Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Game Dev (Except in St. Louis)
ksquire writes "Ben Sawyer, of Digitalmill, has published an interesting article at Avault.com about
the past, present, and future of game development.
Sawyer argues that the game industry is going more and more toward 3rd party development tools and '4th party' publishing -- meaning that game developers are essentially tool developers for game enthusiasts to create mods (also using tools like Alienbrain or Discreet's
GMAX).
I'm really curious as to whether the Slashdot community thinks we'll see a future era of standardized game tools and developers courting modders, or if we'll continue to see more specialized game engines. Maybe a greater PC / Console split?"
Meanwhile, over in St. Louis, the Free Expression Policy Project has filed an
amici curiae brief
by 33 media scholars saying that "Most studies and experiments on video games containing violent content have not found adverse effects."
They're trying to stop the county from banning violent games --
Wired has the story.
ksquire points out that "Sawyer also wrote an article, Serious Games: Improving Public Policy through Game-Based
Learning and Simulation, which was
discussed on slashdot."
netphilter and TCPALaw get credit for the Wired link. Previous Slashdot stories on violent gaming include this one and this one.
TCPALaw's full comment was (minus a dangling modifier): "Wired has a nice story on the St. Louis ban on violent video games. If the ban sticks (it was upheld by Judge Limbaugh against a constitutional challenge... Rush Limbaugh's uncle ... the same judge who struck down the federal ban on junk faxes as an abridgment of free speech - go figure) it could be extended to MP games available to play over the Internet."
Look at Half-Life. I can still, after how long now, fire up Half-Life and join a decent game.
;)
Hell, I can still find Quake 2 servers around, and there's still a few Quake 1 holdouts.
Gamers love mods. For the developer, it gives them a chance to experience how games are made first-hand and also gives them an arena to show off their skills to existing gaming houses.
For players? Depending on the mod community, it's like buying one game and getting ten in return. And everyone likes to save money, eh?
What would be cool to standardize would be the 3D modeling language and behavior scripting representations. After that it is a matter of compiling the world models and behaviorisms into the games custom binary representation.
We aren't that far from this now. There are a number of *common* engines. Various generations of Quake and Unreal seem to be used in all sorts of games. If both of these could compile levels and models designed in a standard 3D editor, others would surely follow.
I've seen alot of companies hiring people based off of their proven abilities in the mod field.
Likewise, I've seen people use their contacts in the mod community to get better jobs.
With some of the newer games coming out with good tool support (Unreal 2k3 has dedicated programs included, for example) for people to make their own content (be it maps, models, sounds, what have you), I fully expect game companies to actively search out mod teams.
Obvious case in point:
Think about what Valve would be doing right now if it wasn't for a very small number of mods.. (Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Action Half-life, etc... Especially Counter-Strike)
This perspective only holds in the PC game enthusiast market. The PC market is only a fraction of the total videogaming market and the enthusiasts are only a fraction of that.
The really big market for games is not on PC but on consoles, where customization is pretty much unheard-of. If you think that the industry is getting large enough that 3rd parties can create a market selling tools or libs or whatever, then that's absolutely correct and has been so for over a decade. If you think the market is going to 'decentralize', think again.
Personally, I think arcades are in decline because there are really only about 4 games out there these days, and DDR is the only one that's at all innovative -- the others are all retreads of "shoot an Uzi", "drive a car", and "twitch kung fu fighting game".
From the wired article: One studio recently signed a deal to make Doom a motion picture. /. story about this by now, or did I just miss it?
At first I presumed they meant the failed attempt several years ago, but then I found this article on Yahoo dated last Wednesday. I figured we would've seen a
It's never black and white with anything. Do video games cause all kids to commit violent acts? No. Do some video games cause some kids to commit violent acts? Probably.
Children that watch other kids do things mimic them but the way to overcome that is to ensure that there is a good moral foundation ( which comes from parents )
Have we seen a spike in violence in children since video games became more prevalent? Yes. But why is the question. You'll note that this is the same time that most families had to start having two working parents ( to supplement income ) and so there isn't somebody to monitor tv, games and other media. Nobody there to comment on this being done in the game. Nobody to say "we don't do that in real life".
