"He seems to be thinking - granted, at this early stage - of simply shoehorning Shakespeare into World of Warcraft, using it as a powerup. The question they should be asking themselves is 'what do we want people to learn?' and, most particularly, 'how?' Judging by the statement "We'd like to allow our players to learn something valuable, so that's why it's about Shakespeare", I'd say the underlying goal is, in addition to the 'social science Petri dish' concept he's espousing, to teach random internet people about Shakespeare. So, what do you want to teach them? I'm assuming, because Castronova is a college professor, that he's interested in teaching Shakespeare in the academic sense, which is to say first and foremost simply understanding what's happening (parsing Elizabethan English.) From there, appreciating Shakespeare's genius would be nice, understanding narrative structure and so on. Then, it's always interesting to understand the context in which Shakespeare's plays existed, the world they came from, and to examine why they, of all works (being very much the pop culture of 17th century England) have endured over five centuries of scrutiny and continue to be held in the highest regard today."
That's just amazing...are you guys aware just how many copies of Bejeweled 2 Popcap is likely to sell in that time? That's unbelievably generous.
Also interesting and of note are the fact that it's basically the same game with more highly polished graphics and sound. Oh, and Scott Kim did the new puzzle mode, which won't appeal to fans (addicts?) of the original game but which will likely rope in more 'hardcore' players. Bejeweled is the quintessential casual game, the first breakout success in a sector that went from 0 to multimillion in the last five years or so.
Every game designer (and gamer, for that matter) worth his salt should know and love it. An old blab on it:
X-com is essentially a simulation that asks a simple question, a perfect question to build a game around: what would the practicalities of defending the Earth from alien invasion be? The beauty is that it's not trying to build a game around a story, a fundamentally linear endeavor, but that it uses invasion only as a metaphor for a deeply engaging simulation. Every part of the game is relevant to every other part, and all of them are self-canonizing. They just don't make 'em like this anymore.
X-com is comprised of three parts, each one of which could have been a game in and of itself: research/base management/building, UFO incursion management (receiving funds from each country based on how well you protect it), and the excellent 3rd person tactical combat (in fact, 'Warhammer 40k: Chaos Gate' is an entire game based on the X-com combat system.) The genius of X-com is that all three of these systems are keenly interrelated. You must shoot down UFOs in order to have access to technology to research at your bases, which then provides you better means to shoot down UFOs and better weapons for dealing with alien landings, and so forth. Both of these systems, the base and the salvage/ground assault, require large amounts of money to maintain and operate, which is provided primarily by funds allocated by the various countries of the world. If you allow UFOs to go unchecked and unchallenged in a country, that country will pull funding.
So you have this gardening aspect; you have to choose where to plant X-com bases, find the most 'fertile' soil (the countries that provide the most income) and if your base grows you can reap the fruit. Then you try to choose the next most fertile place for your next base, or you can use the game's graphs of alien activity to try and find an area that is overgrown with weeds (aliens), and till it and make it grow. If you leave an area untended, the weeds will invade other parts of your garden and you'll be overgrown and lose.
Another exemplary aspect of X-com is the character system. The characters, by being visually generic and using randomly generated names, present themselves as blank emotional canvases to the player. Much like The Sims, to play the game is to wield the brush; the character's actions in the game become their personality and therefore are far more powerful than any preconceived story could be. The game is the story. I still recall with great sadness the moment when Shigeo Akira, my most seasoned veteran commander, was gunned-down from behind by a lowly Sectoid soldier. In my opinion, there's no higher aim than the kind of emotional involvement I've had with some of my X-Com soldiers.
I'd heartily recommend X-Com to anyone, especially game designers. It's one of the greatest games ever created. I still can't believe they managed to make so many seemingly complex and disparate parts sing together in such perfect harmony. I'm floored by it each time I play.
Um, excuse me? Five million copies of Enter the Matrix sold? According to whom? I'd love to see some credible statistics for this. The last figure I'd heard was two million and even that, to put it lightly, strained credibility . Even then there was some fine print about 'units shipped' which any retailer will tell you has very little to with units sold.
To put that in perspective:
Super Mario 64 - 5.94
Grand Theft Auto 3 - 5.35 (million copies sold)
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 - 2.63
Metal Gear Solid - 2.43 Enter the Matrix - 5 million(?)
Which one of these things...is not like the others? Admittedly these numbers are US sales, perhaps Enter the Matrix sold these ridiculous millions of copies in Europe and Asia. Again, though, that seems somewhat implausible.
Also, as anyone with any sort of business acumen will tell you, units sold speaks very little about net profit. And let's not forget that Shiny reportedly paid $10 million for the Matrix license. What's that smell? Ah...fresh books. Delish.
I guess my only real reason for writing this is that I find Bonell to be somewhat unsavory and feel somewhat unnerved by the possibility that anyone takes him or his company at their word. He strikes me as something of a con man. I don't like that he bought and is now wearing Atari's rough-sewn skin as a branding rain-slicker and I don't like his comments about the future of gaming what games are supposed to be: http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.n ytimes.com/2003/12/21/magazine/21GAMES.html For an excellent summation of why Bonnell's comments are a proverbial avalanche of bullshit:
http://www.costik.com/weblog/2003_12_01_blogchive. html
Anyhow, the only point of that rather shallow tirade was that I sincerely hope no burgeoning game designers are being led astray by the parade of delusion that is Infogrames' press releases.
When a developer starts touting 'bullet point' features in lieu letting the game speak for itself, I get leery. Personally, such promulgations have the opposite of the intended effect; I start asking questions like 'are they so insecure about the quality of their game they feel the need to bolster its quantity?'
I saw Metal Gear Solid mentioned above, and that's a perfect example. Did anyone care how long it was? If a player is paying attention to how long it's taking/taken to complete a game, the game has failed. The counterpoint being the somewhat unsubstantiated notion that if people get to the end of a game and find themselves wanting more, they'll feel cheated. This is, of course, ludicrous. If the player reaches the end of the game and is wanting more, that's a good thing. Duh.
