinks of utter un-gameness.

Fuck this, I'm off to play Speedball 2. Wake me when Speedball Arena comes out - now THAT will be the way future games will go.

The future of gaming should be.... fun games...

[heldlikesound]

I know people have said it before, but graphics and framerates only provide enchancement for a fun game. The gameplay is still the most important factor in a game being fun. Anyone else play Rampart (Arcade or SNES), I think it's probably my favorite game of all time, but the graphics suck...

I can already hear...

[Anonymous Coward]

People complaining that realistic games aren't fun. Possibly, but good fantasy games will be made with engines that could give a realistic if asked to.

The difference between a great modern painter and a bad one is that the great painter could do a photo-realistic painting if he wanted, even though he prefers to paint random strokes. The bad painter only knows how to do random strokes.

The difference between a creative speller (automagically) and CmdrTaco (its there fault) is that one knows how to spell correctly, and the other does not.

So full throttle towards realistic simulations! I want my game engine to be able to do these!

"Future of Gaming"

[Starship Trooper]

Sorry, but I have ceased caring about the latest and greatest graphics chipsets, game engines, processors, etc. I don't want games to be "more realistic" or "better looking". What these developers have become blind to is that games should be fun. I don't care how many triangles per second the games puts out if it's just another variation of the tired Doom point-and-click kill-everything-that-moves theme.

The lack of innovation in the gaming industry has gotten so terrible that crap has become celebrated. Mediocre titles like The Sims and Deus Ex win tons of awards by the dubious virtue of being only slightly more interesting than all the other dross on the retail shelves. Meanwhile, all of the truly innovative thinkers slowly trickle away to the console markets, leaving the PC game landscape for the wasteland it is. This Harvey Smith is representative of the sad state of the entire PC game industry, which every day seems more and more like it only exists to line nVidia and the other high-end hardware makers' pockets instead of entertaining its customers.

Simulationism vs. Gameplay

[Bud Dwyer]

The bottom line: Is a better world model and more detailed graphics going to make the game better to play? I know plenty of people who still play the original Doom, despite the fact that it's graphics are blown away by its antecedents, such as Quake III. Why? Gameplay. Quake III is an awful game, despite the graphics. Quake III could be photorealistic and get 600 fps on my P3, but that wouldn't make it a good game. If you want a photorealistic, simulationist game, take a step outside. You could probably use some sun, anyway.

Is that a problem, or a benefit though?

[mindstrm]

Is a proximity mine with a strong magnet not cabable of such a feat in real life? is it not at least somewhat realistic.

I witness Urban Terror - Rommel.. this map has a number of interesting locations that possibly the designer did not intend for people to reach.. but through, say, standing on another player's shoulders, you can reach them. This is not unrealistic.. it simply requires teamwork.
Now.. using the shotgun to 'launch' someone really high... that's not realistic.. but still.

It's exactly this mix of things that can make a good game GREAT. Witness Streetfighter 2... yes, it was well designed... but was everything in it intended? Some of the combinations? The timing that made certain combinations of movements unbeatable? I know in later games they were intentional.... There were also a few 'elite' tricks with a few characters.. essentially bugs in the game, but they simply made it that much more interesting.

I think a realistic game engine MUST allow for things the game designer didn't intend.

Re:Is that a problem, or a benefit though?

[Alien54]

I think a realistic game engine MUST allow for things the game designer didn't intend.

Precisely the point. In that case, I would have made the mines sufficiently small or narrow or rounded that they would have been a precarious ledge at best.

but a very large world with lot of possibilities would allow the flexibility that you had with the old paper and pencil games, where you at least had a referee to judge to the long term consequences. Or to take advantadge of the possibilities that were opened up.

To some extent, some of the problems you have with games like everquest comes when you have people running around looting stuff from other people, without an easy place of safety at hand.

I wonder what would happen if social stations were handed out more at random instead of having to come up just through the levels. The equivalent of "You are 13 years old, and have reached Manhood. You are a member of the Royal House of Saud, one of 5,000 plus people running the Kingdom." In this case, you are rich, but you have political responsibilities as well. Don't mess up!