Studies and statistics are often misleading and misused. A prime example that we learned in a Psych 101 is that of Churches and Crime rate. Did you know that in areas with more churches there is a higher crime rate? Considering that astounding revelation we should ban churches since they obviously lead to crime.
The issue is that there isn't a direct relation, but rather a common factor between the two. Where are there more churches? In higher populated areas. Where is there more crime? In higher populated areas. The problem for higher crime is increased population, not churches.
However, those in congress and those doing this study use common link evidence and say it is a direct relationship as if anything is so black and white
Games in the US do have a rating system, the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board). It's completely voluntary, and all publishers have their stuff rated. Unlike movies who fought tooth and nail against ratings.
It's also more specific than anything on movies or TV. A game doesn't just get M for Mature, but there's a short list of icons explaining *why* it got the M. Ie; Language, Adult Situations, Realistic Blood and Gore, Cartoon Blood and Gore.
Thing is, while most retail outlets are now refusing to sell M rated games to minors, there's still a big whoopty doo because of things like Columbine, where the fact that the shooters played video games was blown out of proportion.
Right now one of the big "targets" of the video game lobby is Grand Theft Auto 3. Now first off you have the title, then you have the box art covered with stylized mobsters, pimps, and prostitutes. Then you have a fairly prominent M for Mature, with underneath: Adult Situations, Coarse Language, Violence, Realistic Blood and Gore.
Yet noone clues in that this isn't a game for 6 year old Billy.
AFAIK, there's no legal accountability if Billy gets the game. Thats what they want, and they wouldn't dare hold the parents or gaurdians responsible for their childs welfare. It must be someone in corporate america's fault.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
In 1972, he invited Long Island mother Ronnie Lamb to bring her message to his show and launch her campaign to ban video games.
WTF was the violent video game in 1972? Death pong?
Did her Little Tommy kill somebody with a ping pong paddle? This is just silly.
Murphy was an optimist.
Technology forced design changes, too. It took time to become familiar with the Unreal engine. I wish I could say we uncovered all its potentials and limitations quickly, but we didn't. Months of experimentation were necessary to reveal how best to do things in Unreal and what things not to do at all. When we stopped playing with Unreal andactually started working with it (roughly six to nine months after we got our hands on it), lots of ideas we'd come up with in the abstract didn't work quite as well in reality.
Here's a case where game design was sacrificed in name of the existing game engine. Ah, but there's more...
We went into Deus Ex hoping that licensing an engine would allow us to focus on content generation and gameplay. For the most part, that proved to be the case. The Unreal Tournament code we ended up going with provided a solid foundation upon which we were able to build relatively easily. Dropping in a conversation system, skill and augmentation systems, our inventory and other 2D interface screens, major AI changes, and so on could have been far more difficult...
However, to my surprise, licensing technology didn't save us all the time I'd hoped it would. You'd think cutting a year or more of engine-creation off a schedule would result in an earlier release date. On Deus Ex, that didn't prove to be the case. Time that would have been lost creating tools was lost instead to learning the limitations and capabilities of "foreign" technology. Time that would have gone into making an engine went into focusing more on gameplay systems and tuning than normal. Unreal certainly allowed us to focus on content generation over everything else, but we spent more time doing it...
There were times when we should have ripped out certain parts of the Unreal Tournament code and started from scratch (AI, pathfinding, and sound propagation, for example). Instead, we built on the existing systems, on a base that was designed for an entirely different kind of game from what we were making. It's not that Unreal had bad AI or pathfinding or sound propagation, but those systems were designed for a straightforward shooter, which was not what we were making. (The entirety of this can be found at Gamasutra)
As I stated before, using a top-notch third party system might save you some time, but you often need to strip out a lot of the code and do some heavy modifications. Not to mention that they cost several hundred thousand dollars and a royalty percentage. Most of the time it's just better to write one yourself.