That said, a relatively short game of extremely high quality is not the same as a short inchoate mess of a game that unravels at its end, comes to no satisfying conclusion, or both. And that's really what we're talking about here, games that for whatever reason leave the player feeling unsatisfied. To assume that the reason people were unsatisfied with your short, shitty game was that it needed to be longer is both stupid and ignorant. In all likelihood, it was the development cycle that needed to be longer, not the game. Turok 2, hooray!
Of course, the point I wanted to make was this qualifier, the 'hours of gameplay' qualifier, really only applies to linear games. How exactly does this apply to a Grand Theft Auto game, eponymous sandbox game that it is? The linear, story, and goal-driven bits, I suppose. Honestly, though, doesn't everyone just boot up GTA to kill people and break things for a few minutes? To play? That's the appeal of creating a game; a good game has limitless potential for entertainment. The amount of time I've played Counterstrike is measured in weeks, not hours. Would you advertise the 'hours of gameplay' on a chess set?
Marketing wants to shoehorn yet one more aspect of play, which is inherently unquantifiable, into a number they can spout off in press releases. Why not just build a 'fun' slider into the game and be done with it?
My general takeaway from the article was lament for the turn the once universally lauded marriage of games and academia has taken. Lament interspersed with some interesting and challenging ideas about how better the academic resources being thrown piecemeal at games could be better spent. I enjoy that he's challenging convention here and looking to spark critical debate and deeper analysis. That said, he seems to have buoyed some of his more untenable points with some flimsy logic.
To watch a play testing session is to erode the assertion that theme and structure can ever be completely divorced from one another in digital/video/computer games. Players are far more willing to engage in an experience that is well-presented. That is to say, part of a game's design necessarily includes a player's initial willingness to play it and the implications that theme has on continued play. Aarseth backs off this one slightly in his lengthy reply to Crawford and Moulthrop's ripostes, but still stands on the assertion that Lara Croft's appearance is interchangeable with that of a dead ferret, or something. He's covered his academic cornhole fairly cleverly by saying "...sales figures are not a reliable measure of artistic success, or -- dare we say -- quality." In this way he makes it clear that his definition of artistic or critical success is divorced from financial success, but does not pin down his 'successful' definition. How successful was Tomb Raider as a game? To ignore that question is to ignore a fundamental concept of game design, and to take an equally untenable position as the narratologists he seems to hold in such contempt.
To answer it is difficult. How do you measure the success of a game? Is that even the right question? This starts to venture into territory that is pragmatically and empirically unapproachable. How do you measure the play that arises from a particular game? How do you measure the quality of said play? It's duration? The physiological effects it has on its players? The psychological? At some level, play springs equally from the intuition of the designer and the willing participation of the players. Never fully-formed; games are much more iterative and require far more tinkering than other mediums. I agree that sales figures aren't necessarily telling (Enter the Matrix) but I'm going to have to side with Raph and with my college game instructor, Steve Librande (Lead Designer, Blizzard North and co-speaker at this years Game Tuning), here and say that what really matters is the player's experience. That is, the way that every part of a game harmonizes to create an experience for the player. The theme, narrative, structure, and platform included. This is what I'd consider a holistic or pragmatic approach to game design, and one that game 'scholars' would do well to examine. It works.
Aarseth has some interesting points about the technology, the 'platform' of games, being too ephemeral to be realistically criticized by any sort of traditional means. Unfortunately he falls short of really examining why this might be or to propose a solution, which I think would be a very profitable avenue of study. The perennial inability by the critical multitudes to define 'play' (or, to bitch-slap the World's Deadest Horse, 'fun',) is central to the problem of studying games. I'd really like to see him expand on said idea and suggest an academically acceptable solution. Because, honestly, 'intuition' can only get us so far.
A friend of mine picked a P5 up on a whim (and for a very reasonable $20!).
Being a sharp and sprightly lad he created a Virtools BB that exposed the various variables the P5 outputs, for to tinker with: http://devlab.flashbangstudios.biz/article.php?sto ry=20031104014626613#comments -scroll down a bit for the exact post.
Unfortunately, his prognosis was that while the finger bending data was simple enough and had the fidelity to be applicable, the positional data is unusable garbage. Because the desktop P5 positional sensor looks at a series of reflectors on the top of the glove to determine 3d position, the 'actual' position of the glove (as far as the sensor is concerned) leaps around in the most annoying manner imaginable if even one if the sensors becomes obscured. If you've seen the glove, you can see how easily that might happen while trying to play a game with it.
For my part, I played with it for awhile and found it to be well-designed and aesthetically pleasing, if not practical.
For $20 it would make a good centerpiece for a Halloween costume;).
So, I interviewed with these guys about a year and a half ago. At that point they were only saying about the licensed property that it was 'an action movie released in 1999 by Fox that featured two big stars'. At that time the only film I could come up with that fit that description was Fight Club, but it seemed so implausible. I just can't imagine why anyone would license Fight Club as a game property. Quelle surprise!
Palanhniuk's novels inspire a particular kind of devotion in a particular kind of people. Some of these people are gamers, to be sure, but I would argue it unlikely that many of them would be interested in a game based on the film. This thread in and of itself gives credence to my reaction to the announcement which was that there is no conceivable way to make a good game out of Fight Club. And that was my reaction before reading that press release nonsense about it being a 'gritty street fighting' game. I have to wonder if the developers even saw the film.
Whether you find the movie itself engaging or pseudo-intellectual it must be admitted that it touches on some complex ideas. Some complex, reactionary ideas. Games as they exist today are not a good medium for conveying complicated ideas. We're simply not there yet. I've had some experiences playing games like 'X-Com' and 'Hidden and Dangerous' that show me tiny glimmers of a vast and limitless potential for complicated emotional involvement with games. Certainly The Sims touches on some high emotional concepts. The thing that's different is that Fight Club already exists. It has already achieved its emotional goals and struck its nerve. If the goal is to produce the same feelings in a game, then it's a game that is about three generations ahead of its time. It's not a gritty street fighting game that borrows likenesses from big name actors.
