Some very interesting news today: Apparently, one third of business for Unity 3D is from non-games companies, i.e. music, film and advertising. It’s not particularly surprising that a technology that, from a user perspective, functions similarly to flash would gain that kind of adoption from big media organisations, given that they have years of development experience and are used to using tools like this to talk to their audiences.

However, a couple of things do interest me about this: Firstly, Unity 3D is a technology I was introduced to through games events, and it always seems to have been presented explicitly as a game development tool. Secondly, as we reach peak-game with non-games organisations pushing well beyond their first awkward approaches to the industry, Unity’s fortunes may be tied to how much that comes to be viewed as a fad or not. It deeply concerns me that games are so fashionable; there’s a lot of talk with very little understanding.

He’s not really. He spoke for us at World of Love last month and did a great talk on practicalities of business as an indie. I kept away from the “controversy” over Mark Rein and Cliff Harris at Develop, and Sean Murray has had pretty much the best thing to day about it: Neither of them are jerks.

Sean has a couple of massively valid points. First: The press will pick up the most controversial thing you say, blow it out of all proportion and it will become the only thing people do see. Second:

It’s just strange that the story was so widely reported and almost all the comments were supportive of Cliff. Very few people questioned if Mark was actually a jerk, or hated indies. Presumably like me, most people at the talk actually heard what Mark said, not what Cliff thought he said.

No one seemed to have a problem with Cliff’s assumption that everyone working on Gears Of War was a macho testosterone-fuelled idiot, either. Which is strange, because my assumption is that the artists and programmers at Epic are some of the world’s most talented (and very geeky). Judging by the messages in the credits to Gears Of War 2 they absolutely love what they do, too.

I think there’s a really big narrative at work here, especially in the UK: Underdogs are plucky heroes that everyone wants to win, and Mister Executive is of course an evil exploitative git that will be humiliated in the end. I’ve dealt with Mark Rein as a mod-maker too, and met him several times at Develop, and Sean Murray’s description of him is spot on. Cliff and Mark are both nice guys, and both very different personalities.

(CC image by Alexander Stübner)

This is a somewhat lazy blog post for a monday morning, but I read this piece by Wendy Fonarow and thought it was very interesting. Even though it’s about music, many similar things from it go for games too. I’m going to quote that section wholesale:

This may be a dumb question, but what criteria are you using for “indie” here – musical/hairstyle, or artists who aren’t signed to a major?
Simianbaffin

Not a dumb question, and one that lots of people asked in one form or another. I’ll try and tackle the question that takes 57 pages to answer in my book in the shortest way possible. “What is indie” is the issue that is most contested, dissected, and passionately debated by journalists and fans alike. For me, indie is found in the arguments people have. For example, no one argues about ownership in hip-hop and nobody worries about who wrote the music to decide if you are “jazz” or not. For indie, there are five major arguments. I like to think about them as teams. First is “Team Independent Label/Distribution”. For people who use this definition, it doesn’t matter what you sound like or your practices. You just need the label (US) or distribution (UK) of the artist to be not owned by one of the four major international record corporations. The ideal is that independent labels interfere less, are more ethical, are “small” and reflect a local scene. However, no one seems to worry about the ownership of artists’ publishing companies or booking agencies. This tells you independent ownership is more about perception of autonomy rather than actual autonomy. Second is “Team Attitude”. For “Team Attitude” it is about the spirit of independence, the most punk criterion. This would include artists with creative control, DIY practices, egalitarian non-conformists who value individualism. Third is “Team Aesthetics/Genre”. This is the one that creates the most exasperation for purists. Here, indie would be stylish four-piece beat combos with skinny guys and skinny girls in skinny jeans wearing their everyday clothes on stage, a twee, retro, or lo-fi sound, simple songs with intelligent, nostalgic, escapist, or depressing lyrics. This team allows audience members to be indie as well. Fourth is “Team Taste”. These elitists claim to recognise the most authentic and quality music, it’s just that the best music is the music that they like. It’s a question of “artistic merit” and it is why Mr Tomfoolery “indie kids pretend to like rap music”. They are the aesthetically elect. They are also the objects of collective ire.

Finally, there is “Team Non-Mainstream” (whatever the mainstream is, I am not). The mainstream is seen as a bloated centralised authority run by corrupt bureaucrats more concerned with sales than artistic expression. Therefore, indie would be anything that is the opposite of what we perceive as mainstream: diminutive, intimate, local, personalised, modest, original, intelligent, raw, austere, and substantive. I’m not privileging any of these teams. People want you to choose a side. Yet, if you take these premises together, you’ll find out that they have more in common than you might initially think.

