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Creativity, a Problem for the Gaming Industry?
Steeda95GT writes "A Reuters story reprinted at Forbes.com is an interesting read, saying that 'The gaming industry will shrink unless we start to see new games'. It talks about how the ratio of original titles to sequels is dropping dramatically, but it also goes on to say that upcoming sequels (Doom 3, Halo 2, Half-Life 2, GTA: San Andreas) will be successful only because their predecessors were."
The big companies aren't willing to take any risks. That's why there is GarageGames.
I think Half-Life 2 will be successful not purely on its name. Half-Life had no name to begin with, and the company that made it had no prior history. That was their first game, and it became one of the most successful games in history. They've had time to learn from their mistakes and do cool new things in this game.
Halo 2 I know nothing about. I have no interest in it since it will probably be an Xbox-only title, so perhaps someone here who finds Xbox interesting can give us some insight on the potential technical innovations for that game.
GTA: San Andreas. How can you make a statement one way or the other on this one at this point in time? They have yet to release any actual information on the game yet. We haven't seen any screenshots or feature lists or anything. If they're knocking the possibility of innovation based purely upon its name, then let's take a trip down memory lane and remember the differences between GTA and GTA2.. then GTA2 and GTA3 (clearly the biggest difference), then GTA3 to Vice City (not really a huge difference technically, but I think the gameplay was much improved and it was even more fun than GTA3 for most people). Anyway, the point is that without any information about what GTA:SA will be like, you have no room to knock it at all. They may have expanded this game to be a fucking huge region instead of a single city.
"The ratio of original titles to sequels is dropping dramatically," said Ryoichi Hasegawa,
"We have to think very carefully about the type of audience we're reaching with our games," Andrew House,
These two quotes sum it up perfectly.
It's not that new, original, refreshing mechanics of gameplay aren't -- it's that they're not what's marketable. By far, the largest chunk of the gaming public is that which loves sports games, racing games, FPS's, and traditional RPGs.
Games like those can only deviate from their core gameplay so much before they stop appealing to that chunk. Furthermore, it's not just about mechanics, but style. Except for RPGs, nitty-gritty "realism" is what dominates; just look at Need for Speed, Project Gotham, Unreal Tournament, Halo, Madden. That style dominates and will continue to dominate until a large-scale shift in gaming culture happens, something on the scale of the transition from 2D SNES cuteness to grim-and-cool 3D PlayStation.
What of titles like Pikmin, Fusion Frenzy, Cubivore, or that one game where you go down tunnels and match up music with what's written on the walls? Marginalized, utterly marginalized. They are all fantastic games -- and had they come out during the golden age, the '70s and '80s, when game mechanics were just beginning to be explored and there were very few established norms, they might have become classics.
The coolest voice ever.
I don't know about you, but the reason I bought the XBox was for Halo.
Morrowind to a lesser degree, as well.
Recently I just picked up Disgaea for PS2. I read a few reviews on it, and PA seemed enthralled by it, but I couldn't justify the full $50 GameStop insisted I pay. I mulled it for months, and finally decided why not and included it in a stack of games I bought.
I seriously regret having put it off for months.
The story, though fairly basic, is sometimes downright hilarious. There were three times where I seriously had to contain myself, and throughout the rest of the plot there are many of chuckles. A lot of things are simply said in the dialogue that really came out of left field. And it all comes through with great anime style, and quality voice acting. This is akin to the "Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail" of tactical RPGs.
There's a lot of hidden things to explore. The demon senate concept is amusing to say the least, though I haven't managed to persuade any senators by force yet. The item world is ridiculous, and turns the game into a FF Tactics meets Dungeon Crawl concept since its always different, and I end up with all sorts of crazy items if I survive.
And the core game itself? Pretty good. I'm 9 chapters in after about 30 hours, and have a feeling it'll be 60 hours before I just beat the core game -- but they're going by as fast as they did for the original FF Tactics. Nevermind the fact the game supposedly has a ton of different endings, and that I could spend forever leveling up to level 9999, getting all sorts of insane items and ridiculous looking attacks, etc.
Yet, good luck finding it. 14 stores and one had two in stock. I'm sure this was a low-volume venture by Atlus here in the states. I've thoroughly enjoyed it, but most folks haven't even heard of it. Which is a shame.