All of that said, the problem of designing a Fight Club game is wholly intriguing. Conceptually there are some interesting directions you could go. You could play as Tyler Durden, your goal being to complete Project Mayhem before the Narrator became aware and could consciously intervene. The problem with that concept is that it's just that: a concept. What are the verbs? That idea doesn't define game play. What does the player do? Obviously there should be some fighting involved but the question to ask is 'what does fighting accomplish?' In the film it was one tool Durden used to recruit to his cult and inspire devotion in his followers. One of many tools. So perhaps the game could be a sort of Cult Builder or sim. The time you're able to spend as Tyler Durden each day could be a sort of resource, with successfully fought Narrator vs. Tyler fights earning you more time to recruit and lead your cult. As your cult grew you could carry out more and more complex missions, with the eventual goal of erasing the debt record, as in the climax of the film. There are a couple problems with this, though.
One is a lack of a defined enemy. In the film the ostensible reason to destroy satellite dishes, to trash coffee bars, and to generally disrupt modern society was some nebulous concept about freedom. Freedom for people who are dissatisfied with the role they've found in said society. In the end it all seems to have been about one man's struggle to find himself and to come to terms with his past and future. My point is that, as in the film, ideas and motives so incendiary will burn themselves out. They can't be sustained because they don't present a real sense of danger. The members of Project Mayhem aren't in mortal danger. They choose to rebel because they are unhappy, they are not fighting a defined enemy. So how do you quantify success? Erasing the debt record, I suppose. Accomplishing each mission without Meat Loaf being shot in the head by the police, I guess.
All in all, I think it would be most difficult to make Fight Club a game because its conflict is internal. Internal strife is hard enough in narrative. We're nowhere near close to being ab
...and in no way constitute the views of Neversoft, Activision, or anyone but myself. All my information is hearsay and is in no way verifiable or documented and should not be construed as any sort of offical word from Neversoft, Activision, or Microsoft.
Sorry for any confusion.
The one thing I would point out is that the core tech for those those were all more recently developed, had way longer development cycles, and in (in the case of PSO) had their online component as a major selling point.
But, as you said, you're not interested in playing THUG online anyway;).
Eh, that's a bit trollish.
Point 1: as I said, not a huge factor in the decision, just a contributing factor. Mostly, management objects to players having to pay Microsoft to play Tony Hawk. Also, note that Microsoft does not allow any online Xbox play that doesn't use Live.
Point 2: Live does not work with our code. It's easy to say things like "Live has an online framework in place with which you would have to comply, that's an odd thing to complain about..." if you're not the one that has to make it work. Essentially what you're talking about is a complete rewrite of our netcode to accommodate Live, leaving us with two entirely separate code bases to debug and maintain. We have one net programmer. You do the math.
Guess what, people expect their Tony Hawk game at Christmas. Every Christmas. And know that the mandate that enforces that ship date comes from the people who employ us: it's not up for discussion.
Also, you can be as upset as you want but it's ridiculous to call anyone at Neversoft lazy. I've no idea what you do for a living but I'd wager it doesn't include working 18-hour days for three months. The bottom line is that Neversoft is the only company that can make a game of such size and quality in one year.
If I didn't care, why did I post in the first place? We've been saying from the beginning we weren't going to support Live play, I don't know why everyone's so riled. If it mattered so much Live users could have rallied for support back when the game was early in development. No one seemed to care.
If you want excuses, look elsewhere. I'm giving you reasons, take them or leave them.
Swink
I didn't know the server was tanked, last I'd heard it was up. Hopefully the usage will level out a bit after the inital push, though it's likely we'll add servers to meet demand.
As far as the Live subscription goes, the concern was primarily for the users who aren't subscribed to Live but who want to play Tony Hawk online. That said, it could be argued (and I did) that anyone who'd want to play THUG online would probably already be a subscriber. So, you're not really in that demographic, being a subscriber. But, being a subscriber you have to appreciate that there the majority of Xbox owners aren't Live subscribers. Either way that was probably the least important of the reasons behind the decision.
The IGN review was actually pretty funny...at the end he talks about 'shopping cart racing' which doesn't actually exist in the game. I wonder what game he was reviewing...;)
I like your idea about having the game critic be up front about exactly how much they've played each game they review. I think the reason that they don't is that there would be major outcry if people realized how little critics actually play games they review. My perfect review system would include an ongoing blog-style review of a game with a running tally of how much the critic has played the game included in each post. I also think that games as a medium are fundamentally subjective and therefore shouldn't be boiled down to a numeric score, but that's a different rant alltogether;).
The runout does extend the life of combos past what they were in THPS4 but it does have a constraint, the timer. I won't tell you that it doesn't effect the gameplay pretty radically but in essence it's just another state to transfer to to keep a combo alive, like vert/grind/manual. I guess we'll see how radically it effects scores etc when the scoreheads really go to town.
That was one of our cheif concerns in designing THUG: how to cater to the largest possible audience. As a designer that's a bit sucky because you run the risk of having the game feel watered down, but on a retail game it's more or less a necessity. Our solution this time was to add four difficulty levels that even go so far as to modify the physics of the game, hopefully making it fun for almost anyone. On the lowest difficulty setting my Mom was able to get through the first couple levels so I think it's safe to say it shouldn't pose a problem for many gamers;).
Are you even reading what I'm posting or just trying to bait me?
I'm a game designer at Neversoft, a game studio owned but not operated by Activision, a game publisher. The decision no to support Online play for Xbox was made but us, the creators of the game. And if you'd read what I posted instead of hitting 'reply' after the first line you'd see that that the point I was making when I said not to listen to Activision was that they don't make those decisions, we do. Nowhere do I call them liars. You'd also see that you'd misread the Activison site to begin with.
Exclusive co-marketing agreement means that Activision and Sony have an agreement whereby they will collaborate to market the Ps2 version of THUG. I don't know how else to spell it out for you. Why would money change hands when they're working towards the common goal of selling software? Both make a profit when someone buys a Ps2 version of THUG so it's in their interests to market it.
I suggest you carefully read what you've posted and my responses then think about whether you actually think there's some sort of conspiracy against you or if you're just mad because you don't get to play Tony Hawk online.