It’s probably the best answer I’ve seen to the question, as most people seem to reply by telling you what they think isn’t indie.

I would also recommend consulting The Indie Game Doctor for a large dose of salt on the scene…

(CC image by aussiegall)

Following on from Kim, Alice and Dan, and with a bit of poking from Toby, here are five things I’ve been thinking about recently.

1: Games heritage and the provenance of game designers. Specifically with videogames. Within the industry, there are interesting podcasts like A Life Well Wasted, new games journalism altered the way people think of and write about games, there are events like GameCamp, Playful and Hide and Seek. It’s becoming commonplace for me to be in conversations where people name favorite board game designers, and outside the industry there’s a lot more acceptance of, and excitement over, board, card, pervasive and videogames. We found something comics didn’t, or at least have translated it in a very different and successful way. Seeing things like this, I think: We’ve long been past the point of having cultural icons within the games industry, but how long will it take to get them outside? Getting people onto the UK honours list is a step but doesn’t count as being there; having a Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald does.

2: Peak game (HT to Dan Hon) means there’s an impending shortage of game designers, or at least game design talent. As ad agencies and brand owners rush into games, there’s going to be huge demand for design talent, and not enough of it to go around. There will be many, many mediocre campaigns, but the well designed ones will shine. If it doesn’t turn into an anti-playful backlash outside the design community, then it will make it easier to get a job in game design. Just not in the previously typical, AAA studio sense. Gameplay consultancy was once heavily derided in the videogames industry, but the next wave of it will be for those non-games orgs.

3: The longevity of indie. Small studios and bedroom programmers are back, and they’re cool. Just by becoming possible again, indie development engages with people’s dreams and ambitions. Setting up a small company is a lot less daunting than setting up a small company that has to become an 80 person one. Are they back for good, or will it just be a few years before publishers and new dominant players have everything sewn up again?

4: Card games. Running a monthly board games night and attending several other regular ones has really developed my ability to think abstractly about game mechanics; card games, though, seem to be a particularly good way of studying and comparing them though. The similar format seems to make comparison more graspable; it’s certainly while playing card games that I get the strongest sense of game elements interacting with each other. Having the card as a consistent token that performs every function in a game, it seems to be easier to perceive its abstract function.

5. Real things. My final one riffs off of one of Toby’s: The love of physical things. I think there’s more to it than nostalgia. I think as more of our existence is tipped onto the net and happens as data, we become connoisseurs of physical experiences and understand more about the value of things. Maybe we even need it more. Also, as more things are instantiated from digital designs, a higher proportion of objects have the capacity to be novel. I’m finding it very hard to untangle this one: Where do I draw the line between value and nostalgia, when, for instance, it comes down to the smell of books? Am I biased toward physical experience because I took up cycling, snowboarding, and a martial art this year? Is a shift in the way I value things a by product of getting older? I don’t know, but I think there’s definitely something post-digital about it.

(CC image by Michael | Ruiz)

This week, I started listening to A Life Well Wasted, which is an excellent podcast on games culture. Robert Ashley records, hosts, edits and scores each episode, and supports it by selling a limited edition prints to go with each one. He seems to have an extraordinary knack for tracking down and interviewing interesting people on the periphery of the games industry and fandom.

The show has some of the most existential musings on games I’ve ever heard. From someone reverse engineering a Commodore 64 as a child then later being engaged to design the C64s you can get in a Joystick and building easter eggs into them, to someone talking about cosplay conventions not having enough lifts to accommodate all of the giant robots and angel wings, he gets people right down to why they care so much about what they do and draws out the most astonishing stories about their past and families.

It’s really very nice to hear a podcast that isn’t just people reviewing stuff, talking about the latest news or plugging their own stuff.

(Image adapted from print made for Episode 3 of the podcast)

Robert Fearon was going to be one of the speakers at World of Love, but unfortunately couldn’t make it. He did, however, write up his talk. He makes an excellent point: Giving away source code is seen as the most generous thing a game developer can do, but in fact that’s only useful to the few people that really understand it. He argues that a much more useful thing to do is let people reuse your art assets.

To make the point, he references Limbo of the Lost. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen someone make a serious point from that rather than just poking fun at the guys who made it. Read Oddbob’s piece, it’s excellent.