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A game does not have to be "new and different" to be good. If it ain't broke don't fix it.
I think that certain sequels like Grand Tursimo 3, Soul Calibur II, GTA3 etc. are better than many of the so called creative games.
Not to mention that many sequels are very new and diffrent and have very little in common with the previous titles other than the name.
Games are currently outdoing the movie industry in sales....so games are dead, long live games.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
in Nintendo...
seriously, we need Nintendo to start making up games again - just like back in the day...
wait a minute...
Actually, now that I think about it, the whole concept behind an Italian plumber and his brother fighting an evil turtle with spikes (ok, its a
"Koopa") to save Toadstools (mushrooms) and a really hot cartoon chick of a princess really by eating fireplants and shooting fireballs, and sprouting a racoons tail and ears to fly does make me wonder what they were doing when they came up with that concept....
(Of course, then again you have to wonder about the Ninja Turtles, Sonic [a flying fox?, a superfast hedgehog?], Power Rangers, etc... Pokemon I can kinda understand, as uhm, they're kinda a pet thing...)
Try not to let life get in the way of living.
Enjoy some context (not intended as a criticism). Part of the reason is demographic trends and part of the reason is financial. The ideas in the article seem to support a shift to creativity as discussed in an article with some game industry experts last year.
I think you're confusing revolutionary with evolutionary.
Half-Life 2, while great-looking from the gameplay that's been shown so far, isn't revolutionary. It isn't using inverse kinematics for the first time in its physics engine, it isn't the first graphics engine to pass pixels more than once, and it isn't the first game to use vehicles in game play.
It might improve on these things, but it's not ushering in a new era of elements we've never seen before.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
I know this will be tagged as a typical "Nintendo Fanboy Rant," but Nintendo is nothing if not gutsy. They pumps tens of millions into games like Pikmin and Animal Crossing which have absolutely no basis to weigh sucess on. What I mean by this is that while Vavle made a great game like Half-Life back in '98, they were basically saying "Let's pump money into a proven money-making genre and fill it with awesome ideas no one ever did before!"
While it did fail (miserably), Nintendo also took a chance and developed the Virtual Boy. Sony and MS, on the other hand (while respectable companies) have decided to make systems and games which are already proven winners (violence, RPGs, FPSs). And I think we can all assume that the Nintendo DS is a really creative idea (which can very well sink the company or put it back to #1). Just my $0.02...
I could think of many others. There are some that have another reason (for example many rythum games don't do too well in the US), but many were just great games that didn't do to well. I think a big part of the problem is that many parents buy games. So why risk their $50 or $60 on something the kid might not like when they know the kid has GTA3 or NBA 2k3 or some other game and they can just buy the sequel and the kid will almost certainly like it (even though it might not be that great).
There are many games out there, and many are fun. But personally I don't buy very many games (innovative or not). There are games that I've played and then thought "I wish I bought that", but I'm not going to because I've already beat the game. But far Far FAR more often the game wasn't that good (or terrible) or it was just short. I can't afford to take the chance to buy games. If games were $30, I would buy more, but a $60 for a new game you've got to be kidding me if you think I'll buy any games that look interesting. I think this is proven by the fact that I have about 5x as many GB/GBA games as most other consoles. Losing $25 or $30 on a game that looked fun (FF: Tactics was nice, but just not for me) isn't so bad. But if the games cost more, I wouldn't buy very many.
Sequels aren't always bad. Some are very innovative or really improve things (think GTA3 vs GTA2). As you can see above I'm eargly awaiting the sequels to many games. The problem is that some games get a sequel. Then they get another and another and before you know it you're on volume 10 of about the same thing. (Final Fantasy games don't count because each one is different, they're not true sequels (except X-2, which is almost "non-sequel" in it's own right)).
The end result of all this (and I think moving away from the razor blade model of video games would REALLY help) is that we get mostly sequels and remakes/collections and such.