On that note, I'm sorry that you're not able to play the game online. If you're that upset about it, take it up with Microsoft. They're the ones who made Live a paying service and set up the prohibitive guidelines.
Don't listen to anything Activision says. The decision not to support online play was ours, not theirs. They own our studio but they have very little influence over our products.
"Activision and Neversoft have entered into an exclusive co-marketing arrangement with Sony whereby we will be cross-promoting Tony Hawk's Underground for the PlayStation 2 online through national advertising and promotional launch activities."
That's lipservice to Sony and has little or nothing to do with us, same as all advertising. And, if you read what you bolded you'll notice that it says Sony and Activision are cross-promoting the Ps2 version of the game using online advertising. That has nothing to do with online play, and nothing to do with the Xbox version of the game. It also says nothing about sony paying anyone anything. Cross-promotion means Sony and Activision both want to sell lots of copies of the Ps2 version of the game so they're combining some portion of their marketing budget.
So, I'm a designer at Neversoft. A couple thoughts:
"Activision is essentially telling its Xbox customers to fuck themselves"
Well, not really. As observed above, it's Microsoft's stringent Live guidelines that are preventing you from having your THUG online. Basically, we (Neversoft) refused to compromise on two points: 1. People should have to pay extra to play Tony Hawk online (players pay Microsoft for the privilege of accessing our online vault!?) and 2. Microsoft's Live 'guidelines' mandate certain things, some of which overlap with our online features. And, from a pragmatic standpoint, having our game be Live compatible means an entirely separate submission process for us, meaning the Xbox version would probably ship later than the other two.
On reviews:
The problem we're having with reviews, from my perspective, is the same across the board. THUG is larger and deeper than any console game has ever been. Now, I don't mean that as a blaring note on my own trumpet; THUG's size is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, anyone who invests in the game could probably play it for a month without running out of things to discover. The downside: effectively reviewing the game in a short time is nigh impossible. Some reviewers see the good (1up); some see the bad (Gamespot). This is not a problem particular to THUG; it's a problem with game criticism as a whole.
A single player can only ever offer his or her own experience with a particular game. As a designer you accept that, and you accept responsibility for every player's experience when playing your game. The frustrating part is that a game like THUG is that it must be designed with the assumption that people will invest a lot of time in it. This is not an unreasonable assumption considering the history of the series but it's frustrating as a designer because it means that people can't just pick up your game and have fun with it (see also: game critics). They have to be in it for the long haul.
I believe it was Jonathan Baron who observed that playing a game is like reading a novel; you invest much more time and effort than in something like a film or television program and are consequently rewarded with a richer, deeper, and more fulfilling experience (pardon my lazy paraphrasing.) That said, I also think that it's unreasonable to ask an underpaid hobbyist to spend more than a few hours with your game before giving his or her impressions of it. What I don't think is unreasonable is asking said critic to update that review at some point.
Now, I agree that playing a game is much more like reading a novel than watching a movie but I think where the analogy falls short is in the relationship between time invested and mastery, specifically in how predicable that relationship is. When you buy a novel you know that regardless of how quickly you read, reading the contents of each page means that you've finished that book. Not so with games (I'm assuming we're talking about reasonably designed games here, not the dregs.) They offer a different experience each time you sit down to play and they're self-canonizing: the more you play, the more learn about the game and the more skilled you become. The better you are at a game, the more fun it is to play. I usually avoid making generalizations but that one is universally true. You must master a game to unlock its full enjoyment potential and must therefore master it to effectively understand and critique it.
For example, I've seen quite a few reviews mention the runout/walking addition in passing, as though it really has no effect on gameplay. Forsooth! When mastered it redefines the gameplay. It's an entirely new verb. On the roadmap of Tony Hawk gameplay innovations it lies somewhere between manual and spine transfer, meaning it radically redefines the way in which you play the game. If you've only played the game for a short while this is not readily apparent, especially if you're playing the game the same way you played Ton
So, I'm a designer at Neversoft. A couple thoughts:
"Activision is essentially telling its Xbox customers to fuck themselves"
Well, not really. As observed above, it's Microsoft's stringent Live guidelines that are preventing you from having your THUG online. Basically, we (Neversoft) refused to compromise on two points: 1. People should have to pay extra to play Tony Hawk online (players pay Microsoft for the privilege of accessing our online vault!?) and 2. Microsoft's Live 'guidelines' mandate certain things, some of which overlap with our online features. And, from a pragmatic standpoint, having our game be Live compatible means an entirely separate submission process for us, meaning the Xbox version would probably ship later than the other two.
On reviews:
The problem we're having with reviews, from my perspective, is the same across the board. THUG is larger and deeper than any console game has ever been. Now, I don't mean that as a blaring note on my own trumpet; THUG's size is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, anyone who invests in the game could probably play it for a month without running out of things to discover. The downside: effectively reviewing the game in a short time is nigh impossible. Some reviewers see the good (1up); some see the bad (Gamespot). This is not a problem particular to THUG; it's a problem with game criticism as a whole.
A single player can only ever offer his or her own experience with a particular game. As a designer you accept that, and you accept responsibility for every player's experience when playing your game. The frustrating part is that a game like THUG is that it must be designed with the assumption that people will invest a lot of time in it. This is not an unreasonable assumption considering the history of the series but it's frustrating as a designer because it means that people can't just pick up your game and have fun with it (see also: game critics). They have to be in it for the long haul.
I believe it was Jonathan Baron who observed that playing a game is like reading a novel; you invest much more time and effort than in something like a film or television program and are consequently rewarded with a richer, deeper, and more fulfilling experience (pardon my lazy paraphrasing.) That said, I also think that it's unreasonable to ask an underpaid hobbyist to spend more than a few hours with your game before giving his or her impressions of it. What I don't think is unreasonable is asking said critic to update that review at some point.