Jeffrey Sheen is the founder of Stargazy Studios, and posted this piece on Indievision about a tool he uses for game design: The Quad. I’m quite partial to these kind of dimensional models, having looked into them before in relation to human emotion, and I think Jeffrey’s pins down a few important elements of game design, as well as contextualising it against sports.

I’m not sure if it’s timeless or merely a useful tool on the way to a deeper understanding of what games are, but it’s sufficient to include board games, card games and sports as well as video games, and I think any tools that can distinguish the form from the discipline right now are important.

The Psychology of Video Games posted something about the demo of Crackdown 2 that really caught my eye: The demo has some of the achievements from the game, and gamers can earn them by playing the demo, but they only get banked when they load a copy of the full game on their 360.

In principle this is pretty devious. I’m not sure if a hundred gamerpoints would be enough to swing people enough to buy the game, but it’s split over ten achievements coupled with a half hourly reset on any characters you play with. The time sunk into gaining those ten achievements might well be enough to make people care enough about them to buy the game.

I find this really interesting, as self-contained demos are often enough to sate my curiosity about a game. This, however, dangles satisfaction right in front of people. They’re opening up the cookie jar and letting players get close enough to smell them, then slamming the lid shut again.

(CC image by Whipped Bakeshop)

The most intersting thing to come out of E3 for me is this blog post by Jeremy Parish, on violence in games. He points out an important transition in a lot of violent games recently, from violence as a means to an end, to violence as revelry. I wouldn’t say it’s strictly confined to games either, having been very uncomfortable for years with the cinematic fad of films about torture.

Still, I can thoroughly empathise with Jeremy’s discomfort about hearing stories from someone who survived several conflicts in Vietnam, then watching an E3 press demo in which people strafed Vietnamese villages. Most of the video games I play are violent, but there are a few from recent years that have really put me off with their casual savagery.

It feels as if, somewhere between night vision cameras and embedded reporters, a lot of stuff became just okay, and a lot of narratives we ascribed to the violence we couldn’t see died off. Everyone tried to make everything dark, morally ambiguous and a bit twisted, which in itself is fine, but seems to have fostered an implication that it’s perfectly okay to be and remain in those states. I don’t think it is.

He talks about two particular moments in media that have broken down stereotypes for him and actually said something about violence. I’d like to add a third: Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks is a decent SF novel on a related subject. I wouldn’t want to spoil it by saying more than that.

Jeremy also states “no one’s really questioning why violence is so intrinsic to the medium”. I have a few embryonic thoughts on this: Games are fundamentally about conflict, or if you want to state it more dispassionately, disequilibrium. In the case of physical games like sports and board games, this is rendered symbolically. When digital worlds allow unfettered creation of games, then of course such symbolism is possible, but not required. There are a great many board games, at least, that feature violence without primarily focusing on it or feeling “violent”. “What is the player fighting and how?” might be an interesting design question to ask in relation to videogames: There’s an answer to that for a game like Flower, but the game itself doesn’t feel violent in the least.

(CC image by Phu Son)

Toby pointed me to a very interesting presentation by Sebastian Deterding, related to the things I’ve been writing here about system fatigue and game design. The presentation, embedded below, is about the trend of putting points and leaderboards on everything, as if these husk-like metagames are enough to keep people hooked or make something tedious suddenly fun.

While game designers themselves are currently discovering, or rediscovering a lot about the roots of game design and how to do it better, everything seems to be absorbing game aesthetics right now, to the extent that there are a lot of shallow, unsatisfying game-like things around.

It’s true that the creation or addition of some simple rules can drastically change people’s behaviour. However, it’s also true that if an experience is tough, fulfilling, beautiful, or engaging enough in itself, it doesn’t necessarily need points, timing or a leaderboard applied to it, and if there is such a thing, it’s generally put in place to measure something significant or meaningful. Every time you see such a thing in a sport, there’s a lot of dedication, persistence and discipline behind those results, but you don’t rack up points for watching sunsets.

Applying points to, say, reading news articles, being stuck in traffic jams, or filling in spreadsheets may make them a little more engaging for a while, but the fundamental disconnect between the system of points and the subject matter of a given “game” turns points and achievements into a boring trope that people can smell a mile off. These meta-games really fall short of games as a way for players to model systems and learn. They’re a system measuring nothing of consequence, or at least, with no significant relations to the subject matter they’re laid over the top of.

Sebastian has a lot more to say on the subject, if you have any interest in game design I highly recommend taking some time to go through it:

(CC image by Kim Scarborough)