The advantadge of a world of truly huge size, as mentioned above, is that you could have a thousand such kingdoms to be affiliated with, and yet you could travel elsewhere if someone really messed up the kingdom or the war went badly.

but now we are getting into the specifics of a game design

Make 16-Bit games again!?

[Maul]

Seriously, all these 3D games are great and all, but nothing beats pulling out the Super Nintendo and playing the 16-Bit Final Fantasy games, or pulling out the Genesis and playing some Sonic.

People forget what made these games great when they start focusing on making the next 3D Engine.
It ultimately wasn't the graphics.

Re:Make 16-Bit games again!?

[Kris_J]

I don't think the same as the people that write these "open-ended" immersive games, thus I quickly end up bored and/or trapped. However, when the game is simplified down to the odd bit of lateral thinking and some half-decent reflexes I really enjoy it.

I also really enjoy the technology that used to be thought up for console games. I've just bought myself a Sega 32X, which was an amazing peice of hardware totally crippled by petty in-fighting. I've just found out about the "Lock-on" feature of one Sega game that lets you replay older games with new characters. Now that's innovative and interesting.

These strategy/RPG/FPS/3D games are all too complicated. I'd rather whack a cart into an old console and screw around for 15 minutes, than have to spend hours trying to second-guess some programmer who thinks his game is "open-ended" even though the dozen or so perfectly legitmate solutions I come up with don't work.

To sum up; I bought an Atari 2600 today and I'm probably going to play "indy 500" with the padles longer this weekend than I've spent total time on all 3D PC games released after Quake 2. Computer games should be abstracted, not more complicated than life itself.

He has some good points...but

[Anonymous Coward]

This article sounds like it was written 5 years ago. The reason I say that, is that the auther doesn't seem to understand why multi-player games are so succesful. The most popular PC game in the world is not Black and White, it's not The Sims, it's not Baldur's Gate, it's not even Diablo II. The most widely played game (for some time now) is Half-life Counter-Strike. A team based FPS, with no character AI elements, and extremely simple physical simulation(friction, gravity, collision detection, and...that's about it). So how can a game that de-emphasizes the authors points(no AI, not much simulation) be so successful? (successful == people love playing it).

Remember other people?

In the article, the author doesn't mention Counter-strike, Everquest, or any other MPG. In the entire 7 page article, he makes only a one paragraph mention of MP games at all:

"Most of us have accepted MP as the future. But if AI entities were as smart as people, wouldn't narcissism dictate the desire for SP? Would you rather have 4 obnoxious roommates or a really good dog?"

Frankly we aren't even close to achieving AI that is 1/100th as sophisticated as a dog. And when AI entities are as smart as people, we'll have solved the single greatest problem in the history of computer science. Wake me up when that happens. Here in the real world however, the numbers seem to show that people want living breathing opponents/allys. Gamers know the difference, and will continue to know the difference for a very long time.

But that's just the playability side. What about the design side? The author wants the users to enjoy an ever widening space of possibilites in the game environment. He wants gamers to be able to express themselves by thier play-style, but they are in HIS sandbox. Now don't get me wrong, we need things like physical simulation and standard constants of gravity, and we need an underlying engine to hold it all together. But what about the creative side? What makes game designers think that they are the experts?

Luckily, not all of them do. There are a few shops who are taking a different approach (Bioware, Lucas Arts, etc). Building environments like Neverwinter Nights, and Star Wars: Galaxies. Games which welcome all kinds of possibilites in terms of empowering the gamer. At places like Bioware, there is tremendous focus on building tools. NWN will include a very advanced scripting language which is freely available to everyone. Users can create thier own dungeons, thier own quests, and thier own cultures in NWN. Star Wars: Galaxies takes this a step further, and includes an intricate system of commerce/trade/barter in which players can assume the roles of shop-keepers, smugglers, pirates, dignitaries, or even state officials.

The point is, if a game designer is truly interested in expanding possibilites of play, let the users in the door! Tired of "canned" conversations and predictable NPC's? Let us role-play! Gamers provide AI that you will never be able to fabricate(not in our lifetime). Tired of power players? Let us assume different roles! We gamers love to build, enrich, and contribute to the world in which we play. And now, for the first time in the history of computer gaming...it looks like we will soon be in a position to do just that.