Now, I agree that playing a game is much more like reading a novel than watching a movie but I think where the analogy falls short is in the relationship between time invested and mastery, specifically in how predicable that relationship is. When you buy a novel you know that regardless of how quickly you read, reading the contents of each page means that you've finished that book. Not so with games (I'm assuming we're talking about reasonably designed games here, not the dregs.) They offer a different experience each time you sit down to play and they're self-canonizing: the more you play, the more learn about the game and the more skilled you become. The better you are at a game, the more fun it is to play. I usually avoid making generalizations but that one is universally true. You must master a game to unlock its full enjoyment potential and must therefore master it to effectively understand and critique it.
For example, I've seen quite a few reviews mention the runout/walking addition in passing, as though it really has no effect on gameplay. Forsooth! When mastered it redefines the gameplay. It's an entirely new verb. On the roadmap of Tony Hawk gameplay innovations it lies somewhere between manual and spine transfer, meaning it radically redefines the way in which you play the game. If you've only played the game for a short while this is not readily apparent, especially if you're playing the game the same way you played Tony 4. The runout is basically an infinite backdoor clause to any combo:
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a brief post examing the game design challenges of such subject matter, if anyone's interested:
m o/
http://www.steveswink.com/posts/a-shakespearian-m
"He seems to be thinking - granted, at this early stage - of simply shoehorning Shakespeare into World of Warcraft, using it as a powerup. The question they should be asking themselves is 'what do we want people to learn?' and, most particularly, 'how?' Judging by the statement "We'd like to allow our players to learn something valuable, so that's why it's about Shakespeare", I'd say the underlying goal is, in addition to the 'social science Petri dish' concept he's espousing, to teach random internet people about Shakespeare. So, what do you want to teach them? I'm assuming, because Castronova is a college professor, that he's interested in teaching Shakespeare in the academic sense, which is to say first and foremost simply understanding what's happening (parsing Elizabethan English.) From there, appreciating Shakespeare's genius would be nice, understanding narrative structure and so on. Then, it's always interesting to understand the context in which Shakespeare's plays existed, the world they came from, and to examine why they, of all works (being very much the pop culture of 17th century England) have endured over five centuries of scrutiny and continue to be held in the highest regard today."
Also interesting and of note are the fact that it's basically the same game with more highly polished graphics and sound. Oh, and Scott Kim did the new puzzle mode, which won't appeal to fans (addicts?) of the original game but which will likely rope in more 'hardcore' players. Bejeweled is the quintessential casual game, the first breakout success in a sector that went from 0 to multimillion in the last five years or so.
Swink
To get Xcom running on modern hardware: http://www.xcomufo.com/x1faq.html/
X-com: UFO Defense
Every game designer (and gamer, for that matter) worth his salt should know and love it. An old blab on it:
X-com is essentially a simulation that asks a simple question, a perfect question to build a game around: what would the practicalities of defending the Earth from alien invasion be? The beauty is that it's not trying to build a game around a story, a fundamentally linear endeavor, but that it uses invasion only as a metaphor for a deeply engaging simulation. Every part of the game is relevant to every other part, and all of them are self-canonizing. They just don't make 'em like this anymore.
X-com is comprised of three parts, each one of which could have been a game in and of itself: research/base management/building, UFO incursion management (receiving funds from each country based on how well you protect it), and the excellent 3rd person tactical combat (in fact, 'Warhammer 40k: Chaos Gate' is an entire game based on the X-com combat system.) The genius of X-com is that all three of these systems are keenly interrelated. You must shoot down UFOs in order to have access to technology to research at your bases, which then provides you better means to shoot down UFOs and better weapons for dealing with alien landings, and so forth. Both of these systems, the base and the salvage/ground assault, require large amounts of money to maintain and operate, which is provided primarily by funds allocated by the various countries of the world. If you allow UFOs to go unchecked and unchallenged in a country, that country will pull funding.
So you have this gardening aspect; you have to choose where to plant X-com bases, find the most 'fertile' soil (the countries that provide the most income) and if your base grows you can reap the fruit. Then you try to choose the next most fertile place for your next base, or you can use the game's graphs of alien activity to try and find an area that is overgrown with weeds (aliens), and till it and make it grow. If you leave an area untended, the weeds will invade other parts of your garden and you'll be overgrown and lose.
Another exemplary aspect of X-com is the character system. The characters, by being visually generic and using randomly generated names, present themselves as blank emotional canvases to the player. Much like The Sims, to play the game is to wield the brush; the character's actions in the game become their personality and therefore are far more powerful than any preconceived story could be. The game is the story. I still recall with great sadness the moment when Shigeo Akira, my most seasoned veteran commander, was gunned-down from behind by a lowly Sectoid soldier. In my opinion, there's no higher aim than the kind of emotional involvement I've had with some of my X-Com soldiers.
I'd heartily recommend X-Com to anyone, especially game designers. It's one of the greatest games ever created. I still can't believe they managed to make so many seemingly complex and disparate parts sing together in such perfect harmony. I'm floored by it each time I play.
Swink
To put that in perspective:
Super Mario 64 - 5.94
Grand Theft Auto 3 - 5.35 (million copies sold)
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 - 2.63
Metal Gear Solid - 2.43
Enter the Matrix - 5 million(?)
Which one of these things...is not like the others? Admittedly these numbers are US sales, perhaps Enter the Matrix sold these ridiculous millions of copies in Europe and Asia. Again, though, that seems somewhat implausible.
Also, as anyone with any sort of business acumen will tell you, units sold speaks very little about net profit. And let's not forget that Shiny reportedly paid $10 million for the Matrix license. What's that smell? Ah...fresh books. Delish.
I guess my only real reason for writing this is that I find Bonell to be somewhat unsavory and feel somewhat unnerved by the possibility that anyone takes him or his company at their word. He strikes me as something of a con man. I don't like that he bought and is now wearing Atari's rough-sewn skin as a branding rain-slicker and I don't like his comments about the future of gaming what games are supposed to be:n ytimes.com/2003/12/21/magazine/21GAMES.html
. html
http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.
For an excellent summation of why Bonnell's comments are a proverbial avalanche of bullshit:
http://www.costik.com/weblog/2003_12_01_blogchive
Anyhow, the only point of that rather shallow tirade was that I sincerely hope no burgeoning game designers are being led astray by the parade of delusion that is Infogrames' press releases.