I can't afford to take risks on innovative games. Of those above, I own Animal Crossing (because I rented it and got addicted to it and bought it) and Pikmin (because it looked fun and I trust Miyamoto). It's too risky.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
perhaps true, but many of us have real lives and find it truly impracticle to play oneline; I have maybe two hours a week, in ten minute increments, to play games (and no problem or compunction about plunking down $50, $100 or more to buy one). I am not interested in keeping up my skillz to match a bunch of teenagers with no job or family who are online for two or ten hours a day, so for me (and a lot of my 40+ ex hacker buddies) 'massivly multiplayer' just does not matter; just like I love MTGathering but hell if I'm going to spend $3K on cards, my friends and I all play with proxies (copies of cards) so it's a matter of skill, not having no life outside of the game. (no disrespect meant to someone whose entire life is gaming, I was there once and games are a very valuable tool of intellectual development, IMHO)
At 43 I'm one of the original video game generation, starting with \spacewar and various Apple1 sims. I still love gaming as much as I did 20 or 25 years ago but if I have a choice between jumping my wife's bones or hanging with a bunch of 15 year olds in some 'clan' the kids can go on without me. Sorry, I've got the doctorate to work on and other stuff to do to bother with a LAN party, so I won't pay one cent more for that functionality; good AI (defined as something that can suprise me 9 times out of 10 and approach each situation differently even in replays) is worth an extra $30 or $40.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
Revolution doesnt have to come in the form of a new genre. Old genres can see revolutionary ideas. I consider Starcraft to have been a revolutionary game. It was the first RTS to use a 'trigger' system for the maps, making it even MORE infinitely replayable. It also had the first well balanced non-cookie-cutter races (the 3 SC races have different mechanics/rules governing their expansion).
The worst thing to see in modern games is not just a lack of revolution, but even a lack of evolution. HL2 might not be doing much that is new, but its combining state of the art concepts in a new way. Compare that to Warcraft 3, the antithesis of a revolutionary game, in which not only is there nothing new and very little almost-new but there is also a disastrous lack of even BASIC features common to almost every other modern RTS game. It is like a 5 year step backwards in gameplay and a not-impressive graphical engine, only succeeding on its predecessors' shoulders.
Big publishers go through several steps when launching a new title. They do market analysis, competitive product comparisons, greenlight sessions, profit and loss statements and so on. Basically, lots and lots of paperwork that mostly tries to compare the new product against already existing titles. It's easier that way.
How do most game concepts start? "Super Killer Frenzy Shooter is a cross between Quarter-Life 3 and ReallyFarOutCry, with an RTS component based on..." Even game developers are constantly comparing games to other games by saying this is a little of that, and a little of this, or just like game X but with feature Y. I can only imagine that other creative industries do the same (movies come to mind.)
This is not just the way big publishers do business. A lot of pitches I've seen from smaller developers include how they are different or better than a list of already released games. Mostly popular games.
Most game companies are out to make money. Usually so they can continue to make games and not end up on the dole. So, we tend to look at what is popular and selling. It's very risky, especially with the game development budgets these days, to try something brand new. It still happens, it just doesn't happen as much as the early 8-bit days when it was literally one guy in the garage doing all the design, coding and art. Unless you look at the shareware, PDA and demo scenes where small teams and individuals are still making games there.
Sequels are popular with publishers because a) they tend to cost less to develop since you can use assets/engines/design from the first game, b) if the first game was popular, the sequel _usually_ sells well unless it's a bad game, c) you can get more press since you don't have to sell the magazines on a completely brand new concept that they are not sure will appeal to their market and d) you find it easier to get "buy-in" from your internal sales and marketing staff when dealing with a known property.
I don't think the games industry is non-creative, but we've definitely matured and tend to take less risks overall. Sequels and derivitive products are a way of reducing that risk.
Some sequels represent a rehashing of an old idea with newer technology, sometimes to disasterous effect (Deus Ex: Invisible War, anyone?). Other times, a sequel is a good way for the developer to further flesh out the story, improving upon the previous game and still telling a very compelling story (Max Payne 2).
...oh, wait. LucasArts cancelled that so that they could devote more time and energy to inane and purile Star Wars franchise rehashes.
Still other times you have a "sequel" to something that is so old, that the developers can't help but reimagine it for the current technology, and you have what looks to be a very promising title, such as with the upcoming Sam & Max game...
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Half-Life 2 is a terrible example of that. If it had been a game no-one had heard of but had the same graphics engine and gameplay mechanics there would be almost as much hype and hoopla around it, I can guarantee that.
I wholeheartedly agree that there nearly isn't enough creativity in the video-game industry. Because it is a mass entertainment medium, the incentive to give the creative people real creative freedom is severely lacking. But also, because video-games are such a mass entertainment media, the laws of market apply to it, i.e. more often than not, a bad game will flop, and a good game will sell, sequel or no sequel. Like with movies. This is what recently happened with, say, Deus Ex 2, which had a lot of hype going for it and a huge fanbase but (even though I loved it) most people didn't like it and it flopped, even though it was a sequel to one of the most critically acclaimed games of the past decade.
That said, there are several other things to take into account.
First of all, what matters in a game isn't the title as much as the gameplay mechanics. In a movie or a book, a sequel implies a lot of things : same characters, same genre, same universe... Of course there are lots of unconventional sequels out there, but in a videogame what is appealing is the gameplay (in the broader sense, i.e. gaming experience, graphics, etc.) more than the characters or the story. Look at a game like The Legend of Zelda : The wind Waker. It's, what, the tenth sequel to one of the most successful franchises in videogame history? And yet wasn't that a very ballsy game? The Wind Waker was a very innovative game in more than one way. A very creative game, no matter how much of a sequel it was. Sams with an other hit console game like Prince of Persia : The Sands of Time. An other adaptation of an old school 2D game into a 3D masterpiece. Boooring you say? No, because even though it's a sequel, there are tons of creativity jammed into it. The gameplay mechanics, the famed rewind, the animation, the level design... The point here is that because videogames rely so much on gameplay mechanics, a sequel is far from meaning an uninnovative or non-creative game.
Very far from it.
The main problem with the videogame industry isn't that there isn't creativity, it's that there is no incentive to give the creative people the creative freedom they require -- much like Hollywood. As long as boring, unimaginative sequels will sell, why should execs look further than boring, unimaginative sequels? I only wish that there was a 'creativity crisis' in the video-game industry. Those things force the people with the big $$$ to take chances, to crop the useless fat out. Look at what happened with television : HBO proved with The Sopranos that a quality TV series could actually make money. Now we see all kinds of great shows pop up all around the place like Six Feet Under, K Street, but not just on cable, with The Shield, CSI, and many more like The Wire, Dead Like Me, and more I'm forgetting. Only a few years back the only reason I kept a TV was out of habit, for DVDs and the occasional documentary or Star Trek. Now I find myself cancelling dates (yes, I can get dates) to watch a great TV show. The problem with the videogame industry is that a good videogame takes a lot of money, and a lot of skills. The time when you could program a game on your Amiga in your bedroom while your brother drew the sprites and made a bad MIDI soundtrack for it is long gone. Once again, why is HL so good? Because they've been working at it since the first one came out! And because Valve hired some of the best programmers they could find! That's what, six/seven years of development and with very talented people. I can only imagine how much money has been invested in this project. And it paid off! The game is fantastic, even before it came out. It's got the best graphical engine anyone has ever seen (John C
At the IGDA awards, three games were given "Game Innovation Spotlights": the EyeToy, Viewtiful Joe, and WarioWare Inc. All three of these seem quite novel and worthy of the attention.
At the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, both indies and mainstream games were shown. On the indie front, this year's Indie Game Jam games (full disclosure: I co-run this event); Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates; and Zoesis' The Demon and the Princess. On the commercial front, the creator of Namco's Katamari Damashii spoke about and demoed the game ("Was it difficult to convince Namco to let you do this game?" "Of course." was even funnier with the long pause for translation between question and answer); we had presentations about WarioWare and about the explorations of time as a game mechanic (specifically in Prince of Persia, Max Payne 1 & 2, and Viewtiful Joe).
(There were a few more presentations about more academic "games": Ken Perlin's work on natural-language-programming for kids, "Haptic Battle Pong", and I forget what else, as I was developing a fever during the 3-hour EGW.)
The winner of the Indie Games Festival's web downloadable grand prize, Oasis, is a fairly original and creative game (full disclosure: I did contract work for Oasis' developers on a different project), and since this is announced at essentially the same ceremony as the IGDA awards it has a fairly significant cachet.