By the way, the source on those statistics is http://www.the-magicbox.com/Chart-USPlatinum.shtml
I saw Metal Gear Solid mentioned above, and that's a perfect example. Did anyone care how long it was? If a player is paying attention to how long it's taking/taken to complete a game, the game has failed. The counterpoint being the somewhat unsubstantiated notion that if people get to the end of a game and find themselves wanting more, they'll feel cheated. This is, of course, ludicrous. If the player reaches the end of the game and is wanting more, that's a good thing. Duh.
That said, a relatively short game of extremely high quality is not the same as a short inchoate mess of a game that unravels at its end, comes to no satisfying conclusion, or both. And that's really what we're talking about here, games that for whatever reason leave the player feeling unsatisfied. To assume that the reason people were unsatisfied with your short, shitty game was that it needed to be longer is both stupid and ignorant. In all likelihood, it was the development cycle that needed to be longer, not the game. Turok 2, hooray!
Of course, the point I wanted to make was this qualifier, the 'hours of gameplay' qualifier, really only applies to linear games. How exactly does this apply to a Grand Theft Auto game, eponymous sandbox game that it is? The linear, story, and goal-driven bits, I suppose. Honestly, though, doesn't everyone just boot up GTA to kill people and break things for a few minutes? To play? That's the appeal of creating a game; a good game has limitless potential for entertainment. The amount of time I've played Counterstrike is measured in weeks, not hours. Would you advertise the 'hours of gameplay' on a chess set?
Marketing wants to shoehorn yet one more aspect of play, which is inherently unquantifiable, into a number they can spout off in press releases. Why not just build a 'fun' slider into the game and be done with it?
Swink
To answer it is difficult. How do you measure the success of a game? Is that even the right question? This starts to venture into territory that is pragmatically and empirically unapproachable. How do you measure the play that arises from a particular game? How do you measure the quality of said play? It's duration? The physiological effects it has on its players? The psychological? At some level, play springs equally from the intuition of the designer and the willing participation of the players. Never fully-formed; games are much more iterative and require far more tinkering than other mediums. I agree that sales figures aren't necessarily telling (Enter the Matrix) but I'm going to have to side with Raph and with my college game instructor, Steve Librande (Lead Designer, Blizzard North and co-speaker at this years Game Tuning), here and say that what really matters is the player's experience. That is, the way that every part of a game harmonizes to create an experience for the player. The theme, narrative, structure, and platform included. This is what I'd consider a holistic or pragmatic approach to game design, and one that game 'scholars' would do well to examine. It works.
Aarseth has some interesting points about the technology, the 'platform' of games, being too ephemeral to be realistically criticized by any sort of traditional means. Unfortunately he falls short of really examining why this might be or to propose a solution, which I think would be a very profitable avenue of study. The perennial inability by the critical multitudes to define 'play' (or, to bitch-slap the World's Deadest Horse, 'fun',) is central to the problem of studying games. I'd really like to see him expand on said idea and suggest an academically acceptable solution. Because, honestly, 'intuition' can only get us so far.
A friend of mine picked a P5 up on a whim (and for a very reasonable $20!). Being a sharp and sprightly lad he created a Virtools BB that exposed the various variables the P5 outputs, for to tinker with: http://devlab.flashbangstudios.biz/article.php?sto ry=20031104014626613#comments -scroll down a bit for the exact post.
Unfortunately, his prognosis was that while the finger bending data was simple enough and had the fidelity to be applicable, the positional data is unusable garbage. Because the desktop P5 positional sensor looks at a series of reflectors on the top of the glove to determine 3d position, the 'actual' position of the glove (as far as the sensor is concerned) leaps around in the most annoying manner imaginable if even one if the sensors becomes obscured. If you've seen the glove, you can see how easily that might happen while trying to play a game with it.
For my part, I played with it for awhile and found it to be well-designed and aesthetically pleasing, if not practical.
For $20 it would make a good centerpiece for a Halloween costume ;).
Palanhniuk's novels inspire a particular kind of devotion in a particular kind of people. Some of these people are gamers, to be sure, but I would argue it unlikely that many of them would be interested in a game based on the film. This thread in and of itself gives credence to my reaction to the announcement which was that there is no conceivable way to make a good game out of Fight Club. And that was my reaction before reading that press release nonsense about it being a 'gritty street fighting' game. I have to wonder if the developers even saw the film.
Whether you find the movie itself engaging or pseudo-intellectual it must be admitted that it touches on some complex ideas. Some complex, reactionary ideas. Games as they exist today are not a good medium for conveying complicated ideas. We're simply not there yet. I've had some experiences playing games like 'X-Com' and 'Hidden and Dangerous' that show me tiny glimmers of a vast and limitless potential for complicated emotional involvement with games. Certainly The Sims touches on some high emotional concepts. The thing that's different is that Fight Club already exists. It has already achieved its emotional goals and struck its nerve. If the goal is to produce the same feelings in a game, then it's a game that is about three generations ahead of its time. It's not a gritty street fighting game that borrows likenesses from big name actors.
All of that said, the problem of designing a Fight Club game is wholly intriguing. Conceptually there are some interesting directions you could go. You could play as Tyler Durden, your goal being to complete Project Mayhem before the Narrator became aware and could consciously intervene. The problem with that concept is that it's just that: a concept. What are the verbs? That idea doesn't define game play. What does the player do? Obviously there should be some fighting involved but the question to ask is 'what does fighting accomplish?' In the film it was one tool Durden used to recruit to his cult and inspire devotion in his followers. One of many tools. So perhaps the game could be a sort of Cult Builder or sim. The time you're able to spend as Tyler Durden each day could be a sort of resource, with successfully fought Narrator vs. Tyler fights earning you more time to recruit and lead your cult. As your cult grew you could carry out more and more complex missions, with the eventual goal of erasing the debt record, as in the climax of the film. There are a couple problems with this, though.