So I think the Reuters reporters just didn't go to the right events at the GDC.
The story itself has plenty of debatable claims. Are gamers, as the article claims, getting more conservative, or are publishers just getting extremely conservative and releasing more sequels and focusing their marketing dollars there? Hint: nobody debates the truth of the latter.
Why does the gaming industry need a new revolution?
Warcraft III was evolutionary enough to be entertaining. It developed the notion of 'heros gaining experience' for realtime strategy games and all the aspects that went with that. It improved upon the AI. It introduced multi-angle 3d to realtime strategy as far as I know.
Besides, how often has the publishing industry put out 'a new type of book.' Npt too often.
But unless there's some benefit or call for a 'revolutionary' type of game, 'evolutionary' improvements can keep things entertaining for a decade.
Besides, the advantage of 'sequel' games is that people can pick them up quickly and play them with their friends without a huge learning curve. They just need to learn the particulars of the current game. Too much 'revolution' kills the market because it takes too long for many people to learn to play the new game. This means fewer multi-player games, removing a big incentive for folks to buy and a particular game.
I used to test games for Turbo Graphix. I kept telling them they should focus their efforts of making one or two good multi-player games.
With the possible exception of bomber man, and dungeon explorer, they never did.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
The entertainment industry as a whole is hitting a brick wall. Hollywood keeps making 'safe' movies and rehashing old ones for guaranteed hits. The game industry is doing the same thing.
You're kidding, right? Have you seen:
* Any of the decidedly non-safe LOTR movies?
* American Beauty?
* Lost In Translation?
* The Matrix films (whether or not it's your thing)
* And tons more I can't list off the top of my head right now because it's 1:42AM and I'm tired...
My favorite DOS game was The Incredible Machine, which was a puzzle game where you had to solve a problem by placing balloons, fans, motors, conveyor belts, and other components in order to have a working machine.
:)
Sadly, I've never seen a 3D version.
And people still cry out for a 3D version of Leisure Suit Larry
If you look at game companies, instead of the entire industry, you'll see that it makes a lot of sense to focus their limited resources on producing sequals to top selling games. This is common in most (all?) entertainment industries. They'll make incremental improvements, focus heavily on tweaking gameplay, adding features, enhancing graphics, and then take the money, the internal experience, and the code libraries to their next innovative idea. As soon as people started getting tired of playing Half-Life 4: Half and Half and Halfed again... they'll be an opening for an innovative and interesting game. Now of course, some other company without a franchise like HF2 may come along and shake things up, but again, it's less risky to target and existing market.
It takes a lot of money to make a commercially successful game, and most investors don't want to invest in "starving artists" with just and idea and no real solid plan for financial return.
You're missing the point. LOTR & the Matrix films are excellent examples of 'safe' movies. They're low risk investment since the studios know a big budget VFX heavy film with enough promotion is likely to at least make a profit.
Just because some of them make more than others doesn't mean that even the relative flops weren't 'safe'.
American Beauty & Lost in Translation were character driven films, which wouldn't have cost a great deal (in relative terms) to make. Hence the risk wasn't great.
And Lost in Translation wasn't particularly original or challenging anyway, although obviously that's just IMHO.
This is a rampant problem throughout many industries. As a research scientist and former employee of Pfizer(once Pharmaica&Upjohn then Pharmacia) I can tell that drug "sequals" are consistantly sought after. We are consistanly pushed to find a chemical alterations to some drug (effectivly a sequal) instead of finding new and innovative solutions to health issues. The people in power want only to make stock holders feel safe and secure - srew the patient. New ideas that are outside this schematic are activly discouraged. Any other /.ers work in industries with similar problems?
"Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
... and much more discriminating. Compare you're young gamer self to how you view games now. When you were a kid you didn't care so much about reviews of games (unless you had a magazine subscription) you just wanted to play and experience every genre type of the games that you liked in existence. Thats how it was for me. Back in the day it was 1) Action / Beat-em-ups 2) Fighting games 2) RPG's and 3) shooters like Gradius, R-Type, etc. (Not first person shooters).
And to tell you the truth that hasn't changed in all these years I still like games from those categories/genres. I have expanded my gaming to included PC gaming, RTS and online FPS like Quake/unreal. But the gameplay/genre could still be boiled down to 5-6 genres you can count on your fingers.
There's a few problems and realities that the industry has to face:
1) Games and gaming are $!@# expensive (Esp for teens/kids who don't have rich parents) which limits the size of the market who can afford them. Look at what happened when Nintendo dropped their Gamecube to $99 they sold 2.5 million more! Thats nothing to sneeze at you just increased your market by 15-20% with a single price cut. I believe games themselves could reach a much wider audience if they didn't cost so much to produce and retail for over $40US ($60-70$CDN).
2) The older you become the more discriminating and jaded you get with the more games you play. It's unavoidable, the novelty loss gets worse with time, it becomes harder and harder to wow a seasoned gamer. Your nostalgic 'old favorites' from when you were a kid look like a pile of crap nowadays, with the rare few old games that are as your nostalgic mind remembers them.
3) Game rentals, I'm sorry but game renting negates almost any reason for anyone to purchase a game. The publishers and companies are just F'n dumb I swear! Available game rentals should be DEMOS of the game, not the complete thing. How moronic it is when you can buy and finish a game on 4-7$ weekend rental at blockbuster then fork out $40-50 for a brand new singleplayer game that once finished sits on the shelf and collects dust, thats over 500% savings at least for the same gaming experience!
Gaming industry has to wake up and realize that games are consumed differently them movies. It's not like the movie industry where you release to the theatres first and then make DVD/VHS versions available later, and you can consume movies much faster then you can consume games due to their short length of usually 1-2hrs. Rented games are available usually the day they are released, which totally negates any reason to buy them, after you've already played them! It's very simple economics really. Thats what has been the norm all throughout these years in thh industry, you can rent any game and finish it in a weekend rental for %500 less then actually buying the game.
Well, I see one problem with that theory: people _are_ voting with their wallets for non-standard games. At least if those games are also quality stuff, and not some buggy unusable piece of crap.
Let's think of some games which sold spectacularly well, or are played the most.
- The Sims. It's _the_ best selling game of all time, even taken by itself. If you add the seven full-price add-ons for it (and yes, some of us bought all seven:), it dwarfs any other game by ludicrious margins. In spite of being a 2D isometric game in an age of 3D bump-mapped pixel-shaded games.
- Counterstrike. The most played online game. It's based on Half Life, which is how old? Right. The graphics were horrible, the hostage AI was piss-poor, but people were buying Half Life like crazy just to play Counter-Strike. Why? A new mode of play.
But let's go even farther back in time:
- Diablo. Strictly speaking not totally new, but it still was original enough for a PC game. It also was a quality title: rock stable, good game balance, a good interface, easy learning curve, and basically a self-adjusting difficulty curve to fit most gamers. It sold like hot cakes.
- Dune II. A 2D 320x200 game, completely unimpressive as graphics go. Yet not only it sold great, it spawned a new genre. For a while everyone who wasn't making a FPS, was making a RTS instead.
- Wolfenstein 3D. You may notice that Id never needed a publisher ever since. Again, it was so popular that it spawned a whole new genre.
- Sim City. It practically invented the city building genre.
- Civilization. Probably the game which actually did _more_ than spawn a new genre. You'd be surprised how many games are essentially derived from Civilization. From obvious stuff like "Two Thrones" to practically any space colonization/empire building game out there, there's one solid market segment playing Civilization derivatives.
So, you see, my take is that people _did_ vote with their wallets for more original games, and did so again and again. Invariably truly new games sell _far_ better that titles whose only quality is "hey, look, we have even nicer textures. Look, we have 1324 screenshots too."
You think that would send a message to publishers already. But no, instead they'll keep making retarded clones instead. (And by "retarded" I mean: by people who haven't even understood what made the original sell well. So they'll make something that looks like a clone, but misses all the fun parts.)
No matter how many such truly original games appear and rake in a big pile of cash, the publisher still won't think "hey, let's try more original stuff." They'll just think "ooh, The Sims sold well. Let's include that in our next game."
(Except see above what I've said about retarded clones. So far they invariably missed every single part that made The Sims fun. Even though Will Wright even spelled it out in dozens of interviews.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.