One is a lack of a defined enemy. In the film the ostensible reason to destroy satellite dishes, to trash coffee bars, and to generally disrupt modern society was some nebulous concept about freedom. Freedom for people who are dissatisfied with the role they've found in said society. In the end it all seems to have been about one man's struggle to find himself and to come to terms with his past and future. My point is that, as in the film, ideas and motives so incendiary will burn themselves out. They can't be sustained because they don't present a real sense of danger. The members of Project Mayhem aren't in mortal danger. They choose to rebel because they are unhappy, they are not fighting a defined enemy. So how do you quantify success? Erasing the debt record, I suppose. Accomplishing each mission without Meat Loaf being shot in the head by the police, I guess.
All in all, I think it would be most difficult to make Fight Club a game because its conflict is internal. Internal strife is hard enough in narrative. We're nowhere near close to being ab
...and in no way constitute the views of Neversoft, Activision, or anyone but myself. All my information is hearsay and is in no way verifiable or documented and should not be construed as any sort of offical word from Neversoft, Activision, or Microsoft. Sorry for any confusion.
Hahah...indeed.
;).
The one thing I would point out is that the core tech for those those were all more recently developed, had way longer development cycles, and in (in the case of PSO) had their online component as a major selling point.
But, as you said, you're not interested in playing THUG online anyway
Eh, that's a bit trollish. Point 1: as I said, not a huge factor in the decision, just a contributing factor. Mostly, management objects to players having to pay Microsoft to play Tony Hawk. Also, note that Microsoft does not allow any online Xbox play that doesn't use Live. Point 2: Live does not work with our code. It's easy to say things like "Live has an online framework in place with which you would have to comply, that's an odd thing to complain about..." if you're not the one that has to make it work. Essentially what you're talking about is a complete rewrite of our netcode to accommodate Live, leaving us with two entirely separate code bases to debug and maintain. We have one net programmer. You do the math. Guess what, people expect their Tony Hawk game at Christmas. Every Christmas. And know that the mandate that enforces that ship date comes from the people who employ us: it's not up for discussion. Also, you can be as upset as you want but it's ridiculous to call anyone at Neversoft lazy. I've no idea what you do for a living but I'd wager it doesn't include working 18-hour days for three months. The bottom line is that Neversoft is the only company that can make a game of such size and quality in one year. If I didn't care, why did I post in the first place? We've been saying from the beginning we weren't going to support Live play, I don't know why everyone's so riled. If it mattered so much Live users could have rallied for support back when the game was early in development. No one seemed to care. If you want excuses, look elsewhere. I'm giving you reasons, take them or leave them. Swink
I didn't know the server was tanked, last I'd heard it was up. Hopefully the usage will level out a bit after the inital push, though it's likely we'll add servers to meet demand.
;)
;).
As far as the Live subscription goes, the concern was primarily for the users who aren't subscribed to Live but who want to play Tony Hawk online. That said, it could be argued (and I did) that anyone who'd want to play THUG online would probably already be a subscriber. So, you're not really in that demographic, being a subscriber. But, being a subscriber you have to appreciate that there the majority of Xbox owners aren't Live subscribers. Either way that was probably the least important of the reasons behind the decision.
The IGN review was actually pretty funny...at the end he talks about 'shopping cart racing' which doesn't actually exist in the game. I wonder what game he was reviewing...
I like your idea about having the game critic be up front about exactly how much they've played each game they review. I think the reason that they don't is that there would be major outcry if people realized how little critics actually play games they review. My perfect review system would include an ongoing blog-style review of a game with a running tally of how much the critic has played the game included in each post. I also think that games as a medium are fundamentally subjective and therefore shouldn't be boiled down to a numeric score, but that's a different rant alltogether
The runout does extend the life of combos past what they were in THPS4 but it does have a constraint, the timer. I won't tell you that it doesn't effect the gameplay pretty radically but in essence it's just another state to transfer to to keep a combo alive, like vert/grind/manual. I guess we'll see how radically it effects scores etc when the scoreheads really go to town.
Swink
That was one of our cheif concerns in designing THUG: how to cater to the largest possible audience. As a designer that's a bit sucky because you run the risk of having the game feel watered down, but on a retail game it's more or less a necessity. Our solution this time was to add four difficulty levels that even go so far as to modify the physics of the game, hopefully making it fun for almost anyone. On the lowest difficulty setting my Mom was able to get through the first couple levels so I think it's safe to say it shouldn't pose a problem for many gamers ;).
Are you even reading what I'm posting or just trying to bait me?
I'm a game designer at Neversoft, a game studio owned but not operated by Activision, a game publisher. The decision no to support Online play for Xbox was made but us, the creators of the game. And if you'd read what I posted instead of hitting 'reply' after the first line you'd see that that the point I was making when I said not to listen to Activision was that they don't make those decisions, we do. Nowhere do I call them liars. You'd also see that you'd misread the Activison site to begin with.
Exclusive co-marketing agreement means that Activision and Sony have an agreement whereby they will collaborate to market the Ps2 version of THUG. I don't know how else to spell it out for you. Why would money change hands when they're working towards the common goal of selling software? Both make a profit when someone buys a Ps2 version of THUG so it's in their interests to market it.
I suggest you carefully read what you've posted and my responses then think about whether you actually think there's some sort of conspiracy against you or if you're just mad because you don't get to play Tony Hawk online.
On that note, I'm sorry that you're not able to play the game online. If you're that upset about it, take it up with Microsoft. They're the ones who made Live a paying service and set up the prohibitive guidelines.
Swink
Don't listen to anything Activision says. The decision not to support online play was ours, not theirs. They own our studio but they have very little influence over our products.
"Activision and Neversoft have entered into an exclusive co-marketing arrangement with Sony whereby we will be cross-promoting Tony Hawk's Underground for the PlayStation 2 online through national advertising and promotional launch activities."
That's lipservice to Sony and has little or nothing to do with us, same as all advertising. And, if you read what you bolded you'll notice that it says Sony and Activision are cross-promoting the Ps2 version of the game using online advertising. That has nothing to do with online play, and nothing to do with the Xbox version of the game. It also says nothing about sony paying anyone anything. Cross-promotion means Sony and Activision both want to sell lots of copies of the Ps2 version of the game so they're combining some portion of their marketing budget.
So, I'm a designer at Neversoft. A couple thoughts:
"Activision is essentially telling its Xbox customers to fuck themselves"
Well, not really. As observed above, it's Microsoft's stringent Live guidelines that are preventing you from having your THUG online. Basically, we (Neversoft) refused to compromise on two points: 1. People should have to pay extra to play Tony Hawk online (players pay Microsoft for the privilege of accessing our online vault!?) and 2. Microsoft's Live 'guidelines' mandate certain things, some of which overlap with our online features. And, from a pragmatic standpoint, having our game be Live compatible means an entirely separate submission process for us, meaning the Xbox version would probably ship later than the other two.
On reviews:
The problem we're having with reviews, from my perspective, is the same across the board. THUG is larger and deeper than any console game has ever been. Now, I don't mean that as a blaring note on my own trumpet; THUG's size is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, anyone who invests in the game could probably play it for a month without running out of things to discover. The downside: effectively reviewing the game in a short time is nigh impossible. Some reviewers see the good (1up); some see the bad (Gamespot). This is not a problem particular to THUG; it's a problem with game criticism as a whole.
A single player can only ever offer his or her own experience with a particular game. As a designer you accept that, and you accept responsibility for every player's experience when playing your game. The frustrating part is that a game like THUG is that it must be designed with the assumption that people will invest a lot of time in it. This is not an unreasonable assumption considering the history of the series but it's frustrating as a designer because it means that people can't just pick up your game and have fun with it (see also: game critics). They have to be in it for the long haul.
I believe it was Jonathan Baron who observed that playing a game is like reading a novel; you invest much more time and effort than in something like a film or television program and are consequently rewarded with a richer, deeper, and more fulfilling experience (pardon my lazy paraphrasing.) That said, I also think that it's unreasonable to ask an underpaid hobbyist to spend more than a few hours with your game before giving his or her impressions of it. What I don't think is unreasonable is asking said critic to update that review at some point.
Now, I agree that playing a game is much more like reading a novel than watching a movie but I think where the analogy falls short is in the relationship between time invested and mastery, specifically in how predicable that relationship is. When you buy a novel you know that regardless of how quickly you read, reading the contents of each page means that you've finished that book. Not so with games (I'm assuming we're talking about reasonably designed games here, not the dregs.) They offer a different experience each time you sit down to play and they're self-canonizing: the more you play, the more learn about the game and the more skilled you become. The better you are at a game, the more fun it is to play. I usually avoid making generalizations but that one is universally true. You must master a game to unlock its full enjoyment potential and must therefore master it to effectively understand and critique it.
For example, I've seen quite a few reviews mention the runout/walking addition in passing, as though it really has no effect on gameplay. Forsooth! When mastered it redefines the gameplay. It's an entirely new verb. On the roadmap of Tony Hawk gameplay innovations it lies somewhere between manual and spine transfer, meaning it radically redefines the way in which you play the game. If you've only played the game for a short while this is not readily apparent, especially if you're playing the game the same way you played Ton
Sucks...no formatting for me! What's up with that?
So, I'm a designer at Neversoft. A couple thoughts: "Activision is essentially telling its Xbox customers to fuck themselves" Well, not really. As observed above, it's Microsoft's stringent Live guidelines that are preventing you from having your THUG online. Basically, we (Neversoft) refused to compromise on two points: 1. People should have to pay extra to play Tony Hawk online (players pay Microsoft for the privilege of accessing our online vault!?) and 2. Microsoft's Live 'guidelines' mandate certain things, some of which overlap with our online features. And, from a pragmatic standpoint, having our game be Live compatible means an entirely separate submission process for us, meaning the Xbox version would probably ship later than the other two. On reviews: The problem we're having with reviews, from my perspective, is the same across the board. THUG is larger and deeper than any console game has ever been. Now, I don't mean that as a blaring note on my own trumpet; THUG's size is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, anyone who invests in the game could probably play it for a month without running out of things to discover. The downside: effectively reviewing the game in a short time is nigh impossible. Some reviewers see the good (1up); some see the bad (Gamespot). This is not a problem particular to THUG; it's a problem with game criticism as a whole. A single player can only ever offer his or her own experience with a particular game. As a designer you accept that, and you accept responsibility for every player's experience when playing your game. The frustrating part is that a game like THUG is that it must be designed with the assumption that people will invest a lot of time in it. This is not an unreasonable assumption considering the history of the series but it's frustrating as a designer because it means that people can't just pick up your game and have fun with it (see also: game critics). They have to be in it for the long haul. I believe it was Jonathan Baron who observed that playing a game is like reading a novel; you invest much more time and effort than in something like a film or television program and are consequently rewarded with a richer, deeper, and more fulfilling experience (pardon my lazy paraphrasing.) That said, I also think that it's unreasonable to ask an underpaid hobbyist to spend more than a few hours with your game before giving his or her impressions of it. What I don't think is unreasonable is asking said critic to update that review at some point. Now, I agree that playing a game is much more like reading a novel than watching a movie but I think where the analogy falls short is in the relationship between time invested and mastery, specifically in how predicable that relationship is. When you buy a novel you know that regardless of how quickly you read, reading the contents of each page means that you've finished that book. Not so with games (I'm assuming we're talking about reasonably designed games here, not the dregs.) They offer a different experience each time you sit down to play and they're self-canonizing: the more you play, the more learn about the game and the more skilled you become. The better you are at a game, the more fun it is to play. I usually avoid making generalizations but that one is universally true. You must master a game to unlock its full enjoyment potential and must therefore master it to effectively understand and critique it. For example, I've seen quite a few reviews mention the runout/walking addition in passing, as though it really has no effect on gameplay. Forsooth! When mastered it redefines the gameplay. It's an entirely new verb. On the roadmap of Tony Hawk gameplay innovations it lies somewhere between manual and spine transfer, meaning it radically redefines the way in which you play the game. If you've only played the game for a short while this is not readily apparent, especially if you're playing the game the same way you played Tony 4. The runout is basically an infinite backdoor clause to any combo: